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Struggling to be Uniquely Oneself

One of my favorite sources of insight and inspiration is the ML2 e-newsletter published by Dr. Mark Albion (www.makingalife.com). In the current issue he discusses the reasons we have to struggle to become our unique selves. It's reassuring that to realize, that to some extent, it's natural.

If you are driven to prove your worthiness to others, you have handed over your life to the opinion of others. Cultural dictates are powerful. We each must make our peace with the past and the present, making mistakes along the way, learning from them, if we are going to find our way to becoming an original.

Podcasting as an Advertising Channel

When I did my recent presentation on marketing innovations, I didn't include podcasting because I wasn't sure how we could use it as an advertising channel. Now Starcom's research group has an excellent suggestion, covered by Zachary Rodgers at ClickZ. Read the whole article.

ClickZ: Podcasting Augers 'Connoisseur Cultures,' Says Starcom

Podcasting will give marketers the opportunity to niche-target a new set of "connoisseur cultures," according to a new report from Starcom MediaVest Group (SMG). But user sensitivities around advertising in the medium mean sponsorship and content integration are better models than straight advertising.

Marketers Letting More Users See Themselves

A couple of months ago, I talked about Crunch Fitness who featured their customers (in their underwear) on billboards. Now Verizon is giving each of their customers 15 seconds of fame on a Times Square billboard. The Verizon campaign microsite is challenging to use at first, but although I think that will be a liability for them, I still admire their willingness to try something very challenging. Testimonial advertising was always about the product, but this type of advertising makes the user the hero. And it isn't about being perfect, it's about being bold.

Link: MediaPost Publications - Out to Launch - 07/27/2005 by Amy Corr (registration required)

To support Verizon's corporate branding campaign, including the launch of www.richerdeeperbroader.com, the company is displaying the site's profiles of actual broadband enthusiasts live on the Reuters sign in Times Square until August 10.

Future Brands will be Built on Community

The powerhouse brands on the future will be less dependent on capital investment or kick-ass creative ideas. Instead they will leverage the power of their community. As a resource, the community offers greater risk and hence greater return.

Martin Lindstrom at ClickZ: Community Brand-Builders: Join 'Em.

Without sharing, listening, and compatible matching, eBay, Amazon, Weight Watchers, and any other community-based brand would struggle to survive. Consider whether your brand ticks yes to each of these questions: Is your brand based, or could it be based, on trust? Can your users share what's on their minds, not only with you but with all your customers? How easy is it for your users to not only find a match with your brand but also make your brand match their needs?

Old-school brands will opt out at this point. But modern brands still have choices. Seize that choice now. Who knows? In a few years, your community options may be taken up by other brands who nurtured their communities by trusting 'em, hearing 'em, and matching 'em.

One Way to Make a Contribution

You can't read the new issue of Fast Company online unless you've paid for the issue, but Tim Manner extracts some juicy tidbits at Cool News of the Day. Confederate Motor Co. is designing motorcycles like their sanity depends on it.

Reveries: Teaching Harley-Davidson a Lesson from Bill Breen at Fast Company via Tim Manners

"The more we diminish money as our chief goal, the more passion we can put into our efforts," he says, adding: "Passion gives the motorcycle its life force. You can literally feel it coming off of the machine." Confederate hopes Harley will soon feel that heat, albeit in a good way. The hope is that Confederate ultimate might get Harley to "adapt some of its breakthroughs and bring them to a wider market, at lower prices." As J.T. Nesbitt puts it: "We don't want to beat Harley, we want to teach Harley."

Understanding how Relationships Impact Finanical Decisions

If it's your job to influence purchase decisions, you MUST read this article. In fact, if it's your job to MAKE purchase decisions--you should also read this article. Postrel has rounded up some of the most fabulous quotes from scholars and researchers who are forming a new model for economic behavior in a world made of relationships.

Boston Globe: Market share by Virginia Postrel

While economists continue to probe into social life, a growing academic subfield known as economic sociology is doing just the opposite--bringing tools and concepts from sociology to bear on the economy. We cannot understand how people earn, spend, and invest their money, economic sociologists argue, unless we understand social relations. If, as economists contend, incentives and choice are everywhere, so are social conventions and personal connections.

Being a Savvy Online Community Member

Whininess is one of the Net's more-grating lingua francas, heard everywhere from bad blogs to Web sites dedicated to the hatred of single companies. But it may be at its worst on consumer message boards. We're not against Company X Stinks sites or message boards -- in fact, it's terrific that consumers now have a way to take deep-pocketed companies to the court of public opinion. But as is the norm for human endeavors, the experiences that people want to talk about are mostly bad ones

Wall St. Journal: The Age of Raised Expectations. (subscription required)

Over at their excellent column Real Time, Tim Hanrahan and Jason Fry review the exaggerated behaviors that occur in online communities including eBay. As more and more of us rely on these sites for information, we need to be conscious of natural biases. Whining is a popular sport on many message boards. It's more entertaining than admitting everything was fine (not great, but competent). And at eBay the obsession of some members with maintaining a perfect feedback score has led to some pretty dysfunctional behavior. Watch out for it.

A Radio Program Turns to a Blog to Cull Ideas - New York Times

A new radio program from Public Radio International, called Open Source, will collect and refine story ideas from posts and comments on their blog. The intent of the producers, Mary McGrath and Christopher Lydon, is to allow people to see and participate in the production of each show. At first they'll read blogger contributions over the air, but eventually they hope to capture and broadcast MP3 sound clips of the contributor's voice.

NY Times: A Radio Program Turns to a Blog to Cull Ideas by Tania Ralli

There are always people in the radio audience who know more on the topics being discussed on the air. Open Source's blog taps into that, and tries to get the experts on the air. But at the end of the day, what the audience of nonexperts hears will define Open Source

A New Type of TV Programming from Current

More details are now available about Current TV, which is expected to debut on Monday. Aspiring and professional filmmakers have already submitted 3,000 tapes.

NY Times: For [Al] Gore, a Reincarnation on the Other Side of the Camera by Jacques Steinberg

Instead of packaging its programming in 30- and 60-minute blocks, Current plans to show segments 3 to 10 minutes in length - the better to hold the attention of channel-surfing multitaskers - that are to be shuffled throughout the day like songs on a radio station. Some will be minidocumentaries, produced in-house or by outsiders; others will be feature-oriented, on subjects like spirituality and relationships.

Virtually the only structure is to be provided by three-minute "Google Current" segments at the top and bottom of each hour, in which the most popular Google searches of the day are to be mined for evidence of what is on people's minds.

Though Mr. Gore, who will not disclose his stake in Current, is determined to make the enterprise profitable - "This is business, not therapy," he said - he added that he had already been energized by its broader mission: to give young viewers, in an era of media consolidation, enormous control of what they see.

Zazzle.com Sizzles with Major Investment

John Doerr and Ram Shriram, early investors in Google, announce they are investing  $16 million in Zazzle.com, an internet retailer that produces customized t-shirts and posters from licensed imagery from Disney, Build-a-Bear Workshop and NeoPets. Soon a joint venture with Pitney Bowes will allow them to produce customized postage stamps, which they expect will become very popular for items like wedding invitations.

I thought the Post Office was already doing customized stamps. Guess everybody thinks Zazzle has the magic touch...

AP Report: Google Investors Bet on E-Commerce Startup at Forbes.com.

"They are Googlesque in their energy and their ability to think big," [says Doerr.]

When you visit Zazzle, be sure to click on the Today's Best tab and visit Community Collections, Editor's Picks to see the really fresh and original ideas. You can sell your designs and make money at Zazzle.

Advertising Worth Chasing

For a refreshing lift, visit www.nesteaice.com. (Yes, I know I'm playing into their marketing campaign, but when advertisments are a lovely as this, we welcome them.) I hear that you should look for the shark; he's quite a character.

Found at the iMedia Connection Creative Showcase.

Innovating the Social Structure

Over at the BBC, Jo Twist has an interview with Iqbal Quadir, founder of Grameen Phone in Bangladesh. The real key to this type of social innovation is picking the right technology, seeing where the lever is. In this case, it's voice communication. I'm fascinated with the idea: connectivity leads to dependability then to specialization then to [increased] productivity. I'd really like to test that concept.

Technologies to 'Aid the Poor'

Talking at the TED (Technology, Entertainment and Design) Global conference, a top US event being held in Europe for the first time, he criticised aid for developing countries that benefited authorities over the people themselves.

"The only way we can depend on each other is if we connect with each other. Connectivity leads to dependability which leads to specialisation and then productivity," he said.

A woman with a mobile becomes important in a village. This changes the power distribution Iqbal Quadir

What was key about a technology as simple as the mobile in a rural village was that people's voices, not just those in authority, were heard.

The next step, he hoped, would be to get wireless internet via mobile devices into villages. But he warned of jumping on the technology bandwagon.

"If everyone can talk, it is more egalitarian," he told the BBC News website.

Good Marketing Dare

Guitar players enjoy playful campaign...found in Amy Corr's Out to Launch email newsletter at MediaPost.

Take the moogerfooger challenge.

If you buy a moogerfooger and don't think that it's the warmest, fattest sounding effect on the market we'll give you this "I'm an idiot" shirt absolutely free!

TV Programming Schedules are History

I enjoy the fatalistic sound of the clipping below. Why do we have to watch our shows when the networks says? On the other hand, I think that at the same time normal TV programming goes 'on demand,' we'll see a rise in 'event programming' where we all look forward to seeing something new together, such as a concert or a debut. This will satisfy our desire to be 'the first to see it' sometimes. Yes, I think scheduled programming will be focused on release dates, live events, etc.

The Hollywood Reporter's Entertainment Industry Columns and Articles.

Widespread use of VOD and DVRs is conditioning consumers to expect content instantly and the services they want, when they want them, which will force television in particular to shift from scheduled time-channel distribution to on-demand specific searches. As VOD-based interactive advertising comes of age and interactive interfaces, or content search guides, are built into media infrastructure, obstacles will fall and the transition will occur.

Houston's Most Innovative Coffee Shop

Last night I gave my Marketing Innovations presentation to the East Montrose Civic Association, and we met in one of the most innovative spaces in Houston, 2115 Taft.

Owned and operated by Ecclesia, a arts-focused and exploratory Christian community, 2115 Taft includes a coffee shop, art gallery, recording studio, meeting space and more. The space and the web site are still evolving, but warm and responsive. Drop by often to see what's emerging.

Results Shine from Consumer-Genarated Ads

Over at BusinessWeek, David Kiley has a terrific article that describes the consumer-generated ad campaigns at Audi, Converse, Cadillac, Nike and Samsung. Plus, he prints the results of many of them--Converse sales up 12%, visits to Cadillac.com up 300%, etc.

BusinessWeek: Advertising Of, By, And For The People.

Donovan Unks, a 28-year-old biotech researcher at Stanford University, spent valuable minutes every day for three months to follow an Audi marketing campaign. The ads for the new A3 hatchback, appearing in magazines and on TV, billboards, and the Internet, wove a complicated serialized mystery of a stolen car. Some 500,000 people, according to Audi, tracked the story by following online clues. But Unks and his friend Laura Burstein didn't just play the game. They were drafted to be characters in the plot by ad agency McKinney & Silver in Durham, N.C., after they answered an encrypted ad that only solvers of binary code could read in The Hollywood Reporter. In their Audi roles, the two drove all night to a music festival, crashed a party, were blogged about by fans of the story, and Webcast worldwide on the final night of the drama at the Viceroy Hotel in Santa Monica, Calif., on June 30.

Mash-ups Innovate the Web

Watch for this new trend: developers are stepping out of their day jobs and using the programming tools provided by big e-commerce and search sites like Amazon and Yahoo to develop new services. There's no clear economic model yet, but this trend looks very ripe--expect some one to break out of the ranks with a successful business any day now.

BusinessWeek Online: Mix, Match, And Mutate.

People are seizing far more control of what they do online. In the process, those efforts are putting skin on the bones of Web services, the long-delayed promise of software and services that can be tapped on demand. "They're taking little bits and pieces from a number of companies and stitching them together in some clever way," Amazon Chief Executive Jeffrey P. Bezos noted recently. "You'll start to see the real power of Web services."

TiVo upgrade allows instant response to TV ads

Consumers want their advertising conveniently. So they share their contact information when they can get targeted offers. Those companies which do a good job of listening and sending the right thing to consumers will get to send more. Those who don't will eventually be blacklisted as marketers.

Yahoo News: TiVo upgrade allows instant response to TV ads

For years, TiVo has offered long-form commercials that are downloaded discretely to TiVo set-top boxes for viewers to view once they click over to a special area, or "opt-in." The new system creates an option for viewers who want to know more about a product to tell TiVo to release their contact information to an advertiser.

Innovation in Story Telling

At first glance, it's hard to believe that the art of storytelling, which has been around as long as people, could be subject to innovation, but over at his ClickZ column, Jeremy Lockhorn, an internet marketing strategist at Avenue A/Razorfish, makes a powerful point.

A few years back, I hypothesized that if you take interactive TV to the extreme, where the viewer is somehow empowered to control the storyline, you'd need a completely different skill set to tell a compelling story.

Making storytelling's linear nature interactive requires a different kind of creativity. It's at least partially why some offline agencies have trouble with online. So many have built their business around the :30 spot. It's a very linear (and short) format, whereas online is mostly nonlinear and consumer-empowered.

It won't be the master storytellers who will be the respected geniuses in this world, I hypothesized then. Stephen King, Steven Spielberg, George Lucas -- they're all linear storytellers. Video game developers possess the right combination of skills and experience to succeed in this world.

HDMA Presentation: Words

Here is a copy of the document I distributed to the attendees at my July 14 presentation to the Houston Direct Marketing Association. The presentation was titled "How to Profit from Recent Innovations in Marketing." There are no pictures in this file, just words. The pictures are in the PowerPoint file in the previous post.

Download MktgInnov.doc

HDMA Presentation

Here's a copy of the slides I presented at the HDMA on July 14, 2005. This is a PowerPoint file of 15 MBytes. There's no text, just pictures. The text is in a Word document in the next posting.

Download MktgInnov2.ppt

Fresh Perspectives from Millennium Park

Can't travel to Chicago to see the new Millenium Park? Plenty of cool pictures on the web site, plus you can download the audio tour. But where's the 360-degree panoramic view?

This picture isn't from the web site. I found it on Flickr. It's by Steve Rish.

Web site: Millennium Park, Chicago

One-to-one: Always knew it would work

Over at the Peppers&Rogers Group newsletter, we have a great marketing story about how giant Hewlett-Packard is slowly learning to treat its corporate customers as unique enterprises. Kudos to Stephanie Acker-Moy and her team.

Inside 1to1, the Peppers&Rogers newsletter: Personal Touch at Hewlett-Packard

Acker-Moy's team started with email newsletters that tailored product, service, pricing, and training information for different classes of business. A large corporation sitting with a bank of HP servers received different information than a small business that just purchased HP office equipment. Each business had different purchase patterns and information needs, whether it was software updates, marketing materials, or product upgrades.

"Once we could identify the needs of each account we could identify opportunities for more product sales at those accounts," Acker-Moy says. "Our ability to cross-sell and up-sell increased with every personalized newsletter."

After its 2001 start, HP now emails 5 million newsletters across the globe and has the ability to customize each one automatically, using business rules and print on demand.

In 2004, HP took personalization to enterprise portals. This took the newsletter approach to a more interactive level. Instead of reading about a new product upgrade, customers could see a demo and even place an order. Links to other Web sites can also be customized, depending on the area of interest. For example, a financial services customer may get information about new laptops and a feature story on change management. An insurance company may be in the market for e-billing solutions and digital printing updates. In the U.S., 95 percent of all enterprise customers are covered via Web/email personalization.

The results have been dramatic. Since 2001:

• Customers that receive personalized, targeted e-newsletters are 1.5 to 3 times more likely to click through than with non-targeted newsletters.

• Enterprise customers with account-specific Websites log on 2 to 3 times as often as customers without account-specific sites.

• HP increased its annual call center cost savings by $400,000 per year (300 percent) because customers receiving e-newsletters now have their service questions answered by e-mail.

• Average revenue-per-existing-customer has tripled since HP went live with a customized Web site.

Innovation in the Health Care Model

In the column called Manager's Journal at The Wall St. Journal, Bill Castell of GE Healthcare suggests that access to health information may lead to an entirely new model for medicine. I think he's right, but I think it will take hold and grow outside the U. S. first.

WSJ.com - The Next Generation of Health Care (subscription required)

An "Early Health" model may actually be less expensive. Investment in excellent, primary care, with strong attention to lifestyle, environment, early diagnosis and intervention, stands the best chance of limiting the development of the expensive, debilitating late-stage diseases. The investments required depend less on remote hospitals and more on community-based patient-centric services, enabled by integrated electronic health-care records and the best possible screening and early diagnostic programs. We should constantly ask how do we bring care to the individual, not how do we bring the patient to a medical institution.

Analysis of Happiness and Desire

Over at the NY Sun, Nick Gillespie reviews two recent books about happiness and has these quotes and comments for Daniel Nettle's Happiness: The Science Behind your Smile. Separating the desire sytem and the happiness system seems like good common sense.

The Happiness Scam - July 6, 2005 - The New York Sun

"Evolution has given us a strong implicit theory of happiness," writes Mr. Nettle. "We come to the world believing that there is such a thing as achievable happiness, that it is desirable and important, and that the things that we desire will bring it about." Alas, he notes, "It is not self-evident that any of these are true." Indeed, that's an understatement. It turns out that our "pleasure system" and our "system of desire" often work at cross-purposes, either leading us to pursue the wrong things or leaving us unsatisfied if we attain them.

Making Word-of-Mouth Manageable

Trying to spark a word-of-mouth campaign or 'buzz' about a new product or service has always been very risky, but now the Tremor division of Proctor & Gamble is building tools to reduce the risk. If you're interested at all in using word-of-mouth as a marketing tool, you should read this article, which also has good data about the success of Tremor and BzzAgent with a variety of clients.

Making Waves by Samar Farah at CMO Magazine.

The advocacy and amplification model was constructed from a mix of academic theory, psychological insights, existing P&G data and Tremor's proprietary research. In Tremor lingo, advocacy is what happens when a connector naturally experiences a product and likes it enough to talk about it with her peers. "When connectors are exposed to a new idea," explains Knox, "the first question they ask themselves is, ‘Is this idea worth my advocacy?' It's their social currency on the line, so it has to be a product that they at least believe in."

Tremor doesn't let the fickle emotions of high school hallways determine whether a connector responds to a product. "We have a way of finding what the critical advocacy component is of a brand and what would cause a connector to advocate it," says Knox.

The second element in Tremor's word-of-mouth model, amplification, means that a product message or experience is easy to talk about, that it lends itself to casual mentioning in varied conversations. "It's very difficult to find a word-of-mouth concept that has both high advocacy and amplification," says Knox.

State of the Market for RSS Advertising

I'm not a fan of receiving syndicated news and blog updates via RSS (Really Simple Syndication) because it seems like a hard-to-handle faucet that only comes on at full force. Once you sign up, you get flooded with information and it takes a lot of your time to pare it back to what's valuable. Also, many of my favorite bloggers are terrible at writing headlines and introductions, which really degrades the quality of a 'feed.'

Anyway, there have been plenty of people saying that RSS will 'revolutionize' the way we access information. Louise Story actually has a more cool-headed article in the NY Times that gives everything a more clear perspective.

Marketers See Opportunity as a Web Tool Gains Users - New York Times.

Most R.S.S. feeds - from places like Amazon.com, PBS, the British Broadcasting Corporation, and Craigslist - do not now include advertisements. The feeds themselves, which often include summaries of stories or product offerings, serve as advertisements for the sites' content, and those sites often have ads.

But research is showing that R.S.S. users are often just looking at the feeds, and not the sites where they originate. Google is encouraging content providers to send everything they have, not just headlines, and to include ads only at the end of the feed. "We need to preserve all of the things that are good about R.S.S. feeds right now and also introduce the opportunity for publishers to monetize those feeds," said Shuman Ghosemajumder, a business product manager at Google.

At first, it seems like RSS might rival direct mail as a direct connection between users and suppliers...

As companies learn about advertising opportunities in publishers' R.S.S. streams, they have begun to express interest in building their own R.S.S. feeds, said Steve Stratz, a spokesman for aQuantive, which owns Avenue A Razorfish, an interactive ad agency in Seattle.

Consumers who want to know about certain products can opt for R.S.S. updates on the products' Web sites. Advertisers are eager to reach these consumers, so if R.S.S. feeds from companies become widespread, it could reduce the companies' need to advertise in traditional media, ad agencies said.

But, on the other hand, RSS allows users to stay anonymous...

With R.S.S., Web publishers have no way to know the identities, e-mail addresses, or computer locations of users, making R.S.S. feeds practically spam proof

Putting Podcasting in Perspective

David Carr in the NY Times does a good job of putting podcasting into perspective. It has certainly made audio recordings more univerally accessible, but it's not a very interactive medium. And you should try On the Media--it's a great program.

Big Media Wants a Piece Of Your Pod - New York Times (registration required)

Podcasting is also frequently described as an audio version of blogging, but it is essentially a delivery system that has none of the interactivity and dynamism that make blogging such a compelling and viral form of publishing. As in radio, they talk and you listen. Podcasting merely gives consumers the opportunity to time-shift and listen at their convenience.

In some instances, the impact has been profound. "On the Media," a media analysis program produced by the New York public radio station WNYC, has been podcast-friendly since January. They have picked up almost 40,000 new listeners a week, the equivalent of adding a major American city to their distribution.

New Markets bring New Responsibilities

I wasn't going to read The Power of Us, but then John Smart praised the article in the Accelerating Times email newsletter. And he's right--it's more than just a round-up, it has sharp new insights as to how 'consumer-generated media' are changing the marketplace.

BusinessWeek: The Power Of Us by Robert D. Hof

All of us will have to take on more responsibility. And to get the most out of the new cooperative tools and services, we'll have to contribute our time and talent in new ways -- such as rating a seller on eBay or penning a short essay in Wikipedia. But the rewards will be more personalized products and services that we don't merely consume, but help create.

Click to the article online, and even if you don't read the whole article, but sure and look at the 'online extras' including an interview with Pierre Omidyar, founder of eBay. Here's an excerpt from that interview:

We have technology, finally, that for the first time in human history allows people to really maintain rich connections with much larger numbers of people. It used to be, your connected group was really your immediate community, your neighborhood, your village, your tribe. The more we connect people, the more people know one another, the better the world will be.

Everywhere, people are getting together and connecting. And using the Internet, they're disrupting whatever activities they're involved in. It's because it's a fundamental shift in power toward the bottom, toward the people as they organize themselves, and away from a small group of people who want to impose a policy top-down. That's really the promise of the technology, and we're seeing it in all these fields.

How to Grasp the Long Tail

Geoff Ramsey, one of the most successful pioneers of the internet, has a terrific analysis of the 'state of the media' and the rising power of the 'long tail' at iMedia Connection. He starts off his article with a wonderful quote I've never seen before.

iMedia Connection: Famous for Fifteen People.

In 1991, a European musician by the name of Momus spun a radical vision for the future of music: “The future will be a lot of musical shrapnel… The old unifying stars like Madonna and Michael Jackson will be seen as the last of their kind, global monoliths, relics of an age of monopoly capitalism which has been smashed to smithereens.”

Putting his own spin on Andy Warhol’s “fifteen minutes of fame” adage, Momus suggested a different dynamic. In the future, he wrote, “Everyone will be famous for fifteen people.”

Momus’s vision of a fragmented music world is probably only half right. I doubt that mass media stars like U2 or Britney Spears will cease to exist. And yet, Momus was prescient, predicting (nearly 15 years ago!) the democratization and fragmentation of music. The internet -- coupled with the MP3 devices and digital music payment models -- can create markets for even the most obscure bands.

Ramsey goes on to say that five trends are converging to change the marketplace:

1. Digital technologies are giving consumers more control.
2. Broadband is allowing more and richer content to be accessed freely in all sorts of locations, including the home.
3. Search is helping people sort through the avalanche of new content and find what they want.
4. The number of people buying online has reached critical mass.
5. Merchants are now figuring out ways to take the 'friction' out of the purchasing system, so more low-volume items are available with less distribution costs.

Now we have a better idea of what trends to keep an eye on if we're going after the Long Tail.