When innovations pique interest
Today I published a Pulse article, “When is ABM revenue velocity rarer than Mew, Moltres or Ditto?”, that oddly enough draws a distinction between the rage surrounding Pokemon Go and Account-Based Marketing. My kids had me load the Pokemon Go app a few days after it released. Since then, I’ve seen tons of kids walking around our neighborhood who probably haven’t seen the light of day since the last day of school, more than a month ago. Yesterday I saw this video of a Vaporean sighting in NYC Central Park last week. What an amazing site, literally thousands of people heard of this rare Pokemon creature being seen in the park so they Ubered, ran and hitch-hiked to get and be the first to get this badge of courage.
At first, this video hit me as being ridiculous. After letting it stew in the brain for a while I saw a great parallel between two great innovations that are very unlikely partners: Account-Based Marketing and Pokemon Go. Sure, this is a weird connection but let’s have some fun!
My thought on this parallelism:
- The deafening noise surrounding Pokemon Go has only begun but is already as nonsensical as the majority of content surrounding ABM. Seriously, the downside of content marketing is that too many marketers feel a sense of duty to write about stuff they’ve never done before. They have no frame of reference to separate good ideas from bad, and all too often simply repackage and repeat the bad advice others before them shared.
- Few people will add Vaporean to their Pokemon collection, and few ABM marketers will find revenue velocity from their ABM program. Here at the Consortium we published the industry’s first research regarding the requirements for delivering a high-performing ABM program. In the Pulse article I used the sense that Pokemon is obviously a game, but the majority of marketers treat ABM as something less than the powerful strategy it is… perhaps a game. Concretely, the research identifies somewhere between 70% and 80% of ABM programs as falling into this bucket. Basically, almost every marketer would benefit from resetting their POV on what ABM is… and is not.
- While Pokemon is delivering a real world experience to far too many people who find it hard to break away from their devices long enough to hold a conversation or get outdoors, the reality is really not… well, real. It’s the same crap in a new place. Guess what, a lot of marketers are still applying inbound ideas to ABM. Lacking engagement across stages of engagement, many marketers have reset their sights to see a display ad program targeted to a smaller audience as a means to drive more leads at an acceptable price. Sure, that can happen, but a core promise of ABM is to increase pipeline Volume, Velocity and Value. Without having the capability to “pull” target accounts through stages of engagement, switching creative to entice the next stage of engagement, an ABM program is nothing more than an advertising platform that reaches fewer people.
