What a cellular company can teach us about targeting

And I'm changing the title of this newsletter to gobbledy max

Hello Gobbledeers,

How’s it going? Have you been hitting refresh 27,300 times on Ticketmaster so you can get tickets to Taylor Swift for your kid? No? Me neither.

One bit of housekeeping: The Gobbledy offices will be closed for Memorial Day, so we’ll have no newsletter next week. In its place, you can just read this one again.

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This week I considered just posting this Gartner graphic and calling it a day.

I could write some snarky comments about that, but why? I’m now convinced Gartner is just trolling all of us. They’re putting this silliness out there to get a reaction. And I, for one, shall not be a party to this.

Therefore, I will NOT use this impact map as I adopt, learn from, and/or mitigate the risks of Decentralization, whether it involves Nature Positive, Walled Gardens, Network Service Platforms or whatever.

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In My Continued Quest to Convince Everyone to Actually Segment Their Market…

If you’re a cellphone company, you have fewer options than you might think if you’d like to market your product.

• If you’re Verizon, you own the color red and go with celebrities. Tried and true. Seth Meyers standing on the street having/yelling a conversation with/at Cecily Strong who, for some reason, refuses to come down from her balcony and actually chat with her friend about cellphones and is instead standing 60 feet from him like it’s late March 2020.

  (Editor’s Note - you don’t need to watch that…you’ve probably seen it 37,000 times).
  

• If you’re AT&T, you own the color blue and you create a character (as Progressive did with Flo) that can be used to represent your brand in a zillion different ways, including with celebrities.

• If you’re T-Mobile, you own the color magenta, and you use celebrities.

• If you’re Mint, you own the color green and go with a celebrity (Ryan Reynolds).

I guess what I’m saying is - if you’re going to take a mass market product to the masses, owning a color and having a celebrity is one way to do it.

Well, that’s the start of how you do it. Any moron with a cellphone company can claim “Maroon + Snoop Dogg” (or whoever). (Note to self - start cellular company and hire Snoop.)

Part 2 is spending an thinkable sum of money on advertising.

I can’t find anything very recent, but I found some ad spend numbers from March of 2018, and I can’t imagine this year looked much different:

• AT&T spent $71.2 million on nine spots that ran more than 9,000 times, generating 3 billion impressions. 3. Billion. Impressions. In one month.

• T-Mobile spent an estimated $48.2 million on 13 spots that ran more than 7,700 times.

• Verizon spent an estimated $43.6 million on 12 spots that ran more than 6,800 times. (I’m pretty sure I saw at least that many Verizon ads in the past month).

Anyway, if you have a non-differentiated product, colors and celebrities or fake spokespeople coupled with absurd amounts of TV advertising works well (insurance companies have the same playbook).

But it’s not the only route, and I wanted to share how Visible (which is owned by Verizon) has taken a different approach.

Rather than go mass, they actually - wait for it - decided to focus on a single well-defined target market. I know, that’s weird. We definitely don’t talk about that here constantly.

I know you won’t watch this, but here’s an ad of theirs that I thought was great:

(I love that when you look for an ad on YouTube they will show you an ad before you’re allowed to watch the ad you were looking for.)

Since none of you are going to watch that, here’s a partial transcript:

Hi, we’re Visible, The wireless company that thinks you should only need YOU to save. No families. No significant others. No random roommates. Just you. Maybe your pup if you have one. Because with Visible you get exactly what you need on one line… yep one line. Not 4, or 3. Not even two. Just the one.

Nothing makes me happier (marketing-wise) than when the copy in an ad is unbelievably clear about the product’s positioning.

Visible is a Verizon brand that targets the young’uns. How do I know that? Because their ad says that - unlike other carriers - you can get a great rate even if it’s just you. Which, amazingly, is also what I imagine their positioning statement would be - “Unlike other cellular carriers, Visible gives you a low rate without making you join a family plan, starting at $25.”

Crazy how that works, no? Be clear about your positioning, and the messaging flows nicely out of that. Weird, right?

(I just need to go back one second, my apologies. I’m not really even sure what the hell is going on in that Verizon commercial above. Seth Meyers is (I guess?) walking by his friend’s apartment building. He stops and says, “Not to brag, but I just switched to Verizon.” No “hello” or “hey, so good to see you.” He just launches into it. Then his friend responds, “Wow.” (She very much does not say “wow!!” He then replies, “And I got to choose the phone I wanted, for free.” And she says, “Not that you’re bragging.”

That’s the commercial. And there’s some sort of link between that weirdly awkward fake encounter and people deciding they need to switch mobile providers. I don’t know.)

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HBO NO

You can imagine a company that has a great 50-year old brand. That brand is a leader in its category. It stands for prestige. It commands a premium price.

However, the landscape is changing. Your customers are changing how they consume your product. The product is still good - maybe great.

Except it has a very different type of competitor. And that competitor is kicking a tremendous amount of butt in the marketplace.

And now suddenly, there’s trouble. And when there’s trouble you can either keep the core product and adapt it to a new world.

Or you can bring in the marketers.

HBO brought in the marketers.

And calling their streaming service HBO GO didn’t fix the massively changing landscape. And calling it HBO NOW didn’t change the massively changing landscape. And calling it HBOmax didn’t change the massively changing landscape. So obviously what you’re going to want to do is to change the name to ‘max’. Because clearly the problem was having a wildly successful premium brand associated with this product. And “max” is best known for its “Skin-e-max” line of erotic thrillers that we definitely, definitely didn’t watch in college.

Best of luck, max.

(Obviously the next step is to bring in McKinsey and pay them $1,200,000 to tell you to go back to your roots and embrace the premium brand and re-name the service “HBO.” Or they can send me a check for $800,000 to tell them that.)

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I’m always happy to chat with all of you - If you want to talk about your website or positioning or how to re-brand your streaming service, here’s my Calendly link.