marketmambo

It's Alive!

2010-02-15T15:35:00.006-06:00

Dear readers, today we offer you a special treat: a post not written by your Tio Tito.

The Mambo diaspora spreads far, and one can never be sure that there is not a Mambo next to you in a bar, at a fish fry, or at the library at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. You see we have a cousin in that snow-bound state, Davido, with whom we have often shaken both head and fist at the industry in which we once toiled. He is now preparing himself to teach the arts that he once practiced.

The business of advertising has fallen from the high perch it once occupied. Unfortunately few inside the industry ever realized or acknowledged how precarious that perch had been for the past two decades.

For those of you who don't follow these matters...lucky you...many advertising agencies spun off the media planning and buying discipline that once once part of the many services they offered their clients. The idea was to create larger media companies that could get better prices from newspapers and networks through their increased buying power. You see, ad agencies had always considered media the unskilled labor of the ad world, basically a commodity that could only be better by being cheaper. As the complexity of media has increased, so has the power of these new media giants, but at the expense of the ad agencies of which they were once a part.

But Davido never gave into this second-class thinking. He was brilliant because he combined human insight and a touch of creativity into his ideas. I was brilliant because I recognized this in Davido. We were brilliant together.

And Davido has recently written a post on his blog, Kerfuffle, about the role of media skills in the careers of today's advertising students and tomorrow's leaders. But what he has really written about is the recent past and immediate future of the advertising business. It's a story with underlying themes of money and arrogance, fate punishing vanity, and the ultimate triumph of the creation over the creator.

Please enjoy.

Don’t look now, but the media people are taking over the advertising business. (post link)

It would seem, based on popular culture, that the advertising business is all about the creative. Indeed, as noted in a post [on Mediated Communication, the J-school blog] earlier this week, over 100 million people tuned into the Super Bowl, as much for the ads as for the game. Consider one of the most-mentioned things about those Super Bowl ads: the price. Was it worth $3 million for one of those :30 ads? Hard to say; that would depend on the advertiser’s media strategy.

Three times in the past two weeks I have been approached by undergraduate students in the J-School who said they hoped to land a job as advertising media planners. As one who spent a few decades as a media planner, I couldn’t be happier. For too long, it seemed media was next to no one’s preferred ad agency job. For whatever reason, media planning — the mix of art and science that guides the strategic deployment of advertising dollars –still seems to be overlooked or flat out dismissed by young people looking to enter the advertising business. And yet, in the 21st Century advertising industry, it’s not the creative product that gets all the attention from clients.

Clients care most about making their money work as hard as possible. How hard that money works is closely tied to the media strategy, which is why these days the media strategy informs the creative strategy instead of the other way around. Broad-based, mass reach media is rapidly becoming a wasteful marketing luxury, and simply shoveling a budget in the direction of the television networks doesn’t cut it anymore. Media plans are far more targeted, measurable, transactional, experiential and flexible. Advertising is about changing behavior, and nearly all behavior is circumstantial to some degree. It’s the job of the media strategist to find the optimal circumstances to try to change that behavior. The best ad in the world won’t sell a damn thing if it isn’t exposed to the right person at the right time in the right circumstances, whatever those may be.

Given the increasing importance of media strategy and its precise execution, it’s no surprise that media agencies are growing and diversifying while traditional advertising agencies are withering. Client relationships with media agencies are more stable than relationships with their creative counterparts. Creative assignments may be divvied up among several shops, but media planning and buying tends to be consolidated with viable long term partners. To the entry-level advertising job seeker, this should make media strategy and execution a whole lot more appealing, especially since that’s also where the job growth seems to be.

Core media planning and buying functions — what the old agency model lumped into the “media department” — are only one part of the today’s media agency model. Specialty media agencies have emerged to handle a wide variety of client media needs, often at the expense of traditional creative agencies. A look at Omnicom’s OMD Media network provides a good example. Among OMD’s strategic business units are agencies that specialize in sports marketing, entertainment marketing, digital direct marketing, branded entertainment, programming and content creation, and search marketing to name a few. These are media agencies that lead the development and implementation of media-driven ideas, sourcing and managing ancillary support elements (like creative) along the way. Clients have come to realize that while it may be fun to make TV commercials, the vast majority of their marketing dollars are spent on media, not creative. Clients are focused on the money.

If I had my way — which I don’t… yet — I would like to see our J447 course, Strategic Media Planning, be required of all students who wish to major in advertising. Since it’s not, I can only suggest most enthusiastically that if you are an undergraduate, and you think you want to work in the advertising business, be sure to take J447 and learn as much as you can about media strategy. Don’t stop there. Read the media trade publications and web sites. Develop opinions about media campaigns you admire. Know what goes into a good media plan, and be able to identify media strategies that miss the mark. Recognize that nearly anything can be a media opportunity… and not just by slapping an unsightly ad on it. Be knowledgeable about industry leaders and innovators.

In today’s world of rapidly converging media channels, user-generated content, and multi-platform entertainment options, creative is no longer the undisputed king of the advertising hill. Clients have limited marketing resources and great expectations. They place a very high value on feeling confident they are spending their advertising money wisely and effectively. And that money is entrusted to the media strategists.

[Originally posted on Mediated Communication, the blog of the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Wisconsin at Madison.]

Slam dunk squeeze play

2010-02-08T17:57:00.019-06:00

The banishment of the brands

I, Tito Mambo, have a problem. I often find myself fixated on subjects of little obvious consequence, and this affliction resurfaced last week on the topic...of all things!...of food storage bags. You see last week Walmart announced that it will no longer carry either the Glad or Hefty brands of storage bags. As you most likely know, Walmart has been recently pursuing a strategy of brand consolidation, and in this case, will consolidate their shelves around Ziploc and Great Value, the Walmart store brand. The goal of Walmart’s strategy is to reduce supply costs and at the same time increase sales margins. And Walmart is not alone. Both CVS and Walgreens are pursuing similar strategies. Anticipating this decision, Glad, Hefty and Ziploc increased their advertising spending about 67% in 2009 versus 2008. Hefty alone increased their spending by 500%. Little good did it do them.

We are not sure why this news caught and held our attention. We don’t shop at Walmart, we don’t know anyone who works at any of these manufacturers, we couldn't tell you which brand of storage bag sits in the Mambo-family pantry. But what we do know is that increasingly the marketplace punishes the idle. Yes, such cruel justice was dispensed in the past, but is now more quick and unforgiving in its workings.

Playing ketchup

And today we again became fixated on yet another news story. Heinz has revolutionized the ketchup package. Okay, perhaps a bit of hyperbole, but we felt the need to get your attention. It seems that the ketchup package, born in 1968, is no longer serving our needs. The ketchup package was originally created for use in the situation in which food was eaten at a restaurant table, where your brains and hands could focus on the tearing of the package, the squeezing of the ketchup, the repetition of the process until enough ketchup was dispensed. And of course, the ketchup had to be made suitable for your specific use. If you dunked your fries you needed to prepare your ketchup in a different and incompatible way to someone who squeezed the ketchup directly on to their fries.

But the world has changed. Most of the foods that demand the companionship of ketchup are now eaten in cars, and the on-road manipulation of the ketchup pack threatens your shirt if you're a passenger and much more if you're the driver.

So the product development people at Heinz bought themselves a used mini-van on the company dime and drove around eating fast food. They were looking for what we at marketmambo like to call an “empathetic” understanding of their consumer. The fruits of their effort is a new ketchup pack which holds three times the amount of the traditional pack and can be peeled open for dunking or torn open at one end for squeezing. It will rest nicely on the dashboard or console of most major brands of minivan.

Yes, dear readers, it is Monday, but I was not so desperately in need of mental stimulation that I would declare genius in a new ketchup package design. But here’s the thing. We as marketers are everyday challenged to add to or at least demonstrate the value of our products, and as we've said, when we fail in this task we are likely to be punished quickly. And yet we are given stewardship of products that long ago converged on category parity. So we paint our plow horses to look like thoroughbreds. Is that what the brand managers at Hefty did when they were invited to the shootout at the Walmart corral? Perhaps.

A banana will lead you

In the untidy brain of your Tio Tito, the stories of Hefty and Heinz have been circling each other like playful dogs, and we turn to this post in search of peace. In the eden of their dreams, marketers find an improvement in their product that vanquishes the competitors. In the nightmares that inhabit their waking hours, they desperately bet their careers on price cuts and none-too-clever promotions. But a few find success not through some tedious chemist or tiresome creative director but through the simple insight of a package designer. Most packaging decisions are made to reduce product damage, to improve display, or discourage theft. But for many products packaging is some part of the "user experience". For some products its a significant part. In a commodity category, let's use ketchup as an example, small packaging improvements to the packaging can create a better user experience and become a clear advantage versus the competition.

But the world is still changing. As retailing moves from the store to the internet, the importance of display and security in packaging are reduced. The Walmart of the internet, Amazon, has asked its suppliers to join its "frustration free" packaging initiative and reduce the burden placed on consumers by clamshells and twist-ties.

We at marketmambo propose a test. Call it the banana test. It goes like this: If the packaging of a product is a greater portion of the user experience than the peel is part of the banana experience, whether a source of pleasure, entertainment or frustration, then the packaging for that product has the potential to be a source of competitive advantage. Certainly ketchup passes this test, and we suspect that many other products will pass this test as well.

Apropos of nothing

If you missed the pop culture reference above, let me point it out to you. The banana graphic above was created by Andy Warhol for the 1966 album, The Velvet Underground & Nico. This was one of those rare albums which had more to do with the next ten years of music than the previous ten.

It's appearance on the cover is shown to the right.

This has nothing to do with the post except that we'd like to offer our readers a treat in return for their time. We've embedded a video below of a rehearsal of the Velvet Underground set to our favorite song from the album, Waiting for the Man. Please enjoy.

Death of a Firefighter

2010-02-01T08:05:00.007-06:00

We have again become distracted by affairs that boil the pot. So must we all at some time. And speaking of fire...maybe our lack of practice has made that the best segue we can offer...what brings us back to our post is the recent passing of Earl Cooley, a firefighter we have never personally met, though circumstances have allowed us to meet many firefighters.

Yes, several of our recent posts have been at least partly obituaries: John Hughes, Billy Mays, were there others? We offer no explanations, excuses or rationalizations.

This post is not about Earl Cooley. Its more about Wag Dodge, though ultimately its not about him either. But to get to Dodge we must go through Cooley, and once through Cooley we'll see where we end up.

On the Wings of Hubris

Cooley passed in November, at the age of 98, and that gives you a hint about where our story begins. In July of 1940, Cooley and his partner stepped out of an airplane and into the Montana sky. Their job was to confront a forest fire and quickly bring it under control while it could still be brought under control. They were the first smoke jumpers, poorly trained, poorly equipped, yet confident past the edge of hubris. Cooley described his training as "This is a parachute. You know what a fire is. You jump tomorrow." His chute didnt open properly that day, and he survived by crashing through the branches of a quick-thinking spruce. But within four hours, he and his partner had won the smoke jumpers' first battle.

On August 5, 1949 Cooley was once again in a plane over Montana heading to a fire, this time as a spotter. Crouched down in the open doorway of the plane, his job was to find the best place to drop the crew of smoke jumpers, and as they lined up at the door, to then tap each man on his left leg as a signal that it was his turn to step into the sky. The first leg he tapped that afternoon was that of Wag Dodge, the foreman of the crew that was jumping into Mann Gulch.

In the Face of Fickled Winds

You may be familiar with the story of Mann Gulch. Perhaps not. In Montana it is passed down as oral tradition. For smoke jumpers, the tragedy is the painful spasm that defines the birth of the profession. Most never heard of the story until Norman Maclean's brilliant treatment, Young Men and Fire, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1992.

Thirteen men burned to death that day. Cooley had done his job well, safely setting the crew on the north slope of the gulch, opposite the fire burning on the southern ridge. But it is here that in our story that we bid farewell and peace to Earl Cooley and move our attention to Wag Dodge.

After inspecting the fire, Dodge became concerned about the situation and began walking his men to the safety of the Missouri River which lay at one end of the gulch. Before they could make much progress the winds switched direction and carried the fire from the forest on the southern slope to the waist-high grass of the northern slope on which the men stood.

We learn many things from Maclean's story, and one thing in particular which is relevant to this moment in Mann Gulch. Fire, it seems, loves running through waist-high grass up a 76% grade. Men are different. The race to the northern ridge lasted about ten minutes. Two men made it over the top with the fire at their backs. Thirteen lay where their legs gave out or the fire out ran them.

Thank you Tio Tito, we hear you say. It is a compelling story, as tragedies so often are, and we're sure that Maclean's version is even better. But you haven't yet made the connection to marketing and we are beginning to fear that you never will.

Unfortunately you are correct dear readers. Maclean's telling of the story is greatly superior. Those who read it never forget it. And yes, we haven't connected the story to marketing, and we're not sure that we can, at least not to anyones satisfaction other than our own. But what we never expected, and you may not have either, is that the story of the race up the northern slope of Mann Gulch has inspired many to contemplations and explorations of insight and creativity.

Wag Dodge never made it to the top, and realizing the futility of the effort, gave up on his attempt. Let's bring some numbers into this story. When Dodge stopped he was about 200 yards short of the ridge, the wall of fire was about fifty feet high, about 250 feet deep, traveling about 700 feet per minute, and about 30 seconds behind him and the rest of the crew. As he stopped Dodge pulled a match out of his pocket, faced the fire and lit the grass at his feet. His fire grew quickly into an expanding ring. Dodge stepped into the burned-out center and called for his crew to follow him. No one had ever seen this tactic before, no one understood, and no one joined him. While we can't be sure what the other men were thinking, or if they were thinking at all, we can imagine that at some point in the previous few minutes, some ancient brain mechanism located just above the spinal cord had settled on "run" and "ridge" as the two words to govern all their decisions.

Robert Salley, seventeen years old at the time and the only member of the crew alive today, tells of his reaction to Dodge's actions:

"I saw him bend over and light a fire with a match. I thought, With the fire almost on our back, what the hell is the boss doing lighting another fire in front of us? We thought he must have gone nuts."

But as Sallee made it to the top of the ridge he turned back, and through the smoke saw Dodge lay face-down in the charred circle of the little fire he created. Dodge later estimated that the fire took about five minutes to pass over him, several times lifting him off the ground with its updraft.

What Happens in Montana...

As we wrote this post we were surprised to learn that the passing of Earl Cooley was picked up by the Economist and The Telegraph, both UK publications, one ridge, one ocean and 60 years from Mann Gulch, Montana. We credit the writing of Norman Maclean who, as we have said, has the ability to make the story part of your story.

But for Maclean, Mann Gulch was part of his story also. During World War I Maclean, then fifteen, worked for the Forest Service, and ran his own race with a fire up another Montana slope, winning by just enough to save his life but not his boots, which smoldered on his feet. And in August of 1949 Maclean was once again in Montana, and visited the site of the fire while it still smoked.

Ultimately the thirteen who died and even the three who survived became ghosts that Maclean couldn't escape. Maclean began writing Young Men and Fire at the age of 78, hoping to give the men of Mann Gulch a completed story to sum up their lives, as he put it, to make their story "not just a catastrophe, but a tragedy". And as he came to terms with his own mortality, the book is also an attempt by Maclean to find a story that helped him understand his life. We at marketmambo feel confident that we could recommend Young Men and Fire to our readers with little concern of disappointment.

And as we've already mentioned, we were surprised to discover that the story of Wag Dodge has captured the imagination of those interested in insight and creativity. While fifteen other men ran for their lives up a ridge, driven by the instinct inherent of flesh to preserve itself, Dodge stopped and did the unexplainable. He realized that the driving muscle of their legs would not save them. This was not a reasoned decision. Dodge did not stop and consider his options. He did not conduct a meeting or an idea generation session. Furthermore, and dear reader please keep this in mind, he was never trained to start an "escape fire", and in fact, no one in the Forest Service had ever heard of such a thing. Dodge had a moment of insight while all others were driven, and perhaps blinded, by instinct. At the inquiry established to investigate the event, Dodges only explanation was "it just seemed the right thing to do".

As those of you who have previously joined us at this post know, marketmambo is a place where I, Tito Mambo, work through the puzzles that rest uneasily in my mind. And here is why we have been called back to the post by the death of a firefighter, Earl Cooley, and have taken our readers inexplicably up the slope of a Montana gulch. In the most unlikely, yet the most dramatic, of situations, insight occurred, stripped of all fancy words and deep thinking, and revealed its most basic biological, primitive potential in all of us.

On the marketing dance floor, it is truly creativity and insight that drive the tune. Yet we cannot summon it on demand nor avoid it once it starts. We promise insight and creativity to others, and expect payment in return, but cannot explain it any better than the Greeks who, almost 3000 years ago, believed that insight came from a god singing into their ear.

We know that we rarely offer answers to the questions we raise and have made no attempt at an answer here. Perhaps this post is meant to help clarify the questions. What is insight? What is creativity? Where do they come from? And most importantly, what can we do to encourage the gods to sing in our ear. We hope to take on these questions in upcoming posts, and maybe a few more we couldn't anticipate. We have no plan, only inclination, which seems to be how we start most ventures in our life.

Mann Gulch is still today remote and inaccessible, and still littered with rattle snakes and still able to rise to over 100 degrees on an August afternoon. Some are drawn to the site by the ghosts and the story, some make it. If you ever make it to the north slope of Mann Gulch you'll find thirteen concrete crosses, each marking the spot where a man fell. These crosses were made and erected by Earl Cooley, who climbed the steep grade to maintain them until a few years before his death.

The Shitake Hits the Fan

2009-08-23T11:56:00.004-05:00

We must admit that we enjoy browsing the aisles of Whole Foods. The service is great, the products are high quality, and the variety...where else can you find a jar of Punjabi dipping sauce? But as much as we browse, as much as the dipping sauce may be the closest we could ever get to the Punjab, we have never purchased anything at Whole Foods. Never spent a penny.

Along with the great service, which is truly great, and the high quality, which is undoubtedly high, come high prices. The job of a curmudgeon has never been lucrative, and in this economy, there are many curmudgeons whose forums are facing foreclosure. Your Tio Tito shakes his fist only for the love of fist shaking. Ranting at the wind brings us no financial gain. And we understand and accept that service, quality and variety aren't free.

But we suspect that at Whole Foods you get, and pay for, more than this. As we pass the other customers, the ones actually putting food in their carts with the full intention of purchasing it, we get the sense that shopping at Whole Foods is more than shopping, more than filling the pantry. When a Whole Foods customer buys locally/organically grown broccoli at $2.19 per pound, they want to feel that they're the kind of people who buy locally/organically grown broccoli for $2.19 per pound. They want to know that the beans that they brew for their coffee are sourced from farmer cooperatives in Guatemala. When you're a customer of Whole Foods, your cash buys cachet. For los Mambos, when broccoli hits 99 cents per pound, we don't eat broccolli.

Now John Mackey, the CEO and co-founder of Whole Foods is facing a backlash from his customers who have a bent to blog. In a piece in last week's Wall Street Journal (here) Mackey shared his opinions on health care reform. Risking over-simplification, we will summarize that Mr. Mackey believes the federal government should play a secondary role to the choice and responsibilty of the health-care consumer.

Mackey provides the following preface before offering eight suggestions of his own for health-care reform:

"While we clearly need health-care reform, the last thing our country needs is a massive new health-care entitlement that will create hundreds of billions of dollars of new unfunded deficits and move us much closer to a government takeover of our health-care system. Instead, we should be trying to achieve reforms by moving in the opposite direction—toward less government control and more individual empowerment. Here are eight reforms that would greatly lower the cost of health care for everyone."

The spirit of his piece and his specific suggestions seem reasonable to us. In the long run, they may not be correct, may not be feasible, but they fall within the range that fits the space of adult political discussion. At least to us they do.

Mr. Mackey's piece has ignited an internet inferno. A Facebook page called "Boycott Whole Foods" (here) has gone up and as of this morning has nearly 25,000 fans, and so many postings that the moderators shut down the discussion last night so they could catch up. Whole Foods own public forum has a section dedicated to the debate. The chart below, courtesy of Technorati, shows the increase in blog activity on John Mackey over the past few weeks.

There are many things of which we are uncertain. First, we are uncertain of the proportion of this internet activity that is opposed to Mackey's comments, and that which supports them. There are just too many comments to count and no one has yet been kind enough to do that for us.

Our suspicion is that there are more comments against Mackey than for him. Even the other Whole Foods co-founder, Renee Lawson Hardy has posted a letter on the company forum disagreeing with Mackey and encouraging others to read the source texts of ObamaCare with an open mind "free from ideological clinging". (more here)

We are uncertain as to which of Mr. Mackey's points are the cause of the offense. Posts mention frustration with the Iraq War, the financial bailout, Whole Foods relationship with unions, and Mr. Mackey's contributions to Tom DeLay. We have been unable to find one critic that directly takes on a point in his opinion piece related to health care. We suspect they may be out there, but there's so little time. All posts end by vowing to find alternative sources for their groceries. Here is an excerpt from a writer at the Daily Kos, known as "DarkSyde":

"Mr. Mackey, you just shat all over your best customers. Given the years of pseudonymous postings on Yahoo finance slamming a competitor you were quietly trying to acquire at the time, double talk and unethical behavior arguably seems to be becoming a habit for you. So I will never, ever, shop at your stores again, unless you retract that op-ed, apologize for stabbing us in the back, or resign." (more here)

Mr. DarkSyde seems to express as best as possible the opposition's specific criticisms against Mackey's health care suggestions.

Dear readers, let us assure you that we make no attempt to judge Mr. Mackey's critics or his supporters. We are confused by much of the debate and issues of health care reform. Perhaps if we knew more, we too would be outraged.

We are also uncertain as to what the message is for corporate leaders who are inclined to share their point of view with the public. Blogging and twittering by executives has been encouraged in recent years. Tony Hsieh of Zappos is the poster boy. But those in the public who yesterday applauded openness from the exec suite are today's Jacobins who will terrorize those they disagree with. At least the guillotine was quick compared to the blogotine. We expect that there will be an increasing reluctance to openness by exec's who are unsure of the value of social media but quite sure of it's dangers.

But let's return to the beginning and something of which we're reasonably certain. Whole Foods is more than a grocery store, it's a place at which many people who share a relatively common outlook gather to express their faith through the sacrament of shopping. Sometimes we only see the power of a brand and the source of its power when the shared but unspoken assumptions of the relationship are violated.

The Fruits of Karma

2009-08-07T22:10:00.006-05:00

As inviolable as the law of gravity is the law of karma. Karma is a causal explanation for our lot in life. The idea of karma has a place in all of India's religions. It seems to work for them. As you pass through the cycles of becoming, the samsara, the quality of your deeds determines the form you take when reincarnated. If you're a kind goat herder, you may come back as a holy person. If you're a nasty goat herder, you may come back as the goat.

We at marketmambo believe that karma works not only over lifetimes, but also over shorter periods, such as weeks or days. If bad things happen to you on Wednesday, its probably because you did something bad on Monday. We were not raised in the Jain or Sikh or Hindu faith, but karma is nothing more than the admonition of the Apostle Paul who said "You reap what you sow", but more conveniently packaged in a handy two-syllable word. Hence we subscribe.

Let us explain and perhaps provide an excuse for our early digression on karma.

Karma I

In mid-July we followed the press coverage of one Matthew Robson, age 15 years and 7 months. Matthew is an intern at the London office of Morgan Stanley who wrote a short research brief entitled "How Teenagers Consume Media". The managers were so impressed with Matthew's brief that they published it. This week we had the time to read the brief and were impressed that something so insightful and thoughtful could have been written by one so young. Matthew's findings are based on his personal observations of the lifestyle of his friends. Science and rigor are absent from the brief, but we don't believe there is a strict correlation between numbers and truth.

We won't be reviewing Matthew's ideas here, but it is worth a read. Please follow this link if you'd like to see the actual three-page report. We'd like to mention one of his findings that drew the press coverage. In the brief Matthew states matter of factly that teenagers don't use twitter.

Most teenagers are heavily active on a combination of social networking sites. Facebook is the most common, with nearly everyone with an internet connection registered and visiting >4 times a week. Facebook is popular as one can interact with friends on a wide scale. On the other hand, teenagers do not use twitter. Most have signed up to the service, but then just leave it as they release (sic) that they are not going to update it (mostly because texting twitter uses up credit, and they would rather text friends with that credit). In addition, they realise that no one is viewing their profile, so their ‘tweets’ are pointless.

The rationale makes sense to us and we have no direct experience which would stir us to argue the position. Others in the press and blogoshere where less accepting because it wasn't substantiated by percent signs and decimal points.

Well now its is. In response to debate caused by the 15 year old's brief, Nielsen has released data from their NetRatings Panel (here) that shows that this teenager is smarter than most adults. According to Nielsen, despite the remarkable growth of twitter, only (here come the percent signs) 16% of twitter users are under 25, though that group as a whole makes up 25% of internet users. For those of you who have some history with media indices, this means that the under 25 group under indexes by 36%. We provide below the chart from Nielsen which shows the growth of twitter across all demographics.

We may take on the possible reason for this unexpected finding in a later post. But for now we offer up this incident to show how easy its is for an adult in a cubicle to dismiss the intelligence and insight that a teenager has about their own life. This is bigotry, ageism, karma.

Yes, karma. Let's call this instance Karma I, for there is another to be mentioned.

Karma II

We at marketmambo enjoy no smugness about karma's role in this affair because this week karma kept her keen eye on us as well. Careful readers of this blog may recall that in our post on the commercial success of Billy Mays, we facetiously blamed the arrogance and artistic pretenses of ineffective creative directors on the success of John Hughes, the writer/movie director. Sure enough Mr. Hughes also passed away this week (what a summer). The official cause was a heart attack, but for someone who is sensitive to the workings of karma, we can't help but feel that our post may have dislodged the clot that caused the infarction.

We'll label this as Karma II and make no attempt to shirk responsibility.

Let's be clear that we've enjoyed the work of Mr. Hughes from our first viewing of National Lampoon's Vacation. The script was based on Mr. Hughes own recollections of cross country trips he made with his family as a teenager. Hughes built much of his career on sensitively depicting the life and angst of teenagers, as in Ferris Beuller's Day Off and The Breakfast Club, and many teenagers in the audience responded.

We were moved by the recollections of one blogger who was a teen in the mid-eighties. After seeing The Breakfast Club, Alison Byrne Fields wrote the director to tell him of the effect it had on her life. Unexpectedly, the young Ms. Fields and Hughes began a two-year relationship as pen pals. Now the author of the blog We'll Know When We Get There, Ms. Fields writes of her correspondence in the post Sincerely, John Hughes. We recommend that you give it a glance.

We believe that we are very early in our own samsara. We are still in the process of becoming. At any rate we are far from completion. In fact, we wouldn't be surprised if we gained a pair of legs in our next incarnation. Perhaps even two pair. Tell your children to be kind to goats, and just to be safe, flys also.

We need not have such worries for Mr. Hughes. He will enjoy the fruit of his karma. He found a way to connect with people at a very trying time of their lives, and those people still appreciate him to this day. Not bad for an ex-advertising hack.

More Than Meets the Eye

2009-07-31T12:24:00.014-05:00

You auto be in pictures...

Nothing says summer like the big budget blockbusters, and I, Tito Mambo and the little ones—ah, but not so little anymore—have enjoyed each and everyone of them. We've seen Ice Age 3 twice, Harry Potter (Five?) once. And there's the latest Transformers, G-Force this weekend and soon after GI Joe. Has anyone noticed that both Transformers and GI Joe were toys before they were movies? Here's wishing you a Hasbro summer.

And before they were toys that could turn from cars into robots, Transformers was a Marvel comics series. The Autobots and the Decepticons come to earth from another planet. When they arrive, the Autobots gain the power to transform into cars, err, autos. The Decepticons, who can transform into other stuff, run riot over the planet in search of an energy source. The Autobots join forces with humans to resist the Decepticons. But I'm sure you remember all this.

One Autobot in particular, Bumble Bee, the spunky younger brother of another Autobot, befriends the teenage human hero, Sam. At various times, Bumblebee has been killed, only to be reborn. In the first movie BB can talk, in the most recent he can't. In the comics, Bumble Bee is a Volkswagon, but becomes a Camaro for the big screen. The only constants for Bumblee Bee are his yellow and black coloring, his youthful determination to prove himself, and his ability to protect his human friends from destruction.

Finally Tito, we hear you thinking, a topic we will enjoy: film. Sorry, my friends, but this is the end of the reel. We mention films, in general, and Transformers in particular because of Bumble Bee, especially Bumble Bee the Camaro. It seems that the early part of this summer has also belonged to Camaro, not just Hasbro.

GM, who has seen overall sales drop 40% this year, has a hit car on its hands with the comeback Camaro. For a car that stopped production seven years ago, it is now bringing excitement back to the Chevrolet line and welcome relief to dealers, who have sold about 10,000 Camaros in June alone, and have 13,000 more on back order.

How can a throwback brand like the Camaro bring fresh traffic to show rooms when otherwise only the promise of a $4000 cash for clunkers check is moving buyers from the safety of their sofas? It seems that great brands, the ones that live in the heart, are hard to kill.

Power Struggle

The Camaro was born in 1967 as Chevy's answer to the wildly popular Ford Mustang. The brand was in keeping with Chevrolet's inclination to attach names to new models that began with “C”: Corvette, Chevette, Corvair. When reporters asked product managers to explain what exactly was a Camaro, they answered, “a small, vicious animal that eats Mustangs”.

Among those who care about such things, the Camaro is considered more of a Pony car, more of a sports car, than a true muscle car such as the GTO. The first Camaro was based on the compact Nova frame. It sold for a base price of about $2500. A few more dollars got you the big engine and 375 horses of pony-power that made it feel like a full-sized muscle car.

Like muscle cars the Camaro struggled with the onslaught of more stringent emission standards in the early '70's. Sacrificing power for compliance, the 1975 top-end model offered a very practical, very boring, 155 horsepower engine.

The Camaro reclaimed some of it's lost glory in the mid-eighties with the introduction of the IROC model, named after the International Race of Champions. But the car was at its best standing still. With an aesthetic make-over and a middle-aged engine, it looked powerful only when waiting at red lights. Unfortunately the Camaro brand became almost synonymous with IROC, and when the sponsorship of the race was taken over by Dodge in 1990, the Camaro lost even the veneer of authority. Chevy produced the car long enough to fulfill its agreement with the Canadian government which had offered GM attractive tax breaks to host the Camaro plant. In 2002, with the agreement expired and a near obsolete frame design, GM's car czar Bob Lutz announced the brand was to be placed on “hiatus”.

From the Ashes

We observed in our last posting that Billy Mays would enjoy a period of immortality, an after-life, as the brands that he pitched worked through their remaining store of produced spots. In reality this is not immortality or after-life, not as one would hope for, as the video images of Mr. Mays provide none of the satisfaction of the real thing to himself or his loved ones.

But are brands burdened by the same corporal constraints as people? Can a brand, a thing of the mind and the heart, return from the distant shore that becomes the final inescapable home of us mortals, who appear in flesh but once? Friends of marketmambo, we had never considered this question, and likely would have assumed that once a brand departs, or is placed on “hiatus”, especially after years of steady decline into irrelevancy, there would be little hope for a fresh incarnation.

One who believes in the rebirth of brands is GM's Bob Lutz, the same man who had euthanized the gracelessly aging Camaro. In 2006, Mr. Lutz began development of a new Camaro concept car, which he nurtured through several versions. In March of this year, the reborn Camaro—officially model year 2010--went into production with a new frame and a new, more efficient assembly plant.

What hasn't been made new is the car itself. In fact, GM found inspiration in earlier models for the new Camaro's style and engine. It's big, almost two-tons of car. The hood is long and low like a traditional muscle car. It's fenders bulge like a tight t-shirt stretched over well-worked biceps. The $31,000 SS model with the V8 engine puts out 426 horses of very impractical power.

Not long ago we wrote about GM's decision to end its Pontiac line. Traditionally, the Pontiac was built with big Detroit engines, American Muscle we called it. The Pontiac GTO did more than any other brand to launch the muscle car era, and the demise of Pontiac was a long-delayed symbol of the era's passing. The Camaro has made its comeback when the preferences of auto shoppers and the business of auto makers aligns with small and practical, when pious Prius drivers savor the smugness of their cultish correctitude, when Chevy waits for salvation from a hero yet to come, the Volt.

Bob Lutz has recently taken over marketing for GM. Does the success of the Camaro suggest a special marketing savvy on the part of Mr. Lutz? So far we have been unimpressed with the efforts, certainly the marketing spend seems unimpressive. Maybe the answer doesn't lie in current marketing. Maybe, like the old tag for the Transformer toys, there's more than meets the eye.

Mr. Lutz seems to understand the power of well-loved brands. A generation of men, maybe two, came of age with the Camaro as their first auto-infatuation. For many, their desire went unfulfilled at the time. But older, wealthier, and as passionate as ever, the Camaro reappears, buff and bulging, among its bulemic siblings.

Also, Mr. Lutz seems to understand that for the Camaro to be successful, the car would need to go beyond aesthetics. The new Camaro offers as powerful an engine as it ever did in its history. The brand had failed as its engine atrophied, it became a name plate without substance to reinforce its heritage. Thank you to Mr. Lutz and GM for actually offering a product that lives up to its name. Most marketers today don't understand their brands value or the link between the brand value and its design.

But perhaps most of all, Mr. Lutz understands then when you follow the herd, all you'll likely see are bovine behinds. There is no greater opportunity than the moment your competition righteously marches off in the same direction, especially when by doing so they've turned their backs on a group of customers who are hesitant to follow.

The Boys of Summer

Twenty-five years ago, “Papa” John Schnatter sold his '72 Camaro to fund his new business, Papa John's Pizza. Schnatter is off on a road trip this summer, in a replica of that Camaro to find the real thing. He's also offering a $25,000 reward for anyone who helps him find it. At the time of this posting, we believe he is in Denver. You can follow his progress at papasroadtrip.com if you like.

In June, Chevrolet sponsored “Gay Day at the Movies” at the Hollywood Cinema, featuring a preview of the new Transformers movie. The event was supported with youtube videos of “bumble bee boys” clad only in black and yellow speedos washing a new Camaro. Chevy provide the Camaro free of charge for the video. Unfortunately, the video is no longer available. We're not sure if our friends at comicbookqueers.com had any reaction to this, but if not, we extend an invitation to them to post one here.

Finally, Chevy has announced that it will offer a Transformers version of its Camaro. For less than $1000, you can upgrade your purchase to Bumble Bee yellow and black. Chevy appropriately made it's announcement at last week's Comic-Con in San Diego.

We apologize for our inability to provide access to the bumble bee boys washing the new Camaro. Hopefully, we can make up for this. In the mid-eighties, about the same time Chevy introduced the middle-aged IROC, the same time John Schnatter started his business, a mature Don Henley released “The Boys of Summer”. In the song, Henley meditates on the lost passion of his younger days, and more broadly on our sometimes fruitless attempts to recapture this passion.

Out on the road today I saw a deadhead sticker
On a cadillac
A little voice inside my head said, dont
Look back. you can never look back.
I thought I knew what love was,
What did I know?
Those days are gone forever
I should just let them go

Legend has it that this line was inspired by the Grateful Dead sticker on the bumper of the Cadillac hearse owned by Joe Walsh. This may not be true, but it should be.

For those who wish the original, here is the link to the Henley video. But we've embedded below the 2003 version by The Ataris, who changed “deadhead” to “Black Flag” so as to be more relevant to their generation. But like the new Camaro, this version is updated but captures the essence of the original. Please enjoy.

Mortal Coil Shuffler, Act Now!

2009-07-15T22:04:00.017-05:00

June, the traitorous month.

We fall victim to the pleasure of it's languid slumber. The last frost has retreated from the field. Brown becomes green. The month offers the days that nearly escape the need for night. It is the month, we are told, which is ideal for matrimony. We need present no more evidence of it's infidelity.

What dreams accompany this slumber? This year they were the disquiet caused by the reminders of our own mortality. We closed the final days of June with the passing of Michael, Farrah, and Ed. Death, at its cruelest, often steals from us only in pairs. Jimi and Janice. Bobby and Martin. We leave to you, the faithful of marketmambo, to weigh your own grief at the loss of this trio.

But your Tio Tito would like to speak another name for our remembrance: Billy Mays. Billy, as we're sure you know, also fell in June. America's favorite pitchman passed quietly, as he slept, from heart failure, at his home in Tampa. He was close to our heart as well as our hearth.

Billy was a throwback. He learned his hard-sell style of pitching on the boardwalks of Atlantic City in the early '70's, when he was taken under the wings of established but anonymous hawkers. Billy's booming voice hit the airwaves when he was asked to sell Orange Glo on the Home Shopping Network in 1996. He went on to sell a variety of products, though he's best remembered for his work for OxiClean.

Billy joined the Mambo family in April of this year as his TV show, Pitchmen, became a favorite of mine and little Tito. He teamed up with his long-time business partner and fellow pitchman Anthony Sullivan to enthusiastically champion the products which represented the dreams and passions of some entrepreneurial inventor. One week it was slippers that cleaned the floor, the following week a device for removing stripped screws. Each episode showed Billy and Anthony developing the campaign from initial selling idea to production of the spot to evaluation of the return.

Pitchmen was something of a classroom for DRTV hopefuls. Billy and Anthony had three rules for determining if a product could be sold in a two-minute spot. First, the product had to solve a problem experienced frequently in everyday life. Second, the product had to sell at a price that eliminated any barrier to an impulsive purchase. Twenty-dollars was often the number which was associated with success. Finally, the product had to lend itself to a dramatic demonstration that proved its effectiveness.

While these rules are useful, its unlikely that anyone following them by rote would have the same success as Billy. For what sold the products, more than the media schedule, the pricing, or the products themselves was Billy. He was passionate about the products he pitched and found a way to transfer his passion to the screen. He was serious about what he did but not serious about himself. As would be appropriate, Billy was laid to rest in an OxiClean shirt and his pallbearers wore the same blue shirts that had become Billy's trademark.

We are surprised that no one has made what would seem to be the obvious connection between Billy and another of the recently departed, Ed McMahon. Those of us who have passed a certain minimum age will remember that Mr. McMahon was also a pitchman. No, we're not referring to his emeritus work for senior insurance, but his prime of life pitching for brands such as Alpo and Budweiser. Ed did live spots for these brands while he was the sidekick on the Tonight Show, sometimes with unexpected results. Below is a link to one such adventure. (If video doesn't appear below for any reason, click here for a direct link)

Please friends, absorb this paragraph of the post slowly, for Billy has left us with a message, a moral, that we all must learn from. TV sells. Or at least it can sell. Advertising became synonymous with TV commercials, and as the value of the TV commercial fell into disrepute, as the price of TV airtime has fallen, it has taken the entire industry for a ride. Deservedly so. We blame John Hughes. Yes John Hughes the writer or National Lampoon's Vacation, the director of Home Alone. Some may not realize that he was a creative director at Leo Burnett in Chicago, who turned his cinematic side interests into a lucrative career and carved a possible path of salvation for many other advertising creatives who felt that selling products was a waste of their talent. After John Hughes every TV spot became a 30 second indie film, a pay-off to a “this is what I'm doing until Hollywood returns my calls” story. Selling took a back seat to cinematic pretense. Billy used TV, the moribund medium, to pitch without shame or apology, and along the way he made a lot of money for himself and his clients.

If you missed it the first time: TV sells.

Billy will enjoy some momentary immortality. He'll be seen in a few TV spots that had already been produced. Two will be for the Mighty brand, in this case Mighty Putty and Mighty Tape. His family approves of the post mortem appearance by Billy, sure that he'd like to go out pitching. Billy would also be pleased to know that since his death, sales of Mighty products are up 30% in retail outlets. Church and Dwight, owners of Orange Glo, have decided to not air their remaining Billy Mays spots.

And only this week the Discovery Channel announced that because of the success of the first season of Pitchmen, they'll be renewing the show for a second season, this time with Billy Mays II as the on-air partner of Anthony Sullivan.

If you'd like a sampling of Billy Mays at his finest, the Discovery Channel will be re-airing Pitchmen: A Tribute to Billy Mays on Friday, July 24^th.

Readers may have noticed the allusions to another Billy littering this post, Billy Shakespeare. Brushes with mortality put us in a reflective mood. If the mortal coil shuffler ever becomes available, we are compelled to ask, who would fardels bear?

We would like to leave you on a different note, returning to our opening attack on the month just past, the month that marked the passing of so many. Please savor “Summer Wind” by clicking the link below, and Frank Sinatra will share his feelings on the loss of one he loved, made appropriate to the season.

Summer Wind

American Muscle

2009-04-30T08:50:00.012-05:00

In many ways, a significant part of our life is spent in developing a facility with meaning. We learn words and how they correspond with the world, we learn letters and how they compose words, and we learn the importance of context, so that we can discern the difference between "hoarse" and "horse" by the other words that go around them. More subtly, we learn that words mean more than simply their correspondence to the things we see. They accumulate all sorts of connotations and emotions that allow words to become weapons or tools of art. Thus "muscle" is different than "mussel" and "muscle" different than something like "American muscle".

Tio Tito, I hear you say, you've lost us more quickly than usual. Should we excuse ourselves now to avoid a cryptic digression on linguistics, epistemology and semiotics? Fear not, dear readers, and have patience.

This week General Motors, once the Atlas of economic and political muscle, had to finally concede it was now the 98 pound weakling on the beach, and that as unsatisfying as a face full of sand could be, it must sometimes be accepted without protest. In order to receive the federal funds necessary to limp on to its next crisis, GM announced that it is slashing its workforce, its production facilities, slashing its dealership network, all while admitting to the world and to itself that it will at best be a second-tier contender in the future of the auto industry.

And amidst these announcements that are portents of painful personal and community disruption, was another with less real weight but some cultural meaning. GM will discontinue production of it's Pontiac brand.

As we passed through the stage of accumulating the meaning of words to accumulating the meaning of things, one of the first symbols we learned to decipher was that of the automobile. When a man in our neighborhood purchased a Ford Mustang, he immediately became more appealing, though his belly bulged as much as ever. Buy a Dodge Charger and he received a complementary virility makeover, with just a touch of dangerous to flavor the bargain. This could have been done earlier with a brand that ended with "inni" or or even "ati", but this was American sex appeal. No cravats, no silly hats or sillier mustaches, but blue-jeaned, white t-shirted, beef-fed, broad-backed, "Yo Stella" Stanley Kowalski sex appeal. The sex appeal of American muscle, of American muscle cars.

And of all the American muscle cars, none was more broad-backed, etc. than the Pontiac GTO.

The muscle car era lasted only from, let's say, 1964 to about 1973. No standard definition is accepted, but they typically were mid-sized or larger frames with over-sized engines. They had to seat four or five, anything smaller was a sports car. Some say that the Mustang was too small to be a true muscle car, but we feel this makes the difference about numbers when in this case the numbers don't really matter.

Muscle cars were boxy in overall shape and big across the hips. They were not lithe. Hoods often seemed excessively long. They were not stubby. They were designed to convey one thing: excessive, unnecessary, straight-line speed. Lithe would have conveyed agility, stubby would have shouted stability.

The Pontiac GTO was launched in 1964. with a big engine in a mid-sized Tempest body. Pontiac had a reputation for offering big engines, and had nurtured associations with professional racing. Then in the early '60's GM decreed that it's divisions stop race sponsorship. John DeLorean, then the head engineer at Pontiac, developed the GTO to look as if it was built for street racing. Many at GM thought it wouldn't sell, but it did. Other muscle cars followed.

The muscle car lost popularity in the early 1970's undermined by the OPEC oil embargo, stricter emission standards, and Ralph Nader's pesky insistence that cars have the ability to turn safely at any speed. Passing the econobox era, Americans would once again return to big cars: SUV's, Minivans, and if those weren't big enough, Hummers. This big wasn't sexy big but more stature big, more car as real estate, more big as bloated big, more paunchy than broad-backed.

According to a 2006 Pew survey, 23% of drivers considered their cars "something special", as more than just "transportation". That number is down from 43% in 1991. We don't know how many would have agreed in 1981 or 1971. We could guess. But in 2002, an Atlanta car collector sold his 1971 Plymouth Barracuda for an even million dollars. At the 2006 Barrrett-Jackson car auction a 1970 Chevrolet Chevelle convertible with a 454-cubic-inch V-8, sold for $1.2 million. American muscle cars are growing in value much more than any "atti" or "ini".

Is this the way the Mambos would spend a million dollars? We're confident we'll never know for sure but pretty sure we wouldn't. But price lives somewhere near the intersection of Desire and Scarcity. For many, American muscle cars mean something which is still dear, but otherwise no longer available.

Our broad-backed hero, Stanley Kowalski, lived in this neighborhood, just down the street at the corner of Desire and Elyssian Fields.

While it might of been an understandable connection to take a post about the Pontiac GTO to "Little GTO" by Ronnie and the Daytonas, the Mambo mind is not that linear. We went to a cult film classic from 1971, "Vanishing Point". The hero of that movie, coincidentally also known as Kowalski, is driving his muscle car cross-country, escaping from a society that has given him only disappointment. His car of choice is a Dodge Challenger, not a GTO, but regardless of brand, the movie seemed to capture the then new world of declining American muscle.

Please enjoy the trailer below.

Jackman Decides

2009-04-27T16:24:00.002-05:00

Last week in "Love146" we reported on Hugh Jackman's Twitter contest to choose the non-profit to receive a $100,000 donation. He announced his decision Friday morning.

Mr. Jackman actually decided to split his donation between two organizations. The first, "Operation of Hope" arranges surgeries for children born with facial deformities in developing countries. The other, "Charity: Water" supports projects providing fresh water to people in developing countries. Charity: Water was also the non-profit that received $250,000 from the first-ever Twestival, which we also reported on earlier this year (see "Twestival").

Our Tweet went to support Love146, but we feel no disappointment. Mr. Jackman's donation will make the lives of some people a little better, which is all we can hope for.

As we read today of Mr. Jackman's decision, we couldn't help but notice that coverage of his donation was swamped by the coverage of his denial that he's gay. Not being gay is much more news worthy than philanthropy.

We also found it interesting that Charity: Water has now received two significant contributions from Twitter-based fundraising. Is this the non-profit darling of the Twitteratti? Charity: Water has several experienced marketers on its board, and its our inclination to credit skill before luck.

Love146

2009-04-23T13:16:00.010-05:00

We at marketmambo are about to send a Tweet to Hugh Jackman. Yes that Hugh Jackman. The Wolverine guy. The sexiest-man-alive guy. The guy about to give away $100,000.

This week saw Ashton Kutcher become the first Twitter user to top one-million followers (why can I no longer say or write those words without the voice of Dr. Evil in my head?). Also, making the rise of Twitter somehow more official, Oprah joined and immediately shut down the service with her celebrity-sized drain on the system's resources.

Lost in all this is the more quiet gesture of Hugh Jackman, who has promised to donate $100,000 to the charity which is the subject of the most compelling Tweet. Mr. Jackman will make his decision tomorrow.

We will send a Tweet in support of Love146, an international group working against the sex trafficking of children. We chose this group not because its mission is more worthy than others; we're sure all are. We are supporting this group because we follow the blog of a company called “Brains on Fire”, which has helped Love146 with its branding and marketing. BoF has asked readers to Tweet Mr. Jackman beginning today at 1:46 et to make the case for Love146. We will do our small part. If you have a Twitter account and the inclination, so can you.

We applaude BoF for their passion for their client that goes beyond revenue. Whatever they are called in the future, the things that used to be called agencies have the power to do well and do good. Relationships like these will make our professional lives more tolerable as other rewards are withdrawn from the business.

It's also interesting to see bloggers or Twitterers use the capital of their social networks to mobilize support for a worthy cause. It makes the often insipid content of tweets and posts seem more like an investment than an indulgence. I, tito mambo, have very few followers on Twitter, but our loving sister Lena demonstrated her generous heart by launching a tweet to hers. Thank you once again Lena.

If you'd like to Tweet Mr. Jackman, you can: @realhughjackman.

If you'd like to learn more about Love146 please visit their website. You can also view the short video below.

Love146-The History

Finally, if you'd like to visit the BoF blog (which is much more interesting than marketmambo) go to Brains On Fire Blog.

BaRock Star

2009-04-22T10:27:00.002-05:00

We at marketmambo never tire in pursuit of our mission to watch over the dance between marketers and consumers, and are never satisfied with noting only "what" happened, without some attempt at determining the "why".

That is, until now.

We recently noticed news coverage of a decision by Walgreens to remove Chia Obamas from their shelves in Chicago and Tampa. The company decided that the figurine was "inapproriate" after receiving complaints that it's green sprouting Afro was racist.

Undeterred, Joseph Pedott, head of Joseph Marketing and founder of Chia Pets, has begun negotiations with other retailers. Mr. Pedott expects Chia Obama to be his company's biggest seller and promises retailers that "As soon as they can take them, we'll send them".

Most bloggers we've come across are spouting indignation over the sprouting ceramic. Maybe this is just the outcome we should expect for the most intensively marketed president in US history.

For those of you who lack the patience to wait for a Chia Obama in a local store, please go to Amazon.com where you can get one for your own for less than $20. Better yet, go directly to chiaobama.com where you can choose between the "Happy" and "Determined" versions. We found the site's parody of presidential rhetoric to be an interesting attempt to balance self-promotion and satire.

And we leave it to you, dear readers, to decipher the cause and implications of Chia Obama.

The Watch on the Rind

2009-04-13T13:36:00.009-05:00

We were fortunate to have as friends and colleagues several of the people responsible for the leadership of the Morton Salt company. Fine people all, and a very interesting business. Tito, you will surely ask, it's salt; what could possibly be interesting about salt? Well, like most businesses, Morton had its challenges, its complexities. But for the purposes of this post, it is interesting also because it has a memorable and beloved icon, the Morton Salt girl.

Let's Hear It for the Girl

Long before any of us were alive, salt was salt, as it is today. But for a short period at the the beginning of the last century, Morton had a better salt. Salt, it seems, is very good at absorbing the humidity in the air. When it does it turns into a solid brick that needs to be broken and pulverized before each use. That is, it did until Morton added magnesium carbonate to their salt which allowed it to flow freely even in the dampest weather.

Please be patient dear readers, this is coming to a point, and one in fact which may be lost on some marketers today.

Morton asked the Doner Agency to develop advertising to inform the world of their breakthrough. Doner developed the Morton icon, the little girl carrying an umbrella in one hand and an upturned container of salt, spilling freely, in the other. They also added the tagline "When it rains, it pours".

You see none of us, or perhaps more accurately, few of us, know this fact about salt, or about Morton's innovation, or need to know. All salt companies now add a little something to their table salt, an "anti-caking agent", which allows it to flow freely. Those drawing breath today do not know a world with salt that cakes. Yet almost one hundred years later, Morton still uses the same tagline, and the same icon, freshened to match the progress of fashion, on its blue round containers of salt.

And while Morton spends very little on advertising (about $4 million per year the last time we checked), it still dominates the salt category and draws about a 30% price premium compared to its competitors. Same product as the competitors, same container, no heavy marketing spend, a no longer relevant tagline, but a 30% price premium.

The fine people at Morton Salt know all this, and they know that women love the little girl. When they were small, they saw the icon in their mother's kitchen, and when they use it today, their daughters see the icon also. It may be salt, but to them the little girl represents quality, and timelessness, connection, love, and the care displayed by their mother.

The last time a little girl worked this hard was at a Nike shoe factory in China.

Please glance at the evolution of the little girl icon below and think of the great forebearance of these leaders of the Morton Salt company. Do you detect anywhere the sweaty, grasping hand of a CMO looking to make their mark?

Draw the Short Straw

Our friends at Morton have reappeared in our thoughts recently, precipitated by news coverage of the plight of Tropicana orange juice, its redesgned container, and Peter Arnell, whose Arnell Group was charged with refreshing the brand's imagery.

Tropicana Pure Premium orange juice, a PepsiCo brand, has been the leader in their section of the supermarket for many years because of it's product quality, heavy advertising spending (reportedly $35 million annually), and a stable of loyal brand fans. With flat growth in the overall category, the company looked to new advertising and new packaging to help grow sales.

We at marketmambo have never impressed anyone with our design judgment, but to our eye the new Tropicana package looked more appropriate for a generic store brand. Gone is the familiar straw piercing the orange, now replaced with an image of juice in a glass. Isn't orange juice, regardless of the brand, typically served in a glass? The new type treatment loses its tropical references and is placed vertically and to the side. Tropicana branding now appears secondary to "100% orange".

We don't know if others agree with our reaction, but the new Tropicana packaging has not met with the hoped-for success. During the first two months of this year, the period of the launch of the new design, unit sales of Tropicana fell 20% and total dollar sales dropped $33 million. Bloggers and their readers were unforgiving of the makeover given their brand. According to Neil Campbell, president of Tropicana North America "We underestimated the deep emotional bond...The straw and orange have been there a long time, but people have not necessarily had a huge connection to them". Mr. Campbell has announced that consumers should expect to see the old version of the container return to the shelves shortly.

The new container design was the work of the Arnell Group, which last year took over the advertising for the business from Element 79. For so young of a year, Arnell had already received much criticism for its work on Pepsi's flagship cola brand. The redesigned Pepsi logo launched with great fanfare for the Super Bowl, and some say, bore too close a resemblance to the logo used by the Obama presidential campaign. Since then, an internal Arnell branding document has circulated entitled "Breathtaking Design Strategy" that positioned the agency's Pepsi work as the latest manifestation of historically great design which includes Pythagoras, Da Vinci, and Arnell's immediate predecessor in this lineage, Le Corbusier.

Mr. Arnell has not commented on the "Breathtaking" document, but regarding the negative reception of the redesigned Tropicana logo has said "I'm incredibly surprised by the reaction".

But we can imagine the pleasure in many hearts in Atlanta. Coca-Cola's Minute-Maid has grown in sales, not quite gulp for gulp, as Tropicana has stumbled. And though twenty years have passed, old-timers at the company can take perverse satisfaction that Tropicana has become PepsiCo's "New Coke".

__Links__________________________________________________

For the article including the quotes from Mr. Arnell and Mr. Campbell, click here.

And to view the Arnell "Breathtaking Design Strategy" document, click here.

The Fleecing of the Masses

2009-04-07T00:19:00.009-05:00

Our cousin, Lola Mambo, recently invited us to a high-end make-up demonstration. We were confident that we were included unintentionally through an errant email click, but still felt the need to decline formally, with regrets of course. Lola was understanding of our response and invited us instead to another social event she was organizing, a Snuggie pub crawl.

The image to the right is not from Lola's soiree. But we do believe it may likely be a dream-fragment from the slumbering mind of the person responsible for Snuggie marketing.

Snuggies have been a contentious topic in the Mambo household since last Fall, when the promise of cutting-edge blanket technology arrived with the change of the season. Most of the family was intrigued by Snuggies, especially our wonderful daughter who has as many words to capture the nuances of blankets as eskimos have for snow. I, Tito, have never been dissatisfied with our current blankets, except for the occasional complaint of too short or too thin, neither of which were uniquely solved by the Snuggie. Besides, the TV advertising which supported the launch depicted cult-like groups of Snugginistas in social settings, each uniformly clad in this blanket with sleeves. Was it merely a coincidence that this product began distribution almost 30 years to the day after the mass suicide at Jonestown?

Don't dismiss the possibility just yet.

The Snuggie campaign has been so successful and the marketing so lauded that one could imagine even this detail had been covered in the marketing plan. The basic strategy for Snuggie-like products (think Sham-Wow!) is to break even in the direct-response television launch and then make the profit with the sales that eventually come from the shelves of retailers. Snuggies have already made a profit through direct, where they sell for $14.99. The sales from retailers such as Walgreens, where the product is listed for $19.99 is just gravy. Since October, over 4 million Snuggies have been sold. Reports are that in some Walgreen's the product is selling out of the stocker's hands, before ever making it to the shelf.

What accounts for the remarkable sales of the Snuggie? Some suggest that it's just the case of a product whose time had come. Maybe while we all have been waiting on the the promise of a better mousetrap, a revolution in blanketry was brewing unnoticed.

Perhaps some of the success can be attributed to good fortune. The Snuggies launch hit the air as other marketers were pulling out of cable tv advertising, leaving a lot of unused time selling at a deep discount. This allowed All-star Marketing Group, the company that markets Snuggies, to buy more and better time than it could have otherwise expected.

But what about this Snuggie pub crawl? Lola's crawl won't be the first en blanket. SPC's (how often can I write Snuggie pub crawl?) are a nation-wide phenonomenom, or trend, or fad. The accompanying picture is from a recent SPC in San Francisco (thank you to the SF Chronicle). A highlight of the event was the Snuggie fashion show in which contestants were awarded prizes for the most creative modification of their Snuggie. A portion of the proceeds went to charity. An SPC will be held in Chicago on April 18th. We understand that tickets for this event have already sold-out. The Washington, DC SPC was canceled this week because of a lack of organizational support. An SPC may be coming to your town. Those of you considering creating your own be warned: just as the cool of Fall made the Snuggie attractive, the warming of Spring will likely make any trailing SPC's a sweaty, smelly mess.

We have a warm blanket and a story. All we are missing is a hug and a moral to the story. We'll first offer up our attempt at the latter. One moral to this story is that when the God of marketing smiles upon you, consider yourself fortunate and cash the checks quickly. As we mentioned, All-Star Marketing was fortunate to find themselves able to buy tv time at direct-to-you prices. And they were equally fortunate that their advertising was, let's face it, just cheesey enough that the spots and the product became references for easy laughs at the office, and became a prop in a nation-wide goof.

But a more important moral to the story is that in a year when things just aren't selling, after a superbowl that showcased mostly mediocre advertising, the creative that is receiving the most attention is some low-cost drtv. EFFIES are nice, a Cannes Lion is great, but an ad that actually sells may be the greatest award that a creative could have on their reel.

Oh, and as for the hug, I would, if only I could.

__Addendum 4/9___________________________________________

After this post went live we received a note from our sister Lena Mambo and her friend Nick. It included a link to a Gizmodo post that provides a thorough of the Snuggie, the Slanket, and other blanket with sleeves options. If your interested, here's the 'lankie link as Lena calls it:

click here

__Links__________________________________________________

Of course, here is a link to the tv commercial.

For more pictures from the San Francisco pub crawl, click here.

For information on the upcoming Chicago SPC, click here.

For a glimpse at all things Snuggie, click here.

__Thanks________________________________________________

Finally, thank you Miguel for encouragment on this post.

Fish Story

2009-04-01T22:58:00.013-05:00

Has it really been a whole year? It seems so much more recent when we posted our thoughts on companies which play an April Fool's Day hoax on their customers (Gratuitous Not Included). We referred to them as "marketing gestures without expectation of reciprocation" and admired the spirit of offering a momentary morsel of delight unmotivated by financial gain. We believe that such gestures have a significant effect on the relationship between the brand and its fans.

And so today we awoke in anticipation of the gift's that we would find under our April Fool's Day tree. Google did not disappoint us with their launch today of Gmail Autopilot, a service that can automatically create a response to inbound emails.

As more and more everyday communication takes place over email, lots of people have complained about how hard it is to read and respond to every message. This is because they actually read and respond to all their messages.

Autopilot has two great features which will keep it ahead of any competitors. It can "learn" from the emails you actually write and mimic your style of composition. It also offers a control panel that allows you to adjust the brevity, tone, and propensity for typos of your "responses".

Perhaps our favorite new internet service of the day is Yahoo Ideological Search

Until now, many Web search users were offended by the facts, pages, articles, and blogs in their search results that contradicted their own personal beliefs and values.

With Yahoo's solution, users simply indicate their political leanings before searching the internet and the findings are appropriately tuned to reinforce your view of the world. This one could be a money maker.

But our overall favorite of the day goes once again to National Public Radio for this year's coverage of whale farming in central Illinois. What we especially enjoy about NPR's entries are their subtle ability to ratchet up the absurdity of the story as it progresses. In this case we let slip past us the notion of whale farming in Illinois. We became suspicious when a town citizen finished his list of whale farming benefits with his use of whale bone to build a porch. It wasn't until the story side-barred into the the success of a local college in training the whales to sing in three-part harmony that we realized we'd been had. Of course all of this was delivered with the same gravitas and sincerity given to all NPR stories.

We offer here a link to the NPR podcast. Be honest: how long before you begin to doubt the credibility of the story?

Farm-raised whales

And of course the more important question is what can the brands you use do to delight you?
=========================
Other hoax linx

Gmail Autopilot

Yahoo Ideological Search

The Keys to the Candy Shop

2009-03-18T15:45:00.015-05:00

Yesterday, I made a late night visit to our freezer in search of ice cream. I found a container of neapolitan—you know, the kind that combines chocolate, vanilla and strawberry in one container. What was left for me was one vertical vein of strawberry. You see, Mrs. Mambo has always preferred chocolate, to the exclusion of other flavors. When we purchase neapolitan ice cream she first strip mines the chocolate. The following day the vanilla will disappear, to be consumed under a sludge of chocolate syrup. All this is fine with me, as I have always been fan of fruit flavors.

Oh, mi amigos! We again try your patience with irrelevant information. But you see, we feel the need to provide you with this background to help you appreciate our excitement over the recent news coverage of Skittles and their very new website. It is a rare and fortunate coincidence when our professional interests and personal failings intersect.

On March 2^nd of this year, Mars Corp. launched the new website for Skittles. This “website” was nothing more than a widget, almost a small menu bar, that floated above the Twitter page for Skittles. The menu included links to the Skittles' Facebook page, the Skittles' wikipedia article, the and the Skittles' YouTube channel. And yes, there was a menu item that linked to some information about the candy that was provided by the company.

Many marketers have begun monitoring or managing their brand's buzz on social media. Many have made social interaction a prominent feature of their site. But to our knowledge, Skittles.com was the first site from a major brand that turned the majority of their content over to their friends and foes on the web. We include below an image of the Skittles “site” as it appeared when launched.

We have yet to come across an explanation of the strategy either from the Skittles people or the sites developer, Agency.com. Skittles is a fun brand compared to others, and the brand's marketing target probably overlaps well with the demographics of social media users. We can imagine the conversation that transpired at the presentation of the concept. But overall kudos to the team for the creativity and courage to try something new. We marketers need pioneers to sketch out these possibilities, especially those of us who are only open to following a well-trodden (paved?) path.

As the old saying goes, you can tell the true pioneers by the arrows in their backs. Within two days of the launch of the site Mars was forced to hastily revise their approach. It seems that web vandals could not ignore the destructive impulse to post profanity, racial epithets, and worst of all, advertisements for their own unrelated products and services. By Day 3 the Skittles widget floated over the Wikipedia article for the candy. We assume that the decision was made to retain the general concept but to execute it with content that was less likely to be defaced. As we write today, Skittles.com opens over the candy's YouTube Channel.

How do we judge a company's marketing efforts? Hopefully it helps the company achieve their business goals. Hopefully the efforts bring true value, either psychic, aesthetic, or functional, to its consumers. Hopefully long-term goodwill accrues to the brand.

On the first day of Skittles.com so many Tweets were launched that Twitter crashed. The great majority of the Tweets were positive about the brand. Skittles' Facebook page now has 610,000 friends. And you can see from the two charts below that the site—and the news about the site—generated a significant increase in web traffic. We'll keep you informed as business results become available.

But as Fidel has always said, democracy is no way to run a country. Maybe its no way to run a marketing program either. We'll see. Social media are here to stay. And the ignoble instinct to deface and destroy transfers easily to the internet. Marketers will need to quickly learn to balance their traditional need for authoritarian control with the potential for anarchy that comes with democratic control of their brands.

References

For the current Skittles.com site, click here.

For the Skittles Facaebook page, click here.

For an article about Skittlescom, click here.

Three Sigma Marketing

2009-03-11T11:45:00.009-05:00

We at marketmambo recently realized that almost half of our entire lifetime has been spent in marketing. Perhaps a fact such as that would have once been a badge to be worn proudly, or at least with a minimum of shame.

In that time marketing has gone through several evolutions, some of which were jarring, some more subtle. In the latter category is the increasingly dominant role of process in the development of marketing ideas. Marketing has always had a non-linear, non-rational side that strikes many as, well, sloppy. Accounting-types see in this inefficiency and unnecessary cost. Those of the manufacturing mindset link a lack of method to an implicit loss of quality.

Some friends of ours who are also marketers have recently gone through six sigma training at the suggestion of their corporate leadership. As a reminder, six sigma is a manufacturing discipline developed at Motorola that refines processes so that they make products that increasingly fall within acceptable tolerances. Six sigma refers to the number of standard deviations (sigmas) within which the output falls. Put more simply, six sigma means that 99.997% of what you make is right.

We have a hard time arguing with anyone who wants to save time, save money or make things higher quality. Certainly marketers could be faster, cheaper, better. But can the principles which guide accountants and manufacturers also successfully serve the marketing department?

According to an article in the March 2008 of Harvard Business Review “When Should a Process Be Art, Not Science” there are processes within organizations, and within the disciplines of that organization, which can be yoked to the horses of rigor, and those which should be allowed to run off the reins. The authors explain how to recognize the two situations and offer suggestions to better manage the business “arts”.

Embracing or Eliminating Variability

In many business disciplines, let's stay with accounting and manufacturing as examples, consistency of output is an appropriate indicator of success. We don't want two accountants to look at the same set of numbers and arrive at radically different conclusions, or the same accountant arriving at one conclusion on Monday and something all together different on Friday. We want manufacturers who make break pads that stop our cars all the time. We want the vaccines we give our children to always be free of side effects. In all these cases variability is bad, and the more one unit of output looks and works like the one before it, the better off we all are.

But according to the authors, consistency is not the dominant goal to be prized by all disciplines. The dividing line comes down to variability. For some situations, the things that go into the front end of the process are, unlike truckloads of aluminum ore, variable from case to case. Judgment, or “art” must be added to the mix in these situations if we are to have any hope of achieving satisfaction with the outcome.

There are also situations when the end-users of the process, the customers, don't want consistency, don't want their “widgets” to operate exactly like everyone else's widgets. For some customers, a product that is different, that is unlike all others, or most others, or maybe even unlike any others is an indicator of success.

And here lies the needs of most marketers. Marketers value products that act differently and are more attractive than their competitors. They value advertising campaigns that set them apart from others, that, as is commonly said, “break through the clutter”. Marketers want “cheaper”, maybe now more than ever; they want “faster”; and with corporate leadership's demand for results, they want “better”. What sets marketing apart from other business disciplines is that “different” is an important ingredient into getting to “better”.

Artists In Training

The authors also offer several suggestions for managing an “artistic” business process.

According to the authors, as a first step managers need to be clear as to which of their processes are “science” and which are “art”. For the former managers should develop discipline which increases efficiency and reduces variability. For the the processes which are more akin to art, managers should should create an environment that supports art. “Artists” need continuous exposure to their customers to prevent them from developing an idiosyncratic view of what is relevant and valuable.

Managers must also develop training programs which go beyond simple skills. Corporate artists need to learn to thrive with ambiguity, uncertainty and incomplete information. Training could also shift from traditional classroom models to apprenticeships in which less experienced professionals learn from the judgment of more experienced artists.

Finally, artists need continuous feedback on the results of their efforts, so that they can hone their judgment to best meet the needs of their customers.

Three Sigma Marketing

Many years ago we had a conversation with the Marketing Director of a very large company. He spoke to us of what he called the chocolate chip cookie problem. This is the hypothetical case of the company that makes and markets chocolate chip cookies. One day, someone from accounting performs an analysis that if the average number of chips in a cookie is reduced from 8 to 7 the company will reduce its costs and increase its profits. Success being the foundation upon which all disaster is built, the company repeats the logic from quarter to quarter until its customers soon determine that this company makes bad chocolate chip cookies.

“Art” is the chocolate chips in the marketing cookie.

John Wanamaker, founder of the department stores which bore his name, is famously credited with saying “Half of my advertising is wasted, the problem is that I don't know which half”. By our assessment we would agree to his estimate. Perhaps good marketers are 70% effective, and 70% effective translates into two-sigma, in case you were wondering.

For most of its history, marketers waved their outstretched hand across their domain and declared it “art”, as if that designation forever absolved them from any accountability in either costs or results.

But as is often the case in human affairs, business is swinging to the other, equally wrong, extreme of forcing marketing to aspire to the discipline of accounting and manufacturing, and by doing so, diminishing its ability to create value.

So marketmambo announces a new designation for success in marketing, we call it “Three Sigma Marketing” and have created a button that any marketer could display with appropriate pride. If you feel you can do better have at it. But what three sigma marketing tells the world is that this company aspires to be both right and different, and that customers can expect from them products of unique value, and while we may miss the mark about 10% of the time (hence three sigma), we'll take that risk so that we can be brilliant the rest of the time.

Twestival

2009-03-05T14:20:00.015-06:00

A news item recently caught our attention which intersected two topics which never fail to hold our interest: philanthropy and Twitter.

On February 12th the first global Twestival fundraiser was held to support efforts for providing clean drinking water to India and Africa. The event was held in almost two hundred locations worldwide.

Twestival was organized by Amanda Rose, who only announced her plans in January. News of the event circulated through online social networks. Those who were interested scrambled to organize local events, for example tampa.twestival. Each location chose arranged its own cite: in Tampa, at Crabby Bill's, in Dubai, on the beach, in LA at Club 740, where the photograph below was taken.

Twestival participants gathered for food, drinks and entertainment. All procceds above costs went to the charity. They also posted tweets to the Twitter page, wishing others well, connecting with friends and enjoying the comraderie of the event.

In addition, organizers made arrangements with Tip Joy to collect contributions directly through tweets. Contributors tweeted Tip Joy the amount they were interested in contributing, and then asked to fulfill their promise through PayPal.

A little over one-quarter of a million dollars was raised by Twestival. Dallas raised almost $2000 through Tip Joy, though most US cities raised less than $50 each.

Can Twestival serve as a model for similar efforts in the future? Perhaps. But unfortunately most Twitter users tend to be younger, and the charities that are associated with an older demographic may not be comfortable participating through micro-blogging. Also, we at marketmambo can't help but feel that part of the success of Twestival was due to its novelty. How many more Twestival-like events could take advantage of this novelty is anyone's guess.

But ultimately Twestival was a creative way to raise funds. Its now up to others to build on this foray into philanthropy 2.0 with even more creativity.

__Links________________________________________

For more on Twesitval and other social networking based fundraising resources, click here.

To visit Tip Joy click here.

For the Twitter Twestival page, click here.

The Roar of the Unseen Crowd

2009-01-31T22:24:00.010-06:00

Like many households this Sunday, the Mambos will be spending much of it enjoying the Super Bowl. What is special for us this year is that the game will be held in our backyard, almost literally. We may not have the money or the connections to attend the game in person, but when traffic is light on 275, and the wind blows just right, the roar of the unseen crowd will swell from the horizon, much like waves on the bay. To be sure, we've never heard the bay from our backyard, regardless of the direction of the wind, but we have our hopes for the game, and if our hopes fail, our imagination will jump into service.

Like a Pig

We will be serving a new dish for the game, one that the whole family is eager to try. We found the recipe on the internet. It's called the Bacon Explosion, and it's two pounds of sausage wrapped in a woven mat of two pounds of bacon, all smothered in barbeque sauce. The recipe calls for cooking in a smoker, but we'll be making use of the Weber Kettle.

We found the recipe for the Bacon Explosion on a website called BBQAddicts.com, though we were lead there after seeing the recipe mentioned on several other sites, and followed a link back to the original source. The recipe is the creation of three men who form the Burnt Finger BBQ barbecue team.

It seems that one of the men on the Burnt Finger team, Aaron Chronister, is by profession an internet marketer. He wanted to increase visits to their site to increase advertising revenue to further support their barbecue team's activities. He began the campaign to bring the Bacon Explosion to the masses by sending a Tweet to his 1200 followers on Twitter, each of whom had followers of their own. Mr. Chronister also made use of sites such as Digg and Del.icio.us, but believes that his greatest success came from his use of StumbleUpon. At StumbleUpon, users can enter information about their professional interests or hobbies, and SU serves up relevant sites.

According to the statistics, almost 400,000 visitors have, like we have, found their way back to the original recipe at BBQAddicts. We're sure that number will increase noticeably with this
mention on marketmambo.

Everyone Needs a SideKick

My apologies dear reader. We began this post inspired by our local pride and self-destructive gluttony, and have wandered into marketing. Such is the habit of our mind, freshly excited by every bird and squirrel like an unleashed dog. This vaunt reminds us of another situation of the recent past, though we admit the connection is unclear at the moment. It's the story of a bride-to-be, Ivanna, her computer geek friend, Evan, and a 16 year old Latina, Sasha, all from the burroughs of New York City.

The bride-to-be Ivanna left her cellular phone, a SideKick, in the back of a Manhattan taxi. This frustrating and disruptive loss was compounded by the fact that the Ivanna had kept her wedding information--dates, guest list--on the device. She asked her computer geek friend, Evan for assistance in its recovery.

Unable to remain wireless-less, Ivanna quickly bought a new SideKick and was suprised to learn that her wireless company had backed up some of her data. Here's where the story takes a modern twist. Among her expected data, Ivanna found new call records and several photos of our young Latina, Sasha, and her friends and family in Corona in Queens. Considering herself fortunate, Sasha, young and modest of means, had taken her new-found treasure through a trial of its features. Sasha had uploaded several of the pictures to her MySpace page, and doing so had made it effortless to learn her email address. When contacted by Ivanna and Evan, Sasha, like any other person of her situation, drew on the tactics that had probably helped her through other conflicts--deception, threat, and avoidance--all with the goal of retaining the phone.

Evan, incensed by the injustice, leapt to action. He created a page, "lostsidekick" on his personal website, evanwashere.com, where he told the story of the errant phone and posted pictures and the exchanges between himself, Ivanna, Sasha, and Sasha's brother, a member of the Military Police, who had come to the aid of his young sister. Evan also posted links to this page on Digg and Gizmodo, a techie blog. Within hours Evan received hundreds of emails from others who shared his outrage. Links to Evan's page were soon on hundreds of other websites. Emails came in from around the world. Some attacked Sasha's MySpace page, a few, overzealous, drove past her home shouting derision.

Eventually the story broke out of the blogosphere and into traditional media. The police, who had been thus far disinterested, arrested Sasha. Her brother was reprimanded by his MP commander. Ivanna recovered her phone. Evan received several offers for freelance PR work.

The Roar of the Unseen Crowd

As we return to where we began, to the pleasure of the Super Bowl and the anticipation of four pounds of pork packing 500 grams of fat, we think of recent news about advertising sponsorship of the game. For all their other, many, faults, Americans have always had a healthy disregard for advertising. It was the Super Bowl that, as the exception, caught America's commercial attention, with these 30 second lavishments receiving almost as much analyisis as the game itself. They were considered the highest expression of the discipline. Yet this week NBC, the host network of the game, was still trying to sell the remaining advertising time. Some may say its the state of the economy, some may say its the state of marketing, another sign that power is moving away from large, centralized control of media and into the hands of those individuals who can manipulate crowds through the tools of the internet.

We're in the Money

2008-12-15T13:05:00.007-06:00

As happens during this season, several members of the extended Mambo family braved the recent inclement weather in search of wine, companionship, and the meaning of happiness at a local restaurant. Before the evening was over, the waiter had become engaged in the discussion, and declared himself an “Aristotelean” on the matter. We’re not sure what that meant, or what was the ultimate conclusion of the entire effort, but we left the bar pretty confident that wine and companionship was one route to happiness.

Apparently our discussion spread quickly to the offices of the Wall Street Journal, for on Friday morning the careful reader may have noticed an article entitled “Designating Shortcuts to Happiness” on the Media & Marketing page with the lead

Be happy. That's one message marketers are trying out, with ads evoking warmth and good cheer, as they cast about for ways to appeal to consumers amid a recession.

The article covers recent campaigns from Carnival Cruise Lines and Best Buy that offers consumers emotional relief from the present economic uncertainty in these marketers’ embrace.

Several marketing wizards offer practical but cautionary advice on the use of such tactics.

To do it right, he says, marketers have to be specific about how their products offer happiness, whether it's a cigar that brings comfort to the smoker or a toy that makes the consumer smile.

And later another expert’s opinion which is as insightful as it is terse

It's tricky to pull off

On the subject of terse, thanks to Miguel for bringing this article to our attention. He would have posted it himself, but has committed to a responsible thrift of words. The link to the full article is here.

But is this all there is to be said on consumerism and happiness during an economic recess/contract/depress-ion?

We may not know from Aristotle, but we turn to Berkeley for a final word on the subject—not George, Busby. A few generations ago, people took their solace from their economic woes at the movie palace with the Gold Diggers of 1933. It contains a masterpiece of choreography and camera work in the number “We’re in the Money”. Berkeley created beauty with the geometry of a chorus line. The excess of his productions often hid his subversive personality. Is irony an ingredient that Berkeley baked into this treat?

Continuous City

2008-11-26T06:32:00.006-06:00

Ah, so soon Tio Tito? The clock has not yet run its full course, let alone the calendar page. But who can tell when the muse will sing, and when the goddess who unspools the thread will allow a length for such things?

Several months ago we wrote a post (The Ties That Blind) that expressed our muddled thoughts on the sometimes false feeling of interpersonal connection we get from technology and how it may distract us from the more authentic item.

We’ve recently become intrigued by a play that is moving across the country in a path seemingly designed to avoid our location. We’ve so far only been able to savor samples from afar.

The play is entitled “Continuous City” and is a production of the Builders Association, a New York based theatre company whose recent productions have explored the human implications of technology.

Continuous City is the story of two men trying to launch a social networking service, Xubu, that allows its users to record short video greetings for friends and family that they may otherwise not see in person. Both men travel the world trying to build Xubu and maintain their personal relationships at the same time.

The play is staged so that large video screens dominate the set, leaving the actor on stage to play opposite a character present only through technology. One of the men, a father, uses technology to have lunch with his daughter, each present by webcam, but otherwise on opposite sides of the world. When the lunch ends, the daughter hits a button on her key board, and the image of her father disappears.

Xubu is in reality an existing service. We’ve included a link for anyone interested in learning more or creating their own greeting. Some of the greetings are incorporated into the video montage of the stage, and perhaps yours will be one of them.

We at marketmambo often rely on technology to maintain our connections with our friends and colleagues, who we so appreciate for their indulgence of our delusions, for their patience with our mania. As we enter the holiday season, we look forward to our next coffee together, our next meal, our next beer, or possibly joining together for the next great battle, for the time we spend in battle is the time we value the most. Until then, draw strength from the possibilities of the season.

====================================================

For the website of the production including tour schedule, click here.
For articles on the play, click here, here, or here.
And for Xubu, here.

Tweet Nazis

2008-11-25T15:29:00.006-06:00

We recently had a conversation with a colleague who in the course of thirty minutes riffed three different ways he could make use of Twitter to help his client market their clothing line. And it was only 3 months ago that he and I had a conversation about Twitter, in which he decried it as a valueless fad.

Ah, the power of Twitter. And the power of three’s.

The kind readers of marketmambo may remember that Twitter was the past topic of a post. We too wondered at its long-term value, especially in light of the information saturation that has come to define our world. And it was our loving and insightful sister, Lena Mambo, that promised that in time, we would begin to understand the usefulness of broadcasting short (140 character max) messages from our phones.

And to total three Twitter moments of the past week we’d like to mention two other stories that have passed our desk.

A Tweet By Any Other Name

In September of this year, Yammer won the TechCrunch50 Award of $50,000 for best new tech product of the year. Yammer is a Twitter-like service, and in fact, think of it as Twitter with two important differences. First, unlike Twitter, Yammer allows for the Tweets (Yams?) to remain inaccessible to the general public. While my Tweets may go directly to my friends, they are also publicly posted on the Twitter website. The second difference between Twitter and Yammer is that Yammer has found a way to monetize their service, which, as of yet, has escaped Twitter. Some call Yammer “Twitter with privacy” some call it “Twitter with a business plan”. It is the lack of commercial viability that has prevented hard-core capitalists, such as my brother Miguel Mambo, from joining the ranks of the Twitter intrigued.

But we can also call Yammer “Twitter for Business’ because that’s the arena in which it has been most successful. It seems that companies are adopting Yammer as a way for coworkers to stay in contact, without ever raising a comment or query to the formality of email. Hence the value of its privacy feature. Yammer was created by a company called Genie for their own use, and they came to believe that it had potential as a product for other companies. Basic service from Yammer is free, and a more premium service is available for a fee.

If you're interested, click on the video below to see the Yammer's TechCrunch presentation.

News coverage of Yammer invariably explains it by reference to Twitter, as if it were possible to explain something that no one understands by comparing it to something that very few understand.

(As an aside, there are several other Yammer-like products growing in popularity with businesses, such as SocialCast and Basecamp, which makes us wonder if microblogging will ultimately make its home in the world of commercial organizations.)

Beat Me With Your Twitter Stick

Also in the past week we witnessed another of the accumulating cautionary tales of marketing in the Web 2.0 World: The Mugging of Motrin by Mothers.

Motrin recently began a campaign targeting mothers which has as its premise the pains created by the use of strap-on baby carriers. The creative alludes to these devices as a way to use a baby as a fashion accessory. We at marketmambo though it was clever, pleasantly constrained, and that it spoke in a voice we hear everyday from the many mothers in our life.

Please view the ad below.

But apparently there are a group of mothers that we don’t know who became outraged at the affront to the dedication of motherhood.

The offensive nature of the ads had gone unnoticed for several weeks until a posting appeared on a blog which mentioned the ads. A mother came across the posting and passed it to several other mothers. The inferno quickly found its natural home on Twitter.

The trade publication Advertising Age provided a timeline of the relevant events which demonstrate how quickly the Motrin mugging grew from a spark to a flame-over on Twitter.

9/30 J&J posts ad on Motrin.com
11/14 The ad is mentioned in a blog post with a comment that the mom in the ad is using her baby sling incorrectly.
11/15 An offended mom in Fort Collins, CO sees the post of the Motrin ad and posts a criticism on her own blog.
11/15 Another Colorado mom posts the first Tweet on Twitter at 10:28 pm.
11/15 A second mom posts a second Tweet at 10:58 pm.
11/16 The Motrin ad hits the top of Twitter trends with 1500 Tweets.
11/16 300 blog posts are written on the topic. Bloggers also begin to contact mainstream media.
11/16 A blogger posts a video of the anti-Motrin comments to YouTube. (See below)
11/16 J&J shuts down the Motrin website, removes the ad and issues an apology to the offended mothers.

We at marketmambo are still unable to feel the rage against the Motrin machine. Then again, we have never been accused of excessive sensitivity.

But we have championed the potential of technology to bring true value to its users and the potential of technology to create valuable relationships between companies and their customers.

It is horrifying for any marketer to see a mob of villagers approaching their brand with torches. In this case, we at marketmambo believe that the makers of Motrin surrendered much too quickly, lasting just three days under siege. For those of you don’t share our graying hair or spreading paunch, we must point out that Johnson & Johnson is the same company that so bravely and adroitly navigated the corporate crisis created by the Tylenol killings in 1982.

Some may say that the outrage was righteous, that it was an inspiring case of mothers taking it to the man. That may be true. Or maybe it’s the case of a handful of consumers, intentionally sparking the anger of a slightly larger handful, and using social media such as Twitter to mug an undeserving company.

Cell 3.0

2008-11-05T14:04:00.030-06:00

Current wisdom suggests that blogs are much like fences: the best supported of each has frequent posts at regular intervals. We confess that the interests of Team Mambo have recently been focused on other creative endeavors, one of which is the indulgence noted in the sidebar, KultureKat. Yet it has been too long since our last post and for this we apologize to our regular readers who make up in patience what they lack in numbers.

Prologue

Many years ago while at university I had my first experience with cell phone technology. I was sitting for an economics exam when beeping interrupted the painful silence. A student stood up embarrassed and apologized for the distraction. He pulled an early cell phone from a small duffel, extended an antenna that could equally serve the role of a fly rod, and lifted the device, the size of a box of breakfast cereal, to the side of his head. In that odd twist of behavior that has been repeated every second of every day since, he said “Hello” as he left the room.

The image to the right, from the 1987 movie Wall Street reminds us of what the early cell phone looked like.

Los Mambos share a strain of Ludditism. It may stem from our generational position astride a technology canyon: one foot confidently planted in the “what was”, the other tenuously on the “will be” in a posture of awkward balance.

Of course we have long since succumbed, and always several beats behind the cultural heart, do not yet feel the cellular chafing felt by others. We share the sentiment of fifty-one percent of respondents to a recent survey by the Pew Internet and American Life Project who also agree that “it would be very hard to give up my cell phone”. This same sentiment was held by 38% of respondents in 2002.

These numbers have lately distracted us from the seasonal change of colors that may be a better use of our attention during our morning walks. And these numbers are in reality insignificant data pixels only beginning to suggest the much bigger image of the relationship we’ll have with our cell phones in the relatively near future. In this dance of technology and humanity, will we lead the evolution of the technology or will technology, as it sometime does, lead us to evolve?

Click, Send, 6

On a recent visit to a bookstore during which I had more time than money, I came across a book “Reframing Organizations” that I would love to read. But with a rare display of delayed gratification that should be much more frequent given my years, I kept my credit card in my wallet and instead clicked a picture of the cover with my camera phone, then hit “send” and “6”. Book browsing had finished for the day.

“6” on my simple cell phone is the speed dial number for Evernote. Evernote is an application that I’ve stumbled across which seems to be a favorite of those more technologically savvy than myself. For me, Evernote is a metaphor, a replacement for a behavior previously associated with the back of receipts, torn napkins, or at best, a post-it. By pressing “6”, I sent the image of the book cover to my (free) internet account at Evernote. The image is stored alongside another image of a poster describing a class that I think may be of interest to my son, Tito junior, and images of other books that yes, I will buy and read someday. I swear.

Of course this effect could be accomplished by sending the image to my email account, except for two important differences. First, Evernote processes each image with character-reading software that makes these images searchable (enter “Organization” and “search”). Second, the information is stored on Evernote’s own servers, making it available to me wherever I have access to the internet. If I had a moment at “the office” and decided to take the opportunity to purchase that book—Oh, who was that author?—or more responsibly if the thought occurred to me while at the public library, I could access the information and act.

Evernote can capture other types of information as well. You can clip portions of web pages, type yourself a note, or store a recording. Thus the basis of its slogan: Remember Everything.

Evernote took a very big step recently and released their service API, which allows any programmer to develop an application extending the functionality of Evernote or allowing it to interact with other programs.

But for the purposes of this post, what’s important about Evernote isn’t Evernote. It’s the click, send, 6, on the cell phone, the simplicity of the act, its effortlessness, its thoughtless use of technology, not for the pleasure of technology, but for a very everyday purpose. Most importantly click, send, 6 is a small act of revolution, albeit without clenched fists punching the air. For with click, send, 6 I rip through the membrane that had previously demarcated the real and the virtual worlds.

Web 1.0, 2.0…

Who was the first person to refer to the great conflict of the early 1940’s as the Second World War? How long did it take for someone to then re-reference that conflict of the 1910’s as World War One? How long before the human capacity for extrapolation, for the leap from implication to expectation, created an assumed inevitability for World War Three?

At the 2004 O’Reilly Media Conference, a group of attendees conspired to give definition to a word that was then in use informally, Web 2.0. Until that moment the term had no clear meaning, but was useful as a way to refer to the “will be” and distinguish it from the “what was” of the internet. No one created Web 2.0--that was and is the result of a collection of individual efforts--but by giving it a conceptual structure, the attendees encouraged all to shift their weight to that side of the web canyon.

We seem to use the term Web 2.0 so freely that surely we all understand what it means. We discuss Wiki’s and blogs and RSS and Ajax and envy those kids who made fortunes with MySpace and YouTube and Wikipedia (oh that’s right: the latter wasn’t started by a kid and doesn’t make money. Hmm…)

To us at marketmambo, we subdue this conflagration by thinking of Web 1.0 as that wonderful method for distributing static pages of information, pre-bound into websites, Call it the Gutenberg Web, for in many ways the web fulfills the imperative of the printing press, cheaply distributing information, letting it run free or freely off the leash, and stretching a common culture beyond the light of our campfires.

Web 2.0 allows the users of the web to create and distribute information according to their own interests and passions. This web becomes the cave wall, waiting for the application of charcoal and iron oxide in the shape of a stag. It’s the mimeo machine that allows us each to be a pamphleteer. It’s the building wall covered with graffiti, where once the billboard hung.

Oh, for a remedy that calms the mania of metaphors.

And such a long route to get to our original question, for to us, the question of “wither the cellphone?” must somehow be held in our brains along side “wither the web?”

Let Your Fingers Do the Walking

Walk through the streets of New York or Seattle or most other US cities and you may still find, on a sidewalk or lamppost, written and underlined in blue marker or paint, a dangling word devoid of context: “high” or sky” or some meaningless string of letters. You’ve just stumbled upon a remnant of Grafedia.

John Geraci was a graduate student in New York a few years ago. He was fascinated by the use of technology which could enable people to create their own sense of community. And his focus wasn’t some everywhere-and-nowhere community such as a blog or a wiki, but a community built around very specific geographic locations. He had just finished his first effort, NeighborNode, which provided free internet access to neighborhoods that was accessed through a home page created and maintained by the residents.

Geraci began Grafedia in 2005 as a way for people to leave little “public messages” for others. If we were walking along a street, and were in someway struck by a thought relevant to that spot, we could text a message, or send an image or sound file to “high” or “sky” or any other word we chose, to grafedia.net. Write your word in blue on a lamppost, napkin or cigarette butt (yes it was done) and leave it behind. Come across one of these blue underlined words? Send a text message from your cell phone to high@grafedia.net and retrieve the message, this thought that had occurred to someone else at some other time in this place you’re now standing. Think of Grafedia as a digital message in a bottle.

A similar project began in New York about the same time. Yellow Arrow also provided links that users could post at points of their interest, though in this case, on yellow arrows. While Grafedia was typically used by individuals to tag one specific location, Yellow Arrow was often used by small groups to string together several locations tied by a theme, such as places important to the development of hardcore punk in Washington, DC.

Both Grafedia and Yellow Arrow have closed up shop, each satisfied that they’ve fulfilled the goals of their project. Other projects are ongoing. [murmur] is a project in Canada that posts telephone numbers around cities at which people can leave voice messages. At Semapedia.org you can create stickers with “2d” barcodes that provide links to a Wikipedia article about a location or something interesting that happened there. If you find one of these barcodes, aim your camera phone at it, click, send, and learn the significance of your location.

Feels a little like Evernote, doesn’t it?

Scanbuy

A-hem. Uh, yes, 2d barcode. Back in the 1950’s when the first patent was filed for the barcode, the “bar” was actually a set of concentric circles. In the ‘70’s as the barcode began its march to universal adoption, the code became the parallel lines --1d -- we now see everyday. 2d codes are simply a square composed of smaller squares, some black, some white, that make us think of a crossword puzzle.

While our eyes have no problem reading a yellow arrow on a lamppost or blue underlined words on a cigarette, our phones are not nearly as capable. But they have no trouble making sense of 2d barcodes. If your phone has a camera and the necessary software, these codes can automatically and near instantly deliver information to your phone.

Semacode is a company in Ontario, Canada that creates and markets 2d barcodes for personal use. At their website you can create your own code to print on your business card (or any other surface). Pass it off to a new friend and with a click of their camera phone they have your contact information, and if you like, are immediately taken to your facebook page.

And now to Scanbuy. Scanbuy is the company that is most likely to bring these 2d barcodes into commercial application in the US.

Earlier this year, at the change of the previous season, we at marketmambo had the pleasure of speaking about technology at a marketing conference. We covered many examples, one of which was Scanbuy. To our surprise, we were contacted by Jonathan Bulkeley, the CEO of the company, who offered us a chat. Mr. Bulkeley was generous with his time, but the one point which captured our imagination was his assessment of the challenge to his company. Success for this technology would require the cooperation of marketers, cellphone manufacturers, and ultimately those consumers sneaking up, unaware, to the next technology canyon. And the problem is that for each of the parties, the value to them, of adoption, is related to how many of the other two parties have chosen to adopt. Why put the software in the cellphone if marketers aren’t behind it. Why use these 2d barcodes for marketing if consumers don’t understand them? You can do the rest of the combinations. Kind of a digital chicken and egg.

Please be patient for a brief aside. While we appreciate the time that Mr. Bulkeley shared with us, we applaud his gesture. Marketmambo acknowledges its place in the ranks of the insignificanti, yet Mr. Bulkeley understands that that e-chatter adds up and has decided to participate. Kudos to Mr. Bulkeley and a lesson to others.

Well, Scanbuy’s chickens and eggs (yikes) seem to be lining up. Earlier this year several magazines began testing EZcodes (what Scanbuy calls their 2d barcodes) in their books. If you see an EZcode in an ad in Car and Driver, click an image of it with your camera phone (loaded with the Scanbuy software, called ScanLife) and you’re taken to a microsite with images and reviews of the car. Find one of these codes in Billboard and you’re a click away from their Top 10 list and links to purchase music. Sears has also decided to participate in a test.

The real coup for Scanbuy (or should we say coop?) came with the announcement last week that Samsung will pre-load the Scanbuy software into their cellphones.

Much has happened in the past year to advance the adoption of Scanbuy, and much of it has still escaped the attention of marketers, who are so frozen with technological vertigo that they avoid raising their eyes to the opposite canyon wall. Friends of marketmambo can point their browsers at Scanbuy to learn much, much more.

But the real question for marketmambo and Scanbuy is whether the average citizen -- not the geeks at CNET, or Gizmodo, or Ars Technica, but the Luddites like ourselves who were reluctantly dragged into the wireless world, who didn’t care if their handset could take pictures, who, though unsure, think that SMS might just be the new distress call – will falter when faced with the chance to take the leap.

…3.0

Just as these same average citizens are becoming fluent in the language of Web 2.0, those responsible for such things have moved on to Web 3.0. There doesn’t seem to be a consensus as to what this new version of the web will look like, but there are a few common themes shared by the competing visions.

Tim Berners-Lee, the person most often credited with creating the initial incarnation of the web foresees Web 3.0 as the “semantic web”. While the current web is great at presenting individual pages in a format readable by humans, it is incapable of drawing data across these pages together based on the meaning of the information. If you want to learn the meaning of “love”, a search engine can help you find web pages which contain the word, but will ignore all those pages of poetry that explore the concept without using the word. More prosaically, if you want to better understand the relationship between weather and baseball scores you could get both by city, but you yourself would need to put pen to paper to combine the two. The web would be no help.

We at marketmambo readily admit that we don’t really understand the concept of the “semantic web”. Our best hope is that we can successfully parrot the words of others. What seems to be clear to us is that at the moment, no one has a clue as to how the semantic web can soon become a reality.

Another theme shared by the many visions for Web 3.0 is “object hyperlinking”, the ability to link the web to the real world, allowing information to be shared between the two with minimal intervention by people. Real world objects will require a unique identifier such as an RFID chip or a bar code, and a way to link this id to the internet, either through a radio signal or some kind of data capture device…a cell phone for example.

Has anyone begun numbering the various incarnations of the wireless world? We hope not. Whether its world wars or the world wide web these schemes create an imperative of the future that seems to never allow us to satisfactorily deal with the present.

The cell phone and its meaning for our lives is changing. What began as a simple metaphor for the home telephone, something we could all understand, evolved into the Swiss Army knife gadget with camera and music and calendar, and with the ongoing development of the Smartphone, a portable computer. All again, things we can understand.

What will it mean to carry a device that yes, you can use to speak to other people, and yes, you can use to access the same web pages you access at home (only excruciatingly smaller), but now you can use to get information which is relevant to your specific time, your place, and your activity, not through an act of technological heroism, but a simple, thoughtless, effortless wave of your cellphone?

1g, 2g, 3g, 4

While no one may have applied numbers to the wireless world overall, the data part of the cell phone, not the voice, is counting up to the promised land of 4g, that is, Fourth Generation wireless internet access. Currently about 50% of handsets are ready for 3g, and among those with these handsets, about half ever use it. 3g is much better than its predecessors, though all are built off of a technology designed to handle voice calls. Though constantly improving, wireless connection to the internet is still unbearably slow compared to home access, expensive, and for most consumers, seems to offer no compelling benefit, no “killer app”, no functionality which, once sampled, we can never again live without.

4g will deliver internet access, always on and available everywhere, and at speeds that will seem almost instant, or at least instant enough to make its use, again, simple, thoughtless, and effortless. Some believe it will be less expensive than the previous g’s because it will be open to all manufacturers and break Qualcomm’s monopolistic position and pricing in the market. Will it have its killer app? Maybe. Maybe 4g will have no killer app, but a bunch of great apps, perhaps including a service like Scanbuy, that taken together, will offer us something we will never live again without, and underpin a Cell 3.0 world that we can now barely imagine.

5, 4, 3, 2, 1

We at marketmambo rarely have answers and are rarely confident in the ones we have. Our world is dominated by questions and observations, and we never seem capable of using the latter to satisfactorily address the former.

We will make one assertion to our readers in which we are confident, in fact the point of this long and twisting contemplation of technology: 2008 is the year we begin, in a meaningful way, to transition into the Cell 3.0 world.

The year 2008 will likely be remembered as a turning point in US and world history, in which our traditional assumptions about political and economic institutions have been forever undermined, and the headlines, which had been safely sequestered to the front page of our newspapers, are now visited upon our homes.

Justifiably overshadowed by the cataclysm around us, the countless changes required to shift our relationship to technology have, in 2008 proceeded, accelerated and matured, mostly unnoticed.

As we all know, within a few months our televisions will no longer work without a convertor. The reason for this is that the federal government has taken back from broadcast television a 65Mhz swath of radio spectrum centered at about 700 Mhz and auctioned it off, in January of 2008, to wireless carriers. This particular piece of the radio spectrum allows for signals to travel four times further than the frequency currently used by the carriers and will host the build out of the wireless internet.

In July of this year Apple launched its new iPhone, the 3G (yes that 3g), and in the way only Apple seems to do, has made a new technology accessible to the masses. You walk into the store looking for cool design, you walk out with advanced tech, and never have to feel like a geek. And the App Store encourages the never-ending increase of iPhone functionality through the creativity and ambition of countless developers.

In September, T-Mobile launched the G1, also known as the Google phone. The G1 is no where near as cool as the iPhone, but in an important way it’s far more revolutionary. Though Apple allows outside developers to create iPhone apps, it reserves proprietary control over the operating system. You’ll never see the iPhone OS on another device. The G1 is built on Google’s Android operating system, which can and will be built into other handsets. In an important way, Google has picked up the democratization of Cell 3.0 technology begun by Apple.

Just last month Sprint announced the launch of its version of 4g, Wimax. It will roll out, slowly, market by market, and some critics complain that it may not yet offer true 4g capabilities. What Sprint has done is begun the process of taking the technology out of the labs and into the vocabulary and expectations of consumers.

But let’s begin to end where we began earlier, with existing projects and applications such as Graphedia, Yellow Arrow, [murmur], Semapedia, Semacode, and Scanbuy, and yes Twitter. The development of 4g hints as to what can exist in the future. These applications show what can be done now. And they make no sense in our current understanding of either the wireless world or the world wide web. They are technology without existing metaphor. They will be more difficult for consumers to understand and adopt, but at the same time they begin to suggest to marketers a world that now “can be”, if only they look across the canyon with courage and creativity.

Epilogue

In 2007 Reebok launched a website called RunEasy. The site targeted runners, allowing them to post their favorite routes along with comments and photos from their camera phones which were taken along the way. We don’t know the business results generated by the site, but admire the idea behind it. It was the use of technology at the service of an insightful understanding of this target, their identification with the sport, their sense of community, the transcendence of the run, and the collection of experiences they have at specific times and in specific places.

Somewhere near the time of the economics class we mentioned above, and just about at the exact same place, we also began our academic education in marketing. On the first day of the course we were given a definition of marketing that was based on an exchange of value, that one party give something to another with the anticipation of value in return.

The Cell 3.0 world is upon us. How can we as marketers use this concept to create greater affinity with out brands, how can we shape behavior, and yes, how can we generate revenue. Most importantly, how can we accomplish these objectives by creating real value for our customers?

We end this post with one nightmarish vision of how marketers will use these new technologies, which given our history, may not be altogether unlikely.

================

For Grafedia examples, click here.
For a Wired article on Grafedia, click here.
For Yellow Arrow examples, click here.
For Semacode, click here.
For Scanbuy, click here.
For Scanbuy on San Fran streets, click here.
For a blog post on Sear's Scanbuy test, click here.
For the Wikipedia article on object hyperlinking, click here.
For an article on 4g cell phones, click here.
To visit Reebok's Run Easy webiste click here.

Carbon Dating

2008-07-15T11:48:00.013-05:00

Not too long ago we at marketmambo posted some thoughts on the "green gesture", the small act that people or companies take in the hopes of being perceived as eco-friendly. (see "How Green Was My Gesture")

On June 15th, The Hideout, a lounge in Santa Monica, California hosted, to our knowledge, the first Green Speed Dating event. Sixteen singles, from 25 to 40 years old, each paid $20 to participate. The money got them free appetizers and drinks. Valet parking was extra.

They also got the opportunity to meet for three minutes with a potential dating partner. A bicycle horn signaled the end of one "date" and participants moved on to the next. Coverage of the event seemed to indicate that one's brand of car was a frequent ice-breaker.

The event was organized by Developing Communities, Inc., an organization founded by former Peace Corps volunteers "dedicated to the development of small communities in Central America". All proceeds will be used to fund a solar-energy project for the one-room school house of El Pedregal, Nicargua.

Visit the Green Speed Dating website for information on their August event in Anaheim, or to learn how you can organize an event closer to your home, or to make a donation, through PayPal, to the school project in Nicargua.

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For National Public Radio's podcast on the event, click here.
For NPR's article on the event, click here.
For the Green Speed Dating website, click here.
For the Developing Communities, Inc website, click here.

A Room of His Own

2008-06-15T15:18:00.014-05:00

“I hate Phil Donohue”

A good friend of ours is also a good friend of Phil Donohue. The relationship is not transitive: we’ve never met Phil Donohue. Yet we recently realized that we carry a latent animosity for the man, and also recently recovered the memory of its source.

Twenty-five years ago I and another good friend, Donelo, found ourselves dating two women who also were good friends with each other. We became a constant foursome. In the course of one group conversation Donelo said something surprisingly sensitive. As the two women rose to leave the room, both commented approvingly on the modern masculinity Donelo had demonstrated. When the women were out of earshot, Donelo half-mumbled “I hate Phil Donohue”.

I don’t remember what Donelo had said that was so notably sensitive, or the topic of conversation from which it precipitated. And, as intense as our foursome had once been, like most friendships, ours were not maintained through the years.

But back to our current friend, the friend who is also a friend of Phil Donohue. We were invited to a local showing of a new film produced by Phil Donohue, Body of War. The film depicts the struggles of a young disabled vet and his anti-war views. We were unable to attend the showing and thus missed our chance to meet Phil Donohue.

The invitation, however, had stirred our latent animosity which we had never been aware of. It took me back to the long abandoned foursome and Donelo’s remark, which I had not given much thought to at the time. But I am now unsure if Donelo made this remark to me for effect, or if, as often happens, he had unintentionally articulated a passing thought which reflected (and possibly transferred) his own animosity toward Phil Donohue.

Ecce Homo

Of course this posting is not a rant against Phil Donohue. In fact it has little to do with Phil Donohue. But at one time, now passed, and under a set of social-political circumstances, now passing, an experiment in cultural engineering was undertaken in which masculinity would be redefined, mostly with little participation of men who would eventually be required to live the new definition. Phil Donohue didn’t start this experiment, but given his personality, his popularity, and his time slot, he became the best representation of what men could be.

The 1980’s were a very flexible container that not only held Phil Donohue but also his antithesis, Andrew Dice Clay. Clay created a persona in the Diceman in which he could say the things that no reconstructed man at the time could say, or at the very least, could laugh at in the company of women. More importantly, the Diceman outraged those who believed in the possibility of the great gender experiment. He was eventually banned from the MTV Music Awards show, and his appearance on Saturday Night Live was boycotted by musical guest Sinead O’Connor and cast member Nora Dunn.

The Gospel of John describes Jesus brought bound and scourged before the people of Jersualem by Pontius Pilate. According to John, to dramatize the difference between what some had hoped Jesus could be and the human who could be accountable to Roman law, Pontius Pilate introduced Jesus to the crowd with the Latin words “Ecce Homo”: Behold the man.

Andrew Clay’s Diceman persona was criticized for what many considered sexism and misogyny. Perhaps Clay was presenting someone to the crowd who didn’t fit with their expectations either.

Where Men Hide

In the Newtonian laws of culture, each action creates an equal an opposite reaction. The Diceman was masculinity in extreme, which was the only way it could have been portrayed at that time, and under those circumstances. From the averaging of Donohue and the Diceman came Tim Allen, whose Tim “The Tool Man” Tyler character arose from his stand-up act to
mount the sitcom stage in “Home Improvement”. Allen’s portrayal of masculinity was much more palatable. He worked through his own questions of identity, fumbling with what it meant to be a husband and a father, often in the safety of his workshop, the garage, or at the end of each episode, over the backyard fence with the older, wiser neighbor, Wilson Wilson, Jr.

James Twitchell, the author of Adcult USA, turned his attention in 2006 to the subject of men and their spaces. “Where Men Hide” was inspired by Twitchell’s male friends who were curious about the layout and furnishings of the “spider hole” which was Saddam Hussein’s final hiding place. Twitchell postulates that man-spaces play an important role in lives of men because they provide a place where men can work through their masculine identity in the more accepting company of other men. According to Twitchell, the loss of traditional male spaces, such as fraternal lodges, has created a shortage of opportunities for men to do this.

Our apologies and reassurances must be given. Readers of this post are surely thinking “Tito, this all may be interesting, and to be honest we’re not sure that it is, but what does this have to do with marketing, and the promise of marketmambo to report on the action at the edge of the marketing dance floor?” Let us close in on that point.

Recent surveys of architects and contractors reveal a new trend in home construction and remodeling. Gone from the top of the list of most requested amenities are the master bedroom suite and the grand entrance, now replaced by the dedicated media room and the home office. Perhaps modern masculinity will make its stand not in the lodge or the workshop but in front of the television, in the tradition of Al Bundy, who sought refuge from his family and job in front of his TV, but only found further frustrations.

Geeks to the Rescue

Apparently this trend has not been lost on the electronics retailer, BestBuy, and their services subsidiary the Geek Squad. The Geek Squad recently rode to the rescue of their male customers to aid them through the release of the movie version of Sex in the City. Understanding that men would be put into peril as they negotiated the movie, their reactions, and the women in their lives, the Geek Squad created a survival kit. In one component of this kit, Geek Squad representative take their video cameras on the tour of important New York locations which are frequented by the women of Sex in the City. The Geeks tell men that they’ve done this “so you don’t have to”. The video of this Geek tour is embedded below.

Representatives of the Geek Squad handed brochures to men on the street which included a cheat sheet of the female characters and their issues.

The brochure also included four quarters so that men who accompanied their women to the movie could sneak out to the lobby for a try at a video game or two.

From the Balcony

Boston Legal is a comedy-drama that makes up with critical acclaim what it lacks in breadth of audience. It also has the highest ratings of any show among highly affluent 25 to 44 year old viewers. BL is the creation of David E. Kelly, who unashamedly uses the show as a platform for his political and personal opinions and musings.

The first 56 minutes of each episode are entertaining but mostly irrelevant to this posting. The last four minutes of each episode are devoted to a conversation between the two male lead lawyers, Alan Shore who is in his late forties and Denny Crane, who is approaching seventy. David Kelly allows these characters to spend their four minutes discussing life, politics and women on the balcony of the law office, accompanied by scotch and cigars. Alan and Denny also discuss their love for each other, refer to themselves as flamingos, and have sleepovers. In our opinion it is the best written four minutes on television.

Unfortunately, days after the last episode of this season, Kelly announced that he is leaving the studio that produces the show. We can only speculate as to how this will change Boston Legal.

But an interesting phenomenon accompanies the show. When male fans of BL find each other they quickly turn to a discussion of the relationship between the two men, and the depiction of men acting not as others would like them to act or as comic caricatures or as andro-apologistas, but simply as men. Unfortunately most marketers and creators of popular culture don’t share Kelly’s sensibilities.

For those who are unfamiliar with the show, we’ve embedded a video that compiles several of the scenes from the balcony. It’s a bit long so sample as much as you like.

Epilogues: Boston Legal Balcony Scenes, season 2, pt. 8

It is often said that the first work of western literature, The Iliad, is the story of a fight over a woman, Helen of Troy. Beyond that mechanical device, it also is a study of men seeking immortality through the attainment of honor. The second book of western literature, The Odyssey, is sometimes dismissed as a fanciful adventure tale. But it is also the story of Odysseus’ return from the Trojan War to his kingdom to resume his role as the caretaker of his parents, the father of his son Telemachus, and by banishing her suitors from his household, the undoubted husband of Penelope.

So today we celebrate the parent, satisfied with a feast of steak, uncorsaged, unbrunched, uncelebrated by long distance calls, who pushed you higher on the swing until you shrieked, urged you higher up the tree until your mother shrieked, and offered the sanctuary of a lap during the scariest scenes. He would sacrifice his kingdom to do this all once again.

Ecce homo.

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To see the trailer for Phil Donohue's Body of War, click here.

For eight minutes of Andrew Dice Clay's breakthrough performance on Rodney Dangerfield's 1988 cable special, click here.

For the Amazon link to Twitchell's Where Men Hide, click here.

The Ties That Blind

2008-05-25T12:44:00.004-05:00

Barack Obama is Now Following You On Twitter!

David Letterman, while still at NBC, regularly ran a bit in which he interviewed audience members about their “brush with greatness”, also the title of the segment. Greatness has always been very considerate with us at marketmambo, providing the widest possible margin at each passing. We once most literally brushed the arm of Mike Wallace at the top of his 60 Minute greatness, while we each approached a urinal in the restroom at the Ambassador West Hotel in Chicago. Funny how our moment came when men are the least likely to strike up a conversation.

But we’ve been given a second chance. “Barack Obama is Now Following You (Us, that is) On Twitter”. That was the subject line of an email we recently received. We must admit to the brief elation one feels when elevated above their station, the feeling the low-slung gopher must have when he rises on his haunches and looks across and then down at his fellow gophers still on all fours.

Twitter, for the uninitiated, is a new (about a year old) web-based service that allows members to send and receive short (140 character max) messages from a chosen group of other members on their computers and as text messages on their phones. These messages or “tweets” are the response to the query which is the mission of Twitter: “What are you doing?” The tweets typically contain updates such as “Having a green tea with Joe at Club X”, “Just got to the airport” or possibly if we had someone to tweet, “Typing a post about Twitter”. All these tweets occur in near-real time, and unlike email, chase you down and pop-up on your cell phone. Also unlike email, which offers a promise of important information, tweets are intentionally without real purpose.

We at marketmambo try to keep abreast of the latest products offered in the Web 2.0 catalog. Sometimes because the products may be actually useful, sometimes because they hold great potential, and sometimes, like another low-slung mammal, the lemming, we can’t help but wonder where everyone is going. It’s the latter that drove us to join Twitter. We must admit that we’re unsure how Twitter would find a place in our life, although our beloved and respected sister, Lena Mambo, tells us that it’s more valuable than we currently believe, and promises to personally provide the necessary enlightenment.

We were disappointed when we joined Twitter because we had no one to tweet, and no one to tweet us. But we learned that Barack Obama tweets, as does Hilary Clinton. Our understanding is that McCain doesn’t tweet, but often toots. So we connected with the Democratic hopefuls, someone using the nom de tweet Darth Vader (how could we resist?), and a guy, Tony, who sells clothing on Zappos.com and tweets all the livelong day (thanks Lena).

And that’s what led to the email from Barack, which we now feel comfortable calling him. He’s one of our Twitter followers, and we are one of his, meaning we have agreed to accept each other’s Tweets. We believe we’re Barack follower number 28,746, which is the number his follower-ticker turned to after our note.

Tony of Zappos is also now a follower. No word yet from Hilary Clinton. Cold.

The entangling web

Our intention is not to question the motivations of those who use Twitter, or the value of the service. The most common take on Twitter is “you really don’t get it until you use it”. That is likely true. One statistic floats about, unverified by Twitter, that active users average 15 tweets per day. We believe that its current users only hint at its ultimate usefulness, and that Twitter will evolve into something even more compelling. More statistical rumors claim that Twitter has more than one million users and transfers three million tweets per day. We’ve almost reached the critical mass of an infinite number of monkeys and an infinite number of typewriters. Someone will figure it out.

But we at marketmambo have been struggling for the past few months with a different version of the question “What are you doing?” With cellphones, and iPhones, and Zunes, iTunes, email, text messaging, instant messaging, GPS, PNDs, Linked-in, Plexo, MySpace, Facebook, Flickr, YouTube, and yes, we’ll include Blogger, How connected do we really need to be? How much information do we really need? Maybe we need a web-based service that doesn’t nudge us with the question “What are you doing?” but gently prods us with “What else could you be doing?”

But where’s the fun in that, and more important, where’s the money in that?

Tune in, turn off, shutdown

Saturday, May 3^rd was the second annual Shutdown Day, a worldwide, self-imposed holiday from technology. Organizers encouraged tech addicts to break away from their computers and sample a little unmediated human interaction. Their website contains three videos about Shutdown Day, each 30 seconds long if you’d like to sample them. We’ve embedded one below, “Meet Your Kids”, which we feel best conveys the spirit of the event.

Shutdown Day is the idea of Ashutosh Rajekar, a file-systems architect from Montreal. "People are failing to socialize with each other and they are becoming outcasts, they are becoming more and more introverted". According to Rajekar, 50,000 web citizens agreed in 2007 to swear-off technology for the day. As of May 1, 12,000 agreed to the 2008 anti-tech Sabbath.

We were interested by the reactions to the event. We were unable to find any coverage for Shutdown Day by first-tier news media before the event. A casual scan of the following Monday’s blog chatter seemed to mostly convey the apologies of techies for giving in to their web urges or simply forgetting their pledge until it was too late. If we are mistaken in our observations please correct us.

So Shutdown Day didn’t receive the attention of Earth Day. Perhaps the battle against technological obsession hasn’t yet established the cache of the evils of carbon emissions. Maybe no one has figured out a way to wrap their brand in an anti-tech crusade. We certainly love our tech, so maybe our friend from Montreal has punched his clenched fist into the air only to be greeted by the throaty roar of indifference.

Pockets of resistance

Ariel Meadow Stalling lives in Seattle, works at Microsoft, and writes a blog called Electrolicious. She also declares herself a tech addict and is trying to reclaim part of her life with a personal project she calls “52 Nights Unplugged”. Each of Ariel’s upcoming Wednesday nights will be tech-free: no phone, no computer, no TV. She hopes to fill the void with cooking, dancing, crafts…well, visit her blog and you’ll see the list goes on. (You can also see the video from an interview she recently did with the Today Show) Ariel confesses:

"I realized that I was in a constant state of 'partial tasking'. I had the illusion that I was multitasking but the truth was, I was not actually doing anything fully except thinking about what to do next and how to keep in a state of a sort of intoxicated hyperactivity."

In October 2007, 150 engineers at Intel launched their own rebellion in the form of “Email-free Fridays”. This moratorium acknowledges the need to tend to email, especially from clients, but encourages the engineers to substitute face-to-face meetings whenever possible on the last (office) day of the work week. “Email-free Fridays” are already common practice at US Cellular and several other companies.

USA Today recently published one of their famous little charts which captures the state of the world at a glance. It showed that the worldwide daily volume of email has increased from 15 billion in 2000 to 97 billion in 2007. The companion article cites “experts” who report that it takes four minutes to refocus onto our tasks after dealing with email. Another expert reports zillions of dollars lost to the US economy because of internet distractions.

And then there’s the Lifehacker Movement. Currently a website of the same name (.com), lifehacking began as an idea presented by Danny O’Brien at a tech conference in 2004. “Hacking” represents a core value of techies: the cleverness of a simple idea to fix an otherwise insurmountable problem. Life “hacking” therefore is the application of clever ideas to efficiently fix those challenges presented by technology. The word has broadened in meaning at the website to include any idea which helps us do things faster, whether organizing emails or starting a compost heap.

Hair of the dog?

So we guess it comes down to efficiency. The tragedy of lost money, lost time. But isn’t the focus on the promise of greater efficiency what got us here in the first place? Some of this sounds a bit like the “hair of the dog” strategy of curing hangovers: the best solution to the pain of too much whiskey the night before is more whiskey in the morning.

We’ll mention one more movement intended to take on information overload. We had the pleasure to attend a seminar several years ago given by David Allen. Allen is the unavoidable product of the intersection of space and time: he was at Berkley in the ‘60’s. He studied history, Buddhism and drugs. Like so many others with similar experience, he now spends his mature years giving business advice to “the man”. He calls his seminar “Getting Things Done” and if you visit the blogs of techies, you’ll often see a link composed of those words or the initials, GTD.

Allen is in demand because his seminar offers a simple system for efficiently dealing with information, and many leave it at that, placing GTD on the same shelf, for example, as Lifehacking. But Allen ties his system to its ultimate Zen-inspired goal: “Only when our mind is clear and our thoughts are organized can we achieve results and unleash our creative potential.”

The Roaring Zeroes

Lena kept her promise. Somewhere between the first and final keystrokes of this posting our sister sat us down and explained Twitter. As always, she was enthusiastic and insightful. I am now more convinced than ever that Twitter will be something someday, and more convinced that whatever it becomes, its not there yet. Lena is off to a great life adventure which removes her from my geography. I sincerely wish her well. We have each other’s email addresses, blog addresses, and cell phone numbers. We’re connected on Linked-in and now follow each other on Twitter. But as we discussed Twitter, her new adventure, and life in general over lunch, the waitress came to our table three times offering to remove our plates. As it is always with Lena and me, our conversation distracted us from our food and any attention to what employers would call a reasonable time for lunch. I’ll miss my lunches with Lena and am sure that technology will provide only an unsatisfying substitute.

In November 2007, Walter Kirn wrote an article for the Atlantic Monthly entitled “The Autumn of the Multitasker”, though not the point of the article, he referred to the first seven years of the our current century as “The Roaring Zeroes”. It seems to so successfully capture the furious motions and questionable progress of recent years. Please be sure, to us, this sentiment is not directed at any specific political denomination, at corporate leadership, at the chattering class of infotainers, or at any other us versus them. It’s directed only at us, the slave class that confuses being shackled to our fellow slaves with the pleasure of interpersonal connection.

We at marketmambo crave interpersonal connection also. If you visit Twitter.com, you can declare yourself a follower of tito mambo. We in turn promise to follow you. Unfortunately, we have not lived up to the average user tweet-rate of 15 per day. In fact we’ve so far only offered one tweet:

“With all this technology to connect us, why do we feel so disconnected from each other.”

Maybe our love of technology doesn’t deserve to be skewered. Maybe no one has yet risen to the task. We can’t help but think of Ben Hecht, who so thoroughly satirized the world of the old paper technology in “The Front Page”. There’s Paddy Chayefsky, who took on the previous (TV) technology with “Network”. We offer up Paddy’s words, as delivered by Peter Finch, and let our readers decide for themselves how well they may apply today.