What's the idea? By Steve Poppe

Moved

spoppe — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 12:54:00 GMT

As of November 2009, "What's The Idea?" is moving to www.whatstheidea.com. Please follow me over...and thank you for reading...Steve Poppe

The Ford Story.

spoppe — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 12:40:21 GMT

Ford Motor Company does not really have a campaign today. An old mentor of mine, Peter Kim (now deceased), once told a very important client that “campaigns are overated.” The Ford story is not a “Drive One” campaign story – it’s a lot of little ones.

It’s social media stories curated by Ford’s Scott Monty. It’s leadership demonstrations by CEO Alan Mulally. It’s smart marketing directed toward millennials, the next generation of car buyers. It’s a promotion where a 100 cars not yet available in the U.S. are given to average Joe and Jane bloggers to drive for a year. And for the tech-savvy it’s a cool product like v.2 Sync the in-car software that in the future will have the ability to shut down texting while the car’s in motion. For motor heads, how about a newly engineered engine that offers V8 power with V6 fuel efficiency. Or the Edge that goes beep-beep when you are about to back into a fire hydrant?

This is a car company that smelled the Starbucks and decided to do something. A lot of somethings. This is a car company that is showing, not telling. Ford is rebuilding an American car company with good product, forward product development and no campaign. The story is a wee bit disorganized, but the gestalt is that this company is beginning to win – on many fronts. And Bill Ford deserves credit for getting out of the passing lane for a few miles. Go Ford Go. Peace!

(NOTE: Please follow me over to my new home for What’s The Idea? at www.whatstheidea.com. I will continue to publish here for a while, bit hope to move over to the new URL by month’s end. )

Curators Wanted.

spoppe — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 13:14:06 GMT

Two disruptive trends one can observe on many a marketing street corner these days are “user generated content” and “crowdsourcing.” Like them or not, they’re here. Everyone knows what user generated content is - the creation and sharing of online media content (text, pics, song and video) – but crowdsourcing is a little more inside. Crowdsourcing is the practice of offering up a creative assignment to many, who work for free (or a pittance) in the hope of having their work selected for a one-time fee.

People who participate in either of these areas are your more creative types. Crowdsourcers are often freelancers, tyros, or out-of-work, and on the UGC side the net gets wider – some of the people more creatively challenged. Both these marketing practices create the need for another function: Curation.

I once created a contest for ZDNet in which 23,000 50-word essays needed to be read and judged. “Who gonna do that?” Exactly. We hired temps for the initial culling of the herd. For a crowdsourced logo design competition with 600 entries who will evaluate the work? For an online newspaper with, 175 local stories send in my citizen reporters, who is going to decide what publishes? A curator.

Don’t be surprised to see the word curator appear more and more on Craigslist and business cards. Peace!

(NOTE: Please follow me over to my new home for What’s The Idea? at www.whatstheidea.com. I will continue to publish here for a while, bit hope to move over to the new URL by month’s end. )

Marketers and "How-To" Videos.

spoppe — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 14:10:41 GMT

I learned to make risotto last night. My first time. I’d made paella before which uses the same rice and I’d read a bunch of recipes, but it wasn’t until I actually watched someone make it on a video that I tried.

How-to videos are big business. And getting bigger.

Reading a recipe and seeing it done in living color with a voiceover are two completely different experiences. That’s why cooking shows are so popular. Someone I was chatting with last week used YouTube to learn how to set up his son’s Xbox. Want to make up some cement to patch your driveway? There’s a video for that. Videos are so cheap to make these days that they’re starting to flood the web. The key for marketers is finding the right instructors and making sure the videos reside on their sites. Marketers can't cede education to the generic channels of the world.

It will not be long now before all marketing websites have “How-To” tabs chock full of videos. And if properly cast, these How-To personalities will play an important role as brand ambassadors. The Future. Peace!

(NOTE: Please follow me over to my new home for What’s The Idea? at www.whatstheidea.com. I will continue to publish here for a while, bit hope to move over to the new URL by month’s end. )

What a Brand Is and Does.

spoppe — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 13:06:24 GMT

When I say I like Good and Plenty, it really means I like licorice. When I say I like Budweiser, it means I like beer. Granted there are lots of flavors of licorice and beer but the point is one doesn’t have an innate, built-in need for brands. If I like Maytag, it means I like clean clothes. The iPhone? Staying in touch…with everything.

Some of us in marketing forget this, spending too much time on a distended version of the brand story. ("We must break though the clutter!") But it is the product we are selling.

The way out this trap is by focusing on the Is-Does: what a brand Is and what a brand Does. I came upon this notion when reading some branding literature while at McCann-Erickson. Eric Einhorn, I believe, created a document exploring what a brand is and what it means. I rolled the "means" over on its side to make it more concrete, sorry Eric.

For me the pursuit of the Is-Does became particularly necessary when planning in the tech sector where chief technologists have a hard time explaining their new products in less than 50 words. Was Apple’s iPhone really a phone? For most marketers and planners, the heavy lifting is in the Does, but even here you can go off track. Does Coke really provide happiness? (Today’s strategy.) Or, does it provide refreshment, the real strategy. Find the right Is-Does and you tell better stories, create more loyalty and sell more shtuff. Peace!

(NOTE: Please follow me over to my new home for What’s The Idea? at www.whatstheidea.com. I will continue to publish here for a while, bit hope to move over to the new URL by month’s end. )

Search and the Art of Selling.

spoppe — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 12:49:35 GMT

Miguel Helft, a writer for The New York Times, is quickly becoming “a person of interest” in the technology opinion leader space, cranking out good analysis for a couple of years now. His column “Ping” in the Sunday Business section is definitely worth the read. This week he wrote “…search advertising is probably the most effective form of marketing ever invented.” Remove the word “probably” and you have a serious declaration.

Search has changed the world. If the Internet is the planet-changing technology, search is certainly the killer application. That’s why Google is making da monies. Yeah, Google says they’re all about organizing the world’s information, but organizing it is the how-- search is the what.

As search becomes more complicated, and it will, too much information will make it harder for consumers to pull the trigger on brands. This is the crux of Microsoft’s Bing campaign which discusses information overload positions Bing as the decision engine. As algorithms help us shop and compare and as we become more loyal to the search tools than the brands, the art of selling becomes less artful. We’re seeing the beginnings of that today. Peace!

(NOTE: Please follow me over to my new home for What’s The Idea? at www.whatstheidea.com. I will continue to publish here for a while, bit hope to move over to the new URL by month’s end. )

Bad Experiment Starbucks.

spoppe — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 12:28:04 GMT

VIA ™ is a new instant coffee product sold by Starbucks and though they probably won’t ever use the word “instant” in its description that's what it is. You make it by simply adding water – hot or cold. VIA comes in a little beef jerky size packet and it is a horrendously bad idea! If Starbucks doesn’t take VIA off the market soon I’m afraid it will have a long term, devastating effect on the brand. And please don’t write me saying how strong last week’s sales were. Creating an instant Starbucks experience is counter to what the brand stands for. This move is akin to the failed over-exposure of Krispy Kreme... selling old donuts in gas stations.

Most everyone has been to a Starbucks and knows its sounds and smells. Some of the sounds, unfortunately, have been removed thanks to the addition of time-saving espresso machines. Another mistake. (Remember the jarring thump thump the barista made as s/he settled your ground coffee into the metal espresso vessel?)

The store, the cup, the cardboard cup insulator, beans and music -- the starched baristas all contribute to the rich coffee experience. Instant Starbucks removes it all. Thousands of consumers will pour the VIA granules into their chipped Dodgers cups tainted by a hints of soap and say “Hmm, tastes like Folgers.” Lose the VIA, Howard Schultz…and fast. Bad experiment. Peace!

(NOTE: Please follow me over to my new home for What’s The Idea? at www.whatstheidea.com. I will continue to publish here for a while, bit hope to move over to the new URL by month’s end. )

Left Turn for Microsoft

spoppe — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 13:35:36 GMT

I love reading about campaigns and commenting before I see them. It’s a practice that can result in serious egg-on-face but it’s fun nonetheless. So here’s my take on the new Microsoft Window’s 7 ads -- a campaign that conveys Microsoft listened to user complaints about Vista and fixed them. Sorry, not a fan.

Microsoft made its bed releasing a sluggish, over-engineered, buggy product (Vista) and now is doing a campaign built on a mea culpa. Okay, they’re manning up... but using the new work to put the responsibility of product development on the consumer? I don't think so. If anything goes wrong, will it be our fault? (Can you say scar tissue?)

The process of listening to consumers and giving them what they want should not the subject of advertising – even if the company has a bad rep. It’s rearview mirror stuff. The “I’m a PC” work by Crispin Porter Bogusky is really great work. Warm, forward looking, communal. It is user-focused advertising yet doesn't make the user product manager.

I’m a PC is a campaign that may go down as a Harvard Business Review case. “I’m a PC and Windows 7 was my idea” on the other hand is a left turn that goes off road. Hope they find the highway again. Egg or no egg? Peace!

(NOTE: Please follow me over to my new home for What’s The Idea? at www.whatstheidea.com. I will continue to publish here for a while, bit hope to move over to the new URL by month’s end. )

Nook, Line and Sinker.

spoppe — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 13:03:25 GMT

“Hi! I’m Kate. And this is my Nook.” says the pretty pitch women on a video introducing Barnes and Noble’s brand new eReader today. www.nook.com. A video I arrived at thanks to a beautiful spread page ad in The New York Times, the headline for which promised me “The World’s Most Advanced eBook Reader.” With little ad copy I had to move to the website to see why Kate’s Nook was most advanced. Print ads now make big claims and drive you to the web for the proof, which is smart (ish) -- the web clearly offering a richer landscape for storytelling.

Since usability is such an important sales science on the web, I looked at how the landing page is organized to see if it is, indeed, going to tell the “most advanced” story. To wit: We land on a nice product shot page with the most choose-able option being a 360 degree tour button. (For nerds and returnees, there are other visible options: Overview, Features, Accessories, Blog, Support.) The 360 Tour simply turns the Nook around and stands it on end. The next nav options are also quite clear…and over the fold. They’re numbered, sequenced and read left-to-right: 1. Meet nook. 2. Read clearly. 3. Get ebooks in seconds. 4. Endless shelf space. 5. Read for days. 6. Make it yours. 7. Watch video. It’s interesting that the video is last. Also smart.

Overall, the website deserves good usability grades. It’s clean, well thought out and organized -- albeit a little low key. Where it falls down is in creating mscle memory for the “most advanced” idea. And that my friends is my Nook. Peace!

PS. Don’t be surprised if Kate’s words “and this is my Nook” find their way into the popular culture. As Kid Rock would say “or all the wrong reasons.”

(NOTE: Please follow me over to my new home for What’s The Idea? at www.whatstheidea.com. I will continue to publish here for a while, bit hope to move over to the new URL by month’s end. )

Plan It Up!

spoppe — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 13:23:23 GMT

I’m reading about Apple’s amazing 47% rise in profit and realize I’m part of the story. My son went off to college this August and he talked me into buy him a MacBook. Somewhat against it, being a price shopper and netbook fan, I gave in after lots of “beat down.”

The whole thing got me thinking about the back-to-school timeframe, a short period during which lots of laptops are purchased, especially by entering freshmen. Knowing when someone is going to purchase lets you create a thoughtful game plan. At what points does a marketer want to connect with a 17-18 year olds when it’s known they’ll be buying a laptop in August? Using what media? And with what methods of persuasion? That’s planning. That’s what’s up.

For expensive products like a MacBook, you can’t just send out a free-standing-insert (FSI) with a low price point in late July, though most everyone does. You need to begin the persuasion six months in advance -- building to D-Day (the purchase period). Knowing the target intimately, knowing the media they use, the tools they employ, their rites of passage and their rituals – knowing all these things will help build an effective, targeted, and lower cost plan. Plan it up! Peace!

(NOTE: Please follow me over to my new home for What’s The Idea? at www.whatstheidea.com. I will continue to publish here for a while, bit hope to move over to the new URL by month’s end. )

Face Without the Book.

spoppe — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 13:23:24 GMT

Have you ever been to a high school football game and watched kids walk the bottom row of the stands? It can be more fun than the game itself. Some kids parade as if it’s a Narciso runway show while others skulk, head down, hiding from the world. The paraders are filled with “hi’ and “heys,” the skulkers, not so much. It’s a matter of confidence. But now the skulkers have a tool -- texting. They have a reason to avert their eyes, while looking tre cool and busy.

Subways and buses in urban centers are other places people like to hide from stares, ergo you’ll see a preponderance of iPods and texting.

Today, technology is often a diversion, especially for kids, giving them an excuse not to socialize. Early MySpace cadets and current Facebookers called what they were doing “being social” and to an extent it is. Certainly, there are nice apps on Facebook allowing people to expand their circle and do new stuff. But let’s face it, sitting on your ass and typing to friends and neofriends smells of the letter-writing, attic-recluse types of yore.

I’m betting the next group of cool apps will be closer to FourSquare than Facebook -- helping people actually get out of their chairs and meet others with whom they are comfortable. “Likeminds” as Noah Brier and Piers Fawkes might say. There’s social and there’s social. I for one, prefer the version conducted in person. (He said typing from his chair.) Peace!

(NOTE: Please follow me over to my new home for What’s The Idea? at www.whatstheidea.com. I will continue to publish here for a while, bit hope to move over to the new URL by month’s end. )

The Usability of Advertising

spoppe — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 12:04:58 GMT

Having been steeped in the world of digital media the last couple of years and seeing how important usability is to web companies, it dawned on me that perhaps we marketers should begin to ask ourselves about the usability of advertising. I don’t mean to pile on, but I read a $20-30,000 ad in The New York Times today, the headline for which was “Excellence.” One world headlines are so awesome!

The usability of this ad was close to nil. If you don't know the company you flip the page. If you read the logo and know the company, then from a usability standpoint you must decide if you want to spend the time to find out what is excellent about the company. This presumes the company being excellent is newsworthy -- meaning it is not normally excellent. If it simply reinforces what you already know, the ad is not useful.

In order for an ad to have usability, it must educate, stimulate, show something never before seen, entertain (if one needs entertaining), or warm up a part of the brain that persuades. A usable ad makes you “feel something then do something.” Every maker and approver of ads should pay heed. We need to make more usable ads. Peace!

(NOTE: Please follow me over to my new home for What’s The Idea? at www.whatstheidea.com. I will continue to publish here for a while, bit hope to move over to the new URL by month’s end. )

Global Warming…the brand.

spoppe — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 12:41:26 GMT

Today is Blog Action Day, the topic for which is the environment.

Global warming is a horrific, long-term problem for the planet. The trapping of carbon dioxide, methane and other noxious gases is altering the planet’s flora and fauna in ways we can’t imagine in our day-to-day world view. But the brand “global warming” is in some ways even more insidious. Who ever came up with the term created a brand that’s quite a euphemism. When has the word warm really had such a bad connotation? And how about “climate change" or "greenhouse gases,” those terms shiver me spleen.

Methane gas escaping into our atmosphere accounts for about 1/3 of all greenhouse emissions and stays there for 10 years. Carbon dioxide, the most common gaseous emission, lingers 100 plus years. Are you getting a warm feeling? Not me, I’m pissed.

Methane, carbon dioxide and the euphemistic words used to describe the ecosystem-changing area above our planet need to be demonized. No more happy words! For a society that curses and drops the f-bomb as we do, you’d think we could come up with some more apt, creative words to describe what’s enshrouding our planet. Here are some starter words to think about: toxic, deadly, cancerous, poisonous, noxious, odious, grisly… (Please comment with your entries, I’d enjoy hearing them. Here’s one: “Global Warning!”)

So on Blog Action Day I could ask you to shut off you lights, use more energy efficient appliances, stop flushing for number 1, and say “no bag please” to the deli guy, but I’d rather you change the way you refer to what happening to the planet. Let’s get more indignant. Let’s get angry! Words matter. Peace!

(Photo by New York Times, and EPA)

(NOTE: Please follow me over to my new home for What’s The Idea? at www.whatstheidea.com. I will continue to publish here for a while, bit hope to move over to the new URL by month’s end. )

The Few, the brave, the marketers.

spoppe — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 13:24:18 GMT

I don’t know Mike Braue of David&Goliath and I haven’t seen Dave Angelo since softball in the 90s (Nice mouth, nice hands.) but I have been a fan of their work for years. Mr. Braue wrote a post for Talent Zoo this week in which he shared David&Goliath’s corporate philosophy of bravery. I’m on board with bravery, not of the stupid, blind type that seeks to “break through the clutter” (Oh, how I loathe those words), but the bravery that makes one feel a bit uncomfortable and suggests acting with an unpredictable outcome.

Crispin Porter (May I call them Crispin Potter? They are sort of Harry Potteresque.) has a theorem about creative that suggests good work must create conflict for the consumer; conflict being a keystone of good storytelling. Oddly, when I present a brand strategy there is typically one word that makes the CEO uncomfortable. Often it’s a critical word…a strategically pivotal word. When I hear that nervousness, I know I’ve got them. You see CEOs want to be brave, love to be brave – that’s how they got to be CEOs.

Seeing the future and predicting the future is not for the weak kneed. Seeing and acting on the past on the other hand is the practice of 92% of marketers. The brave have been hit in the schnoz, they’ve been struck by an arrow…and lived. Stick your nose out, take an arrow. Be brave. Peace!

(NOTE: Please follow me over to my new home for What’s The Idea? at www.whatstheidea.com. I will continue to publish here for a while, bit hope to move over to the new URL by month’s end. )

You one finest, overcome excellence.

spoppe — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 12:30:30 GMT

(NOTE: Please follow me over to my new home for What’s The Idea? at www.whatstheidea.com. I will continue to publish here for a while, bit hope to move over to the new URL by month’s end. )

When in a fun mood, I like to speak in a dialect called angry Korean grocer, something picked up on Saturday Night Live skit. Silly I know, but it makes my wife laugh. The title of this post is not in that dialect though, it is an assemblage of 5 headlines from NYU Langone Medical Center's latest ad campaign (the comma is mine). Each one-word headline sits atop an expensive testimonial picture and one sentence story, followed by a little sell, e.g., Scott Abrams, injured in the line of duty, walked out of our hospital, when he couldn’t walk in.”

The campaign, for a reason unbeknownst to the reader is entitled “Any Given Moment.” It was developed by Arnold NY, an agency that should know better. It is “we’re here” advertising at its worst. Lots of hospitals have taken to the papers and airwaves with new campaigns this season, but this one is pretty much idealess. Hospitals are notorious for creating poor advertising, often filled with miraculous survivor stories, yet the category has been getting better. “NYU and AR-nold suffer setback. Hope they overcome.”

The trouble with Coke and Pepsi.

spoppe — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 13:23:39 GMT

(NOTE: Please follow me over to my new home for What’s The Idea? at www.whatstheidea.com. I will continue to publish here for a while, bit hope to move over to the new URL by month’s end. )

Rant time. My bad, it’s Friday. Pepsi’s sales, it was reported yesterday, were weaker-than-expected caused by lower soft drink sales in North America. Interestingly, Pepsi Cola just finished a big brand redesign which was well received by the design, advertising and brand planning communities; the latter community acknowledging the work at the recent Jay Chiat Awards in NYC. I am a dissenter when it comes to this new Pepsi strategy, which revolves around the idea “Refresh.” Pepsi’s strategy celebrates refresh more for the computer definition than the thirst-quenching definiton. Hello? Is anyone paying attention? Refreshment is Coke’s strategy.

Anyway, both Coke and Pepsi -- but Coke in particular -- need to focus advertising not on culture but on the ability for colas to truly quench a thirst. Nothing in the world can quench a thirst like a Coke. It creates a jolt, a satisfying, smile-provoking recoil for the thirsty drinker. Here’s a test strategic account planners: get out of the building and walk a trail in the hot sun for 8 hours. Have someone meet you at the trail’s end with a Coke in one hand a Gatorade in the other. See which your arm reaches for. (Only physicists will grab a Gatorade.)

Colas are under fire from waters, energy drinks and teas. They need to fight back. And fight back with all the syrupy, coca-ey, carbonation demonstrations at their disposal. Cola growth in the third world is strong because those consumers know that Coke and Pepsi refresh like nothing else. In the US we’ve lost sight of that. Come on people, stop over-thinking this stuff. Cultural refresh indeed! Peace.

Deloitte “2009 Tribalization of Business Study” Boil.

spoppe — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 13:08:28 GMT

NOTE: Please follow me over to my new home for What’s The Idea? at www.whatstheidea.com. I will continue to publish here for a while, but hope to move over to my own URL by month’s end.

The just posted Deloitte “2009 Tribalization of Business” study positions them as a leader in this very fertile space -- certainly as a leader among the big consulting companies. Here’s a boildown on the findings.

Telling enterprises to build “communities” or “social networks” within the company is a hard sell. The words here matter and currently connote the wrong things.

The people most comfortable with current enterprise “worker nets” are the Millennials or the mega nerds. Some successes in terms of efficiency improvements are being recorded by these companies but the clean-up batters aren’t really participating and that is the tipping point challenge.

American enterprise and individualism is keeping people from sharing, for fear that others will take credit and they will not benefit financially or career-wise. “Me first, company second.” This needs to change.

Social Business Design (coined by the Dachis Group) is the best definition I’ve heard so far for this technology and behavior pursuit – a pursuit that will alter business as we know it. It may not be long before Social Business Design becomes an acronym. (A shame, said the junior high kid within.)

These are exciting times, and I’m glad Deloitte is doing good research work here, with this second study on the topic. Tomorrow, tune in for some ideas about how to get the clean-up hitters involved. Peace!

Trademarkia.com A Path Thru the Trademark Jungle.

spoppe — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 13:24:05 GMT

What happens when you put a lawyer and marketer in a room together? A lot of quiet. What happens when you put a lawyer and a small business marketer in a room? Nothing, it doesn’t happen. The same is often true for mid-size marketers because like Ocean Beach, NY, long known as the “land of no,” small businesses operate by a don’t ask don’t tell ethos – and they don’t want to pay lawyer fees either.

Enter Trademarkia.com, a company with a great name which combines “trademark” and “Wikipedia.” The name passes the Is-Does test – a big plus for start-up businesses. Trademarkia CEO, Raj Abhyanker, also a patent and IP attorney, realized that the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office and patent attorneys have not yet caught the Web 2.0 train. Furthermore he realized that there are millions of expired company names, logos and slogans in the morgue, all of which are marketable.

Mr. Abhyanker’s press releases refer to Trademarkia as the “freshest, easiest way to create a Brand” and though that goes beyond just the Wikipedia metaphor, it does capture the essence and functionality of the site. One can go to Trademarkia and for about $159, buy an expired mark and secure it. Or search for a never been used mark through the Trademarkia database and secure that. The searching part is free. (Trademarkia was a TechCrunch50 participant this year.)

Trademarkia does a lot of other things like send competitive alerts but its single biggest breakthrough is creating a place filled with lay explanations and search tools, to help business owners and marketers chop through the jungle that has to date been the expensive provenance of trademark lawyers. Peace!

Social Media Inside and Out.

spoppe — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 12:17:39 GMT

The smartest, most progressive companies in America are using social media to demonstrate brand strategy and brand value. It helps them recruit new (young) employees, create affinity with prospects, and retain and maintain existing customers. Social media is currently too tactical and not well governed, but that’s a topic for another post. That is what’s up in social media outside the company.

Social media inside the company is intended to extend and make more robust information sharing and collaboration with an end-goal of creating shareholder value. Social media within the enterprise started in earnest at trade shows like Web 2.0 Expo and Enterprise 2.0. Lots of companies are doing it well, but collectively we’ve only scratched the surface. The 10 years leading up to social media inside the company were the domain of software and consulting companies selling business processes reengineering (BPR) and enterprise resource planning (ERP). They made gazillions, but their solutions were 80% machine, 20% people. I like to think today’s social media offerings will invert that mix, but it will certainly be a challenge.

America’s free enterprise system rewards big ideas and breakthrough findings; our business history is filled with the names of inventors, yet we don’t have a lot of collaborator stories to tell. Companies like The Dachis Group are dealing with this needed culture shift. (A shift that might, someday, cure cancer more quickly.) Consultants of this ilk are studying how companies, enterprises and associations work -- defining the 1s and 0s or the ons and offs of the enterprise knowledge worker. Dachis call it the Hivemind mentality. It’s not going to be easy. In America the hive always has a queen bee and lots of wanna bees. Stay tuned.

Macs, Markers and Music.

spoppe — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 12:28:14 GMT

I just read the first page of an IBM white paper entitled “The End of Advertising as We Know it.” IBM spends a lot on advertising, is should know of what it speaks. But IBM also spends a lot of energy and Benjamins getting people to buy machines that process data.

The IBM thesis is that one-to-many advertising – using TV to create demand and preference for brands -- is old school and the new school model surrounds micro-segment targeting, where handfuls of people, even individuals, are targeted. The new school messages are delivered over a number of mediums, especially the web, in ways that are much closer to the point of sale, much more measurable and efficient. A one-to-one approach.

IBM is wrong about the death of advertising. Way wrong. TV ads will live on. In fact, they will get better as we ferret out the sloppy craftspeople. But IBM is right in that marketing budgets will be using a lot more digital tools to help find customers, set the hook and maintain loyalty. These things will coexist; finding the right mix is the key.

The problem with IBMs of one-to-one prediction is that it requires more data analysts, marketing scientists and technology to get involved in consumer communications. The highly paid creative geniuses and the poorly paid Millennials who sit at their feet are not crafting the myriad brand stories. And product image suffers. The art of brand building and brand maintenance is lost when handled by the technicians in IBM’s data-driven world. The percent of actual dollars spent on marketing will tip in favor of computers and computer services and away from Macs, markers and music. A slippery slope indeed. Peace!

Posters. Where art thou?

spoppe — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 12:31:45 GMT

Posters are original content creators who rule the social web. They write blogs, upload pictures, create and hang videos on YouTube, microblog on Twitter. The good ones create interest and action. Action might take the form of a comment or pass along of the original content -- a behavior I call Pasting. So there are Posters and Pasters on the Web. The ratio is about 1 to 10. I counsel clients to target Posters and the Pasters will follow. It’s more efficient.

The million dollar question is “How do you find Posters?” Where do they congregate? And once found, how do you know if a Poster has a following? The beauty of the web is that there are a crazy number of measurement tools. Views is a good indication of a Poster’s popularity on YouTube. Number of comments on a blog is a strong litmus of sway with readers. Number of friends or tweets on Twitter is a good measure. With Flickr the number of photos or recency of photos are telling.

Numbers and measures are one thing, but sometimes the best Posters are hidden. If you find them first, on the way up, it’s like finding marketing gold. A good way to determine if a Poster is on the way up is to get into their art. Read them. View their work. See how they treat people. Do they listen and help or are they just there to crack wise. Do they care about their topic or are they just clicking for friends. What’s their motivation?
Posters earn the earned media for marketers. Peace!

Penske. If not today…

spoppe — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 13:19:18 GMT

I was very sad to read Roger Penske has dropped his plan to buy the Saturn Corporation from General Motors. My bet was that Mr. Penske, who has a record of automotive turnarounds, was going to have great success with Saturn. That bet was placed upon the idea that a lot of NASCAR enthusiasts and “car heads” know and admire Mr. Penske. Admiring someone who actually knows a thing or two about a carburetor, driving at high speeds, and what a garage looks like at 2 A.M. under a hanging light bulb is way different than trying to feel affinity with a company run by “phone guy” walking around a gleaming showroom in a Hermes suit.

One of the reasons I got into brand planning was to answer the question “Why will a rural, head-of-household with an annual earned income of $25,000 spend hard earned cash on premium motor oil for the family truck and then go in and eat chicken gizzards for dinner?” (Fried gizzards are actually quite good, if you must know.) It’s about brands (claims, supports and demonstrations).

There are lots of American’s who trust Mr. Penske. They would buy a car from him sight unseen. He is real. He is an expert. He’s not a paid pitchman. He commands market share.

Mr. Penske will be back. My guess is he will have an electric car offering and it will rock our world. Peace!

Usability is the New Black.

spoppe — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 12:49:17 GMT

I speak to account and brand planners all the time who are in search of the next big trend. Anyone can plan based upon what has already happened but to plan for what will happen takes huevos (unisex reference).

So here’s my trend for the next few years: Usability.

Some things will never be usable: financial prospectuses, tax documents, legal briefs, pharmaceutical disclaimers, website registration guidelines, HTML and information technology (IT) setup. We don’t expect them to be usable and we’re okay paying people to do it for us. Though with money tight, more and more of us are trying to do things ourselves and usability is becoming not only a differentiator but a business.

Online services are getting so intuitive you rarely need to click on “help.” New products are getting easier to use because the “out-of-box” experience is improving and the products themselves have been simplified. Can you say “Flip” video recorder? And lastly, smart entrepreneurs are looking for ways -- especially on the web -- to make difficult, time-consuming processes clickable. Is the 3 minute divorce that unrealistic?

More and more branding ideas and taglines containing the words “fastest and easiest” are finding their way into consumer messaging each day. And I love it. Peace.

The Haque

spoppe — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 12:27:52 GMT

Umair Haque, Director of the Havas Media Lab, and writer of Edge Economy for the Harvard Business Review is an amazing new economy thinker and a bag of chips (a whole lot more). He’s very contrary (check out this current post pooh-poohing innovation), he is very right, and he is quite a communicator. I read his “Twitter’s Ten Rules For Radical Innovators” and thought them worth sharing:

1. Ideals beat strategies.
2. Open beats closed.
3. Connection beats transaction.
4. Simplicity beats complexity.
5. Neighborhoods beat networks.
6. Circuits beat channels.
7. Laziness beats business.
8. Public beats private.
9. Messy beats clean.
10. Good beats evil.
(For the full post, click here.)

I have never met Mr. Haque but hope to. And though I don’t agree with Rule number 1 as a general statement, in this case I do because in this case he suggests the idea to build Twitter was more important than the idea to build a Twitter business model. Agreed.

Mr. Haque is poster. But he is more than a poster, he is an uber poster. An inspirer. Ladies and gentlemen, Mr. Haque is already a force of nature and commerce. My prediction? This dude will be historic! Peace!

The Future of Healthcare.

spoppe — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 12:38:01 GMT

A number of years ago I wrote the brand plan for the North Shore-Long Island Jewish Health System. Though I had to fight to sell it through – the strategy had the cold, cold word “systematized” in it – most approvers agreed it captured their essence. Of the three brand planks, the two that carried real water were resource and information sharing and community integration.

Today it was reported that North Shore-LIJ has decided to lead the way in creating and implementing digital patient records. The system has creates financial incentives for docs to record and save all patient procedures and outcomes on computers. Digital patient records were inevitable, but someone big had to do it first. The two key benefits of this approach are less mistakes and improved best practices. Thank you Jesus.

I write about this because it shows that a good brand plan should have legs. The systematized approach to improving healthcare was written the summer of 2000 and it's not only still accurate today, it's more powerful today. More powerful because the system has spent millions of dollars and millions reminding doctors, patients, employees, administrators and others that this organization is “Setting New Standards in Healthcare.” Brand plans must see and prepare the way for the future. North Shore is still living its brand plan. Peace!