Never build your house on rented land

The reason this web site exists is because I took to heart the mantra “Never build your house on rented land” from my two favorite marketing gurus: Joe Pulizzi and Robert Rose of “This Old Marketing” fame. Just about all my writing on marketing, public relations, and other facets of strategic communications was on other people’s platforms — Blogspot (i.e. Google), LinkedIn, etc. What if, one day, they decided to charge me to post, or charge my readers — without paying me — to access my stuff? I’m no better than you are when it comes to reading the terms and conditions, so I had no idea what they do and don’t have the right to do. So here you are, reading my thoughts on my very own web site, which I pay for and maintain.

Seems simple, but so much of the content we create depends on these platforms for the eyeballs and clicks we so desperately need. The latest wake-up calls came over the past week from Maryland and Australia. First, Maryland: The state legislature has approved, over the veto of the governor, a tax on online ad revenues generated by the likes of Google and Facebook. Other states may follow suit, and, predictably, the tech giants have all but promised to pass along the costs to the businesses that buy that online advertising. If you work in marketing, that means your employers and your clients.

Now, I’m not here to discuss the wisdom of the tax as public policy. Nor am I going to tell you to stop investing in digital advertising. The ad business, after all, has always been about renting an audience from a third party, whether it’s a newspaper, a TV station, or Google and Facebook. We’ve always been, to a degree, at the mercy of the platform owners. But that’s the point. Advertising is a means to an end, and you must always be investing time and money in other means to achieve that same end — which is building an audience you own, for lack of a better term, that you can leverage to achieve your strategic goals.

Consider the rise of email newsletters, in spite of years and years of predictions that email is as good as dead. Brands like them because they put content in front of subscribers without an intermediary. Good email newsletters provide useful content, original and curated, conveniently packaged for readers who may be too busy to seek out all that information on their own but have to check their emails every day — or multiple times a day — for their job. It’s part of what Gini Dietrich calls the PESO model: paid, earned, shared, and owned. Each component of the model works in concert with the others, and you neglect any one of them at your peril.

The second recent wake-up call comes from the spat between Facebook and the Australian government over the latter’s proposed law to require social media platforms to pay for links to news content, a topic covered on this week’s “This Old Marketing” podcast. Facebook initially pulled all news from the site in Australia in response. Again, I’m not here to impugn or defend the proposed law, but Facebook’s response is yet another reminder that these platforms have virtually unlimited power to remove whole categories of content at will — let alone what some flack in Pittsburgh decides to post.

So I say again: never build your house on rented land.