Rimfire

It's About People, Stupid....

Marketers can learn a lot from the global financial crisis, and even more from the US banks and financial groups that fed into this perfect storm of fiscal foolishness. The paradigm shift the US banks, and its global counterparts, enter changed the foundation of lending. Rather than lend to people, and their relative incomes and abilities to service a loan they began to invest in the future equity of the property. In other words they moved from believing in the value of people to believing in value of a property; or perhaps better stated the speculative value of an inanimate object.

For a while it worked. And as we all know if it’s working and making money it can’t be wrong. This same philosophy drives Hollywood and why we are subjected to the reality TV phenomena. The problem is that the premise is fundamentally flawed and, well, just plain bad business. Rather than stop it and turn off the profit pipeline, the banks tried to fix it with complex risk mitigation schemes; but as we have learned-- lipstick on pig...

The lesson for marketers is simple; market to people. Whether it’s a business-to-consumer or business-to-business campaign, marketing communications in all its permutations is about people. A brand is a promise and you cannot make a promise to an inanimate object.

Financial markets enjoy a cyclical nature, what goes down must come up. Marketers do not have the luxury of time. Once we make the wrong investment choice, we lose the business for good. Do it too many times and we are out of business. Choose wisely, invest your brand, and brand communications, in people.

The Kids are Alright

I spend a lot of time on the web, well more than I should, but I like it. One thing I've noticed is web marketing blurs the lines of what is appropriate to broadcast to kids. Pop ups for alcohol, dating sites, herpes cures and penis enlargement schemes are synonymous with web surfing and email accounts. Luckily Ruby Pseudo is on the case. In this post she tells marketers what works with kids and what makes them cringe...take heed.

http://rubypseudochatchat.blogspot.com/2008/10/ruby-digital-rules-or-at-least-passing.html

Don't get me wrong, I'm not advocating a regulated Internet. The Internet should stay free of regulation and taxation. The very nature of the web makes it a petri dish for regulators hoping to save the millions who turn to it for freedom of expression and community from certain evil. And Lord knows the tax vultures are salivating at an opportunity to levy revenue from the millions of hourly transactions. No, that path is certain to lead to a Big Brother society complete with a revival of McCarthyism.

What needs to happen is we marketers need to be smarter about how we reach our audiences on the web. This means a polar shift in how we decide to market. Gone are the days of one way windowed focus groups, where many show up for reasons other than providing marketing intel, and decision making based on previous behavior. The web is immediate, its communities dynamic and alive in the present. 

Recently I attended a digital strategy brain storming session to determine a web marketing strategy for a brand in a challenging space. Idea after idea popped up only to be shot down as not doable. After all ideas, some brilliant, were dismissed I asked a seemingly stupid question of the group. "How many of us actually spend time on the web, belong to an online community, blog or have a profile somewhere?"

I was the Lone Ranger and Tonto was not in the building. It was quickly established, despite the bright, creative minds present, that we may not have all the sandwiches required for the picnic. From this a rather novel course of action arose. Rather than discuss what we did not know, we would go away and each of us spend time online in communities where our target audience lives to listen and respond with them. This will take time and effort, we will have to engage with many we do not know, we will have to listen and learn on a more personal level. Scary stuff.

The work is on going, but the results will be much more dynamic than traditional planning tools originally leveraged for the project. And there will be a few more brilliant minds wandering the Internet. Not unlike the monkey who throws it's baby in the water to see if it will swim, Web marketing is hard to do unless you're in the water.  

Eyes Wide Shut

Actress and down-to-earth celebrity Jamie Lee Curtis offers a refreshing insight into our ailing culture with her Huff Post today. She postulates that we are caught in 'bad news days' solidified by our addiction to technology, frail celebrity, political confusion and international embarrassment which keeps us from focusing on what is important; eye-to-eye communications about issues that really matter. She has a point. We are caught in a cultural 'mis-information' campaign, but I don't blame technology, rather the super marketers, i.e. politicians and the media.

Recently I witnessed, first hand, the swift power of a 'mis-information' campaign aimed at leveraging the fears of conservative voters in a rather pathetic attempt of racial profiling. On February 26, 2008 GOP operative and Cincinnati talk radio host Bill Cunningham delivered an inflammatory anti- Obama speech in which he repeatedly referred to the Senator from Illinois as Barrack "Hussein" Obama, with a little extra emphasis on the middle name for good measure. He made other accusations that he couldn't back up due to a lack evidence (obviously) and derided the so called left wing media, especially CBS and NBC, as solely supporting the Clintons; are we beginning to see a pattern here kids? Immediately the cable news media scooped the story and soon Cunningham was on Hannity and Colmes defending his position and denouncing Senator McCain for repudiating him. Of course, the never 'fair and balanced' Fox News quickly gathered a group of questionable experts to debate this nonsense ad nauseum, including the always available for a fee Dick Morris. This went on a few days and further fanned the flames of confusion to leverage America's xenophobia surrounding all things Muslim in an attempt to gain political ground for the Republican party.

The reality is that two-thirds of the world's population is Muslim, many of whom are wealthy, sophisticated and educated. If they wanted to over run the country, they would have by now. But this kind of logic doesn't create controversy, get attention for politicians, and feed the TV producers need for viewer-ship to sell more advertisements to add to Mr. Murdoch's coffers. No, its really not bad news, now is it?

While all of this was happening I was on a ski holiday with dear family friends who are old school conservative Republicans and fine, decent people who were easily swayed by this 'mis information' campaign. Why? Because it came from their leaders and was on the television; two sources of trusted information for them.

The issue of Obama's loyalty due to his Muslim heritage is an ongoing platform of ignorance some members of the Republican party like to stand on. It is a weak and immoral one, but as Hitler, McCarthy, Saddam Hussein and Karl Rove all knew, it's easier to scare people into following you than actually leveraging logic and solving the issues that really matter.

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The evil side of PR

William F. Buckley, more than any other marketer of our generation shaped the modern conservative movement. With a silver tongue, prodigious pen and seminal understanding of broadcast he leveraged hate and fear under the guise of Ivy league sophistication that made it acceptable to the weak. No beer belly, tobacco chewing good old boy redneck was our Willy. Rather, he was a Yale grad who turned on his alma mater for being to liberal. An East coast WASP who enjoyed the finer things in life which, unfortunately, included finer versions of racism, bigotry and war mongering. Here are just a few of his shining moments:

• Buckley came out in support of the segregationist South, writing "The central question that emerges…is whether the White community in the South is entitled to take such measures as are necessary to prevail, politically and culturally, in areas where it does not predominate numerically? The sobering answer is Yes—the White community is so entitled because, for the time being, it is the advanced race.”-- in the August 24, 1957 edition of the National Review

• Buckley sadly defended Wisconsin U.S. Senator Joseph McCarthy as a patriotic crusader against communism.

• Gore Vidal implied that, in 1944, Buckley and unnamed siblings had vandalized a church in their Sharon, Connecticut hometown after the pastor's wife had sold a house to a Jewish family.  Buckley sued Gore, but the case was laughed out of court and dismissed.  (You wacky anti-Semite.)

• The Iraq War enjoyed support from William F. Buckley, and even while later admitting its failures, he refused to acknowledge the war was wrong.

Buckley knew early on that preying on the shallow and weak with fear and hatred would capture the imagination of the xenophobic American, especially when clothed in faux sophistication. Rove and Bush learned their lessons at his knee. Evil comes in many forms.

(Streetvein contributed to this article)

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As we expand we contract....

All living organisms expand and contract as part of their life cycle, and businesses and companies are no exception to this rule. I learned this the hard way, I do that alot, years ago while working at Novell. Despite fulfilling my duties beyond expectations, (I was the senior manager of business media in the PR department and had successfully placed newly appointed CEO Eric Schmidt on the cover of BusinessWeek among other accomplishments), I was laid off when the newly appointed VP of Marketing came aboard and changed the structure of the marketing department. It contracted and I, like many others, was not part of the counter expansion move. It ended up best for all as I entered a more rewarding conversation a few months later.

Valeria Maltoni's insightful post, Revealing Yourself To Others, wrestled this memory from me when she postulated, "Has mutual disclosure through memes, for example, also become a form of PR?" As we know a meme is a theoretical unit of cultural information, and as Valeria also says-- more and more people are using social media. The PR craftsman, and I deliberately use the term craftsman, is faced with the task of knowing when and how to craft a client's 'disclosures.' Much the same way we used to manage lists of journalists to pitch, today's craftsman must know how and where to enter the best conversation possible to disclose his clients 'meme.' And as Valeria goes on to say, "revealing yourself takes time. There are many layers."

Stuart McFaul at Spiralgroup,(disclosure: I perform business development duties for Spiralgroup) puts this very succinctly when he says, "Social Marketing is really about getting the right message to the right person, using the right media at the right time."

And as social media expands the ability to insert memes of disclosure into the conversation will contract until the only way to do so is to always be part of the life cycle.

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The Writer's Strike and all that Doody...

The writer's strike is coming to an end and the writer's truly won. Not just because they will now receive deserved compensation on Internet distributed content, but because the strike has been instrumental forcing us to leverage different technologies for our entertainment and revealed the increasing blur between media.

With the strike sending television viewing into re-run world I gravitated away from the tube, with the exception of watching the Golden State Warriors, and towards the web, movies and, yes, the good old fashioned novel. On the web I caught up on my You Tubing, of course, but also discovered VIRB, a unique social network site with a decidedly indie music and film bent where you can store all your favorite stuff, share it with liked minded folks and meet new friends, (check out the video of The Wendell Baker Story, a pretty cool film by Luke and Andrew Wilson that debuted at the Tahoe Reno Film Festival a few summers ago.) The good wife and I had enough of reruns of Law and Order and started going to the movies again were Juno blew us away the other night. If Ellen Page doesn't win Best Actress this year, I think we'll both be devastated. I also read that Juno has become an Internet darling with teenage girls posting about it on My Space and Facebook in record numbers. With more time to at hand I also returned to reading and  recommend Water For Elephants , the story of an orphaned veterinary student who joins a traveling circus in the 1920s.

Perhaps the strike served a greater purpose by exposing the breadth of entertainment choices across technology. Which, as we move closer and closer to living in the cloud, we will be able to experience from one technology base. One with many different channels where we can simply dial up the type of entertainment we want, when we want and where we want. That day is coming sooner than we think and the writer's were smart to make sure they get their slice of the pie.

And while I'm on the subject of the strike, friends on the front line created this video to help pass the time and get the message out, enjoy!

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Perusing and Fast Company's New Online Look and Feel

I was perusing the latest issue of Fast Company the other day and discovered Robert Scoble is penning a column for them now...very cool. Then I perused his blog this morning and discovered the reason he went with them was their committment to building a strong online/social network experience. So I jump over there and perused Fastcompany.com and, I must say its very impressive and smart. Congrats to Ed Sussman and team for embracing the future.

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The Medium is the Message

Today's WSJ has an interesting article about the lack of projected advertising revenues currently realized from social networking sites. While announcing lower than expected fourth quarter earnings Google cited poor revenue results from its social media business, You Tube. MSFT has been facing an up hill battle in trying to figure out how to monetize Facebook as well.

With all due respect to both Google and Microsoft....you got it all wrong. You see bloggers and those of us who travel the blog-o-sphere and cavort virtually don't give a rat's behind about ads. One of the reasons we went there initially was the refreshing lack of ads, banners, pop ups...all the annoying stuff we hated about our home pages and surfing to find a suitable date or new automobile on-line. I can assure you that I have logged thousands of hours on-line blogging and visiting folks on Vox and Facebook and have clicked on ONE ad in the past year....

That's not to say that social networks aren't gold mines for marketers, but mining the rich veins will require a different approach. One that has more to do with listening, watching and engaging members of the blog-o-sphere rather than realizing technology, crunching numbers and throwing banner ads on heavily trafficked sites.

Bloggers are by nature rebels, we want to have a voice, be heard and be part of the conversation.  Marketing to us should follow suit. We're also smart--regardless of how much Google and Microsoft paid for their respective social networks, we know we are the real owners.

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Keep It Simple, Keep It Real....

Is it me, or were the Super Bowl ads just a whiter shade of pale this year? It seemed that every ad was buried in nostalgia, or worse, half-baked. One can forgive the nostalgic, 'let's play it safe' attitude taken by major advertisers Anheuser-Busch, Coke, Pepsi, and believe it or not, newcomer Tide. After all we're heading into a recession, still in a protracted war and in an election year. Playing it safe is the current motto of our times. But spending millions on a commercial to air during the most watched TV event of the season and being boring, well....that's just downright wrong. (And don't even get me started on the fat guy using cable jumpers for nipple clamps to jump start a car...I mean, just who is the Amp'd target audience?)

Despite the amazing technology that allowed lizards to dance to Thriller, (memo to the creative department, I can't remember the product from this ad), the Charlie Brown balloon to beat out the Underdog and Stewie parade balloons for a bottle of Coke and Terminator style pigeons delivering for Fed Ex nothing really stood out except one quiet, unassuming ad based on a simple concept that played on a universal theme felt by many, if not all, Americans.

The spot with James Carville and Bill Frist coming together on a human level as they enjoyed a Coke while touring the sites of Washington DC told a simple story that managed to capture the hope of a nation mired in a "let's play it safe' mentality as we long for better days to come. No over the top special effects, no gross out humor or negative concepts to draw attention to the product. Just a simple, well told story with universal appeal and the product as the hero. Call me nostalgic, but I miss those days of advertising.   

Promises Kept...

Marketers have much to learn from President Bush and the ailing US economy. As the subprime mess spread companies laid off employees, Wall Street began to tank and the ‘R’ word swiftly entered our collective consciousness. In response Mr. Bush proclaimed his belief in the strength of the economy. Nothing happened. Despite repeated assertions from Mr. Bush the train wreck continued with international markets soon joining the melee. On January 18, he called for, and Congress agreed to consider, a $145 billion economic stimulus package, yet the downward spiral continued. Only when the Fed took action and cut interest rates did Wall Street reverse direction, albeit breifly, and we saw a glimmer of hope in a one day surge…but we’re not out of the deep, dark woods by a long shot.

If a brand is a promise then certainly one of the main tenets of any brand is credibility; or the belief by the consumer that the product lives up to it perception. Mr. Bush, and Congress for that matter, has little or no credibility with the US voter and apparently the situation is the same with Wall Street, financial and world leaders as it wasn’t until action was taken that the train wreck slowed.

The lesson for marketers is twofold; allow your audience to believe in your brand by remaining credible in the marketplace, and, strategy without action creates a vacuum.