If you work in advertising you know Alex Bogusky as an icon, chief of Crispin Porter + Bogusky who does aggressive things with hamburgers. Bogusky dreams up campaigns with a disturbing psychological bent designed to yank the media. He has cool hair, a motorcycle with a rack for a mountain bike on the back, and draws the kind of love-hate idolatry that only an industry obsessed with eating its young can muster. If you see an ad that gives you a nightmare, but a warm fuzzy nightmare like you're almost drowning and kind of enjoying it, CP+B probably did it. We're reluctant to write about him for fear it looks like we're kissing his ass.
Be honest. Be respectful. Be good. Set positive goals for yourself that can benefit lots of people. You’ll have lots of support because what’s good for you is good for them. Some people think they have to knock somebody else to get into a top spot. I’ve known people that thought they needed to knock me down to get up the ladder. It rarely works that way because there is infinite room for success and you’ll just get distracted from your true goals.
Don't exaggerate. Don't complicate. Very humble versions of success can lead to a wonderful life adventure. You don’t have to make it seem grand for it to become grand as it becomes reality.
Simplify. I think two sentences should be enough to hold your life’s professional dream.
This is complicated so pay close attention. Microsoft just gamed you, bloggers. Yes, Redmond distributed a video that comically showed nerds hosting a "Windows 7 Launch Party." And like fish snapping to the bait, bloggers began reposting the video while laughing at it, saying Windows 7 was uncool. Windows 7. Windows 7. And the links spread. The bad Windows 7 viral went viral. Microsoft was uncool, out of touch, with Windows 7. Windows 7. Within weeks the video scored 638,000 views on YouTube, mostly among the influential tech set. NPR picked up the story. And millions of Americans are now thinking about Windows 7.
Microsoft knows there is no ad placement better than the one that creates scandal. Windows 7. Very. Well. Played.
Google has launched SideWiki, a web plug-in that allows you to comment on any site or read comments placed there by others. Now ketchup fans can tell Heinz.com what they really think. Jeremiah Owyang suggests this will be big, as Google integrates the feature with other services and competitors rush to emulate it.
However, other Google attempts to play at crowdsourcing content have stumbled. Google's SearchWiki launched last November with the promise of checking how other users marked up search results, and never took off (perhaps because people search for things once and rarely go back to the same hunt). Google's Knol invited the world to compete with Wikipedia by writing thought pieces, yet didn't gain traction. We searched Knol for "media planning" hoping some expert had defined our own field, and were greeted with copy telling veterans how to negotiate with their landlords.
We'll see. For sites people feel passionate about -- imagine the forum over at FoxNews.com and Whitehouse.gov! -- reader comments will be insightful. Either way, Jeremiah is right: The days of owning your own brand and web site are numbered.
This summer while guest posting over at Brandflakes for Breakfast we riffed on Robert Sommer's 1969 theory of personal space. One of his key concepts was humans have three fields for receiving communication - intimate, near your face or ears; personal, about an arm's length away; and social, inbound from about 10 feet. Now if you think about the communication devices in your life - mobile phones, laptop computers, and big-screen TVs - they fit nicely into each range. People have a need for each level of communication, likely embedded in our genes from ancestors who whispered secrets, talked face to face, or entertained from the campfire.
This is worth noting as some, like Bob Garfield, predict the end of advertising. Computer banner ads may be replacing newsprint in the personal space, but consumers still watch more than 5 hours of live television a day in the social space. Mobile may be ascendant in the intimate space, but the ads there don't work well due to limited inventory and consumer modality. The Chikita network recently tracked 93 million impressions and found cell phone ads had a click-through rate only half that of the already horrific banner ad CTRs (0.48% vs. 0.83%). The sexy iPhone, with arguably the best screen for mobile web browsing, had the worst CTRs of all -- 0.30%. But so what? Advertising never fit well into lovers' whispering messages, either.
Campfires live on
The point is we all have a need to be passive occasionally, and as we allow cable television to wash over us, there remain plenty of slots for paid advertising. DVRs are nibbling away at this, but beware stats that tell you 1 in 4 homes have them, because they overstate commercial skipping. Nielsen reports consumers only watch DVR-recorded programming, on average, about 15 minutes per day. The total time spent viewing commercials or paid sponsorships from various screens? Sixty-one minutes. And we keep improving the entertainment tools for our social space; next up, 3-D television is coming to a basement near you soon.
Advertising is alive and well, especially in the social space of inbound entertainment. We'll riff more on this in an upcoming ad column.
The world of advertising is full of silly metrics, probably because many who work there are suppressed novelists or film producers who didn't carry calculators in college. Alas, the problem of foolish marketing math has gotten more severe with the advent of social media, where you'll find numerous numb-headed attempts to explain how to "measure" "engagement" for "ROI."
Data guru Anna O'Brien got so ticked off by the hyperbole she created the chart above to explain exactly what goes into true measurement. She writes: "It hit me. Adding qualitative aspect to a previously primarily quant-based world has thrown some people so far for a loop that they are willing to accept complete gibberish as a viable marketing solution as long as it has words like 'tweets', 'likes', and 'posts' built into the equation." O'Brien's resulting post is a brilliant kingdom-phylum-class-order-family-genus-species hierarchy of the measurement universe, and she keenly draws the distinction between monitoring and true measurement.
Funnel. Return. Value.
We suggest the truth is even more simple: There are only 3 basic questions that need to be answered for measuring any marketing performance.
(1) Where is the customer in the marketing funnel? (Is your target moving through awareness, consideration, or action?)
(2) What is the ROI on the marketing investment? (Does the financial gain from your initiative outweigh the cost?) (3) What is the resulting impact on customer valuation? (Customers are your real asset base; is their lifetime value rising based on your marketing activity?)
Customers are your source of financial value. Everything in marketing manages customers' inflow of value with those questions. Everything outside of marketing measures the outflow of organizational costs. Yes, even Razorfish got it wrong
The problem with most social media measurement is it touches only a subset of (1) above: the awareness stage of the marketing funnel. You can track the number of mentions of a brand online, and rank the people talking by their level of influence, and evaluate whether the "sentiment" is positive or negative. But do all that, even with Razorfish's lovely Social Influence Marketing score (see page 24 of Shiv Singh's Fluent report), and all you get is a mood ring for how much customers love your product while they are talking about you. The vibe of awareness within the earliest stages of your marketing funnel tells you nothing, really, about whether they moved to action and bought something, the resulting ROI on campaign investment or long-term customer value.
That's OK. There's nothing wrong with measuring small sections of your entire value chain, and social media itself is primarily conversations that do not provide insight into consumers' true actions. But remember that. Don't get carried away by software that tells you X brand was mentioned 2,318 times yesterday, and that sentiment was up to 0.79. If you can put a number to something that helps you adjust marketing course for improved results tomorrow, then you know the measurement has value.
Footnote: We are a huge fan of Shiv Singh, one of the sharpest minds and clearest speakers in social media, and this post is not a knock on his insights. We just find the Razorfish social media score a narrow view of one way customer value flows into your organization, even within the confines of social media, and should be labeled as such. Hat tip to Anna O'Brien and the comments on her blog for inspiring this post.
So Seth Godin has an idea -- why not build a simple web portal for your brand that collects the top online chatter about your business, and gives you a forum to respond? And better yet, why not pay Seth Godin $400 a month to manage it? Godin has launchedBrands in Public, a simplified view of consumer conversations about you, and an easy way for you to respond when crisis hits. The only challenge we see is how to get consumers to visit your Godin page to check responses; Godin says he is running the equivalent of $500,000 in house ads across the broader Squidoo network to promote it, but good luck with that. Still ... it's intriguing that Godin has made the dashboards public. If you are curious about any brand's buzz in social media, you can hit the Brands in Public for a free peek. Heck, don't tell Seth, but you could even use it for competitive research.
Want to look yourself? Here's how Trader Joe's is using it.
One of the more interesting defenses against consumers tuning out advertising is when advertisers cut back on the ads themselves. A few years back, Clear Channel was forced to retrench on the minutes of radio commercials per hour after it realized consumers were aghast at spot overload so switched the dial, hurting ratings. More recently Hulu.com launched its online video format with a similar less-is-more ad structure, with minimal paid interruptions.
Now big broadcast boy ABC is cutting back as well, reducing television commercials in its premiere episodes and not starting most spots until 15 minutes into the show. Jeff Bader, ABC Entertainment's scheduling chief, told the Los Angeles Times "you hope the longer you keep them at the start of the show, the more likely they are to stick to it." The gripping "Flash Forward," which premieres this Thursday night, may go as long as 18 minutes before a commercial break. A history of polluted networks
The tragedy of the commons is something marketers typically fail to think about until it's too late. Telemarketing was the first victim, becoming so obnoxious that consumers eventually rebelled with the Do Not Call lists, almost killing the industry. Email spam became a joke with filters blocking most messages and a response rate something like 1 in 12.5 million. Now social media risks the same network counter-reaction: paid messages in blogs and tweets -- not advertising, but paid opinions in which people profess to write what they want about a brand while being paid to do it -- are coming from companies such as Izea, and we predict new filters will arise to block out the confusion. If such fuzzy sponsorships go too far, the utility of the network will be diminished, and all users, including marketers, may suffer the consequences.
Want proof? Try to set up a telemarketing program today, and let us know how well it works.
What advertisers fail to realize is we all need a healthy ecosystem for any communication to work. It's not easy showing restraint, because you're betting the lost revenue of today will be replaced by more viewers, and more resulting ad sales, tomorrow. But if advertising is kept inside its box, clearly marked with limits on how much time it consumes, consumers in turn will be more likely to pay attention and respond. As media planners, we find the ABC strategy intriguing ... because the marketing messages that do get included are likely to break through.
We miss Batgirl. You see, when we were kids in the 1970s (yes, we admit it), Batman reruns on TV were big after school, just as in primetime Happy Days was the big thing on TV. We went "pow" in the schoolyard fighting like Robin. Schoolkids would come in after a showing of the Fonz recounting the latest hip saying. After one Happy Days episode, where naive teenager Richie helped a geeky relative get cool by catching pennies falling off his elbow, we spent the better part of a week's recess trying to grab 30 or 40 coins. (OK, to try this, put your right arm straight up; bend your forearm back over your shoulder; your forearm should now be horizontal with the ground, with your elbow in front of you about eye level; now stack a series of coins above your elbow, then rapidly swing your arm forward and try to catch the coins in mid-air before they pass your waist and hit the ground...) You get it. That was a meme.
We see fewer and fewer memes, or cultural viruses, coming from mass media. In the 1980s and early 1990s, Saturday Night Live on NBC was one launching pad for cultural pass-alongs, and hip comedians could get everyone saying the same things on Mondays. The Blues Brothers, Wayne's World, Stuart Smally, all were comic riffs that people for some reason wanted to emulate. Alas, memes, those cultural ideas spread from one person to another like early Christianity or healthcare death panels, are getting harder to propagate with the fragmentation of media. While every ad agency in the land professes to help you build viral campaigns, we often wonder if "viral" has become totally randomized. Like the H1N1 Swine Flu, communication viruses mutate randomly until they eventually create the perfect version to become embedded in the culture of the moment. Because consumers themselves are creating so much content, their missives are just as likely to grab culture's attention as anything a media conglomerate dreams up. The bell curve front matches the back
If you work in marketing, sales or advertising, you're in the business of memes, whether you know it or not. Your job is to influence people by spreading ideas, and yes you hope that they send those ideas on to others -- that's a meme. Alas, compounding the problem for marketers seeking to seed fads or needs or desires is that the lifespan of communal ideas is becoming truncated. Studies have shown that plotting the rise and fall of a viral phenomenon over time is equally as steep on the uptick as it is in the downswing. The Beatles gradually became a sensation and endured for decades. Skittles came and went in a week. If something suddenly becomes popular, it is just as likely to fade quickly. Culture, like the human body's autoimmune system, can even reject memes if they seem too foreign; a dispassionate observer might argue Fox News' and conservatives' harsh rejection of plans to extend health insurance to 46 million citizens are a culture's autoimmune system defense to a foreign object: an ethnic president from Chicago trying to expand urban support systems onto rural America. The issue of healthcare reform crested suddenly and unexpectedly this summer in the press, and just as quickly counter-forces drove the issue down in the polls. It wasn't right or wrong; health care was just a meme that rose too high too fast, and fell off the logical popular cliff on the backside.
Easy come, easy go
So how do you get memes going? Here's an interesting test if you are a marketer about to hire an agency to give you a social media "viral" campaign. Ask your agency, which is bragging about number of impressions and scope of "engagement" from its last viral successes, to plot the timeline of its past campaigns. Was it months? Weeks? Days? Hmm.
Add it up and we have fewer central cultural communication Petri dishes to seed memes; fragmented media which randomizes what gets transmitted; masses of consumers creating their own content just as likely to go viral; and shortened attention spans meaning even if your meme does succeed, it is likely to quickly fade. It's not easy to bend culture to your will. The only solution we see is to continue to experiment, and to allow the masses of consumers who now have control over media tools the power to manipulate and play with your idea. Like a virus mutating, eventually something will form that takes creation tension too far until society goes boom. All of which reminds us that we miss Batgirl.
Digital strategist Jordan Julien got us thinking about "synthetic authenticity," the risk large corporations face as they try to engage customers in social media. The problem, Jordan says, is social media tools were built for individual people to interact with each other, but suddenly faceless entities -- big brands with big names -- are entering the space.
This creates a cognitive dissonance that can erode trust. Say you lob a question at Nike Plus on Twitter and get a response. Who wrote it? Do you trust their opinion? Is it a real person's thought, or a brand spinning its own future sales?
Jordan suggests one solution is to add real faces to your corporate persona. Instead of trying to make a brand act human, put real humans in charge. Earlier this year Mashable listed its favorite 40 companies on Twitter; the list is worth reviewing to see how "human" they act. Here is Luxor Hotel in Las Vegas responding to a guest:
OK, that's a start. Luxor gives us an attractive woman in a swimsuit chatting about hot dogs. But the most authentic brands online are the ones that give us real people's names. Surprisingly, the auto industry has been leading this charge. Scott Monty at Ford gets press, but here's Adam Denison, PR guy for Chevy, offering a human connection:
What? A Chevy marketing executive is asking for help building PowerPoint? Exactly. Suddenly the big auto brand seems like a potential colleague, a guy looking for advice. While Adam uses Twitter to answer questions about Camaros and promote his brand, he also chats about Mormon missionaries, crows about BYU football, hints he is an avid golfer, and wades into debates about Swine Flu. You know. A quirky, opinionated, helpful real human being. If we ever considered a Chevy, we'd reach out to him instantly.
Yes, it's a risk to let real people become the touchpoints between the brand you've carefully crafted for decades and the consumers who use it. But the bigger risk is you blow it, eroding trust from an audience that will tune you out. If even giant IBM can have Twitter streams authored by real people, so can you.
Our favorite economist Jodi Beggs points out many "indicators" of recession are sexist, the result of male-skewing humor from the men who dominate the dismal economic science. We've had the skirt-length indicator, lipstick measures, and our favorite, the Hot Waitress Index -- you know, the idea that pretty women lose jobs in real estate or sales when bubbles collapse and so are forced to serve food at the local bar. The prettier your waitress, the worse the economy.
Sexist stereotyping? You bet. So the Puma sports brand is playfully fighting back with the PUMA Index, a stock ticker for cell phones showing models -- male or female -- who take off their clothes when the Dow goes down. Sure, you can pick a girl, but the default image on the app is a buff guy cranking weights, ready to drop his jeans. Economists, hope for a rally.
This CBS clip above shows how actor Dennis Quaid's baby twins were almost killed by a nurse in 2007. A week after being born, his twins developed a common staph infection. Staph is easily cured with 10 units of heparin, but Quaid says a nurse grabbed the wrong bottles and gave each baby a massive overdose of 10,000 units. Quaid and his family recovered, but Quaid became an advocate of so-called Electronic Health Records -- the use of computers, not paper, to track your body's history. Call it the tragedy of group inertia
Your local hospital or physician likely uses vast amounts of paper to track your health -- paper with no backup, that cannot be searched, that cannot be quickly checked to avoid mistakes. About 100,000 U.S. citizens die each year as a result of hospital medical errors. The Certification Commission for Healthcare Information Technology notes that small medical practices, say with 20 physicians and assistants, can save $250,000 a year simply by replacing manual chart pulls with electronic records. It's obvious computer systems could improve public health and reduce costs, so why aren't hospitals jumping on such modernization?
Solutions that require consensus from group decision-makers, even those with obvious benefits, are difficult to sell.
When demand is disconnected from supply
President Obama has earmarked $46 billion to help U.S. hospitals invest in patient records, but those funds are reimbursements, and cash-strapped hospitals must grapple with the upfront investments, training, and installations. Unlike products that are marketed easily by single companies with profit motives, Electronic Health Records are a more complex sale -- requiring decisions by hospital boards, service line executives, and chief medical officers. The dramatic benefits in cost reductions and improved patient care arrive years in the future, while costs must be budgeted today. Patients themselves, the actual real beneficiaries, have little incentive to get involved, because most people rarely use health care -- until they get sick -- so the issue has as much top-of-mind awareness as whether your local fire department has enough hoses.
But what about services where desire and profit are not clearly connected -- say, fixing aging bridges, keeping public water supplies clean, or using low-tech bar codes to save little babies' lives? Like cleaning out your garage, such missions fall through the cracks when distant (but real) paybacks don't stimulate demand to take action, and inertia takes over. Add the requirements that entire groups agree before action, and the issues stall further.
The way to market against inertia is finding pressure points that move groups to action. We've seen this recently in the antimarketing against public healthcare reform, where the labels "socialism" and "death-panels" fueled groups to push against a fuzzy, complex issue. There are people with power in bureaucracies who can be convinced to take the lead and incite others to action. Mr. Quaid alone can't stimulate demand for the Electronic Health Record solution, but he gave it a nice push.
We noted a year ago that cable systems Brighthouse, Cablevision, Charter, Comcast, Cox and Time Warner were in talks to launch a new ad targeting system. "Project Canoe" would use details on viewer demos to customize TV ads; say, if you have a pet, you'd see dog food commercials, while if your neighbors have girls, they would be served ads for Barbie Dolls while watching exactly the same channel.
Those one-to-one ads aren't here yet, but Cablevision is out of the gate with another form of interactive TV ads -- where consumers can get more information by clicking on their remote. Benjamin Moore is the first advertiser aboard; during its commercials a pop-up screen will invite viewers to hit "select" on their remote to receive a coupon for a color sample. Cablevision hopes to eventually add e-commerce capabilities (imagine clicking for more pizza during the Super Bowl). Could be a healthy move for beleaguered television; 53% of ad spending in the United States flows through direct marketing budgets, and if cable TV can go direct, wouldn't Cablevision love to click on that?
In a few weeks Facebook will join internet voice players such as Skype by offering voice chat. That's right -- Facebook phone service. You will sign up by installing a simple plug-in from Vivox, and away you go, chatting with Facebook friends.
Thank "Voice over Internet Protocol" (VoIP), the fancy technical term for phone calls sent over the internet instead of the old public telephone networks. The revolution of VoIP is driven by a little pricing secret -- your old phone company charges you for voice transmission based on time, but internet costs are tied to the amount of data transmitted. The difference is like that of a lawyer who charges you based on the good ideas he provides instead of by the hour. Since the actual data sent in a phone call is relatively low, internet calls are exponentially cheaper than old-school phone minutes, and service providers can give it away practically for free.
Finally, human networks out of the office?
The Facebook voice service has several hooks designed to make it scale in adoption -- it will include free dial-in numbers to set up conference calls, and Vivox is making its system available to all other third-party developers so they can add voice to their Facebook plug-ins. Players of those dreadful Mobster/Farmville games on Facebook can soon talk with their fellow gamers. Mashable reports Facebook is working on a video version, too.
Play it forward and the future will give you video conferencing standard on every computer or handset, as cheap as water from a spigot. Telecommuting will finally take off. Ad agencies could form using virtual communities of the best talent around the globe. Businesses will create partnerships quickly without plane flights or time-intensive proposals. Teens will go to college without moving away from home, saving room and board. As the surge in cheap video transmission erodes wireless revenues, companies such as AT&T will need to innovate more rapidly in product design and services to defend their customer base. Driven by this competition, mobile phones get exponentially sexier, adding new features. And marketers, faced with a vast increase in video inventory, will finally work on one-to-one personalization to make their messages break through the content supply overload.
All of which means that by 2015 you, with a tiny glass handset, will video-conference in the pizza delivery guy, who in turn remembers exactly how much you love double pepperoni.
Researchers at the University of Alcalá de Henares in Spain have announced they've proved humans can learn echolocation -- sending out sounds like dolphins and bats to "see" the world around them, even when their eyes are closed. Years prior to this news, Ben Underwood was already doing this; Ben was totally blind and yet could rollerblade sensing cars around him by clicking his tongue and listening to the echos that came back. Apparently the trick is rather simple. Put the tip of your tongue at the top of your mouth, snap it backward (not downward) quickly to make a click, and continue rapidly with eyes shut. With enough practice, you will hear variances in the sound returning to sense objects in front of you.
Ben Underwood died in January at age 16 from the cancer that robbed him of his vision. He left a new vision behind. The fact that most people can't do this might give advertisers pause; in a world awash in messages, how do you get individuals to really listen?
Whether you work in advertising, write editorial or jot blogs, your real goal is to create memes: cultural ideas that (you hope) are passed from one mind to another. More than impressions, readers, or sales, the real goal of any content creator is to influence society -- to get everyone to believe his or her idea/religion/product is worth sharing with others. Memes (pronounced like "beams") were coined by Richard Dawkins in his 1976 book The Selfish Gene, which explored the transmission of ideas within culture.
Tonight, scanning Twitter, we learned Patrick Swayze had died 20 minutes before CNN reported it. And then, just as quickly, one of Swayze's funniest moments began being referenced -- his old Saturday Night Live skit with Chris Farley. A meme we can't forget, or stop laughing at. RIP, Mr. Swayze, and you too, Mr. Farley. Meme on.
Charlene Li notes the downside of social media monitoring tools: It's one thing to watch. It's another "to tell people you are monitoring without invoking Big Brother feelings."
Last spring at the annual South by Southwest Interactive conference in Texas, Guy Kawasaki had just started to interview Chris Anderson on stage when a cell phone went off in the audience. "It can't by AT&T," Guy cracked, "because they have no coverage in Austin."
AT&T has gained notoriety as a spotty network, and so has launched an apology campaign with "Seth the Blogger." The videos have in turn caused a little controversy, since Seth is really Seth Bloom, a senior vice president at Fleishman-Hillard, AT&T's PR agency, and not a techie blogger. (Unpaid bloggers get upset when paid professionals impersonate them. No matter.) We think Fleishman-Hillard struck the right tone and got the message out, namely that the iPhone is a data-guzzling beast and keeping up with it requires significant investment in infrastructure. iPhone over?
The real story here is the glow may be fading from the iPhone's design beauty. The iPhone gave AT&T huge momentum -- AT&T, the sole carrier of the Apple phone, shot from 70 million to 77 million wireless customers in 2008, and ended the year as the United States' largest mobile provider. Margins have grown fatter too: AT&T's wireless segment operating income margin ballooned from 12.2% in 2006 to 22.5% in 2008, driven largely by increased data usage from iPhones. But as glass pads with apps become a low-cost commodity, AT&T may lose its Steve Jobs advantage. AT&T notes in its last annual report "we have three to four other wireless competitors in each of our service areas and compete for customers based principally on price, service/device offerings, call quality, coverage area and customer service." The market is saturated with sexy phones. Time to build out the network.
To hear a whimsical debate on the matter, catch The BeanCast advertising podcast, which we recorded last night with host Bob Knorpp, Bill Green, Greg Verdino, and Åsk Wäppling. Åsk lives in Malmö, Sweden with gads of bandwidth, and wonders why we Yanks don't have video conferencing on mobile yet.
Speaking of antimarketing, FedEx takes a swipe at UPS, accusing the "mega-corporation" of "trying to use its political clout to get a bailout from the U.S. Congress, leaving you to pay the tab." Apparently UPS employees say they were forced to lobby against FedEx, UPS is asking Congress to limit competition, and most Americans oppose a UPS-type bailout.
True? False? Doesn't really matter. Seeding doubt about opponents is enough to stall a healthcare bill helping 46 million uninsured, so it might swing a few packages FedEx's way. How do we know FedEx is behind it? Check the copyright at the bottom of the BrownBailout.com web page.
Via former Peppers & Rogers colleague Brian Roberts. (Disclosure: Our Mediassociates colleague Charlie Menduni once led media planning for UPS's "What Can Brown Do For You?" campaign, but those days are past and we're simply reporting the news.)
Apple, the computer company, unveiled new Nano music players this week that double as video cams, and Slate asked the obvious question: why do little devices keep getting so damned complex? Turns out companies add features to defend higher prices, and consumers keep paying because they love features (despite the occasional odd industry reset to lower-quality MP3 formats or cheap Flip cameras). Even markets expect advances; investors are so calloused by Apple's yearly leaps they dinged Apple stock this week, apparently disappointed the thumbnail-size music players only capture film images and do not yet levitate.
So: What happens if you play technology all the way forward?
When lenses and storage and GPS and wireless internet fall to the Andersonian price of zero, every device -- your watch, earrings, wedding ring -- will have video broadcasting capabilities. Video we said, not text. Psychologists debate whether 93% of communication is non-verbal, but it's at least more than half; aeons of seeking high-quality mates while avoiding tigers have taught people to see the world with eyes. So the final pinnacle device of communication, a nanochip that records and shares the world in 3-D from your retina to our minds, will free our most human needs -- to communicate visually, record the environment, share thoughts, and reach all the world. Like the lit highways radiating out from cities and small towns at night, our communication streams will spread from anywhere to everywhere.
The impact on business communications will be huge. Advertising, for instance, cannot possibly intercept the haze of all of those future broadcasts ... because streams will originate from billions of individuals. The supply of ad inventory will reach to the sky, and prices for ad space will plummet as media publishers face competition in the air around them. Noted Ad Age columnist Bob Garfield calls this the Chaos Scenario (a bit of a punt, we think), but his point that ad media someday may be recalled as a passing 20th century fad resonates. Riding the balloon
Of course advertising will endure, just in choppier weather. Marketers will still have voices, customers will still long to consume, and marketplaces for information will evolve to help buyers and sellers make choices. Advertisers may gain in the short term as increased competition for their dollars, driven by ballooning communication inventory, drives down ad prices. (You can see this trend most visibly now in the plummeting CPMs for online advertising space.) At the same time, advertisers will have to measure results carefully to ensure dilution of media does not weaken their results.
Perhaps one approach you should test in the coming year is content that you can film cheaply and pass to the masses for their own modification and replication. Is your organization comfortable using cheap video? Can you produce material nimbly and quickly, giving up draconian controls and HR legal constipation for rapid response? Have you practiced seeding images to the masses? Your customers are going to find and share film anyway. If you don't get involved, they'll just shoot apple pie.
Imagine the telephone was invented in March 2006, and now, three years later, marketing executives remain confused by this startling technology. "It's a network to communicate with people, but only if we know their numbers? And they have to answer? So how do we make money off this?" the CMOs ask.
Ah, but new software promises to help marketers identify phone numbers of prospects, and then schedule automated phone calls every hour. Executives relax. "We can do robocalls! And at X percent response rate, we'll make money!"
Sounds good, right?
Twitter, invented in March 2006, is becoming just such a robocall wasteland with software services such as Tweet Adder promising to help you "CAPITALIZE on the NEW Twitter phenomenon very quickly." This is not necessarily good or bad; ethics, after all, are just agreed-upon levels of moral values, and if you have to sell like most of us do, then outbound contacts are not above you. Ad consultant Michael Gass has a detailed post about how to use these software systems to identify business prospects and then ping them with automated tweets; he pushes 373 old blog posts through two Twitter accounts trawling for leads. Some of the world's most innovative businesspeople, such as VC dude Guy Kawasaki, fill their streams with useful links that appear human but are really scheduled with automated broadcasting software. Tweet Adder refines this approach by allowing you to identify people who work in certain industries; for example, you can follow everyone who in turn follows @mayoclinic to develop a target list of doctors and hospital service line execs to pitch for your ad agency or technology service.
Automation vs. authenticity
Go too far down this path, though, and you risk losing authenticity. New users often see Twitter as streams of random thoughts, but soon patterns emerge -- people going @ateachother, carrying on conversations, debating ideas, sharing information. Within any active Twitter user's base of 2,000 followers there may be 50 or 100 people who develop a close-knit communication club. Your expertise may be noticed by other firms, and PR people, and the business press. Authenticity is the way to build trust in that audience, and any whiff of automated salesmanship is the surest path to erode it.
If you just want to use Twitter to sell, by all means, build 50,000 followers in your target industry using tools like Tweet Adder and then robotically broadcast your blog posts with, say, SocialOomph. You'll be spraying bait into fish-infested waters, and some may bite. But if you want to be known as a human being, you can always play the network like a real person. Your social network growth will be slower, but someone important out there may take notice ... and give you a call.
Memolio offers a more detailed personal touch by publishing small decks of multiple images. You can quickly hand out a mini portfolio, or photo album, or business proposal without booting up PowerPoint. A nice triage of the urge to share with the need to fit in a pocket. And at only €15 (about $22.00), it's cheaper than a second meeting. Via Cool Hunting.
When Dudley Fitzpatrick, CEO of Jagtag, emailed us about a recent campaign with a 47% response rate, using mobile phones to take pictures of bar codes, we laughed. Impossible, we thought. And then we saw Jagtag promoted the codes on the rear ends of models at a comic convention -- inviting the mostly male crowd to download a video of a "Miss March."
OK, we believe.
All sex aside, this press release is a clever example of Jagtag breaking through the antipathy of marketing and advertising managers to PR claims. We often joke that if someone invented a new form of advertising that guaranteed sales, no one would notice, because all vendors claim in essence the same thing. So here comes Jagtag, a variation of the QR Codes that began in Japan in the mid-1990s, in which consumers are invited to snap photos of bar codes with their cell phones, text in a message, and then receive additional information on the product back. At first glance this process seems comically complicated ... but for demos that walk around with cell phones and curiosity, Jagtag-type response mechanisms are the real-world equivalent of bookmarking a web page you wish to read later. Walk by a poster of a band, or new cell phone, or a model in shorts, and want to recall it? Snap a picture with your phone, and more information arrives to guide your search later.
Shocking to get you to listen
The problem with this new-media story is it takes exposition -- we need to slow down to understand how QR Codes work. (Jagtag is just one version of such codes, and differentiates itself by not requiring any software additions to cell phones, delivering content including video in a format tailored to each phone, and with what it calls "superior metrics.") So Jagtag has resorted to a startling case study driven by sex. Models in shorts may not be appropriate for your business, but if you want to get noticed, you have to do something different.
What if we told you most companies spend millions of dollars each year on a research study but never look at the data?
That's advertising for you. Wired magazine's fun little mapping of American vice reminds us that many marketers spend big on advertising, but fail to leverage it as the research tool it is. Marketers typically compare responses and sales to campaign expense to see if the campaign "worked" with an acceptable ROI. If a $500,000 campaign makes 5,000 sales, and the cost per sale is an acceptable $100, then we have success.
But what about all the data hidden in those responses? Where did those calls come from? It's a simple list exercise to match originating phone numbers to ZIP Codes, and suddenly the marketers could have a heat map, like Wired's above, showing hot spots in market demand. ZIPs could then be run through PRIZM data to identify psychographic clusters of prospective customers. Sales by ZIP could be compared to responses by ZIP, to see if certain market areas have a low vs. high close rate. Some simple data digging, and you could find exactly which markets to direct future advertising to, where to reallocate your sales force, and where to send those expensive direct mail drops.
Advertising does more than generate a sale; it's capturing knowledge about what the market thinks about you. If Wired magazine can map sin in the United States, surely you can plot your best future prospects.
If you've followed the debates about paid blog posts and sponsored Tweets, you know that advertisers are encroaching on editorial. But one of the most intriguing trends is editorial going the other way -- with real, objective reporting being provided by businesses. We noted last week that IBM has launched a new Think portal filled with Economist-type content.
Now Mint.com, the online personal finance aggregator, is offering news analysis to help consumers understand the complexities of different business sectors. Mint doesn't have to do this -- it could have a blog just promoting its own services -- but the value it provides in understanding the financial world is intriguing enough that consumers may give it a shot at managing their finances, too. Uber-blogger Chris Brogan suggests in his new book Trust Agents that the formula for trust is the ratio of your authenticity to self-orientation. We agree, which is why paying bloggers to write reviews about your products fails the trust test, and why helpful, authentic resources like this from Mint pass with flying colors.
Bonus Points: The actual formula from page 79 of Brogan's book is Trust = (Credibility x Reliability x Intimacy)/Self-orientation. On a scale of 1 to 10, plug your communications into this formula and see what the result would be.
In this season of political protests, we thought we'd share this old one warning Americans of "pay TV" encroaching on their families. Apparently there is no change that does not upset the status quo.
We understand the challenge. Dictionary.com has one main page, and few tricks (like Weather.com) to pull you deeper inside for multiple clicks to sell lots of ad inventory (although it is trying here). So Dictionary.com has to get big bucks from its home page ad impressions.
But damn. Push ads too far and users will run away. Reminds us of the Clear Channel radio push in the late 1990s, in which commercial breaks crept to more than 12 minutes per hour, that led to diminished ratings and the radio network eventually backing down with a "Less Is More" campaign. In 2005 Clear Channel's then-CEO John Hogan told USA Today "I distinctly remember driving to work in San Antonio and listening (to the radio) and thinking, 'There's no way that people are going to listen to this.' " What happened when Clear Channel reduced its commercials? Why, listeners came back, with ratings shooting up 5.3% in the Top 10 markets. Clear Channel defended revenues by raising rates on :30s to about 75% that of :60s and telling advertisers the impact would be largely the same. (Still, not all is well with the media giant thanks in part to a difficult recession.)
Worth a listen, Dictionary.com. Now excuse us while we look up a word on our Mac's desktop widget.
It's hard to remember now but what put Ronald Reagan on the political map was his ardent fight against Medicare in the 1960s. Medicare, which was eventually passed into law in 1965 and enrolled former President Harry S. Truman as its first participant, faced many of the same arguments as health care reform today: people without insurance need help vs. government is not the best way to run insurance; compassion vs. socialism; left vs. right.
Whatever your view, this old tape of Reagan is worth a listen for its sheer persuasive power. Reagan exudes an authenticity that amplifies his message, creating a Steve Jobsish reality distortion field; after 60 seconds, no matter your old opinion, you begin to believe.
Persuasion is not about logic, it's about survival
Scientists have dissected the root of charisma as the psychological frisson you get when someone projects both toughness and empathy. Reagan did it. Obama does it. The feeling that you're about to get hit yet helped, an emotional at-sea response that puts your receptors slightly off center. Persuasion comes from belief that the person trying to lead you has an overpowering ability to assist, to the point of slight danger. Charisma is the Brad Pitt you want to be, but wouldn't want left alone with your wife. It's what you'd need if you were running a cave clan.
Today, health care is ringing our help-danger bells. Darwinian psychologist Geoffrey Miller explains in "Spent" that humans are trained by evolution to both project and receive signals for reproductive safety -- vital to pass your genes to the next human generation. When you wear an expensive watch or necklace, you are projecting signals that you have fit genes for sex (even though you're probably married, your DNA can't help itself). When the sky grows gray at night and suddenly you feel like retreating to a warm restaurant or bed, you are receiving signals to seek shelter from genes that once might have been eaten in the dark. Because we need sex and shelter, we chase leaders who give off the same vibe.
You oog-ah. We like-ah.
Brands and causes can also project charisma, if they signal both strength and empathy. This is why nations rush to war when wronged (we're hurt, heal us by fighting an enemy in a tough-guy stance) and why health care is now such a hot topic among conservatives (we're hurt, heal us by fighting an enemy in a tough-guy stance). The message causes the same frisson of a danger avoided, an injustice righted. Get behind it, because in your heart you're afraid and need help.
Health care evokes emotion because our great-great grandparents followed clan captains who would guide them from danger to safety, from famine to rich harvests, who exuded brawn that led to copious mating and future generations. It's a good lesson for marketers as the U.S. ad industry contracts by $10 billion. To persuade a skittish audience feeling fear, you need tough-guy love.
The culmination of hiring a new creative agency comes when they present concepts in a boardroom. Young-looking men and women dressed in black smile up front. Lights are dimmed. The marketing director cracks a joke about not giving the project to her 14-year-old cousin. A huge flat-panel video screen lights up. Music plays. And the executive audience, warmed by coffee and croissants and the anticipation that everyone is about to make a boatload of money, digests in crisp clarity the most beautiful rendition of their spot/ad/banner/video/viral/logo/website possible. Applause! Approved!
And then the work gets printed in cruddy newsprint, hangs on a dirty billboard unlit at night, or airs on TV while the target moms are distracted by fighting children.
German designer Ralf Herrmann confronts the problem of poor viewing conditions, at least in typography, with a new design tool that allows you to mess up the view -- just like the ad impression will be corrupted in reality. For street signage, for example, you can simulate the blur that comes from seeing work at a distance, or under poor lighting, or other adverse viewing conditions. The reality issue is worth exploring for any creative treatment -- how will consumers respond when your message is presented in the dirty material world and not the artificial clarity of a conference room's plasma TV?
If your organization wants to listen in on Twitter, blogs, and social networks, Ken Burbary has compiled a comprehensive list of social media monitoring tools. He includes 60 paid commercial systems and 34 free tools to help you monitor conversations about your brand. Did we mention free tools? Rachael Maughan, strategic planner at The White Agency, reviews many scanning approaches here.
Mediassociates is a media buying firm specializing in advertising planning and measurement. We bring a mathematician's focus to the fuzzy world of advertising. Contact us at Mediassociates.com.
