I have to say I’ve been disappointed with the way the Republican presidential candidates have been handling the YouTube/CNN debate. When I first heard that only Ron Paul and John McCain were committed to appearing and how Romney wasn’t gonna answer no questions from no damn snowman, I immediately thought of Henry Jenkins.

Continue reading "An Humanizing Technology" »

So I was waiting for this massive file copy to complete (I'm actually still waiting) and for the hell of it, I google "marketing blog". Which, well, I just laughed in spite of myself (I'm actually still laughing). (I've now stoped laughing.) The first result is this: Shotgun Marketing BLOG.

Now let me just say that there are other bloggers I enjoy whom hail from generally the same geography as the author of Shotgun Marketing, Chris Houchens and so I was curious. Standard blogger template blog. Smattering of comments here and there.

But pow, the second post from the top struck me as perfect. Granted, this is no representative sample he's talking about (18 people) but there is definitely a rat race of memetic novelty that happens among the wired crowd.

I doesn't surprise me in the least that it takes a Kentucky blog to point that out. Good on you, Chris. I'm starting to think there needs to be a media vehicle dedicated to marketing from the midwestern/southen perspective. Just to hijack the point of his post and expand it, I think it's interesting that those who presume to speak for what the futures should look like are largely from the coasts, and those for whom such futures are intended are everywhere. Hell, I'm even being (consiously) US-centric in this post.

John Hagel is giving rhetorical form to what I think are the most important issues at the confluence of business, economics, marketing and even epistemology. His “Unanswered Questions at Supernova 2007” post from a month ago is still consuming my thoughts even when I’m trying to do other things, like eat and sleep.

Continue reading "Perceiving The Whole From The Parts" »

Here's a recent McKinsey report on Web 2.0 in business. The highlight for me was that 42% of respondents said that they, "Invested at the right time but should have more in our companies internal capabilites," and 24% said that they, "Should have invested sooner in technology that in the meantime had a significant impact on our industry."

I don't know why I haven't posted something about this before. I find myself talking about this all the time. Here's the gist:

Marketing is dead. You can be humans again.

No, really. Not the practice of taking things to market; I mean “marketing, the paradigm”. Marketing, of necessity, has been about dealing with customers at arm's length. This is a byproduct of the industrial revolution. In order to pass the value of economies of scale to customers, companies had to be big. They had to talk to a lot of people. Since Gutenberg, the only tools available for—indeed the only ways to even think about—talking to a lot of people have been unidirectional. These univalent tools are the currency of marketing. They offer really no meaningful dialogue.

Continue reading "It's the Humanity, Stupid!" »

Taking a HEEEEEYYYYAAAAARGH from Howard Dean, the Barak Obamaniacs have woven themselves a tapestry of MyBarakObama microsites to motivate, connect, and empower a formidable cluster of web-savvy politiquitos. While every viable candidate in the slim pickin pile is using blogs, Flickr, and YouTube to some degree, Obama's advisors force the question: can they harness enough online energy to offset the disadvantage of a political underdog (whoever that may be)? Will online word-of-mouth supplant the legacy of ever-mounting political contributions?

Regardless of political leanings, it's worth investigating the emergence of online social networking as the new political networking.

It's too early yet to get my vote, but they've definitely earned a link.

Ahhhh, the wager is on. Can web 2.0 make money for companies? Will people continue to work for free?

If you believe Nicholas Carr, people will NOT work for free forever. The economy simply hasn’t figured out how to charge for the model yet.

If you side with Yochai Benkler and the gift economy, people will contribute for free for as long as they are appreciated and moving toward the perceived greater good. Or, in his exact words, the key is:

"managing the marriage of money and nonmoney without making nonmoney feel like a sucker"

I like him.

Continue reading "So the hacker said to the economist…" »

I was disappointed to hear the lackluster results of an ad campaign I found to be clever, on target and different than other competitors. The ad was for a drug called Rozerem, a sleep aid by drug manufacturer Takada. The drug, despite $100 million ad spend ranks 6th in its category; far behind category leaders Ambien and Lunesta and even trailing two generic brands. Check out Brandweek’s full article for more details.

So now you have to ask the following: “Was the concept wrong? Was the message wrong? Is the product inferior to its competitors? Was its late entry into the category too big of an obstacle to overcome?” I can come up with a bunch more.

Without knowing all the details I have to speculate. I think the ads are well concepted and executed as previously stated. But perhaps the product is to blame. The article references that although the drug helps those with sleeping disorders fall asleep faster, they often wake up in the middle of the night. Perhaps they succeeded in capturing first time users but due to this shortcoming, those users didn’t refill their prescriptions and requested another brand. This combined with their late entry into the market could prove to be too big of an obstacle to overcome. And if this is true, and users aren’t repeating, the drug will die out in the next couple years. It would be nice to know what percentage of first time users refilled thier prescriptions and how that compares to industry standards.

This is where some consumer generated feedback, through a forum or blog would be very advantageous. Instead of speculating, they can gather ongoing feedback, both from consumes and perhaps even physicians. If what they learn is that the product is inferior, then guess what – cut your losses now and go back to the lab and improve the product. Put the money in R&D and save the money marketing the product as is. In my opinion, these kinds of web based tools need to be part of every campaign in some shape or form. The days of a well planned out campaign that would run for a couple years are over. You have to learn and adjust as you go.

Ah, the rules of marketing keep changing. Let's see what happens to Rozerem over the next 24 months.

Great example of authentic branding. Nice job of Dove’s ad firm using YouTube to reinforce Dove’s “Real Beauty” campaign which is an awesome concept. I actually pitched a similar concept to the CEO of large prestige cosmetics company about 4 years ago. This idea came from the fact that this particular brand, wasn’t acknowledging the fact that their customers tended to be middle aged women – not young beauties and that they should embrace that position and market to them. No dice though – they refuse to admit who their core customers were and kept trying to appeal to younger women and continuously losing that battle to other brands more aligned with that age group. Why doesn’t anyone in prestige cosmetics want to embrace the mature woman – aren’t they the ones with the deepest pockets and strongest desire to maintain their beauty?

Nice job Dove.

I did a brief search to and find out who is behind the campaign but came up empty. Anybody know?

An inevitable debate is taking place around the nature of the marketing. John Moore, at his excellent blog, Brand Autopsy, has been a recent party to the discussion. He offers this edited footage of David Jones, global CEO of Euro RSCG speaking at a recent AdAge clambake.

Continue reading "The Nature of Marketing Revolution" »

I had a meeting this morning with a counterpart at a mid-size well established PR firm. We were discussing some of the work our company was doing for several clients. One in particular that was of interest to her involved helping our client to revamp a key executive's presentation content and style. I recommended the blog Presentation Zen to her when she inquired into some of the resources we utilized in developing our approach. I had forgotten what a great blog that Garr Reynolds has.

One of the things we have been preaching to all of our clients is to communicate in a way that is less autistic and more human. Many of the mediums we recommend have to do with applications for the Internet, as it allows more of a two way dialogue. But I had forgotten about how powerful a good presentation can be. It’s an opportunity to make a connection with your audiences, and potentially start an ongoing relationship with them. Unfortunately this opportunity is lost with many companies. They look at it solely as a way to push out information about their company or pitch their products and services.

As Garr points out in a recent post Presentations and Word of Mouth Marketing should play hand in hand. Giving your audiences something of value and providing a way for them to connect with you and your company goes a long way in fueling positive word of mouth. Direct them to a blog created around the topic being presented, share additional information and welcome feedback and dialogue. This has the added benefit of making it easy for them to share information about your company with their piers.

Think of presentations as an opportunity to build a new relationship and start a conversation. The end of the presentation is the beginning of the relationship, not the end of a tactic.

A little bit Digg, a little bit Gong Show, Advert Lover encourages the square-eyed masses to feast upon the briney meat of the capitalist barnacle. So, how long until agencies themselves overwhelm the site with self-adoration? Or use it to popularize their own leaky virals? 11 minutes.

Matt has a post in which he points out the folly of the advertising agency that does not post their work on YouTube. His point seems painfully obvious, and yet, as he points out in his post, many do not. As to why this is the case, I think Thomas Kuhn's watershed "The Structure of Scentific Revolutions" offers a simple explanation. Basically, those whose life's work has been in the service of a particular paradigm are understandably reticent about the possibility of having that paradigm overturned.

Marketing blogger, CoolzOr provides an example of this in action. He has been served a DCMA notice from YouTube because he had posted a PSA about drunk driving which British ad agency, Lyle Bailie International cited as a copyright infringement. What does Lyle Bailie think they have accomplished by this, except to have limited the reach of a PSA about drunk driving, and demonstrated to the world that they are bullies?

Anyway, I'd wager it is exactly this kind of old-paradigm thinking that provides the space for early adopters create novelty while the incumbents sit by and watch.

h/t - Ilya Vedrashko at the MIT Advertising Lab blog

Scott Schiller, who has been doing unbelievably great stuff with Javascript for a long time now, built this devilishly clever test of your Web 2.0 bona fides. To purify myself of the crushing weight of the pressure to have remnents of these sites from his list in my cache, I've decided to print the homepages and burn them at some future date. I scored a 21%.

I don't exactly know how it all spun out of control, but I'm fairly certain I have a Blogger and Friendster and MySpace and GameSpot and YouTube and Flickr and Technorati and del.icio.us account. In all likelihood, my username clogs the registry of another handful of community apps gathering dust. Pat Robertson, forgive me if you're reading this, but in an effort to establish human connections online I've been intimate with dozens of web 2.0 communities, and the names of most I cannot even remember.

Please don't judge me, because I cherished every one of those applications, if only for a few minutes in the parking lot behind the wi-fi cafe.

Continue reading "ASpaceCalledMine" »

We had our little meeting in the corner office, compared notes, exchanged blank stares and agreed that Agency.com really took a nose dive with their YouTube.com stunt. I'm not sure what's more suprising about this - the fact that Agency.com committed such a blunder or that our creative team, account team and sales team actually agreed on something.

I'm also not sure what I'm more disappointed about: 1)the reinforcement this video gives that agencies are full of slimey sales guys or 2) the fact that they backed their way into a "viral" campaign.

Adrant does a great job of summarizing how I feel about the first point. This video epitomizes everything that drive people crazy about agencies. I'm not trying to pretend like we don't do some of those things, we do. And sometimes we're probably more obnoxious than the crew on this video. I mean, we're the ones who created a ridiculous love song for our clients on Valentines Day. We're all for self-depricating humor.

I guess the thing that does't connect for me is how the rollout and follow up to this video seemed so forced and unnatural. The blog wasn't released until after the video got some attention and Agency.com felt the need to begin defending themselves. That's not viral. All smart agency teams know that good advertising and marketing come from good plans. There clearly was no plan here. They were excited about the opportunity to create a video. They were stoked about the idea to release it on YouTube. That's where the plan stopped. They put all of their energy into creating the video and not thinking about what would happen next or how to follow it up, etc. It's an innovative idea - I'll give them that. It's executed poorly. And that's why I'm disappointed. They had an opportunity to demonstrate how good viral marketing can work and totally missed. Sure, they can call it viral. I call it a fluke. Humorous, but a fluke.

Next time, when they meet in their corner office, they should do a little more thinking before they begin rolling the cameras.

One sunny, New York afternoon Agency.com received a phone call. Subway is looking for a new agency-of-record and they've asked Agency.com to pitch the business. They're likely thinking - 'Wow! What an opportunity. A huge account with deep pockets. Let's not only show them how strategic we are, but let's show 'em how brilliantly creative we are.' Corner office. Now!

They created a video diary, a la The Real World, of their creative process and released it on YouTube. Instead of doing a traditional new business pitch (with strategy documents and spec creative out the wazoo) they decided that documenting their approach to new business and releasing it on the web was more creative. And showed their thought process in a more compelling way.

What do you think? Brilliant marketing approach or embarrassing experiment? Our thoughts and insight coming tomorrow. After, of course, a meeting in the corner office. Now!

So this is a blog. And a rather new one at that. Acting under the assumption that a blog is the proper venue for tempest-in-a-teapot grandiloquence, I intend now to unwind my narrative on new marketing. It will shake out into a number of parts, but I must to warn you now, fair reader: I have a penchant for a kind of looping, lateral storytelling which some (the lawyers want me to warn people with epilepsy) might find, well, obnoxious. So you’ve been warned and all that.

Continue reading "Integral Marketing, Part I - Exordium" »

Wired has just come out with their “Wired 40” list of the most innovative and progressive companies. They identified 5 major trends, power to the people being one of them.

Look at the trend today around Internet-based technologies. There are millions of individuals sharing information on blogs, sharing photos & videos, and participating in forums. Business and government are slow to adopt these new innovations using the Internet because they are seen as “radical” and therefore scary and risky. Government and large corporations are much more comfortable with evolutionary improvements. Even though they have been developed by and for the masses (ie MySpace), the applications of these technologies hold great promise in the business world. Those that choose to adopt them more aggressively will make great strides in moving ahead of their competitors that choose a more evolutionary path.

Continue reading "Big Co’s resistance to “Radical Innovation”" »

It seems every kid, band, comedian, neighbor is on MySpace these days. At least in America. But what about the lesser-known orkut? Turns out it’s pretty well-known south of the hemisphere.

In fact, 67% of orkut users are Brazilian. Similarly, Friendster has millions of Brazilians (which is much more poetic than if they’d just had mere hundreds of thousands) and Fotolog is nearly half Brazilian.

Why? I’ll spare you the equations my math degree is trying to force out of me and just point out that since they’re social networking sites they increase their member community largely by current members inviting new ones. In theory, orkut members can ONLY join if they are invited by a current member. So you start with a few Brazilians and they’ll invite primarily Brazilian friends.

Additionally, Brazilians are relatively new to the Internet and for them it’s a craze and they’re all jumping on board. Everything is new and exciting and they want in.

However, there seem to be quite a few non-Brazilian orkut users complaining about all the Portuguese-language posts Many people want it to remain English-only. In the spirit of the web, I say let them in. Isn’t that what the web is all about? Connecting people? And more specifically, isn’t that what a social networking site is all about? Besides, people from the country that invented caiparinhas are considered heroes in my book.