The violinist played for almost an hour at DC’s L’Enfant Plaza at the height of morning rush hour.  He cleared $32.17.

This wouldn’t be remarkable except that the violinist was Joshua Bell, one of the great classical masters who can normally command up to $1000 a minute for his playing.  He was playing on a $3.5 million-dollar Stradivarius.  Only seven of the thousand people passing him even paused in their daily grind.  The Pulitzer-prize winning story about the experiment is here.

Context Matters

We often forget this when it comes to online advertising.  Savvy marketers who would never allow their ad to run on the bus station outside a crack house allow their ads to run on the digital equivalent.

Think I’m exaggerating?  Consider that J&J, Coke, Pepsi, Walmart, BMW, Apple, Visa, Allstate, Warby Parker, Kellogg’s, Lyft, HP, and many more didn’t know they were advertising on Breitbart, the AltRight website,  until alerted to the fact.  This meant their ads were next to articles like “Gay Rights Have Made Us Dumber, It’s Time to Get Back in the Closet” and “Birth Control Makes Women Unattractive and Crazy.”

(In fairness, I do think the headline “Gay Rights Have Made Us Dumber” is accurate, as long as the “Us” refers to the staff of Breitbart.)

If such marketing luminaries (and, I swear, the Canadian government is one of these) can make this type of error with their targeting, is there a chance you might be?

After all, with online, we think we are paying for the click or the eyeball, not the experience or the source.  That’s how ad networks make money and thus, with extremely limited exceptions, they will let in anyone.  It’s sold as a feature of programmatic advertising – look at all this reach! – but can be a very damaging bug if it cheapens your brand.  And until recently, many smart folks weren’t thinking about context.

So let’s return to first principles: right person, right message, right time/context.

Right person: We’ve talked about how you can tame Facebook with the power of donor identity and how using identity in your ads can increase click-through.  This is also a preventative measure.  By targeting your ads to only those who will logically be interested, and addressing them in a way that shows that you know them, you mitigate the risk of ads showing to the wrong person on the wrong site.

Right message: We’ve all been to a site and had those ads follow us around the Internet.  One nonprofit, however, has taken this to a new level.  They are soliciting me so often asking for a memorial gift in honor of someone who has passed that I’ve been paranoid that they know something about my family members that I don’t.  This is especially bizarre considering I’ve never been to the memorial giving section of their site.

Getting the right message to people applies to ads just like any other medium.  For some, that’s making sure that your monthly giving ads are targeting those who are most likely to make them, with one-time gift asks for those who are lapsed, potential donors, or give infrequently.  For others, it’s making sure your ads are not creepily talking about death for no particular reason.

Right time/context: There is a politician who we won’t name, using only a pseudonym of POTUS.  His campaign uses keywords to target advertising to stories; apparently one of those keywords is POTUS’s name.  Unfortunately for the campaign, there appears to be no sentiment filter on these ads.  Thus, they show up next to every sort of story with his name in it.  POTUS being POTUS, many of these stories are negative.  That campaign would be wise to add in some negative keywords like impeachment, criminal, felony, Russia, Mueller…  well, it would be a long list and changing by the day, but it would target his ads to those who would be most receptive to them.  (They also should limit the amount one individual can see and click on those ads, because I do every time, knowing that’s it’s likely a cost-per-click model.)

You likely want to do likewise.  If you are advertising targeting your brand name in news stories, and you likely should be, you will also want to take steps to make sure it’s only for the positive stories.  You don’t want to be like Folgers, who advertised next to articles about how coffee is bad for your health.

In short, we’ve been treating online ads as if the default is everyone and you pare down.  Getting the person, message, and context right means we may want to consider them more like other media where the default is no one and you are added in because you are the right person to receive the message.

Nick