tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-80458183640370112992024-03-05T18:32:29.668-05:00Ad NauseamWriting about advertising since 1994Christopher Simpsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07465089990572108350noreply@blogger.comBlogger38125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8045818364037011299.post-71887973610679036262009-08-06T16:37:00.002-04:002009-08-06T16:39:10.658-04:00Ad Nauseam now at WordpressI've moved all of Ad Nauseam to Wordpress. Nothing against Blogger -- it's a great package -- but there were templates at Wordpress I liked better than the somewhat limited selection here. <div><br /></div><div>You can reach the new Ad Nauseam <a href="http://kitsadnauseam.wordpress.com/">here</a>.</div>Christopher Simpsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07465089990572108350noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8045818364037011299.post-45499701899699655292009-05-20T01:04:00.022-04:002009-05-20T12:12:48.643-04:00• Adventures in Advertising: This Is a Recording<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:arial;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">I should come clean and admit that this post is appearing in both Ad Nauseam and Editor's Sidebar since it deals with both advertising and editing. </span></span><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:arial;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"><br /></span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:arial;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">Hey, why waste a good post?</span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:arial;"><br /></span></div><div><hr /><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:arial;"><br /></span></div><img src="http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v369/Husserl/265719440773448517e0-main_Full-1.jpg" style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 200px; height: 118px;" border="0" alt="" /><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:arial;">Many years ago, I worked at a small start-up magazine. The owner and publisher, Peter, was adamant about the need for advertisers if we wanted to grow our business.<br /><br />Of course, back then we didn't actually say, "grow our business." We might "increase our business," or our business might grow. But the idea of "growing" a business hadn't made its way into the vernacular yet. However, if it had, Peter would have said it. I've never liked the expression, although I'm hard pressed to explain why. You "grow" corn. You "grow" turnips. But damn it, you don’t "grow the farm." Likewise, your children "grow," but you don't "grow your children."<br /><br />I'm not sure what the difference is, but it still sounds wrong to me.<br /><br />It's kind of like prepositions. If I said, "I'm going to Montreal on a bus," you wouldn't think anything of it. Well, you might think, "That's a hell of a long bus ride," but that's about all. You might think, "Why is he going to Montreal when everything he could ever want is right here in Toronto?" but other than that, it wouldn't seem odd. </span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:arial;"><br /></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:arial;">On the other hand, if I said, "I'm going to Montreal on a car," then you'd think I was going to make the trip strapped to the roof, like some dead grandmother in an urban legend. </span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:arial;"><br /></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:arial;">Why "on" a bus, but "in" a car? Only the language gods know for sure.<br /><br />And maybe Noam Chompsky. He knows everything. Or thinks he does.<br /><br />At any rate, there was no question Peter was right about one thing: without advertisers, we'd go belly-up inside of four months.<br /><br />Our only disagreement was how to go about getting these advertisers. Peter thought that cold calls were the answer. We'd simply call every business in the area and convince them to place an ad.<br /><br />My plan was to take the magazine to the businesses most likely to have an interest in it and pitch them.<br /><br />In the end, we decided that cold-calling was the best way to get Peter off my back.<br /><br />Our other disagreement revolved around who was going to do the cold-calling. </span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:arial;">Since I was already doing layout, writing, editing, photography, research, and re-wiring the phones to give us two lines without the phone company knowing about it (a task for which I was eminently unsuited and in which I failed to accomplish anything other than discovering first-hand that telephone lines carry much more juice than you might think), I kind of figured maybe someone else could do it. Someone like -- and I was just spinning thoughts off the top of my head -- the receptionist whose job consisted of answering the phone twice a day. On a busy day. </span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:arial;">Except during that unfortunate period of time when the phone wasn't working.<br /><br />To Peter, however, the only person capable of making effective cold calls was me. My protestations that I was already over-worked, and had absolutely no talent in calling people for ads, only served to bring out the positive thinker in him. I was selling myself short, he told me. After all, with absolutely no training, hadn't I rewired the phones to give us two lines without the phone company knowing about it?<br /><br />Well, no. In fact, we'd had to bring in the phone company to fix the phone -- after telling them that the wiring had been mucked up during renovations.<br /><br />Naturally, in the end I did the cold-calling.<br /><br />After several days without a single response, Peter finally figured out what the problem was.<br /><br />It wasn't that we were calling completely random businesses without regard to their nature or need for magazine advertising.<br /><br />It wasn't that we were trying to commit them to a sizeable outlay on the basis of nothing more than a voice on the phone (a phone which, on my end at least, had an annoying buzz in the line).<br /><br />No, the problem was that since the message was being given by a live person, it was bound to have variations in tone and pitch, which threw off the scientific effectiveness of the cold call.<br /><br />What was needed was consistency. He'd read research about it.<br /><br />The answer, of course, was a pre-recorded message and automatic dialling system.<br /><br />Unfortunately, we had no automatic dialling system, having barely escaped with one working phone after the repairman had initially expressed doubts that the wiring could have become screwed up in that particular way from renovations -- especially when there were no signs of renovations having been done in the last 30 years. Nor did we have a means of recording anything by way of the phone itself. Our only recourse was to use a tape recorder. One of us (and by "one of us," of course, I mean me) would record a message, then for each call place the receiver near the recorder and play it back.<br /><br />What? I'm serious. I'm telling you -- I was there.<br /><br />Anyhow, Peter wrote out a carefully worded message, and that night I spent a couple of hours reading and re-reading it into the tape recorder. The next morning, when I was sure he was in the office, I got him on the line and played it for him. When it was finished, I asked him what he thought.<br /><br />He'd hung up.<br /><br />And right then I learned one of the most important lessons in advertising: If even the client can't sit through the ad, it's probably not going to work.<br /><br />The other lesson I learned was that without advertising, a magazine can go belly-up in even less than four months.<br /><br />It only took us three.</span></div>Christopher Simpsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07465089990572108350noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8045818364037011299.post-71126190695282173142009-05-12T12:46:00.009-04:002009-05-15T15:13:11.614-04:00• What social marketing can learn from learner-centered education<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v369/Husserl/dunce.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 145px; height: 318px;" src="http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v369/Husserl/dunce.jpg" border="0" alt="" /></a><br /><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:arial;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style=" ;font-family:'Times New Roman';"><div style="border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 3px; padding-right: 3px; padding-bottom: 3px; padding-left: 3px; width: auto; font: normal normal normal 100%/normal Georgia, serif; text-align: left; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style=" ;font-family:arial;">If a lot of the philosophical language surrounding the new social network marketing sounds vaguely familiar, it should: we've heard it all before from the good folks in the educational field.</span><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style=" ;font-family:arial;"><br /></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style=" ;font-family:arial;">Beginning in the late sixties, picking up force in the seventies, and becoming the foundation of pedagogy in the eighties, the "learner-centered" approach to education called for a shift of control from teachers to students. The idea was that students were in a better position to know how they learned than were the teachers. Given the freedom to do so, students would essentially teach themselves, while the teachers simply provided the resources. To reflect this new approach, teachers were no longer "teachers," but "facilitators," while students became "learners." Lessons were no longer meant to be uni-directional, with one person standing in front of the class imparting information, but to be multi-directional, a "dialogue" in which the ideas and thoughts of the students were of equal, if not more importance than the authoritative course material.</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style=" ;font-family:arial;"><br /></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style=" ;font-family:arial;">Much the same has been occurring in the realm of social network marketing. Its proponents insist that the consumer is better positioned to know which advertising techniques work, and which don't. We are to move away from simply broadcasting information about our product or service in an authoritative and uni-directional fashion, choosing instead to engage in "conversations," the content of which is driven as much by the public as by the company trying to sell to them.</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style=" ;font-family:arial;"><br /></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style=" ;font-family:arial;">And how has this worked?</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style=" ;font-family:arial;"><br /></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style=" ;font-family:arial;">Well, in the educational field, it turned out that when you asked students (sorry, "learners") the most effective way of teaching them (sorry, "facilitating their education"), they responded by telling us to either entertain them, or leave them alone. Course curriculum became subject to whatever pop-culture trends were enjoying their fifteen minutes of fame at any given time, and classroom instruction turned into classroom discussions in which the only opinions that counted were those of the "learners."</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style=" ;font-family:arial;"><br /></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style=" ;font-family:arial;">Speaking as a college prof who is tasked with trying to teach the products of this system how to write a coherent sentence, I'd have to say it's been less than a resounding success. </span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style=" ;font-family:arial;"><blockquote><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic; ">"After that I applied for [name of college] and had to write a English test to get in and believe it or not I passed with an excellent mark they even called me to welcome and congratulate me into the program, yeah I was just as surprised as you" (personal essay from student, aged 23)</span></blockquote>The profound illiteracy and lack of general knowledge with which we're faced on a daily basis is disturbing -- not to mention debilitating to our motivation. The multi-billion dollar educational system is a sham, and we know it; but there's nothing we can do about it. Too much has been invested in the philosophy, and those most fully indoctrinated in it (public and high school teachers) are hardly likely to suddenly admit it's all been a big mistake. Meanwhile, those of us with the least indoctrination are in the post-secondary institutions, and therefore unable to bring about meaningful change where it would do the most good -- in the lower grades when students' minds are still open to learning.</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:arial;"><br /></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:arial;">In the advertising industry, things are showing signs of going in much the same direction. It turns out that when you ask consumers (sorry, "participants") the most effective way of advertising to them (sorry, "engaging them in brand conversations"), their response is eerily similar to that of the students: either entertain us, or leave us alone. In place of uni-directional ads, they want YouTube videos which can be remixed and redistributed to their friends. Instead of information about product features, price, and availability, they want to see the CEO of the company sending out 140 character Tweets about the boring meeting he's in. </span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:arial;"><br /></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:arial;">Speaking as an advertising commentator, I'd have to say that this, too, has been less than a resounding success. Despite the millions of words praising the effectiveness of social network marketing, there have been shockingly few examples of anything approaching a decent return on investment. Where companies set up their own social networking platforms, the only visitors they get are those already committed to the brand: which is fine, but the very nature of such platforms encourages confrontation, and those visitors can easily take offense if their comments or incidental complaints aren't dealt with in the fashion they expect. And where the brands are trying to invade pre-existing social networks, they open themselves up to mischievous attacks which have a far higher potential of going viral than do the brands' feeble attempts at being "hip."</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:arial;"><br /></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:arial;">The danger, of course, is that advertising, like education, will find itself overly-committed to a system that simply doesn't work; but which nobody is willing to step away from.</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:arial;"><br /></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:arial;">Students don't want to go to school, and if you ask them to redesign it to their liking, you end up with a social club. Likewise, consumers don't want advertising, and if you ask them to redesign it to their liking, you end up with...well, a social club.</span></div></div></span></span>Christopher Simpsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07465089990572108350noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8045818364037011299.post-55617002257627250232009-05-04T08:31:00.018-04:002009-05-14T01:45:59.323-04:00• Best Before #1<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v369/Husserl/w2-nuts-bestbefore.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer; width: 159px; height: 106px;" src="http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v369/Husserl/w2-nuts-bestbefore.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><div style="text-align: left;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;font-family:Arial;">Welcome to "Best Before," a semi-regular feature in which we look at advertising tropes that are long past their best before date -- if they ever had one to begin with.</span><br /></div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><hr style="text-align: left;"><h3 style="text-align: left;"><b><span style="font-family:Arial;">The customer as moron</span></b></h3><h4 style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family:Arial;">The concept</span></h4><p style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family:Arial;">Upon using the client's product or service, the consumer is overcome with an inability to function in a normal fashion. He or she (generally he) becomes incapable of normal social interaction, loses all interest in sex, and is often oblivious to physical danger.</span></p><h4 style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family:Arial;">Examples</span></h4><ul><li style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family:Arial;"><b>Arby's</b>: A young couple sits by the side of a lake at night. When the beautiful woman suggests a dip and runs to the water taking off her clothes, her boyfriend repeats the word "dip" a couple of times and then drives off for an Arby's beef dip sandwich.</span></li><li style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family:Arial;"><b>Casino Rama</b>: Another man, another attractive woman, another lake. After having spent the night at Casino Rama, the man is unable to pay attention to her because...well, it's not clear, really. At one point we see the world through his eyes and there's a vague bright spot in the centre of his vision but at another point he asks if the cloud doesn't look like a motorocycle. Not only is it insulting, but it makes no sense.</span></li><li style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family:Arial;"><b>A&W</b>: A young man is so enraptured by the burger he's eating that he completely fails to notice the young woman flirting with him, and uses the napkin on which she has written her phone number to wipe his mouth. (I've already written about A&W <a href="http://ad-nauseam-original.blogspot.com/2009/03/im-disappointed-in-for-several-decades.html">dumbing-down </a>what started out as an intelligent, mature, and amusing campaign.)</span></li></ul><h4 style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family:Arial;">The problem</span></h4><p style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family:Arial;">Is it even necessary to spell it out? Maybe there's a point to portraying those who <i>don't</i> use your product as stupid, although perhaps insulting the people you're trying to seduce has its drawbacks. But where is the logic in making your own <i>customers</i> look like idiots?</span></p><hr style="text-align: left;"><h3 style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family:Arial;"><b>Common sounds making a rhythmic tune</b></span></h3><h4 style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family:Arial;">The concept</span></h4><p style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family:Arial;">A series of natural taps, bangs, or other sounds combine to form a tune or distinct rhythm.</span></p><h4 style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family:Arial;">Examples</span></h4><ul><li style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family:Arial;"><b>Maxwell House</b>: The first, and probably most effective, would have to be the Maxwell House percolator. This was so successful that while it hasn't been aired for decades (percolators having been replaced with drip), those of us old enough to have grown up with the original ads can still remember the tune.</span></li><li style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family:Arial;"><b>Folgers</b>: More recently, Folgers has tried to duplicate the phenomenon. As a couple prepares breakfast in the kitchen, each item they put down adds another "note" to the tune. Unfortunately, the Folgers "tune" is not particularly distinctive and it takes repeated viewings for the intent to become clear.</span></li><li style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family:Arial;"><b>Can't remember</b>: In a remarkably forgettable commercial, the entire family beats out a pointless rhythm and then they all look extremely pleased with themselves.</span></li></ul><h4 style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family:Arial;">The problem</span></h4><p style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family:Arial;">While there's nothing wrong with the actual concept, making it work takes real genius, and there's just not a lot of that going around. The Maxwell House ads succeeded because the tune was catchy and the creation of the tune (a percolator) was directly tied to the product. None of the ads since have managed to pull off the same formula. Until they do, it's time to put this one to bed.</span></p><hr style="text-align: left;"><h3 style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family:Arial;"><b>Our product sucks, but it's much better now</b></span></h3><h4 style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family:Arial;">The concept</span></h4><p style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family:Arial;">In an honest recognition that the company's product has been inferior in the past, these commercials ask the consumer to give it another shot, with the promise that it has vastly improved.</span></p><h4 style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family:Arial;">Examples</span></h4><ul><li style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family:Arial;"><b>Ford</b>: For over 25 years now, Ford has been begging the public to give it another chance. "Have you driven a Ford...lately?" is the longest-running incarnation of this plea. "We know that in the past our cars have pretty much fallen apart while driving off the lot," they're saying, "but it's all fixed now...really."</span></li><li style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family:Arial;"><b>Oldsmobile</b>: While it wasn't plagued with the same history of mechanical breakdowns as Ford, the Oldsmobile was burdened with the reputation of being an old man's car -- and the name didn't help. In an effort to make it more hip, they launched a campaign claiming, "This isn't your father's Oldsmobile," then went bankrupt a short time later.</span></li><li style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family:Arial;"><b>Microsoft</b>: Blatantly acknowledging that Vista was the biggest mistake since Windows 2000, Microsoft tried to win the hearts and minds of consumers with an incredibly transparent campaign called "The Mojave Experiment." In it, people were introduced to Vista under the name "Mojave" and, when they saw it running on high-end, perfectly-configured machines, many declared that they liked it. Real consumers, oddly enough, weren't fooled.</span></li></ul><h4 style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family:Arial;">The problem</span></h4><p style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family:Arial;">While it may seem like a good idea to be honest and admit to past failures, in real life it seldom does anything more than remind everyone about your past failures. More importantly, those coming to your brand with no previous knowledge of its past performance will learn to distrust it from your own ads. Your best bet? Improve the product from the ground up, then start advertising it on its features. Ignore the past.</span></p><p style="text-align: left;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:Arial;"><br /></span></p><hr style="text-align: left;"><p style="text-align: left;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:Arial;"><br /></span></p><p style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family:Arial;">That's it for this edition of Best Before. We'll have another in the future. If you have any suggestions for campaign concepts that really need to be taken down from the shelf, feel free to e-mail them to me. I'll give full credit.</span></p></span>Christopher Simpsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07465089990572108350noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8045818364037011299.post-8774302630662942472009-05-02T02:21:00.007-04:002009-05-14T01:46:09.479-04:00• Marketing Heroes: Michael Scataloon<em>In this semi-regular feature we celebrate those unsung heroes of the marketing world who, faced with products that seemed impossible to market, succeeded in defying the odds to create highly successful campaigns.</em><br /><hr /><img src="http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v369/Husserl/pants11.jpg" style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 209px; height: 319px;" border="0" alt="" /><h4><div style="text-align: left;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style=" ;font-family:Arial;">Marketing Hero #1:<br />Michael Scataloon</span><br /></div><span style="font-family:Arial;"><br /></span></h4><span style="font-family:Arial;"><div style="text-align: left;">Due to a malfunction in the computers that ran their cutting machines back in the early '80s, a clothing manufacturer accidentally churned out hundreds of thousands of pants with crotches that came down to the knees. Faced with the expense of discarding all this material, the owner of the company took the problem to his ad agency, Dayton, Darton, Burnsten and O'Reilly (DDBO) to see if they could work some magic. Michael Scataloon was a lowly intern at the time, but he was positive he could sell the damaged inventory if given a chance. Since DDBO had nothing to lose, they agreed to put him in charge.<br /></div></span><span style="font-family:Arial;"></span><div style="text-align: left;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:Arial;"><br /></span></div><div><div style="text-align: left;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style=" ;font-family:Arial;">"I knew traditional approaches weren't going to work," Scataloon said in a recent interview with <em>New Pathways in Marketing</em>, "so I set out to explore some nontraditional approaches. We didn't have the formal concept of 'viral' campaigns back then, but essentially that's what I was after. I just needed to define the right demographic. It had to be a demographic with absolutely no fashion sense. Naturally I decided on the rap culture. I figured any group that could base a musical culture around the absence of music, while dressing themselves in cartoon clothing and jewellery was the perfect prospect for our client's pants."</span><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><span style="font-family:Arial;"><div style="text-align: left;">Scataloon approached a couple of rap stars (even today he won't say who they were) and offered a substantial amount of money if they would wear the malformed apparel at some of their public appearances. They weren't eager to take him up on it, however. <br /></div></span><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><span style="font-family:Arial;"><div style="text-align: left;">"Here they were, dressed in ludicrously huge, rhinestone-studded sunglasses, gold chains that looked like they'd come from the paste-jewellery counter of a 1940s Kresges, and multi-coloured bandanas with pork-pie hats on top, and they were balking at wearing these pants. Well, I didn't blame them. I had to up the ante considerably before I finally won them over. A few concerts later, however, and suddenly the 'diaper pants' (as our client had taken to calling them), were selling by the hundreds, then thousands. At the end of two months he was sold out."<br /></div></span><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><span style="font-family:Arial;"><div style="text-align: left;">Scataloon himself was somewhat puzzled by the enormous success, having started with no real marketing philosophy. "I was just banking on the lemming-like behaviour of teens and young adults to emulate their musical heroes." In retrospect, however, he thinks the pants just happened to make a statement which appealed to the members of that particular sub-culture. <br /></div></span><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><span style="font-family:Arial;"><div style="text-align: left;">"Rappers would travel from place to place doing marathon battles with other rappers, so on the one hand they had to be mobile, and yet on the other, they had to be able to stand their ground for long periods of time. The pants said: 'When wearing me, you can travel anywhere.' But they also said: "When wearing me, you won't have to move from this spot for a week -- even to use the bathroom.'"<br /></div></span><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><span style="font-family:Arial;"><div style="text-align: left;">That the campaign was successful is indisputable. It was originally intended to last only until the damaged inventory had been sold off, but the client and the agency soon realized they had a gold-mine on their hands. There were even rumours of a movie being made about the phenomenon.<br /></div></span><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><span style="font-family:Arial;"><div style="text-align: left;">"I was approached by a Hollywood screenwriter," recalls Scataloon. "He put together a script and shopped it around, but ultimately nothing came of it. I think it was called something like, 'The Cisternhood of the Traveling Pants.'"<br /></div></span></div>Christopher Simpsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07465089990572108350noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8045818364037011299.post-61551749901824675902009-04-30T12:57:00.013-04:002009-05-14T01:46:18.902-04:00• Another example of how social marketing can damage brands<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v369/Husserl/istockphoto_2813071_the_outcast-1.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 200px; height: 150px;" src="http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v369/Husserl/istockphoto_2813071_the_outcast-1.jpg" border="0" alt="" /></a><br /><p><span class="Apple-style-span" style=" ;font-family:Arial;">I should be upfront and admit that I don't like Oprah. I can't say why, exactly. Maybe it's her ostentatious displays of generosity. Maybe it's her insistence that everyone show exactly the same upbeat attitude she purports to have. Maybe it's the feeling that her conversion from shock-show host to moral leader of the multitudes and maven of modern literature was predicated on sagging ratings. Maybe it's just that I distrust anyone who can sway the feelings and opinions of millions of people.</span></p><p><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:Arial;"><br /></span></p><p><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:Arial;"><br /></span></p><p><span class="Apple-style-span" style=" ;font-family:Arial;">Whatever the reason, it certainly isn't because I feel she has somehow personally betrayed me.</span></p><p><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:Arial;"><br /></span></p><p><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:Arial;"><br /></span></p><p><span class="Apple-style-span" style=" ;font-family:Arial;">Unfortunately, the same cannot be said of her social network followers.</span><br /></p><p><span class="Apple-style-span" style=" font-style: italic;font-family:Arial;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family:Arial;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">The Silicon Valley Insider</span> reports that although she's only been Tweeting for a shot period of time, and boasts one of the largest followings, "she is already bored" with the experience. "In total, she's sent 20 tweets in 11 days. Almost half are from April 17, Oprah's first day on Twitter, when Ashton Kutcher and Twitter CEO Evan Williams appeared on her show ."<a name="Return1"></a><sup><a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=8045818364037011299&postID=6155174990182467590#Footnote1">1</a></sup></span></p><p><span class="Apple-style-span" style=" ;font-family:Arial;font-size:13px;"><br /></span></p><p><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:Arial;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family:Arial;">This defection does not sit well with some. "The reason why Oprah lost on Twitter is because of her lack of commitment to engage her community," says Craig Daitch of <i>Advertising Age</i>.<a name="Return2"></a><sup><a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=8045818364037011299&postID=6155174990182467590#Footnote2">2</a></sup> "She could give away a G6, sell subscriptions to her magazine and bring huge A-Listers to her show every day -- but being asked to participate in conversation is much different than being asked to spark conversation."</span></p><p><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:Arial;"><br /></span></p><p><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:Arial;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family:Arial;">In other words, while these people once loved Oprah because she gives away millions of dollars for social programs, supports worthy causes, provides a role model for women, and encourages literacy, now they are turning against her because she's not spending enough time keeping them updated on her latest meal. </span></p><p><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:Arial;"><br /></span></p><p><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:Arial;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family:Arial;">Of course, this backlash is quite mild and unlikely to affect her overall status as the Woman God Sent to Straighten out the World. But in a nutshell, it illustrates one of the most serious problems posed by social network marketing: When your product or service becomes a member of a community, its value becomes dependent upon its participation within that community. As part of the "consumer conversation," so beloved of modern marketers, what it says counts for much more than what it actually does.</span></p><p><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:Arial;"><br /></span></p><p><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:Arial;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family:Arial;">It no longer matters how well your product cleans dishes, kills germs, improves your looks or handles on the road, once it's part of the great communal conversation the only thing that counts is how well it can talk. While consumers of old (read, 20 years ago) might have become annoyed if their pain reliever didn't work, modern consumers are ready to become personally insulted at a misguided, but transient commercial on TV: as Motrin found out to their chagrin.<a name="Return3"></a> <sup><a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=8045818364037011299&postID=6155174990182467590#Footnote3">3</a></sup> The Motrin ad, which incautiously spoke about Moms wearing babies in slings as a fashion accessory, was released as a viral campaign, and the resultant viral backlash turned into a digital pandemic. Those who would otherwise never have seen the offending video were told about it (with links) by their community members and encouraged to take part in the outcry. In trying to join the online community, the company found itself outcast, reviled, and with a large scarlet letter sewn on its chest.</span></p><p><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:Arial;"><br /></span></p><p><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:Arial;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family:Arial;">Of course, if it hadn't taken its campaign online, those who felt the need to be offended would still have been able to blog and Twitter about it, and this kind of adverse publicity can attain a critical mass on occasion. In general, however, the isolated nature of these outlets keeps nuisance complaints limited and relatively harmless. But when the company voluntarily either creates or joins a social network, it provides a central pavilion in which every crackpot with an axe to grind can bring his soapbox and be heard. Furthermore, because of the direct connection between the platform and the company, those who gather within it have a natural expectancy that they should be heard and responded to.</span></p><p><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:Arial;"><br /></span></p><p><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:Arial;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family:Arial;">Businesses have always had the responsibility to deal with customer complaints and listen to unsolicited suggestions. That's how companies grow. But the social marketing sphere is an echo chamber which so magnifies every casual and meaningless comment that the resultant din can threaten the company's very foundations -- like a digital version of Joshua's trumpeters bringing down the walls of Jerico.</span></p><p><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:Arial;"><br /></span></p><p><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:Arial;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family:Arial;">Whatever benefits there may be in marketing through social media, and to date the success stories are still vastly outnumbered by the failures, when things go wrong, they do so in a spectacular fashion. </span></p><p><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:Arial;"><br /></span></p><p><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:Arial;"><br /></span></p><p><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:Arial;">I've said it before, but it bears repeating: Social network marketing is like sending a company salesman into a Friday-night frat party, and it's not exactly surprising if he gets stripped to his underwear, hung upside down, and covered in beer.</span></p><hr /><p><a name="Footnote1"></a>1. Fromm, Dan (2009, April 28).<a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/oprah-already-bored-with-twitter-2009-4">Oprah already bored with Twitter</a>. <i>Silicon Alley Insider</i>, Retrieved April 30, 2009. [<a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=8045818364037011299&postID=6155174990182467590#Return1">Return to text</a>]</p><p><br /></p><p><a name="Footnote2"></a>2. Daitch, C. (2009, April 28).<a href="http://adage.com/digitalnext/post.php?article_id=136335">@Oprah already bored with Twitter? So what?</a>. Siilicon Alley Insider, Retrieved April 30, 2009. [<a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=8045818364037011299&postID=6155174990182467590#Return2">Return to text</a>]</p><p><br /></p><p><a name="Footnote3"></a>3. Havenstein, H. (2008, Nov. 18). Motrin maker feels pain from social media backlash. <i>TechWorld</i>, Retrieved April 30, 2009. [<a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=8045818364037011299&postID=6155174990182467590#Return3">Return to text</a>]</p>Christopher Simpsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07465089990572108350noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8045818364037011299.post-57781306120866647022009-04-28T13:50:00.009-04:002009-05-14T01:46:28.004-04:00• Before and After. Before and After. See how that goes?<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v369/Husserl/bae03.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 319px; height: 179px;" src="http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v369/Husserl/bae03.jpg" border="0" alt="" /></a><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:arial;"><div style="text-align: left;">The old "before and after" technique has been around for a long time. Take a look at this advertising card from a century or so back. See the left-hand panel which shows how much trouble the mother has as she tries to give her children the dreaded "old style of medicine": castor oil? Now see the right-hand panel which shows them lining up for the "new style of medicine": Hamburg Figs? Hell, even the dog is trying to get into the act. <br /></div></span><div style="text-align: left;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:arial;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:arial;">There's something about this particular advertising ploy that is timeless. It appeals to our need to see the results of a product. "Here is the way your life used to be," it tells us, "but now look at how it <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">could </span>be."</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:arial;"><br /></span></div><img src="http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v369/Husserl/beforeandafterlips.jpg" style="text-align: left;float: left; margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 10px; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: 0px; cursor: pointer; width: 319px; height: 268px; " border="0" alt="" /><div style="text-align: left;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:arial;">Generations have grown up seeing the "before and after" of cosmetics, cleaners, diet aids, vitamin supplements, hair tonics, and underarm deodorants. </span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:arial;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:arial;">There are, of course, variations. There's the product comparison, for instance: "their" product versus "our" product. And then there's the contrast between those who don't use our product and those who do.</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:arial;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:arial;">But all of them share the same basic idea of "before and after." </span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:arial;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:arial;">Now with that in mind, what is wrong with this "before and after" picture?</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:arial;"><br /></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:arial;"><img src="http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v369/Husserl/beforeAfter_4.jpg" style="text-align: left;display: block; margin-top: 0px; margin-right: auto; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: auto; cursor: pointer; width: 320px; height: 277px; " border="0" alt="" /></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:arial;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:arial;">Right! It's an "after and before" picture. Not a "before and after." </span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:arial;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:arial;">And there seem to be a lot more of them than there used to be.</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:arial;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:arial;">Now admittedly, it only takes a moment to figure out which is the "before" and which is the "after." And perhaps that's fine for print ads (no, it isn't, but we'll let that pass), however, when you're dealing with TV, in which the shot may only last for a few seconds, it can be downright confusing.</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:arial;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:arial;">One of the worst offenders I've been seeing is a television commercial for a pickup truck (I don't remember which one, and while I could look it up or wait until I saw it again, I figure it's not my job to dig out the name of a product from an ad). The main selling point for this truck is its smooth ride, which they illustrate in a rather clever way: a split screen showing the road from inside the cab of two trucks -- the featured truck and a competitor. </span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:arial;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:arial;">The problem is, the shaky, jittery scene is on the right while the smooth, steady scene is on the left. To the viewer, it looks as though the advertised product (which, by tradition, is always on the right) bounces like a wooden cart plummeting down the side of a gravel quarry. </span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:arial;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:arial;">Does that matter? Well, it took me a couple of viewings to realise what the point of the shot was. I have to imagine that other people faced the same bewilderment when they first saw it.</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:arial;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:arial;">There are conventions in advertising that have been worked out over the past 100 years. It doesn't do anyone any good to circumvent them (unless, of course, you know exactly what you're doing).</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:arial;">For instance: </span></div><div><ul><li style="text-align: left;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style=" ;font-family:arial;">when the selling point of your product is visual, show the product, don't talk about it or show people's faces.</span><br /></li><li style="text-align: left;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:arial;">when your product is cheaper than others, show the price.</span></li><li style="text-align: left;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:arial;">when your product has the potential to appeal to a large number of people, don't put your ads on media used by a small demographic</span></li></ul><div style="text-align: left;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:arial;">And of course: <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic; ">Before</span> goes on the left! <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic; ">After</span> goes on the right!</span></div></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:arial;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: center;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:arial;"><br /></span></div>Christopher Simpsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07465089990572108350noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8045818364037011299.post-39030154189957770482009-04-22T11:00:00.023-04:002009-05-14T01:46:38.418-04:00• New Directions Advertising Symposium summary<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">Earlier this month one of the most important events in social network marketing took place when the New Advertising Directions Symposium was held in Chicago. Here, in its entirety, is the story from <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">The New Marketing</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"> </span>magazine.</span><br /><hr /><br /><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">The New Marketing</span> Magazine<br />Chicago, April 1, 2009<br /><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: bold;">It takes NADS to promote the new marketing</span><div><br /><table border="1" cellpadding="8" cellspacing="5" align="left" width="120" frame="void"><tbody><tr><td><a href="http://smg.photobucket.com/albums/v369/Husserl/?action=view&current=massi_rossi_massirossi_947078_o.jpg" target="_blank"><img src="http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v369/Husserl/massi_rossi_massirossi_947078_o.jpg" border="0" alt="Photobucket" /></a><br /><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:x-small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">Walter "The Buzz" Vaine, president, NADS</span><br /></span></td></tr></tbody></table>This past Wednesday saw the first annual conference sponsored by the New Advertising Directions Symposium. Aimed at exploring the expanding opportunities offered by the new media, the symposium is in direct opposition to the assumptions of traditional advertising methodologies.<p></p><p>This discrepancy between the new and old generations was apparent from the moment Walter (The Buzz) Vaine, president of NADS, strode out to greet the crowd, none of whom appeared to be over 35.<br /></p><p><br />“The Old Guard were all about ‘effectiveness’ and ‘sales,’” said Vaine. “We now know that our job goes far beyond these primitive goals, reaching out to the very consciousness of the consumer. No longer do we measure our results in the number of widgets, whatnots, or whatevers that our campaigns sell; instead we look for the ‘conversation,’ the ‘buzz,’ and the ‘insight.’ It is our job to e-enable real-time communities and matrix interactive experiences.<br /></p><p><br />"Or to put it another way, as the motto of the New Advertising Directions Symposium says: ‘The old school had guts, but we’ve got NADS!’”<br /></p><p><br />One of the bold new concepts of the New Marketing is the “Brand Footprint.”<br /></p><p><br />“The brand is everything,” said Vaine. “Rid yourselves of the obsolete idea that consumers are interested in the product. They’re not; they’re interested in the brand, as our research has repeatedly proven. Every time we ask them brand-related questions, whether it be in focus groups, electronic surveys, or on-site questionnaires, consumers invariably respond with brand-related answers. It is the brand, not the product, that we want strutting through their consciousness — and the bigger the footprint it leaves behind, the better.”<br /></p><p><br />The Brand Footprint has become one of the fastest-growing ideas in the marketing industry. While conventional advertising concentrates on making products stand out by drawing attention to their features, the Brand Footprint concentrates on promoting the brand itself, often to the exclusion of the actual product.<br /></p><p><br />“In the Brand Footprint,” Vaine explained, “information about a specific product represents, at the most, the little toe, whereas the ‘sole,’ if you will, consists of the branding. And one of the key points of branding is to keep the brand fresh. Clients have a tendency to become comfortable with a particular name, for example. You need to shake them out of it. Consider the great campaign presently being done changing the name of Electrosol to — well, I can’t remember right now. But <i>that’s</i> a campaign that is doing its ad agency proud.”<br /></p><p><br />Another approach much valued by the New Marketers is Social Marketing, which employs various online social networks such as Facebook and Twitter.<br /></p><p><br />“Whenever you have people talking,” Vaine told his listeners, “you have the chance to walk through their conversations and leave your footprints behind. People join these sites to socialize, but as we can tell by the meandering nature of their conversations, they’re in desperate need of something interesting to talk about. That’s where we come in.”<br /></p><p><br />The three-day conference featured a host of speakers lecturing on a variety of New Market topics. These included William Leakey on, “Making Them Guess: Engaging Consumers Through Ambiguity”; Jill Whedon, who spoke on “Conversing with the Twits: The Strength of Social Marketing”; and Richard Baylee who drew the most enthusiastic response with his seminar, “The ROI is Dead, Long Live the Conversation,” in which he extolled the “democratization of the marketing process.”<br /></p><p><br />The symposium, as befitted the subject matter, was promoted through social marketing. The Facebook page, “Sign up now for NADS,” had 105,492 friends, and “NADSinApril” on Twitter had 78,345 followers. As a result of this promotion, the number of attendees could barely squeeze into the symposium’s meeting place in the basement of St. Mary’s Baptist Church, which only has seating for 45 people.<br /></p><p><br />When asked if we could expect to see another symposium in the future, Vaine said, “With a social-networking promotional success like this, I think you can count on it.”</p></div>Christopher Simpsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07465089990572108350noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8045818364037011299.post-69983615003202200542009-04-20T01:04:00.007-04:002009-04-22T12:51:33.013-04:00Social Marketing: Kmart goes to the Twits<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v369/Husserl/kmart.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 159px; height: 124px;" src="http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v369/Husserl/kmart.jpg" border="0" alt="" /></a><br /><div>As promised, today we're looking at one of social marketing's success stories.</div><div><br /></div><div>At the start of the 2008 Christmas season, <a href="http://izea.com/">Izea </a>decided to try their hand at social marketing for Kmart. Their goals were: awareness, brand perception, education, traffic, and insight.</div><div><br /></div><div>Right at the start you should be seeing a couple of red flags. First of all, what keeps Kmart alive? Is it public awareness of their stores? Is it an educated consumer? And just what the hell does "insight" mean?</div><div><br /></div><div>No, what keeps Kmart alive is the volume of their sales. And "sales," you may note, is not one of the goals of this campaign. That's probably a good thing; makes it much harder to declare the campaign a failure.</div><div><br /></div><div>What Izea did was to take six "influential bloggers, each of whom received a $500 Kmart gift card along with another $500 gift card which they could give away to a selected reader. Each of these bloggers (with full disclosure on the "sponsored nature of the post") then had to write a blog post about "their shopping experience" with their gift card, and host a contest to give away the second gift card. To enter the contest, their readers were told to go on a "virtual shopping spree" at the Kmart.com website, then come back and list what they would buy if they won the gift certificate. They could enter a second time by means of a "specified Tweet on Twitter," thereby ensuring "that news of the contest appeared in the timelines of over 2.5 million direct followers." Meanwhile, over on SocialSpark, which connects bloggers with blog marketers, bloggers were "given the paid opportunity to run ads on their blogs promoting any one of the six primary bloggers in the campaign."</div><div><br /></div><div>So then, you have six primary bloggers along with their readers, community bloggers on SocialSpark being paid to send traffic to these bloogers, and news of the contest going out to 2.5 million Twitterers ( Tweets? Twits?).</div><div><br /></div><div>What was the result?</div><div><br /></div><div>"By the time the contest period ended," says <a href="http://www.wendypiersall.com/influencer-marketing-case-study-kmart-holiday-hoopla-contest/">Wendy Piersall</a>, one of the six primary bloggers, "there were 3,481 comments left across the 6 blog posts, and over 3200 Twittered contest entries. Most impressively, Kmart (green line indicator) increased their Social Media Index as measured by <a href="http://vitrue.com/">Vitrue </a>a whopping 59%, outpacing parent company Sears and completely overtaking JC Penney."</div><div><br /></div><div>Have you got that? 3,481 comments and 3,200 Tweets. Did any of these people buy anything at Kmart? Well, we suppose the commenters who won the extra gift cards probably did. and maybe a few more people went to the company web site -- possibly as many as 6,000 or so, although we have to remember that the 3,200 Twits didn't go to the site, they merely reposted a Twit, or some such thing. Still. They may have gone. Can't prove they didn't.</div><div><br /></div><div>And then we have to remember the Vitrue figures showing Kmart's Social Media Index was 59%, which basically means that those people who use social media stood a decent chance of being exposed to the campaign. </div><div><br /></div><div>As far as meeting its goals went, the campaign was a success. Not sure about the "insight" section, but since we still don't know what it means -- what the hell, we'll consider that a success too.</div><div><br /></div><div>Did they sell a single item more than they would have without the campaign? I don't know. Neither do they. When it comes to social network marketing, success comes in being able to do it -- not whether it actually boosts sales. I would presume they did. It's most likely that some of those 6,000 or so people may have gone to Kmart and picked up something. But let's keep this in perspective: that's a possible fraction of 6,000 people for a company that has a yearly sales figure in the tens of billions of dollars. If each of the 6,000 people went to Kmart and bought $100 worth of merchandise, that would represent roughly three and a half <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">one hundredths of one percent</span> of their revenue. (To be precise, it would be 0.003529411764705882% -- but let's not get picky.)</div><div><br /></div><div>The upside, of course, is that these social marketing experiments don't cost much -- but neither are they as inexpensive as their proponents would like us to believe, and they still take up time and resources.</div><div><br /></div><div>Does this mean that social marketing is without value? No, merely that whatever value it may have remains still largely unproven by any measurement that doesn't include "insight" or "brand identification." Furthermore, for smaller companies, especially entrepreneurial operations, social marketing can prove remarkably effective (but that's a topic for another post).</div><div><br /></div><div>The real point here is simply this: social network marketing is a vast, unproven, and problematic field. Don't get rushed into forgoing real advertising in favour of pie-in-the-sky schemes.</div><div><br /></div>Christopher Simpsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07465089990572108350noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8045818364037011299.post-4458454873160174092009-04-18T12:10:00.010-04:002009-04-19T12:09:46.749-04:00Sure, advertising works - but what about social network marketing?<div>Let's get one thing straight: virtually <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">all</span> commercials work -- to some extent or another. Putting a picture of a product in front of a gazillion people every day of the week is going to raise awareness of the product and result in some added sales. </div><div><br /></div><div>Every commercial works...whether you hate it or love it. There isn't a commercial made that somebody doesn't claim is "absolutely hillarious," even as millions of others condemn it as "the most fucked up piece of shit" they've ever seen.</div><div><br /></div><div>Okay, a few ads don't work, the most notable being public service ads meant to keep kids from smoking, drinking or doing drugs. So effective, in fact, are some of these PSAs at doing exactly the opposite of what they're supposed to do that Philip Morris has been accused of sponsoring an <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/27/opinion/27mon1.html?ex=1322283600&en=064bce790c3c2d27&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss">anti-smoking campaign</a> for the express purpose of increasing sales of its product. It may be true, but it's hard to know why that particular campaign was picked on when all the others seem to be equally guilty in their own areas. Were the <a href="http://www.slate.com/id/2148999/">notroiously ineffective anti-pot</a> ads secretly paid for by the Association of American Gro-ops?</div><div><br /></div><div>So why did these ads fail in their stated intent? Because they were trying to do the impossible: they were publicising the very products they were discouraging. Even the ancients knew how well something like that would work. "Hey Adam, here's a tree with the fruit of knowledge. I'm just showing this to you so you won't eat from it." "Happy birthday, Pandora. I've given you a box, but whatever you do, don't open it."</div><div><br /></div><div><table width="25%" align="left"><tbody><tr><td><img src="http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v369/Husserl/cloaca-machines-2222_iOScM_1333.jpg" border="0" alt="Photobucket" /><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:arial;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:x-small;">Vacuum packed shit to seal in fresheness</span></span></span><br /></td></tr></tbody></table><br />All commercials work. If you put up ads for feces you would undoubtedly find buyers. Oh, wait...installation artist Wim Delvoye has already done this with his <a href="http://www.impactlab.com/2008/09/15/cloaca-the-poo-machine/">Cloaca machine</a>, a complex system of containers which replicates an animal's digestive track complete with real poo coming out the other end. The poo is then vaccuum packed and sold.</div><br /><div>Anyway, the point is this: in the wild and wooly mix of humanity, you can always find somebody, or even several somebodies, who will buy pretty well anything...if they know about it. And they will know about it through advertising. I could create an ad selling three-year-old uncooked eggs and likely find buyers.</div><div><br /></div><div>So if you're asking, "Does the advertising I'm doing work?" the answer will be yes. No matter how bad your ads, you will undoubtedly be getting at least one more customer than you would without them.</div><div><br /></div><div>The real question, however, is whether or not the advertising justifies its ROI. I might be able to find ten buyers for my three-year-old, uncooked eggs, but if I have to advertise to 50 million people, the cost probably won't be worth it.</div><div><br /></div><div>This is obvious.</div><div><br /></div><div>At least it's obvious unless you're talking about social network marketing. Social network marketing is a brand of marketing all its own, in which the goals include anything other than actual sales.</div><div><br /></div><div>Next post we'll look at one of the more successful, and well-documented cases, Kmart's foray into the blogging and Twitter scene in 2008.</div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div>Christopher Simpsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07465089990572108350noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8045818364037011299.post-30439998117081071882009-04-12T14:17:00.009-04:002009-04-19T11:50:04.260-04:00V8 Juice Ads & Canadian Unity<span class="Apple-style-span" style=" ;font-family:'Times New Roman';"><div style="border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 3px; padding-right: 3px; padding-bottom: 3px; padding-left: 3px; width: auto; font: normal normal normal 100%/normal Georgia, serif; text-align: left; "><div align="left"><em><span style="color:#996633;">This is a reprint from a satirical piece I did 15 years ago (can that really be right?). During the 1994 National Unity debate, Lucien Bouchard made headlines when he predicted Quebec's separation would lead to the swift fall of English Canada to American invasion.<br /><br />And then these odd, French-only V8 posters mysteriously began to appear in downtown Toronto.</span></em><br /><br /></div><div align="left"><hr /></div><div align="right"><br /><span style="font-size:78%;"><em>Reprinted from Ad Nauseam, June 14, 1994</em></span></div><br /><img src="http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v369/Husserl/LucienBouchard.jpg" style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 111px; height: 160px;" border="0" alt="" />Anglophone Canadians trembled recently when Lucien Bouchard revealed a secret American plan to annex Western Canada in the wake of Quebec separation. And while the Bloc Quebecois Leader later denied making such statements (by arguing "I would be crazy. Am I crazy? Am I crazy? Do I look crazy?"), his skilled rhetoric came too late to quell Anglo anxieties.<br /><br />I only bring this up because in the past week I've seen not one, but three French-only V8 advertisements in the Wellesley/Yonge/Church streets area: an obvious bid to placate French-speaking vegetable juice drinkers.</div><div style="border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 3px; padding-right: 3px; padding-bottom: 3px; padding-left: 3px; width: auto; font: normal normal normal 100%/normal Georgia, serif; text-align: left; ">The posters, which hang outside two convenience stores, show people drinking a V8. Underneath is the phrase "V8 est a notre gout," which I believe means "V8 prevents gout" — although I am unable to confirm this as my translator isn't talking to me until she determines whether or not Bouchard is, in fact, crazy.<br /><br />Nevertheless, such a translation makes sense as a ploy to hold onto Quebec. Rich French cooking has been known to cause gout; V8 prevents gout. Subtextually, what the ads are saying is that no matter what Quebec wishes to dish up, we'll eat it.</div><div style="border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 3px; padding-right: 3px; padding-bottom: 3px; padding-left: 3px; width: auto; font: normal normal normal 100%/normal Georgia, serif; text-align: left; ">At the top of the ad is the word "Sante!" which is probably French for "Sanity." What clearer message could we send to Quebec as a plea for Canadian unity? Protesters will storm Ottawa chanting: "My Canada includes Sanity!" and "V8 prevents gout!"<br /><br />It's this kind of unambiguous sloganism that has worked so well in the past to bring about thoughtful and nuanced political decisions.<br /><br />Nor should we, as do some, take lightly the threat of separation. While many commentators have pointed out various problems that could arise should Quebec choose independence, M. Bouchard has, in fact, openly stated what the rest of us have hardly dared think: that with Quebec gone there would be nothing to prevent an American invasion. Surely even the most politically naive have known the only reason Canada has not already been annexed by the States is because they have no wish to be saddled with the problem of Quebec nationalists.<br /><br />And so it is that we salute V8's selfless effort to do its part in keeping Canada together. I'd like to end with one of those rousing French slogans, but I just called my translator and she still hasn't determined Bouchard's mental stability.<br /><br />Some mysteries may never be solved.</div></span>Christopher Simpsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07465089990572108350noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8045818364037011299.post-83606784663493464442009-04-03T12:01:00.006-04:002009-04-19T11:48:58.947-04:00Oh, so now they're turning to BoomersOnce you've dropped them into a few insulting ads for adult diapers, life insurance, and <span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_0">Viagra</span>, when it comes to marketing, the only thing Baby Boomers are good for is comic foil in commercials aimed at the <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">real</span> market: the under 30s.<div><br /></div><div>A lot of us have complained about this (<a href="http://advertisingtobabyboomers.blogspot.com/">Chuck <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_1">Nyren</span>,</a> <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"><a href="http://home.earthlink.net/~cdnyren/bookreviews.htm">Advertising to Baby Boomers,</a></span> being perhaps the loudest and most articulate voice), and more than a quarter of us are outright insulted by the commercials aimed at us (according to a study by <a href="http://www.xak.com/main/newsshow.asp?id=65180"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_2">Focalyst</span>, </a>a joint venture between the <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_3">WPP</span> advertising group and the American Association of Retired People). The same study also confirms what many other studies before and since have tried to make apparent: that the over-50 market controls three-quarters of the country's financial assets and have more than $2 trillion in spending money.</div><div><br /></div><div>Despite this, the Mad Men are convinced their fortunes lie in the three-minute-long attention spans of a youth market in which brand loyalty changes faster than the songs on their <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_4">iPods</span>. </div><div><br /></div><div>Until now, that is. It seems that with the sudden economic meltdown, at least a few advertisers are discovering what anyone not fully immersed in all the <span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_5">latest</span> social-marketing principles could have told them years ago: the Boomers have money and may be willing to spend it -- if approached in the right way.</div><div><br /></div><div><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_6">NeuroFocus</span> is a consumer research group which measures subjects' responses to various advertising <span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_7">stimuli</span> by means of <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_8">EEGs</span>, pixel-level-eye-tracking equipment, and galvanic skin response technology. In a recent study, aimed at helping financial institutions find the best ways to win back the <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_9">public's</span> trust, they made several observations which, when looked at objectively, shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone not already brainwashed by the latest youth-marketing <span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_10">propaganda</span>. </div><div><br /></div><div>In <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"><a href="http://www.neurofocus.com/pdfs/MoneyMeltdownsMindsandMilliseconds.pdf">Money Meltdown, Minds, and Milliseconds</a></span>, the white paper describing the results of their experiments, <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_11">NeuroFocus</span> highlights several key areas, many of which emphasise the advantages of advertising to an older market.</div><div><br /></div><div>The most obvious of these was the discovery that "age trumps beauty." When shown advertising which replaced young spokespersons with those over 40, subjects showed greater trust. In a similar vein, consumers responded better to people who had some expertise in the field over those who merely had some form of celebrity. </div><div><br /></div><div>Closely connected to these findings was the discovery that subjects responded far better to "clutter free, humanized" websites, and that good navigation scored higher than the number of widgets, <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_12">wadgets</span>, or <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_13">whatnots</span> incorporated. Even in the social marketing area, the results indicated that an adult orientation beat out an adolescent one. YouTube videos "emphasizing <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_14">CEOs</span>, employee comments, information, and advice scored better than many other interactive mechanisms." Furthermore, employee blogs rated high despite any "preconceived notions about it being planned and generated." </div><div><br /></div><div>The conclusions are clear. When you want the consumer to trust you, start aiming your message at the Boomers. Forget the social-marketing <span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_15">geegaws</span>, don't clutter the site with every conceivable feature the 18-year-<span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_16">olds</span> in your IT department can come up with, and create videos that address the issues rather than entertain. </div><div><br /></div><div>If nothing else good comes from the recent economic crisis, at least we have the faint hope that advertising can become more adult.</div>Christopher Simpsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07465089990572108350noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8045818364037011299.post-24368302020707106992009-03-26T11:04:00.004-04:002009-04-19T11:48:45.349-04:00CTRs: The "Car Through Rate"<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi2j7PS9CltcVlHABG0HNwq_RUrY1cjP_XeEh_3JpO2ATWt6n7fBFHh5C2ftkHXD-XoiDvlJXvoAOZiiTOVh6lvSfl7qC1RXnEiiXCU16ZpFvHeTB2_KhzJezhHw4VeoDlygdcIfgiaB7EW/s1600-h/Burma-Shave-Posters.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 350px; height: 238px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi2j7PS9CltcVlHABG0HNwq_RUrY1cjP_XeEh_3JpO2ATWt6n7fBFHh5C2ftkHXD-XoiDvlJXvoAOZiiTOVh6lvSfl7qC1RXnEiiXCU16ZpFvHeTB2_KhzJezhHw4VeoDlygdcIfgiaB7EW/s400/Burma-Shave-Posters.jpg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5317513526438822098" /></a><br /><div>Following WWII, the National Highway Act was put into effect and 40,000 miles of modern superhighways were created. While useful for the fast-growing car culture, it spelled the end for intimate, road-side ads like those made famous by Burma Shave. To adapt, advertisers created the billboard. </div><div><br /></div><div>In other words, the (non-information) superhighway occasioned a brand new advertising medium.<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(255, 255, 255); line-height: 19px; font-family:'Helvetica Neue';font-size:13px;"></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(255, 255, 255); line-height: 19px; font-family:'Helvetica Neue';font-size:13px;">vertising medium.</span></div><div>Now imagine if they had pitched the idea to their clients by stressing that since the target audience was already in their cars, it would now be possible to measure the success of the new medium by counting the cars that passed a billboard and then turned off at the next exit to purchase the advertised product. <br /></div><div><br /></div><div>They would have called this the “Car Through Rate,” or CTR. </div><div><br /></div><div>It’s fortunate that such a “benefit” was never put forward because the expected behaviour, of course, would never have materialized. Clients would have judged the worth of billboards solely by the pitiful CTRs and costs would plunge. But while the CTR may not have been successful, the signs would still have performed the function of advertising -- putting images and copy in front of the consumer. This, coupled with the absurdly small cost, would provide incentive for an increase in the number of billboards erected, mostly by small-time business owners who knew little about advertising.</div><div><br /></div><div>The result would be a plethora of ads whose innate effectiveness would be diminished both by their irritating and amateurish qualities as well as their sheer numbers.</div><div><br /></div><div>Had Internet advertising been recognised from the beginning as no more, and certainly no less, effective than ads found in the pages of any other publication, the cost would have better reflected their worth. This, in turn, would have discouraged the explosion of cheap and poorly-conceived ads while attracting high-quality ads created by professional agencies.</div><div><br /></div><div>There are differences, of course, between online ads and those appearing in physical publications, the most important, perhaps, being the restriction of real estate. But if small publications like TV Guide and Readers Digest could command high rates for their ads, then surely websites with equivalent readerships could have done the same. And as the size of screens increases, the real estate problem becomes far less of a problem.</div><div><br /></div><div>The problem with Internet ads has never been that they don’t command people’s attention -- that’s a problem faced by all ads. A well-designed ad placed in front of 50,000 readers of an online magazine has exactly the same power as the same ad placed in front of 50,000 readers of a paper magazine. The problem is, when they didn’t perform miracles we began giving the online ads away -- and then complained that they weren’t brining in enough money.</div><div><br /></div>Christopher Simpsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07465089990572108350noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8045818364037011299.post-49793687876912163592009-03-19T19:29:00.009-04:002009-04-19T11:48:22.318-04:00Student Presidential Campaign Shows Professional Ineptness<div>It’s election time on campus. While nobody is quite sure what student presidents actually do, a number of candidates are still eager to reach out to their fellow students and shamelessly beg for the opportunity to do it. On its own, of course, this holds no interest for me. What caught my attention was how many of the candidates, without any training in advertising, have instinctively employed tried-and-true advertising techniques. </div><div><br /></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: bold;">If It Worked for Him…</span></div><div><br /></div><div>Most common are those ads whose creativity comes from plagiarising previously successful campaigns. This year, of course, the primary source is Barack Obama, although use of his slogans appears to be limited to students who can claim some degree of ethnicity. The most notable of these are two black students, one of whom promises “Yes, we will,” while another, whose posters feature an image of his face on a coin, asks, “Want change? I’ve got some.” Meanwhile, a Greek student employs the “change” motive in a number of posters such as “Change our student government,” and “change our rights” (one of these rights being a place to relax and even sleep -- a pointless promise since they already have the lectures for that).</div><div><br /></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: bold;">I Tell You Three Times</span></div><div><br /></div><div>The next most-common advertising method is the simple proclamation: “I am the best.” This is the fall-back position for several of the candidates, although like the real-world counterpart ads, they neglect to provide us with any particular reason for believing in their superiority. “You want the best, vote for ____,” reads a typical sample, or to be honest, pretty well all of them. While “I’m the best” may be an honourable tradition, it’s boringly limited.</div><div><br /></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: bold;">The Concept Ad</span></div><div><br /></div><div>One candidate has embraced the concept ads popular among agencies promoting high-end purchases, such as luxury cars, perfume, and wrist watches. These generally consist of an artsy photo taking up most of the ad space, coupled with vague copy that seems to say something, but actually doesn't. In this case, a close-up of part of the candidate’s face fills half the poster while the copy asks various life-style questions such as, “Do you want more empowerment?” </div><div><br /></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: bold;">The Snake Oil Cure </span></div><div><br /></div><div>One of the great drawing powers of the snake oil salesmen was their promise to cure every problem facing humanity. One candidate in particular has embraced this style with gusto. Among her many promises are: a student study space (which they already have), a campus radio station (which is financially impossible), and a student-owned book store (which is downright scary). </div><div><br /></div><div>Now I’m not faulting the students for their lack of creativity in their campaigns. What disturbs me is that, with only a few minor changes. they are virtually indistinguishable from the kind of advertising that clutters up so much of our media, both in print and online. </div><div><br /></div><div>When amateur ads by semi-literate students appear so similar to professional ads by established agencies, it may signal that we’ve got a problem in the industry. </div><div><br /></div>Christopher Simpsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07465089990572108350noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8045818364037011299.post-67181843968218468902009-03-18T18:39:00.003-04:002009-04-19T11:47:55.362-04:00A&W Campaign Increasingly Disappointing<div>I’m disappointed in A&W. For several decades they’ve been searching for an effective advertising strategy with limited results. Sometimes they attempted to appeal to the youth of the moment, such as their embarrassing Root Bear of the ‘70s, and sometimes they’ve drawn upon the nostalgia from their history as one of the earliest drive-in restaurants. </div><div><br /></div><div>A couple of years ago, however, they hit upon a new approach. An attractive, mature couple, possibly in their early 40s, is walking down the street after what has obviously been a first date at a high-end restaurant. As they walk, they discuss, in a casual, witty fashion, the overly-pretentious and tiny portions of food they’ve just been served. When it comes time to go their separate ways, the woman suggests they get something to eat. “But we’ve just eaten,” says the man. “No we haven’t,” she responds. Of course, they end up at an A&W with the “real food” of a hamburger and fries. “Will you be having desert with that?” asks the franchise owner. “This <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">is </span>desert,” he’s told.</div><div><br /></div><div>It’s warm, intelligent, and appealing. It positions A&W as a piece of nostalgia with modern relevance. It was aimed at adults, and it portrayed a real, adult situation. </div><div><br /></div><div>Recently, however, the agency behind the ads appears to have been seduced by the siren call of adolescent humour. In a spot called "The Trainee," to introduce their sirloin Uncle Burger, the franchise owner calls his staff together only to discover that the sample burger (improbably kept undercover on a silver platter) has disappeared. He then notices that one of the young staff has a spot of sauce on his shirt and is ecstatically mumbling about “sirloin.” In a follow-up spot, "Lose Yourself," the father of four children is so enraptured with his Uncle Burger that he fails to understand what his wife is saying when she suggests they try for a girl. Mistaking his moans of pleasure for agreement, the mother generously tells him he can choose the name. He mutters “sirloin,” which she ponders for a moment, believing this to be his choice. “For a girl?” she says, dubiously.</div><div><br /></div><div>From ads aimed at adults, they’ve become ads aimed at young teenagers’ concepts of adults. The product goes from being a believable alternative to fancy, but unsatisfying dining, to food that is so orgasmically pleasing that anyone indulging in it is incapable of carrying on a sensible conversation. </div><div><br /></div><div>It’s disappointing to see such a promising campaign turn into yet another youth-directed piece of nonsense.</div><div><br /></div>Christopher Simpsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07465089990572108350noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8045818364037011299.post-40894698852004423162009-02-25T00:49:00.001-05:002009-03-15T18:27:34.128-04:00Hiatus<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: arial;">Due to a determined effort to release my library of 5,000 books from their boxes onto shelves, along with increased teaching demands, Ad Nauseam will be on hiatus for a couple of months.</span><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: arial;">See you all by April.</span></div>Christopher Simpsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07465089990572108350noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8045818364037011299.post-37568314247969823502009-01-02T04:11:00.003-05:002009-05-02T02:37:53.734-04:00Cultural marketing threatens Keebler Elves and Tetley Tea Folk<span style="font-size:130%;"><span style="font-style: italic;font-family:times new roman;"><hr /><br />The following is a reprint of the Ad Nauseam column which appeared in the December 30, 2008 edition of the <a href="http://www.metaversemessenger.com/">Metaverse Messenger.</a></span><br /><hr />While marketing is important, we should always keep in mind its cost to culture. News shows are cluttered with spots which amount to little more than promotions of consumer goods; snack food advertisement has been credited with the increase of obesity among children; and educational institutes have find themselves engaging in various degrees of product placement in return for funds.<br /><br />But nowhere is the influence of marketing felt stronger than when the commodity being marketed is the culture itself. This can clearly be seen in the case studies of two separate cultures which, as a marketing device, turned to their own heritage.<br /><br />“Admittedly, tea has always played a large and important role in our culture,” says Earl Bergamot, one of the Tetley Tea Folk’s most prominent citizens, “but over the last few decades it has grown out of all proportion. The only things tourists are interested in these days are the tea-related items: handcrafted tea-pots, coasters, strainers — that sort of thing. Sometimes they’ll pick up a couple of the ankle bells we wear for traditional dances, but only because they’ve seen us dancing on TV.”<br /><br />Artisans who create the in-demand items find themselves doing a thriving business, and certainly no one is complaining about the much-needed infusion of foreign dollars into the economy. The downside, however, is that many of the other, and equally important, traditional art forms have gone into serious decline.<br /><br />“Our religious artefacts have all but disappeared,” mourns Bergamot. “I think there are only two artists still producing black-velvet paintings. Our heritage is suffering.”<br /><br />The second case study involves a culture forced to reinvent its history in order to disassociate itself from characteristics which may not be conducive to the marketing of its products.<br /><br />“We’re supposed to be cute, ya know?” says Shop Steward Ernest J. Keebler of the Keebler elves; but the cigar-waving figure seated across from me in the office of a large cookie factory is a far cry from his TV persona frequently shown gently encouraging his helpers.<br /><br />The Keeblerites came into their cookie heritage many centuries back. Representing the losing faction in a civil war fought over labor issues in 1345 AD, they were exiled from the North Pole and forced to start a new society further south. But while they had little in the way of resources, they refused to compromise their most precious principle. “We work, we get paid!” says Ernest, summing up the Keebler philosophy. “It’s as simple as that. We didn’t give in to the f---ing fat man in the red suit and we’re sure as hell not going to give in to anyone else!”<br /><br />Upon founding their new country in 1347, they were then faced with the challenge of finding a new line of work.<br /><br />“All we knew was, like, wooden toys, see?” says Ernest, laughing. “Then when the plague started breaking out all over Europe we figured: what the hell — let’s make cookies.” Starting from scratch was no easy task, however.<br /><br />“Of course, we didn’t know the first thing about cookies, and all our early recipes called for a lot of saw-dust.” Ernest leans forward conspiratorially. “We still make the saw-dust cookies,” he says with a smile. “We just sell ‘em to the dorks in the health food store. It’s amazing what those guys will buy!”<br /><br />But public image isn’t the only problem facing the Keeblerites. Once a year, after the filming of his popular television, the Cookie Monster beats his annual, month-long retreat to the Keebler valley.<br /><br />“Man, oh man!” groans Ernest. “When that guy hits town we all know it. And when he brings that a--hole friend of his, Barney, it takes us a full month just to fix the place up again.”<br /><br />While solutions may yet be a long way off, simply acknowledging the problem is a step in the right direction. The question is, will the cultures be around long enough to benefit?<br /><br />The pathos of the situation was brought home to me at the end of my interview with Tetley Tea’s Earl Bergamot. The solemn little man took me into a local church and pointed out an empty alcove. “Until it was broken a few years ago,” he said, “there used to be a beautiful plaster-cast bust of Elvis in that space. It still hasn’t been replaced.”<br /><br />He shook his head sadly. “Our culture is dying.”</span>Christopher Simpsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07465089990572108350noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8045818364037011299.post-5604252452045695292008-12-12T14:30:00.004-05:002009-04-19T12:06:15.825-04:00Social network marketing and customer relations<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">The following is a reprint of the Ad Nauseam column which appeared in the December 9, 2008 edition of the Metaverse Messenger.</span><br /><hr /><br />All I wanted was an H2O™ mop.<br /><br />You’ve seen them advertised on television. They look like the old-fashioned stick vacuums, only instead of a bag there’s a water supply, and instead of sucking up the dirt they steam it away.<br /><br />Clever gadgets.<br /><br />While I love the Swiffer Wet Jet™ for the tile floors in the bathroom and kitchen, I’m less than pleased with the sticky residue it leaves behind on the wooden floors. I hate feeling like I live in a movie theater every time I walk across the floor.<br /><br />The H2O mop seemed like the perfect solution.<br /><br />Of course, just because it works on TV doesn’t mean it works in real life — just look at those ShamWow™ cloths. When that guy in the commercial demonstrates them, while yelling at the camera, he can take a wet ShamWow and use it to leave behind a completely dry surface. In my hands, however, all a wet ShamWow leaves behind is water. Maybe I’m not doing it right. Plus, he never mentions that they can’t be washed with detergent, which means that they need their own separate wash cycle. I have no idea what happens if you disregard this instruction. Maybe they absorb all the detergent and the next time you use them they fill the house with foam allowing the guy from the commercial to sneak in and steal your CD player.<br /><br />The point is, I wanted to know more about the H20 mop and, seeing as how I write about advertising and such, this seemed like the perfect opportunity to explore the “social network marketing” that’s all the rage among cutting edge marketing experts.<br /><br />Social network marketing, we’re told, is like having a thousand or more friends who share information, trade handy tips, and possibly even tell cute stories about a particular product. You know, just like in real life (if your real life is in Pleasantville).<br /><br />Of course, in reality, social networking is a mish-mash of conflicting testimonies. I tried getting some information from YouTube and while I admit the results were entertaining, they weren’t particularly informative. One video shows a woman calling the company because her mop spread hot water all over, burned her baby’s foot, and scratched up the floor. That will happen when you fail to put the cloth on the end of the mop like it shows in the directions (which the woman complained had been “blurry”). In another video two girls filmed themselves sideways as they demonstrated that the H20 mop wouldn’t clean a stain off a carpet if you just leave it in one place, as opposed to moving it back and forth (as per the instructions). On the other hand, the frenetically energetic man on a morning show found it to be quite effective as he cleaned the floors for a family of five.<br /><br />As for text reviews, I discovered that the H20 mop was “a piece of junk,” “everything I could ask for,” and “has no learning curve at all.” (Say what?)<br /><br />Yep. That was helpful.<br /><br />The only sane advice I got was from my wife.<br /><br />“If you don’t like it, you can always get your money back,” she pointed out.<br /><br />Of course.<br /><br />The next step was finding out who sold them. The logical choice was Wal-Mart, so I gave them a call. After going through several “Your call is very important to us” messages combined with a brain-challenging puzzle which involved pushing various numbers in response to ambiguous questions, I was finally connected to a young girl who had obviously been wandering through on unrelated business when the phone rang and she decided to pick it up.<br /><br />Either that or she was just plain stupid.<br /><br />“Do you have the H20 mop in stock?” I asked.<br /><br />“I’ll put you through to the chemical department,” she answered.<br /><br />“I don’t think that will help,” I said.<br /><br />“Well, I don’t know what we have in stock, I have to send you to the right department,” she answered.”<br /><br />“Sure,” I said, “but the chemical department isn’t the right department.”<br /><br />“Well I can’t answer your question,” she said.<br /><br />That’s because you’ve got the brains of a turnip that’s been hooked up to an iPod for a hundred hours straight, I thought.<br /><br />“I know that, but it’s just a mop, it doesn’t have anything to do with the chemical department,” I said.<br /><br />“Is there anyone here who wants to talk to this guy?” she said, thoughtfully holding the phone a good six inches away so I wouldn’t hear.<br /><br />I was on hold for about half a minute, fully expecting another voice to come on the line to deal with this difficult customer. I was somewhat surprised, then, when the same voice came back.<br /><br />“Just hold on while I put you through to household supplies,” she said.<br /><br />“That makes more sense,” I said.<br /><br />“Well,” she said indignantly, “you should have said right at the beginning…”<br /><br />She got no further.<br /><br />“Just get me away from you!” I yelled.<br /><br />To her credit, this was one instruction she seemed capable of carrying out.<br /><br />In the end, I bought the mop. Not from Wal-Mart, mind you. Even though it turned out they had them in stock, I spent another half hour on the phone finding a different supplier. No way I was going to spend my money at a place with customer service that sounded like a bad sketch on Saturday Night Live.<br /><br />When you come down to it, this is the foundation of social network marketing. It’s not exciting, and it’s not particularly cutting edge, but if your customer service sucks, you’re going to lose business. I doubt that all Wal-Mart stores have such catastrophically poor service, but those that do will suffer.<br /><br />As for social network marketing, when you open your product up to reviews from every brain-damaged moron in the country, the results are bound to be less than optimal. Just because it involves the latest in communications technology doesn’t mean it’s a good medium for marketing.<br /><br />I’d heard about the mop through traditional advertising and I decided to try it based on the old-fashioned “money back guarantee.”<br /><br />The rest was a pain in the butt.Christopher Simpsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07465089990572108350noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8045818364037011299.post-13390247980743282952008-11-17T13:57:00.002-05:002009-04-19T11:47:03.588-04:00Nodding headsI follow a number of marketing blogs (currently <a href="http://adcontrarian.blogspot.com/">The Ad Contrarian</a> is one of my favourites, but that's a different story). On Jonathan Trenn's <a href="http://digitalstreetjournal.com/wordpress/"><span style="font-style: italic;">Digital Street Journal</span></a> he makes a point I think we all too often overlook when complaining that this or that person or group "just doesn't get it."<br /><br />He writes of attending a conference in San Francisco during which he realized that the crowd of 400 "energetic people who are on the forefront of marketing communications and the technology that will make it possible" were all remarkably the same. In other words, "overly diverse" is not a phrase likely to be found in any news report of the event.<br /><br />With that realization he goes on to say:<br /><br /><blockquote>It’s imperative that we in social media seek to understand the diverse world that we’ll be looking to engage. It’s imperative that we realize that many of those that we see as “not getting it” will end up “getting it” on their own terms and in ways that will reflect their own cultural experiences. And it’s all the more important if we’re correct in our assertions that this is how we’ll be receiving our marketing messages, our news…the information that we need to live by. ("<a href="http://digitalstreetjournal.com/wordpress/?p=34">My Age of Conversation Post</a>," <span style="font-style: italic;">Digital Street Journal</span>, November 15, 2008.)</blockquote><br /><br />While Trenn is essentially speaking about two cultures (the targeted marketing audience, and the promoters/designers of the new media), there are actually three cultures involved with the whole marketing activity.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">1. The targeted marketing audience:</span> These, of course, are the people already using the media whom the marketers are hoping to engage in their marketing strategy. And woe unto the new media marketer who enters the fray without knowing the shibboleths and secret handshakes of the in crowd. To make matters worse, the culture of one in crowd can be radically different from the culture of another.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">2. The promoters and designers of the new media:</span> These are the people who are probably most represented at a site like ThinkBalm. They are definitely "plugged-in," "with it," and "on the cutting edge." They are smart, inventive, and most of all enthused. They are also, however, the people who come up with the names and terms used in these applications.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">3. The targeted financing audience:</span> These are the people category two people, are trying to convince to put money into the new media. They are, by and large, not part of the in crowd. They may not be technophobes, but they probably don't spend much time Twittering, keeping up a page on Facebook or MySpace, and have likely not even heard of Second Life, unless there's been a particularly juicy scandal about it in the news recently.<br /><br />When category two people try talking to category three, the results often make about as much sense as a Dane speaking Swahili with a heavy Martian accent.<br /><br />"You see sir, after you join up you can myrl an entry and..."<br /><br />"Myrl?"<br /><br />"Yes sir, it's kind of like spriging something in Sprigit, but it's called a myrl here."<br /><br />"Spryl?"<br /><br />"Um, no. Myrl. Or Sprig. It depends on what you mean."<br /><br />"Problem is, I don't know what I mean. Let's just put the money in a damned television spot like always!"<br /><br />The point I'm trying to make, of course, is that all too often when we complain some old fogey "just doesn't get it," the reason is that we haven't really tried to give it to him. And the applications themselves don't help. It was something I noticed years ago when I had one foot in the world of the programmers, and the other foot in the world of the users. While programmers were happily coming up with their own terms, many of which came from the heavily technical end while others consisted of in-jokes, the users were unhappily trying to figure out how to put a "string" in a computer and why there was a button called "query" when they weren't asking a question.<br /><br />Second Life is a good case study, as I pointed out in a previous article (“<a href="http://ad-nauseam-original.blogspot.com/2008/09/when-boojums-attack.html">When Boojums attack</a>,” <span style="font-style: italic;">Metaverse Messenger</span>, September 23). The “Debug Settings” have to be among the most offensively cryptic settings in Second Life. Not only does the term “debug” send most non-geek users running in the opposite direction, but their names seem to consist of ultra-technical terms combined with some kind of running in-jokes. As for their descriptions, they do little more than reiterate the names. CheesyBeacon, for instance, enables “cheesy beacon effects,” while the FlycamAxisDeadZone1 is described simply as “Flycam axis 1 dead zone.”<br /><br />The support features are of limited help. To start with there are several, and most seem to wallow in a labyrinth of jargon. When faced with enough of this incomprehensibility, most users simply decide to go somewhere else. (15,000,000 registered users versus a few hundred thousand active residents — that’s a lot of dissatisfaction).<br /><br />Now imagine trying to explain any of that to a client who is looking into the use of the immersive Internet for his company. "The challenge before us," says Trenn at the end of his blog post, "is not only to overcome the barriers of those who seek to resist the changes we are embracing; it is also to develop a deeper understanding of the diverse peoples that are becoming users of social media."<br /><br />This also includes the users on both ends — not just those already in Facebook, MySpace, Second Life and the rest, but those trying to use these platforms as business tools.<br /><br />"If we fail to do that," Trenn concludes, "we’ll simply be a bunch of nodding heads mistakenly thinking that we are the future of communication."<br /><br />And most nodding heads happily sit looking out the back window of cars with no clue what's coming up.Christopher Simpsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07465089990572108350noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8045818364037011299.post-48721199096090098412008-11-11T17:05:00.003-05:002009-04-27T21:47:03.292-04:00Hell hath no fury<span style="font-size:130%;"><span style="font-style: italic;font-family:times new roman;"><hr /><br />The following is a reprint of the Ad Nauseam column which appeared in the November 11, 2008 edition of the <a href="http://www.metaversemessenger.com/">Metaverse Messenger.</a></span><br /><hr /><br /><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:arial;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">Asking advocates of social network marketing and virtual world promotions about the Return on Investment (ROI) can be as controversial as walking into an Al Qaeda hangout and asking their opinions on B’nai Brith. But then this is nothing new. Promoters of non-traditional advertising have always been a bit touchy on the subject. To illustrate, let me give an example from before the days of the Internet.<br /><br />Many years ago I was commissioned to analyze a software program for a large diamond company. The company spent a fair amount of time sending informative and unsolicited articles about diamonds to newspapers, magazines, radio and television stations in the hopes that some of these would be published and aired as actual news stories. Although it didn’t cost them much, it did put a certain drain on resources, and they wanted some idea of their ROI. The purpose of the program, which had been designed in Europe, was to measure the value of published articles in terms of advertising dollars. They chose me because I had previously worked with them through the advertising firm I'd been with and they knew me as a systems analyst with marketing knowledge.<br /><br />My job was two-fold. The first phase consisted simply of analyzing the program in terms of its actual operation. Did it work? Were there bugs? Could the bugs infect the users and make them sick? That kind of stuff. The second phase consisted of actually examining the purpose of the program and its effectiveness. Could it, in fact, give them some idea of their ROI?<br /><br />Well, phase one was no problem. It was picky and time-consuming, but it was nothing I hadn’t already done a hundred times before with software for the ad agency, some of which I’d written in the first place.<br /><br />Phase two, however, began to feel like a Philip Marlowe novel: a minor, seemingly straight-forward mystery that rapidly escalates into a far-flung conspiracy involving hidden motives and faceless men uttering threats from the shadows.<br /><br />The core of the mystery involved the algorithms being used to determine the monetary value of press releases used by end recipients. If, for example, an article explaining the traditional method of determining the right price for an engagement diamond (yearly salary divided by six) was used in a newspaper or television spot, what did that represent in terms of advertising dollars? (Keep in mind that because these were ostensibly “news stories,” they didn’t really mention the diamond company, and therefore their value would be less than a similar sized advertisement.) At first everything looked fairly conventional. Values were given not only for the medium (newspaper, television, radio), but also for each particular medium (</span></span><span style="font-style: italic;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:arial;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">Toronto Star</span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:arial;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">, CityTV, CHUM). A quarter page story in a weekday edition of </span></span><span style="font-style: italic;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:arial;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">The Globe and Mail</span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:arial;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"> would receive a score of, say, 0.4, while the same story in the Saturday edition would receive a score of 0.6. This would then be multiplied by the value of a quarter page ad in the same edition. The result would be the value of that story in advertising dollars.<br /><br />The problem was, the more I looked, the more it seemed that many of the values, to put it kindly, were completely arbitrary. As with all advertising, audience is of particular importance. A full page story about engagement diamonds in a publication aimed at teenagers would have far less value than a quarter page story in a publication aimed at people in their twenties. And while there was some sense to the program’s determination of values for print media and radio, when it came to television I had the feeling the software writers had picked values out of thin air.<br /><br />Although I had some expertise in the day-to-day mechanics of the advertising industry, I was by no means an authority, and so I began consulting with the head of traffic (advertising buys) at JWT where I maintained a good relationship, even though I was no longer working there. The idea, of course, was that he could clear up the ambiguous data. Instead, where I had merely been somewhat puzzled by what I’d found, he, on the other hand, was completely mystified. Not only did the values I’d been suspicious of make no sense, he told me, but neither did many of the values I’d accepted as basically valid.<br /><br />When I took this to the project manager she seemed remarkably unsurprised, leading me to think that she’d been harboring suspicions which had led her to hire me in the first place. When she told me that the software was already in use in Europe, I asked where they were getting the figures from. She said she’d try to find out. The next day she got back to me, much subdued, and told me that the project was going to go ahead and could I please wrap up my report and get it in to her.<br /><br />All in all, a very peculiar experience, but also a very valuable one in terms of marketing. I learned that hell hath no fury like the proponent of a non-traditional advertising method whose ROIs are examined too closely.<br /><br />Today we have a whole host of new marketing techniques ranging from viral YouTube videos to promotional events held in virtual worlds. And while a good number of consultants are more than ready to explain the vast potential of these new media, anyone who asks about the actual ROIs is liable to be skewered to the wall and branded a reactionary.<br /><br />That doesn’t mean that there isn’t value to be found in these wild and wooly media; merely that trying to determine it is a bit harder than trying to determine the state of North Korean leader Kim Jong-il’s health.<br /><br />Next week we’ll look at some of the prevarications as well as the straight-shooters in this modern mine field.</span></span></span>Christopher Simpsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07465089990572108350noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8045818364037011299.post-62924185471679551632008-11-03T23:01:00.005-05:002009-04-27T21:49:47.847-04:00The brave new world of social network marketing: Part 1<div><br /></div><div>The following is a reprint of the Ad Nauseam column which appeared in the November 4, 2008 edition of the Metaverse Messenger.</div><hr /><div><br /></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: arial;">I have a confession.</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: arial;">For the past few months I’ve had a growing suspicion that much of the “new” marketing innovations employing social networks and virtual worlds just don’t work.</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: arial;">It started when I wrote an article back in July about the problem marketers face in Second Life due to its lack of real mass media (“Second Life circa 4 BC,” July 15, 2008). In it I noted that not only does Second Life not have any form of medium that reaches a majority, or even a large minority of residents, but that such a medium was unlikely to ever appear.</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: arial;">As time went by I began exploring the many claims being made for “social network marketing” through such media as Facebook, MySpace and Twitter. On the surface it made sense. Certainly there are a lot more people involved than there are in Second Life, and the idea of creating a marketing buzz through a network of people is unquestionably appealing. Furthermore, there appeared to be a number of marketing success stories — a rarity for Second Life.</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: arial;">But then the novelty began to wear off and before long I found myself noticing some of the same problems I’d seen for virtual worlds. While a company might find it advantageous to set up a presence on Facebook in which contacts can be kept informed about the latest products and improvements, it really amounts to little more than a sim capable of handling a larger number of people: if you don’t belong to the group, you’ll never hear from them, and if you do belong, it’s because you’re already a fan.</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: arial;">Of course the idea is to create “brand evangelists,” customers who feel so included in the existence of a brand that they proselytize it with an evangelical zeal. This way, while your brand may only have 500 “friends,” those “friends” are going to tell their “friends” and so on and so on.</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: arial;">Nice idea, but the more I looked at the “success stories” the more my suspicions grew. Take this case of MySpace marketing held up by Dave Balter of IMedia Connection back in the summer of 2006.</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: arial;">“Recently,” he says, “in a campaign for the blockbuster film Superman Returns, MySpace was hired to create a Superman Returns profile, and then engaged users to share with friends through simple activities like adding the Man of Steel as a buddy or posting a comment on their new Superfriend's page. The cornerstone of this promotion was to find people with vast networks who could spread this message to more people, faster and more effectively.”</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: arial;">And how well did it work? It’s true that Superman Returns debuted to the number one spot on the Fourth of July weekend, but considering that it was a revival of a previously successful movie franchise, I suspect it would have done at least that well even if advertising had been restricted to posters plastered on telephone poles in all the major cities. The fact is, Superman Returns earned a disappointing $84 million during its first five days (the traditional time period for measuring a “weekend”), and only $250 million for its entire run. As openings go, especially openings for the Fourth of July weekend, it really wasn’t anything to write home about. Three years earlier the much-maligned X2: Xmen United beat it by a million, and only a year before War of the Worlds brought in $100 million over the same period.</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: arial;">For its overall run, Superman Returns comes in about even with Night at the Museum. This is not good company to keep. But the real question is this: did having a few hundred “friends” on MySpace increase the bottom line by so much as a fraction of a percent?</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: arial;">Somehow I doubt it.</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: arial;">Yet that’s one of the big success stories. The rest look like testimonials for the classifieds of a neighborhood newsletter.</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: arial;">Consider the examples offered by Social Media Optimization in an article boosting the advantages of social marketing. Having already featured a bicycle shop in Texas that was using MySpace to reach potential customers, they wrote about an ice cream company, Cold Stone Creamery, which created a kind of ad for YouTube in order to publicize a new flavor. In the video two ice cream flavors are joined in wedded bliss. A special profile was created for them on MySpace. “I think the power of YouTube and MySpace and the connection it’s made with young people is important for not only Cold Stone, but for every company to investigate,” said Kevin Donnellan, senior director of advertising and public relations for the company.</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: arial;">And then there’s the example offered by Stephan Spencer, who bills himself as a “scientist turned web marketing virtuoso.” On his website, Stephan Spencer’s Scatterings, he waxes poetic about Weird Al Yankovic’s use of MySpace to revive his flagging career. Over a few months the has-been singer had already gained 219,033 friends!</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: arial;">So tell me. Do you have Weird Al’s latest records? Didn’t think so.</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: arial;">After a while it became obvious that the success stories all view increasing numbers of “friends” as the sole criterion of “success,” while quietly ignoring the issue of whether they’ve actually had any increase in sales. Those who legitimately seem to have experienced measurable gains tend to be independent musicians, for whom any exposure is better than none, and small to middle-sized businesses which use the social networks to keep in touch with already-existing customers.</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: arial;">This is the brave new world of social networking?</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: arial;">* * *</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: arial;">Next week — social marketing continued in “Hell hath no fury.”</span></div>Christopher Simpsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07465089990572108350noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8045818364037011299.post-12654433605233664082008-11-02T13:16:00.009-05:002009-04-19T12:01:30.839-04:00I've got a secret.<div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">The following is a reprint of the Ad Nauseam column which appeared in the September 30, 2008 edition of the Metaverse Messenger</span></div><div><br /></div><hr /><div><br /></div><div>Brands are constantly being scolded for their pitiful attempts to break into Second Life. They build a few buildings, offer a few pointless freebies, and then sit back waiting for avatars to come flying in. It doesn't work, it hasn’t worked, and it’s not likely to work.</div><div><br /></div><div>Consultants, such as Millions of Us, try to convince them that they must offer something to the community, and in some cases the suits have even listened — with varying results. The release of the newest Harry Potter movie was promoted with viral giveaways, and Evian offered samples of their water which were accompanied by free skins that were perceptibly better than the default skins we all get as newbies.</div><div><br /></div><div>But no matter what they do, it never seems to be enough. The stink of failure covers them like a car that’s run over a skunk.</div><div><br /></div><div>You could even feel sorry for them if they weren’t so oddly blind to the ultimate problem.</div><div><br /></div><div>Let's back up a few years. There once was a time in which not a single company had an presence on the Web. There were many reasons for this, but the main one, it has to be admitted, was that there was no such thing as the Web. Once it was invented (by Al Gore, according to rumor), a few of the more forward-looking companies tried their hand at creating virtual stores where customers could get information about their products and even make purchases. Some were more successful than others, but those who made a go of it had several characteristics in common, such as creating sites with value-added services, a running tally of in-store stock, and even methods of contacting real live people for help.</div><div><br /></div><div>But even the best-laid sites would have withered away if the companies behind them hadn't done one very important thing —they told people about them!</div><div><br /></div><div>I can still remember the first time I saw an ad on TV for something (can’t remember what it was) which included the URL for their Web site. “Will anyone actually take the time to visit?” I wondered.</div><div><br /></div><div>Well, people did. Today, of course, it’s rare to find an ad that doesn't include information on finding their online presence. “Call, visit or click” is a phrase that I find occurring with amazing frequency in ads from TV commercials to the printed page.</div><div><br /></div><div>You see, here’s the thing: if you’re going to do something cutting edge and avant-garde, if you’re going to set up a new approach to doing business, you have to tell people!</div><div><br /></div><div>This isn’t a secret power-principle of business — or at least it shouldn’t be. If you want people to visit the smart, efficient, clever, dynamic, or what-have-you website, you have to let them know it’s there.</div><div><br /></div><div>So let’s pop back to the present and take a look at the companies that came into Second Life. Coke has always been considered one of the successes, mostly because they didn’t end up with a complete, abject failure. But the bar for success in virtual world marketing, it has to be admitted, has been set pretty damned low. Still, let’s credit them with their little triumph. How did they spread the word about their sim? Well, by word of avatar-mouth, for one. Then there was…uh. Well there was word of avatar-mouth — damn, I already mentioned that one.</div><div><br /></div><div>The fact is, aside from the short spurt of publicity they gathered when they first came in world, the bright boys and girls behind the bold new marketing concept never told anybody about it.</div><div><br /></div><div>Nobody.</div><div><br /></div><div>Or maybe I missed something. Perhaps you can recall some TV commercials from the time which ended with an invitation to visit their new virtual land in Second Life? A tag at the end of magazine ad with the SLURL of their corporate island with an offer of a free virtual Coke? Anything like that? Anyone?</div><div><br /></div><div>No. I didn't think so.</div><div><br /></div><div>The fact is, to the best of my knowledge, not a single corporation which has attempted in -world marketing has bothered to clue in their customers. None.</div><div><br /></div><div>Does this strike anyone else as being, oh…I don’t know. Brainless? A tad dim-witted? A few swings short of a playground?</div><div><br /></div><div>So here's a bit of advice for anyone contemplating yet another marketing blitz in the untapped world of Second Life: when you do it — tell people about it! Put the information in your real world publicity. Generate interest. That is, after all, part of the reason you want to come into Second Life in the first place, isn’t it? To generate or renew interest in your brand? Well, everything else aside, a good start is by letting the general public in on the secret.</div><div><br /></div><div>And of course, as more companies include references to Second Life in their advertising, the more people will be drawn to our humble little world which, in turn, will also mean a larger audience for in-world promotions.</div><div><br /></div><div>See how that works?</div><div><br /></div><div>Tell people, ya nitwits!</div>Christopher Simpsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07465089990572108350noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8045818364037011299.post-85464060331240185682008-10-24T19:35:00.001-04:002009-04-19T11:44:48.083-04:00Thurber's Legacy<span style="font-size:130%;"><span style="font-style: italic;font-family:times new roman;"><hr /><br />The following is a reprint of the Ad Nauseam column which appeared in the September 23, 2008 edition of the <a href="http://www.metaversemessenger.com/">Metaverse Messenger.</a></span><br /><br /><hr /></span> According to most pundits, the recent monetary crisis has dealt a devastating blow to the future of online, non-traditional advertising. “Are ‘experimental’ marketers doomed?” asks Adotas. “Credit crunch hits new ad technology” utters Utalk Marketing. “Investment in bullshit ads plummets,” gloats Gawker.<br /><br />Kind of reminds me of the great High Street rout during the Ohio flood of 1913.<br /><br />In March of 1913 Ohio experienced the worst natural disaster of its history when heavy rainfalls caused massive flooding of the region. The worst of it occurred along the Great Miami River, and in Dayton the flood water rose to twenty feet in the downtown core. The stress of the rushing waters ruptured gas lines causing fires that burned unchecked as the fire department watched helplessly, unable to gain access. In the end over 400 people died and more than 20,000 homes destroyed.<br /><br />Although I was born and raised in Canada, I knew about the Ohio flood because it had been featured in a story by one of my favorite authors — James Thurber.<br /><br />In his “The Day the Dam Broke,” Thurber tells of the teaming mass of humanity which fled down High Street in his hometown of Columbus, Ohio. “‘Go east!’ was the cry that arose,” he wrote. “East away from the river, east to safety. ‘Go east! Go east! Go east!’” As the panic took hold, more and more people joined the throng. “Black streams of people flowed eastward down all the streets heading in that direction.” Before it was over, some had run more than 12 miles to escape the raging waters.<br /><br />Except, of course, in Columbus there weren’t any raging waters. The entire incident had been nothing more than a massive misunderstanding. “Suddenly somebody began to run,” says Thurber, suggesting the ultimate cause. “It may be that he had simply remembered, all of a moment, an engagement to meet his wife, for which he was now frightfully late.” Under normal circumstances, one person running would have been unremarkable, but with the flood waters rising in neighboring regions, any quick movement could be interpreted as an attempted escape from impending doom. “Inside of ten minutes, everybody on High Street, from the Union Depot to the Courthouse was running. A loud mumble gradually crystallized into the dread word ‘dam.’ ‘The dam has broke!’”<br /><br />In a similar fashion, the recent panic concerning “experimental” advertising has been sparked by little more than a single voice: that of Emily Steel whose recent article in the Wall Street Journal appears to have set off a stampede with more than a few similarities to that which occurred in Columbus almost 100 years ago.<br /><br />“In recent years,” she writes, “marketers have set aside a portion of their ad budgets to experiment with digital technologies such as Web video, mobile phones, gaming and virtual worlds. But with broader economic turmoil reaching Madison Avenue, these ‘experimental’ budgets are among the first to hit the cutting-room floor.”<br /><br />From this single source, a tidal wave of acquiescence has arisen. And while there is undoubtedly cause for concern — just as in 1913 there were some very real flood waters in Ohio — Steel’s dash for safety may possibly be just a trifle premature.<br /><br />Fortunately, not everyone has joined her in flight. Adam Needles, of Propelling Brands, offers a thoughtful critique of the Wall Street Journal piece, focusing especially on the author’s neglect to differentiate between the many different forms of “experimental” media.<br /><br />“She makes broad-based assumptions in her piece about marketers’ priorities and about the capabilities of digital and new-media initiatives,” he writes. “She also lumps together everything from mobile marketing to place-based media to advertising on social-media sites to embedded advertising on games and virtual environments in the same boat. She finally ignores the blurring of the lines over time between traditional non-interactive advertising, on one hand, and emerging interactive PR/social-media based digital marketing programs, on the other hand — making it harder to substantiate the reality of the exodus she predicts.”<br /><br />To Needles, Steel’s biggest mistake, however, is that “she is not thinking like a marketer.” And to a marketer, “[d]igital and new-media initiatives are, in fact, just what the doctor ordered in the current environment.”<br /><br />When times get tough, the real marketer begins looking for the edge, and to Needles, the edge is in the new media. Citing such advantages as low cost, two-way communication through social networking sites, and improved tracking, he puts forward a compelling argument.<br /><br />As for me — what do I know? I’m merely a hack with pretensions of mediocrity. But I can tell you this much: when the crowd starts to run from the flood waters, it can be damned hard to get them to stop. In Thurber’s account, militiamen attempted to restore order by riding about in trucks with megaphones calling, “The dam has not broken.” The immediate effect, however, was “to add to the confusion and increase the panic, for many stampeders thought the soldiers were bellowing, ‘The dam has now broken!’”Christopher Simpsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07465089990572108350noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8045818364037011299.post-55923321886754529282008-10-13T23:12:00.003-04:002009-04-19T11:45:48.660-04:00User-created content: great for users, but hell on advertisers<i>The following is a reprint of the Ad Nauseam column which appeared in the October 14, 2008 edition of the</i> <a href="http://www.metaversemessenger.com/">Metaverse Messenger</a><br /><hr /><br />A TV commercial can cost hundreds of thousands, sometimes even millions of dollars. The reason is two-fold: not only are vast numbers of people watching the shows (and hence the ads), but the production costs of TV shows put their creation well beyond the means of the average person. Even with a few hundred channels, there is still a limited number of programs because it takes big corporations and big bucks to make even the cheapest reality show. So what would happen if a technology came along that allowed people to create their own shows for free?<br /><br />The answer is simple: ad revenue would disappear. With an almost endless number of new shows, strategic ad placement would become impossible and the worth of an advertising spot would plummet. Shows with ads would lose audience to shows without. Ads may be placed on the service distributing the shows, but they would have little relevance and be easily ignored. In short, advertisers would essentially ignore the platform and the only way it could make money would be to charge for its use.<br /><br />As most of you probably realize, this situation is not hypothetical — it’s YouTube. And while nobody can doubt the success of the site in terms of users, its earning power has remained stubbornly untapped. A 2006 article in the Bivings Report by Erin Teeling (“YouTube: Show me the money!”) pointed out that even though the video-sharing service was still in its early days, it had already racked up some impressive statistics: 6.1 million videos, a total of 9,305 people-years spent watching them, roughly 500,000 profiles, and a ranking of 8th most popular site in the US. But these bright and shining figures merely served to cast a darker revenue shadow. “Underneath these amazing user stats,” said Teeling, “there are financial problems. It seems that YouTube and other sites like it that depend on free, user-generated content, have yet to figure out a way to turn site traffic into profit.”<br /><br />Along with the difficulty of trying to monetize user-created content, Teeling’s 2006 article lists a number of other YouTube drawbacks that sound eerily similar to those facing Second Life, including copyright infringement and the risk of a brand’s association with “offensive or questionable” content.<br /><br />Google bought YouTube in 2006, but as recently as this past June the corporation had to admit that its famous Midas touch wasn’t working. Sarah Arnott’s article for the UK’s Independent (“Google admits it still can’t make money from YouTube”) quotes Eric Schmidt, Google’s chairman and chief executive, as saying that while there was obviously money to be made from the site, they still hadn’t figured out how to do it.<br /><br />In only a few months, however, the situation appears to have changed. This week Google unveiled a new advertising plan which shows every chance of succeeding. Anders Bylund of The Motley Fool, a major investment online magazine, explains that since “six of the ten most-watched videos of all time are straight music videos,” the plan is to incorporate “unobtrusive but easily accessible links” to the online stores selling the actual songs. This will give viewers the opportunity to buy their favorite tunes instead of always having to go to YouTube. And as Bylund points out, “this is just the first example of YouTube growing into a full-fledged e-business platform.” Corporations whose content appears on the site can “claim ownership of the user-uploaded videos they used to want removed and add some cash-generating shopping links to them.”<br /><br />But while we may look for guidance to Google’s YouTube solution (while keeping in mind that it has not yet proven successful), we cannot transfer it directly into Second Life. YouTube content sits on a neutral background easily accessible to advertisers: Second Life content sits on a background owned by the creators of the content. While real-world companies may be able to make deals with a few Second Life content providers to give space for related advertisements, it’s hardly a universal remedy. One example would be Coca-Cola renaming the popular in-world blues venue “The Junkyard Blues” to “Nestea Live Music Stage at Junkyard Blues.” And while we applaud the idea behind the tactic, it is still little more than a sponsorship package. Coca-Cola would be naïve to believe that residents are going to start drinking a particular beverage merely because of a banner hanging over a stage — especially a beverage that has no traditional connection to the music. (Now if the Junkyard Blues stage were to be sponsored by Johnny Walker or Southern Comfort the results might be more positive.)<br /><br />The Google approach to YouTube provides a new service that will both improve the YouTube experience and earn ad revenue. The Coca-Cola approach to Second Life, on the other hand, provides nothing new and brings little, if any improvement. But more important is the involvement indicated by these two approaches. The new Google strategy has all the earmarks of something from the mind of a dedicated YouTube user, while the Coca-Cola strategy feels more like a pretty good idea cooked up in a board room among people who have visited Second Life only long enough to “get a feel” for it.<br /><br />The key point is simple. Those who are truly interested in breaking into the virtual world are going to have to forego their corporate approaches and learn to love the world for its own sake. At that point it’s quite likely that the key to serious ad revenue or marketing success will suggest itself: first and foremost as an enhancement to the experience, and secondly as a means to make boat-loads of money.Christopher Simpsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07465089990572108350noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8045818364037011299.post-71254193526679950082008-09-23T03:00:00.004-04:002009-04-19T11:43:50.942-04:00When Boojums attack!<span style="font-style: italic;">In the midst of the word he was trying to say</span><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">In the midst of his laughter and glee</span><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">He had softly and silently vanished away</span><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">For the snark was a <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_0">boojum</span>, you see.</span><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">-- Lewis Carroll, "The Hunting of the Snark</span>"<br /><br />Recently I suggested that a client change the name of his product (a platform for virtual <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_1">tradeshows</span>) and completely revamp his website. Not only was the name meaningless to the average prospect, but his website seemed to be talking about something entirely different.<br /><br />Names are important. They’re the first thing most people ever know about a product or service and should convey something about its nature. All too often, however, names appear to be chosen as an afterthought.<br /><br />Truly bad names can be avoided with a bit of thought. Whoever came up with “<span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_2">Poolife</span>” for a pool cleaning service obviously <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_3">wasn</span>’t completely clear-headed at the time. Other times the name itself may be fine, but as a URL new and unwanted meanings emerge. As an example, “John,” of the <span style="font-style: italic;">Bad Product Names</span> blog, tells the following (possibly apocryphal) story.<br /><br /><blockquote>An employee at a software company was fired for visiting a particular website. Which site was it? Experts Exchange. But why? It seems like a legitimate site that one would go to in order to find help on various topics.</blockquote><div><br /></div><div>The answer, of course, was its URL: <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_4">expertsexchange</span>.com. Other famous problematic URLs include Who Represents (<span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_5">whorepresents</span>.com), Therapist Finder (<span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_6">therapistfinder</span>.com), and the classic Pen Island (<span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_7">penisland</span>.com) — although the last is actually a sophisticated joke.<br /><br />Most often, however, the problem <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_8">isn</span>’t a bad name (such as “Crooks Accounting”), but a name that fails to give any real information, and the technology industry is the worst culprit. Matthew <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_9">Stibbe</span>, of the <span style="font-style: italic;">Bad Language</span> blog, calls technology product names “a rich vein of terrible writing”:<br /><br /><blockquote>For example, what are the following products from one well-known manufacturer: <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_10">dv</span>8000z, <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_11">PSC</span> 2350, <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_12">vp</span>6300? One is a printer, one is a laptop computer and one is a projector. How can you tell? How can you differentiate one product in a given range from another? The answer is, quite simply, that you can’t. (Matthew <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_13">Stibbe</span>: <a href="http://www.badlanguage.net/stupid-product-names">Bad Language</a>.)</blockquote>This is essentially what I faced with the creator of the virtual trade show platform. He was first and foremost a programmer and engineer with a stunning amount of expertise (bluntly put, he’s something of a bloody genius), but when it came to describing his service he could only speak to fellow programmers. With the change of a name, however, and a bit of guidance on articulating the purpose of his service, he was able to create a new website which showcased his product in an intelligent and engaging manner.<br /><br />But names <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_14">aren</span>’t the only culprits, and sometimes even the worst of them can be overcome with good products. “Bowel Buddy” is a popular brand of cookie in certain regions, and Fluke Trucking actually capitalized on its rather unfortunate name with a clever <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_15">tagline</span>: “If it’s on time, it’s a Fluke.”<br /><br />What’s worse is when bad instructions and “help” features drive away existing clients.<br /><br />The people who chose “Second Life” did themselves proud. Not only is it understandable, it describes the service in two concise words. It’s just too bad the name was the extent of their communicative talents.<br /><br />One of the most common complaints against Second Life is its difficulty — but why? Learning to move your avatar and interact with things really <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_16">isn</span>’t hard, and while camera movements require a bit more time, surely most people have mastered it in under an hour.<br /><br />So what makes Second Life “difficult”?<br /><br />I would have to lay the blame on its almost aggressively incomprehensible jargon. I used to be a programmer (many, many years ago) and the one thing I would never think of doing is playing with another programmer’s debug settings. Yet in <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_17">SL</span> the Debug Settings are precisely where we have to go if we want to enhance our in-world experience.<br /><br />And then, when new residents finally discover the value of Debug Settings, they’re faced with the almost offensively cryptic nature of the options. What, for instance, does <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_18">AutoMimeDiscovery</span> do — check the surrounding area for <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_19">unspeaking</span>, white-faced avatars trapped in invisible boxes? And what about <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_20">CheesyBeacon</span>, <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_21">DisplayAvatarAgentTarget</span> and <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_22">FlycamAxisDeadZone</span>1? The descriptions accompanying them are little more than a reiteration of the names. <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_23">CheesyBeacon</span>, for instance, enables “cheesy beacon effects,” while the <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_24">FlycamAxisDeadZone</span>1 is described simply as “<span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_25">Flycam</span> axis 1 dead zone.”<br /><br />Yep. That helps.<br /><br />Residents are often encouraged to use the available support features, but many find the explanations to be a labyrinth of jargon. When a new resident (read “new customer”) is faced with enough unfathomable jargon, the natural reaction is to simply go away — a problem with which Second Life is quite familiar (15,000,000 registered users versus a few hundred thousand active residents).<br /><br />Part of marketing your product or service occurs up front with things like names and advertising campaigns. The rest takes place behind the scenes. If you’<span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_26">ve</span> succeeded in acquiring new customers, don’t chase them away with incomprehensible instructions. Bad names, bad URLs, and bad customer features can all add up to some pretty nasty <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_27">Boojums</span> which, if not dealt with quickly, can lead to your customer base “softly and silently” vanishing away.</div>Christopher Simpsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07465089990572108350noreply@blogger.com0