flights

I’ve been off the grid for a couple weeks, backpacking with my brothers. We embarked a day or two after McCain announced his surprising (and IMHO almost surreal) choice of Sarah Palin as his running mate. This, and she, dominated the headlines as we headed into the mountains, and I was hoping the shock and awe would have faded by the time we got back.

The press’s attention span is an interesting thing. It’s still all Palin all the time, and the Republicans seem to be fine with that. They can’t win on the issues, so why wouldn’t they be?

Anyway, I’ve designed a graphic for the new Republican ticket (above). Let me know if you want some stickers.

Why do they call these things “circulars?” The word makes me think of my mom, clipping coupons from the Sunday paper for the weekly trip to the Shop-N-Bag.

Anyway, this one came in the mail from Target. I usually toss these things right into the recycling bin, but I thought it was pretty clever.

I used to love flip books as a kid. I even made one once, as a Christmas present for my younger brother - a mix-n-match sports thing where, for example, you could put a football player’s head on a baseball middle and a pair of hockey legs.

Anyway, kudos to Target for having fun with something so everyday. You actually got me to look at all the coupons as I played with different face combinations.

I’ve been so busy, I haven’t had time to exercise for a while.

The big athletic footwear companies have built their marketing campaigns around aspirational themes and creating connections between regular sports hobbyists and elite athletes. If you work hard, if you show character and passion - the message goes - then you are like them.

I saw this clip from Nike today, and I think it does an especially good (and literal) job of putting the viewer in an athlete’s shoes…

Back in my agency life, clients were always asking us to create “viral” campaigns that would get the attention of the digital youth. Our inside joke was that there was a simple three part formula…

• Create a MySpace profile
• Enlist the Black Eyed Peas (they were especially hot at that time)
• Put some videos on YouTube

Then… POOF! it spreads like wildfire.

Now, reading the pitches from the current lot of would-be gurus, it seems things haven’t changed very much.

The basic pieces of a social marketing campaign today seem to be…

• Create a profile/group on MySpace/Facebook/Twitter/Jaiku
• Launch a blog advertising campaign
• Create a contest that has some viral hooks

This formula is attractive because none of these things necessarily requires much effort on the part of the company. It might get kudos from the Madison Avenue crowd and a few marketing pundits, impressed by your “revolutionary” foray into the frightening universe of social media, but the long term rewards from real people will be thin and fleeting unless you do a little more.

Give something good away.

I’m personally tired of the whole contest thing. Too many big companies think it’s good idea to create some kind of cheesy campaign where, for example, they entice people to make their own commercials for you or slog through a ridiculous scavenger hunt for the chance at a big prize. This doesn’t count as a giveaway because contests like this demand payment (manual labor and/or creativity) in exchange for nothing but a chance at a reward.

Instead, what I’m talking about is not all that different from the old concept of a loss-leader. You take a loss on something that will attract people to you, and then you try to deepen the relationship with those people and persuade them to (or simply hope they will) buy more stuff. What if Microsoft simply gave away the Xbox for free, knowing that such a move would push their console market share way past the PlayStation? Could the resulting increase in game sales make up for the cost of such a move?

I’m sure Microsoft has already run the numbers on this, so I won’t fantasize about getting a free Xbox, but there are plenty of giveaway ideas that cost almost nothing.

A lot of companies have quite a bit of capital in the form of information. Become the expert. Make your company’s blog the go-to source. Tell secrets. Teach people something cool or valuable. Enable. Entertain.

Have you ever noticed the way American beer commercials emphasize packaging gimmicks? The wide-mouth can. The label that turns blue when it’s cold. The easy-pour vent. The shelf pack that fits better in your fridge.

Are there people who peruse the beer aisle thinking, “hmm… you know I really enjoy [favorite microbrew/import], but it pours all splashy, and I can’t tell if it’s cold without picking it up. I guess I’ll take the Coors.”

In the same vein, I was listening to the radio the other day, and a commercial for Miller Lite came on. Apparently, they took the top award for “American Style Light Lager” at the World Beer Cup in 1996, ‘98, ‘02 and ‘06. Well whoop-dee-doo. American Style Light Lager? Really? There’s an award for that? How many beers could possibly be competing in the American Style Light Lager category? “American Style” itself narrows the field quite a bit, since American microbreweries typically produce traditional European style beers. This leaves you with just the big brands. When you add “Light” to the mix, you’re down to what, three beers? And Miller Lite is bragging that they won the top award only four times in the last twelve years.

The thing is, I don’t actually have a problem with the taste of some of the big brand American beers. I’m more than happy to drink MGD at a ball game.

They way these guys mostly brag about the packaging though, you’d think they’re embarrassed about their own product.

In this week’s installment of his ‘Circuits’ column, David Pogue asks, “Are you taking advantage of Web 2.0?” By ‘you’ he means your company, and he describes the response this question got from the attendees at a recent PR conference:

“…within seconds, there were 132 responses on the screen in a huge, scrolling list. ‘Not enough money.’ ‘Don’t understand it.’ ‘No technical resources.’ ‘Not enough manpower.’ ‘No visible return on investment.’ ‘Fear of ridicule.’ ‘Fear of slander.’ ‘Fear of permanence.’ ‘Fear of the public running amok.’”

There are lots of common fears in there, and they’re all reasonable at first glance. Companies are understandably afraid of opening themselves up to ridicule and slander from a public running amok, knowing that all the messy results will live forever, just a Google search away. And they’ve seen some embarrassing failures from companies who’ve tried to embrace the new paradigm - like the Chevy Tahoe debacle, and Wal-Mart’s fake blog (or flog) scandal, to name just two incidents. So the safest bet is to simply stay away from all things Web 2.0.

The problem with this approach, obviously, is that the public is already running amok. That’s what the public does. If they want to slander you, they have YouTube and MySpace and a million other places to do it. Sticking your head in the sand doesn’t make all this stuff go away. It just makes your company look silly - or worse, aloof, uncaring and behind the times - and ultimately more vulnerable to whatever mud they might be slinging.

So if it’s unwise - or unrealistic - to stay out of the fray, then what’s the best strategy for jumping in? The other questions from the PR conference attendees fall into this category. More and more companies have recognized the need to participate, but they don’t know where to focus or how much to invest.

There are lots of success stories. Big companies like Dell and Mariott have generated good will and good press through their forays into Web 2.0, and this has surely translated into dollars. But it still comes down to the question of ROI. If one of the ultimate goals of embracing Web 2.0 is to engender good will, then how do you quantify it? How do you measure success?

I read a lot of blogs, which I organize into a number of categories. One of those categories is marketing, which is a fruitful domain for bloggers. I thought I’d share the list of marketing blogs I find myself reading every day…

Blog Maverick - The usually long-winded, sometimes incoherent, but always colorful musings and rants of Mark Cuban. Not strictly a marketing blog, as the champion of HD TV and owner of the Dallas Mavericks covers everything from politics to sports to big business.

Buzz Machine - Also not strictly a marketing blog. Jeff Jarvis, a journalism professor at the City University of New York, espouses on the nature of media and communications in general, of which marketing is a subset.

doshdosh - A recent discovery. The author of this blog is apparently a political science and philosophy student in Toronto, but he’s amazingly prolific and super sharp when it comes to discussing the business of doing business online.

Future Now’s GrokDotCom - Surprisingly bad name for a blog, considering it belongs to the Eisenberg Brothers, gurus of online marketing and authors of Waiting for your Cat to Bark.

Logic + Emotion - There aren’t a lot of new ideas here, but David Armano, VP of Experience at Critical Mass has a gift for articulating in pictures the ways people experience the web.

Made to Stick - The blog companion to the bestselling book on how to communicate ideas so that they stick and spread. They boil it down to a formula that I find myself referring to again and again.

Micro Persuasion - Steve Rubel, Senior VP at Edelman, the world’s largest PR firm is known for his bold pronouncements and sharp insights.

Seth’s Blog - Well-known pundit Seth Godin is a thought leader and guru when it comes to the challenges of marketing in the connected digital age.

From the image above, you know I’m not talking about the notorious former football great.

In case you’re counting, yes, that’s twelve varieties of Tropicana orange juice. Twelve! And that’s not including the orange juice blends (orange-tangerine, orange-pineapple and orange-strawberry-banana).

There are varieties to suit various pulp-tolerances of course, but also tastes (low acid) and nutritional needs (calcium, fiber). There’s an orange juice for kids for some reason, one just for your heart and one to “reduce the effects of oxidation.”

Next up, maybe we’ll see one just for men (Tropicana E.D.), one for seniors (Tropicana Hip Therapy), dogs (Tropicana Liver and Bacon), hell, why not senior dogs (again, I suppose, Tropicana Hip Therapy).

If that’s not enough, maybe Tropicana will scrap them all and replace them with an in-store orange juice configurator kiosk. You dial your pulp up or down, add any combination of nutrients, answer some demographic and lifestyle questions and… voila: personalized orange juice.

Until then, make room in your pantry.

Some kind of silly excuse for a Golden Globe Awards ceremony took place last night, with no speeches, performances or jokes - just winners announced by unknown non-celebrities who had the look of Star Search contestants in the “spokesmodel” category.

The impact of the writers’ strike on the event and activities surrounding it reportedly cost the Los Angeles economy anywhere from 75 to 100 million dollars. If the Oscars suffer the same fate - which looks likely - the blow will be much bigger.

The producers who are the target of the strike represent only a slice of that pie, but even if you consider the whole thing, $100 million is small potatoes compared to the amount the producers would give up by submitting to the writers’ demands, so a couple of missed awards shows probably won’t cause them to blink an eye.

The other problem for the writers is that the strike hasn’t had the expected crippling effect on the quality or quantity of television available to viewers like me. Sure I miss a couple of shows, but I was watching too many anyway. Now, with the writers’ strike going on, I can still watch my favorite reality shows (lately, Kitchen Nightmares, The Dog Whisperer, Survivorman, No Reservations and Top Chef), and I can watch other shows in reruns that I didn’t make room for before. With my favorite scripted shows on hold for a while, I’m enjoying my chance to give my second choices - shows like Friday Night Lights, The Office and Lost - their due.

The only show I was really painfully missing was The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, but that’s back on now. Woohoo!

The bottom line is, I’m not sure how much pain the strike is delivering to the wallets of the producers, which is why no one expects it to end anytime soon. There’s simply too much good TV left on the air for the strike to make much of a financial impact.

Even if this was not true, or even if the writers hold out long enough to dent the supply of good television, they still might not hit the producers where it hurts, because, as a product, television follows a demand curve much like that of a controlled substance. With television, as with cocaine or cigarettes, a reduction in supply has little effect on demand. Watching television is the default leisure activity for Americans. We do it out of habit. We’ll keep doing it whether or not there’s anything worth watching.

The thing is, the writers are in the right. They deserve a piece of the web revenues, and the producers are greedy bastards for not allowing that. Maybe the force of public opinion will ultimately be enough to sway the producers. Maybe the strike will hurt their moral sensibilities, and that will be enough.

Or maybe there are enough good people in Hollywood to eventually force a bottom-up victory. Maybe the string of isolated side deals already happening between shows and their respective writers will reach a critical mass and lead to an industry-wide agreement.

It has happened before.