It’s easy for marketers to get obsessed with numbers. Our marketing department reports on numbers like “web visits” and “twitter followers” to show how effective we are being. We must be doing well if thousands of people like our Facebook page, or visit our website. Right?

Not so much. These numbers are nice to report on and make cool looking graphs and pie charts, but they aren’t the pulse of our business. Our business is centered on engagement and loyalty. Our job, both in the marketing department and for our clients, is to create engagement and loyalty and as a natural result, sales-ready leads.

Avinash Kaushik, the digital marketing evangelist for Google presented to the audience of the well-known digital marketing event SES in Toronto. The message was “don’t use stupid metrics”. There’s a great summary of the presentation in BtoB magazine that I wanted to share. It’s a great reminder to all marketers that we cannot be measured by clicks, views, Likes, follows and all of those other words that meant something completely different 15 years ago. Read the full article here.

Last Friday I was one of the millions of people who logged-on or tuned in to watch the IPO of Facebook. I added the stock ticker to my browser and watched it through the corner of my eye for the remainder of the trading day. I’m not a day trader, or heavily invested in stocks, I was just interested in how Facebook would fare on Wall Street. It had been so widely publicized that I wanted to watch history being made in real-time. In reality, history was not made. Instead, Wall Street offered a reality check to the digital business model.

At about 11:30 the Google Finance ticker came alive and the stock slowly crept up. I remember thinking how nice it would have been to be able to buy into the IPO at the “bargain” price of $38. After a peak of $43 or so, it started to trickle back down to its initial price. It never regained momentum, and three trading days after the IPO, the stock sits at $31. Some commentators came out immediately and blamed the fact that the 28 year old CEO wore a hoodie to his “impress Wall Street” tour. Others said the valuation was so much higher than the actual value of the business; and added that to meet earnings expectations they would likely have to turn off a large percentage of their user base with an increase in annoying advertisements.

One undebatable fact is that Facebook needs to raise revenue. There has been a lot of speculation on how they can do this. There has been talk of an e-commerce payments product, similar to Paypal. Sure, why not? They know everything about you now; why not give them access to your checking account? Okay, that was sarcastic, but since Facebook has an iffy track record with privacy, this may not be the best idea. Can’t you see the notifications? “Four friends would like to know how much money you have, click here to post it on your wall.”

Perhaps the greatest opportunity is in attracting B2B marketers, something they have been lagging behind their competitors in. The chart below is from an inbound marketing study conducted in 2011 by Hubspot. You can see B2B and B2C customer acquisition through various digital channels.

To strengthen their B2B advertising product, Facebook needs to offer features that attract B2B marketers. For example, their ad analytics capabilities are still very basic and simple. They could also add more of a variety of ads, such as interactive banner ads, videos, and even an integrated instant response form that advertisers could add to their business pages, creating some type of landing page platform. Lastly, with the majority of Facebook users accessing their accounts on mobile devices, perhaps there is an opportunity to offer advertisers access to an integrated QR Code scanner, location-based notifications and more. The possibilities are really only limited by two things; the creativity of Facebook’s development team and the willingness of users to share their data.

The coming months will reveal Facebook’s plans for increasing revenue, and I wouldn’t bet against them. I wouldn’t necessarily buy their stock either, but keep this in mind. Facebook has access to an enormous amount of talented entrepreneurs, experienced executives and creative designers and programmers. They’ll find a way to fulfill the promise they made to the public last Friday.

Stemming from the overwhelming success of AMC’s Mad Men, a spinoff has been born. Premiering last month, AMC has opened the doors to the chaotic, unpredictable and sometimes cutthroat world of ad agencies. The narrative centers around two agencies that are chosen to pitch new campaign ideas to a major brand. The show doesn’t feel overproduced, like most “reality” TV, but is heavily edited to squeeze in a week of agency work, and a big pitch all in one nice hour-long package. You don’t have to be in advertising to enjoy the show. My wife and I watched the first two episodes of the series last night and I found two interesting takeaways.

Funny doesn’t always translate.

McKinney, an agency in Durham, was pitching two ideas to the executives at Subway. One of their ideas was very well received and they ultimately won the business. However, the other idea just didn’t translate from the creative sanctuary of the McKinney offices. As they were explaining the idea to the executives, there were uncomfortable blank stares of boredom and confusion. In fact, you didn’t really get the sense that the pitchman was into it either. Though you were only given a few minutes of what was likely many hours of discussion between the creatives at the agency, the viewer was led to believe the idea was ill-conceived and perhaps a bit forced. The idea that was funny, creative and edgy to the team at McKinney just didn’t translate to the executives at Subway.

It’s easy to get an idea or concept stuck in your head that you just believe is brilliant. And it may be, but you may be the only one that thinks so. In fact, there’s a bit of science behind it. Studies have shown that people with specific political persuasions tend to process news very differently. News stories that support a point of view are often given far more credence than stories that oppose one’s views. The truth should just be reality, but it rarely is. This phenomenon isn’t surprising to anyone who watches cable news in today’s divisive political climate.

Is there a lesson here? I suppose it’s that taking risks and thinking differently is good, and you should defend your ideas vigorously. But, know when to wave the white flag.

Trampling a project to death.

Back at WDCW, an agency just down the road from our west coast office in Culver City, the creatives had an idea percolating. They wanted to sell Subway’s breakfast to a tough demographic, 18-24 year olds. They were working on a concept “zAMbies” that likened the young breakfast seekers to zombies who needed a fresh new breakfast routine.

The concept was new and creative, but risky. It didn’t look like anything Subway had ever done. While the agency was working on the idea, overseeing the project was the agency founder, Tracy Wong. He made a great point about the creative process. While pointing out how hard the entire team was working on the project, he reminded viewers that it’s easy for ideas to get stepped on, suggesting that too many people were involved.

I would venture to bet that everyone in advertising has experienced this frustration. An idea starts getting kicked around a team, then another group weighs in, then senior management puts in their two cents, and eventually the concept is trampled to death, crushed by the overwhelming weight of too many opinions. Maybe that’s how the process is supposed to work. Or maybe it’s the result of a process that isn’t working. I really don’t know. I do know that advertising and design is largely subjective. By definition, something that is subjective cannot be right or wrong, true or false. But somehow, we let a pure idea get tossed around, torn apart, painted over, until it’s not recognizable by its originator. In my experience, fewer opinions are almost always better, but that could just be the bias in me, discussed in the third paragraph of this posting.