@bmorrissey

3 links 1.30.09

1. Opt-Out Advertising. The WSJ's newish blog has a case study on WikiHow's move to let users opt out of advertising on the site. According to WikiHow, not many visitors take it up on the offer.

2. Collapse of Authority. The grandees at Davos are apparently coming to terms with the fact that people aren't trusting much of anything nowadays, according to Jeff Jarvis. People's trust in government, media and advertising is at historic lows.

3. Staying Optimistic. Influx Insights oints to a very apt lesson in the need for optimism given by Boston Symphony conductor Benjamin Zander. It's quite useful with all the doom and gloom that everyone is dealing with in the economy. Influx Insights points to a great presentation Zander did at TED.

Advertisers on the Obama bandwagon

Even a hardened cynic would take a break during last week's inauguration of Barack Obama. Sure enough, though, advertisers were plotting how they could get in on the action. It would be nice to think, just once, they'd sit this one out, like how the Hollywood celebrities went underground after 9-11. Pepsi started early, gathering its stable of celebrities to construct an "open letter" video to the new president. Not so bad. Advertising should reflect the culture.

But it of course ends up going too far. Advertising always makes things worse rather than better. Soon after the inaugural, I wondered when advertisers would push the envelope too far. It was inevitable. I saw a Seth Godin post about what it means for those selling stuff. "What marketers sell is hope," he writes. "The reason is simple: people need more. We run out. We need it replenished. Hope is almost always in short supply." Sound advice. What do we get? "Yes We Can Sales Events." A BBDO "Yes We Can" Chrysler sales event in Australia. A Southwest Airlines "Yes You Can" sale. (Thanks, Kingston Massive.) Bluefly honored the occasion with classy inaugural cursive -- and a reminder that "yes you can" take an extra 15% off. Beyond their silliness,these ham-handed reactions show how marketing tends to skim the surface. The real lesson of Obama, the stuff Godin mentions, isn't learned. Advertising instead feels much more comfortable simply cadging his slogan for sales. At least Starbucks did more than steal Obama's slogans. It offered a free coffee to those who volunteered during inauguration week and  set up a site for people to put "change" into action by volunteering five hours in their communities. So far, if the counter is to believed, 250,000 have pledged.

Is data the new creative?

Another interesting offshoot from my conversation at 212 was David Verklin's notion that "data is the new creative." (An alternative version could be: All marketers are direct marketers now.) In explaining this notion, he referred to Battelle's "database of intentions," the idea that what we type into search engines ends up informing our likes, dislikes and needs. He even made idea into a very good book. Who is to argue? Google does quite well, thank you very much. But as Battelle himself would point out, search is only part of the media equation: it's demand fulfillment. Right or wrong, advertising is about demand creation. This is where I see the shortcoming of "data is the new creative." Verklin has a vision: it's a world where only pet owners get dog food ads. That is, after all, the mission of Canoe Ventures, the cable company JV he heads. Canoe wants to take lots of set-top box and subscriber data and make TV spots more targeted and (horrors) interactive and accountable. The vision is we'll leave this digital trail of data everywhere that will be scooped up, sliced and diced, then matched with thousands of pieces of messaging to fit our various whims and desires.

Here's the thing: I wonder whether all the targeting in the world is the answer. Look at the Web. You can have laser-like with your targeting of banner ads and they'll still be ignored in most instances. Verklin himself pointed out that nobody really knows anyone who clicks on banner ads. Untold millions have flowed into ad networks that all seem to offer variations of the same story: better targeting. I even met guys from one network at the event who claim they'll cull only the affluent -- whatever that means nowadays. I'm not sure if "data is the new creative." It'll surely be part of the equation -- and it's honorable to let us non-dog people off the hook for seeing Alpo spots -- but it sounds kinda fuddy-duddy to think we just need more info on people to interrupt them with our messages. Now that we're leaving a trail not just of our searches but our social ties, there are lots of companies out there thinking they can one-up the database of intentions with a database of relationships. I'm sure some of them will do quite well, yet I wonder if more data, more targeting and more segmenting is the answer.

David Verklin's career advice

 At last night's 212 Newsmaker Event, I moderated a chat with Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia's Wenda Harris Millard and Canoe Ventures CEO David Verklin. They're a couple heavyweights in the industry, so I tried to mix industry-type questions with the more personal and career oriented. Verklin, who rose quite quickly through the ranks at Carat and Aegis Group, gave one of the most interesting responses on his career advice to those just getting their careers underway.

1. Work harder than your boss. Early on in his career, he found himself working for a boss who barely did anything. Verklin was shocked the guy actually got paid and seemed to advance. Every organization has these type of people. Being young and ambitious, David asked the guy to give him some of his work to do.

2. Never follow a superstar. It's always good to set the bar low. It helps to pick out jobs that were held by underperformer. Obama clearly identifies with this one.

3. Look for turnarounds. This is quite similar to the previous one, but Verklin made a point that he always looked for positions at the top of organizations that were struggling. This makes progress easier to attain and, he added, more satisfying.

3 links 1.15.09

1. "Asleep at the Wheel of Creative Destruction." Umair Haque calls out Silicon Valley, saying the VCs have been too busy funding yet more widget companies to help people waste more time than radical innovations. "Here's a simple question. How many new industries or markets have venture funds created in the last decade? By my count, exactly two (search and cleantech - and cleantech is still a maybe," he writes. "Sure, that number might be low by a few percent - but not by an order of magnitude, which is what putting the creation back in creative destruction demands." Bonus: five problems VCs should have solved.

2. "Facebook Connect Boosts Signups." Shiv Singh is excited by the possibilities of Facebook Connect for brands. He says early reports that 100,000 people signed up for Facebook Connect on sites like Hulu and Digg are a good sign. The promise is for users to take their social networks with them across the Web. "I believe marketers are missing an opportunity by not looking at Facebook Connect seriously," Shiv writes. "Its not just about making a website more social, its about allowing for social influence marketing by having people talk about your brands and products with their friends and influence each other." Q: What brand implementations have you seen out there? I know the Doghouse thing from Saatchi (and Razorfish) used it, but I haven't seen others.

3. "Things I've Learned in My Life So Far." This is a somewhat old video from Stefan Sagmeister about an exhibit and book of his life lessons. My favorites: "worrying solves nothing" and "having guts always works out for me." Easier said than done. See ones others have contributed too.

Advertising's (over)consumption problem

No conversation with an ad executive these days cannot start with the recession/depression question. Everyone is hurting nowadays, though some plucky digital firms – hello R/GA! – claim the cratering economy is helping them. That aside, advertising is in for a rough ride.

While layoffs get the headlines, the real story is advertising itself is in uncharted territory. This is beyond a cyclical economic problem, where a downturn means advertising and marketing is the first to get cut and the last to be restored. Smart people like Umair Haque, Idris Mootee and Karl Long have sounded the alarm. What happens when we move beyond the mass consumerism that’s propped up our economies for so long? For kicks, I often ask ad types this question during meetings to see the responses. I often get quizzical looks. This is impossible, I'm told. But is it? Many of the problems we face right now are at their root an indictment of debt-fueled consumption. Cheap credit made us feel rich to buy big houses, then use the fake wealth of them to buy more stuff. Cheap fuel means bigger cars, more pollution, etc.

Every step of the way, advertising was there to underpin this untenable cycle. We are a nation of spenders that needs to become savers. This is a major challenge for an industry premised on making us buy stuff we don’t need. Don't take my word for it, listen to WPP CEO Martin Sorrell's words from last year.

“All our habits of clients, agencies, media owners is to encourage people to consume more – super consumption. That is still embedded in the consumer’s psyche, so we’re going to have to respond by doing things differently and making sacrifices if we’re going to deal with issues such as climate change.”

Umair thinks the old playbooks need to be thrown out. He’s arguing for radical businesses that provide real value to people. There are companies out there doing this. Zappos, of course, with its use of a customer service culture as marketing. Etsy is a fascinating example of a company using community and digital technology to subvert our mass consumerist mindset. It’s empowering armies of handmade goods makers. Rob Kalin, the founder, told me he wanted to extend into agriculture. Yes, agriculture. Now that’s a radical business idea – not some widget company.

My guess is building great brands will be more about services, making people’s lives better, even improving society. What we see going on in social media, however chaotic, gives a clue of what great brands will do in the future. It will be more about connecting people, listening to them and collaborating with them. Things like the (very imperfect) Nike+ point the way to a different way of marketing. Adrian Ho even points out that marketing might become something like Apple’s emailed receipt. It has to be less about spitting out messages, whether TV spots or banner ads, convincing them to buy more stuff.

3 links: 1.13.09

1. "It's Time to Transform." Peter Kim is thinking hard about what "social media" really means. Too often, it's about one-off ad campaigns, the equivalent of "one-night stands with your customers, not building long-term relationships." Peter and Jeff Dachis are building a company that they hope will do for social technologies what Razorfish did for the Web sites in the dot-com days: bring software and services to enterprises to make social a core part of their businesses. I'm interested in how that pans out.

2. "Knowing Armano." Alan Wolk breaks down last week's "Daniela" effort by David Armano, a successful case study of how an influential Web celebrity can use his network for social good. (I wrote a brief piece in Adweek on the lessons for marketers from David's effort.) Alan isn't sold on whether this holds much hope for marketers looking to crack the social Web. It all comes down to the fact that David got people to act on the basis of a personal connection. In the real world, people don't have that kind of connection with brands. "We may like certain brands a whole lot, consider ourselves experts on them, but we don’t ever feel we 'know' them," Alan writes.

3. "Two Keys to Life." Brad Feld, a VC and fellow marathon runner, points to a video of Will Smith telling kids at a Nickelodeon awards show how to be successful. It comes down to running and reading. "The person who works the hardest wins," he says. No problem is insoluble. They've been confronted and dealt with by others, many of whom have written about it. Running and Reading.

Content + advertising = ?

 

There's a subject near and dear to my heart, even more so than holiday shopping dad style: how content creators will get paid in digital media. It's clear we're going to see dozens of newspapers fail this year. The blame for this is mostly on the newspapers themselves -- and the reporters for resisting changes based on "tradition." Battelle has it right when he invokes the parallels to the auto industry: too many workers spending too much time creating products people don't want. Yet I wish it was as simple as the "cult of free" people make it out to be. It's not just a matter of trading in print for digital.

We'll see from the carnage that will surely begin in 2009 is the rise of more independent voices. It's inevitable we'll see olo personal brands, collectives and stripped down aggregation+original content models like The Huffington Post. Still, I worry. Display advertising is a race to the bottom. Fred Wilson had a harrowing post on this last week, welcoming in the era of permanent $1 CPMs. Let me tell you, $1 CPMs won't pay for quality, professional content. The idea of more intrusive ads is a non-starter.

All this interests me in new advertising models that move beyond relegating brands to be ignored on the sidelines. Don't get me wrong, I hate it as a content creator, but there's a clear need to think in new ways about how content is supported. It's a nexus of my selfish interest and my professional job to find new ways advertisers connect with consumers in digital channels. In this week's issue, I looked at a range of "influencer" programs in which brands rely on independent content creators to create content for them. There is purposefully a range. The reason I wanted to look at this is because I firmly believe the innovation in ad models will not take place at large organizations. I can promise you that. It's going to happen at the edges. Battelle's Federated Media, IZEA and Crayon are three groups trying interesting things that, however indirectly, might give part of the solution.

For a while now, I've thought IZEA CEO Ted Murphy was onto something with PayPerPost, even when everyone shit on him. (I figured Jason Calacanis hated him so he couln't be so bad.) What Ted got, I thought, was that advertisers need to come off the sidelines and be part of the content. You can quibble with the implementation with PPP, but it was onto something. I looked at an influencer program Izea ran with top bloggers, giving them $500 gift certificates and instructions to write about their Kmart shopping spree. It was met with mixed reviews, although not as much virulence as Izea has generated in the past. To me, the interesting part is that it generated a lot of buzz for Kmart at a low cost.

I also looked at programs run by Crayon for Panasonic at CES and Federated Media for AmEx OPEN.Panasonic pays bloggers to go to CES, meet with Panasonic execs, see its new products, etc. Sure, they weren't told what to write. But come on, the fix was in -- and, surprise, they dutifully live Tweeted the Panasonic press conference. Crayon's Greg Verdino objects to the term "advertorial," something I discussed at length with my editors. Here's how I described this "new form of advertorial":

"Rather than relying on magazines, {brands} are contracting with influential bloggers who bring with them their own powerful distribution networks. Rather than a long-form narrative, content is fit for the Web via blog posts, Twitter updates and  YouTube videos. And the key differentiator: instead of dictating the content to lead to a sale, brands typically keep their distance to maintain credibility."

Greg says it's like "press junkets," which I don't get because the A-listers on this trip make points to say they're not journalists. Maybe the tech press is different, but good luck Panasonic getting Walt Mossberg to cover your press conference while you pick up his hotel room, flight and provide him equipment. Not going to happen. This is fine. Chris Brogan's audience seems OK with him taking these trips, so that's good enough for me.

There is a growing class of more journalistic-minded bloggers that are dipping their toes in these waters. Chas Edwards at FM has long held to me that FM hiring out its stable of writers to write on a specific topic for an advertiser site is no different than my publisher selling a special section, then the editors filling it with copy. I don't really buy this argument. I'm not creating copy for advertiser Web sites, but often FM writers are. There's nothing wrong with this. It's just new. The side effect is a Guy Kawasaki writing on "the art of laying people off" for an AmEx small-business site also lends his online network to the content. That means both direct traffic by his promotion on Twittter and his own blog site -- and Google help thanks to his high Page Rank. Again, this is new territory. FM got its snout hit over a program with Microsoft a couple years ago. I wouldn't be surprised if it crossed some lines again, since they're fuzzy.

The bigger question, which in retrospect I don't think I spent enough time on, is whether this works for brands. Does hiring out these influencers to blog, Tweet and shoot videos around a topic or event really pay off? At some point, won't attempts to arrive at "authenticity" just lead to content created that has nothing to do with what the brand is trying to achieve?

What I hope is people keep thinking (and trying) these new models -- and actually quantifying whether they work better for advertisers than regular banners. Again, it's selfish, but I'm with NYT's David Car in hoping for an iTunes for news. Beyond my selfish concerns, it's important for our country and society to have a healthy press. I"m a firm believer it's going to be one thing but several things that supports professional content. I'm sure it'll happen, but it's time to move beyond talking about it to doing it.

What's a digital agency?

It used to be easy to divide up the agency world. There were general agencies, media agencies, direct agencies, then Web agencies. You were media or creative, above the line or below the line. Nowadays, we see lines blurring everywhere. Publishers are acting like agencies. Advertisers are acting like publishers. Agencies are even trying out media. Everyone is in everyone else's backyard.

One of the new gray areas is the digital agency. It used to be simple. Traditional agencies came up with The Big Idea, then others like Web agencies constructed some matching luggage to go with the TV spot and print ads. That's clearly breaking down. What is happening is a big free-for-all. Traditional agencies are driving to have the tech chops of digital shops, while the digital specialists want to get the branding acumen of the traditional shops they slag off all the time.

This was clear in a couple of interactions I had yesterday. First, I saw a Tweet from Poke New York's Tom Ajello about how impressed he was with a new Burger King Facebook program.

I went to check out "Whopper Sacrifice," and I got what Tom was talking about. Brands have totally failed at building Facebook applications. They tend to be intrusive and not give users any reason to actually use them. In short, they're typical advertising -- or really, really bad utility. What Burger King's agency Crispin Porter + Bogusky did was create something different, both tertaining and useful. More than that, though, it showed an understanding of the social media context. Whopper Sacrifice is simple. It asks users to "sacrifice" 10 of their Facebook friends for a free Whopper. Jeff Benjamin, the interactive executive creative director at CPB, explained to me how the program came about because he and the CDs at CPB have all had the experience of building these big Facebook networks and wondering who the people are. That's smart. They get the experience of social media. What's more, CPB now has hired dzens of developers and interaction designers. (This was partially out of necessity after it burned too many bridges with digital production shops -- ahem, Barbarian Group.)

Then I went on a trip uptown to the Garment District -- don't tell me 39th and 8th is Hell's Kitchen -- to see R/GA, the digital agency that created Nike+. This is an agency with an army (some say sweatshop) of developers and tech people. My first question to the CEO, Bob Greenberg, was which agency he sees as R/GA's biggest competitor in the future. CPB. See, R/GA is trying hard to go from its tech base to add the type of smart brand work done by CPB. It'll be a different flavor to be sure: more production-oriented, rooted in technology, short on storytelling. But that doesn't mean it's not doing all sorts of work formerly in the preserve of traditional shops. It has a campaign launching for a client that includes Web, TV and print. R/GA doesn't want to become TBWA, but it will do a version of what's done there.

CPB and R/GA are more alike than they seem. To me, they're both digital agencies.

Lies, damned lies and Web ad forecasts

It's pretty clear most forecasts, with some notable exceptions of course, suck. The entire endeavor is flawed. When predicting the future, most assume it will resemble the present and develop in a straight line. That doesn't always happen. (See Obama.) This is particularly true when it comes to industry forecasting. Internet research firms make a pretty penny peddling consulting services. One of their marketing strategies for the real dough of advising clients is to put out "industry forecasts." Reporters dutifully write stories with blaring headlines of giddy growth in mobile, seach, social media, whatever. These have long struck me as ridiculous. You're going to tell me what's going to happen in video advertising five years from now? What do they use a crystal ball? I recently asked an analyst about whether this stuff was just pure B.S. He claimed the forecasts are "directionally accurate." How accurate? "About 20 percent." Today I wondered how eMarketer could with a straight face forecast search ad spending in 2013. In the words of Lon Cohen:

The problem: these figures are used by companies to justify strategies to investors and the press. Yet nobody asks whether they're valid. For fun, I decided to hunt down an Internet ad forecast from years ago to see how the gurus did. Sure enough, Jupiter projected in August 1999 robust Internet ad growth, enough to reach $11.5 billion in 2003. Guess where it ended up? $7.3 billion, according to the IAB. That's not 20 percent off, it's 57 percent wrong. Jupiter assumed the past would keep repeating itself. It didn't factor in the structural weakness of the online bubble, along with the aftereffects of a recession exacerbated by a terrorist attack. Maybe it's not research firms' fault for not knowing the future, but it's everyone's fault who puts much stock in these forecasts, even "directionally."