If you’re anything like me, you have set aside the strategic plan and final 2008 budget deliverables due to your boss next week to do something really important: plan your Halloween costume!
Ah, so many choices. In New York, as I’m sure in other places (maybe…), temporary pop-up stores abound just to sell Halloween costumes – so the mind boggles.Stressed out executive?Nah. New York resident pushed to the ‘burbs because of rising apartment prices?Gee, fascinating… but no. Then I saw it.So weird, so disgusting, so bizarre that it has its own Wikipedia entry… an icon originally introduced in the 1970s and brought back to us in 2004 care of Crispin Porter + Bogusky… As if the tv ad showing this dude waking up with you in the morning wasn’t enough to give me nightmares, it’s (GAH!@*!!) Creepy King!
Alley Insider has posted a list of 10 “embarrassing” product placements from film, Web and TV, along with associated videos.
I’m not sure how this list could possibly fit with the site’s raison d’etre - and from the look of readers’ comments, neither can anyone else (“Please don’t sell out to cater to the Digg crowd…”) – but here we are.
The product placements on this list are not all bad: there’s a huge range here. Converse’s participation in I, Robot was highly relevant to the story, in my opinion. eBay in MIB? Funny and seamless. But Pepsi One in The Thomas Crown Affair? When Rene Russo’s character is supposed to be a health junkie who drinks green glop that makes everyone want to toss their cookies? And the way the can is tilted toward the camera? Ouch.
In the middle of this list is FedEx’s participation in Runaway Bride. Not spot-on but not distracting, either. FedEx has done a fine job in this arena. I disagree with many naysayers who feel that the movie was a walking billboard for the company. To me, the company was as much a character in the story as was Hanks. FedEx’s involvement in Cast Away was gutsy and gut-wrenching. The movie is imminently watchable, and the company is just as relevant upon multiple viewings.
According to The Telegraph, Credit Suisse is the first big bank in the UK to create a custom private banking service for homosexuals. Founded by gays, for gays.
Credit Suisse’s service will cover not only deliver standard private banking products but will also provide counsel tailored to this customer base pertaining to civil partnerships, adoption and estate planning.
Stephen Connolly, the chap leading the new Credit Suisse business service, says, “Clients with us have no need to explain their lifestyles or – as we know happens in some cases – almost feel the need to justify the way they choose to live their lives.”
Britain’s average gay man earned a full 20% higher than his heterosexual counterparts, and will frequently have fewer expenses associated with raising a family – thereby becoming a great target for cash management, investment and retirement planning, as well.
It’ll be interesting to see how they do. Merrill Lynch in the UK is dialing back a custom service they established for gays a few years ago, and there have been other similar services across the pond that have gone away because their founders determined that the need for such services had passed.
It may be, in fact, that the service’s core target is well-educated singles, in a fashion, who don’t have children and may or may not be in relationships. We’ll see. The basic insight is that there is still money to be made by finding underserved – and sometimes, well off – populations. As always, their success will come down to prospecting and execution.
Earlier this month, I was alarmed to see a blogger label a pricing action taken by JetBlue as following “the battered wife customer service model.” While the author may claim to “lead a movement to inspire people to do things that inspire them,” I find little that could be inspiring about the thoughtless application of this phrase to the airline’s decision to charge for a pillow and blanket kit.
I sort of chalked this up to bad taste and moved on.
Then this week’s AdAge showed up with an article on the front page entitled “Brand vs. Brand: Attack Ads on the Rise.” Attack? The article asks whether it’s the tight economy, or the effective PC vs. Mac ads, or maybe the Presidential election that have “set the tone” for some “pretty aggressive” comparison ads. Except… there’s no there there. When you read the article, the ads discussed include the Pepsi Challenge, Dyson vs. Hoover and Time Warner vs. Verizon. None of these strike me as “attack” ads. I don’t think that anyone experiences the PC vs. Mac executions as “attack” ads. Even the head of branding at Dunkin Donuts, which is currently running ads taking direct aim at Starbucks, says that it’s important not to get nasty.
So what exactly is being “attacked?” Perhaps the publication’s own need to drive circulation and ad revenue (this is, after all, the same pub whose front page screamed about clients losing business due to the economy, while the inside featured a full page about agencies who employ their own bartenders), because there is nothing in the article itself to warrant its title.
Do marketers have any responsibility to use language that does not deliberately offend when discussing the average no-big-deal topic? I think we do: as marketers and as humans. The word “attack” may be appropriate in the title of an article about Obama supposedly consorting with terrorists, but it’s just gratuitous when applied to a taste test ad comparing Progresso to Campbell.
You may remember my review of the book Buying In by The New York Times Magazine columnist Rob Walker. Now comes the latest marketing-as-boogeyman tome, Buyology.
Martin Lindstrom, a long-time ad guy, has written a new book that hypes every “suspicion” people have about marketing… that consumers’ minds are controlled by marketers who stand behind the curtain pulling our strings. Martin’s website made me giggle: pull it up and you’ll immediately see what looks like a brainscan, backed by spooky music and the pronouncement that Buyology will reveal the ”truth and lies about why we buy.”
There are videos of Lindstrom providing an overview of each chapter of the book – all backed by the same spooky music first heard on the homepage. Chapter 4 will reveal that we are affected by subliminal advertising. Chapter 8 will inform us that we are influenced by the universal smell of childhood experienced by anyone holding a box of Crayola crayons. That – because of product placement (Coke, anyone?) – the show American Idol affects us in “ways you’ve never seen before.”
The problem with these books, in my opinion, is that they underestimate the average consumer. In other words, both Buying In and Buyology assume that a consumer accepts everything at face value and would be shocked to learn that marketers leverage shoppers’ feelings, beliefs, aspirations and worries in “non-rational” ways.
It’s interesting to me that many reviews of these books (see AdAge on Buying In and FutureLab on Buyology) tend to say things like “… is a must-read for marketers.” Perhaps these books leverage the average marketer’s fear of what consumers think of us, more than anything else.
Knowing that computers run the universe ought to keep me from being surprised at such things, but… this is pretty cool.
Titan Worldwide, an out-of-home advertising company, has introduced addressable digital advertising on buses and other forms of transit in both the US and UK. The ads look like television commercials and can be targeted by time of day, block, zip code, demography and ethnicity.
The Metropolitan Transportation Authority is testing the system in NYC now and hopes to roll it out to 200 buses in 1Q09.
Like I said I don’t know why LED-meets-GPS amazes me: maybe its an excrutiating level of knowledge as to how long it takes to invent, test, sell and implement something this large.
I have not been able to find pricing yet, but this could be a real break-through for local business consortia and non-profits (assuming the network will take some amount of public service announcements). I have no doubt that a city may be able to use the space to post messages in the case of an emergency, as well.
Everyone knows that social networking is today’s IT girl of marketing. Most people aren’t exactly sure why, but there you are. What’s given me a chuckle are networks tossed together on a very loose definition of “shared” interests. Facebook, ironically, may the best example of them all. While it’s the media darling, to be sure, and has a kagillion members (including yours truly), most of whom have little in common. So its cosmic customer growth has been great for news outlets, but not so wonderful for marketers who quickly discover the limitations of Facebook applications and the difficulty of uncovering and aggregating “like” people.
Enter Unilever and their ad agency, Bartle Bogle Hegarty who chose Kodiak, Alaska for its harsh physical conditions and promptly set up a storefront where they began giving away free bottles of a new Vaseline lotion, Clinical Therapy. From there, Vaseline representatives began asking visitors to pass the word and subsequent visitors had to name the townsperson who had referred them. In other words, they went hunting for a key influencer: a “tipping point person” whose advice people heeded and who could influence others to try a new product.
This is the way they found Petal Ruch, who tried the lotion when she read that the company was giving away samples.
Once she did, the company claims that she passed the product along to 1,000 town residents in only two weeks. The company set up a special website, www.prescribethenation.com, where visitors could see individuals who have tried the lotion and how many people they passed it on to. Unilever also spent several days filming documentary-like footage for the ad campaign, and site visitors can watch videos of each person talking about why they like the product.
This is an outstanding word-of-mouth effort that I hope wins some awards. The effort itself could not have been that expensive (no doubt the filming was the most costly element, not the consumer/storefront piece) and, most importantly, Unilever built a “social network” from the inside out: by finding a passionate advocate first, rather than building the network and hoping someone will pop out of it.
I just saw a Tide TV ad that compares the contents of other detergent brands to Tide. In a split-screen comparison, the voiceover says that other brands contain a lot more water and less of the elements that actually help clean your clothes. The curious part is the language the ad uses: other brands ”have very little cleaning ingredients” vs. Tide which “has much more cleaning ingredients.”
Does that strike anyone else as weird? “Very little ingredients” and “Much more ingredients?” With the plural subject “ingredients,” the correct adjective clause would also need to be plural, such as ”very few” and “many more.”
Andree Brooks penned an article for Saturday’s Wall Street Journal and I can’t tell if it’s satire, or truth, or whether she gets paid by the word (1,069 of them, to be exact).
The piece goes to great lengths to describe the horror (the horror!) experienced when a woman of a certain age must give up shoes she likes for “old lady shoes.” Brooks puts that age somewhere in a woman’s 50s, with a generic explanation from “medical experts” having to do with flattening arches and weakening ligaments.
I have absolutely no idea what she’s talking about.
It’s certainly true that women, in particular, tend to wear pointy, too-high and otherwise torturous footwear to look good. And when they start to hurt your little feets… you should stop. Or if an injury makes such footwear painful. Or when your eyesight isn’t helping you see those street grates anymore. All good reason to stop wearing spiky shoes.
But age on its own? I don’t think so. And the chest-beating vocabulary Brooks uses is sillier still: a “heavy heart,” parting with “long time friends” (i.e. shoes), “grief.” Good grief. She equates shoes with power, reminding us of Dorothy’s ruby slippers in The Wizard of Oz. This is so dumb, it’s beside the point that Dorothy’s shoes were about 1-inch high, with a sensible toe box: a shoe not likely to outlive its wearability.
I think the article caught my eye because I went to high school in a part of the country where girls wore dresses, make-up and 3-4 inch shoes and I, too, had to give such shoes up: because of a herniated disc. But “a bad case of shoe envy?” Not after I was introduced to Stuart Weitzman…
I guess I ought to chalk this up to my original impression of the Saturday Wall Street Journal: that there’s at least one article each week that’s a little unhinged. There to fill space. Goofy. But hey – compared to taking music advice from John Malkovich (October 6, 2007 Saturday edition), this article makes perfect sense.
Brandweek recently ran a lengthy article about behavioral targeting. “BT,” or contextual targeting, keyword targeting or psychographical targeting all roughly refer to the same idea: that a marketer uses your own actions or profile to serve up advertising that might be of interest to you. This is pretty standard stuff that has migrated its way from the generic web onto social networks such as MySpace and Facebook.
I did think, however, that the notion of “influencer marketing” was interesting in this context. As with a coming post on how Vaseline built a social network around one key person who helped spread the word about a new product, influencer marketing would mean crafting a message based on how many people you reach in your life and around which issues or topics you may have the greatest influence.
Say I have 350 “friends” on Facebook, 250 of whom are part of the “New York” network. I might get served an ad for a local New York service, the value of which could increase for me based on the number of individuals to whom I send the offer. Or maybe I have 100+ female friends, all over the age of 50: an audience that consumerreports.org is interested in targeting for paid site subscriptions. The site might not only promote specifically to me, but could offer me a free 6-month subscription for referring 15 friends (with verified email addresses). These are examples of how the ”influencer” idea might be used on an “outbound” basis – that’s me communicating outwardly to individuals in my network.
Targeting could be used to equal effect on an “inbound” basis: if a Facebook member regularly posts a lot of positive messages about Barack Obama on his profile to which many people regularly comment, the campaign might want to reach out to that person and ask him to host a house party (particularly if the influencer lives in a zip code that is underpenetrated).
We’ll see if marketers start experimenting with overt “influencer” messaging on social network sites. It holds promise.
Friday October 17th 2008, 11:23 am
Filed under: Google, Internet
In a report published this past week, an assistant professor at HBS charged Google with taking advantage of individuals who mis-type the names of URLs. Cybersquatters buy URLs betting that people will misspell the URL (typing “xpedia.com” vs. “expedia.com,” for example) and then they use Google Adsense on these misspelled URLs to make money.
Ben Edelmansays that this is “one of the unsavory ways we all end up paying Google,” and that while “users don’t have to write Google a check to receive Google’s services… one way or another, Google manages to get users’ money.”
Unsavory? Unsavory. Compared to what… AIG spending $30,000 on spa treatments? The Keating Five?
Let’s take a look at this.
On its face, typo-squatting is not illegal. The law is not very interested in those who register words that are similar to established URLs, unless the new site violates trademark law for the purpose of competing with the original trademark’s owner. So if “Orbits.com” benefits from those who can’t spell “Orbitz” – but it’s in some entirely different business and is not trying to compete with or nefariously deceive those looking for “Orbitz.com” – then more power to ‘em.
Banking, for obvious reasons, attracts evil-doers but, again, one needs to consider each circumstance individually. It is legal to buy and use a URL such as www.bankofdamerica.com (which was hardly a site at all – just a cascade of links, per the above graphic), which was most definitely not trying to compete with Bank of America or lead BofA customers astray. It had a sponsored link to www.bankofamerica.com and other ads served by Google Adsense for which the deep-thinking bankofdameria crowd was paid. It was, on the other hand, ruled illegal to purchase mortgagewellsfargo.com for the purpose of deliberately misleading users interested in Wells Fargo services.
I guess what I’m saying is that if a website is deliberately trying to rip me off, then I care. But do I care if an individual makes money from Google Adsense when I go to wakeupwalmart.com (free speech) or, conversely, wallmartsucks.com? Not really. And do I believe that Google has some liability here or, worse, is acting in an unsavory manner? Not so much.
I know this may surprise some of my gentle readers, and I am hardly letting Google off the hook for instances of trademark infringement for which the company has been seen as liable. I just think that Edelman, a professor who issued an academic report in the McAfee Security Journal – not exactly a newsstand favorite – managed to use this mysterious “typo-squatting” term to get a lot of undue attention this week with an over-the-top exclamation about Google.
So what is this, my 4th or 5th post about Starbucks? It’s the 5th. I wrote one when Howard Schultz declared that he would return to daily management because Starbucks had lost its way; I wrote one when Starbucks launched its new daily brew, Pike Place; I wrote one when the company announced that it was pulling back on its entertainment initiatives and eliminating its music business… etc, etc.
The point of all my meanderings this year is that Starbucks wandered too far off course and, like all companies, must become and remain exceptionally good at delivering on its core brand promise before even considering whether or not consumers will consider anything off-strategy or loosely complimentary (as CDs, books, magazines and smelly egg sandwiches most assuredly are).
Starbucks = Coffee + Service. Get this right first.
Why is this so hard? And I’m not saying it’s forever: you closed 600 stores this year and $4 coffee is becoming increasingly unaffordable. Bad times call for you to pull yourself together and take actions that will hold your loyal base close to you while the economic cold winds blow. Just… for awhile!
It’s a shame that they just can’t seem to handle that. In the lengthy Portfoliointerview that marked Schultz’s return to day-to-day management, he despaired at how badly Starbucks had strayed from providing a great experience and the best coffee. Then he told the journalist how excited he was about the smoothies (from Italy!) the chain was about to launch.
This week, Starbucks reinforced this on strategy/off strategy line of thinking by kicking off two discount programs to try to help its customers (the strategy part: keep coffee drinkers), while simultaneously announcing a new co-publishing deal with Farrar Straus Giroux for The Traveler, a picture book, described as “a beguiling and tender fable about what really matters in life.” Is there an unmet need for full-price picture books at Starbucks? No.
I’m frustrated. And I had a cup of coffee from the deli this morning. It was cheaper, there was no line and no one tried to sell me an iTunes card.
I wrote a post last week about marketers who are creatively capitalizing on the mangled economy, highlighting both Wal-Mart and KFC. All are trying to do something.
More and more fast-food and casual dining chains are introducing value meals, including IHOP’s $4.99 all-you-can-eat pancakefest, lunches at Applebee’s for $5.99 and hamburgers at Ruby Tuesdays for $1… and now we learn that several states are stepping up their lottery advertising with messaging like, “Maybe It’s Your Lucky Day.” Taking real advantage is Missouri, who is offering gas discounts with the purchase of a $2 lottery ticket.
What do fast food and lotteries have in common? They both disproportionately impact low-income individuals who can least afford the come-ons, with respect to both their financial affairs and their health.
“Green” is so big and gas is so expensive. Electric cars have been around for years, but most of the actual news you hear about them involves some celebrity who has one, ergo the 48,000 and 22,300 Google results for “ed begley electric car” and ”ed begley electric bike, respectively. Outside of Begley and Woody Harrelson, it’s all a little hazy.
How come?
Jut today I came across two websites: www.priuspixelometro.com, a Toyota site that lets a user see how much he/she would save over X miles driving a Prius vs. an “average sedan.” I don’t own an “average sedan,” do you? Plus, you may drive the same number of miles from New York to New Jersey and between two spots in the Mojave Desert, but you most certainly will not use the same amount of gas. No one’s looking seriously at electric car options using this tool. The second (unrelated) website was www.costtodrive.com, which allows you to specify an exact starting point and destination PLUS the actual year, make and model of the car you drive.
Now we’re getting somewhere.
So how hard could it be to create the best of both worlds: a site that allows you to (1) specify where you’re driving from and to, (2) along with the exact car you currently own… then shows you the all-in costs of using that car vs. the (3) year, make and model of an electric car that perhaps you are considering buying? All-in costs could easily reflect both the cost of a kilowatt-hour and the cost of a gallon of gas in your home zip code as of some set date.
Very Short List (VSL) may be one of the most unique and special endeavors to come out of the IAC stable.
The idea is very simple. In a world drowning in news and content, most of questionable quality and all promoted with equal force, Very Short List serves up one daily email recommending one thing having to do with culture. It might be a good book or movie or a video on YouTube. Some recommendations are actually for free stuff, which is nice, and – in a no/low revenue-producing example of the long tail in action – VSL may recommend something too old (or “vintage,” as they say) to be found anywhere but on the Web.
When I read the recommendation for and then viewed the funny ”‘CharlieRose’ by Samuel Beckett,” I felt my brain loosen up (in a good way). It was a short but much-needed respite from Extra/Hollywood Insider/The Enquirer/OK Magazine, etc.
Kurt Andersen leads the small group running VSL, so you get a well-curated and edited recommendation for one thing, just one time, once a day. And it’s probably safe to say that it’s unlikely Britney, Lindsay, Heidi or Mariah will make an appearance anytime soon.
There are also VSLs devoted to science and the Web, with versions focused on food, books and kids to come.
VSL needs to add RSS to the service, as has been noted in a number of reviews, but it’s still pretty wonderful. In contrast to IAC’s Internetish description of it as an “entertainment filter,” I think VSL may be the most finite and succinct example yet of why we still need humans to create value. Try it out.
Last Fall, I wrote a post using a photo of Angelina Jolie and her daughter, Zahara, clutching matching Valentino bags as the foil for an ongoing conversation about Neil Howe’s and William Strauss’ fascinating prediction that children/teens are returning to a more wholesome, altruistic view of the world.
Apparently, TomKat didn’t read my post before hitting Hermes on Madison Ave.
If you are interesting in marketing – or just think you may need to be in the same room with anyone 15-24 years old in the near future – and you haven’t read any of the Howe/Strauss books… you should. They’re all good, but I might recommend starting with either Millenials Rising: The Next Great Generation (2000) or Millenials and Pop Culture: Strategies for a New Generation of Consumers (2006). Using their own principles, Neil Howe did a great job in AdAge last month outlining why Obama has done so well with Millenials.
I know they were just trying to be honest, but… let’s just say that they were smart to make the last slide in the presentation the picture of a bartender.
Sequoia Capital is a well-known VC firm that has invested in hundreds of companies including Cisco, Apple, Facebook, Google and PayPal. Last week, Sequoia hosted an emergency meeting for 100 executives from its portfolio companies to notify them that the sky is falling and they better be able to reach profitability, or else.
When entering the room, the attendees saw the opening of what was clearly going to be an interesting slide presentation: a huge mock tombstone that said ”RIP: Good Times.” Venturebeat posted a link to Sequoia’s slide show HERE. It’s worth reviewing. Their parting messages: cut spend now now now, become cash flow positive as soon as possible and spend every dollar as if it were your last. The last slide before Q&A: GET REAL or GO HOME.
A Toronto-based site helps match individuals in need of a parking space with those willing to rent one out. Parkingspots.com is very easy to use: you specify the city in which you’d like to find a spot and the site serves up a Google map of all the open spaces in the vicinity. When you click on one of the spots, you get a photo of the location/street (smart), the price and the term.
At least that’s how it works for Canada – the site is still new and has so few spots available in the US that the it simply shows you a map of the entire country if you request, say, Miami. But who knows: maybe knowing that there’s a spot open on S. Washington Street in Seattle for $175 per month is something that I’m going to need to know tomorrow.
As in all things, the devil is in the details: many of the spots I browsed in the US were available in time slots that had already expired. Consumers will rarely try multiple times if your service is poor.
Parkingspots.com is an excellent example of service that matches sellers with buyers of a perishable good. In August, SF:MOGD wrote about Lifebooker.com, a site that matches users with last minute spa reservations at discount prices – another perishable good. prompted me to think of all the services or items that go wanting because there is no clearinghouse that could match sellers with buyers.
How about… movie tickets? Haircuts? Theatre tickets (this has been tried and the results aren’t good – there has to be a better way)? How about classroom slots at adult ed schools just prior to the end of the registration period? Any service or product that does not get used when “the doors close,” so to speak, would easily qualify.
Newsflash: the whole idea that a consumer can watch TV, surf the Internet, listen to her iPod and talk on the phone all at the same time is bunk.
MRI conducted a survey and found that nearly half of at-home media consumption occurs when a consumer is “exclusively engaged in one medium.” 55% of newspaper reading, 49.4% of TV and 54% of magazine reading are exclusive on the average day.
Even your own SF:MOGD may want to dial back the multi-tasking: last week I dialed a phone number and, while it was ringing, forgot who I was calling. FORGOT WHO I WAS CALLING! That’s scary. Not too scary, though: I had the presence of mind to stay on to find out who the lucky callee actually was…
Title: Stephanie Fierman Goes to… Wal-Mart?
Subtitle: Retailers making the grand gesture to heed consumer concerns in the face of a depression got it goin’ on
As The Wall Street Journaldetailed just today, retailers are slashing prices and discounting like crazy in the face of shrinking consumer demand. Too bad most of these promotions aren’t working. Enter the grand gesture… and I’ve seen two retailers do it particularly well recently.
The winner thus far has to be Wal-Mart, with its announcement last week that it’ll be pricing several top toys at $10 for the holiday season. Both Target and KB Toys scrambled to follow with their own cuts, even adding items to the discounted list… alas, too late to get the spotlight. One of the most important people in my life is rabidly negative about Wal-Mart: its politics, its employee policies, its chilling effect on local commerce… She’s never been in one and never planned to go. When this announcement was made, the earth stopped rotating, pigs started flying and she said that, if she had kids, this promotion would get her into a Wal-Mart. That’s serious success.
The second smart promotion I noticed recently comes from KFC, where marketing is now led by Javier Benito, formerly of Coca-Cola and Starwood. KFC has introduced the Value Meal, a “complete and affordable meal for today’s value and time-conscious families,” consisting of seven pieces of chicken, one large side order and four biscuits. The twist here is that the marketing campaign challenges consumers to create the same meal for under $10 on their own. The TV commercial highlights a mom and her two kids moving through the grocery store trying to replicate the meal (at the butcher counter, the little girl exclaims, “7 pieces of chicken is HOW MUCH??”).
While the ad has generated a lot of buzz online from (mostly) women saying that they could beat this challenge any day of the week, it’s… generated a lot of buzz online. I think it has good potential to break through an awful lot of clutter.
Both of these are examples of retailers thinking outside the box and swinging broadly toward the outfield. Just because you have a bat, doesn’t mean everything has to look like the same old ball.
halloween costume
halloween
Unsavory? Unsavory. Compared to what… AIG spending $30,000 on spa treatments? The Keating Five? 
I know this may surprise some of my gentle readers, and I am hardly letting Google off the hook for 
How come? 
How about… movie tickets? Haircuts? Theatre tickets (this has been tried and the results aren’t good – there has to be a better way)? How about classroom slots at adult ed schools just prior to the end of the registration period? Any service or product that does not get used when “the doors close,” so to speak, would easily qualify.
