i [love] marketing.

the problem with forecasts

The end of the year is known for releasing "best of" / "worst of" lists, forecasts, & trends that will "shape" the next year. While I heart lists, it's the trends that I found real dumb. And no, I am not alone in this. Predictions usually go from plain ridiculous to rather obvious and to those that are there for shock value - "blogging is dead", "podcasting is dead" that no one but Armano really takes seriously. Speaking of Armano, what's up with those copyrighted little cartoons?? ... um, anyway. So, this year, stuff that caught my eye in "ridiculous" category, by self-proclaimed futurist Marian Salzman, are: "technology and media advances will help people to create a self-curated, media-driven Third Place to escape the pressures of home and work" (um, that's REALLY new) & my fav "global leaders, individuals, industries, communities, and governments (sure you haven't miss anyone here??) will join together to begin a "reboot" of global systems, allowing them to operate in a more robust and sustainable way". Besides the fact that meaning of this sentence eludes me, it is so general that it can't be proven wrong. That's the problem with trends - they really don't mean anything: they explain nothing and they predict nothing. So they are pretty useless when applied on the year past (um, what where the trends of 2008? did they "come true"? does anyone care?), and also when used as predictions. I don't think anyone with their straight mind will base their decision-making on the those 2 "predictions" above. The trends also fail the criterion of falsification =  a statement can't be proven wrong. and what can't be proven wrong, is not right either - just ask Carl Popper. So they are basically just someone's [unfounded] observations ... the same way Malcom Gladwell is an "expert" on influentials. And (while I am at it), not only trends have no explanatory/predictive power, they also fail to work as "scenarios" because they are disconnected from any context / interaction with other unfolding events. Ok, now to "plain obvious" predictions category, courtesy of IPG Emerging Media Labs: favorites include "the semantic web will create more sophisticated, intuitive, refined ways to filter information and services, based on users' personal preferences. Early attempts include StumbleUpon and Twine" (and yes, happy new 2004) & "now, it's about engaging customers in conversation and managing relationships online" (um, ok) & "Zen Tech Warrior is the consumer who wants to be digitally connected on their own terms" (awesome, the same sentence every year for many years now [minus the "zen tech warrior" title]). There are also some other forecasting exercises, but at least the guys from ReadWriteWeb make it a collaborative effort AND admit that they usually get SOME of  their predictions right ... takes the pressure off :) At the end, I really liked the idea of replacing predictions with things to look forward in 2009. Much more inspiring & also prob way more likely to happen.

feeling good is just one app away

I've seen Brian's article  on Kraft FB app, and went to Kraft's site to read more about their charitable efforts. After clicking on the "Community Involvement" link, the following page [not found] was displayed. Well, so much for it. While it's always awesome to hear about corporations' charitable efforts, I wonder what happens when Facebook becomes a place for them. Apparently, the idea works (alleged "more than 25,000" people added the application thus far). You can also fight global warming by adding (Lil) Green Patch, but since there's no brand behind it, it's a different story (still, I am tempted: the app - just imagine! - saved 96,124,167 Sq ft of Rainforest). Seemingly, social activism has never been easier (doesn't even require leaving the house). So, what is really going on here? In case of the Kraft app, I call it "social-activism-as-a-marketing-gimmick". First, it seems that - in their effort to feel good (no blame), people find it exceptionally convenient to delegate [their] social responsibility. Where? Well, to the brand, where the whole thing starts from and ends with (the brand created the application). So - um - it is about the brand. The possible outcomes of the Kraft's app thing in this case are: brand recognition, a short-terms sales lift (always a tricky one), or (yes) the number of meals distributed. I bet on the first one). Second, it is really not a giant surprise that a community involvement initiative is going to succeed on a social networking site. People want to feel good; and they want to feel socially responsible. And, who better than other people is going to provide a more valid confirmation of this? There is no easier way to achieve the validation by others than by merely doing add+send some "let's save the world" app. In this case, what is called a "cause marketing" seems to me as nothing more than - yet another - brands' effort to capitalize on people's social habits (in this case, "do-good" ones. And honestly, I can see that brands feel that with these ones, they uncovered a giant bag of dollars).  It is not impossible to combine a brand with community involvement & social causes. Designing a system of action that creates opportunity for people to DO something socially responsible is an option. Very smart people Lee Maschmeyer and Nancy King write about this in more detail (and with considerably more knowledge) on their awesome blogs, Transformation Design (Lee) and See Change Happen (Nancy). Both of them work in digital marketing, and no, neither of them talks about a FB app.

engulfed in flames

 

Um, can I still travel with it?

the wisdom of the crowd vs. the wisdom of the elite

If you are really into getting some more spam email alerts in your mailbox. In my opinion, this 100+ twitter app is not that different (if any) from tweetscan. But that's not the point. What I find more interesting is the sheer number of social & technical activity that booms around twitter. With "Shorty Awards" just around the corner, all the twitter's incredible & incredibly abundant number of "divas", "gurus", "mavens", "experts" and/or "goddesses" (yep, a ton of deity walking among us mortals) can get validation of their "celebrity" [and by this I don't even mean "Twit or Fit?" thing]. I really get to wonder if talent is really that generously distributed among the masses. Sometimes I think about days of TV when only a few got exposure. And that may not necessarily have been a bad thing.

i miss writing + some bad browser name ideas

... but i have been drawn back into the industry world for a bit. will remain there until friday, so until then the posts will prob be rudimentary. like this one above, i mostly put it b/c i start wondering whatever happened to Opera (and btw, what is Maxthon? and what a lovely name, in that) ... another other fav icon set thus far is the "old school". More stuff here.

never say yes

I said yes to Brian to take a bite of my pizza ... and the next thing I saw was this.

compfight redesign + some thoughts on how to become a virus

I think that this new compfight site is great. [for those unfamiliar with compfight, it's a tool that enables you to search the universe of flickr images. the thing that makes it even better (for me) than google search is not only the quality of images but also the search itself that is better than google for terms that lean towards conceptual, like "happiness" because it searches through human-made tags and text and not through context/links]. Anyway, they've launched the new site a couple of weeks ago, and now it's possible to bookmark your searches, which means that now it's possible to create del.icio.us-style your searches and share them w others . Which is not only truly awesome in itself, and also because this whole compfight thing gave me an idea of "how to become a [benevolent] virus". Compfight defines itself as "a flickr search tool" and claims that, although it is not affiliated to Flickr, "makes good use of the Flickr." Flickr already does have it's own search tool, but this one is better. So when you want to develop a service, or a brand, you may just go to some website and do something better than it does [like, you can go on someone's blog and leave comments there that are better than the content of that blog, so people start to come there for your comments]. Infiltration is a virus-like tactic (and it may save a lot of money for building your own website. if comfight wanted to create a database of images it would fail miserably. and why would they do it? there's already a ton of user-generated content on the web - to make money = to organize it. This is what never fails to amaze me with brand promotion campaigns that solicit users' content submissions and then put some impossible legal conditions and get something like 12 entries. Like, why? There's already ton of content out there. Use it, it's free). But allowing search+bookmarking+sharing of a ton of stuff that already exists is a good idea. Maybe brands should try something like that with Facebook instead of repeatedly creating dumb-and-dumber applications. So anyway back to virus idea: instead of really beating yourself up to create some content that you hope will  go "viral", become a virus. And then you go contagious on people by using their content. At least, you know where you're going.

making someone happy

I found this at the home of many great things.

fail fast, fail often

I find this impressive. In less then a year, Google established its logo, and kept it for almost a decade without any change. [luckily, they figured out pretty early that they should lose the exclamation point. yahoo! unwittingly kept it - and now look where that got them] The point, however, is not in the logo: rather, it's the process of iterations that made (and still) makes google one of the strongest brands today. No wonder, too, that there it is in the company of other digital brands, like Amazon, Netflix, eBay, etc. While the question of why those brands are successful, and more importantly, how to imitate them eludes their offline counterparts (and is a million dollar puzzle for agencies who build brands' digital campaigns), the answer may be something really simple: test before you launch. [yea i know, sounds techy but in fact it's not]. The old advertising thing is "50% of my advertising fails ... " In my opinion, that's a terrible success vs. failure rate. [and makes one wonder why (and how?) this industry lived as long as it did, the way it did]. The thing is that anything (any solution, idea, etc) is very likely to have a 50% success rate when tested the first time. Google's (or Amazon's & Netflix's) solutions prob have the same likelihood of succeeding as any ad spot or a brand campaign, but then they get - through a number of iterations & feedback - repeatedly tested so when they are launched, this rate goes up to something manageable, like 90-95% (altho that's also prob still not high enough). So the question is: what makes ad agencies so sure - in absence of any iteration - that the products they deliver are going to succeed? (and what makes them to continue to be so sure altho they are proved right only in 50% of cases, a rate that clearly borders randomness). The thing that makes this kind of thinking even more appealing is that digital agencies - which, in fact, can iterate - mostly choose not to, but rather "test" their product by measuring impressions&click-through rates only after it's already launched. If success of digital brands resides in their process [summarized as: try as many things as you can, get a  diverse feedback, fail quickly, focus on what works], then why not imitate it? Good news: some smart places are already doing it.

no idea why i have this ...

... but it was sitting on my desktop forever and i want to get rid of it so i thought i may just as well put it here.

the FB poll is back!

and the results:

I actually approve of this one. There are no brands mentioned, and the questions sound reasonable. In fact, so reasonable that I wish someone does the same poll for the brand's websites. Apparently, "how much i can do with it" & "it works for me when I need it" are absolute winners here ... on the other hand, "how it looks" has not-so-coveted last place. I wonder how would this, this and this fare. An empirical question.

any publicity is good publicity

... and that is all i am going to say about it because i refuse to participate in the debate about Crispin's new spots. Because, the debate is what Crispin wants. (I honestly suspect that what CPB is after are not the ads themselves, but people's reactions to them (positive or negative, whatever). CPB prob had ONE goal in their brief "Make-People-Talk"). Mission accomplished.

[and ... it kinda became obvious who's really targeted here. (no, not the "natives" and not the BK's target)]

for people who are into brand logos ...

This elaborate thing on the left is Apple's first logo (wow, what's going on there??). Firefox's logo dev is also awesome. As is Nike's (created at the time when Nike was still making great running shoes). Microsoft's first logo (1975) came straight from Studio 54, an uncanny resemblance to which made way for a brief (but nonetheless scary) thought of Bill Gates doing disco. Fiat's first logo was apparently made in the Roman Empire, and Cannon started w the name "Kwanon" and a Shiva look-alike creature (then prob figured that it may come across as "too foreign" in the US market). Texaco & Siemens's unwittingly made their logos too similar to ideological symbols. My fav thus far is Buick's logo (part 1 and part 2) with a dude smoking a pipe while walking on the globe and dragging something on the wheels that i can't name or recognize. At first, I thought that people from the past had a lot of time on their hands, but then I realized something else: a trend towards symbolization (and not just simplification) of logos. Logos are often defined as signifiers of something intangible = brand. And ok, they have over time become less&less iconic, and more&more symbolic. For example, Shell's first logo was, um, a photo of a shell. Volkswagen's first logo was a chopper wings. So, what have enabled this symbolization of the signifier? Well .... the brand itself. This really is a no great discovery, and more interesting to me than saying that we all share similar brand concepts that can be made visible via our habitual responses to logos, I find the question of does anyone still really care? I mean, it's truly awesome that Wal-Mart's logo is now green, or that Starbucks for a sec went back to its brown roots. But, so what? Logos apparently today refer to nothing else but to symbolic version of their past selves (as this list shows real nice). I totally get it that they had some role when no one knew what a brand represented (like, the first thing when you think Buick is obviously a dude walking on a globe) and they have to be as close to *reality* as possible but when people became familiar with the brands (and figured which ones are pure crap) does it even matter than logos became more symbolic? Not only do I suspect that Apple would have the same market cap even with that weird, straight-from-brothers-Grimm logo above, but I am also pretty sure that people would actually REACT THE SAME if you displayed to them brand names in just plain black&white text & generic font. So maybe it's time to stop talking about logos and start getting used to the fact that a brand can be something tangible.

some days, i feel like this.

Other days, there's nothing to grab on the sky. More great stuff here.

how, and more importantly, why this ended up in my FB feed?

Is this one of the "social media strategies" that agencies developed for brands to "connect" with consumers on social networks? And, why does it not offer the option "none of the above"? Out of sheer curiosity, I clicked on "Pantene" (no, I really don't care whether I can buy it online or not). As a result, I got a graph with the survey results. What does it do for the listed brands, beats me. As for what it does for me, it annoys me. [nonexistent option: "less about Sponsored Poll"]