Impression of the year: Mary at Arlington

Getty photographer John Moore captured Mary McHugh at Arlington National Cemetery on Memorial Day, as she spoke to the tombstone of her fiancé Jimmy Regan. Viewers of NBC Today named it picture of the year.

Dear Pontiac: What a spec ad is ...

... is not for the squeamish. Spec ads are not real ads, but things you create to try to show what you could do if someone hired you. Check out this brilliant, disturbing spec ad for Pontiac that probably will never see the light of TV, but, damn, if it did, no one would ever forget it.

Wouldn't it be great if automotive ads showed something other than cars zipping down Route 1 south of San Francisco?

(Tx to AdGabber. And if you're looking for a job in advertising, read about spec ads here.)

Coke's sweet return to the basics

Make the Logo Bigger points out a sweet new Coke ad, tying the world together as one big happy family. At a long lunch table. Watch this spot and try not to feel an emotional tug at your heart. Somehow, this works in a way that most jingles and dancing hipsters can't.

So cliché, and yet so effective.

Political campaign of 2007: The Ron Paul blimp

$400,000 a month gets you national press and an outdoor statement cars on I-95 can't ignore. Tx Slate.

The open market niche: Profiting from environmentalism

Here's a feel-good idea for the New Year: What if you could make money by saving the planet?

Recycling gadgets will get more attention in 2008, as 70 million TV sets go obsolete. By February 2009, the FCC will force all TV broadcasters to convert to digital signals, turning millions of old cathode ray tube sets into pretty black glass boxes. Many of these old TVs have 4 to 8 pounds of lead in the screen. You better believe recycling gadgets will hit the major news wires by next fall.

Consider the 500 million used cell phones in the United States, with a combined total of 312,000 pounds of lead. Dump them all in local landfills, and that lead heads for groundwater ... and we were worried about Chinese toys? Cell phone batteries also contain cadmium, a human carcinogen that causes lung or liver damage.

Wouldn't it be interesting if a company had the foresight to profit in advance of an environmental concern? What if a Sony or Apple or AT&T repositioned themselves as a national resource for gathering old gadgets, beyond their own products? We bet they'd make a boatload of money in new gadget sales.

Until then, we offer four ways to clean out the junk drawer for the New Year.

1. Drop off old cell phones at a cell phone store. Most carriers will recycle them, or even donate the old phones to victims of domestic violence. Verizon, for example, has a HopeLine recycling program that has kept 200 tons of electronic waste and batteries out of landfills.

2. If your old gadget seems to still work, punch it in to secondrotation.com. This web site will give you a quote to actually buy your old technology, and if you accept, it will send a free shipping label for you to drop it in the mail.

3. One of the best things you can do is find out where to take old batteries. About 3 billion batteries are sold in the U.S. each year. Call to Recycle offers locations for battery recycling nationally.

4. For general information on recycling, the web site Earth911 lists local resources that will accept batteries and all forms of electronics.

What if the next iPhone update was universal remote control?

What if instead of selling us something new in 2008, Apple simply updated its 1 million+ iPhones already in circulation with a little gift: Universal remote capability? If all those iPhones suddenly could control your DVD and cable and stereo with a few glowing icons, purchasing Apple's new video players might be more appealing.

The thought is spurred by a Fast Company article, which throws cold water on Apple noting that Steve Jobs has his work cut out to outdo the iPhone hype. The big problem, FC says, is that Apple's current stock momentum is based on the rare luck it had by breaking both the MP3 player and music download market at the same time. Back when the first iPod and iTunes were released, there was a huge vacuum in the entertainment content market and Apple filled it. The iPod took off, then the iPhone, and Apple's computer sales have rode the wave. Now, with the market awash in good technology and with videos all over the web, video entertainment won't be so easy to dominate. If Apple doesn't do something brilliant soon, its momentum may run dry.

Which is why we find it interesting Apple has filed patents No. 20070189737 for a Multimedia Control Center and No. 20070230723 for a Portable Media Delivery System. The first is a method to manage different devices with a media control center; the second would help current Apple products talk to non-Apple products.

Are iPhones a Trojan Horse for Apple to gain access to your beloved living room? Would a million users given sudden access to a remote that actually ran everything be more interested in downloaded Apple iTunes videos for the Apple TV system? Just a thought. This may sound radical, but then, so is an MP3 player that talks to your Nike sneakers.

Hello, Mint. Good-bye, checkbook.

If you do nothing else this year, check out Mint.com. It's a free web site that automatically pulls together your entire financial life -- credit cards and bank accounts -- sorts the data, and presents you with summaries without you having to lift a finger. The beautiful site, unlike other complex personal finance programs, does everything automatically.

The site launched in September as the brainchild of Aaron Patzer. His mission is to help the under-34 crowd, especially the college kids with ADD who have $21k in loans and $3k on credit cards by the time they graduate. Unlike Quicken, Mint doesn't require data input. You don't have to hold on to receipts, type in numbers, or sort your spending into categories. Instead, Mint automatically pulls information from your cards or bank using the same backbone technology as Bank of America, so your information is always secure, and sorts the data for you.

We tested Mint out after reading a glowing review in Fast Company. Setup took 3 minutes ... we punched in an email, password, picked the names of our major banks and credit cards, put in their passwords ... and were done. Mint sucked information from each of the accounts into a series of simple tabs. One web page showed spending categories. A second showed us how we could easily save $500 a year.

Mint has many cool features, such as the ability to send you a text message when your bank account is low. Its pie charts and graphs break your spending down into categories, so you can easily see if your gas and food costs are rising or falling each month. It also has a few bugs -- the most obvious being it double-counts what you spend within a credit card account and what you spend from your bank to pay off the same credit card.

And yes, Mint exists to make money with ads or "savings recommendations" that refer you to new banks, but those are easily ignored.

But damn, it's brilliant. In 2008, thanks to Mint we may never balance our checkbook again.

Beautiful windows to the soul

The artist Rankin has created an absolutely stunning series of photographed irises. Has little to do with media strategy, other than to remind those of us skilled in spreadsheets and flowcharts that the power of image must work with media to make an impression.

Tx BoingBoing.

Walt Mossberg and the future of video: Beauty or the beast?

We love Walt. But watching the WSJ guru on camera makes us wonder: Why is so much web video still so bad? It looks like Walt forgot to clean his office before this take.

We wonder if the emergence of video -- yes, real democratized video input will soon be here, with every cell phone inputting images to the web once the U.S. finally gets high-speed mobile figured out like Europe -- will threaten old-school writers who, while brilliant, don't have the anchorman smile of standard TV production. Or maybe viewers will lighten up and learn to enjoy a more gritty world where content, and not beauty, drives communication images.

Wanna bet?

The British monarchy's little shackles on YouTube

Elizabeth II, the Queen of Britain, has posted her annual Christmas message on YouTube this year. 2007 will be the year when video officially moved to the web--with even conservative government leaders recognizing it as a major channel. Trouble is, the monarchy has blocked the ability of users to share this content with others.

Big mistake. Video content works best online when you give up some control. For example, the latest report by Pew shows 64% of online teenagers engage in some type of content creation--and that means pulling, posting and sharing information.

The survey found that content creation is not just about sharing creative output; it is also about participating in conversations fueled by that content. Nearly half (47%) of online teens have posted photos where others can see them, and 89% of those teens who post photos say that people comment on the images at least "some of the time.

Think of the marketing power behind this. No longer do you have viewers sitting passively in front of TV just watching your ads or message; you now have avid fans reposting, distributing, and commenting on your communication. This builds impressions, can go viral to reach millions, and empowers your users to engage in a conversation.

Giving users such freedom can be scary. We've noted that when big organizations or traditional media players (such as the British Monarchy or Oprah's Harpo Productions) move online, they typically try to restrain the content distribution. Alas, put brakes on it and you stop the impact. That's why you can't see the Queen's message, above, since we could only grab a screen shot. The Queen has disabled the YouTube features that would allow users to share her video or even write comments about it.

Dear Elizabeth II, happy new year. Here's hoping in 2008 you set your message free.

Wanted: The reason why Clear Channel digital boards cost 4 times as much

So now the FBI is using digital billboards to post AMBER alerts and America's most wanted criminals in 20 cities across the U.S. It's a brilliant concept that finally makes use of the flexible nature of digital outdoor.

A good thing, because so far the price structure of digital outdoor is out of whack. With all the buzz about those glowing, digital boards, what is often missed is the cost is eight times as high as that of the same sized board with regular illumination.

Here's how it works. In LA, for example, an advertiser can buy a single unit on each of 10 digital displays in the Clear Channel Outdoor network. The ad would appear for 7.5 seconds as 1 in a rotation of 8 different ads -- meaning that it is followed by 52.5 seconds of other advertising. The cost? About $8,500 net per digital board vs. $8,300 for a regular, full-time billboard (rates are unnegotiated and based on the Clear Channel Outdoor 2007 Media Planning Guide).

No matter how bright the digital board looks, we're not sure that's a good deal. Mathematically, even if half the drivers caught your message, you'd still be paying about 4 times as much for the same number of impressions.

Outdoor is a powerful media, especially as Americans spend more time in cars. We think digital media has huge potential for timely updates and even personalized messaging. Imagine weaving the day's news into your outdoor creative, to hit consumers with something truly relevant. And we've heard that it costs Clear Channel and others more than $700,000 to put up each digital display, so they obviously need to recoup those costs.

But until the price structure comes down, we can't see spending 4 times as much for the same outdoor display just to have your name in lights. Perhaps the FBI partnership with Clear Channel isn't total altruism; at these prices, outdoor vendors may have trouble filling inventory.

(Tx Engadget.)

Apple won't rule TVs ... because cavepeople said so

So Apple will now offer Fox movie rentals via iTunes, finally giving us real video juice off the world's most popular online music service. What's puzzling is that the convergence of flat-screen computers and bigger flat-screen TVs hasn't happened yet. Apple, Microsoft and numerous others have tried to conquer the living room with a widget box that does both, but consumers seem to like their movie equipment and computer equipment in separate rooms, thank you very much.

Why? Maybe it's just distance. We're much more comfortable interacting with a screen 18 inches in front of our eyes than a big TV 8 feet away. And, conversely, we enjoy sitting passively watching a movie 8 feet away much more than a video 18 inches from our nose.

Maybe it all goes back to our hunter-gatherer days. Our cavemen ancestors would interact with the tools in their hands, so we still concentrate intensely on sharpening flints ... or typing blogs ... close in front of us. But when we are relaxing, we prefer to see our mate dancing by the fire a few yards off ... or, today, watch the theatrical equivalent on the LCD TV. That's why we bet when the new, improved laser TV comes out next year, it won't be connected to our iTunes.

We all want to be entertained, but not too close to the fire.

Google's fascinating peek at market demand

Ever wish you could see the month-to-month market demand for your product or service? Go to Google Trends, type in any topic, and you can see how many people around the world search for it. The above graph, for instance, shows the annual cycle of demand for home heating oil, peaking as the weather turns cold each fall.

The charts have several uses. Google compares search volume (the top line) with news report volume (the bottom line), so marketers can draw correlations between news reports and market interest. Here's a look at searches for "mammography," with a spike each fall, a trough each Christmas, and an interesting peak in September 2005 when DrKoop.com released a news report promoting the health benefits of breast screening.


Trends in search can be illuminating. In our own business, advertising, we note that searches for "advertising agencies" are down about 50% since 2004. So for our agency Mediassociates next year, we recognize we will need to expand other marketing channels to build national awareness for our media planning services.

Could be worse. Pity the poor folks at Amazon watching consumers walk away from its e-book reader Kindle. If your product search trend line looks like this, it's time to find a new product.

Why marketing online is like a prom date, and 200 other brilliant essays

If you can't tell Digg from Twitter from Reddit from Sphinn, Brandflakes kindly points to this massive list of best internet marketing posts of 2007. It's the best writing of the year in how to understand and leverage social media. Such as why internet marketing is like a teenage boy asking a girl to the prom.

The X Factor guide to overcoming office inertia

If you work in a big organization that, say, has a planning committee for the planning committee and an org chart that fills a large binder, don't miss Marketing Sherpa's guide to conquering office politics in 2008. Anne Holland has a brilliant take on the need for marketing plans that reach your internal audience. Get yourself on the company scorecard. Start an internal newsletter. Feed top decision-makers with news, while also referencing your successes. Avoid napping at your desk. (OK, that last bit was our advice.)

Holland calls this the X Factor required to help you break through an internal glass ceiling. The people who rise to the top aren't shy about making noise; they have "X" that gets noticed. This year, make the X your own.

Not only will this help elevate you within an organization, but if you value your work, it will draw the attention and resources to your projects required for you to reach your goals. Many initiatives never succeed because they can't conquer internal inertia or build the momentum required to really launch. Convincing people internally that your ideas have merit is the first step in turning that idea into real performance.

Give your old tech junk a Second Rotation

Ars Tech tells how to clean out an old junk drawer and burnt out laptops with a clean conscience. Second Rotation is a web service that allows you to type in the name an old tech product for a price quote (they'll buy old tech junk!) and a free shipping label sent to your home. About 90% of the materials are resold, and the rest are recycled, not trashed.

Now, if it would just help us stop losing all those mismatched power cords for the new gadgets.

How Pandora recognizes the many faces of me

Way back in the last Internet bubble, Stanford grad Tim Westergren had an idea to launch a music recommendation service. Today Pandora gives 4 million users access to songs magically matched by 400 different components; punch in Tori Amos, the site breaks down her songs by melody, chord structure, rhythm, and vocal style, and presto, the next song on your free online radio dial is by Bjork. The personalization is an intriguing combination of manual expert rankings (by 2,000 musicians who assess each song in the library), collaborative filtering (in which other users' experience contribute to your recommendations), and 1to1 learning (in which you can rate each song that pops up as thumbs up or down).

Pandora makes money by pushing ads to its main site or pulling users deeper to buy songs they hear for free once on the online radio. The overall vibe is tremendous value and personalization, and a big temptation to click through when a new, unknown song emerges that you want to hold on to.

Unlike Amazon or Netflix, Pandora recognizes that consumers have modalities -- we like different things when we are in different modes at different times. Users can set up channels for varying moods; for example, type in "U2" as your second channel, and Pandora will serve up harder songs in minor keys with strong male vocalists. We keep hoping Amazon will set up a similar channel personalization dial, so we get business book recommendations when we're in work mode and pop psychology when we're shopping for our wife.

What we really dig, though, is the clever way Pandora captures and identifies new users. Hit the site, type in a musician, and you're off and running with 10 minutes of free tunes ... and then Pandora gently cues you to put in some identifying information if you wish to continue. It doesn't ask too much: just email, date of birth, if you're male or female, ZIP, and a password. So simple. Pandora now knows how to reach us, how old we are, and where we live, but we don't mind. It was so easy to open Pandora's box, and the box introduced us to Cut by Plumb.

The horror of the American Marketing Association's web site

Why does the AMA's web site suck so bad? We hit it today to see what might be relevant in planning our own agency's growth in 2008 ... and were greeted by at least 45 links in 11 content categories. Egad. Maybe this is why blogs are so popular; you can find a point of entry quickly, the content is fresh, and you walk away with a useful idea or two.

This isn't a quibble; this is a failure to meet member needs and probably drives AMA losses. The American Marketing Association is a subscription model with 38,000 members around the globe, and we suspect it has a churn rate of perhaps 10-20% of subscribers, with defections concentrated among year 1 members who bail after trying out membership and seeing limited utility. Members who defect may be lower-value in the AMA hierarchy (after all, if you are an executive for Ford you probably don't pick up the tab, while smaller business members probably watch every expense). But younger members are the future of the organization, and younger members demand something meaningful from the web.

Let's imagine what would happen if the AMA fixed its site. Say losses were reduced by net 5% -- for 1,900 incremental AMA members a year each paying $185 in dues, for $351,500 in new revenue. In three years, that's $1 million. The web site could be fixed for less than $100k. That's a 10:1 payback.

There are also strategic reasons to light a fire under this project; if we, as marketing professionals, can now network on the 100 top marketing blogs, why do we need a stodgy old AMA? AMA might brush up on Porter's Five Forces Model and consider it faces huge competition from new market entrants. A bad web site might do more than contribute to 5% annual member churn -- it might be the frozen deer in the headlights looking at a social-media Mack truck bearing down on your membership heartbeat.

We imagine there are several challenges to solving the crappy site problem. Most AMA members have day jobs and focus elsewhere. The AMA is an event-driven networking organization, and the web site is probably item No. 49 on a list of top 50 priorities. Perhaps few AMA members dare to criticize the site, for fear they may bite the hand that publishes their white papers. We're AMA members too and a little nervous about using the word "suck" and AMA in the same sentence.

Look, AMA. Call it tough love. We want you to succeed. We want the marketing industry to grow. So it's not about you -- it's just about your site. So turn this thing around. For inspiration, we recommend two doses of Adgabber (look, members are engaged and seek out other members!), one dose of Slate (hey, clean points of entry!), a dash of Janet Jackson (not the thong -- the user-generated viral content), and seasoning from NikePlus.com (make us want to come back with something personal and useful). Come on, AMA. It's time to market yourself.

Is Apple really trying to crush Fake Steve?

Just in time for the holidays. Daniel Lyons reports Apple is threatening legal action -- and making a $500,000 offer -- for him to shut down the Fake Steve Jobs blog. Lyons, the real author behind FSJ, says he had this exchange with Apple before Christmas:

Lyons: But you guys put Martin Luther King Jr. in your ads. And John Lennon. You had Gandhi in your ads. Gandhi, dude. Think about that. Think about what Gandhi did in his life, what he stood for, the price he paid for freedom of expression ...

Apple lawyer: I'm authorized to go as high as five hundred thousand dollars, but that's it.

If Lyons is simply mocking Apple's recent shutdown of Nick Ciarelli, then that's guts. But sadly, this feels true, because Lyons has broken character a bit and is expressing honest frustration as the imperiled author behind the scenes. We're not sure what Apple will accomplish if its PR machine becomes the sole source of news and reviews about its products. But in the long run, if fans are shackled and prohibited from having a little communications fun, then Apple will end up with fewer fans.

Note to Apple: Information wants to be free.

Why some memories stick: Jingles all the way

Sometime on Jan. 1, 2008, the radio networks of the United States will switch from a five-week rotation of holiday Christmas classics back to regular music programming. Which makes us wonder: What is it about some traditional music, and some repeat impressions, that can be so compelling for humans?

This is no trivial question, given the trend in advertising to constantly barrage consumers with the latest, and often loudest, new concept. Dr. Oliver Sacks, a neurologist best known for being portrayed by Robin Williams in the film Awakenings, has studied the effects of music on memory and found that, somehow, music is rooted in the most primitive parts of our minds.

In simple terms, music combined with communications hits the brain with a form of double impression -- the message sinks in deeper, and once in, the music replayed can accurately withdraw it. This is important, because our minds often have trouble processing or recalling memory accurately without strong cues.

Sacks tells of his own memory slipping when he thinks back to a North London bombing during World War II. He vividly recalls seeing two bombs fall:

On another occasion, an incendiary bomb, a thermite bomb, fell behind our house and burned with a terrible, white-hot heat. My father had a stirrup pump, and my brothers carried pails of water to him, but water seemed useless against this infernal fire-indeed, made it burn even more furiously. There was a vicious hissing and sputtering when the water hit the white-hot metal ...

Trouble was, Sacks never saw the second bomb explode; his brother Michael told him recently that his memory had deceived him.

I was staggered at Michael's words. How could he dispute a memory I would not hesitate to swear on in a court of law and had never doubted as real?

"What do you mean?" I objected. "I can see the bomb in my mind's eye now, Pop with his pump, and Marcus and David with their buckets of water. How could I see it so clearly if I wasn't there?"

"You never saw it," Michael repeated. "We were both away at Braefield at the time. But David [our older brother] wrote us a letter about it. A very vivid, dramatic letter. You were enthralled by it." Clearly, I had not only been enthralled, but must have constructed the scene in my mind, from David's words, and then taken it over, appropriated it, and taken it for a memory of my own.

This is extraordinary -- one of the most brilliant men in the study of neurology can't recall accurately seeing a bomb explode, and admits it. It points out that advertisers and communicators need far more the CPMs and GRPs to make an impact on the consumer's mind; they need something heavier to make the impression stick, and be recallable.

Music is one powerful tool, and advertisers have long used it. If you think back to the 1970s, many TV and radio commercials had musical narratives -- Oscar Mayer had a way with b-o-l-o-g-n-a, Coke taught the world to sing in perfect harmony, and Burger King sang about having it your way. Even the famed early outdoor signs of America had a musical cadence: Around the corner, lickety-split, beautiful car, wasn't it? Burma-Shave. Our dad saw that in the 1940s, told us the rhyme in second grade, and we still recall it. For some reason, the use of music jingles in advertising has faded. Perhaps the market was oversaturated, and like the 1970s moustache music just went out of vogue.

Musical communication reaches something primitive in all of us, tied to deep memories and our desire to survive. However annoying, we can't get some tunes out of our mind. Soon, we bet, some clever marketer will bring the jingle back.

Apple and Labor Board try to gag the efficiency of free speech

Information wants to be free, but not if the National Labor Relations Board or Apple can stop it. This week two news items surfaced showing how scared big organizations are about free content.

First up, the U.S. labor board told employers that it's OK to prohibit workers from sending union-related emails on the company email system, since the email is corporate property. Next up, Apple--our beloved, uber-consumer-centric Apple--shut down a web site called Think Secret run by Harvard student Nick Ciarelli. Think Secret was in the business of investigative journalism, scooping Apple's upcoming product releases, and Apple didn't like this. We wonder if Ciarelli got a sweet payoff, er, settlement in exchange for walking away.

Whatever one's politics, these types of actions should give us pause--not because either is morally wrong, but because both prohibitions are inefficient.

It's a good thing if news flies that Apple has a hot product coming, because that news helps the entire technology industry advance more rapidly. It's a good thing if employees can speak openly about work issues, since eventually it helps problems surface and be resolved more quickly, to remove friction and boost future profits. We're not talking about stealing, lying, or misappropriating intellectual property. We're talking about the speed of communication.

Let's examine the corporate email issue more closely. What if, instead of a union message, you email your colleagues a proposal to sell more of Widget A and make the company $10 million in new profits? Ah, but unbeknownst to you, Widget B is a competing product and the Board is focused on that. Your proposal has undercut the other corporate initiative. Perhaps you've just abused company property. But at a higher level, your new idea, if adopted, could change your business for the better.

You see the point--prohibitions block innovation. Freedom of communication has moved beyond a human right into a larger role as the engine of capitalism. Consider what drives a healthy stock market: A buoyant technology sector, perhaps, led by Google, and Google sells the free transfer of information. If you really think about Google's model, it is stealing the first three lines of content from every web site in the world. Do you mind? Put the brakes on that information flow, and search engines, and the entire internet, and then the S&P 500 and Nasdaq will all take a tumble.

Unfortunately, what is good for the economy as a whole--free data--is not always good for individual companies. Industry has a right to protect its creations, to be sure, which is why we don't agree with today's college youths that stealing music or video online is OK. But when industry tries to stop individuals from sharing news or opinion, it steps too far. No matter. In the end information will be free, and businesses who can't learn to profit from that dynamic will sink back into the tar pits, where all dinosaurs belong.

The psychological warfare of pricing

With only three shopping days until Christmas, we have some good news. Retailers in America have banded together and announced that all products will now be 70% off suggested retail prices!

Admit it. You just felt a thrill.

Successful selling is often about controlling context. The New Yorker's James Surowiecki describes the phenomenon of reference pricing, in which a store such as Kohl's might mark a pair of jeans with a suggested retail price of $49.99, but then remark the tag as "on sale" for only $24.99 today. Consumers respond by looking at the first, higher price -- the reference price -- and get motivated because the second price conveys a "good deal." What consumers don't know is reference prices are usually fiction.

Why do people fall for such silly retail tricks? Consumers balance two motives -- a desire to gather new resources, and a conflicting need to hold on to existing resources, sort of like cavemen and women trading hard-saved nuts for animal pelts back in the Ice Age. Reference prices give consumers the illusion they are getting more value in the exchange.

In the past, retailers held an advantage in that consumers did not have access to much information about prices. The old, stodgy 1960s "Four P's" marketing model talked about product, price, place, promotion, with the inference that most consumption decisions are based on information buyers see at the point of purchase such as the store aisle. Four decades ago, most commerce was a physical, hand-to-hand transaction, so how marketers spun price, promotion and place really mattered.

The internet is revolutionizing marketing as consumers learn to peak behind the scenes at the pricing and quality of all the competitors. As consumers can compare everything quickly, manufacturers and designers are being forced to create better products. Autos are perhaps the best example; the information available from Consumer Reports and the internet on quality and safety means that a Honda built in 2007 is probably a better-structured car than a BMW built back in 1980. You don't often see cars broken down by the side of the road anymore with steam coming out of the hood. Some of today's current retailers, such as Apple, thrive on building products that are so good people will pay high margins, and not haggle on price.

Retailers still have many tricks to spur demand: Matching competitor prices, % off sales, limited-time only sales in which stores open at crazy hours. But maybe, as consumers get easier access to the internet, pricing strategies will continue to falter and retailers will have to make money the old fashioned way -- by building better products.

Holiday gift idea for the shopping procrastinator

It's not too late ... thanks to Slate, for this list of the best free online video games. We particularly like Gamma Bros, which brings back those groovy 1980s shoot-the-alien-invaders. Only question is, will your friend/wife/brother/lover appreciate a card with just a URL scribbled on it?

Dunkin' Donuts and the end of Microsoft Office

We're not big fans of gift cards, but something at Dunkin' Donuts caught our eye this morning: A sign on the counter promoting customized coffee cards. So tonight we visited the Dunkin' web site and found we can upload photos to create personalized gift cards.

Not only is this a cool gift idea -- imagine giving your friends coffee gift cards with your smiling mug, or better yet, goofy photos of your least favorite politician -- but it also points out the web is the new software center. The Dunkin' Donuts editing site, actually run by Cardways, allows a user to upload photos, resize them, move them around, squeeze the X and Y axis, and basically do layout work that back in 1996 required QuarkXPress and TrueType fonts on a high-end Mac.

Software is becoming unbound. Soon, when we all have portable internet devices, and when the wireless pathways online get fast enough, hard drives and local apps will go away. Back in the day, Quark had 90% market share for layout tools, but it's fading as design becomes embedded in every offline and online program. Microsoft Office, with its beloved Word and Excel, is facing the same pressure today from Google's free online apps. Software has taken a Buddhist cycle, slowly leaving the wheel of birth, suffering, death and rebirth on our laptops until it departs hard drives altogether and awakens in the online state of Nirvana.

The irony is this: The better software gets, the less consumers are willing to pay for it. But no worries, mate: We'll always spend too much on coffee.

davidandgoliath: Agency web site of the year.

Brilliance in communication. Nuff said.

davidandgoliath's merry Kia Maniac

Yeah, yeah, it's a gimmick, but Kia gets a holiday cheer for one of the funniest EOY car-sales promotions ever. Anything beats shouting announcers or that silly Lexus with a bow on top.

Credit davidandgoliath agency.

As social nets get closer, advertisers are pushed farther away

What happens when social networking turns out to be an interactive feature and not a single company's web site? Andreas Kluth has a brilliant essay where he notes social nets are today where the web was back when we needed AOL to get in. Eventually, just as web access and email became commodities, social networks will be a feature of every node on the internet. Your contacts and news will talk with our contacts and news. And Facebook will go away.

We call this going ambient, meaning social nets -- like the web, and like electricity before it -- will just become part of our environment. You don't walk into a room today and go, wow, man, this room is electrified! There is no single electrical company or single web company. Same will go for social networks, in which our little personal sphere of communications will plug in to everyone else, without a single company making it happen.

This trend explains the slipperiness of today's social media race. Friendster plummeted. MySpace got buzz before it got ugly. Facebook was valued at $15 billion before it bungled Beacon. Now, everyone is launching new social nets. Even Penthouse invested $500 million this month in sex-related communities. Kind of reminds you of Earthlink and Prodigy chasing AOL back in the day.

The trouble for advertisers is if social networks are just the new email--a new mode of communication, not a specific web portal--then advertisers are going to have difficulty intercepting our messages. Consider this: No one has succeeded in placing ads next to email, even the contextual attempts by Google. For example, if this blog post was an email to you, dear reader, a computer algorithm from Google might pick up the word "sex" in the above paragraph and insert text ads to the right of this copy block for Viagra. Is that relevant? Do you even care? Or, more important, if your mode of thought at this very moment is communicating with us on a personal level, aren't you a bit removed from the hunting-shopping mode you enter when you search for products on Google.com?

We think Kluth is right--social networks are here to stay. About 83 million U.S. consumers visited social networks in October, or about half of all people who went online. As networks become unbound, and as we begin whispering with each other in new ways, advertisers may have a hard time bending our ear.

The tyranny of Christmas cards

You know you hate them. Those little pretty things we write on in cursive until midnight, trying to keep up with everyone else, the damned illustrated manifestations of yuletide cheer called Christmas cards that are a bad virus gone boomerang, replicating among colleagues and old relatives and whipping back every season, forcing you to regurgitate the virus and mail it back again.

Not that we're bitter. We'd just rather be drinking eggnog and singing carols, not licking stamps at midnight.

So it's no wonder the first Christmas cards were a commercial creation, designed by Sir Henry Cole in London back in 1843, who printing 1,000 cards showing a family (and child) swigging wine and sold them for a shilling each. Wikipedia gives the entire rundown, but suffice it to say, some marketer began this card-mailing hysteria just motivated to make a buck. Christmas card mailings have dwindled with the advent of email, down 30% to only 20 cards per U.S. household in 2004 -- but at 110 million homes in the States, that's still 2.2 billion pieces of paper.

Ponder this. At one minute each, with writing, licking, stamping and posting, Christmas cards eat up 36.6 million hours of our time each year -- equal to 916,600 work weeks, or 18,300 full time employees working 50 weeks each year. Those same hours could be used to plant one tree a day for 4.5 million trees a year stopping greenhouse gases. No matter. We've have to cut all the trees down for pulp to make more holiday greeting cards.

We say, stop the madness. If you know us, then you know we love you. Nuff said. Happy New Year.

Hmm. Is it the Journal without Wall Street?

Word is Rupert Murdoch may change the name of the Wall Street Journal to just The Journal. We actually like this.

Put aside our brand memories for an instant, and let's consider the future impact. One: A name change would likely upset some readers, but WSJ's audience has survived several recent design changes, including color and the new children's edition small format. The only real screams we heard were when WSJ moved the letters to the editor to a separate section, posting reader responses far, far away from its ice-cold conservative editorial page ... and WSJ quickly caved and moved the readers' voices back. If readers could survive that insult, a name change probably won't kill existing circulation too much.

Two: Now, let's think about the current readers ... baby boomers, wealthy to be sure, but slowly, inexorably headed for that green golf course in the sky. The Journal, er, Wall Street Journal needs to embrace a younger audience. Broadening its brand might help attract new readers. WSJ has already moved far beyond finance into personal technology and feature stories about chefs, cooking, travel and wine.

We're huge fans of WSJ, since it includes some of the best, most thoughtful reporting in the world. Here's hoping they're careful with the brand, but with readers bailing out of traditional print, a bold move may be just the thing.

When web ad measurement fails, build a ruler

We've been critical about broadcast, outdoor and print media measurement systems lately ... but at least there is one ruling body in each of those media that tries to establish standards. A new report says the lack of consistency in online measurement may be scaring some advertisers away from internet advertising, especially as web media continues to evolve into video, widgets, and social media apps. This is ironic, because the web is awash in data ... but often not all of the numbers add up.

For example, one standard of web audience is "unique visitors." But if a user deletes the cookies on his computer, he comes back as a new unique visitor each time ... so John Doe, battling viruses on his Windows PC, may get counted over and over again inflating a web site's traffic report. "Uniques" also do not account for the same viewer logging in from different computers.

This is more than a nit: unique visitors are the baseline of a web site's audience, the equivalent of reach in traditional media planning. If reach is off, what else could be?

Randall Rothenberg, CEO of the Interactive Advertising Bureau, put it: "Marketers