Marketing

Tuesday, February 19, 2008

ooVoo has big potential

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It’s been a while since I participated in a videoconference hosted by Mitch Joel, part of the My ooVoo Day initiative designed to get people talking about the service. (Sorry about the delay—life has been hectic; I’m hoping to catch up on several posts I’ve been wanting to write over the next few days.) You can still sign up to participate in these scheduled My ooVoo Day conversations through February 22.

The ooVoo service—which I hadn’t used before—was impressive, as many others reporting on their experiences have noted. There were six of us on the call and I could hear and see everybody just fine (except for one person, which I attribute to his broadband connection, considering everybody else was coming through loud and clear). The interface is as slick as they come, making Skype’s look like a relic from an earlier time. In addition to the video conferences, ooVoo handles Skype-like calls; right now, all calls to phones in the US and Canada are free, but after the introductory period, they’ll charge for calls, presumably using a model similar to Skype’s SkypeOut service. I haven’t been able to find any reference to a SkypeIn-like service that would assign a phone number to your ooVoo account, allowing you to receive calls from people who aren’t on ooVoo.

ooVoo also does instant messaging, just as Skype does, but also makes recording of the video conversations a breeze. According to one post I read it’s just as easy to record phone conversations, which requires jumping through hoops to accomplish with Skype. You can also record video messages to send via email.

Pretty impressive work from the ooVoo folks who could, conceivably, give Skype a run for their money. Neville and I may even try recording an episode of FIR over ooVoo one of these days, just to see how it goes. (Still, I’m not planning to dump Skype any time soon—my SkypeIn number, after all, has become my only business line; I no longer have a land line for the office.)

Equally impressive, I must admit, is the My ooVoo Day promotion. Congrats to crayon for coming up with the idea and executing it so well. I’d be curious to see the metrics crayon produces from the effort, but I’ve seen plenty of buzz online following the introduction of the campaign. Nice work.

Monday, December 17, 2007

PR and marketing errors pepper Fortune’s annual list

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Money magazine is out with its annual ”101 Dumbest Moments in Business,” and PR/marketing gaffes get their fair share of representation in the list. (I’m not including advertising in this review, since I generally don’t cover advertising on this blog.) The vast majority of the lapses in judgment covered in the list created PR issues for the organizations involved, but the following were created by bad communications or had unusually horrific PR consequences:

#8—A YouTube video of rats frolicking in a New York Taco Bell gets millions of views.

#16—Microsoft PR agency Waggener Edstrom sends a 12-page dossier on a Wired contributing editor to the Wired contributing editor. The less-than-flattering dossier, calling the editor “tricky” and “sensational,” was meant to go to Microsoft executives.

#17—Redux is warned by the FDA to rename its energy drink, which was called Cocaine. It was renamed to Censored, then NoName.

#21—The Cartoon Network hires a marketing agency to place electronic lightboards promoting its characters. In Boston, they’re mistaken for bombs, creating a crisis.

#36—Best Buy is sued by the Connecticut attorney general over its in-store, kiosk-baed intranet, which employees reportedly used to display prices higher than those advertised on the external website.

#46—Johnson & Johnson sues the American Red Cross over the use of its Red Cross logo.

#51—Nine-year-old Shea O’Gorman writes a letter to Apple making suggestions about how to improve his iPod Nano. In response, the legal department sends him a letter telling him outside recommendations are not accepted and telling him not to write any more letters. (I guess Apple won’t be launching its own version of Dell’s IdeaStorm any time soon.)

#65—Verizon refuses to distribute text messages for the abortion rights organizaton NARAL to people who opt in to receive the messages. They had to reverse themselves later, claiming they had “great respect for the free flow of ideas.”

#67—McDonald’s launches a campaign to get the Oxford English Dictionary to change its less-than-flattering definition of “McJob.”

#81—Internet hosting company 365 Main issues a press release touting its 24/7 reliability. The same day, a power failure takes out three of its generators, knocking out Red Envelope, Technorati, and CraigsList.

#84—Southwest makes passenger Kyla Ebbert cover her legs after initially throwing her off the plane over her short skirt. She winds up promoting new airline Virgin America.

#89—British Airways edits out Virgin’s logo on airplane tails and also edits out Richard Branson’s cameo when showing “Casino Royale” in flight.

#90—Southwest Airlines, fresh from trying to recover from the Kyla Ebbert debacle, makes a fellow wearing a t-shirt that reads “Master Baiter” change his shirt before allowing him to board. This leads to another apology.

#96—Reports emerge everywhere of illicit changes to Wikipeda when Wikiscanner launches. Wikiscanner connects changes to the people making them.

Monday, November 19, 2007

Firebrand: TV commercials as entertainment

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The whole Web 2.0 thing has produced a number of assumptions that a lot of people have started taking for granted. Among these is the assumption that there is no creativity in traditional advertising; all the creativity has transitioned to individuals who express it in the form of consumer-generated content.

It’s not hard to buy into this notion. After all, we use our DVRs to fast-forward through commercials we just don’t want to see, yet we readily watch the efforts of individuals who post them to YouTube. Blogs and books are dedicated to CGM. Joe Jaffe has built a reputation around the idea that marketers can no longer expect results through wanton upfront spends.

It’s silly, though, to presume there is no creative talent in the advertising business. It’s just that watching television in its linear format makes it hard to spot the creative gems among all the detritus. Which makes Firebrand, now in Firebrand such an intriguing concept.

I must admit that initially I scoffed at the idea of a website that aggregates mainstream television commercials for people to watch. But I have found the site strangely compelling, a first-class time-waster. The spots on display at Firebrand are inventive, creative, irreverent and just plain fun to watch.

The folks at Firebrand have ammassed an impressive collection of advertisers, including Coca-Cola, Geico, Trojan (with a standout commercial featuring pigs in a bar), Sony, XBox, Adidas, Apple, FedEx, Gatorate, Kellogs, Motorola, McDonald’s, Smirnoff, and dozens more. You find commercials by selecting the brand or choosing a genre (action, sports, animation, etc.). A few playlists are also available, like “Premieres” and “Firebrand Selects”. You can also select spots as your favorites.

As for interactivity, each video features a rating system and the ability to email it to a friend and to download it. There’s also a “Blog this Spot” link that provides you with the embed code and link to the video. A couple of links are disabled, including a shopping cart.

Firebrand is just entering into this public beta, so I’m not concerned about aspects that seem to be missing or some of the opportunities that haven’t yet been introduced. For example, commenting on commercials is a must-add. And just like I can compile a list of music in a Facebook application, a Facebook app that lists my favorite commercials on Firebrand would be cool, too. (Apparently, you can share your favorites on iTunes and a few other places, but I haven’t figured out how just yet.) Finally, there isn’t a way to engage directly with the advertiser (short of whatever the shopping cart will be used for); turning these ads into a two-way conversation with advertisers would take Firebrand to another level altogether.

It also sometimes locks up in Internet Explorer, although I haven’t had a problem in Firefox. These are the types of issues betas are designed to iron out.

But in its early beta, Firebrand is a lot more interesting than I expected it to be and reinforces that there’s still plenty of energy and creativity in those old advertising agencies we’ve all had so much fun bashing of late.

Sunday, November 18, 2007

WaMu: Hype vs. reality

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A marketing/advertising campaign that highlights the differences between your company and your competitors is great, assuming those differences are real. When they’re not, the perception you’ve created will only serve to frustrate customers who expect to experience the image you’ve created.

I had a direct experience with the gap between hype and reality this past week with Washington Mutual (WaMu), the bank that positions itself as the human, caring bank, drawing a line between their casual approach and the stiff, hidebound demeanor of the other guys. First, there’s the language WaMu uses to describe itself on its website:

You’ll know it right away: We’re really not like other banks.

We’re informal, friendly and fun. We take our customers’ money seriously, but not ourselves. We even call ourselves by a fun name that started out as a nickname years ago: WaMu.

We’re the bank for everyday people.

In fact, we believe no one else focuses on consumers, small business and commercial customers like we do. We listen to our customers and give them what they value--yet at the same time we make banking simple and enjoyable.

The advertising features a casually dressed young spokesman juxtaposed against a horde of older, stiff, formal competitors.

Nice image. Here’s the reality:

If you’ve been reading this blog, you know that my son, who completed his three-year enlistment in the U.S. Army two years ago, was activated for another 400 days in Iraq (he spent a year in Iraq with the 101st Airborne during his enlistment). Once he got his orders, he was in a frenzy of preparation for about a month.

Upon arriving at Ft. Benning, Georgia, where he was ordered to report, he realized he was out of money. He called and asked if I could put a couple hundred bucks in his WaMu checking account. I went to the bank with cash, but was told his account had been closed. It had been overdrawn for over 40 days.

I asked about the overdraft amount. It was $5.98, $5 of which was a bank charge. Fine; Ben was preoccupied with preparations for his return to war (and by the interruptions it was creating—he had just become engaged and was on the brink of beginning a new career). I would just pay the overdrawn amount and reopen the account.

Sorry, I was told. We can’t reopen the account. “The circumstances don’t qualify for an exception.”

I explained that Ben had been recalled by the Army and that his WaMu ATM was his only access to cash, and that he probably missed the statement because of the rush to get ready to report.

Sorry, those are the rules, I was told. Ben could open a new account online. Fine, I said. Can the new account be linked to his existing ATM card? No, I was told. It would take about a month to get him an ATM card. By which time, of course, he’ll have been deployed.

I called Ben to explain the situation and he was stunned. “I was in the bank three weeks ago handling the paperwork for direct deposit of my Army paycheck,” he said. “Nobody said anything about my being overdrawn.”

I explained what Ben had told me. The answer I got:

“It’s not our responsibility to tell him. He should have checked his statement.”

Strictly speaking, Ben was overdrawn and didn’t check his statement. His attention was elsewhere. But this is the bank that “gives customers what they value” and makes “banking simple and enjoyable.”

I’ve been racking up sizable charges sending money to Ben via Western Union as he opens a new account with Wachovia so the Army has somewhere to deposit his paychecks. When his ATM card arrives, we’ll have to ship it to him in Iraq. At the end of my last attempt to get WaMu to make an exception and reopen the account, I was reminded that he could open a new account. You think? When $5.98 matters more than the sacrifice a customer is making for his country? When their caring attitude is captured in the statement, “It’s not our responsibility?”

The Stanley Cup Playoffs will be held in hell before anyone in our family has anything to do with WaMu again.

When you hype your company the way WaMu does, you’d better make sure the customer experience is in synch. Otherwise, you wind up with posts like this one.

Tuesday, November 06, 2007

Revisiting paper handouts

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After today, I may have to rethink my position on handouts.

For years, I have resisted providing handouts of my presentations. The reasons:

• Delivering handouts weeks before the speaking engagement precludes making changes to the presentation, even if events or better examples make such a change a good idea.
• We’re supposed to be going green, right? I have a file cabinet full of presentation handouts from conferences. I’ve never looked at any of them. How many trees would have been spared if those handouts simply had never been printed?
• Somebody (I think it was Wilma Matthews) told me about research that proves people retain less from presentations when they have a handout of the presentation in front of them.
• I hate it when I have a point that’s going to be a big “ah ha” moment, but it’s spoiled by people who can’t resist reading ahead.

My concession has been uploading a PDF of my presentation and making it available for download after the talk is over. Then today came along.

I’m in Vegas (at this moment sitting at McCarran waiting for my flight home). I delivered this morning’s keynote at the annual Healthcare Internet Conference, then did a lunch talk at IABC’s Las Vegas chapter. My cell phone rang while I was speaking and the caller left a message. This is the gist of the message:

Hi. I’m attending a conference at the Venetian Hotel. I found the handout of your presentation and it blew me away. I’m at a different conference but I got permission from your conference to keep this copy I found. I’m with a non-profit and, as I read your presentation, I realized our marketing company is doing things the old way. We’re very highly rated but having trouble getting our story out there. Can you help?

I called him back and we’re going to have a longer call when we’re both in our offices next week.

I never considered handouts as marketing tools for people attending conferences other than the one where I’m presenting. That may be worth a few trees after all.

Monday, November 05, 2007

Even snackers eat full meals

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Kevin Dugan tagged me on the MediaSnackers meme, a concept I’ve been digesting (pun fully intended) before juping into well-covered territory. The question: How do you respect MediaSnackers?

By way of background, Jeremiah Owyang started the meme on October 24 by presenting the video from the MediaSnackers site and offering a terse definition:

What’s a mediasnacker? Folks who consume small bits of information, data or entertainment when, where, and how they want.

I’ve now read at least 15 posts contributing to the meme, subscribed to the MediaSnackers feed, watched several related videos...basically, I’ve gorged on snacks. Here are some observations that don’t duplicate too much what’s already been said.

What are MediaSnackers snacking on?

There seems to be a growing body of evidence to suggest that consumer-generated content (CGM)—particularly video—doesn’t have all that much reach. Sure, there are some CGM videos that attracted tens and hundreds of thousands—even millions—of views. These tend to be things like laughing babies, otters holding hands, and thelike. But by and large, the typical YouTube video has gets just a few views, mainly from friends, family, and people searching for videos on just that topic. What typically gets the most views? Professionally produced and, often, copyrighted material.

There is, therefore, plenty of room for organizations wanting to reach snackers to create snack-size content.

I don’t mean to suggest that there’s no value in the videos that get 400 views—if the right 400 people are viewing them. My choice of the number “400” is not arbitrary. It’s based on Shel Israel’s assertion that…

...the Internet is being structured around small circles of friends, usually containing no more than 400 people. There are millions of these global neighbourhoods.  In the not too distant future, there will be 10s of millions of them and they, by definition, will be self-governed.  They will have a great deal of influence iover what people buy, watch, listen to and read.  They will influence where we travel, how we get there and where we stay. They will determine, in some cases, who will get elected.

Shel’s dead on with this. Most of the videos I watch these days are the ones my Facebook friends are posting; I see them when I do my twice-daily scroll through the my Facebook feed. As a result, I see mostly videos that my friends are recommending and sharing, as well as some they are producing. There’s a real challenge ahead for organizations to figure out how to reach these micro-communities with content they’ll want to share without disrespecting and alienating them. (I do expect a sizable part of the marketing and PR profession do do one hell of a job disrespecting and alienating them.)

One final point that a couple people have made but deserves repeating: How well are snackers digesting what they consume? That is, will a call to action be effective in snack-sized content? What is message retention like? I don’t have answers to these questions, but it sounds like a nifty bit of research for SNCR to consider.

Does anyone snack full time?

No. Even people who would classify themselves as Media Snackers have full meals, and probably do so more than they’d care to admit. Given media snacks are, by definition, small, a full meal would be traditional content.

I have two kids—26 and 18—and they both fit the definition of snackers. My son leaves various videos that he wants me to watch open on websites on my computer. My daughter samples music from a variety of sites. Yet both of them go to the movies. Both of them watch full-length TV shows—and if it’s an episode they’ve been waiting for (like the final installment of the three-part South Park “Imaginationland” arc for my son or the finale of “America’s Next Top Model” for my daughter), they’ll even watch it in real time, commercials and all. My daughter will instantly grab the latest Chuck Palahniuk book as soon as it comes out. They go to the movies. They read print magazines (but not the newspaper...except for the comics).

You can probably continue to reach snackers through full-meal media.

Is every snack a snack?

My wife often orders two appetizers to serve as her main course, and she’s hardly the only person to do this. The question, then, is when does a snack cease to be a snack?

If I watch a two-minute video the link to which somebody has emailed me, it’s a snack. If it leads me to find related videos, videos by the same producer, websites that address the issues raised in the video and otherwise consume related content resulting from focused research, then I’m no longer snacking. I’ve assembled a meal from smaller portions.

It is probably worth somebody’s effort to figure out how to identify common memes and engage through the meme rather than (or in addition to) the individual bite-sized nugget of content.

Are young people the only media snackers?

Of course not. I’ve always gotten a kick out of the “Ask a Ninja” special delivery episode titled, “What is Podcasting?” The Ninja says, “People under the age of 12 have asked the Ninja, ‘What is podcasting?’” Cute, but wrong, since Arbitron research suggests that most podcast listeners are somewhere in their late 30s or early 40s. Why? Because the producers of most podcasts are generating content that is of most interest to that group.

Media snacks didn’t generally exist before the whole Web 2.0 thing kicked into gear, so us older folks didn’t have snacks to consume. But it’s a mistake to assume that only the IM generation (born after 1980) are embracing this kind of content. Now that it’s available, everyone is taking advantage of it. If the younger generation has an edge, it’s figuring out how to consume snacks when they’re not tethered to a computer.

How do I respect media snackers?

Like everyone else who has answered this question, I respect media snackers in a number of ways—none of which were concentrated, focused attempts to appeal to snackers. It has all just been adoption of the media that work best to do what I want to do. These include…

• Embracing Twitter and Jaiku.
• Tapping into services like Jott and Utterz that make it easy to produce quick, snack-sized morsels.
• Blogging. Sure, some of my posts are long, but none are as long as your average Atlantic Monthly feature.
• Photo sharing with Flickr
• Contributing at least a little to the video world on YouTube
• I’ve created a widget for my blog and have several widgets on my blog, making it easy for visitors to consume content other than mine in small portions

There are probably other things I do that accommodate snackers, who do deserve attention. On the other hand, as Kevin Dugan points out, Neville and I produce a podcast that runs an hour twice each week, which has a healthy community of listeners and participants. It’s a mistake to assume someone is exclusively a snacker.

It’s probably past time for tagging anyone else on this meme—I’m not even sure I know anybody who hasn’t already been tagged. But comments, as always, are welcome. (Comments are, after all, snack-sized bits of content!)

Tuesday, October 30, 2007

Ownership doesn’t necessarily equal hypocricy

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A couple days ago, as I was checking out the latest view-count for the Dove “Onslaught” video on You Tube, I stumbled upon a video that took the “Self-Esteem” campaign to task. The video—which included bits and pieces from “Onslaught”—called out Unilever for its alleged hypocricy: The same company that owns Dove and its “Campaign for Real Beauty,” which decries the expectations the beauty and advertising industry force on young girls—also owns Axe, the men’s skin-care line that uses those very same images to sell its product.

Here’s the video:

I’ve been thinking ever since I saw the video about my response. Interestingly, Sarah Wurrey from CustomScoop posted about a video that makes exactly the same case in with a little less bashing over the head:

The LA Times was all over this, too, reporting on The Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood’s letter-writing campaign aimed at yanking the Axe ad campaign.

The Netherlands-based Unilever is a massive corporate entity, generating $52 billion in sales last year with 189,000 employees contributing to the effort worldwide. Those employees report to a variety of business units and divisions, ranging from Lipton to Slim Fast. The company even owns its own tea and oil plantations. Like many large companies (this one is a joint venture) many of the brands in its portfolio were added by acquisition. Most of the brands continue to operate as companies.

AdAge’s Bob Garfield makes a valid point when he asks, “What happens when Dove sales begin to flag and market share begins to slide? That will be the test of true righteousness. Does the ‘Campaign for Real Beauty’ then get disposed of, like last year’s fashions, or dubiously ‘enhanced,’ like a pair of fake breasts?”

But Garfield’s point doesn’t diminish the validity of the Self-Esteem campaign or the people working for Dove who brought it to the marketplace. To suggest otherwise is no different than claiming hypocricy when someone on Fox News asserts a disdain for a business practice praised by the Wall Street Journal and dismissed as irrelevant on MySpace: All are owned by News Corp., but each is an independent operation. The portfolio of the owners doesn’t necessarily render the values of a business it owns are insincere merely because they conflict with the values of another brand in the portfolio.

This wasn’t always an issue, back in the days when only a few companies reached behemoth proportions (think Standard Oil). But today, when “grow or die” is the business mantra, the fact that a holding company has acquired businesses that take different approaches to everything from marketing to business ethics doesn’t mean that cynical hypocricy was involved. Dove is a distinct brand that happens to be owned by Unilever, and I continue to applaud the company’s efforts. The fact that, way up the ladder, the company that owns them also owns Axe doesn’t diminish the message—or the sincere people who created and delivered it—at all.