Ballet plus sex. What, are you listening now?

While you probably love the big-screen TV in your basement, local theater companies are hoping for a blackout. Performing arts are being hammered by the perfection of home entertainment plus sucky economy.

Smuin Ballet in San Francisco is fighting back with a series of Bay-area ads by the Evolution Bureau agency. The creative combines ballet with something else -- a dose of sex, Broadway, electric guitar. Ballet isn't stuffy, you see -- it's buff men and sultry women in revealing clothes.

Hm. When people don't get your product, it's not bad to connect it to something they surely want. Via Angela Natividad.

A brief ode to dying newspapers

The bad news for newspapers keeps coming. Thousands of observers have now become "death of newspaper bloggers," but it's obvious that the proliferation of desktop computers, laptops, and cell phones have made sheets of smudgy-inked paper obsolete. Dirk Singer, our PR friend over in London, has perhaps the simplest explanation of why papers are in trouble -- readers have moved online, advertising dollars have not followed, and for every paper that tries to charge readers for content online, there are 10 others that won't.

However, journalism will obviously survive. Blogs, including this one, can't make up for dedicated, real reporting. Someone has to interview people, wade through documents, and see what's really going on.

The second problem with newspapers failing is the potential absence of editors who help select news stories they think you should read. Admit it. If you didn't have an editor at The New York Times telling you about starving people in Africa, you'd certainly never search for it.

The economics are changing, and huge printing presses and the associated costs with chopping down forests will have to go away. Perhaps there have always been too many journalists -- one reason why the starting salary for editorial assistants is often below $20k in the U.S., because dozens of people have always clamored for every single job.

The job market will shrink. The papers will move online. There will be fewer advertising dollars. It's all inevitable. But the role of real journalists, and real editors who help pick the stories you need to see, will always be around. The only ray of light we see is the tightening market may actually improve journalistic quality, as the best of the best fight to remain, sharing via dedicated expertise what happened in the world today.

Photo: DRB62

Why marketers avoid religion (a cautionary tale)

A debate on Twitter tonight made us realize that most commercialism skips right over religion -- because people may disagree with the message. And that points out a danger in any brand communication.

First, consider the irony: Marketers want to reach the masses. The masses believe in religion. Yet religion is taboo. The longest story ever told is one about God, and most people believe in him (or her). One study shows that only 2.5% of the world's population count themselves as atheists and 12.7% as "non-religious," leaving the remaining 6 out of 7 humans to follow a higher power. But advertising messages usually avoid even hints of spirituality.

What gives? You see occasional campaigns like the one above, for the Collegiate Churches of New York, pushing a specific religion. But the varied nuances of belief mean honing in on one message could offend everyone else. Religion is avoided for the same reason marketers don't talk about politics or taxes. Pick one side and you just can't win.

The lesson here, of course, is any marketing message is polarizing, and advertising of any sort may be pushing away as many people as it attracts. That's right -- and no one measures this! Marketers miss this because they only focus on responses, not the unknown masses who don't call in or visit a web site ... and who may be deeply alienated by your message. It's a good thought grenade to put on your ideation table as you play with brand communications: what could backfire among all those who fail to believe? Are they just ignoring us? Or are they rushing to the other side?

Metrosexuals are dying! Brandweek said it's true!

We try not to rehash the industry press, but this is too good to miss. Apparently the well-groomed type of guys who think a product is something you put in your hair were never as numerous as marketers thought. That's bad news for CPG companies, who upon discovering metrosexuals in the 1990s began pushing lotions and gels previously meant only for women onto the more hairy side of the population. (More consumers + more hair = more hair product sales!) David Rubin of Unilever marketing told Brandweek, and we quote, the metrosexual "is still there ... but as a population, he's actually very small."

Hmm. Did marketers just suggest size matters?

It could be metrosexuals remain everywhere but are cutting back in the recession. No matter. Replacing the dude with the fancy gel is a more Neanderthal type whom marketers have reclassified -- pay attention closely, class -- as "the everyday guy." You know, guys like you who borrow their wives' lotion. P&G knows you do, because it studied guys' grooming habits in the shower.

Don't look at us. We're strictly Googlesexual.

NYT retouches Polaroid

Remember the days before Photoshop? When the photo you snapped was what you got? NYT reports Polaroid, bumping through bankruptcy, may be reborn in the Netherlands as a group of investors takes over an abandoned factory. The crux of it all is Polaroid SX 70 and 600 series film, required to make those sliding squares pop out of the instant cameras and about to go the way of dinosaurs, may come back.

The resurrection appears not done yet, so NYT is rallying a movement by inviting readers to email old Polaroid snaps (via scan, or photo of the photo) to pix@nyt.com. This should be fun.

Apple's new iPhone Nano: Democratizing design

Do you want a smaller, sexier version of the Apple iPhone? Well you can't have it. The image above is actually a mock-up by the UK technology site T3, which had an artist dabble in MS Paint for 10 minutes.

Such artistry points out industrial design is becoming a commodity, something that millions of people with talent can now do using today's powerful software tools. The crowdsourcing site CrowdSpring still has two weeks left in its LG mobile design competition (for a $20,000 top prize, upload your phone image here), and Wired recently noted that videogame players are beginning to crack the software to create their own versions of games (such as a baby disarming a nuclear bomb). Not every design is good, as some bloggers like to note. But the democratization of creation means there is a greater chance that brilliance may emerge, as the barriers to the Da Vincis of the future fall.

Our personal favorite? The annual Peugeot Design Competition, in which you can draft your own car. Look at this beauty and tell us that crowds don't have wisdom.

Canadian Club loves your dad. But can you measure love?

Alan Wolk, one of our favorite pundits, notes ad campaigns are often held to unrealistic standards. "For years success and failure have been finite notions in the ad business," he writes. "An ad either worked or it didn’t. A campaign was a resounding success or a dismal failure..."

But is it logical to judge advertising so quickly?

Take whiskey. Canadian Club has been running a wonderful series of print ads that move beyond the product to the complex relationship that its consumer target, men in their 30s and 40s, have with their fathers. The gist is your dad had lots of whiskey-fueled adventures before you were born, so lad, pick up the booze your dad used. We don't drink whiskey (well, unless we're in Nashville), but this message has made us rethink it. We miss our dad. Canadian Club has created a clever emotional frisson.

Now imagine measuring the success of this campaign. You could track responses (difficult), variances in media performance (more difficult), consumer awareness (is the brand now more recognizable?), and of course product sales. You could even believe the wild claims of the agencies who create such stuff, as they build their typically inflated case studies to submit to an awards competition. But in a land of millions of product choices, chances are Canadian Club's message will just lightly break through, as good as it is.

And that's OK. In many ways advertising is now a required cost of business, a messaging platform to keep up with competitors. The days of positioning, where you could grab a unique rung in consumers' heads, are dying as product choices overwhelm our mental inventory. The question now isn't whether consumers rush to respond; it's what would happen instead if you went invisible and consumers failed to consider you at all.

We're not ordering whiskey tonight. We won't jack up Canadian Club sales tomorrow. But next time we're in Nashville, we may give dad's drink a try.

California, Megan Fox, and the madness of crowdsourcing

Crowds aren’t always right. We learned this searching for the right reading material for a double flight from New York City to Wichita, Kansas, today. Feeling a bit schizophrenic, e.g. smart yet lustful, we bought both Esquire (Megan Fox!) and The Economist (California budget crisis!) to cover our stimuli inputs.

Megan is surprisingly intelligent in her Esquire interview, and California is surprisingly stupid in The Economist. Let’s focus on stupid. California voters pushed the state off a financial cliff yesterday when they voted down several measures designed to raise badly needed funds; the state’s budget gap immediately leapt from $15.4 billion to $21.3 billion, and now California may cut services so deeply it sends prisoners home.

What gives? Crowds don’t like to share resources (taxes), but they want shared resources (schools, armies, and fire departments), and without leadership you end up with less give than take. In California the trouble is compounded by its Byzantine Constitution, almost guaranteed to push the state into financial disaster. Follow the bouncing ball. First, California requires that either budget or tax changes be approved by two-thirds of both state houses of legislature, meaning a minority can block logical budgeting. Second, California voters can bring almost any initiative to ballot, meaning the masses can lock in future spending without regard for taxes required to fund it. And third, California political districts are rife with gerrymandering, meaning extremists from the left and right tend to make it to elected office for gridlock.

Add it up and California can’t figure out how to raise the money it needs to fund what it wants, because its selfish crowds can’t think one level up.

You end up with a $21.3 billion hole.

Crowdsourcing sometimes can guide you to solutions. But if the answer requires balancing lust for resources with intelligence on how to pay for them, you may need a single smart person. Perhaps Megan Fox?

Rushing back

We're damn busy this week. It happens. So now we'll leave you with four of our past favorite posts.

1. Because you believe it, it must be true.
2. If robots ever got smart, no one else would realize it.
3. Chasing a mistake is always a mistake.
4. Facebook doesn't want your content. It only wants you.

Photo: Amnemona

Wolfram|Alpha's AI experiment

Why is the sky blue? We ran this and a few other questions by the new search engine Wolfram|Alpha today. Wolfram|Alpha plays around with 10+ trillion pieces of data to make knowledge computational -- if this, then that; this vs. that; if this occurs, what happens then. You know, what are the relationships between things. It's a valiant attempt at artificial intelligence, and fills a void between Google's vast search of static items and social media search of chat in real time.

Alas, this alpha thing feels more like beta. Wolfram|Alpha fails to answer basic queries and is still a babe in the woods of intelligence. It reminds us just a bit of Chris McKinstry's effort to build a vast artificial consciousness that could answer simple yes/no questions. McKinstry never got close to passing the Turing test, and eventually committed suicide.

Designing intelligence isn't easy. We look forward to seeing where Wolfram goes.

Wolfram|Alpha demo here. Image: Gari Baldi.

Skittles, 'stunting' and sustainability

Remember when the Skittles home page became a Twitter feed and the advertising world went nuts about it? Skittles captured 1% of all Tweets. Everyone talked. Brilliant.

A few weeks pass and now Skittles is back to zero. One of our critiques of social media campaigns is too many try to either buy into human networks (paying bloggers money or gift cards or charitable hooks for written mentions) or they "stunt" their way in. Stunting means pulling off a one-time idea that goes viral out of sheer novelty, but never can be repeated.

Are any of these approaches really sustainable? And if not, what can you do to maintain a message in the online idea marketplace?

What to do with all that advertising data

So with newspapers dying and even banner ads becoming problematic, it's astounding that most marketers still don't measure. Sure, you may have metrics in silos -- CTRs on the web, GRPs in broadcast, CPMs in print -- but typically each marketing silo is tweaked independently for performance.

Could you be missing the big picture?


The table above shows just this -- a $1 million advertising schedule that is kicking off about 80% in return. What's that, you say? The return seems to vary in each line? Well, of course. If you grouped your advertising media into 10 equal buckets (called "Media Groups" above) based on their performance in generating sales, you almost always find a 20-to-1 range in what works. Media Group 1 above performs horribly, losing money. Media Group 10 is rocking.

If this were an investment, you'd call your broker and say buddy, move my money around to what works. Kind of like this ...


Much better. We're still investing $1 million in advertising, but now the total return has jumped from 80% to 204%. We're making more than $2 million in return instead of just $795,000.

We didn't spend a dime more. We just made measurement meaningful.

So here's a question for your marketing team. Are you caught looking at CTRs and conversion rates and CPMs and GRPs and reach and frequency, and not doing a damn thing about it? In this economy, it may be time to rebalance your entire investment portfolio.

Find more thoughts on ad measurement in our whitepaper here.

Twitter fans, meet Tipjoy, your new tweeting bank service

Ever notice what is missing from your cell phone? You can call, text, take photos and even surf the web -- but does your mobile device carry money?

New Twitter applications may change that. Third-party services such as Tipjoy allow you to send real money via Twitter, by loading up an account that taps your credit card. Since Twitter works great on cell phones, it soon could be a backdoor for mobile phones to finally replace your wallet. Tipjoy has cleverly launched with a carrot that could attract big marketers to further promote the micropayment service: it touts charitable giving as one use, the perfect platform for cause-marketers trying to buy their way into social media buzz by raising money for charity.

Twitter itself is down with that, even promoting Tipjoy on its home page just below your follower count. If you like the ironic thought of Twitter, so often criticized for failing to monetize, eventually becoming a vast, speedy, mobile backbone of the global currency system, please tweet us $100.

What Don Draper can teach you about viral marketing

When the producers of Mad Men researched American advertising of the 1960s, they modeled their protagonist Don Draper after the real-world ad exec Rosser Reeves. Reeves, as you may know, was a wildly successful pioneer of TV advertising who created the concept Unique Selling Proposition. The USP, like most buzzwords, has become misunderstood in marketing circles but means three simple things:

1. Your ad must convey a specific benefit.
2. The benefit must be something that competitors cannot match.
3. The benefit has to be strong enough to attract masses of consumers.

USPs are different than brand imagery. They are pointed, often slogans, and can even be annoying. Reeves did a 59-second spot for Anacin that everyone agreed was grating, yet it tripled sales for the headache medicine over 7 years. Reeves died in 1984 but you can still hear his work today with the slogan M&Ms "melt in your mouth, not in your hand."

So what do old ad theories teach us about new viral campaigns?

Uniqueness. Think of every viral fad of the past decade and what they had in common was a Unique Selling Proposition. Subservient Chicken. Lonelygirl15. Snakes on a Plane. The Facebook Whopper Sacrifice. The problem with most other attempts is they have no USP -- and in social networks that originality is just as important to success as with traditional media.

We thought of Reeves last night commenting on Scott Henderson's blog about cause marketing, a new fad among marketers trying to go viral on social networks. As consumers spend more time networking with each other online, and less receiving traditional ads, marketers are desperately testing new ways to become part of the conversation. Paid posts simply buy in (and we've challenged the ethics in BusinessWeek here). Cause marketing is more subtle, using the delivery of food or a donation to try to build buzz about a brand (like Scott Henderson's own Tyson campaign here).

Problem is, cause marketing is becoming a commodity -- and as more marketers jump on this bandwagon, the uniqueness and resonance fade.

Beyond the ethical debates of paid posts or cause promotions, the real question for advertisers squeezing into social media conversations is: will it work? If your missive is not original, something competing messages don't offer and something strong enough to be passed to masses, it's not likely. Or as Don Draper said about a cigarette being promoted: "It's toasted."

Cheapotle vs. Chipotle: The Denver Egotist brand smackdown

The fast-casual dining chain Chipotle Mexican Grill became famous for its 1-pound aluminum-clad big burritos. Chipotle recently rebranded touting cheaper, smaller food, and the creatives in its home town Denver are not happy about it. The Denver Egotist has launched an anti-campaign campaign asking Chipotle to please bring its big burrito, and unique selling proposition, back. The Egotist has even published the phone number and email of Chris Arnold, Chipotle's marketing chief, and asked others to write in to complain.

Chipotle's move may have been justified; we haven't seen their market research, and it is very possible lower price points for smaller menu items are required to survive the current recession. The fight is worth a read, if nothing more than to see how the feedback loop of blogs in your industry can create negative word of mouth if your brand is perceived as making a mistake.

The view from our spaceship

William Castleman figured out how to film the center of our own galaxy as it rose over the night horizon in Texas. In case you want directions, here's how he did it:

"The time-lapse sequence was taken with the simplest equipment that I brought to the star party. I put the Canon EOS-5D (AA screen modified to record hydrogen alpha at 656 nm) with an EF 15mm f/2.8 lens on a weighted tripod. Exposures were 20 seconds at f/2.8 ISO 1600 followed by 40 second interval. Exposures were controlled by an interval timer shutter release (Canon TC80N3). Power was provided by a Hutech EOS203 12v power adapter run off a 12v deep cycle battery. Large jpg files shot in custom white balance were batch processed in Photoshop (levels, curves, contrast, Noise Ninja noise reduction, resize) and assembled in Quicktime Pro. Editing/assembly was with Sony Vegas Movie Studio 9."

Via The Denver Egotist.

Your Facebook bikini photo is now being used by marketers

Forrester's Jeremiah Owyang recently sketched five eras of the social web, including the upcoming period of "social context" -- where marketers scrape demographic insights from your online social networking behavior. The idea is to use the real interactions you're chatting about online, which describe the deep desires of your soul, to replace the old marketing list data swabbed from credit card transactions by companies such as Experian.

Several data companies are already mining social media. Colligent monitors online social profiles to build market analysis of consumers' music preferences, helping Hollywood Records, for example, discover that the Jonas Brothers have more Latin American fans than previously thought. And while television technology is not yet two-way social media, TiVo has begun selling data from every remote click to understand real TV viewing behavior.

Wired notes that all of this new data is incredibly valuable:

"If TiVo’s graphs show that slow-motion bikini babes frolicking on beaches cause some TiVo users to hit rewind in order to watch an ad they had been fast-forwarding through, you can bet advertisers are going to want to know that. Alternatively, if a local news station finds out everyone fast-forwards through stories about rescuing cats that are stuck in trees, they’ll know to leave such extrications untelevised."

By observing real media behavior and real social interactions, marketers may finally understand what consumers want. Be careful what you tweet for.

Photo: Libertinus

Next spray can, please

A reporter asked us today if we thought the hyperbole about Twitter was similar to the old Second Life bubble -- which drew gobs of advertisers who couldn't seem to fit in. We answered logically that the models differ; Twitter will last longer because it has broader and more flexible communications utility, creating more loyal users but similar antipathy toward third-party marketers. Sure, there are gimmicks, like the follower/following motif that provides a game-like reward mechanism. (1,000! Score!) But there is no doubt Twitter is becoming a new advertiser-free communications ecosystem.

Then Twitter went down tonight and we got pissed. Silly us. Twitter works simply because we need self-expression.

Image via Kelpenhagen.

Less than zero: How 'double-free' killed the Danish newspapers

Wired and "freemium" guru Chris Anderson had dinner recently with Jon Lund, chief of the Danish Internet Advertising Bureau, and learned about a free business model gone sour. It seems in fall of 2006 a new newspaper called Nyhedsavisen entered the Danish market with a "double-free" model -- the paper cost nothing, and it would also be delivered to homes for free. It was a foray by the Icelandic media group Dagsbrun to capture the Danish ad market but ended up decimating the nation's newspaper industry, as other publishers tried to match the double-free model. In the end, three papers went bankrupt and the industry lost $150 million.

What's intriguing about the tale is how demand plummets when oversupply swamps consumers, even if the goods are free. Local accounts say Danes got fed up with six newspapers a day. Reminds us a bit of all the social media and mobile free apps competing for attention in the U.S. ... or worse, the advertisers trying to buy their way into social media conversations with paid posts that no one welcomes. If supply saturates and prices can't move lower than free, demand is going to run away.

The evolutionary reason why you often fail

Bees die when they sting. Yet they sting with some instinct to protect other bees. Why is it individuals act so crazy sometimes, yet societies survive? Max Zeledon recently noted at his blog that traders in financial markets may have an evolutionary incentive to take wild risks, a conjecture known as the Adaptive Markets Hypothesis, where the many absorb the chaos of the few.

So we responded:

Seed Magazine just ran a great bit called “The Hive Mind,” exploring the evolutionary implications of altruism. In essence, the question was why do some little insects sacrifice themselves, if that removes their genes from future generations even if it helps the group. The answer — which is cool — is that evolution works on several levels, genetic, individual, collective, and for a species.

If you play this forward at the collective level it means certain irrational, self-destructive behavior may kill the individual but actually help the overall group succeed — and thus the group thrives in evolution. Altruism means falling on your sword; nutty market bets mean losing your shirt; but if enough individuals take enough crazy risks so that the overall market prospers, the collective group wins.

So perhaps overconfidence and big bets help markets succeed in the long run, even if individuals or banks fail in the short term. The irony of all this is that altruism and greed are on opposites of the moral spectrum, yet both irrational behavior sets may be just what humans need to survive and thrive.

Perhaps collective groups of humans have formed a new artificial intelligence. AI has arrived and it's not in a computer on a spaceship bound for Jupiter, or in angry robots that look like Terminators, but instead in the financial markets holding our 401ks. It's certainly possible. After all, we contribute irrationally to the investment hive mind ourselves, and our altruism got burned last year in the S&P 500.

Image: Da100fotos

Chanel No. 5 poetry

Angela Natividad calls it magically delicious. AdFreak calls it too long and in need of a train going into a tunnel. We note that if you want a message to go viral, perhaps more than seeding it among influencers or manipulating social networks, just create something beautiful.

A microsite takes you behind the scenes with ad and Amélie director Jean-Pierre Jeunet here.

iPhone apps: Losing users within 30 days?

Speaking of iPhone apps, Pinch Media recently tracked 30 million application downloads and found a startling fall-off among users. Apple has had more than 1 billion of these tiny software launch buttons downloaded to iPhones, but it turns out most users quickly forget about them.

Pinch Media found that only 20% of people continue to use a free application after the first day, and three months after the download fewer than 1% of users continue to tap the app. This doesn't bode well for companies hoping to profit from advertising run on free apps -- ads on iPhone apps run $0.50 to $2.00 CPM (cost per thousand impressions), and Pinch estimates that with only 80 average sessions per user, application makers would have to charge at least $8.75 CPM to break even.

To be fair, iPhone apps likely follow a classic Pareto skew where a handful -- news, weather, maps -- get used far more than others. Or perhaps iPhones were made for calling people after all.

Via TechCrunch.

A little app problem for mobile marketing

Much has been written about mobile advertising, usually "it's almost here! really!", yet one basic challenge remains -- handsets are cluttered with multiple web interfaces, and the problem is growing exponentially as new smart phones such as the iPhone allow anyone to load thousands of app buttons to get services online.

So many doorways. How will advertisers intercept them?

To understand the challenge, consider that the common web browser for computers created a single doorway that allowed certain advertising companies to thrive. The reason Google was able to gain a stronghold on internet advertising is that personal computers have only one interface to get online -- the web browser. Google could become a popular search portal because everyone could easily find it within the common browser.

Ah, but mobile is different. The iPhone and Google's own Android system enable users to load cell phones with apps -- software applications for checking stocks, the weather, directions, retail store prices -- and each button is a separate on-ramp to the internet. How will advertisers intercept users if users are taking a million different doorways online?

Brian Wieser, global director of forecasting for Magna, recently said U.S. advertisers will spend $229 million on mobile marketing in 2009 vs. $169 million in 2008. But he noted the market remains a "highly fragmented group of divergent advertising models collectively organized around portable media." Exactly.

Photo: Sigalakos

A BeanCast debate: Cutting out the middleman

Damn that Chris Anderson. He's been talking for more than a year about the trend of services being priced for free, and now big companies like Coke are taking notice.

Last night we recorded a podcast debate with the brilliant Joseph Jaffe, Bill Green and Bob Knorpp on tectonic shifts of disintermediation rocking the communications industry. Coke is going directly to marketing results, telling its agencies they must now work on a pay-for-performance model and risk having their fees cut if they don't hit targets. The Current Network, a television project launched by Al Gore, undercut agency hunters by sending out an RFP for advertising work directly on Twitter. And the Chuck television show undercut Nielsen ratings via a groundswell of loyalists demanding the show be saved, tipping their hat to the advertiser Subway.

Cut, cut, cut. Suppliers and consumers finding each other more efficiently, squeezing the people in the middle who used to connect them. Chris Anderson, you're taking all the joy out of business.

Download the podcast debate for free here, and don't miss us all interrupting Mr. Jaffe. ;)

Photo: Dr. Craig

Lala.com tests the psychology of music ownership

If the iTunes Store had an affair with Pandora, the resulting love child might look like Lala.com. Matt Geraghty over at the Razorfish Scatter/Gather blog points out Lala.com may revolutionize the music business. Yeah, we've been there before, but Lala has an interesting spin combining your human itch to own songs with your desire to grab music for free off the interwebs.

Lala basically gives you a tiered access structure -- you can listen to any of 6 million songs online for free, but only once; you can buy a song for only 10 cents and play it anytime as long as you're connected online; or you can purchase MP3s for download for 89 cents and take them anywhere. As a bonus, Lala will upload your current iTunes library into the cloud so you can access all the music you already own from any other device connected to the net.

Lala is a fascinating test of the psychology of ownership. Will consumers shill out a micropayment of 10 cents for quasi-owning a song that lives only online? The challenge for Lala is it's not quite as good as free (illegal) music, and it's not quite as portable as the buckish (legal) tunes we're used to purchasing. Given the trend of teens to run around with mobile gadgets and expect a zero cost for digital content, the real audience for Lala may be fortysomething business types willing to build a nice office music collection for 20 bucks. We say, put some early U2 on the home page.

Photo: Behindalens