Marketing's Future: 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 = 4

The Day The Human Universe Changed

2012-02-29T12:56:00.000-05:00

This brilliant guy, James Burke, was my inspiration for doing what I try to do through my posts, make 1 + 1 = 3! This BBC series ran in 1985, but the points he made about the small shifts in our human history that resulted in monumental change are as valid and fresh today as they were over 25 years ago.

Here's a 4 minute edit of one of the most mind-boggling changes that has gone a step further today with the advent of the Internet. In it he points out that it was the invention of movable type in printing presses that moved us from having our databases of human knowledge stored in individual brains, to being stored in books, then in collections of books (libraries), then computers, and today in 'the cloud'.

It's not the storage, nor the quantity of information that has been the key to our vast leaps forward with technology, however, it's something quite simple that is actually changing the way children today learn and process information. Pay attention to his final question...

Kids today memorize very little because they no longer have to, Google is usually near at hand. What they're learning is how to find things (i.e. search and connect). What that means is not that they are less educated than earlier generations, it merely means that their brain power is freed up to think about other things, like how 1 + 1 might equal 3. What this means is that, if we put the brightest bulbs in front of the right problems, they will make leaps forward in thinking an earlier generation might not have because they've been 'programmed' differently.

The next transformational step that is about to happen is instantaneous universal translation and payments on the Internet. This is almost here, but once it happens, you'll be able to chat via Skype with a native in the depths of Borneo's jungle and order a custom-carved hatchet to be delivered overnight by UPS.

All the boundaries of our physical world, like the national boundaries that the invention of printing (standard spelling and grammar in languages) first established, and those of culture and distance, will begin to fade away once this change takes place. Once people can chat for free to people from anywhere, anytime, and exchange not just information, but goods, freely, the very notion of what's important, AND of what 'power' really means, begins to change. That's more like 1 + 1 = 11!

Here's a clip from another episode in his series, this one pointing the way forward to a time when 'free enterprise' will inevitably give way to a more balanced and fair distribution of the planet's natural resources: "Hole in the Ground"

"SOCIAL"!!! It's All About "Social Marketing"! Yeah! The Next Thing is "Social".... Oh, Hang On...

2011-11-17T19:18:00.001-05:00

Indeed. You can't do "push marketing" via a social medium, and "pull marketing" on a social medium is actually PR, so if Marketing has any future, it will not be on any medium that is social in nature...

Ad Industry Titan Sounds the Death Knell for Print, Radio, TV & His Own Ad Agencies... And No One Notices!

2011-09-06T07:58:00.001-04:00

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it."

Upton Sinclair (from: I, Candidate for Governor: And How I Got Licked, 1933)

Sir Martin Sorrell, WPP CEO

Though it went largely unnoticed (amazingly), one of the world's biggest advertising agency tycoons, Sir Martin Sorrell, the man behind WPP, announced the end of print as a profitable advertising-supported medium and, by extrapolation, virtually all 'above the line' media (ATL). Now if the global ad agency networks primary role for the past 100 years was to churn out creative content for ATL, then one can only wonder what Sorrell's pronouncement really means for the mid-term future of global networks. In a one page interview titled "Save the Media!" that ran in Newsweek on April 11, 2011 written by Joanne Lipman, Sorrell said the only salvation for the print medium was government subsidies (read: 'charity'), but the subsidized media examples he cited were radio and television in Britain and Australia.

4 Paragraphs & 4 Bullets on Marketing's Near-Term Future:

The ad agency business thrived for almost a century, first on a national scale, the on a global scale through the 80's and 90's, yet with the advent of the Internet it is now facing the distinct possibility of collapse, especially if the ATL media networks it is dependent upon for commissions dry up. The premise behind the global ad agency's role in the world was near-absolute control of both the message and the medium. While that made sense as long as Marshall McLuhan's insight: "The Medium is the Message", held true, once that basic tenet got turned on its head, any businesses who's primary 'reason for being' was based upon it would appear to have a very tenuous future indeed. Today's 'emerging media' landscape has reversed McLuhan's insight:

The Message is Now the Medium (link).

It has become essential for marketers to shape a message that can be managed (no longer controlled!) across an unknown number of media. At best their brand messages are being enthusiastically 'pulled' across these new media by consumers, at worst attempts are being made to 'push' the brand message into social conversations. Early adopters and people still experimenting with something intriguing and new are VERY open to marketing experiments within emerging media -- however after these new media become a truly integral part of their lives, their tolerance for ads being injected into their social space evaporates. The first adults who began using Facebook are gradually losing interest in it (not coming back as often) as the 'shiny and new' glow wears off (though Zuckerberg may yet come up with a way to make it more relevant for daily usage/visits).

New technology has made the status quo 'push marketing' model of the past repugnant, if not simply irrelevant, and this news is as difficult for the ad agency titans of today to assimilate and address as it was for the railway barons of the early 20th century when trucking/highways became the new shipping pipeline. Now certainly WPP is still making gazillions of dollars and isn't going to see their profits evaporate any time soon, but many disparate things are intricately connected in business world -- Sorrell cannot dismiss the problems ATL is facing as irrelevant to the future health of WPP. Let's keep in mind what his current strategy is: focus efforts on rushing the dying business model into the developing world before related businesses there follow the declines the 'first world' is suffering from.

The future of marketing is not all that complicated or mysterious, nor is it going away. Humans have revered status as evidenced by wearing 'brands' since our very social big-brains evolved.

It's in our DNA, brands elevate our status and make us look good!

Marketing itself will merely evolve to:

Focus first and foremost not on the image or message the brand marketer 'pushes' through ATL, but through the experience of the brand consumers get engaged with first hand via experiential efforts (see bullet-point list near the end of this post).
Revolve NOT around 'manufactured problems' (P&G's "little pieces of toilet tissue stuck to children's bottoms"), but real benefits that consumers appreciate ("The Swiffer Duster").
Embrace fully addressable advertising. No, not location-based services (LBS) that serve up coupons to your mobile phone, but advertorials fed to me only for products and services I am actually interested in, that I alone choose how often I want to watch or share.
Restrict the use of 'social media' exclusively for PR purposes: for listening to how well the brand's marketing efforts are working, for offering contests and advertorial content, not pushing brand messages (not ever!).

The End

The Blah, Blah, Blah, "Full Treatise" Part...

Before you accuse me of getting carried away (and Sorrell has been known to 'stir the pot' in the past), let's put on our thinking caps for a moment and absorb both what he said and who he is. Then let's evaluate what his convictions about the global media business model suggest about the health of the global ad agency business model that he is dependent upon.

The Inevitable Collapse of Traditional ATL Media Content Suppliers in TV (NBC, ABC, FOX) & Radio

"Networked markets are beginning to self-organize faster than the companies that have traditionally served them. Thanks to the web, markets are becoming better informed, smarter, and more demanding of qualities missing from most business organizations.

"We are not 'seats' or 'eyeballs' or 'end users' or 'consumers. We are human beings -- and our reach exceed your grasp. Deal with it."

(From: http://www.cluetrain.com/, home site of: "The Cluetrain Manifesto: The End of Business as Usual")

In other words, heads up "Global Marketing Machine", 'push marketing' is well and truly dead! Long live 'pull marketing' based upon truly relevant product benefits (think the antithesis of P&G's "toilet tissue that doesn't leave invisible pieces of paper on the backside of young bears"), engaging brand experiences and contests and causes that people are happy to talk about around the water cooler and recommend to their friends.

As the music industry has had to shrink dramatically from their formerly self-inflated size, so will these related businesses, the platforms for all of which are rapidly fragmenting. The Internet (with its, as yet, dearth of fully proven business and channel/distribution models), the growing plethora of specialty TV channels and satellite radio -- all of these new channels are busy forcing this change to happen. 'Momentum' will only carry the old ATL stalwarts along so far before they go the way of Blockbuster. The new content giants are already taking over: Apple, Google, the content carrying 'pipelines' like AT&T and the wireless providers.

What Sorrell is saying is that his clients (from Ford to P&G) cannot shoulder the burden of 'supporting' ATL media on their own any longer because the Internet has rapidly depleted the ATL media providers' advertising revenue and they are going to gradually go broke. He is lobbying that it is time for the government(s) to step in and subsidize everything from newspapers and magazines, to commercial radio and TV, all of which have been, for the past 100+ years, solely advertising and subscription supported. He points to the BBC and Australian free-to-air radio and TV stations and says that today "advertising-only models don't work" because "there isn't enough advertising to go around. Period." He is saying this in light of the vast (and growing exponentially) quantity of digital ad inventory out there stealing a growing portion of media budgets from traditional media.

Sorrell believes "pay-walls, consolidation, subsidy," are the solution to augmenting the current ad-supported print business model.

Personally I suspect that the only way to get to pay-walls for print media is consolidation. No, not Rupert Murdoch-style mergers and acquisitions, but rather news aggregator/archival services like HighBeam.com through which a subscriber only has to pay one monthly fee to get access to any article that is proprietary to one source from anywhere on the worldwide web (i.e. HighBeam pays The Washington Post a few cents for every time one of one of the Post's archived articles gets read).

As for the notion of pay-walls, Sorrell also says "Consumers must pay for content if they value it." Sure, they will if they have to, but most of it's free at the moment and I, for one, am NOT going to pay each and every newspaper from around the world up to $39/month to access a proprietary article of theirs once in a blue moon (or even $0.99 per read). (I would pay a universal subscription fee of about $30/month giving me unlimited access to everyone's articles -- link to an earlier post.) To clarify, the problem in print is that, now that the WorldWide Web is overflowing with instant access to global content, the newspapers' (and news stations') old '3-4 news sources per city' model means that there is simply exponentially too many providers. That model grew up around a market need for multiple options for hard-copies of newspapers to be hand-delivered to everyone's doors -- it is now a well and truly redundant, dead model.

Why Listen to an "Odious Little Shit"?

WPP's Global Holdings (click to enlarge)

So why take the words of this "odious little shit" (as David Ogilvy famously called him) to heart? Virtually single-handedly Sorrell grew Wire & Plastics Products plc (WPP) into the world's largest advertising group by revenues. It owns a significant number of advertising, public relations, media and market research networks including Grey, Burson-Marsteller, Hill & Knowlton, JWT, Ogilvy Group, Young & Rubicam and Mediacom. He bought into these firms for one single reason: substantial profit margins.

Now WPP is not in the business of selling media space, but they are in the business of buying $72 billion of it annually for their clients. If this guy doesn't have his finger on the pulse of what is going to happen next in the advertising-supported world of print, TV and radio media, no one does. From his perch high above this intimately-related business, Sorrell is seeing that WPP is soon (a relative term) going to see many of its former platforms for airing 'push advertising content' going belly up, and there will not be any buyers for the bankrupt firms since Rupert Murdoch and the other narrowly-focused ATL media barons are starting to understand that they are kings of a soon-to-be-decimated realm. (Time to jump ship!)

Once this former symbiotic relationship is fundamentally disturbed, once the 'food source' for the ad agencies is well and truly on the endangered species list, this formerly stable ecosystem will be profoundly out of balance and all the species inhabiting it will face mortal peril.

No One Has Figured Out How The Traditional Advertising Formula Might Work Online

In the meantime, in his own words, regarding everyone's efforts to develop a successful media business model in the online digital space: "I don't think there's anybody that's cracked it". (Google has 'cracked' a brand new Internet search advertising business model; Apple has done the same in inventing new models around unique new content delivery technologies like iTunes/iPods and the iPad; Amazon and eBay have dominated niches with new business models -- note that ALL of these examples revolve around brand new business models -- Sorrell's rival at Publicis, Maurice Levy, tried and failed humiliatingly with Honeyshed to shoe-horn a 'push' model onto the Net; Hulu is trying to migrate the 'dead man walking' 'push marketing TV ad model' online' that consumers so dislike, but have had to put up with until now.)

The End is Nigh for ATL

An industry colleague had this to say:

“Not sure I agree with the extrapolation from the death of print to all ATL…”

Well let me breakout the details of my prediction of the inevitable death of ATL:

Everyone in the industry, Sorrell included, is stating one simple fact: since Internet streaming began more and more and more ad space has been created. Hulu is just one of a thousand (and growing exponentially) sites offering TV shows online. All of them have new ad space available.

On top of this, cable has 500+ channels and growing (Oprah, Nature, local stations, etc.). All of them come with new video ad inventory.

What consumers were finally able to tell us with the advent of the Internet is that they never wanted to be force-fed 6,000, or even 600, GRP’s of our :30 TV ads. They do NOT want frequency to increase online, they ONLY want to watch ads they are interested in, and no more than once or twice. (However, if the brand really interests them the advertorial can be 20 minutes long.) In other words consumers want less and less ad frequency, which means the world needs far LESS ad inventory, and now consumers can vote for it (demand it) online by simply not watching. (On my computer I always have other windows open I click to when a forced-view ad comes on. Yes, the ad played, but I didn’t watch it.)

So the increasing volume of TV (video) ad inventory is not only not viable to be filled, the consumer is just itching for a chance to prove to the industry they never wanted even 10% as much inventory.

If every ATL network in the world makes their money by selling ad inventory at a price that has been inflated by 400% over the past 11 years (in the case of TV), and soon there will be far too much inventory to meet decreasing demand as advertisers move their efforts to more engaging media like XM, AND consumers want there to be FAR less as space out there, then all the ad-supported networks cannot avoid going bankrupt, just as the railway barons of old did when new trucks/roadways began carrying much of their volume of freight more efficiently (direct to loading docks) at a lower price.

All of which begs the question: If much of today’s ATL goes belly up, what happens to the mega ad agencies who (to date) have made their commission primarily through the purchase of grossly over-priced TV ad space?

What this means for ad agencies is an impending crisis of Goliath-slaying proportions. They will more than likely end up being faced with the mandate from their clients to spend billions of dollars on media inventory that no longer exists, the only option being to spend it on a broad swath of digital inventory for which effectiveness cannot really be tracked. [Note that, for the past 100 years, despite Nielsen's assertions to the contrary (they are another co-dependent cog in the wheel), there hasn't been any accurate cause & effect methodology to track the effectiveness of ATL. Only print, via coupons, offered an effective tracking methodology.] Everyone knows what happens when you can't spend all of your budget -- it gets cut next year!

15% Commission on Media: Assassinated by P&G

Sorrell's WPP has come through a period of devastation to the original 100 year-old ad agency business model (15% commission on media spend budgets, plus 10% commission on production budgets). Global clients, led by P&G, first insisted that all their agencies both open up offices/subsidiaries in every country that they expanded into, stretching the agency network's profitability to the breaking point as the fledgling networks struggled to buy up and then subsidize satellite agencies throughout the developing world.

About the same time a shareholder-led conviction became entrenched that ad agencies were little more than pirates, profiteering in return for coming up with some simple, silly advertising campaign concepts. This was actually quite untrue of the agencies -- their media commission business model hadn't changed since early in the century and the "creative's" working for them have fundamentally different types of brains from the analytical type that clients hire out of top universities (despite their ego's assertions to the contrary!). The tendency towards 'profiteering' was true of the businesses the agencies fed their ads through, however: the TV networks and the agencies' 'suppliers', the TV ad production companies.

Though it's not like there is any outright collusion going on, there is a co-dependent relationship wherein the ad agencies benefit as the cost of network TV ad space and the production cost of ads have soared to many by MANY times inflation. There was no real incentive for the agencies to try to control the runaway increases as they benefited from more commission revenue as media and production spending grew apace. (It is really no more costly for an agency to develop a campaign for a big brand than a small one -- the increased cost comes from having to disseminate the message further afield and manage the process.)

The clients (read: P&G) began a strategy of divide and conquer (a simple negotiating strategy their new Procurement Departments used handily: split all the costs out separately from the total, then start nickel-and-diming each now-isolated cost downwards). They insisted that the agencies' media planning/buying departments be spun-off into separate firms, taking the 1.5% to 3% commission on media spending they earned with them. Once that percentage was separated from the formerly untouchable 15%, it could be negotiated downward, especially once every former media department was now an independent 'supplier' in competition with each other. Similarly, of the original 15% commission, the remaining 12 to 13.5% earmarked for creative development and account management suddenly got arbitrarily cut to 10%, then even less as media spending got more and more fragmented and smaller agencies began under-cutting to compete.

TV Ad Production Profits Got the Same Treatment

As they succeeded in bringing down agency commissions, the major marketing firms also began putting intense pressure on the cost of TV ad production, bringing the profits in this related industry down significantly, too. (When a car or beer brand's TV ad storyboard hits a production company president's desk, an extra zero or two or three is immediately tacked on to the estimate: A. they can afford it, B. they pay for the experimentation that improves production quality across the board. The reality is that TV production is a risky and creative business, and when the chance to make a ton of money evaporates, the really skilled, creative, smart people leave the business for greener pastures and quality declines.) All of these 'cost reductions' have decimated the advertising industry's profitability.

Less $ Means Lower Quality For All Related Businesses: Ad Agencies and Suppliers

A longer term 'knock-on effect' that was unanticipated by the clients (though the stakeholders would not have cared a whit as their rewards are all tied into short-term gains) was that agency salaries dropped through the 90's and early 00's (to maintain profitability in what is a people-only service business, you have to cut the quantity and cost of employees) -- the best and brightest of a fresh bunch of creative geniuses went looking for greener fields that would challenge their brain power and pay them more handsomely. Many of them found their calling in the financial field, inventing the very creative, but built upon smoke and mirrors, derivative and leveraged-mortgage market. Others among the brightest bulbs were drawn off to the golden glow of Silicon Valley where they helped fuel the hype that lead to the IT bubble unnecessarily bursting in 2000-2001 (it burst NOT because the technology warranted a value decrease, but because the hyperbole could not be sustained -- see "The Cluetrain Manifesto", chapter 4).

Creative quality in the global ad agency business has dropped along with the agencies' value to clients ("Strategic Planning" being the first to go -- the clients happily took that in-house). For the most part, the clients couldn't care less -- they have far too many small, brand new and therefore 'shiny', competitive agencies springing up to provide them with cheap, very creative concepts while they are busy twisting their own arms to pat their own backs for how cleverly they cut network agency costs.

What the clients still don't seem to 'get' is that they have had added an enormous cost to their marketing efforts. Instead of having the old 'one stop shops' they were aiming to build when they demanded the agencies develop global networks, they are now spending endless hours in every market dealing with small shops who are all doing things that are "off brand equity". There is a huge expense involved with policing all these efforts and bringing them back in line -- or seeing many of the 'experiments' in new media careen off-course.

Ironically, clients have helped hamstring the agency networks through their compensation formulas, by tying the agencies' gradually shrinking profitability to ATL, they have forced the agencies to close their eyes to new business model opportunities.

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it."

What these global agencies SHOULD be doing is inventing new business models for themselves AND their clients, but they haven't got the brain power or flex time/resources to do so -- they don't have the profitability to be able to attract the best and brightest creative and strategic thinkers. Their focus is, for the most part, upon profit maintenance and survival. There is a relatively simple solution, however, as Sorrell has recommended for the ATL media: Pay-walls and consolidation (subsidies are for business losers!). Since day one, by basing their compensation on commission instead of IP, agencies have discounted (given away for free) the one thing they produce that the clients cannot: creative concepts.

Yes, the egos of every Brand Manager (and many of the not-so-enlightened CMO's) constantly whispers into their ears that they are as creative as any Creative Director. But how could they be? If they were, they wouldn't be able to stand working at what they do! There simply isn't enough room in the human brain for excellence at both analytical thinking (and the dogged patience required to crank out brand plans) AND being remarkably creative. P&G Canada's GM, Tim Penner, once told me that doing my presentation on "The Future of Marketing" would be a waste of time "for my already very creative team". Sorry Tim, you don't get it both ways. P&G hires for top test score results, agencies hire for top creativity. The grind that is workaday life at P&G spits out the types who have some creative bones in their bodies in the first couple of years!

Ad Agency "Pay walls"

If ad agencies did what the clients have in working together to force the hand of the other side, if they insisted upon tying their compensation to the success of their IP, they'd be swimming in piles of money. Risky, sure, but going bankrupt slowly is risky too, and when you look at the power that a global campaign has on a brand's sales, as it is tested and rolled out, the risk is actually substantially mitigated.

Agencies create concepts that clients cannot. Every time they've ever tried, clients have learned that trying to bring creatives in-house is the equivalent of clipping an eagle's wings -- when they can't fly, they aren't able to do what they do. Agencies simply have to repeat this mantra, en masse, to clients: "If you want our concepts, we expect to share the rewards while you ameliorate the inherent risk in our service-provider business model with a retainer." I'm talking about a simple shift from being 'ad agencies', to becoming 'marketing agencies'. A shift from what clients have often seen as a parasitic relationship, to a truly symbiotic relationship. (And I'm not totally 'out of the loop', agencies big and small have been negotiating terms and experimenting with compensation formulas with their clients for many years, ever since the initial commission cuts began.)

Ad Agency "Consolidation"

Today's agencies, whether networks or hot-shops, resemble the fragmentation of the new media landscape (see WPP's 'bush' image above), with digital, CRM, media-planning, promotional, PR, "social", experiential (not many!), etc., divisions. The reality is that their clients' brands need a single global voice (yes, with local tweaks) and they need simplicity to keep communication costs down. Consolidating and simplifying their sevice offer, rather than desperately fragmenting it in an effort to keep up with the client's constant shopping around for new hot-shops to develop new technology opportunities for them, would offer clients what they asked of them in the first place. It's a simple shift from 'divisions' back to 'departments'.

Yes, the C-Suite is going to shriek that their current structure is predicated on separate profit centres and that trying to bring all these divisions back under one umbrella would be impossible, but I have some news for you, it is the 'fighting for profit' between all these competing internal divisions that has killed your ability to deliver a consistent message for your clients' brands. The first global agency to begin cracking this issue is going to emerge the big winner.

What's Coming Next for the Global Ad Agencies

This new crisis: the gradual (sudden?) death of many of the media networks that the agency networks are co-dependent upon, will likely be the death knell for many global ad agency giants in the coming years. Unless, that is, they take the advice of this 'mewling voice in the wilderness' to heart and follow their noses...

A Golden Future for Global Ad Agencies

IF it is possible for us to assimilate that the death of the 'push' model -- mind-numbingly repeating a brand's message to buyers and non-buyers alike -- was announced by TV viewers with the advent of the remote control, and then dealt a decisive death blow by the Internet,
AND IF we all recognize that we welcomed in "The Experience Economy" in the late '90's,
AND IF everything in marketing today is about 'pull' and 'engagement',
AND IF "the medium is no longer the message, the message is now the medium",
THEN all of today's marketing efforts must be focused upon "The Brand Experience",
By shifting a gradually larger and larger slice of their media budgets away from any 'push media' (including digital) to experiential marketing (XM), the global ad agency networks will not only give the consumers exactly what they've always demanded,
They will give their client's brands more brand trial, life-long loyalty and volume (that's what XM delivers in spades for quality, relevant-to-their-needs brands).
They will also do this with a built-in cause-and-effect tracking mechanism since face-to-face experiential marketing efforts can be designed to accommodate direct sales/results tracking with coupons, web- and mobile-based codes, contests and rewards.
By doing this the networks will maintain their media budgets because XM is much more expensive on a cost-per-exposure basis, hence it swallows BIG budgets (and when XM is managed well it delivers substantial value to consumers and therefore to clients -- what that means is it can make very healthy profit margins).
ERGO, XM is the new ATL.

XM: We're social, we like learning about brands MOST from each other.

Don't Get Side-Tracked By "New and Shiny" -- Anything Labelled "Social" Cannot Support Marketing Efforts

An important aside, most agency folks (see intro quote above) are getting totally side-tracked by 'Social Media Marketing'. Sure, it's the newest thing and is therefore drawing 'eyes', but anything labelled "social" is PR, not advertising. Why? Because it is in the same communication channel as the telephone (remember how welcome 'telemarketing' is to all of us, let alone happening in the midst of a conference call?), and as such any medium labelled "social" is 'pull', not 'push'.

You cannot manipulate anything that is 'social' without losing any credibility. YES, you can facilitate the buzz around your brand by putting social media 'tools' out there, but trying to 'push' selling messages in any way is no longer acceptable to consumers. Period. Never was, actually.

'Advertorials' = good; 'BUY NOW! Ads' = bad.
Unique, engaging one-off message = good; endless repetition of 'selling points' = bad.

A very large part of the problem is semantic and revolves around the use of the word "media". In our business, for as long as we can remember, anything labelled "media" meant something we could buy advertising space on. We tend to forget that our face-to-face conversations are conducted across a medium (sound waves through the air) that we cannot buy ad space on; that phone conversations take place on a medium we cannot buy ad space on (and no one would stand for it). Once we collectively decided that this new Internet medium that people were using to converse socially on should be called "Social Media", our industry has been trying to figure out how we can buy space on it. You cannot, anymore than "WOM", "Buzz", or "Guerrilla" are actually viable marketing tactics, all they are are 'flavour of the year' buzz-words to describe the desired results of 'push marketing' experimentation in social media and experiential marketing efforts.

Where the Next Big Acquisitions Will Happen

The most wrong-headed way for the ad agency networks to welcome XM into their portfolio of marketing tools is to try to build the expertise internally 'from scratch' like O&M's "Ogilvy Action" began attempting to do in 2007 in Canada. The simplest way (and quite possibly cheaper in the long run as existing firms are already profitable), in Canada as an example, would be for the big players to buy the big successful experiential firms like CIM (LAUNCH! Brand Marketing is their XM agency) and Mosaic, or even the medium-sized ones like Match, Inventa, or their competitors. (If you've got a piece of a successful example of one these firms anywhere in the world, hold on tight!)

But What, Really, Is The Future of Marketing?

The best analogy for the shift from 'push' to 'pull' marketing is not changing the direction of an oil supertanker at full momentum, it is more like doing the same thing for a very long train filled with agency personnel who have been chugging down a more or less straight track for decades. It doesn't require just stopping the train, it requires laying a brand new set of tracks to go off on this new direction, into a new country where the language is somewhat familiar, but the grammar is quite different. It's in no way impossible for that train full of people to go in this new direction, and some of the passengers will take to the new direction and grammatical rules fluidly, but it won't be simple or easy to make it happen.

As some of you have read me prattle on about since 2007, the initial realization that came to me listening to a PDA waving presenter speaking to Grey's P&G Euro Team at a seminar in 1997, was that the long-term future of marketing is FULLY Addressable Advertising:

Not 'LBS'*, but 100% personalized, no-repetition advertorials of nothing but stuff I'm interested in buying (click for the link).

* Location-Based Services: 'coupons' sent to your mobile phone for retailers close to where you are.

Marketers FINALLY Starting to Understand "Social Media": It's 'Pull', NOT 'Push'

2011-09-05T13:11:00.000-04:00

Credit: Gary Larson, The Far Side

For many years I've been arguing that, outside of being a NEW medium, and therefore interesting and exciting, that what is now being called "social media" has INCREDIBLE value as a tool for marketers, but only as a 'nearly real time' medium for:

Listening: allowing marketers to monitor how effective their real marketing efforts are in order to guide next steps.
Communicating directly (2-ways) with consumers to address issues quickly and with carefully constructed replies (PR).
Generating positive PR like we used to do with press releases.
Offering access to advertorials and participation in a brand's contests and causes.

Of course the rest of the marketing world is busy trying to do what they've done best since the first 'snake oil salesmen' emerged: force marketing messages into the mix to push more sales. Over time, however, the cleverest firms have started to sort out the real value of new ways to communicate with their customers and to leverage new technology: check out this article (link).

Here are my 'answers' to some remarkably un-insightful 'questions' on Quora from a couple of fine examples of the world's lemmings:

Do advertisers recognize the strength of social media as an advertising tool in the Middle East? If yes, do they prefer it over traditional advertising?

Give me a break! Social Media are a totally unproven 'advertising tool'! Zero truly proven ROI, even via the most sophisticated metrics tools today. "Social Marketing" does not exist, it is a PR channel, not a marketing channel, as time will demonstrate.

That is not to suggest that it isn't going to morph into something that is useful for marketing purposes, but right now most of the efforts being made in the 'social sphere' are 'push' related, not 'pull marketing' (with some notable exceptions). While early adopters/innovators will put up with a lot of ham-fisted 'push' tactics in the early days of any new medium (see: "Second Life"), over time as the masses adopt the medium they will demand 'push' marketing be removed, just as today's government-imposed 'Do Not Call Lists' for telemarketing illustrates.

People will talk about brands in any social millieu only because they want to. We can use social media to MONITOR their conversations, but not to thrust our brand messages into. Experiential Marketing, used in combination with LBS couponing, contests and video ads played to us because we asked to see them once ('fully addressable advertising'), will be where marketing spending shifts as 'Social Marketing' dies its rightful death.

Social Media took the air out of Experiential Media's sails, what is the next buzz-worthy Media concept to deflate Social?

You are actually asking two questions by making an assumption: Social Media has killed Experiential Marketing? While social media definitely "took the wind out of experiential marketing's sails", it has in no way diminished it as a tool of the future!

If you buy into the shift from 'push' to 'pull' marketing that Social Media have forced upon marketers, then Experiential continues to be the leading tool in the box for brands. Experiential Marketing delivers interactive brand experiences with Brand Ambassadors in real life -- there is no more powerful tool to start a Social Media 'conversation'. Coupons, contests and other incentives can help, but they don't employ a live person to contribute information and emotional sincerity (testimonial credibility) to the initial product trial. Experiential, while vastly more expensive than other media on a 'cost per touch' basis, has the advantage of vastly superior ROI. One solitary 'exposure' has the potential to hook a loyal consumer for life. Above the Line media do not change behaviors, they can change perceptions and awareness -- Experiential Marketing changes buying behavior directly and immediately.

Sadly, in the moment that Experiential was poised to win a significantly larger slice of marketing spending, 'Social Marketing' reared its "The Latest Thing!" head and stole a huge chunk of spending based on nothing but hype, with virtually ZERO actual ROI. Social media, because they feel like familiar 'push' media, have an enormously higher 'comfort factor' for media buyers and marketers to shift spending to. Remember that TV advertising has NEVER, in the past 70 years (since 1929) had ANY really provable ROI, outside of us all knowing that if a brand hits us on the head with sufficient regularity and frequency, the pain will linger all the way to the retail aisle.

Your second question about what will follow Social, then, is first and foremost Experiential. As the hype dies down and the low ROI (now demonstrable, in part through social media, whereas back in the first 70 years of TV, we really did not have the technology to prove anything) dissuades CMO's from throwing more of their precious marketing dollars down a PR medium (anything labelled a 'social' medium, like the telephone, is not an appropriate channel for marketing efforts), the smart marketers will realize that they need to put all their efforts into true 'pull' marketing, the best medium for which is Experiential.

However where the rest of marketing spending will eventually be channelled is into Fully Addressable Advertising, delivered via personal devices and tied to location based tracking. Google, Apple and Facebook are currently in a race to get there first. No one hates ads -- they hate ads that are irrelevant to them. Offer me an ad about the latest hot sports car and I'll watch a 10 minute version, then share it with all my buddies. I'll even watch an ad about the latest diaper technology if I have a new baby.

What I WILL NOT DO is watch any ad more times than I require to "get the point". I call it "The Death of Frequency". That shift, from familiar 'push' strategies to new and mysterious 'pull' is not something most marketers are comfortable even trying. Apple has been doing it for years.

Simply Amazing. Makes Me Feel Like a Kid Reading SciFi!

2011-09-03T08:54:00.000-04:00

The "Global War on Terror" is really "The Global War on Identifying/Catching Nut-Jobs'

2011-08-26T09:12:00.000-04:00

A reply of mine to a comment on an Atlantic article brought to mind by the always-switched-on John Glyde of Mollymook, NSW, Australia on the subject of how people who lean left are just as prone to dogmatic thinking/rhetoric as those who lean right. Here's my comment (this was originally posted on my JustOneCynicsOpinion blog on May 14, 2011):

To your point about analyzing human motivations vs. cause and effect, you raise the most telling point about human nature in all of these debates, Omaryak, the underlying barrier to rational, impartial analysis being that we are social creatures with 'unnecessarily' large capacity brains (an 'accident' of evolution). That brain power leads us to be storytellers by nature and to imbue everything we experience or hear about with meaning. That fabricated 'meaning' is most often coloured by our predilections: some people's personalities make them lean towards loving tragedies, others to upbeat romantic story lines (happily ever after). Once some individuals are 'dyed in the wool' tragedy-lovers, everything becomes part of that tragic story -- conspiracies, big/small government, etc. Oliver Stone filters world news through his now-immutable predilections and cannot be objective. Christopher Hitchens, as he alludes to in his aside about his kids' school march, does as well.

Given the enormous complexity of geo-politics, most people look for simple stories in order to have some kind of 'handle' on why things happen. Some simple-minded people in the developing world (and developed world!) hang their hats on the notion that imperialist governments are responsible for propping up the dictators of their home country. They see mass-murder of citizens in the 'imperialist' country, who are as innocent of collusion as they themselves are, as being the only way to bring attention to their nation's plight. (Yes, re-read that last line and run it by some of these simpletons and they'll fist-pump enthusiastically while his 'al Queda' neighbour is busy strapping on a suicide vest to blow up civilians in his local market, the irony lost on both of them.)

My point? "Clouded by emotion" and "rhetoric of evil". Even now, after so much time has passed, after bin Laden has finally been found and killed, our predilections continue to drive us to want to legitimize bin Laden's "cause" as having a valid political platform, yet he was simply a very wealthy psychopath who had the means and motivations to latch onto a regional 'cause celebre' and leverage it to recruit suicide soldiers (each of whom was similarly, though not identically, disturbed). While there are innumerable 'causes' out there that lead to 'effects', in general the trigger-pullers are not legitimate banner-holders (Timothy McVeigh, the Shoe-Bomber, etc.), they're just murder-loving nut-jobs. "Evil" is not the possession of anything, as most people believe quite passionately, it is just the absence of both innate human empathy and our group 'socialized empathy'.

If we had a global "War on Nut-Jobs" we'd all be a lot safer from the Ghaddafi's and Kim Jong Il's, as well as the Una Bombers, McVeigh's and Waco's, let alone the bin Laden's. More in my post from September 2009 here: (Click to read post)

But my convictions wouldn't sit well with military and intelligence type's huge egos, would it? They'd go from being "Geo-Political Spy Lords" to "Nut-Job Identifiers/Catchers". No real romance/thriller story line elements in that!

The real reason that political forces around the world will never name the on-going battle between what is good for the masses versus the small, but exceedingly dangerous percentage of our human population who are murder-loving nut-jobs and megalomaniacs, is that there's not much political capital/leverage in admitting that these people have zero legitimate political motivation, that their motivations are merely to satisfy a deep-seated urge to take lives, or to be all-powerful, or both.

Britain's PM Cites "Moral Collapse" Amongst Youth for the Flash Mobs

2011-08-15T14:10:00.002-04:00

I have to say that I was originally ticked off that some people were blaming the riots perpetrated by youngsters in the UK as some kind of 'moral collapse' that is taking over British society, but then Britain's PM, David Cameron, had this to say in a speech to his constituents yesterday via CNN:

(There has been a) slow-motion moral collapse ... in parts of our country.

Irresponsibility.

Selfishness.

Behaving as if your choices have no consequences.

Children without fathers.

Schools without discipline.

Reward without effort.

Crime without punishment.

Rights without responsibilities.

Communities without control.

He promised that the government will "review every aspect of our work to mend our broken society."

Indeed. What the Brits are doing at the moment is throwing all the participants they can round up into jail, and more power to them. That's what their society's laws demand and it's exactly what needs to be done with any law breakers, swiftly and consistently, along with the general populace coming out both vocally to condemn the kids' actions and onto the streets in significant enough numbers to literally stand in the way of wanton criminality.

But back to the roots of the mayhem. While I do not think that any of it is a result of British society doing the wrong thing, or politicians and civic leaders going awry with their policies, all of the things that Cameron lists above can be said today for most developed countries' youth (and most of the developing countries' youth as well). What I'm getting at is that, while the rabid conspiracy theorists (everyone loves a good story!) will point to politics as a cause, I am a strong believer in Occam's Razor, that we should stick with the most simple explanation that mirrors the basics of human nature in individual behaviour before we start adding in complex explanations about society as a whole.

Something to consider: my "Gen X" generation grew up 'bottle-fed' on WWII movies. My early years were spent glued to the TV watching MASH, a series about the horrors of injuries in the Korean War that left only humour as a defence mechanism and "Hogan's Heroes", a similarly funny take on life in a WWII POW camp (it was a time of healing and 'moving on'). I knew intimately about the Vietnam War as the protests played out during my youth and the casualties, the returning vets, were featured in so many movies and shows. I heard first hand stories from my family elders and their friends about the suffering and death during WWII.

Want to know what the exposure of most of this new teenage generation has been to real life human suffering? (They do not watch CNN.) What these boys have been doing since they were old enough to get access to their older brother's (or Gen X dad's) video game device is play role-playing games like Grand Theft Auto, which involves winning points for criminal behaviour, and Call of Duty, which involves blowing up, shooting, knifing, etc. 'the faceless enemy'. That's it. No stories from their great-grandfather of losing your best friend to a machine gun while running through a field, just 100% virtual death and destruction.

And these boys are addicted to these games, spending endless hours playing them without leaving the couch, the teenage reward centres of their brains lighting up far more strongly, research has lately proven, than they will a few years later. If mom and dad do not intervene, they will stop going to school and will even stop sleeping to play the games endlessly. The thrill they get is just too much to resist!

Now having read that last two paragraphs, go back and re-read Cameron's list above. To this generation of boys (and a few girls) the prospect of finally getting out and, in real life, participating in Grand Theft Auto actions and Call of Duty mayhem MUST be like offering a methadone-addict his first hit of real heroin -- finally the real thing and far too strong a temptation to resist. Add to this the anonymity of a crowd, BlackBerry's untraceable PIN messaging (apparently BB has become the smartphone of choice for those in the drug trade, or who aspire to be like the thugs in the drug trade in England's poorer areas), and a brain that has not yet developed the ability to understand the long-term consequences of short-term thrills, and you will get rampaging 'flash mobs'.

An Important Caveat

What I believe it is important to remind ourselves of is that every group needs a leader. Those who 'step up' to lead in a riot tend to be older and/or socio- or psychopathic. These 'leaders' are NOT indicative of the mob following them any more than the one car driver who murdered three young men in the Brighton riot last week by running them over was a fair representative of the individuals in the crowd. When an emotionally/psychologically unstable individual gets 'empowered' by a mob, the impulses they will act upon are far darker and lacking in normal human empathy than the other 99% of the group. Lumping these whack-jobs in with the rest and painting them all as murdering thugs is unfair.

The reality is that if I'd been born in the 90's and found myself in that group, I can imagine I would have participated in the looting and rabble-rousing, but I would never have stooped to hurting people, it is just not in my core make-up. I do know there were a few lads in my neighbourhood who could have taken things further, however, and it is for the sake of everyone in our society that this new 'flash mob' phenomenon, spurred by a sense of entitlement, a lack of real-life experience with true human suffering, new smartphone technology and social media, must be brought under control whatever the cost. These kids today grow up OUTSIDE their parents (dual or single) control -- their world integrates influences from people and groups that no kids in the past had access or exposure to. We need to guide them in new and as yet untried ways, and soon.

When Twitter/Facebook-Empowered "Flash Mobs" Turn Violent

2011-08-09T09:59:00.003-04:00

"What Sparked the London Riots?" shouts CNN this morning.

Opportunity and the tools to organize some mayhem, that's all.

When "The Media" does nothing but report without offering real human insights, they leave the door open for more carnage by leaving the impression that there is something deeply dark and mysterious taking place among average folks. Nope, it's just a bunch of young people 'having fun'. And "The Media" does it all the time:

"The People of Tottenham Take to the Streets and Riot in Anger over..."
"Vancouverites Turn to Violence in Rage Over Hockey Loss"
"Muslims Worldwide Resort to Jihad in Response to..."
"Torontonians Loot Shops in G8 Protest Against Globalisation"

When "The Media", a field that employs just as many people of average to low intelligence as any other, lumps everyone in an area or culture or religion together in a headline or article together following an incident of one kind or other, stereotypes are not just perpetuated or reinforced, they are actually created in the minds of many.

Was I the only one watching YouTube videos of hundreds of people 'taking over' a London train station for a 'spontaneous' dance performance and feeling vaguely anxious? I mean, if those well-meaning folks could do that...

I was a teen once. I was a young man in my early 20's. Had I been handed a device back then that I could carry in my pocket that would buzz and light up with an invitation to every young person within 50 kilometres to gather together in an anonymous mob downtown and either dance in synchrony, OR wreck havoc on stores and the vehicles of adults I didn't know, I have to be honest, I'd have leapt onto my bike or on the bus and, typing excitedly to every similarly-aged person I knew, I'd have invited them all to join in. Why? I don't know, it would just have seemed far too much 'fun' (read: 'illicit', 'adrenaline-inducing', 'social' and 'adult') for me not to.

As so many clever people have hastened to point out, the current rioting in the UK is NOT about the police shooting a black man. Yes, like the G8 protests in Toronto last summer, a specific or obscure 'cause celebre' gives these young males (and a few females) a cover story for letting their lack of ability to assess actions with long-term consequences and their raging hormones run wild in the streets as anonymous members of a crowd, but it is NOT about the cause, it's about feeling empowered to do something 'wild and crazy' without retribution. It started, ironically, with "flash mobs" gathering in public areas to dance, it evolved into some ne'r-do-wells seizing upon the same tools to engage in criminal action under the cover of a 'cause celebre".

Much has been made of the power of these new technologies to do good, to incite change in repressive dictatorships in the Middle East, to give average people a voice in 'just saying no' to 'push marketing', but what we're seeing now is how a simple thing like an instantaneous, free, local and global news service like Twitter, or Facebook status updates can wreck havoc. What is not being reported is that the appeal of using these free 'services' is NOT just the ability to post some interesting information, it is the irresistible thrill that comes from being the first to post about something. It makes the poster's ego burst with hedonistic pride to believe, if only for a few seconds, that they are the first, the most popular, an integral member of a private club of popular leaders, to share new information.

When that thrill is combined with a peculiar aspect of human nature that is the tendency we all have to feel anonymous in a crowd, AND the freshly discovered area of the brain that is still being 'wired' through our teens into our early 20's that allows adults to assess and evaluate the long-term consequences of actions that might "let-off steam" (read: "pump-up adrenaline"), but are destructive (sadly particularly powerful in some 13-15 year old boys with access to cans of spray paint), we get violence, arson and looting.

I've said this before, but I'll do so again, something peculiar happened to me about 24-25, I 'suddenly' felt mature. Inside my brain something finished developing and I became aware of the gravity of life. I 'suddenly' became concerned about career and family and property ownership, whereas prior to that watershed period, I was largely focused on what pleased my brain most on a superficial level: sailboarding, girlfriends, fast vehicles, having fun. This phenomenon has now been proven to be real, an area of the brain that only finishes it's re-wiring development in the mid-20's, a neuron cross-road that controls our assessment of actions and consequences.

What I find interesting, looking back, was that there was a small percentage of the population of males my age who never did make that transition. There were guys who just continued to like doing things that were NOT positive for themselves or their society or family, like blowing things up and stealing, telling tall tales to explain away or cover up their actions. Many of this cohort were pathological liars like Casey Anthony (mother of the tottler who was killed and who's skeletal remains found near their house), some are sociopaths and a few are psychopaths with a strong desire to lead a group of willing worshippers.

These types do not exist solely in Middle Eastern dictatorships, folks, they live among every human population everywhere. They are the kids down the street, they are your kids and mine. Give these disturbed, lacking-in-empathy youngsters a tool like Twitter or Facebook status updates on a smart phone and a 'cause celebre' and you just might get a riot. You just might get a LOT of riots. Why not? Rioting is a LOT of fun and they are free to throw, free to participate in and have zero consequences for the participants! (Well, near zero, but at that age we all thought consequences would happen to one of our anonymous fellow participants, not to us.)

So what's the answer?

The answer is that same as it always has been, society stepping in and saying we don't like it. Adults have NEVER liked potential harm to their hard work or infants, to their property or themselves, or their aging parents. To prevent it we came up with laws, legals systems and police forces to uphold the laws and control the crazies among us. We came up with morals and ethics and 'societal norms' and we all collectively pitch in to maintain these norms. Lately these 'norms' include speaking up in public to chastise the parent who slaps their child to discipline them, or talking behind the back of the parents who allows their child to play in the street unsupervised, or glaring collectively at the drunk on the bus, etc. The 'norms' evolve.

In the case of the growing tendency of young people to use their cell phones to gather together virtually instantly in "flash mobs" (NOTE: they are NOT "gangs" with structure and relationships, they are merely "mobs") it is going to come down to both the police AND the general public stepping up and doing their job, lecturing our kids that this is not acceptable behaviour, monitoring what kids are up to on their cell phones both by parents, the police and self-policing software by Twitter and Facebook, adults gathering in the streets amongst the kids do to quell their enthusiasm for wrecking havoc and reinforcing "the right thing" by doing so after the fact and forcing the youngsters to do the clean up en masse. (And much of their 'flash-mob organizing' is nothing more than a Facebook status update getting passed along to different groups of other 'friends' saying "FM outside Charing Cross in 20 mins" or "Meet @ Main & 2nd @ 7:05".)

Society has always had to adapt to the misuse of new technologies to do harm, oftentimes well as is the case in most countries where gun possession is illegal, sometimes poorly, as in the US where profit and juvenile pleasure drives the law makers to allow gun makers to sell them indiscriminately. On the 'harmless' side of new technology after the phone was invented Telemarketers gradually became regulated because society in general got tired of being interrupted in the middle of dinner, but phone-tapping was also approved to monitor criminal activity. For reasons very similar to the gun problem in the US, TV advertising frequency went largely unregulated and now the Internet has given the public the ability to turn the ads off, but the Internet has also brought with it a HUGE amount of criminal activity. We're rushing to catch up and plug the holes in the dyke, but the latest rash of 'flash mob' organization means we're going to have to work faster and more effectively to regulate new technology.

Apple and Similar Brands Inadvertently Exploit Religious Zeal

2011-05-31T13:05:00.001-04:00

Comment to a FastCompany.com article by Martin Lindstrom, author of "Buyology": "How Apple And Gucci Tickle Your "God Spot"

As Martin well knows, advances in neurological research have allowed science to uncover more and more of our innate, hard-wired, universal tendencies, the need to 'believe in mysteries' being one of them. The emergence of humankind's particular consciousness brought with it a lot of traits with it that helped us come to dominate the planet. One that helps motivate us to gather together and communicate is an instinctual drive to figure out things we all don't quite understand. Now that science has answered so many of the 'magical things' that were formerly inexplicable without blind faith in a mystical religion, an entire global generation is turning away from dogmatic established religions principally because they just don't need those explanations any more -- yet their brains still want to fill up that formerly adequately stimulated capacity for faith, dogma, rituals, weekly gatherings, a search for purpose outside of simple self-satisfaction (the goal of most teens) with something.

Alongside of this 'need to believe' is an EXTREMELY compelling drive to become addicted to just about anything from gambling to sun tanning; from obsessive interests in stamp-collecting to anorexia. 70% of Americans have an unhealthy addiction to food. In step brands that many, in at first what seems bizarre, but after linking an innate need 'to believe' with a deep seated tendency toward addiction seems almost to be expected, demonstrate a religious-like devotion to. The brands add inexplicable 'meaning' to their lives, just as eating does for so many. Now ponder that last snippet in light of people no longer attending church for a moment...

Here's my take (somewhat related) post on why Web 2.0 and "FREE" will soon go the way of the dodo bird as the religious zeal wears off: http://t.co/vpsdmE4

British Voters Are About to Make Another Monumental Mistake

2011-05-05T09:19:00.012-04:00

British voters are about to be tasked with making a critical decision about what is in their best interests that, sadly, the majority are simply unequipped to make. They are going to go to the polls in a referendum, as Canadians faced not long ago, to vote on whether to abandon the antiquated status quo electoral system, "first past the post", or shift to the more democratically representative "preferential" system. We all know what the retirees who make up the majority of voters who bother to cast a vote in referendums will choose.

Example from a provincial
election. Click to enlarge.

[The difference is simply that, EVEN THOUGH the majority of voters voted against any given party, the old system gives the power in parliament to the party who beat out the next closest competitor on number of seats won. In the most recent Canadian federal election, most voters voted against the Conservatives, led by Stephen Harper, but they 'won a majority' with 39.6% of the vote. 60.4% of people who chose to vote wanted a coalition of the NDP and Liberal parties to lead the country with the Conservatives in a properly representative minority opposition to keep the coalition honest.

In other words, the 'first past the post' electoral system does not allow the wishes of the majority of Canadian voters to be represented accurately in parliament. It was invented at a time when there were only two competing parties. In our modern world, facing exponentially more complicated challenges that require nuance, plurality and compromise, the old system makes no sense, yet voters chose against change, as the politicians knew they would.]

In response to a couple of Australian political journalists' perspectives sent to me by a very clever, switched-on political watcher, John Glyde of Mollymook, NSW, here's my point of view on the option that democratic governments too often have of abdicating their responsibilities and passing the decision-making buck onto the type of people who make up the actual vote-casting majority.

What both writers are essentially bemoaning is a critical feature of the democratic system that is dysfunctional. The system entirely and completely breaks down when it gets dialed back to what most people believe is its essence, the initial ancient Greek version of it, ‘one man, one vote’. Even back then, however, it was never actually ‘one man, one vote’, it was a group of elite guys who had control of the state in their hands due to family ties, ‘noble birthright’, or wealth/power making decisions for the rest of the populace in the forum.

Our modern democratic system works fairly well when our elected representatives are temporarily relieved of the pressure of worrying about what the masses of voters might think of their decisions and are allowed to vote with their intellect, insight and experience (free even, as the American system USED to be, of party policy). This only happens in the first months or year or two of their terms after an election. The American system works slightly better than the ones that allow for non-confidence motions that spur mid-term elections because they get a full 4 years to make change happen (and compromise with the opposition), and often get 8 years if they do well up-front.

Democracy as a system works best when the electorate gets the opportunity to elect a bunch of smart, experienced and (we hope) principled representatives and then leave them alone for 4 years or so to do the job we gave them, to make the difficult, complex decisions on running our country that most of us are not smart enough, or experienced enough, nor have the interest and patience to fully research and contemplate, to make.

That election process, going to the polls every 4 or 6 years, is the only ‘referendum’ any democratic system ever needs: the chance to turf out the last majority and put in place a different one that the voters believe will better represent their collective desires and needs. It is this latter issue that is truly at the core of the debate over ‘first past the post’ and ‘preferential’, and ‘preferential’ is clearly the more democratic of the systems.

My key point is that whenever important decisions are passed off out of the political forum of parliament and into the hands of average voters in a referendum, we do NOT get smart decisions being made that are in the best interest of the majority, we ALWAYS get a lowest common denominator outcome. The ‘first past the post’ vs. ‘preferential’ systems decision is NOT something that should EVER be put to a referendum, in fact nothing in a democracy ever should.

Whenever difficult decisions get shunted out of the appropriate forum and into the hands of the hoi polloi it is usually a forgone conclusion that nothing will change, and the politicians that, together, do this use it as a political tactic (as you well know) to pass the buck to the people and say “We gave you the decision-making power and YOU chose this outcome”. I call BS. We elected THEM to make these tough decisions as, en mass, we can’t grasp the intricacies of the issues.

Looking at a bell curve of IQ and overlaying it with a bell curve of ‘indifference to interest’, and another of ‘change-averse to early-adopter’, you end up with a VAST majority of any population who are not going to vote to adopt new, complex, potentially risky (in their perception) changes to the status quo. (Examples in the US are abandoning the one dollar bill, the metric system, or most recently, gay marriage in California.) What you get EVERY time the politicos pass the buck with a referendum is the decision that makes the old, change-averse and not-so-smart mass of people who get out to vote most (post-retirement-age people, no offence intended!) most comfortable.

Any truly progressive democratic country would adopt several key systematic changes:

A ‘preferential’ electoral system.

Mechanisms to protect smart politicians from being pressured to vote on party lines vs. with their brains (the current critical flaw in the US system).

A fixed term of 4-6 years for the elected politicians to get the policies they were voted in to put in place completed.

A ban on referendums of any kind other than the general election system.

But that's just one cynic’s opinion!

ZOMBIES! "Printed Words on Paper": Literally the Walking Dead

2011-04-09T10:09:00.007-04:00

"I still enjoy the tactile pleasure of leafing through a newspaper and books, so I don't think they're going anywhere soon!"

I said to the speaker, "Sorry, but you STILL really don't get it!" Here's another way to explain why Rupert Murdoch's entire empire is going to crumple into bankruptcy in the coming two decades...

It's 1929 and you are shown a funny audio/video show on the very first cathode ray tube (television) set ever. Wow!!! I then tell you that you could own one of these in your home for only X quantity of money and your family could sit around and watch many similarly entertaining shows of all kinds whenever you want.

Now I ask you if you would prefer having a set for each family member that plays shows specifically designed for that person's interests.

Hm... Then I suggest that soon you'll have a TV that you can hold in your hands, the size of a magazine and it will have not only shows on it, but access to all the world's libraries of information, ALL of them. Instantaneously. All of the news, books, magazines, school yearbooks, family photos, recipes, TV shows, music performances and movies ever created from anywhere on the planet (instantly translated into your language) for one low monthly fee. Oh, and you'll be able to speak, in real time, to anyone on the planet, any time you want for the same fee -- AND live video chat. Really. And send them a photo or video you just took, instantly, like of your child being put into its mom's arms.

Still with me?

Now I tell you that you'll be able to project all that content in full colour and audio onto any flat surface in a size that is equivalent to the experience of sitting in a movie theatre.
THEN I tell you that soon after you'll be able to project, out of a gadget the size of thin bar of soap, a holographic, virtual screen into the air in front of an individual or group of people and play any of that content with surround-sound audio.
And, by the way, you can actually have more than one show playing at the same time, like your favourite team's live baseball game while you are watching a movie.
Oh, and you can stop and switch movies any time if you get bored or have to do something else.
And again, every person in the world will have their own personal device like this one.

What would you bet on from that revelation forward? Number 1 or number 2?

Firms that rely on the printing press and ancient television and music business models, or companies working on developing new business models for delivering content?
Would you bet on forcing people to sit through advertising for products they have no interest in on these personal devices, or on "the Holy Grail" of marketing: fully addressable advertising that solely plays an impactful, informative ad, only as many times as the viewer requests, and only for products/services that we already know that particular individual is already interested in?

Let's revisit that quote:

"I still enjoy the tactile pleasure of leafing through a newspaper and books, so I don't think they're going anywhere soon!"

Ha! Good luck with that. (Though it depends on your definition of "soon", to be fair.)

That melancholy reminiscence came up in a discussion I had recently with a marketing exec from Universal Music Canada who was bemoaning the death of the old music industry business model (posted a comment here to a FastCompany article). Her 15 yr old son will grow up without that "tactile emotional attachment", so by the time he turns 45 "printed words on paper" will have very little except historical relevance.

'Print' is a BUSINESS MODEL that is going extinct, yet those with mortgages on their houses who work in that industry are too vested to consider the implications, sadly.

(Still, with a good 20 years left before their last dodo bird gets clubbed to death on a remote beach in the Atlantic Ocean... ;-)

Just another point that I think it's important those of us who would like to thrive in the coming years should wrap our heads around, and soon!

I Am What I Am! (And He Was Who He Was...) Here's My 'Biography' of MJ: "Super-Pred"!

2011-03-30T12:39:00.011-04:00

Just One Cynic's Opinion: Michael Jackson's REAL Legacy (Hint: It isn't his music.... Click here for the link.)

What? You never wondered who his 'model' was for that brand new face and skin colour? (It clearly wasn't his sister -- she's still her original colour!)

I'm Pregnant with Charlie Sheen!

2011-03-28T10:01:00.006-04:00

No, I don't mean he got me pregnant (ick, he's too old for me!), I mean I think I'm going to give birth to him.

My active online muse (as opposed to my semi-retired online muse who has a new regional job in Europe and has no time for her muse responsibilities), has inspired me again, this time by suggesting I post about the publication (self-publication on Lulu.com) of the first instalment of "Is Rex a Dog? The Short-Story Collection". At first the insight didn't seep through, then I walked my dog-ters through the park and the wheels began turning. Then I read this eye-opening article on Charlie Sheen in Newsweek by Bret Easton Ellis. Then I 'got it'. I gave birth to something that I've been nurturing, pondering and mulling over for the past nine months or so.

You see, what's been astounding the Boomers and more conservative Gen Xers out there ever since Charlie began his very media-savvy ranting of late is how he continues to not only maintain media attention, but use it to make MORE money! Sold out 'concerts', a million twitter followers, millions of YouTube view, etc. What Bret's article led me to understand was something I've been gradually creeping towards in the back of my brain: int this day and age

If you aren't clear on how Charlie Sheen is "WINNING", you are losing.

Bret had this to say about, not just the newest cohort that is entering the workforce, the Millennials, but all the Gen X males who are in Charlie's age group and fully support his ability to be 46 and live like an irresponsible multi-millionaire frat boy:

"Do we really want manners? Civility? Courtesy?

HELL NO! We want reality."

A week ago my muse convinced me, just by doing what she does (blog a LOT of intimate details about what's going through her mind and heart) that I was not 'getting it'. Many of my 'change-o-philic' colleagues have leapt into the world of Web 2.0 'sharing' by blogging relentlessly about their families, idle thoughts, hang-overs and conflicts at the office. I sat back and dealt with my own compulsive urges to 'share' by separating my thoughts into 'business-related' (this blog 'channel'), 'personal' (Just One Cynic's Opinion) and creative/intimate (Is Rex a Dog?). I even went so far as to keep the latter anonymous due to the now-antique fear that I might lose credibility and contracts/work should colleagues and/or clients if they realized I was a bit 'out there' -- like they can't tell!

In my typical 'all or nothing' style, having intensely and obsessively blogged and tweeted to the point where I understood how these new media worked -- and then realized I both had not accumulated a million faithful followers NOR had made a single cent from all that effort -- I ceased and desisted (for the most part) from putting a lot of energy into the blog focused on "Where Marketing is Heading After the Novelty and Hyperbole About So-Called 'Social Media Marketing' Evaporates, as it Should" for the past nine months. What was the point, I asked myself, and the answer was "it merely satisfies your OCD need to get thoughts out of your brain so you can move on to the next insight". Didn't seem worth it, really...

Of late I've been asking myself what would Charlie Sheen do?

Quite seriously!

NOT with a view to desperately wanting to become famous, to 'earn' a million followers (take note all you fellow tweeter/bloggers not only spending up to 25% of your productive work hours posting irrelevant, useless and largely inane 'thoughts' -- "Just photocopied my latest post for the wife. She won't read my blog online!" -- think about it, the 'fame' you are desperately chasing doesn't bring in a single cent for you or your firm, yet every time you stop work to tweet eats up several minutes several times an hour, every 6 minutes is another 10% of each hour). What Charlie Sheen, who is an 'A' type personality, who is manic, who is sharp (big-brained), has OCD issues and can't resist blurting things out (might even be some Turret's tendencies in there), 'gets' is that there no longer is an invisible line between personal and public personas, there is only you with all your oddities and predilections.

What are you imagining is going to happen in 15-20 years from now when all of today's Millennials enter their 30's?

Honestly?

Where do you think all those 'sexting' photos and home-porn videos shot on their iPhones of now 16-20-something year old kids are going to go?

Do you really think that 16 year old boys who, two weeks after receiving the photos 'broke up' with those same young ladies, are going to erase the files? Or are they more likely to 'share' them with 20 friends, or post them on an "ex-GF" website or on PornTube? Once on those sites, where are the files from auto-website-scraping 'bots' on www.archives.org and www.waybackmachine.com going to go? You know where -- not the trash bin! Those videos and photos (and drunk or ill-conceived blog-rants or Gmails, for that matter) are going to be available for the rest of time eternal.

Folks, we have entered a new age, and Charlie Sheen is just one of the eldest leaders of the change.

There is no line between public and personal/private anymore. Get used to it!

You can desperately try to hold it back, you can obfuscate and use Internet scrubbing services to try to hide your inner demons, but the 'winners' get it. They understand that the leaders of this new era are not going to be able to hide their private sides. The outgoing, risk-taking, 'A' type, early-technology-adopting leaders of the future, the politicians, inventors, authors and top business people of 2025, are going to have to live with the fact that all the same tendencies and predilections that pushed them to the top ALSO led them to shoot naked pics and sex videos of themselves back in the day and that the world will be re-watching their hard-bodied younger selves when they become the front runners of the future.

Think I'm making too much of something that is insignificant? Ha! You really don't understand young people very well, do you? They do not have sufficient development in the regions of their brains responsible for calculating long-term implications of spontaneous risk-taking to quell the hormonally-elevated reward/pleasure centres in other regions of their brains. Give any one of these kids (no, they are NOT "young adults") three vodka coolers, a cute partner and a smart-phone with an HD camera...

So what does any of this mean to you or me?

What should we be thinking about in terms of our own individual (personal) "brands'?

You might as well 'put it out there', folks. We are who we are, and, especially today, everyone else is going to figure out who you really are, through and through, sooner rather than later!

Over the past couple of weeks (in my usual highly detailed/focused OCD way) I've been cross-linking my blogs, fiddling with the promotional, traffic-enhancing tools, 'taking responsibility', if you will, for my private and professional thoughts, insights and odd predilections. (No, I'm not posting any erotic short stories just yet, Rex is racy enough!) I've been considering dropping the 'professional channel' altogether. I've been coming around to a new perspective on my gradual evolution from:

Odd, barely passing grades, OCD kid/teen,
To intense, summa cum laude college-grad,
To global ad guy,
To marketing strategy guy,
To business consultant,
To OCD blogging guy,
To human-insight/keynote-speaking/seminar-leading guy,
To storyteller.

I've come to understand that my value to people is no longer merely in the marketing/business arena, but in the realm of what makes us uniquely us. In the spirit of "The Secret" and 'projecting positive energy' I'm going to go back to sharing some thoughts (briefly, versus my early full-length tomes!) here over the coming weeks (no, I WILL NOT give into my OCD nature and blog daily -- the quality would just drop off!).

I hope some of you will follow me through the exploration.

(It will involve some really deep shit that seems simple on the surface, like that bell curve up there below my header. ;-)

An Even MORE Powerful View of Tsunami Destroying an Entire Town

2011-03-27T16:03:00.003-04:00

Amazing how high the water rose, and how incredibly quickly:

Tragic. Some of the Most Dramatic Tsunami Footage Editted Together...

2011-03-25T19:08:00.001-04:00

This from SkyNews, Britain. Sadly, you just know that many of those vehicles weren't empty. Horrible, ghastly, heart-wrenching...

Deaths Per Watt: Coal Kills - Nuclear Power Super Safe Based Upon Experience

2011-03-25T10:36:00.001-04:00

Seth Godin has simplified this into a powerful visual:

His post here.
The data here.
The visuals here.
A well written response on why there are substantial risks in considering nuclear as the only alternative to the fossil fuels that will eventually be extinct in Rami Schandall's comment here.

Rami raises some excellent points, however the harsh reality remains. By 2050 we're going to increase the human population by another 50% versus today's 7 billion and the fossil fuels will be largely gone before then. Nuclear is the only thing we have AT THE MOMENT to meet our species' quickly increasing (on a per individual round the globe) energy demands. Knee jerk political reactions are not the answer, innovation is.

Neither "Design Thinking" Nor "Social Marketing" Actually Exist, Folks...

2011-03-24T11:04:00.001-04:00

My comment (rant?) in response to a FastCompany.com > FastCoDesign.com article on so-called "Design Thinking" by Helen Walters:

Helen, "the formal discipline is still pretty new"?!? I beg your pardon!

The crux is very, very simple. In this post-economic-decline era every major magazine and consultancy is screaming "INNOVATE" and "LEVERAGE DESIGN THINKING" (along with "leverage 'social marketing'!"). So-called "design thinking" is almost impossible to breakdown simply, but allow me to have a go at it:

1) Articulate the challenge/issue/problem,
2) Research thoroughly (leave no stone unturned),
3) Analyze all the info with a totally open mind,
4) Wait for the threads you've come across to coalesce into an breakthrough new concept/idea/approach.

Please explain to me what is in any way revolutionary, or different in any way, in this approach that what the Greek philosophers, or any genius in history from Copernicus to Einstein, used?

The one thing that our politically correct modern culture exclude us from pointing out is that ALL of those rare individuals had the mental acuity for #4 to happen inside their big brains. This process cannot be taught, or applied, or generated. It isn't something new, and it isn't unique to design, it's just the way some rare creatively brilliant human brains work.

It has been said that we all have moments of genius -- geniuses just have them all the time.

All that can be done is for companies to scour their ranks for employees with the ability to think in leaps of inspiration, as many are currently ignored or entirely underutilized (many of them aren't the most socially adept of creatures). Sit these individuals down with the first two points above in front of them, motivate them and wait. Voila: innovation.

Innovation and 'design thinking' training courses for the vast majority of the bell curve are just an enormous scam, as is "social marketing" (people are either going to talk about your product/service with their social circle because it is worth talking about, or not). We cannot train people to become geniuses any more that we can manipulate people into talking about products -- the moment they are manipulated they lose all credibility.

We are living in the age of enriching and proliferating "the brand experience" (more literally: analyzing/improving how consumers experience your product/service and finding innovative ways to get more of them to do so). The only monumental change that has happened in the past decade is the death of 'push' marketing at the consumers' insistence (as a result of their newly public chatter over the Internet) and the growing dominance of 'pull'.

No one ever liked or wanted 'push' marketing any more than Libyans wanted Muammar Ghaddafi as their leader, marketers simply had the ability to shove it down consumers' throats through what is now being called "legacy media". Where the majority of marketing budgets should be shifting is NOT to 'social media' (more 'push'), but to 'experiential marketing'. Yes, at a MUCH higher cost per impression, but XM is all about "facilitated trial" and leads to instantly loyal consumers.

The current hyperbole about 'design thinking', 'innovation' and 'social marketing' is just an awful lot of 'push'. For those people out there who can nab large chunks of corporate training budgets to peddle this snakeoil, I say "Bravo!", but in the end it just leaves a disappointing, malodorous whiff in its wake. A worthwhile investment would be in training how to identify and support the true innovators in any company's team.

Just Because it's Cool...

2011-03-24T09:40:00.001-04:00

And I find it thought-provoking, a visualization of today's global inter-connections on Facebook (note low Russian/Chinese penetration):

Versus population density:

Gamification: Using Our Natural Desire to Win Rewards in Developing Unique Brand Experiences

2011-03-17T18:40:00.001-04:00

This is interesting. A practical theory to use in marketing that ties back to my core theme that the real future of our industry has virtually NOTHING to do with "social media" and everything to do with 'brand experience". Tying in the notion of game-playing in order to win rewards is an insight into human nature that any brand can put to use.

This is from a post by one of my media heroes (and I don't have many!), Uwe Hook, on MediaBizBloggers today:

What is gamification?

Gamification is the use of game place mechanics in order to encourage people to adopt applications and, ultimately, change behavior. Think about Foursquare: People are encouraged to check-in at physical locations in order to earn badges, mayorships and rewards (coupons, freebies, etc.). Gamification or Game Mechanics work because it makes technology more engaging/entertaining by encouraging desired behavior and taps into the human desire to play a game. It can help to perform tasks that are normally considered boring or arduous.

Gamification will gain in importance

There's a good case to be made that 'Pleasure' should be added to the 5 P's of marketing. Why shouldn't pleasure be an extension of a great customer experience? Right now, customer experiences are mostly limited to well-working and easy to use. In the near future, a great customer experience has to add the fun factor. When you're being rewarded to do your timesheets, you'll do them more timely. And it might be even a task you'll be looking forward to. You can create 'player journeys' to reward people with status, access and power – you create meaning inside of the mechanics. Loyalty programs can be expanded through leaderboards, each customer interaction can become an enjoyable experience.

So in building apps and games for contests, or influencing consumers to "like" your product in social media (i.e. trying to get free PR), if we can build in game-mechanics, even soap brands might be able to improve peoples' involvement with their products. The trick is to make the mechanics relevant to the product's use. Hm...

The Media Helps Humans Spread Irrational Panic

2011-03-16T09:12:00.001-04:00

Comment on an online MIT Tech Review article about the 'knee-jerk' impact of Japan's post-quake/tsunami/aftershocks nuclear disaster: Fukushima's Spreading Impact

I'd think, of all the publications out there, that MIT would try to throw a wet blanket on irrational panic amongst the masses.

Japan's ocean-front nuclear plant faced what can only be called 'a perfect storm' of physical challenges:

One of the 5 biggest quakes in the past 2 centuries knocking out failsafe #1,
A TEN METER tall tsunami taking out failsafe #2,
Massive and ongoing aftershocks taking out failsafe #3.

Please tell me, outside of California's plant, which is also on a major tectonic plate convergence and is ocean-side, where else there's a nuclear plant facing this kind of perfect storm of factors?

This particular disaster has NO IMPACT on the world's nuclear plants. NONE. Yes, they need to review the results and evaluate their failsafes, but almost all are based inland, away from major fault lines.

It always amazes me when the not-so-smart masses and the media that feeds them whips up panic over irrelvant incidents. (Kids in the developed world can't play in the streets anymore because a one in a million chance of a paedophile might happen along.)

Life's risky, get over it. Learn, adapt and move on.

A Visual History of Sci-Fi, Cool!

2011-03-11T10:14:00.002-05:00

Mind-Blowing History of Sci-Fi

From FastCompany.com:

Ward Shelley's sprawling, hand-drawn flowchart of science fiction's history.

Artist Ward Shelley has produced another fine, fine, fine hand-drawn flowchart that will blow your mind.

This time, it's dedicated to the 2,500 years of intellectual history that have produced the modern sci-fi genre, which sounds totally ridiculous, but just look at the chart and you'll understand its beauty (click to open larger, click again to zoom):

There is No "Social Media Revolution"! It's a "Communications Technology Revolution"!

2011-03-01T11:14:00.000-05:00

Comment left on FastCompany.com in response to "Baked In: The VC Who Discovered Facebook on Why All Businesses Will Become Social -- Kevin Efrusy tells us why Facebook and Twitter are bringing about a 'fundamental disruption' in the way business is done on the Web."
By E.B. BOYD, Mon Feb 28, 2011

Excuse my acronym, Kevin and Allen, but WTF? I'm all for people jumping on bandwagons to make a buck, "going social" being today's most ballyhooed, but you're talking about two very different things here. There's a vast chasm of difference between Accel focusing on investing in firms that have found ways to leverage people talking about their products/services because they have a distinct point of difference and "all businesses becoming social"!

Over the past several years we have seen a rush of media spending being diverted from traditional above the line media like TV (for good reason in the latter case as 'eyes' have been moving to online programming consumption without a solid ad revenue model being developed as yet for online), to 'social' media WITH ZERO PROVEN ROI. Good for Curebit for trying to ride the wave, but as Uwe Hook has pointed out on MediaBizBloggers.com, humans are social creatures and always have been.

There is no 'social media revolution' happening! There is a "communications technology revolution" happening.

When Allen suggests some companies are "bad" he's merely pointing the finger at the dullards in the marketing world who can't fathom how to shift from "push" to "pull" strategies, or as Kevin points out, are selling products that no one wants to talk about and so are forced to try to inject interesting discussions about their boring products into conversations. Yes, they'll eventually either give up or will find niche areas where their product details have some relevance, but at the end of the day, guys, 'push marketing' is never going to completely die out, there are still going to be billboards on the roadsides and ad content injected into print publications that move onto tablets.

My point is that there is not and never has been and never will be any way to 'do social marketing' because any attempts to do so are merely attempt to manipulate conversations, just like interrupting a private phone call with an ad message. If you are talking, as Allen suggests, about finding new technological ways for people to willingly and happily share info about products they are trying and appreciating, then that all part of today's communications technology revolution, NOT a 'social media revolution' per se.

At the end of the day, however, we are not talking about "all businesses becoming social", we're talking about all marketing efforts becoming 'pull' based -- what I call "brand experience focused" and thinking about how to get people to talk willingly and happily about their product/service's distinct points of difference and weaning themselves off of 100 years of a 'push' based ad model. This ridiculous over-use (misuse) of the word 'social' is becoming tiresome and just a bit sad.

Once and For All: It's Not a Social Media Revolution. It's a People Revolution.

2011-02-02T08:38:00.000-05:00

He says it so much better than I ever could:

Wednesday - February 2, 2011 at www.MediaBizBloggers.com
By Uwe Hook

Social Networks were not created to add another channel to the marketing mix.

Social Networks were not created to spark revolutions.

Social Networks were not created for influential's to share their message. Or nonsense.

Social Networks are for all the people that participate in them.

We are social beings. We spend our whole existence in Social Networks. Being part of Social Networks allows us to share common goals, resources and learn from each other. The people in Tunisia and Egypt didn't get a message from someone to start a revolution and followed like sheep. They pulled down information and learnings from others. And formed a picture, saw that others felt the same way and decided to act.

Messengers, carrier pigeons, Gutenberg, telegraph, radio, TV, Facebook and Twitter never started a revolution. People did. And they always will.

Uwe Hook is the CEO and Co-Founder of BatesHook, Inc. (www.bateshook.com) and a veteran of the advertising and marketing industry with the goal of building connections between people and brands. Uwe can be reached at uwe@bateshook.com.

Read all Uwe's MediaBizBloggers commentaries at Subversions.

Check us out on Facebook at MediaBizBloggers.com
Follow our Twitter updates @MediaBizBlogger

MediaBizBloggers is an open-thought leadership blog platform for media, marketing and advertising professionals, companies and organizations. To contribute, contact Jack@mediadvisorygroup.com. The opinions expressed in MediaBizBloggers.com are not those of Media Advisory Group, its employees or other MediaBizBloggers.com contributors. Media Advisory Group accepts no responsibility for the views of MediaBizBloggers authors.

Controlling Obesity Means Controlling Our Drive to Make a Quick Buck

2011-01-20T12:11:00.004-05:00

(First posted on my personal blog on Sept. 2, 2009, but the topic's relevancy is now a serious business issue.)

Interesting clip on CNN re: who's to blame for rampant childhood obesity (300% increase since 1989): Obesity Epidemic and most recently a Globe and Mail article stating that the average Canadian 14 year old intakes not the recommended maximum of 1,500 mg of salt, but 4,130 mg!

While I normally restrict myself to marketing issues, allow me a rant on an issue that is related, but off my usual topic...

This epidemic of over-consumption is depressing, devastating to the health and emotional well-being of future generations (not to mention the current), spreading rapidly from the developed to developing world and is 100% preventable. Having worked with P&G to push both Pringles processed potato snacks ("Try eating just one!") and Sunny Delight (flavoured sugar-water) drinks in Eastern Europe and the Middle East, plus having lived in Mexico for several years and seeing childhood obesity EXPLODE there during that period, it's fairly clear what spurs the phenomenon. The usual list of blame:

Genes (can't be helped, and indeed it's been proven now that many people's systems are predisposed to weight gain, especially after they pass the body mass index 'tipping point')
Parents who choose the 'easy way out' and buy what's easy to facilitate busy lifestyles, or are lazy, or 'give in' to whiny kids' demands, or live in poor areas without access to fresh foods.
Computers/video games and lack of exercise (see parents above).
Food industry (I'll get to this).
School system that puts only easy-to-prepare foods on the cafeteria menu.

Interesting what's NOT on the list, and maybe it is time for us to take off the "Politically Correct" goggles we've all been wearing and begin to recognize that big businesses are successfully working the PC movement to their advantage:

P&G's Dove 'feel good' campaign (begun by Ogilvy in Canada) for accepting/celebrating that the majority of us are now obese,
For-profit firms' exploitation of human nature. More and more studies are proving us to be fundamentally addiction-prone, once sufficiently stimulated.
The fact that there's a large proportion of humanity who just aren't all that well-educated or smart enough (a bell curve) to 'know better' and thus are easily taken advantage of.

Let me address the latter three points first. The tendency that we have as human beings to try to balance our need for self-esteem with a lack of ability to exercise control over our bodies' tendency to over-consume is at the heart of all three points:

The Dove campaign is really a continuance of a trend that began with the ludicrous notion that slim models promote poor body image. 2,000 years ago Aphrodite was already the definition of ideal female body proportions and today's models are NOT tall and slim because that's who fashion designers/model agencies are choosing -- they are that way because better nutrition is producing taller people and the fashion industry continues to adhere to a ridiculous 'tradition' of producing ALL their samples in size "0" that fuller-figured (and increasingly taller) girls cannot fit into. (Yes, do the research.) It is NOT about the fashion industry ladies, a higher than ideal body fat index is simply NOT healthy -- period. Never was, never will be. (Here's a telling test: fill a backpack with the same weight you, or your loved one, is overweight by and walk a single block with it -- that's what your body has become used to carrying around every moment of the day. Quite the eye opener. No one would volunteer to carry that weight.)
I'm not going to footnote all the recent research studies here (there are literally thousands both completed and underway), but it has turned out that humans have a hair-trigger for becoming addicted to things, whether you are a George Hamilton in love with sun-worshipping, or a teen trying desperately to be cool by holding a cigarette, or a bible-thumping mid-west Republican shouting about conservative values and addicted to Oxycontin (tens of thousands), or a loyal husband who finds himself spending hours on triple-X dot com, or a post-menopausal woman who is suddenly gaining weight but is unwilling to make calorie reductions -- we are all prone to getting 'hooked' on things quite easily and cannot 'will' ourselves to stop, despite knowing the risks. The immediate spike in the pleasure center of our brains far outweighs the intellectual calculation we make about long-term damage or risks.
Obesity is far more prevalent among the poor and lower-educated, but there are plenty of wealthy and university-educated individuals who all share the same predilections -- consuming FAR too many calories for themselves and feeding their kids the same way, but explaining this away as a cultural tradition, or genetic tendency (maybe, but it's actually rare), or due to a lack of time, etc. The point is that when you have the education, the conceptual-understanding ability (some call this "IQ"), the environment (urban and non-poverty) and a culture (support of the news media and neighbors) that ALL combine to support the concept of maintaining a good diet and healthy body mass, your family is likely to be far lower on the weight scale than the average in rural or poor areas.

The facts are simple, as we learned with the large financial institutions who tried to increase profits by getting into hedge funds and high risk mortgages, left unregulated/uncontrolled, big corporations are not going to act morally or accountably. They will go after every possible profit-making business stream they can tap into, ethical or not. The aggressive young Brand Managers at many of these firms put their career advancement far ahead of concern for the greater good, perhaps understandably, and won't change unless their bosses, through corporate governance or government regulations, force them to do so. The same thing goes for school boards who, strapped for cash and efficiencies, welcome the products produced by these corporations.

Several of the most profitable, high margin businesses out there are:

Producing packaged, flavoured, sweetened water in cans or frozen desserts.
Producing processed starchy veggies like potatoes or rice into salty, deep-fried snacks.
Selling fried hamburgers/chicken at break-even or loss-leading prices, but the accompanying fries and drinks at enormous margins.

It is NOT video games that are to blame, folks! The rise of childhood obesity can be linked directly to the inroads made by Coke and Pepsi and their snack subsidiaries (and local firms mimicking their practices), to put salty, fatty snacks, frozen desserts and soda pop into every convenience store across the country. Mexico is currently going through a virtually instantaneous explosion in obesity, especially amongst children due to the sudden distribution/availability of snack foods (Mexico has the world's highest per capita consumption of soda pop). While internet cafes and inexpensive gaming devices are becoming more common in Mexico, the majority of people live at or below the poverty line -- there just isn't the inundation of video game couch-potato culture there that we see in developed countries, they can't afford it.

Even Germany, which lagged far behind the US in obesity rates for many years, now leads the EU due to the country's gradual adoption of American-style fast food and snacks. What else would contribute? Are the Germans suddenly consuming that much MORE schnitzel and beer? Certainly the gradual penetration of a less active lifestyle has contributed, but there has to have been an injection of more calories into their systems, versus their traditional habits, to cause such a massive shift.

And it turns out that it is NOT the fats we consume that trigger obesity, it is the carbohydrates (link): pasta, bread, potatoes, cereals, along with sugary drinks, desserts that make our bodies start retaining fat in our fat cells.

(An ironic, sad side bar: one of the fastest growing services at American theme parks is the rental of motorized, reinforced, electric carts to encourage more large folks to come visit and enjoy access to all areas of the park. They don't need to maintain a few of these carts for special needs individuals, each park now requires a fleet to meet demand.)

My point is simple, until someone exerts control over corporations they will continue to do all they can to profit from the weaker side of human nature, whether it is our desire to not miss the boat and 'get rich quick' by buying houses or Internet stocks, or our desire to buy pre-made 'convenience' foods made with the fat and sugar our bodies instinctively crave. No profit-focused industry is truly capable of 'self-regulation'.

It will not be until government fully acknowledges the real cost of allowing fast-food and 'convenience' foods to be sold without recognition of their long-term effects that society begins to turn the pressure back on all of us to adopt healthier diets, to pay a premium (not a discount!) on convenience foods (it's becoming cheaper to buy pre-prepared foods than cook from scratch), and acknowledge that there is nothing 'healthy', emotionally or physically, about "loving our bodies the way they are (have become)" if that means we're carrying around an unhealthy fat-to-weight-ratio (with my apologies to the Creatives at Ogilvy and Mather Canada).

I'm in no way against big business, I'm just against profit at the expense of the greater good. Better dietary/lifestyle education is a start, but it not going to significantly change the eating habits of those most at risk, who are already addicted to certain types of food and have no strong incentives to change their daily habits.

Twitter Isn't Popular, nor "THE NEXT BIG THING", It's Just NEW and Therefore INTERESTING

2011-01-04T09:35:00.003-05:00

The MOST under-reported 'social networking tools story' of 2010 is the explanation of the human nature that lies behind Twitter hyperbole: in times of upheaval and uncertainty, as the sheer quantity of new tech overwealms us, we look to "seers" to tell us what's next, what to do with it. Geeks are, by nature, early adopters, so listening to them gives us a false impression. (A Dec/2010 Pew Research study shows only 6% of US adults even have an account and just under half log into Twitter less than once a week.)

Twitter is a big deal, but not for the reasons most of us assume. It's technology provides the world's first free, global, instantaneous, accessible to all (if they have Internet access), news service. Period. It cannot pass the 'novelty test' beyond that function. Sure, geeks and celebs are tweeting about their every act and thought in an attempt to 'be famous', but that wears thin VERY fast (whether you are reading it, or tweeting it -- unless you have extreme OCD).

The same can be imagined for the future of Facebook. Most adults who try it very quickly recognize that there's way too much worthwhile going on in their lives to invest any precious time in posting to Facebook -- its greatest value outside of keeping in touch with people you were never all that interested in is keeping tabs on the teens in your life (they have few real responsibilities, hence LOTS of time to invest in trying to be popular on Facebook). Facebook MIGHT morph into something truly valuable, but that transformation hasn't happened yet (the latest 'amalgamation of all your social media' concept they've introduced could be it) and a lot of Zuckerberg, et al's attention is focused on doing just what none of us want, pushing ads at us.

Yes, there are big new things coming down the pipe that will transform our lives, and fully addressable advertising is one of them, but Twitter and Facebook are just baby steps towards the next big thing, not big things in their own right. Smartphones and tablets are a GIANT step towards the future, as is the wireless broadband that enables them.

Key to what will become actual addressable advertising will be ads that are more or less always 'pull', never 'push', that is always asked for by the consumer, not 'pushed' at us at every turn whether or not we're in the target or interested in buying. Keep tuned, dear readers, as has been the case since 2007, you'll read about what is really big in the evolution of marketing first here!

Oh, and Wikipedia is Dying -- told you so!