Archive for the ‘Interactive’ Category:
Facebook and The Transparency Bandwagon
While the tinfoil hatters amongst us who fear the divestiture of liberty keep pointing to the likes of the Patriot Act, the US Census or Google’s caching of every search known to man, the real worry for all of us should be Facebook. Well, all of us that aren’t in marketing, at least. The truth is that the “new openness” that Facebook is propagating has two wildly untapped (and yet genius) ideas at its core.
First of all, it’s tapping into a generational zeitgeist. There’s just something about Millennials that make them not only prone to share intricate details about their lives (and subsequently making them wide open for identity theft) but also willing to let that information be used to help them connect to better products. They don’t feel sold, the feel catered to. And for the generation that lives at home until almost 30, takes their parents to interviews and has never used a card catalog system in a library, why would they expect anything else? This notion of “openness” is also a major tenet of successful social campaigns over the past several years. A certain current president of ours ran on such a platform (never mind that it’s not practiced) to wild acclaim and popularity among Millennials. The concept of opennness is really driven by the use of the web in general, and since Facebook is the standard bearer for all things social, web-oriented and open, why shouldn’t they be the first to sally forth into such unknown territory?
The second thing it taps into is the kind of low-cost targeting that marketers are salivating for. Never mind that Millennials (and that oh-so-coveted 18-35 year old audience) are incredibly difficult to nail down and push your message at, this additional, product and brand-centric style of targeting gives Facebook the ultimate power in the universe to wield over desperate media wonks and marketing directors alike. They will be able to give you more targeted information about their users and segment users better than even Google. It’s staggeringly simple and genius at the same time. About 18 months ago when Facebook made a huge push to be the “login credentials of choice” for hundreds of sites across the internet, it seemed odd. But this, now, makes perfect sense. If Google is out to “organize the world’s information,” then Facebook is out to “segment the world’s people into highly targeted and affordable lists for companies to purchase and profit from.”
But the reality is that Google is loosing its sheen as a kind of do-gooder company. After their initial IPO, people loved everything they did. Now, after a few fumbles with their Android software updates, a couple censorship issues in China and some sneaky backroom stuff with the White House later, Google is mirroring a corporate image as opposed to a warm, smart startup. Whereas Facebook, well, they still have Mark Zuckerburg’s warm, childish face to be the, um, face of their company. They are the living expression of relationships in the 21st century. Therefore, how could we so demonize them? This, mind you, is after the Beacon fiasco of a few years back. They learned and got more sneaky about it. But they’re still tallying buckets of information about you that you are willingly giving them. We, as consumers, are blind to it because it is leading to us getting better access to deals and brands we want. In fact, the level of data that Facebook is able to gather on its 411 million users makes Google’s data from search look more like geo-targeting by zip code. It’s good, but beaten by emerging standards.
And you were afraid of the government.
5 out of 100 is pretty sad
In the most recent issue of Fast Company, they released their list of the 100 most creative people in business. Of the esteemed 100, only 5 of them work for a company that does “marketing” of any variety:
32: Lee Clow, TBWA
39: Greg Hahn, BBDO
59: Noah Brier, Barbarian Group
81 & 82: Karin Hibma & Michael Cronan, Cronan
So, um, wow. I thought we were supposed to be the most creative people in business? What happened here? I thought marketing was the marriage of creativity and business; that we were tasked with creatively solving business problems; that the greater ad industry was the helm of creativity. Not so, according to FC.
For this, I believe there are 2 reasons. The first is far more jaded and less plausible, but requires thought, nonetheless.
1. Is it possible that the marketing industry is far more isolated from the rest of the business world that the people we consider “rock stars” of the industry are really little more than peons in the greater business world? I think it’s highly likely. Look more closely at the names chosen. Clow is an obvious pick, since he is the Michael Corleone to Ogilvy’s Vito Corleone status. Throw somebody in from BBDO, since that’s about the only agency that most people have ever heard of (courtesy of foppish depictions of ad agencies in film. I loved Alan Alda saying “BBD and O” in What Women Want). Do ten minutes of digging past Crispin, and you’ll find Barbarian Group. And, throw in an under the radar name like Cronan, and you’ve covered your bases. And make sure you leave out Bogusky. FC has had an absurd man crush (much like most of us in the biz) on AB for quite a while now. After the big splashy feature last year and the full page blurb 18 months ago, people will begin to think they pump him up because Microsoft (CP+B’s big ole client) has a pretty hefty media buy with the magazine.
Plausible? Eh, maybe. Probable? Sure. If you’re a tad jaded.
Or, there’s the other option.
2. It’s more obvious than ever that the ad industry as a whole has grown embarrassingly stale. Most of our business models are as stale as the rehashed rehashed ideas we continue to sell clients and expect them to throw money at us because we’re creative. At least we tell the we are.
For me, this theory holds a lot more water. Think about it, the basic agency model has barely evolved since the 1960s. Watch Mad Men, and you get a sense of what most agencies are still like that. (Creative team + Account team) x Media team = Agency Model. Outside of a few noteworthy shops (Mother, Creative Orchestra), we still hire people who do one thing well and throw them together with other people that do one thing well and expect a certain outcome. And we as a group are still held creatively hostage by the invoice that our clients may or may not sign based on how the last client meeting went. Until we break these two basic molds, marketers will never live up to their potential.
We should hire multi-talented, smart people who are both creative and business savvy. We should work with clients that respect the value of a good strategic partner, but first we must re-earn that title. We still have a lot of work to overcome the Charlatan stereotype that we will do or say anything for money, because the reality is that stereotype is still resoundingly true.
So, why is it that if we are so creative that we don’t focus that energy on our own business model? I have 2 explanations. 1. It’s scary. 2. Most advertising/marketing folks are bad businessmen. They mostly don’t understand it, outside of the context of a brand. If they did, things would be way different.
Hopefully, it’s just the first reason. But I have my doubts.
Is Twitter the next MySpace?
Does anybody else remember how awesome 2005 was? The economy was rolling, jobs were plentiful and MySpace was all the rage. It was everything. Marketers all over the fruited plains were making sure their brands had a MySpace page. People were blogging on how MySpace was changing the industry. It was almost as awesome as the Adkins Diet.
Now, raise your hand if you still even use your MySpace account any more. Thought so. This is precisely why I feel like Twitter will inevitably fade out of relevance in the next 5 years. Granted, I feel like marketers and agencies alike need to engage in social media and know how to properly wield it as a tactic in their overall brand strategies, but what’s the breaking point? Seeing the numbers for Twitter’s growth (something like 1400%) are troublesome for those who think it’s gonna be bigger than advertising on the television set. It’s a great tool and it should be used wisely, but make no mistake: Twitter has a shelf-life. And when it gets so saturated with your mom, your pastor and your high school English teacher that consumers start to leave, then something else will inevitably take its place.
However, I feel certain that Twitter hasn’t even come close to reaching its zenith. It’s got a long way to go down the monetization path before it gets oversaturated. People are just now figuring out how to make money off of it, so until Apple or some other worthy, cash-laden suitor makes an offer, it’s safe to work into a basic strategy. But I am afraid too many people are leaving agencies only to start social media companies who’s business model is based on the idea of twitter being relevant indefinitely. Well, I hate to break it to you, but it will fade from relevance.
Many of these agencies are also predicated on the idea that social media is right for every brand out there. Also, a farce. Many solid brands have no need of social media because their target audience is almost wholly not online. But no worries. Somebody is inevitably pitching social media to them.
I am a huge fan of the practice as a supplement to good marketing strategy, but as I’ve often stated, don’t make it the focal point of your strategies or of your agency. And especially not on one social media outlet.
I can’t get enough of these guys
Who doesn’t love a little auto-tuning of Katy Couric? And, I gotta admit, Joe Biden does sound way better when he’s auto-tuned, too. That guy is smart.
Never abandon your post
Somebody recently tweeted a great list of Twitter applications that everybody should check out. There are a few of the obvious ones (Twistori, Twitterverse, etc) that are completely designed to destroy productivity in the work place, and then there are others that you can search people by their interest or description. So, after playing with Twellow for a while, I realized just how dangerous social media can be if you don’t stay engaged in the conversation.
There are lots of C-Level executives on Twitter from companies of all sizes, and there are a lot of them who have done nothing but show there ignorance toward social media. Type in CEO, and you get over 5300 people who list that in part of their description. Type in Chief Executive Officer, and the list is quite small. So what’s embarrassing for their companies is when they have no followers and no updates in 6 months. And it gets worse when that update is a mundane fact about their life at home or how then need to better engage with people online. That kind of malfeasance is dangerous on the web. It lets everybody know that you’re not serious about it.
Which really brings me to my point: the only thing that’s as important as transparency in social media is diligence. For people who get into Twitter and proudly display their title and company name in their profile, there is a real need for them to consistently get online and contribute to the conversation. Not talk about their dog’s shedding problem. Not talk about waiting at the doctor’s office. But adding value to the online conversation. A lot of people have been preaching that CEOs must be on Twitter. Your CMO must be on Twitter. Nonsense. That’s like saying every kid needs to play football at 6. No no. They need to engage when they are ready and can dedicate the necessary time to actively contribute and have a smart point of view on things that affect their industry. It’s way better for executives to wait until they understand what to say and how to say it, that it is for them to get on and not say anything of value for months.
Take my hero, Alex Bogusky, for example. He was on Twitter for only a few months, and while he was active, the dude dropped bombs. He had a great mix of Retweets, insight and personal stuff. He did a bang up job. Then, his final statement was a sign off. He said it wasn’t for him. Awesome. Let everybody know you’re not a Tweeter. And, it’s not like he doesn’t contribute content all over the web all the time, too. He engages everywhere, so for him, Twitter was just something else he didn’t have to take up.
For executives, you can’t take the plunge without dedicating serious time to keeping your profile intact. It hurts your credibility and your company’s when you simply abandon your post.
Great new spot from Sprint
I really like the new spot that Sprint put out this week. It operates under the web-based philosophy of providing content to someone instead of just cramming your product down their throats. It’s graphically nice, it’s smart and the final claim of the 4G network is not lost on the consumer. I actually stopped fast forwarding my DVR and rewound it to the top of the spot, just to watch it. THAT is the ultimate test of a spot.
Nicely done.
We killed the media?
It’s often nice to see one broken business model throwing stones at another broken business model. That’s kind of like the Unions blaming the auto industry for making their cars too expensive because they pay their workers too much. But for anybody to insinuate that the Rock Mountain News, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, et al, are declaring bankruptcy and floundering in their own ink because advertising sucks, you’re more stupider than I thought.
In today’s New York Times, their Idea of the Day references an article from TechCrunch and another from The Economist to bolster their case that the shuttering of newspapers across America is all the fault of advertisers. This notion suggests that our work is bad and people don’t want advertising, therefore we’ve been the crutch that fed their fetid business model for years. We’re already the most hated profession in America, so why not pile on a bit more, eh? It’s way easier to blame somebody else. In Disney’s animated film, Meet the Robinsons, the antagonist, Mike “Goob” Yagoobian, makes this great comment: “Hmmm, let’s see: take responsibility for my own life or blame you. Ding, ding, ding, ding! Blame you wins hands down!” So for anybody associated with newspapers, this is so much easier to do. They could look at their archaic business model or the fact that they’ve all become opinion papers instead of journalists, but I think they would much rather find somebody else to blame. And under the current “blame somebody else” zeitgeist, it’s perfect.
Good social media practices, occuring right here on mewrite.com
So, I’ve been ramping up my postings quite a bit as of late, and to that end, I recently installed Google Analytics into the coding of my site. Now, I can’t sweat the details enough. I am dying to know who from what states are reading my blog and trying to figure out everything I can about them. For instance, I don’t think I’ve had a single PC user view me yet. Nothing wrong with that, but if you are one, lemme know.
In the past two weeks since I installed it, I know for certain that a couple posts of mine attracted attention based on their subject matter and that some online reputation management was going on. Massive kudos go to both of these instances.
Firstly, I commented on an article in Ad Age that was written by Alex Bogusky. At the time of posting, I called the blurb It’s hard to hate Alex Bogusky. After initially posting, I went back and slightly altered the title to better reflect the content, but when I SEO-ed the post, that was the title I entered. I also tagged his name on the post. That very day, someone from the Crispin, Porter + Bogusky network viewed the post and actually hung out on my site for 16 minutes. They were checking out an article that was tagged with their CCO’s name and probably because it had the word “hate” in it, as well. Props to them for keeping an eye on it.
Secondly, I wrote about my struggles with finding a quality water bottle and on how I’ve had trouble with my CamelBak bottle. I even posted an image and an email on my post. Today, just a short time after posting, I got this email from their customer service rep:
Not only did they find the post, they sent me a personal email to make up for it. I promised Liz in my response email that I would give them mad props for the immediate response.
So for anybody at home trying to figure out how to wrangle this whole social media thing, that’s it. There’s no better way to build your brand online and to do online PR than with very smart, very aggressive social media efforts. Now, just don’t try and sell something with it, and you’ll be fine.
Tactics vs Strategy
When the media broke a few years ago (I know, just another jaded way to say media fragmentation), the advertising agency model was broken with it. And ever since the internet really evolved into an interactive space, agencies have been scared out of their minds trying to figure out what the next silver bullet is going to be. If you’ve got any doubt, just dig a little deeper to see what Honeyshed was all about. Just click back about 18 months, and people couldn’t stop praising Honeyshed enough as the future of advertising. Even Fast Company got into the mix, calling the now-failed project “the future of digital advertising.” This is just the latest example of how a particular tactic replaced a much wiser strategy. To quote Bob Hoffman in his book The Ad Contrarian:
And yet, today’s marketers seem obsessed with the irrelevant. They have convinced themselves that the Internet is a strategy; that pathetic, desperate stunts are a shortcut to brand building; that advertising is a dying practice that has lost its relevance. Worst of all, they are joined in this by pandering agency heads—leaders of global advertising empires, some of whom have never actually practiced the art of advertising—who are so deeply fearful of every approaching quarterly report they won’t even defend the principles that made them rich and famous.
Step back in time even just a couple years and remember that everybody spent day and night trying to figure out how they could make a campaign “go viral” which is about as stupid as saying “we really hope this product will produce a global pandemic.” Agencies, brands and creatives threw gobs of money at trying to come up with the next viral video or buzz marketing stunt or interactive media. Why? Because they felt like they’d be laughed out of a client’s office if they just came back with the classic push strategies of print, radio and tv. So they created new ones. The strategy never changed, but the tactics did.
Go back a couple more years when agencies would throw 6 figures and EVP titles to anybody who knew flash programming. If you weren’t hocking flash websites to every client on the block and leading pitches with it, then you were a laughing stock amongst your agency peers. So the big agency congloms bought flash boutiques, created new agency-within-agency concepts and charged $120k for big-time websites, all the while forgetting that consumers outside NYC were barely using high speed internet and the fact that flash sites chew through band-width like an O-lineman through a Ci-Ci’s buffet line. Again, the strategy was build an awesome website for people to look at and drive them to it in all our ads. Push, push, push. The site became the driver, not the products and not in a way that consumers wanted.
Then, there’s the tactic dujour: social media. Every two-bit, out of work media strategist on the planet has repackaged themselves as a “Social Media Expert” (which actually means little more than I’m on twitter and facebook and try to make people believe I know what I’m talking about. ) Every other day on twitter, I’ll see somebody posting an article about how Social Media is a strategy and not a tactic. Trust me, if somebody says that, they have something to gain from you using their “social marketing” service. And they’re most likely naive to the broader understanding of both brand building and dialogue with consumers. That’s about as smart as saying that the only thing that matters in conversation is verbal communication. Actual words. Forget body language, tone, situation and parties present, it’s just verbal that matters. Negatory, good buddy.
I think there are a lot of people who are truly making strides in understanding how to wrangle a fragmented media. Most of them have not abandoned the 30 second spot, viral marketing, flash-based websites or social media. They’ve embraced all of them, plus excellent product offerings, good employment strategies and smart public relations strategies, to work as pieces of an overall brand strategy. Brands that have an idea of where they are trying to go have the greatest chance of getting there. It’s rare that a brand will have a good goal to achieve other than “to be the best xxxx retailer in the xxxxx.” And this is where a huge philosophical divide exists between advertising and business. No solid business on the planet exists without a plan of where they are going and how they are going to get there. It’s a shame that marketers aren’t more business savvy to understand that without a vision, there’s no where to go. And even when you have a vision for your brand, it has to be lived out in merchandising, operations, hr and production. When a brand gets to this point, it’s often magical. For somebody like Office Max, with Bob Thacker at the helm, they want to be a preferred office supply retailer for women. That’s an awesome, realistic and unowned position they can achieve. It’s genius. They incorporate everything under the sun in order to reach that goal. They probably even still use a circular, but it’s a tactic and not the strategy.
The sooner brands wake up and realize that their agencies and consultants are in job preservation mode, the better. And, the sooner agencies wake up and realize that strategy, although hard to develop, difficult to maintain and not always as rewarding at first, is the most effective, most affordable and most profitable way to build brands over time. For a recap, just watch my Silver Bullet deck on slideshare.
Change: Redux
Well, if you viewed my first deck, scrap it and check out this one instead. The original presentation was given to a room full of PR folks concerning the blending of PR and design. This one was supposed to be the same presentation give to AdFed, only I found out the night before that my topic changed. Snap.
Instead of just rehashing an old topic, I spent most of my evening retooling the presentation to talk about the changing nature of our industry and where things are headed. I think it does a much better job of reaching conclusions and makes far better recommendations as to what we can do differently to more rapidly evolve.