Fads & Ads

On Competition & Product Management

Mon, 10 Jun 2013 21:44:00 -0700

Benjamin Franklin once said “nothing is certain but death, taxes and a new product X killer.” Well, at least I think he’d say that if he were alive today and living in Silicon Valley.

It feels like every two or three years, I find my friends and people I interact with outside of work inevitably coming up and saying “dude, aren’t you worried about that new [company] killer coming out?!”

To be honest, the real answer is yes, you do think about it… but it really only serves as a gut check to make sure that the work you’re doing on your product still matters and you’ve got your priorities straight.

The biggest lesson I’ve learned about new products coming out onto the market is that competition is the best reminder that you need to remain vigilant that you understand the aspirations, habits and pains of your users/customers.

More often than not, your competitors are entering the market with the mindset that they’re out to beat you. The initial reaction when attacked is to fight back, but this is where remaining steadfast is the most important.

Kumo Chop: The 2009 Battle of Microsoft v Google

It seems like an eternity ago now, but in 2009, I’m not sure if you remember, but Microsoft “brought war” on Google with their new product: Kumo. It was a crazy month of May. Everybody seemed convinced that Microsoft was finally rolling up their sleeves and giving Google the swift kick off of the podium of search. They even had an $80M campaign to change the hearts and minds of America!

The days leading to the Bing launch weren’t the prettiest I saw around the Google offices. The uncertainty drove conspiracy theories and a handful of doomsday sayers. But that was one of the moments where I learned the most important lesson by observing the top product managers: never stop rallying the troops.

The rumors of Bing launching went on for weeks, unproductive side conversations took place, but one thing remained constant: focus on the user and nothing else. And we did. We kept launching. We stayed on course. We didn’t stray.

Then the most amazing thing happened… Microsoft tipped their hats. “Google, tried to preempt this,” said the SVP. Microsoft was in a feature war. Google remained on a conquest to change the way we interact with information. It was over before it began.

It was clear Microsoft was building Bing to “beat Google” and not to solve the need to organize the world’s information. Product managers could laugh about it, because it was clear we were focused. That’s why four years later, your default search engine is still Google.

Feature Wars: The Clear Loser is the Consumer

Feature wars don’t work. Feature wars make you lose focus on what matters. The customer matters. The reason they use your product is what matters. Feature wars bring you New Coke.

Features are a reflection of your customers’ aspirations, habits and pain points. Your customers/users are who you represent every day. You spend your day thinking about them. You build for them.

Competition comes and goes. That’s the certain thing. Sometimes competitors succeed in teaching you something new about what matters, but that’s where the real fun lives: your success hinges on understanding your users/customers better than the competition.

It would be a lie to say nobody paid attention to iTunes Radio today around the Pandora offices. It would be an even greater lie to say that we didn’t do what we do exactly every day: continue to find a way to connect people with the music they love as fast as possible. I would say game on, but the game has been on for years.

Focus is the name of the game. That’s not how you win the war, that’s how you win the conquest.

helloyoucreatives: Beardvertising pays men with beards US$5.00...

Mon, 20 May 2013 15:21:09 -0700

helloyoucreatives:

Beardvertising pays men with beards US$5.00 a day to place a small ad in their beards. Advertising on your body - agency created Beardvertising when they realized that beards were untapped media space that consumers interacted with every day.

Seeing the inspiration for the classic icon never gets old.

Wed, 01 May 2013 10:04:03 -0700

Seeing the inspiration for the classic icon never gets old.

The Importance of Silence as a Product Manager

Wed, 24 Apr 2013 23:02:00 -0700

Inheriting a product as a new product manager requires quite a bit of restraint… mostly in the speaking department.

You spend time meeting your new team during the interview process, generating excitement about what can be built and mulling the value you can bring in your new endeavor… only to hit the brakes the minute you get in the door. Why? Because your job as a product manager is as much to stop interference as it is to get things built… and you can’t build sustainable things if you don’t know how your product was built in the first place.

It was just about 100 days ago that I stepped into Pandora for the first time to work as a product manager. Not every day has been rosy, but the experience has reinforced the importance of one of the most important lessons I have learned time and again when working as or with a product manager: your most important job is to shut up and listen.

1) Listen.

Bright eyed and bushy tailed for a new adventure, I came into my new job full of ideas about how we were going to take the advertising products of Pandora to the next level. Where I may have needed to be more careful: preventing enthusiasm for being mistaken as criticism.

There is not a single business out there which is operating perfectly. Your first inclination as a new product manager is to dissect what is working well, what isn’t working well, try to figure out why and then think through solutions to the problems.

If that is your inclination, roll with it… just don’t start communicating it immediately. The key thing to remember is that you’re new to a problem that many other people have spent months, if not several years, trying to fix. They have domain knowledge that is exceptionally valuable for the future of the product, and it is up to you to build rapport to extract that from them.

2) Internalize.

The problems that your team and partners face make up the core of what prevents a product from reaching its full potential. Listen to the problems of your team: business, engineering and all in between. Make them yours.

It is impossible to build a product strategy without understanding the problems of your stakeholders. For every idea that has been floated, put yourself in the shoes of one of your team members. Think about why they may or may not be excited by this type of change.

3) Categorize.

What are the core themes of why things may not have been done in the way you would have thought they would? How is the communication across teams? Where does the technology meet and not meet the business needs? What processes exist that may slow down progress?

Once you start to answer these questions, break them into categories that you can share with the product stakeholders.

4) Check in.

Building your hypotheses of problems begins to inform your product strategy, however, you can’t assume that you get it right the first time.

Ask concrete questions of your partners: “Is it fair to say that the reason this wasn’t completed within the two week timeline was because process X requires three stakeholders to meet in a room to sign off?”

This is your core set of understanding from your partners. This is where you get on the same page.

5) Synthesize.

Everybody that you work with as a product manager has an individual role that is important to the progress of your product. Engineers, business partners, operations, etc are all focused on achieving the best out of their respective functions.

Being a product manager is not being “an ideas person.” It is about being a “synthesizing person.” It is about identifying the common aspirations, hurdles, and execution plans across all stakeholders and forming them into a clearly communicated strategy.

As you build and execute your strategy, you will continue to listen and measure its effectiveness, though you will find yourself speaking a bit more. Try to hold back as much as possible, because your team and partners are the ones moving the mountains. You’re just there to make sure things don’t get in the way.

This strategy involves understanding the needs of your team, peers, and company. This strategy is the mechanism with which you attempt to eliminate roadblocks for everyone involved. This strategy is the direction with which you manage your product. This strategy came because you focused on listening. This strategy is a culmination of your partners expressing their aspirations. Silence built this strategy.

helloyoucreatives: Monday’s Classic Ad. Toughness ftw!

Mon, 22 Apr 2013 08:57:13 -0700

helloyoucreatives:

Monday’s Classic Ad.

Toughness ftw!

"Good advertising does not just circulate information. It penetrates the public mind with desires and..."

Fri, 29 Mar 2013 15:12:35 -0700

““Good advertising does not just circulate information. It penetrates the public mind with desires and belief.””

- Leo Burnett (via arilevine)

mrwolfdog: If you’re reading this automated post and soon...

Fri, 15 Mar 2013 14:09:34 -0700

mrwolfdog:

If you’re reading this automated post and soon watching this video, something bad has happened to me, Mr. Wolfdog.

Old Spice is the best.

This makes me miss playing baseball

Fri, 15 Mar 2013 13:55:55 -0700

Such a classic spot from Dick’s Sporting Goods. The power of emotion is strong in drawing a connection from current (and former, in my case) baseball players.

Six Years of Building Native Ad Products Funneled into One Blog Post

Wed, 13 Mar 2013 10:35:00 -0700

On February 27, I had the opportunity to represent Pandora for the first time and speak at the Native Advertising Summit in New York. The event was put together by the team at Sharethrough and was a great testament to the work of the past two years from taking native advertising as a concept into a fully fledged investment area for marketers.

My talk (posted below) focused on how developers/publishers should consider building their native ad solution, based on market trends and what I’ve learned in my time at Google, StumbleUpon and now Pandora.

Native Advertising Summit - Building a Native Ad Product from sharethrough on Vimeo.

Here are the accompanying slides:

Developing a Native Advertising Product from Jack Krawczyk

It’s been fun to see the native advertising space legitimized and even more fun to be a part of building the next wave. What have you learned from taking your own attempts at building or buying native advertising?

Moonwalking mini horses are always a good idea. Fun spot from...

Sun, 03 Mar 2013 11:12:34 -0800

Moonwalking mini horses are always a good idea. Fun spot from out in the UK.

The hype machine for this album is getting way awesome. First...

Sun, 03 Mar 2013 10:28:07 -0800

The hype machine for this album is getting way awesome. First www.daftpunk.com and now this 15 second spot during SNL last night.

Grey Poupon 2: Poupon Harder

Wed, 20 Feb 2013 09:05:00 -0800

This is modern day reprisal of a classic ad is a great reflection of what makes advertising so much fun. Love that Grey Poupon can laugh at what made them so iconic.

Also, this:

What would happen if this ad would air on TV today? I’d...

Mon, 04 Feb 2013 13:21:35 -0800

What would happen if this ad would air on TV today? I’d bet it would probably do wonders for brand recognition.

GoPro Baby Optimizes Production Cost to Quality

Sun, 03 Feb 2013 21:37:27 -0800

The high production budgets of some of the Super Bowl commercials can make you forget about the underlying product (or what the product stands for), but GoPro nailed it this year with dubstep baby.

Tugs at the heart strings while embodying the core brand values (and product).

A+.

Why I Love Advertising & Building Things That Make it Better

Tue, 15 Jan 2013 18:55:00 -0800

It wasn’t until recently that I realized that I’ve been towing the line between advertising and engineering for just about every day since I knew what it meant to purchase something. My parents were raised in communist Poland and lived there until their mid 30s until we moved to the US in 1987. Needless to say, the concept of a brand was just about as foreign as the English language when my family came stateside.

My dad was (still is) an electrical engineer by trade, so my earliest memories involve building a transistor radio from spare parts we picked up at Radio Shack… which seemed easier than convincing him why I should own the latest pair of high end Reeboks.

I remember trying every explanation in the book:

me: the quality is better! they won’t fall apart
dad: your feet grow too fast, they won’t matter in 6 months

me: they will make me faster!
dad: can you show me how that is possible?
me: no (the Internet could have probably helped on this one, sadly Prodigy was not advanced enough at the time)

me: Shawn Kemp wears them! (still pining for these shoes)
dad: so what?

None of them worked. Reason couldn’t explain why I wanted to pay a premium for something that was priced 3x what you could buy at Payless. For what it’s worth — we tended to net out at buying Nikes or Reeboks from the racks at Marshall’s or TJ Maxx (compromise: another lesson learned for another post…)

A lot of my childhood was spent trying to solve this question: why did I want these Reeboks so badly? I could understand how soldering some transistors could translate radio waves to sound, but I couldn’t figure out this problem that was so seemingly simple.

It turns out that the answer was not exactly simple, but could be explained with the irrational: I wanted them because of how they would make me feel, and not the physical utility I would get from them.

This is what makes building advertising platforms so fun: it forces you to apply rational problem solving toward an end game that succeeds best when it triggers the most irrational thoughts.

Red Bull gets what it means to push the limits. I like the feeling of being in a circle of like-minded people who also like to push the limits.

Audi understands what it takes to engineer high performance F1 cars and R8s — I want to feel like one of those drivers.

Intel gets what it means to push the limits of technology. I trust that what they build will work in a high tech way.

We use brands to inform how we feel when we consume their products, almost more than when we purchase them. That’s the beauty of advertising.

That’s why we have such memorable moments from advertising:

Grant Hill drinks Sprite?!

I wanna be like Mike!

Think different.

The problem is that we haven’t really moved beyond TV ads telling us stories in 30 seconds to help move and drive those beautifully irrational feelings. There has got to be a rational mechanism to inspire people to feel these ways with the power of social technology and portable mobile devices.

That’s why I love building ad products. I want to bring these stories to life for my generation and the next one. That’s why I’m taking my next step and joining Pandora next week. With over 60 million people tuning in each month, the door for making these connections exists. And I’m really looking forward to building it (and also one day buying those Reebok Kamikaze’s).

Fiat UK - Mommy Rap (and it doesn't suck)

Wed, 02 Jan 2013 11:43:47 -0800

Believe it or not, I’m not a mom, but I still love this ad from Fiat in the UK shedding some light (potty) humor on motherhood. While many raps can feel contrived and mom ads (as my sister tells me) can be some of the most frustrating ones out there, this feels like it strikes the right authentic tone.

3 Ways to Make Advertising Not Suck in 2013

Tue, 01 Jan 2013 10:25:00 -0800

Rather than type out a list of predictions of what brands are going to do and how advertising is going to change in the coming year, I’d prefer to write about the three things that I want to work on in 2013 to continue to make advertising not suck.

First, what do I mean by making advertising not suck? There are a lot of strange tensions between the three parties of advertising: user (you), publisher, and advertiser. Often these things compete against each other because we’ve tried to apply old business models of advertising into new media. Now that distribution has been reworked in the “people, not pages” era, we have our new buzzword du jour: native advertising.

While native advertising is just something old told in a new way, there are plenty of ways we can make it better. These are my three focus areas of building on the momentum gained in advertising in 2012:

1: Many Platforms, 1 Data Set

If there has been one thing that people say doesn’t work about native advertising, it’s that it doesn’t scale. Since the “ad unit” is different on each platform, folks like the IAB are throwing their hands up saying that this can’t work, because you have to recreate the wheel for each platform which makes it even harder for smaller publishers who lean on banner networks because they cannot merit direct sales on their own (and evaluate against the big boys).

This is what makes building ad products more fun than selling them: you get to listen to gripes and try to disseminate what the real problem is. In this case: a consistent data set across your creatives.

Banners are built on the principle that one to three creatives can be standard across hundreds or thousands (or hundreds of thousands) of domains. We spend a lot of time focusing on the fact that the creative is the same, but the real value is the data consistency.

If we can build a standard for evaluating the performance of a “native ad” through a common pixel, cookie, etc across publishers, we can lay the ground work for building scale (and opportunity for new revenue streams for agencies in the form of developing creative).

2: Praise the Good, (subtly) Punish the Bad

Much of advertising is predicated on the concept that advertisers can pay to advertise with a publisher, and so long as it doesn’t violate their ad policy, the creative can be poorly received by the publishers users with no penalty. Conversely, there is no real benefit passed to advertisers that have created high value creative for the publisher.

Google has actually mastered this concept pretty well by the way that they calculate ad rank (high quality merits lower CPCs — and vice versa). Search ads are built to maximize value to users and a good paid search result gets rewarded.

We need to bring this into the world of creating content that a publisher’s audience consumes. As paid content becomes more of a part of a user experience, it needs to get treated with the same scrutiny: boost the views of good content, and hold back the bad stuff.

While it’s scary to grasp the idea that you’re willing to take money off the table that an advertiser is willing to pay, building a quality advertising product (and maximizing your net yield) requires you to think about impacts to session times and page views. If you’re getting paid, but yielding 10% less monetizable views, then you may not be doing yourself a service.

This logic is an operating principle on anything I want to work on this year.

3: Facilitate Competitive Collaboration

The most exciting thing about the tide in advertising is that when we buy/create media today, it’s no longer about one platform versus the other. It’s about how the content interacts across an ecosystem. Something discovered on one platform can be shared out to another and we can advertise/amplify against that discovery.

For example, if I’m Old Spice, and I create a game with Dikembe Mutombo, I can create several creatives to drive people to my ultimate URL, but then I can encourage people to share it out, which can be amplified via Sponsored Stories, Promoted Tweets, etc. Does a sponsored story compete with or enhance what I spent to drive people to the game in the first place?

More of the collaborative than the competitive approach will yield beautiful strides in the world of advertising. Some of the most productive experiences I’ve had in the past year have been talking with companies that are gunning for the same budgets that my product was gunning for. When you find ways to make your content work together with other platforms, you start building better content.

In 2013, I want to further embrace ways that we can work together to make advertising that equates with the user experience. If we just compete with each other, we won’t make the same strides.

2012 was a great year in moving advertising forward, and now 2013 is shaping up to be even better. There will always be ups and downs, but these three areas will be where I’ll be focusing my brain.

If you’re thinking elsewhere, I’d love to hear about it to potentially expand beyond these three areas.

Old Spice Pwned the Mayans

Fri, 21 Dec 2012 11:38:40 -0800

A few weeks ago, I fell in love with Dikembe Mutombo’s 4 and a half weeks to save the world campaign from Old Spice. Today it has reached its magical conclusion. So. Good.

Blast from the Past: Citi Big Boy

Wed, 19 Dec 2012 09:56:21 -0800

Recently was reminded of this classic from Citi. Six years later: it’s still awesome.

For everybody hating on the new Instagram TOS update...

Tue, 18 Dec 2012 13:42:20 -0800

It’s not really that bad. Do you have an account on Google (gmail, G+, etc)? Check out what you agreed to there:

When you upload or otherwise submit content to our Services, you give Google (and those we work with) a worldwide license to use, host, store, reproduce, modify, create derivative works (such as those resulting from translations, adaptations or other changes we make so that your content works better with our Services), communicate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute such content. The rights you grant in this license are for the limited purpose of operating, promoting, and improving our Services, and to develop new ones.

Haters just gonna hate. Sorry the service you’re using for free is trying to cover their ass in allowing themselves to make money. You may now resume snapping photos of your lunch.

Sure the language on Instagram’s policy could be better and more strict… but if you’re hosting an image on someone else’s service, don’t expect the royalties. Start your own site and host your photos there.