BigEvidence

Mobilityness and the New Marketing

2012-01-12T15:33:00.003-05:00

Over a career in marketing reaching back to the near-sepia toned world of database marketing through the birth of the digital web and into the emergent power house channels of search, social and now mobile, I’ve worked inside, outside and alongside several of the big holding company networks.

Excitedly, I bear witness - along with most of you reading this here - to the dawning of the current era, the post digital epoch, if you'll allow me the hyperbole. An era of marketing emerging from the dust settling uneasily upon the tried, true and now waning artifacts of what we all once thrillingly referred to as simply "digital".

RIP, I say. What now?...

For the past year, at my agency on Madison Avenue, we have been working to build something fairly innovative --- an experience marketing practice. We call it experience marketing for a simple reason: it is a method for designing, developing and optimizing brand marketing with an obsessive focus on the consumer behavioral experience. The goal is to make everything else – brand, messaging, offer, touchpoint, media and channel – subservient to this optimal human experience.

What some traditional planners and creatives may view as heresy, we take as abiding first principles: refine your target, identify the need states, model the use case, engineer the desired behaviors and optimize for discreet behavioral outcomes.

I’ll be the first to admit one of our challenges is the name and the time and energy it takes to simply convey what we’re about and how we go about it. Frankly, the more we develop these new tools - composite profiles, experience architectures and touchpoint models – the more I have come to view these approaches as simply new marketing.

At the heart of this new marketing lies a central insight - one which suggests brands must rethink how they encounter and engage with consumers. It’s an insight which has lead me to the sobering conclusion that humans have seriously outrun brands and marketers when it comes to these decreasingly traditional points of intersections where human plus brand encounters and engagement occur.

The insight is best expressed as a slightly clumsy but telling single word: mobilityness.

I don’t mean “mobile” although of course the emerging importance of the mobile touchpoint and channel for our branded messages and campaigns is the most historically important change in marketing science since search. It’s rather richer than that, this mobilityness insight…

Mobilityness describes the irrevocably altered dynamic for the how, when, where, why and what of our planned brand communications.
Mobilityness describes the way a human feels as we shift seamlessly between research, info seeking into a discovery, referral and purchase event.
Mobilityness describes the operating conceit we all now enjoy which says I should be able to access anything I want or need whenever and wherever I want or need it.
Mobilityness describes the nature of branded content when it is socialized by users and recontextualized for fresh discovery.
Mobilityness describes the core principles driving our integrated 4-screen planning and optimization of branded rich media and video content.
Mobilityness describes the immense challenge traditional media planners have in addressing a given target with any specific certainty for a particular message or brand frequency.
Mobilityness describes the equally immense opportunities presented to new marketing (aka experience) planners and creatives who become adept at engineering and optimizing organic brand+human experience architectures.

Perhaps you see where this is going. If we continue to design and serve up tried and true brand messages through – only – traditional formats and media we will be missing more than just the opportunity for testing and touting a more new media in the mix ---

We will be losing the essential battle for attention, attraction, engagement and loyalty with the current and coming generation of potential consumers of our brands, products and services.

After spending the past two years developing a nascent set of tools and approaches to support a more integrated, organic, behavioral marketing I can attest to its trickiness. We don’t pretend to have figured out how to precisely test and balance the right mix of organic marketing with purchased media and messages. We certainly have cracked the code on prying loose sufficient test budgets to fully refine these new activation experiences. And we remain frustratingly far from achieving the perfect storm of strategy, creative and channel / touchpoint mix which approaches the nirvana state of efficiency for driving measurable value though and from our advertising channels.

But we know it’s achievable, we’ve commenced the project and there is progress to report. In coming posts I'll be sharing live cases from the work we are doing in our network as well as observed examples plucked from the interwebs, airwaves and tradeshow circuits from esteemed colleagues and competitors alike.

What are we trying to prove? It’s a fair and telling question. Honestly, I think the answer is quite simple, and not a little alarming --- it is becoming clear that the types of brand messages, impressions and campaigns we continue to build and support with brand dollars are increasingly invisible to humans and driving less and less real, long-term value for our brands’ franchises. The consumer has changed. The channels have changed. The behaviors have changed. Our brands have changed.

It’s time our marketing caught up. And make no mistake – it is a race: in addition to the unseen clock, each of our brand’s have one or more competitors currently angling to get there first. My strong hunch is that we're all going to need a whole lot of mobilityness to keep up.

Death to DSPs

2011-12-04T09:00:00.000-05:00

I was on another advertising / media panel here in New York a few weeks back and left feeling, in equal parts, sad for the state of affairs within digital marketing as well as encouraged by the welling disruption from important precincts. Namely one other guy on the panel and the extraordinarily smart organizer of the event, whom we'll call "Mr. Smith".

First, the disconsolate part. Smart, well-placed, in-power, ought-to-know-better colleagues of mine from other agencies seem more than ready to roll over and cede control of their online advertising to the increasing dominance of blind ad networks or exchanges --- we call them "demand-side platforms" or DSPs. Sounds ominously more like a weapons system, doesn't it?

But the reason to be cheerful part is this - I did't get completely shouted down and off the panel and maybe even found a few comrades in arms in our race to define a more sane and humanistic approach to engineering digital experiences for consumers.

Sure, with Americans sleeping rough, restless and revolutionary-ready in urban parks, the EU and euro on fire and Congress the new enduring drunk teenager on our couch you could argue we have better things to argue over. Still, I tend to take these panels pretty personally - in an utterly professional sort of way of course. And what's at stake, I'd argue, should matter to many of us.

As we approach 2011 year's end even the most innocent web user knows or suspects that what they see in the form of served advertising online is somehow "targeted" to them. We search for hotels in Puerto Rico and for the next several hours or days we seem to see a suspiciously high concentration of banners and offers for Caribbean travel. We visit cars.com for a quick and depressing check on the rapidly receding resale value of our aging mini-van and then seem to be followed around for months by a parade of tri-state (for me anyway) dealer network offers.

Most people - in and out of advertising - would agree this is not such a bad thing. Although tests and click-thru rate reveal the continuing decline in people who even SEE these ads never mind CLICK on one, we might as well be not seeing and not clicking on ads with some vague degree of relevance, right?

As the click thru rates on most online ad units have collapsed to 0.05% (with Facebook CTRs being about half that rate @ 0.09%) publishers and advertisers have a problem on their hands. Their's is a numbers game. Those click thru rates don't seem like much on the individual basis - these units would actual appear to be utterly invisible on that scale - but when you're talking large sets of numbers there is still some money to be made and some traffic to capture.

But where oh where do we squeeze, imagine or create some efficiency in all this? Enter the DSPs.

Demand side platforms are huge, machine-driven, voracious and competitively cannibalistic advertising exchanges which essentially aggregate and arbitrage "audiences". But this, of course, is euphemistic. You and I don't individually belong to or inhabit these audiences as real populations. Rather, the vast sea of cookies which we carry about in our individual cookie jars (your "browser record", essentially) identifies us as anonymous members of amorphously defined, ever-shifting and dubiously accurate audiences. For the purposes of presenting to us the ads we want to see. Or the ads we're most likely to click on. Or, more than likely, just more but different invisible banners and buttons and digitorial we couldn't care less about.

Feel better now? Yeah, I thought so. Me neither.

My biggest problem with this fait accompli evolution in digital media is that it is increasingly siphoning off actual brand marketing budgets which could be more efficiently and organically applied to getting and keeping customers and users. More organically, more effectively, with more loyalty for the longer and higher-value term.

DSPs and these blind ad-exchanges represent a death spiral into which is being sucked the very monies guys like me are trying to suggest for a more integrated and holistic brand marketing. There, I've said it. We call it experience marketing because it is about designing, engineering, optimizing and monetizing actual consumer experiences with our messages, our brands, our services and our products.

We do it by first understanding the essence and nature of our audiences. Their inner fears, needs, barriers and aspirations. Their attitudes and psychological inclinations towards life, the world, their family, work, play --- us brands and our value.

We then plot their behaviors and need states to align as best with can with our brands with sweet little use case engineering tools --- we call them experience architectures and integrated touchpoint models.

Finally, we obsessively focus on feedback mechanisms to optimize these experiences to ensure they are instigating actual ROI-based returns and value for the brands we serve.

Sounds simple enough, right? Well, yeah, but --- it takes time, thinking, investment and freshly tuned teams well-versed in this new marketing process. And it's really really difficult to get brands to peal away the test budgets and resources to try this new marketing when the rest of the entire industry seems to be willing to bet on blind-exchanges of fictive, nebulous audiences simply because if you serve enough ads to enough people (with, btw, frequency and wear rates that are probably 3x of that reported by the overlapping DSPs which sell you all this hooey) there's no, or very little, money left for actual marketing.

New marketing. Experience marketing. Post-digital advertising. Human media. Call it what you will, I desperately want it to be the future of marketing. Instead, we seem to be moving towards an increasingly automated race to the bottom of the CTR and conversion tables, lead by the voracious black-hole maw of ad exchanges and their blizzard of arbitraged mashup of remnant, premium and everything in-between invisible online advertising.

It's my birthday, so I won't end on such a sour note. I don't know about you, but I turn to poets and romantic layabouts for my go-to inspirational sources, and Rainer Maria Rilke seldom disappoints. Plus, he and I share a birthday. Here's Rilke, I swear to god, talking about my kind of marketing - "a person isn't who they are during their last conversation you had with them - they're who they've been throughout your whole relationship".

Makes sense, right? So why would we bet the future of brand marketing on huge sets of blind click and viewing behavior when what's really required is a deep and abiding understanding of what people really are seeking, how they're actually behaving and what we marketers might possibly be able to add - with some semblance of meaningful value - to their moments of key receptivity?

Happy birthday, Rainer and, apparently, Wink Martindale as well. Follow me for cake, singing, birthday hijinx --- and a more organic brand marketing. Bring money, 'cuz we're living off the scraps of these damn nefarious DSPs. For now.

The Changing Nature of Change

2011-10-28T16:06:00.005-04:00

"It is not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change." - Charles Darwin

Change is good, right?

It's almost like there are two different types of people - those who nod and those who shake when presented with this suggestion. About three years ago, I started to roll out some pretty important life changes for yours truly. It's fodder for another, more personal post, but the net for me in looking back, is that almost all of that change has reaped positive results and better life outcomes.

Maybe it's the hopeless 19 year old that seems forever stuck just inside this mid-50s body, but I get impatient and peeved when I hear people who should know better fighting against change. Especially when the rationale is "just because".

There's a maelstrom of change roiling across the interwebs as we know them. It will likely mean the commercial Web a mere 24 months from now will look, act and feel very different from the "Internet" we know today. I firmly believe that there are simply two choices we have as brand owners, marketers and communications specialist: go all in or get out of the way.

Change Has Changed
I am skeptical of futuring and all its crystal-ball trend watching. I am a serious non-fan of the endless supply of jubilant, near-hysterical future predictions from Gartner, Forrester, eMarketer and the rest. But I do believe that we are in a constant state of flux and low-level disruption which, if approached correctly, is an immensely good thing to get your head - and your business and your brand - around.

The constantly morphing landscape of personal technology, media and content consumption, the nature of brand and product discovery and sharing is the new world order. It is inherently disruptive and once a marketing communications professional embraces the very essence of this flux, good things can happen.

Although control - an ephemeral aspiration for a marketer during even the most somnolent of eras - can be an all-too rare state, there are moments when we have the ability to focus on the emerging world around us and exert something close to it. If not control, call it "purchase" or "mediation" or ... I dunno. You know it when you feel it, but by then it's usually gone.

We're living in a world of media, technology and human experience swirl that is changing forever the very nature of the dynamics of brands and their customers. There are three key emerging phenomena which illustrate the radical nature of this fluxxing ecosystem of change -

HTML5 everywhere
the coming generic topline domains, and
the singular unifying theory of mobilityness.

Experience Liberation
The rapid adoption and spread of HTML5 as a universal interface design layer for the integrated web changes forever (or at least the next couple of years) how brands and their stories are discovered and shared across the web. 'Design once, experience many' is a simple way to grok the sweet democratizing affect this approach to cross-platform, OS/device-agnostic digital experience engineering.

The implications of a more universally fit human interface to branded content and experiences are manifold and significant. The content ghettos dictated by "apps" dissolve into a democracy of devices, OS's and software platforms. We can track and manage user engagement across all their devices with a single, connected CRM strategy and machine. Brands no longer need to be dis-intermediated from consumer engagement and activation by app stores and other superfluous layers of human connection interference.

This is big and many forward thinking publishers like Meredith and Hearst are moving rapidily and decisively to re-purpose their entire platforms to exploit this new universal experience layer.

The Shape of the Next Web
Change is also coming to the future of the structure of the web. This past June ICANN (the non-profit people who manage "domain naming" for the web) voted to open up what you see to the right of the 'dot'.

Companies, brands, cities and "communities" will be able to choose arbitrary top level Internet domains to own, run and manage as they see fit (and are able to). As a bonus for the rest of the non-English speaking globe who have labored under forced translations of their web domains for the past 16+ years, non-latin characters such as Cyrillic, Arabic, Chinese, etc. will also be available for the gTLDs.

Here's the thing: ICANN will begin accepting applications for new gTLDs on January 12, 2012. The applications window will be open for just 3 months. They will then spend 9-12 months deciding who wins - and who loses. All indications are that they will be limiting the number of new domains to be released within this first tranche to under 1,000. Globally. The next application window won't open for another 2-3 years.

Are you beginning to see the implications for brands and whole categories?

If you're American Express, in addition to applying for .AmericanExpress don't you think you might also go for things like .Finance or .CreditCard?   Or, if you're a famous athletic shoe brand, won't you be applying for domains like .Nike or .Adidas --- as well as .Sneaker and .Running?

Incredibly, some in my industry are making loud noises to "resist" this coming change. The ANA (Association of National Advertisers) and the DMA (Direct Marketing Association) are both accusing ICANN of price gouging and scare-mongering the new domains as being rife for domain squatting / stealing. I happen to think they're wrong about both, but that's not the point.

The point is that this change is coming - soon - and whether your digital brand strategy is to go all-in, play a defensive, or even do nothing, you'd be smart to learn as much as you can about the risks, opportunities, upsides and downsides to help inform your brand's coming TLD strategy.

Everything, Everywhere for Everyone, Anytime
Then there is mobilityness. Not "mobile" - not "mobility" - or .mobi --- but the essence of what is shaping up as an all-encompassing step-change in how brands, products, services and humans interact and behave in our shared futures.

Mobililtyness is a name for how people behave now that they don't spend their evenings on their couches. Now that they don't have landlines in the homes anymore. Now that they post almost half of their tweets and Facebook updates via their mobile phones. Now that they have their office on a tablet the size and weight of an old marble note pad. Now that they carry a map of their world and a camera to capture it all in their pants and their purses. Now that they watch almost half of their TV not on their TVs anymore. Now that their cell phone just changed into their wallet. Now that they can buy things on Amazon standing in an appliance store for 30% less than the shelf in front of them - and those things practically beat them back to their farflung suburban home. Now that every song they ever loved or wanted to hear can be streamed to their earbuds on-demand in real-time sitting in the back of a bus inside the Lincoln Tunnel. Now that the brands who really love them back demonstrate that love with all sorts of goodies, reminders, value and connectivity anywhere, anytime.

Just so we're clear: it's all about when I say so, it is so ... et voila! Mobilityness is the essence of change that matters.

Starting to see the impact mobilityness is having on everything? The way we eat, the way we sleep, the way we play, the way we work. The way we shop the way we travel the way we dance the way we sing? Do you begin to see the implications - opportunities, risks - for brands in this new world?

Here's a better, and more practical question: are you working on a brand right now that gets, really gets, mobilityness?

If this is a trickier question to answer than a flat out, confident "Yes!" - join the club. The good news is that we're all starting from almost the exact same spot --- on our back foot. Change for us consumers has happened quickly, almost seamlessly, you could argue, for the most part, almost giddily. Re-read that list of changes a couple of paragraphs up, and you can't help but smile at the convenience and beauty these changes have wrought in our lives. Our lives as humans, as citizens, as consumers.

Then - have a deep think about how well your product and brand marketing is keeping up with the humans in the great evolving, swirling world of change. Not all change is good, but change is inevitable and sometimes it moves faster and deeper than anyone could have ever predicted or desired. But dealing with change is always good. In fact, to survive and thrive, of course, it's required.

In a world disrupted by broken economic cycles, total content and experience liberation, a fundamental re-structuring of the ecosystem of digital brands and the near-manic acceleration of the pure empowerment of human mobilityness, the face and nature of change is almost unrecognizable by our old means of tracking it.

Embracing and exploiting change with informed opportunism and nimble skill is the central imperative for a 21st century brand marketer. See you at the barricades. Nothing's changed, except for almost everything. At least that hasn't changed. Yet.

The Next Revolution

2011-10-15T21:42:00.011-04:00

Full Disclosure
As a young and impetuous man I left my safe, cozy life in the suburbs of New York and set off to make my way in life, starting with an action-packed, injury-stoked, romantically chaotic four year stint in the Bay Area before returning to the relative calm of the Village and Lower East Side of the early 80s.

Across that span of mad experiment with art, music, literature and philosophy, I shared a lot of revolutionary political zeal with a mix of rebel types. White Panthers in the Haight, RCPers (Revolutionary Communist Party) in Berkeley, Theory misfits @ CCSF even some very cautious and quietly scary IRA gun-runners in the Mission.

In retrospect, I can see now that I was shaping (and shattering) my social and political self by pushing as hard as I could against whatever norms or constructs I could swing a bat at. I was smitten with revolution for the sheer crackling sound it made and the thick visceral rush of it all. I wouldn't trade away those days of callow posturing, glib tirades and angry marches, protests, fights and late nite rants for all the bonuses @ Goldman and JP Morgan combined last winter.

What Goes Around
I put my 19 year old son on a plane a month ago today, hugging him and his guitar and his Dostoevsky there on the curb @ Newark Airport and told him I loved him and was proud he was doing what I myself did so many years ago --- his Minneapolis of 2011 was to be, in some ways, a carrying-on of my Haight of 1974. I shipped him his banged up TEAC 8-track recording deck the following week and if sporadic txts are true, he's halfway thru composing his first album since leaving home.

He follows by three years my eldest son who entered his senior year @ the Boston Conservatory this past month, further honing his considerable natural skills of singing, acting and mesmerizing theater audiences with his charm, wit and killer physical instrument. He attacks Broadway upon graduation next Spring and yes, I'd get his autograph when he's back for the holidays in December.

Other People's Kids
Twice a week I teach two brilliant clutches of NYU grad students integrated marketing in Midtown. Mondays and Wednesdays I look into their fresh, open faces, challenge their ideas, hear their plans and can't help but walk out and across the sweet autumn air of Bryant Park each evening thrumming with the vicarious thrill of memory: these 26 kids paying $4K a course and my sons, the actor and the poet alike, are all just setting out on the amazingly joyous, calamitous journey. The rocking ride of a lifetime. Their lifetime.

This past week I challenged those two groups of 20-somethings to consider a campaign idea for their upcoming social media group projects: create a message platform and social media distribution presence for the Occupy Wall Street movement. I suggested that the motley crew of 21st century urban rebels (ostensibly spawned last summer on a lark by AdBusters) could use some help. My students seemed to all agree.

Whether any of them will take up the challenge, I'm not so sure. It's not clear to me whether the nascent but growing OWS protest is resonating with them. But I found out today it is resonating with the youngest three children in my little minor clan and I can tell you, with both paternal and political pride, that made me feel like a million bucks.

The Ides of October
The careering winds of social, political and economic change that blew like wild siroccos across the MidEast earlier this year seem to be rattling the very cages of the world financial system down on our very own narrow tip of Manhattan this fall. As an adman - post-digital or otherwise - I am intrigued with the burning clarity of their slow-cook narrative that seeks to simply keep still and be heard. Judging by the growing press and media coverage, it seems to be working.

As much of an establishment mook as I have clearly become, the inner 20-year old and life-long agitator in me has been, like, totally pumped this week being so close here in Gotham to the energy and burgeoning potential of this growing movement. However broad and seemingly too big to boil their issues are --- solve the massive global imbalance of wealth consolidation and create a world of economic justice for all --- how could you possibly argue they aren't laudable, even moral, universal human objectives.

So, today, I loaded my three youngest kids still @ home into my ten-year old minivan, picked up five hot pizzas @ the local pizza joint (thx Naunas), and sped through the Lincoln Tunnel down to Zuccotti Park before they got cold, to feed the good people of the Occupation. It was a day that will live in my heart and memory's eye forever, and I think I can fairly say the same for my 16 and 14 year old daughters and my youngest son of 10.

There, crammed politely into a decent-sized little pocket park across the street from the filled-in hole of the old WTC towers and in the now growing shadow of it's soon to be majestic replacement, my three kids sampled the sweet taste of a quiet but certain revolution for the very first time. A revolution fueled not by violent clashes, angry speeches, profane signs or clashing firebrands, but by dread-locked white kids prepping lunch, professor-like custodians sorting sleeping gear, self-proclaimed "oddball" economists teaching the press, indigenous people organizing teens to a drumbeat alongside 50-something union guys looking like they'd been re-born, because, damn it, I do believe they just might have.

And my kids. My kids waiting patiently for their political slogan buttons to be minted. Handing their pizza boxes and recycled 'tp' over to the motley crew manning the make-shift cupboards. Having their picture taken against the pithy, blunt, erudite signs of these all-of-a-sudden amazing times. Standing at the elbows of mandolin and guitar players as they strummed and bounced and sang an impromptu mix-tape that somehow echoed Woody Guthrie and Bon Hiver all at once. Staring across the barricades at the line of police scooters and cars outside the park @ the seemingly benign men in NYPD blue, wondering and curious as to why they were needed.

99% of Something is A Lot of Something
We drifted across the happily jammed park sticking our noses and ears into the intense and meaningful conversations happening, seemingly, every four or five feet. There were the silent artists, debating with their pictographs, winning. There were the "non-leaders" obviously having a daily planning council in the far northeast corner. There were the students taking pictures in a photo-shoot corner with a single kleig light and a mini white board where we took our turn writing a message, and posing with it displaying beneath our chins --- while on the silent count of 3 by the director we said simply and with conviction - "We are the 99%".

One of the conversations we came upon, almost dead-center in what I believe is now our world's new ground-zero - or at least the new center of gravity in the world my five kids are set to create - was that of three men discussing "the problem". One of them was talking excitedly and with certainty that there was a single truth that needed to be shared, understood and then solved for: "there is living, and there is existing", he said, and paused and breathed deeply and reared back and said, "But we're just existing, and barely --- and that's just wrong. Everybody deserves to live, not simple exist".

My three kids and I stopped there in the center of Zuccotti in the middle of it all, and listened and nodded softly, quietly, probably all thinking we're lucky. We live well, but maybe, just maybe we're also totally rare in the grand scheme of things --- when you think about the rest of the upside-down planet and all the people who lost their jobs, their homes, their heat, their food, their cars and their minds over the past generation of diminishing returns. All those people forced out of living, into the brute fate of existence alone.

We drove back to Jersey into the late afternoon sun, buzzing with the contact high transmitted by those awesome activists who all looked mostly just like us. We talked about the issues, the crazy imbalances and the even crazier idea that the 99% of everybody would ever have to start a revolution just to get the rest of the 99%-ers to stop, listen, think and join in.

I'm in the communications business. I'm a marketer, a clever shill who makes quite decent money helping people find and enjoy the products and services offered by the brands I help go to market. I'm proud of what I do and I love what I do. But I've never been more proud, and more humbled, and more excited for our future than I was today walking my three youngest kids in a single file uptown, past Trinity Church and its ancient graves and Century 21 and its distracted shoppers, back to the beat-up minivan through crowds of tourists and 21st century revolutionaries alike, who all started to look strangely alike the more we looked and the more we nodded.

As we wound our way towards the car, I was thinking that 99% of anything can do a whole lot if - and when - it decides to. This is what change feels like. This is what the beginning of something important acts like. This is what the sound of a whole world turning, grinding and then soft-clicking on its axis towards a step change moment, sounds like.

This is a moment my kids will look back on with a reverence, maybe even a surety that something that mattered happened one Saturday in October for them, their family, the great tribe of New Yorkers, hell, just maybe even America. Something that started something that - who knows! - 100% of their world might someday join, believe in, benefit from.

Maybe even someday, before they - Shayne, Cameron, Victoria, Fiona or Quinn - get to take their kids to the next revolution.

Here's a short slide-show from our day on the barricades with the Kennon Kidz https://plus.google.com/photos/110176736180899547326/albums/5663831337395086177

The Case for the Use Case

2011-08-04T13:44:00.004-04:00

You know how some phrases just bug you? With me, weirdly, the ones that start out bugging me often end up sticking to me, like linguistic gum on the bottom of my thinking shoes. Sometimes the wheel simply stops and there's your number lined up with the catch-phrase that's been shadowing you all along. In this case, in my case, it's the use case.

I'm moderating a panel later this month out in Tahoe on the "mobile use case". As geeky and opaque as it might sound, I'm pretty pumped about the opportunity to commiserate and debate amongst an A-team group of industry wags about such an essential concept.

Here's a link to the show ... http://goo.gl/a6Hv6

Using "use cases" was first suggested in the early 90s by object-oriented software designers in order to build better specs for their programs, based upon how people actually interacted with - used - the system where their application would live. Quickly, architects of non-software systems adopted use cases as a powerful tool in designing and optimizing all sorts of things that people used --- airport lounges, cereal boxes, web sites and kitchen appliances.

So, why not whole marketing campaigns? If we buy into the idea that all marketing is at its essence behavioral there's a great case to be made for charting the human use case for our integrated brand and product marketing programs.

With the emergence of the mobile touchpoint becoming so essential to our campaigns, and its ubiquitous presence within so many of our human user's daily lives, there's a great case to be made that defining, engineering and optimizing the mobile use case is a key ingredient in all integrated marketing programs.

But chances are, many of us aren't yet doing this, and this is why I am excited to see what the leading marketers on my panel are doing about modeling the mobile use case for their brands.

Two years ago I wrote a trade piece daring marketers to put mobile at the center of their integrated marketing program and campaign planning. Most people thought I was daft. But today, more than ever, there is a clear path towards truly integrated brand campaigns being planned, developed and optimized with the mobile use case as the centerpiece of their behavioral marketing.

Think of it: what other touchpoint is so pervasive in my day. So persistent across my moments. So personalized in the content it holds and gets me to. So targetable in where my pocket or my purse is at - quite literally - any time of the day or nite. So relevant to my immediate needs whether volunteered, predicted or passively understood.

When we look back on these days of early interactive and integrated behavioral marketing we will certainly be struck by how critical the mobile touchpoint was to how we evolved. Mercifully, in that not too distant future, our current litany of debating points will have been well resolved. We won't be arguing over mobile apps vs. mobile web (the web wins), or which OS trumps another (my money's on Android/Chrome), or how to replicate old "digital media" advertising models on the newly untethered user experience.

By then we will be operating in a dynamic and utterly integrated human experience model, with the mobile touchpoint no longer just leading the way, but providing the fulcrum upon which all the engineered experiences human users enjoy, control, create, share and respond to are based.

I argue that soon everything we do as marketers will be either launched from, delivered to, relayed by, or reside within a mobile experience. I suggest that we will no longer call this sort of marketing and advertising "digital" (double ugggg) but we will call it experience marketing. And in this human experience use case, all marketing will be behavioral. All our planning, creating and optimizing - or at least the most successful - will be inspired by a penetrating knowledge of how humans behave when they come into contact with our brands, our messages, our products, our content, our value.

So, figuring out how the mobile use case works for early 21st century humans seems to me to be a pretty good idea here in late summer 2011. Seems to me this is an essential and evolving model pointing us towards how all marketing will soon be working. See you in Tahoe for a sneak peak into how some of us are doing it today and how, if my bet is right, all of us will be doing it tomorrow.

Finally Getting Google

2011-07-01T11:28:00.006-04:00

You could reasonably argue that Google has been to our shared global culture over the past several years what Michael Jackson was to the 90s, and Madonna to the 80s, maybe Jackie O or IBM across the ever-fainting 70s. The thing we collectively watch, marvel and puzzle over together the most. But maybe I'm biased. Some might suggest it's Apple (I say - "feh") or Facebook (well, yeah, but). Or maybe even things that actually matter, like a world wracked by wars and debt.

But I set slightly smaller sights here, and caveat it all with the upfront admittance that I spend way too much time thinking about brands and their place in the future of the interwebs of human experience. But still, I am thinking a lot about Google this week, along with everybody else in my myopic little internecine social graph, because of the launch of Google +.

Among all the general buzz and industry wag chatter a few interesting dots emerged and all of a sudden, today --- right after pushups and vitamins, listening to NPR and IM'ing with some new Moscovite agency peeps --- I saw the lines that connected them. A minor epiphany view leapt into focus of the really big picture for Google - and for "us" - for the very first time.

A short AdAge bleat reported Heineken had cut a deal this week - directly - with Google for $x million worth of eyeball engagement in a single package. AdAge, god bless their old-fashioned ad hearts, equated this to a new kind of "upfront". They said Google said, don't worry creative agencies and media buyers, we're not cutting you out. Yet. Whatever. This is very interesting for many reasons, but it was the first shoe falling for me.

The second was a quite smart take by blogger Stephen Pickering explaining how most of us were missing the big picture when it came to the inflection point, he feels (I feel) Google + represents. He says it's not just about Google trying (for the fourth time: 1. Orkut, 2. Wave, 3.Buzz) to steal social share and daily user attention from Facebook, but about the seamlessly connected user experience of the future as we glide noiselessly from one Google sponsored engagement moment to the next. Here's his post http://goo.gl/cUjkk

It's a well argued position for the future of our eyeballs and heartstrings in the evolving connected human world of everything. And I only think it misses one, essential, even bigger piece of the real magilla picture: the role and dollars of brands in this new human fabric of connected experience.

The post digital brand, brought to you by Google. Or maybe it's actually everything you care about, sponsored by the brands that care too. Built, managed, stored, targeted, optimized and delivered by Google. All free, sort of.

Google + becomes the final piece of the Google puzzle affording them (us?) the final power dimension for organizing our collective post-digital human experience: the connection between my search behaviors and preferences and my social graph and everything else --- when it comes to advertising.

Now, more than three months after it's weird, almost noiseless release, I finally get why Google +1 is so key to all this. It becomes the primary signal feed into my Google data profile on my Google + graph. Every time I click that little +1 on a web page or in my search results, things happen back @ DataShip Me.

Google doesn't have to interrupt my Circles or Hangout sessions or feeds with branded communications. (Although I do believe Sparks is ripe and ready for this.) It can serve them up across the rest of my Google-connected experiences based upon what will be the largest behavioral database ever assembled: places like in my Gmail, across AdWords and AdSense where I go, inside my Google TV programming, across Google's display network, popped into my YouTube pre-rolls, embedded within my mobile apps, emerging from within my GMaps --- and everywhere else Google goes with me.

Or, rather, we go with Google.

Heartbent Brain

2011-05-07T22:41:00.010-04:00

Why do we fall in love with one person and not another? Why do we wear that thin little jacket on days we suspect it will be blue-lippingly cold? How do we find the time to fuss with our Facebook picture and then also spend 45 minutes helping the collapsed homeless woman outside Port Authority on a bitter winter morn? How do we know when we’ve cut a friend enough slack already to finally upbraid them with a scathing but well-intentioned email about getting their life together?

The main reason I’ve stuck with a marketing vocation (once I realized the priests wouldn’t have me) is that you get to spend 10 or so hours a day doing stuff that revolves around a pretty singular thing: what makes people tick.

When I suggest that all marketing is behavioral it’s more than wishful thinking. I truly believe that it’s not just the best way to imagine, plan or optimize a marketing program, but the only way to do it with scale and replication in this hyper-fragmented post digital marketing epoch.

This thinking has central implications for how brand marketing and communications is evolving and it’s also why many of us suggest a new kind of marketing – experience marketing – as the emerging discipline codifying this new kind of behavioral brand marketing.

Humans Are People Too

Why "experience"? Because every key component of the discipline – from holistic research integration, to insights development, to creative strategy, messaging, touchpoint modeling and media planning – is fundamentally grounded in an obsessive focus on the human experience.

And humans can be funny people sometimes. We say things we don’t mean, and do things we wish we hadn’t. We make decisions with faulty or half-baked information, and we even fall in love with the wrong people. Trust me, we do.

Clay Shirky, in his brilliant book Cognitive Surplus, spends a chapter deep-diving into the strange and wonderful insights into the social human animal to be gleaned from an experiment devised by a group of behavioral economists called the Ultimatum Game.

In this test there are two people, the Offeror and the Receiver. The experimenter gives $10 to the Offeror and tells her they can offer any amount to the Receiver, keeping the balance of the $10 for themselves, with one catch: the Receiver has the right to turn down the deal, in which case, neither of them get anything, and the Experimenter takes back his ten dollars.

Traditional economic behavioral theory suggests that an Offeror holds all the cards (as it were) and the Receiver should be at their mercy and thus prepared to take whatever they can get. It’s more than the nothing they’d get if they refuse. But it doesn’t work that way.

Even in anonymous one-shot settings, the economic-theory suggested outcome of minimum money transfer and acceptance is rejected by over 80% of the players. That is, the more unfair an Offeror gets away from an even split of $5 each - $7 for him $3 for the Receiver, say – the more likely their offer is rejected.

Sociologists, evolutionary psychologists - and I would suggest savvy marketers - have a field day with this seemingly anomalous but massively consistent result. It flies in the face of traditional theories about the calculus people make in their everyday lives, factoring in such non-quantitative value elements into the equation. Things like honor, reputation, social currency, tribal pressures, peer balancing – justice.

What’s at work here is the obvious role something other than rational calculus has over even the most seemingly "intellectual" decisions we make each day. Like the otherworldly pull that bends light into weirdly warped effects in the nimbus of a black hole, the soft power of our hearts would seem to out-muscle the cold computational crunching within our brains.

Which Way In?

In marketing strategy we spend endless hours seeking fresh angles into uncovering the consumer insights which can help us unlock the inner secrets to brand attraction and product desire. We often think of these dualistically – emotional versus rational.

Many brand strategists and channel planners often will decide to aim for one over the other, forcing a choice on the direction of the creative, content, messaging and touchpoint/media mix.

New theory gurus like archetype maven Dr. Rapaille have suggested there is a much more important, inner set of codes stored within the human circuit board, and the job of brand marketers is to break through the brains’ protective outer rings of rational (cortex) and emotional (limbic) to press the reptilian brain’s lizard button to get the proper results.

Here is Rapaille’s depiction of how people process and respond to the world – e.g. brand marketing – based upon his theory that the reptilian (instinctual) brain ALWAYS trumps the emotional limbic and the rational (or intellectual) cortex.

We’ve been heading into similar directions within our Experience Marketing strategy group, but with a behavioral model which parses out the attackable response territory into a slightly different form ---

Unlike Rapaille’s suggestion that the physical structure of the brain dictates the layered and sequential challenge of our marketing trigger paths, we are testing whether all three of these human response territories are equally available to the marketer.

Our thesis is this: the primary way into successful touchpoint experience engineering is through one response center door, and that from there pathing into the optimal trigger areas of the human being. Think of it --- each campaign doesn't have to chose between emotional, rational or even visceral as the entry point, rather, we can assign specific touchpoints e.g. the content and context, the job of attacking the behavior need states with separate ways in to the human experience.

Getting to Yes

The central challenge of behavioral marketing is how to understand, address and optimize the desired consumer experience to trigger the optimal human response to our marketing effect.

Arguably, the marketing consumer experience ignited within the last mile, or 9 feet or 12 inches is the behavioral realm of “conversion”, and that there is often a critical role played by the rational brain in making the required cost and value calculations necessary to support a “go” on a product or brand purchase decision.

In contrast to Rapaille’s theory that all brand and product marketing must reach the lizard brain to make the sale (or drive engagement or excite an action) what if we assumed that the most reliable and enduring way into the rational brain of a human was through the emotional heart.

What if the majority of marketing and brand expression was to be engineered as a guided missile to first penetrate the most complex but engageable territory of the emotional heart and then to burrow appropriately and opportunistically into the rational brain to pull the trigger of conversion.

This is our hero way in – thru and into the heartbent brain. This can guide us in developing our human experience use cases, mapping out this inner behavioral response territory in the most optimal way to drive the desired outcome of our marketing. Stuff like focused interest, ready purchase, eager referral, passionate adherence --- love!

So what about Rabaille’s lizard brain where the hardwiring of eons sits waiting to be lit up? Science tells us the reptilian brain is fully baked to control just two primary instinctual functions of human behavior --- survival and reproduction.

What if these instincts, as strong as they are, have little or even nothing to do with how humans make decisions about the yogurt they buy, the mobile phones they use, the airlines they travel or the banks they park their money in?

The Power of 3

We suggest there is a third response territory we must consider in designing and optimizing our experience marketing strategies but it isn’t shaped like a lizard. It’s more like a stomach. It’s our more corporal guts, our comfort center.

It’s the place which over-rules the brain no-matter how unbent by the chilly heart when you pay $5 for that $1 cheap umbrella for the 15 minute walk across midtown when the rain is slicing down in mad sheets. It's why sampling distribution of a new high-end ice cream outside a mid-summer mall might work well to imprint taste satisfaction first, cost and brand affinity second.

We’re starting to test behavioral touchpoint models engineered to leverage human insights suggesting a primary way in for a particular piece of content, message or media. Then - once in – the optimal trigger sequence through the three response areas towards conversion.

I believe the most engineerable and enduring pathways first attach into and through the emotional response territory. Then, once primary barriers are breached, heading as directly as possible into the rational response territory triggering the desired outcome of the touchpoint plan.

This suggests the most optimal pathway into triggering the desired human response to our marketing is through and into the heart-bent brain, like this ---

After Rapaille: Experience Modeling

I don’t think the lizard wins the big arguments when humans make everything from knee-jerk reflexive decisions in the Pathmark aisle to the long-term commitments of loyalty to their cologne and auto brands.

And it isn’t often we vote with our stomach although this is certainly a newly attackable territory with tools like mobile coupons, geo-fencing and NFC-enabled fast food store payment systems.

There’s a strong case to be tested and made for targeting the majority of our touchpoint marketing initiatives like an arrow through and into the emotional heart of our human targets, and then burrowing into the rational vault where much of our conversion behavior is triggered.

The fresh insights now available to marketers through a smart filtering and synthesis of emerging research disciplines like listening, exploration and integrated response analytics can be applied to inform an equally fresh type of experience marketing models and tools.

When I start parsing the human response territory into these three discrete zones and modeling our touchpoint plans to ignite the optimal pathways into the targeted engagement or conversion point brain, I feel like I’m falling in love all over again --- this time with a marketing science that owes as much to pathos and ethos as it does to calculus and logos. With apologies to Aristotle, my new love can break – I mean bend – my heart anytime.

How Close is Close

2011-04-10T14:19:00.007-04:00

I spent the better part of an hour last nite killing time people-watching on 42nd Street in Gotham's theater district. For those of you who, like me, remember Times Square from the late 70s and early 80s, it is about as cognitively dissonant as it gets remembering this same neighborhood which 30 years ago was about as thrilling and dangerous as any urban territory. Now, it is like a mall on any Saturday. I won't pretend not to miss the intensity and seedy electricity of the bygone age.

I struck up a conversation with a guy leaf-letting up and down the Deuce as I loitered in front of the theater waiting for the Macbeth curtain (see it, quickly). He was handing out promotional postcards to another Shakespeare play, a production by Pace University Players. I asked him if he was affiliated with the theater group as I had overheard him chatting up a woman sounding well-versed in New York off-Broadway and alternative theater. He said no, he owned a leaf-letting business and, he just happened to have a lot of theater groups as clients.

He asked me what I did and, with just the slightest telling pause beat, I said "I'm in the same business you are, marketing and advertising."

Street Marketing: The OG of Experience Marketing

We began to compare notes. We discussed audience profiling, targeting techniques, response optimization, attribution and media tracking and, natch, agency compensation models.

About half-way thru our chat (interrupted every 2-3 seconds or so by his marketing activation job) I came to two quite startling realizations: he wasn't at all familiar with the terms I labeled things and yet he was likely as good or better at doing what he did than the rest of us do our marketing.

He explained to me how my kind of marketing could never do what his kind did and then he live demo'd it in real-time. Over the years he claimed to have gotten exceedingly intuitive about who - amongst the literally thousands of people streaming by @ 7pm on 42nd Street - was not just most likely to accept his offer of a promotional hand-out but actually follow up on the promotional offer.

How could he know these things I asked. He said he's spent so much time reading people that he has instinctively calibrated his targeting mechanism to predict - by category of offer - who is most likely to make quick eye contact, and reach out to take the card from his hand, read it and act upon it.

I asked how he tracked whether his hand-outs converted or not. He gave me that faintly condescending and amused look I fear I'm guilty of in similar but reversed situations and said "I put a code on the cards and we track my percentage of sales versus all their other promotional and advertising channels. I always win. By a lot."

This was humbling stuff. I was grateful to have the Scottish Play to distract me and salve my aching marketing ego bruises.

Getting Closer

I realized of course what he's been doing with extraordinary (however unscalable) success is exactly what I'm suggesting all of us do more of when it comes to marketing. He's getting close, almost as close as one can possibly get, to the human consumer.

He's perfected a very powerful type of pattern recognition in targeting the most optimal recipient of what he's about to handout within a literal split second of processing a messy mix of visual inputs --- flashes of data surge from a mass of moving people's facial expressions, body types, walking gaits, clothing, accessories and accoutrement.

I watched the moment of activation over and over again, and it was uncanny to behold the consistency with which he identified, approached and closed on the signal of winning accepting targets over and amongst the noise of the brusque refusers.

People, this was nothing short of a thunder bolt moment --- one of the oldest forms of direct marketing, leaf-letting in the public square, is the OG of experience marketing in the post-digital marketplace.

The first principal of experience marketing is getting and staying as close as possible and appropriate to the actual consumer --- at every cycle of the planning, creative, activation, optimization and measurement stage of the experience marketing spectrum.

The vexing challenge is this: it's really hard getting really close. Getting really close can be really scary. It's even more difficult staying close. But close or at least closer we must all get.

Are We There Yet?

So here's the question we need to ask ourselves every Monday morning when we suit back up for whatever our version of leaf-letting battle looks like: how close is your current brand marketing efforts to the critical moments of behavioral truth for your consumer?

Taking a page or two from my lesson in the theater district last nite, I'm going to start using the checklist below to review and hygiene our experience marketing programs.

Fresh Intelligence

The initial start-point for experience strategy is ignited by a fresh source of consumer insights. One perhaps richer than your current pipeline of research might be providing. This doesn't mean we're walking away completely from traditional methodologies or self-reported sources. It does mean we insist on introducing some new sources of fresh consumer intelligence into the mix.

Applied listening is one of the most powerful new sources of fresh consumer insights, as it leverages the linguistic behavioral data mined, modeled and analysed from spontaneous human-generated data-sets. Other similarly rich and authentic methodologies include ethnographic and explorative studies as well as the more nuanced evolving forms of self-reported methods like blographies.

Pattern Recognition

This is critical --- we're not just suggesting including fresher forms of sourcing consumer insights for the sake of being fresh. We're filtering the evidence from these and other available, appropriate forms of research inputs into a holistic framework of analysis. For years brand strategists have relied almost exclusively on directional analysis and artifacts such as media segmentations and traditional qual/quant studies on one end and weeks or months old post campaign analysis on the other to plan and design brand communications.

What is now available - I would suggest increasingly required - is a new filtering and modeling process and planning culture that normalizes a broader mix of consumer behavioral intelligence into data sets we can look at, play with - model! Much like our leaf-letting proto-marketer on 42nd Street, we need to hone new skills of pattern identification, differentiation and recognition when it comes to what our consumers are actually thinking, doing, feeling and saying when it comes to our brands, our products - our value.

Brand Organic

This is perhaps the most challenging aspect of our experience marketing model as it demands a level of agnostic integration within the brand marketing operations which doesn't yet exist for many companies. And yet, it is the essential point we must aspire to as we continually hygiene our insighting, planning and campaign optimization against the experience marketing checklist.

To be brand organic takes seriously the root etymology of the word "organic": we are an integrated organism behaving and managing all marketing processes within a system that signals and responds to itself and the marketplace within which it activates.

It starts with the actioning, filtering, modeling and analysis of a truly organic insights generation program.

This process generates the outputs of fresh listening into tools like organic touch-point models, elastic message matrices and actionable engagement / conversion maps --- developed, tested & optimized in synch across existing silos of programs and agencies .

And finally, it requires a newly opened and robust response loop informatics allowing us to get as close as possible (there's that word again...) to real-time reaction and integrated optimization across all relevant media, channels and human touch-points.

Getting this close to your freshly intelligent, newly integrated & organic experience marketing is achievable. It will require a collaborative effort by a multitude of brand, agency & partner stakeholders. It will demand an obsessive dedication to accumulating and applying feed-back learnings across an increasingly complex, inter-dependent marketing mix.

The outcome is a whole new kind of nimble, integrated & scalable brand marketing machine. An organic machinery which takes the intuitive skills of an urban leaf-letter to a place unimaginable just 10 short years ago --- before these newly available post-digital tools, methods and optimization technologies changed the landscape of our marketing worlds forever.

Marketing in the New Machine

2011-03-20T10:11:00.010-04:00

Over breakfast with some colleagues last week we were discussing where marketing is - should be - heading. Talk lead to the rich debate over how we rationalize the required budget shifts toward more organic forms, the death of advertising (calm down, Kennon...) and whether there was a demonstrable ROI-model for all this post-digital and post-advertising theory.

This is how we distract ourselves from the $15 bowls of fresh-fruit with Greek in pricey Mid-town.

Then, another colleague reached out yesterday to inquire if I had any whizzy innovative bon mots to toss into her upcoming industry presentation on the future of marketing.

Well, I thought, puzzling how deep I should go for her show, the answer to both these questions and lines of inquiries are essentially the same.

It's the machine, stupid.

The innovation I see coming is not from "digital" but from what a small but gathering horde of us are increasingly referring to as post digital. "Digital" is what you get when you continue to brief the same agencies on the same outcomes related to online advertising and web-sites. This is, inevitably, dead-end marketing. Behaving post digitally, which is what our consumers have been doing for the past several years, is how brands and their marketing partners like us are going to have to start behaving if we wish to catch up.

Throwing more advertising at the problem will only prolong this catch-up. Shifting those budgets from advertising into more organic forms of behavioral marketing is what the smarter brands are already doing.

To my breakfast colleagues at week's end, I suggested that there is most certainly a demonstrable ROI from this shift - but it is not as straight forward or speedy as pouring GRPs into TVC support to move products from shelves. It entails building a new kind of integrated marketing machine which is based upon the evolving disciplines around experience marketing (see last week's post for a deep-dive into experience marketing).

Once the most appropriate content is agnostically briefed and developed (using rich behavioral research technique like listening, exploration, ethnographies) this post advertising machine takes that content and creates targeted consumer experiences which lead to brand discovery, attachment, sharing, usage and loyalty. Demonstrating ROI? Everything is tagged, tracked, measured and fed back into the insights engine. Organic attribution models are tested and refined. A new kind of optimizable media is the fresh and abiding currency of an ROI-obsessed experience marketer.

And what does this marketer's new machine look like?

At ground level, it is managed by a new kind of planner/producer. These planner-producers are not terribly unlike the kind of linchpins who once made excellent TV producers and comms planners, but they are uniquely and utterly versed in how brand content is transformed into consumer experiences.

They know how to develop, spread & optimize content to be found, shared and consumed thru the channels and touchpoints where consumers spend their day --- like so:

on social networks - big box, long-tail, random and in-between;
across the search engines which are their personal home pages;
reading and forwarding emails to their lovers, parents, spouses, kids and colleagues;
consuming web content and sharing links;
obsessing over their mobile devices 18 hours a day;
watching and sharing videos in decidedly non-couch-based environments;
and walking by the occasional well-placed out of home marketing messages in those rare moments when we all must look up.

On her team is a social channel manager, an integrated search optimization specialist, a copy writer, a UX / experience interface specialist, an experience engineer, aka someone fluent in HTML, photo-editing, tagging/coding and cookie-management. Maybe a traditional digital media specialist with none of the vestigial prejudices about hard-coded "segments". And finally, of course, a measurement specialist / analyst providing real-time data to the team for constant optimization.

In this new world everything can be tagged and tracked - thus measured and optimized. There is rigorous accountability for results - remember, we talked the advertising guys out of some of their budgets to prove our model, so proven and attributive results are essential.

If we - you! - behave like this, for 4 quarters for any given brand, we will have not only developed a proof-of-concept for a new touchpoint model and marketing machine, but we will have established the foundation and groundworks for a whole new, more socialized, brand. A brand that begins to behave more like our customers do and less like our competitors, every day, a little more.

To my inquiring colleague sourcing a couple of wow moments for her presentation, I say this is where the innovation I see coming into marketing is heading towards - with or without us. Few, if any agencies are getting this right yet in a fully integrated way, although pockets of true organic behavioral marketing models are emerging. Tell-tale signs of this marketing renaissance include ---

auto companies migrating loyalty programs to all-mobile apps, SMS & links;
kids' brands leveraging product placement and YT All-Stars endorsements on YouTube;
airlines and hotels using Twitter and Foursquare as their core customer service channels;
CPGs embedding Amazon-stores into their Facebook pages to sell diapers;
fragrance brands developing short-format video content that goes right to YouTube by-passing traditional;
media, entertainment and community brands buying a new kind of engagement media using smart cookies, permission and - yes, Virginia - email too!

I can't help but sense we are poised on a threshold of mass-recognition of this new machine as the only viable way forward for brands behaving well and marginally profitable today, tomorrow and into the hazy near future of this century's teens - always the most interesting age period in life and shared living.

My breakfast colleague calls it brand marketing enablement. I like that as the outcome, and am extremely excited about getting dirty along side whoever else is joining in to lean shoulders with us into the building and optimizing of the new brand enabling machine.

Be[have] Here Now

2011-03-14T12:39:00.013-04:00

When I was just a wet freshman in high school, Ram Dass published a book called Be Here Now which would become as ubiquitous to my welling maturity and requisite mind-expansion as the tattered copies of High Times and the worn-out Firesign Theater albums that competed with Jethro Tull for rotations on our parent's fancy record players - stereos, we called them.

Although the book's cover and title became essential totems to my generation coming of age in the 70s, I don't believe I ever really read the psychedelically inflected call to love-powered meditation and free-your-mind dictums. I note with zero irony that 35+ years later I stumbled into a similar school of awareness pathing with my recent exploration of zen Buddhism. After all these years, I'm here to tell you that this stuff works.

The idea of "being here now" because, well, it's all here - everything - now, is not bad advice. The opening up of oneself so completely to the impact and consequences of this moment, when strung together with the moments on either side of "now" is not a bad way to live --- insightfully and fully as an engaged and contributing human.

But what's particularly interesting to me is how this way of being can be applied to insightful marketing. The kind of marketing that I believe is fast becoming the only kind of marketing there is any more, true behavioral marketing.

I don't mean to devalue or profane the purity of heightened consciousness theory by splashing marketing mud all over it's pristine tires, but I am playing with this analagous extension into what I do for a living and contemplating a pretty right-sized fit: marketing that is not only focused on the "behave here now" of the (very un-Buddhist idea of a ) "target" - but is intrinsically informed by a unique understanding of what our targets are thinking, feeling and doing before, during and after I get there with my marketing.

The Truth About Lying

To do insightful behavioral marketing we need reliable insights into the true behaviors of the people we wish to reach and activate with our marketing. Troublingly, since the practice of market research and consumer research began to formalize in the 1920s in response to radio broadcasters noticing that certain types of audiences (nee demographics) could be matched to certain types of brands, we've had almost 100 years dominated by self-reported research methodologies.

Surveys, polls, focus groups and interviews remain the dominant methodologies by which many marketers make multi-million dollar bets with their brand's money to generate or source actionable insights into consumer behaviors. We all know there are two problems with this.

First, it is based upon asking people what they think, feel or do about something - a product, a feature, and brand. The second is that people lie. To us, to themselves, to the camera and to the screen. Quantum physics taught us that when we measure something we inevitably affect it. This makes self-reported data triply flawed, with, in order of corruption: the stimulus, the reporter and the measurer, us.

But for the experience marketer in search of quality and accurate behavioral intelligence, help is at hand. There are emerging disciplines of consumer behavioral observations attempting to solve for these fatal flaws, or at least remove a layer or two of affectation. Research methodologies like ethnography, exploration and listening can offer us more pure and less refracted ways to reveal true insights about how people behave in a very simple way --- simply by observing the behavior.

What better way to source applicable behavioral insights for informing how we engineer our behavioral marketing than by extruding those insights more directly from how people actually behave - not how they respond to questions or force-fed stimuli?

Thinking, Feeling, Doing

Studying the evolving science of market and consumer research as it has slogged on for almost a century we note the focus first on demographic, then psychographic, and more recently technographic lenses through which we strive to imagine consumer truths from self-reported data. These layers purport to parse our targets into suggested "segments" which adhere to specific characteristics ranging from age, income, gender, to psychological profiles and, now, your reported facility with the increasingly Jetson-like accoutrement of our technologically saturated world.

But what if all this layering of fresh lenses and filters was moving us further and not closer to the actionably human truths which might lead us to more insightful marketing? What if our tribes, and our friends, and our families and our online streams were better indicators and predictors of our true experiences and behaviors.

What if the keys were simply - and always - behavioral in their manifestation and affect--- and the genesis of these behaviors could all be pegged to more basic and irreducible aspects of what makes us human living in our ever-morphing and shifting tribes?

Things like what we think (rational) how we feel (emotional) and what we actually do (corporal).

And what if we could apply a mix of organic research methodologies which, by their very nature, would gather directly observed behavioral inputs into our equally organic behavioral marketing models.

And what if these models were purposefully designed to help us build, test and optimize (in essential real-time) a new kind of touch-point engineering - a behavioral touch-point methodology modeled to reveal the most optimal mix of message, media and stimulus mapped, richly, to specific consumer behavioral need-states?

That's a lot of 'what ifs', but here's one more: what if we called this experience marketing and what if it became the thing most of us did for a living for the next, oh, 10-15 years of our post-digital marketing careers?

Experience Marketing

I came into this world of marketing and advertising (uggg) thru the door marked "direct". Some credit people like Lester Wunderman or Jerry Huntsinger with creating this discipline but I recommend you to its true earlier antecedents for the full dope: 75 years before Lester and Jerry, Sears Roebuck & Co launched its catalog. And even before them, we had the OG direct ancestors to Ron Popeil hawking patent medicine across the prairies and towns of America from within the pages of the Farmer's Almanac and from the backs of their DM-prescient buck-wagons.

So, to recap, in the glacially advancing pantheon of marketing subtypes we have can add to advertising, direct marketing, public relations, relationship marketing, digital marketing --- Experience Marketing, an evolved kind of marketing science to change all marketing, forever.

Experience marketing, a uniquely post-digital marketing science is born from the simple recognition that all marketing is behavioral; and in the 21st Century we have the tools and the smarts to imagine, create and optimize a new type of touch-point marketing. A marketing theory and process grounded in insights mined from the observed truths of consumer behavior and applied to a near real-time model of engineerable consumer experiences.

Sounds simple enough, right? Maybe not, on first blush - but I believe it is the pathway into, thru and beyond the increasingly over-priced and under-performing tricks we continue to play on ourselves, our brands and our customers beating the dead-horse of advertising in a post-digital marketing world.

Cycling for Truth

Experience marketing owes much of its theory and application to the tools developed and lessons learned over the past 15 years of "digital" --- the most critical being the capacity for a non-linear, real-time design, performance and optimization cycle.

In the experience marketing framework we're refining, there are are four critical cycles within the model, all surrounding, feeding and responding to the human behavioral cycles at its heart.

Here's a topline of the role and the outputs of each of the cycles---

Observation is the cycle where we create, curate and/or collate all appropriate consumer intelligence aka research required for sufficient insights generation.

The Strategy cycle is responsible for synthesizing this intelligence and mining it for the actual insights with which to drive the experience marketing briefs and plans.

Engineering cycle responds to the briefs and requirements suggested by the strategy by designing and developing the required content, assets and touch-point media required to meet the brief.

The Optimization cycle is just that - in field, in real-time we measure and refine the experience marketing programs driving the required results and feeding the accruing cycles of observation with the rich intelligence from program response and results.

Whose Experience is it, Anyway?

Ah, yes, the consumer. The target. The audience. The behaver. The experiencer, herself.

Here's the thing: there is absolutely no way to imagine, design, develop and optimize effective and efficient experience marketing campaigns without obsessively insisting the consumer's experience into the center of our frameworks, models and plans - and keeping it there.

I know we know this, and I know some of us continue to strive for it, but 99 times out of 100, once we start researching and strategizing and producing and optimizing at some point the consumer slips noiselessly from the center - replaced by things like brand objectives, program budgets, campaign timelines or product roadmaps.

But keeping a focused - accurate - picture of our consumer in the center of our experience marketing framework is not merely a philosophic exercise. It is a functional imperative, and the ultimate effectiveness of our model is pegged to what we pin to the three behavioral aspects of the essential consumer dwelling at the heart of our experience marketing.

By filtering and synthesizing the intelligence from the Observation cycle, the experience strategist determines the three key truths of the consumer behavioral experience and plugs them into the model and the brief - until optimization proves them worthy of refinement or replacement.

The Emotional behavioral need-state reveals (with as much accuracy and specificity as available from observation) what the target is feeling at the critical stages surrounding our intended marketing intercept.

The Rational need-state gets at the left side of the consumer's brain at the critical moments of truth.

The Corporal is the lusty label we assign to the observed behavior itself - what the target actually does: not what they say they "do".

This consumer truth identification exercise creates the critical linkage between each of the four cycles of the experience marketing framework and, importantly, is included in the brief itself to ensure the holistic obsession with the central-nature of the consumer experience throughout the cycles of the marketing initiatives.

The Experience Brief

I've been in the marketing communications business for almost 30 years and if there's one consistency I've observed across my tenures at various agencies across all channels it is the obsessively vain need to revisit and revise the creative brief every couple of years, whether it needs it or not.

I shall not be the one to break a long tradition, and so share with you below the experience marketing brief we've developed to serve two important functions within the model:

First, it is the connective tissue whose job it is to translate, synthesize and apply the raw behavioral experience intelligence gleaned from the Observation cycle into the actionable insights at the core of the brief.

Secondly, the brief, if well and elastically developed, will serve as the beacon from which the Engineering and Optimization cycles continually orient themselves as the iterative experience marketing process cycles on.

Here's the briefing template we've started to use to drive this next generation of experience marketing:

Marketing in a Post Advertising World

That's it for today's installment, we've covered a lot of territory - and there are miles to go before we sleep, miles to go...

Tune back in for future installments where we take a deep breath, step back and have a full-throated go at how all this can be applied to a new kind of behavioral marketing, focusing on deep-dives, first, into organic behavioral research models like listening, exploration and ethnography. Then, we'll explore the kinds of rich touch-point models, message matrices and organic media optimization available to the behavioral marketer, today.

I passionately suggest that Experience Marketing, grounded in the naked truth available only from more honest and authentic consumer behavioral intelligence, is arguably the only valid brand response to the changes in how consumers behave in a world of post advertising realities controlled increasingly by them, not us.

Imagined, adapted and optimized through true in-market application, it is fueled by our embrace and incessant refinement of all the post-digital marketing tools, models and techniques that are fully available to the Experience Marketer of the future.

As long as we all agree, that the future started at least a couple of years ago for most of our consumers --- and the only reasonable way for a brand to behave now is to start playing smart and accelerated catch-up... yesterday.

The hidden Buddhist in me tells me that's a suitably appropriate time paradox to solve for using some suitably appropriate zen marketing approaches. Behave here now, with me - won't you?

Post Digital Bonfires

2011-02-26T22:43:00.015-05:00

I must credit some old colleagues from a northern European city who first hipped me to the idea that marketers should stop thinking in terms of big bang fireworks (at the time the brand we worked on together referred to their product advertising launches as 'big bangs' - uggg...) and instead, think of setting off bonfires.

They were still thinking in terms of "viral videos" and "blogger marketing" my quaint chilly mates, but still, I owe them an insight. This is, in fact, how I believe the future of advertising is already evolving. Granted, most brand marketers aren't there yet, or even close, but it is most certainly the frontier inhabited by all our customers.

It's where they spend their days, sometimes upwards of 18 hours of them, when they're ignoring our big bang advertising campaigns. Setting and getting warmed, once in a while, by little minor bonfires when the magic is right. The magic of little drops of value we drop from the marketing sky at just the right time to break thru their habit and make something happen.

As part of the experience strategy practice we're developing down at the shop, we're working on three equally exciting and challenging pieces of businesses --- one is a rebrand & relaunch of a major regional company in a category I adore. The other is a go-to-market strategy for one of the most ancient American brands entering a whole new category. And the third, is, well, let's just say we're re-inventing an old direct marketing dinosaur (really direct, as in 1-2-1, F2F, in-your-face-direct ...) --- redefining a category as we move the business from the air conditioned conference room to the airy, chaotic but organically engineeerable precints of "online".

All of these challenges bring out the best in us ideas guys. I hope. We're gonna need 'em.

The way we bring experience strategy to bear is critical. Our process breaks out into three mini-strategy machines -

Filtering
Modeling
Planning

The filtering part is where we access, commission and/or execute and then integrate relevant research, intelligence and consumer behavior evidence. We're inclining towards more organic types (e.g. non-self reported) of consumer insights generating methods, such as ethnography, exploration, applied listening and blography.

The modeling is where we bring in the pointy heads and I get to break out my old white coat from the DB-crunching lab days...this part, it seems, continues to make those around me oddly nervous.

Once we're done filtering intelligence and cooking our modeling, the fun part starts - the planning.

For each of these brand programs we're quite unlikely to end up with anything close to your traditional 'big bang' advertising launches. The strategies for each - altho unique and quite different - will suggest a go-to-market approach less like the Fourth of July and more like a lot of little Saturday nights, sprinkling and spreading our advertising and marketing spend in a more sustained, human-generated way.

In this new post-digital context we're less likely to be setting off any hugely expensive explosions of GRPs or rich and take-over heavy flights of online display. Instead, we're going into the bonfire setting business. Instead of lines around the stores for one or two days, we're aiming for eager and engaged customers clogging our stores at odd hours, or firing up their Amazon cookies and roaming about, linking around their tumblrs and Facebooks and product review sites. Over time, lots of time, as much time as they have - the same time we have - our brand's value will adhere and hopefully endure.

We're replacing shock and awe ad blitzes with a multitude of little reasons to believe and to share. Instead of early heavy-ups, a long campaign of every day surprises infused with brand and product value, popping up to ignite little bonfires of consumer interest and engagement - commerce and referral, attachment and advocacy. Storytelling our stuff to their friends, their families and across their organic streams. Hopefully coming back for more, when the time - their time - is right.

The holiest trick to all this is how to meld together our value - content, applications, experiences, services, our brand stuff - with the marketing messages themselves. The advertising becomes the product in the post digital consumer experience world. Think sharable travel points, social mobile apps and digital cookbooks with CRM coupons embedded within.

It's a whole new world out here, people. A brave new swirling ecosystem where brands can't just buy their way into love and loyalty with one big weekend of TV spots and Espn.com banner-vids --- look what happens when consumers who had already fallen in love with a brand organically (Groupon) all of a sudden meet up with their big bad advertising selves (Super Bowl Sunday). It isn't pretty.

I will be updating here as all three of these campaigns unfold across the soon to be bonfire-littered ranging hills and valleys of America --- across desktops, mobile phones, boardwalks, laptops, water-coolers, tablets and the occassional couch too.

So, get the post-digital insights engine cranked up and meet me at the behavioral modeling machine; I'll bring the organic touchpoint planning tools --- you bring the matches. And maybe a lot fewer ad bucks than you might have expected to pack in the old days.

The Experience Racket

2011-02-05T07:10:00.025-05:00

I took on a new role this past week, crossing over from Wunderman to Y&R, a gulf more like a schism than an easy rivulet. It all happened quite amicably and even peaceably, although the old purple gang wouldn't let me keep my couch. Some things sting more than they should... I'm pumped --- my brief is to create and lead a new strategy domain, a practice group focusing on experience strategy.

If you've been in marketing for any amount of time, you likely suffer from a similar malady as me: absolutely no one around you - close to you - has the slightest idea of what it is you do for a living. Or, fwiw, even cares a jot to understand.

So, just when I might have finally been positioned, after 30 years in the apparently impenetrable business of "marketing" (nevermind what you meant when you added "interactive" to its front) to tell people it was "advertising" that got me @ the desk each day by 7, I will still not yet reap the blunt benefits of a facile job description.

What's equally ironic is that all week long seasoned colleagues from across the marketing spectrum have given me that same similar quizzical look (tinged now with faint suspicion) that my ex-wife, siblings and children have given me whenever "what I do for a living" comes up.

"Experience strategy"!... what exactly is that? they hemmed over the txts, emails, IMs and voicemails of congratulations this week.

I tell them to wait for the press release, all will be explained, and they still think I'm kidding. I'm not.

We are in the behavior business. For over a hundred years we marketers have been accessing varying degrees of truthful insights into human behavior to aid us in the insertion of positive feelings about our brands and information triggers to buy our products.

For much of those 100 plus years, we've run the table over and over again with essentially the same sort of stuff: push media. Whether it was dense and alluring Sears catalogs, Gatsby era billboards, serial sponsored radio, network and then cable TV spots, direct mail, daily newspapers, lifestyle mags or finally banners and buttons --- we pushed, people behaved. We got really good at predicting that behavior, and allowably good from a cost-return equation at actually making it happen. The behavior, that is.

Then shit happened. Search. Social. Mobile. In the course of the last few years, while many of our colleagues continued to marvel gob-smacked at the shiny allure of what they still refer to as "digital", the consumer, sad to say, has irrevocably moved on. At an overall pace and a daily clock-speed that has left many brands and their marketers almost fatally behind.

So I took this new job to put my money and my future where my mouth and heart have been for the past 3 years. I switched teams because I suggest the task at hand is nothing short of re-imagining and crafting a new body of marketing science which recognizes and accounts for a very simple fact: when it comes to how people behave around brands it's a whole new game. A fresh science is required to match this new behavior with one of our own.

The way brands behave must be utterly rethought and re-engineered. That's why I changed jobs. I want in on re-writing and refining the new playbook.

Without exaggeration I suggest that brand and product marketers are at least 18 to 36 months behind the consumer. While consumer behaviors in the marketplace and consumption ecosystem were evolving into a rich, real-time, always on flux of interaction, research, value experience, purchase and referral, brand marketing has sat almost universally flat-footed.

Not to sound hysterical but it is easy to argue that all brands have massive catching up to do, even the rare few who seem to be catching on a little faster than the rest --- brands like Starbucks maybe. Kenneth Cole. Stride Gum.

Here's the challenge: given the now-altered and constantly evolving consumer mashup of our daily experience in the world, how can brand marketers penetrate these new and evolved experiential consumer need states to drive the required behaviors supporting the business and keep the lights on for us all?

It’s a complex challenge for a good reason. We consumers inhabit a world where experience shift occurs with the rapid changability of flickering needs and desires, screens and formats, moods mixed down to finger-taps and slight gestures.

My bet is that a significant part of this new marketing science will entail a fresh thinking model, a new kind of insights generating and planning machine to help us cut thru this ephemera at something close to the same clock-speed as humans are actually operating within it.

Let's call it experience strategy and suggest it as an essential component of this new marketing science. Experience strategy happens at the beginning of our thinking, at the middle of our briefing and within the optimization loop itself.

It isn’t a layer, but rather a lens. The lens which allows us to see thru the eyes and sense thru the hands and think thru the thoughts and even feel thru the hearts of the consumer.

I switched teams to help develop this dimension of the new marketing and advertising machine. I switched teams from the "direct" side of the marketing looking glass to the "above the line" side because I have lost faith that the digital guys can ever fully pry their collective gazes off their own passing screen reflections and part ways with their websites and Facebook pages and widgets and rich media banners - long enough to break fully from the interactive pack and lead this charge.

Here was my thunderclap insight --- this change is so fundamental it cannot be managed as an incremental shift upward from the dear dwindling digital days.

I started to ponder this paradox: what if it can only be imagined and built by the kind of brand marketers who already have the most to lose, because it's already almost lost anyway. The advertising guys themselves, who know better than to build the space-ship-cum-time-machine we're going to need to catch up to the consuming public upon the legacy of already bleach-white bones of landing pages, banners and Facebook likes.

So, what's experience got to do with it? Everything.

Insights and applications from experience strategy predict that simply inserting ads into a Facebook page wont work. Experience strategy suggests that selling diapers on your Facebook page thru an embedded Amazon sore will (Pampers).

Experience strategy might warn against building a full-blown robust user forum on your brand's web-site while suggesting a distributed customer service program in the social wild (Jet Blue).

A new kind of experience strategist might reject copy ideas flowing from briefs researched via self-reported focus groups while supporting quirky message cartridges developed from applied listening taxonomies (Nokia).

Perfectly smart digital strategy smugly snarks that email is dead, while something tells me there was a sharp-eyed experience strategist who cooked up using email as the hero social media for the next big thing (Groupon).

I am not suggesting that experience strategy alone will magically transform our marketing from its moribund mix of old school digital and tottering TVCs. In my new shop's case we've got two tectonic shifts moving along multiple fault lines at once: exploration research and applied listening are being integrated into our channel agnostic planning as well.

Exploration strategy, led by my much bigger-brained colleagues @ Y&R, extracts previously un-mined insights from explorations (an immersive research technique with most recent roots grown from ethnography).

Combine this with the applied listening evidence and analysis and you provide an experience strategist with a mad rich surfeit of incredible new insights generating tools, inputs and artifacts.

I switched teams for this opportunity to re-write the script, rebuild the machine, re-imagine our shared futures in the lightspeed changing world of brand marketing. That, and I've now got a slightly better view of the nervous but expectant faces looking up from the Madison Avenue canyon outside my new 9th floor office into the hopeful post-digital near distance. A still fuzzy, near-distant landscape which, if experience is any guide, will be absolutely nothing like the marketing machine and science it is rapidly replacing.

If you think about it, the experience racket is the same one we've been dabbling in since Draper first guessed right about nostalgia being the key behavior state Kodak should attack to sell more Carousels and film. They just make us smoke outside now, down there amidst the hopeful throng, inching back up Mad Ave counting on somebody - and it might as well be us - to get it right again.

Why is there air?

2011-01-17T16:58:00.012-05:00

If you are of a certain American age and inclination you will, like me, remember the name of a hugely funny comedy album by Bill Cosby with this title. I could send you to the stacks - I mean Google - or you could skip ahead to the close of this post for the answer.

I have been thinking a lot about such seemingly facile yet nettlesome questions lately. It must be all the snow in the east and in Europe, makes a man get all Tolstovian and existential, especially as we slip warily over the lip and into the long slow slog down into the cold, darkening throat of lasting winter.

But there is something to the impossibly unanswerable that beckons and allures. Over the holidays I went on a reading tear, a few books a week, all sorts of stuff - novels, poetry, philosophy, plays. There are many questions left to ask, many yet as left unanswered. I was interviewed last week by a young Turkish marketing trade editor. Fetching, but, sadly, dim enough only to puzzle me two big questions: what's up with this mobile obsession and why did I choose blogspot over building my own site for my blog.

Frankly, it would have been easier to gas on about the immense changes in the world and Kennon's Theory of Everything - Mobilityness. But I was frozen with icy glares (in untranslated Turkish) until I returned dutifully to the regrets I have had over not choosing Wordpress.

Know what I mean?... It's the plugins, right? Or is it the free and varied 'themes'?

It is meant to snow tonite, again, and as I prepare to decide between tortellini or salmon fillets, I am secretly plotting which best Russian or Irish or French doomsayer would go best with an early to bed date with the covers and turned down heat: Beckett? Camus? Joyce - Dostoyevsky? Each of them, in their own way had something important to say about why there is air, if there isn't why it doesn't matter, really, does it. Read l'Etranger, and report back.

I am teaching more lately - a second course @ NYU, this month two big workshops in Istanbul, a mobile trade event lecture at the end of the month. I do believe the inevitable "Futuring" show also comes to an agency stage near you before Valentine's Day pierces the lonely and fulsome heart alike with its grief and intangibles.

And, I should be grateful, that it seems the more I strive to pin down the meaning of all things marketing into a discernible post digital philosophy the more people want me to tell them about it. Yet - I've never been more unsure of what actually one is meant to be doing about all this: what's a brand's job? Why do products change us? Complete us? How is value created - and by whom, for whom - selfishly: how and why do we share it, and what happens next?

And, while we're on it: weren't we meant to instill some sort of additive goodness to the grand mix of the popular front of the product marketing mis en scene? Set some example for the kids? Isn't that the promise I've been making (too often breaking?!) --- isn't that, at least one reason, clearly, undeniably, why there seems to be air?

I'm also thinking more lately, it must be all that poetry and philosophy I ate over Christmas. I am thinking about the future of being a consumer and a citizen and a human in a world where guys like me get on planes and pin mikes to their shoulders and build great big animated decks with pithy quotes and clips from Mad Men to make their points. My points.

About the future, and how it has never been more "now" (the future, that is) than it is right now. And then to flop onto hotel beds and watch the fruit salad call my name from across the comfy room like all other rooms and on the embedded TV above the desk there are floods ravaging three huge countries at once and Jasmine Revolutions spinning out their new kind of mobile fluidity right there on the screens and across Twitter and I get up and cross the room to pick at the melon pieces and "like" a Facebook page - I hope it's the right one! - for the brave and leaderless Tunisian citizen rebels.

Perhaps I should blame the meditation --- I've been doing it more than ever since the Christmas deep dive into myself. I have quite a centering and comfy cushion set here in the toasty living room on North Fullerton and have been making the time almost daily to parse and peal, carve and cleave the me away from me and into me; if only for scant moments of clarity and suchness for brief snatches here in the close flat above it all.

Clearly there is air for all this, to give us shared currency of --- breath? Sweet breath: they teach you to "come back to the breath" when the noise of daily thinking imposes its crackling sturm and thrum into the striving moments of awareness. Nomyorengaykyo, baby.

It is air that keeps me focused, as it comes into and out of Kennon. Air that offers the great swimming paradigm of shared realities where my evolving theories of post digital everything and mobilityness are spinning their ways into the hearts and minds of my colleagues and students as Spring semester starts next week. And client planning and new business pitches too... It is the air of frozen, sweet white Montclair, and darkening but always lovely Gotham - and next week Richmond, and then Boca too.

Air is all we have sometimes, Virginia. Bill Cosby might not have been kidding when he teased and then told us this was the great secret: everyone, he wagged existentially, knows the reason there is air is to blow up basketballs. And footballs and volleyballs too.

Truth be told, and I must remember to write a note to the Turkish scribe, he was making a joke, and all I can think about are the minor regrets of not having chosen Wordpress and so dash this meandering off to you with breathy inconsequence here within Blogspot, as minor big evidence of things not solved - or even yet asked - before they are shared.

Pass it on. Mobilityness. It's gonna be bigger than air. Actually, maybe that's all it really is, anyway - and already.

Taking Turkey Post Digital

2010-12-28T13:38:00.004-05:00

The Post Digital World Tour we launched last April in Moscow at the Russian Internet Forum, enters Year 2 with our upcoming whirlwind tour in Istanbul in two weeks.

I have been dusting up on my Pamuk, but still feel little prepared for what promises to be an awesome journey along the banks of the Bosphorus!

See you there - staying @ the W, but hope to be spending some time retracing worn pathways shared by Orhan Pamuk in his incredible memoir - which you should read (along with 'Snow') if you haven't.

We can all compare notes - geographic, post digital and literary - when I return.

Breaking the Web to Fix It

2010-12-08T14:46:00.003-05:00

I teach a couple of grad courses in integrated marketing at NYU in addition to my day job knocking about here on Madison Avenue. My overarching theme for each class is simple: all effective marketing is behavioral marketing. At the very start of my class on personalization and segmentation I ask my students two questions:

Do you flush your cookies with any regularity?

Do you buy anything from Amazon?

Not too surprisingly the answer to the first question generally falls in line with surveyed results of the average American – about a third of my students raise their hands. We talk a little about why they do this, when they do this and what they see as the benefit.

Next, and not surprisingly, almost every hand fesses up to being an Amazon customer. We share stories about what we buy, how we shop, when and how we discover and share, whether we write or read reviews, and what place Amazon has in the grand scheme of things e-commerce.

Slowly, the cookie flushers begin to make the connection about their disconnect: Amazon couldn’t provide the cool personalization magic they do without their smart, subtle use of cookies.

Then we talk a little about how cookies work. First party & third party cookies, session cookies, persistent cookies, super cookies, ever cookies, Flash cookies, piggy-back or shared cookies etc. We talk about how retargeting works, within and across ad networks, on publisher and brand sites and the various search engines.

Finally, I ask them this: how often do you click on banner ads? Everyone does that smirky thing with their face and chuckles softly, but with appropriately peeved indignancy. The implication is “me? banners? Never!...”

But we probe a little and find that, in fact, each of us can remember something we clicked on not too long ago – a link in Facebook, a search ad, a video, yes, maybe even a ‘banner’. Anecdotally they describe what it was that caught their attention and sparked sufficient curiosity for them to click.

This cognitive dissonance is not unique to a roomful of 20-something digital natives studying to become the next generation of all-channel brand marketers. It is apparently shared by a whole bunch of other people, including the certainly well-meaning commissioners over at the Federal Trade Commission. The ones who set loose an ocean of industry trade ink this past week with the release of their report titled “Protecting Consumer Privacy on an Era of Rapid Change”. http://goo.gl/tSSfh

The FTC Report: Something Bad for Everyone

The troubling similarity between my kids and the authors of the FTC report is this: neither of them have a very good idea of how behavioral marketing actually works.

But there is also a very big difference, and one which troubles me equally and should trouble you as well. My 20-somethings, when probed, attest passionately to the value of being behaviorally marketed to in meaningful and targeted ways. The FTC guys, at least as indicated from their recent report, seem to think the consumer is under attack by sinister “tracking” wolves baying at each of our personal browser doors.

Words matter, right? They do, a lot. I cut my marketing teeth on the direct side of the family tree, that less than shiny world “below the line” – but the side of the industry which helped to drive, shape and enforce important regulations s and laws like the “Do Not Mail” and then the “Do Not Call” registries. My side of the family were the ones that helped the big friendly government guys bring you the CanSPAM act.

All of these were not only desired and necessary innovations for the industry around consumer choice and comfort, but each also benefited from being appropriately named and labeled. And the language of problem, solution and reform was clear and un-muddied.

That’s why this “Do Not Track” phrase the FTC has coined bothers me a lot. Not just because words matter, but because it seems to betray the real feelings and motivations from within the agency. I read the whole report, and this subtle twist in naming feels deliberate and pointed. Political, even, and I bet most of those guys down there in McLean and Silver Spring share most of my politics.

“Tracking” is what those young men I saw over Thanksgiving in upstate New York with the orange vests do when methodically and patiently seeking to “bag their buck before Christmas”.

“Tracking” is what creepy stalkers do to un-knowing co-eds on campus.

“Tracking” is what skip-tracers do (I only know this from books and 3^rd party sources, I swear) when they pull and compare your change of address, credit and tax histories before they start sending you those nasty letters and calling you on your cellphone at work.

Somebody shout "Oh behave!"

Behavioral marketing in this rapidly evolving consumer world is about personalization.

It is about avoiding interruptions with targeted messages and sometimes, if appropriate even offers.

It is about customizing the experience, the content, the advertising for you and me when we turn on our set top cable box, or surf on our web browser, or search on our smartphones or launch our Gmail service – or shop at Amazon.

So, let me ask you a question --- if this report and any potential legislation that it might provoke, were called the “Do Not Personalize Act”, do you think it would make it to the top of the must-past charts any time soon?

Me neither.

Looking beyond the provocative and misleading title, let’s take a minute to unpack what the FTC is up to with this report and what it could mean for not just all those Gmail users, Amazon shoppers, mobile searchers and web browsers but, well, everybody else. Like me, and almost anybody else who might be reading this.

The report defines and makes broad recommendations for industry regulations within three areas - “privacy by design”, consumer choice and marketing transparency.

Let’s take them one at a time.

Watching Too Much Television

The “privacy by design” (do you think the authors perhaps spent too much time with “industry representatives” at those “roundtables” they held last December, and some of that adman pixie dust rubbed off on them?...) is essentially an admonishment to be good open and honest marketing doobies and bake that do-goodedness into everything you do. I feel better already.

And all one has to do is point to the revised Google privacy policies that almost everyone else is using as a model to see that this is a no-brainer. And it not only doesn’t need a regulation or act of Congress since it’s already becoming the de facto industry best practice and norm for serious marketers, publishers, advertisers and search engines.

If I don't Understand it, it Must be Bad

The second area is called “simplify consumer choice” and this is where the FEC marketing wannabes seems to have had the most fun with. Worryingly, their deep-diving seems to have been distorted through a view that imagines a sinister and almost unknowably complex world of nefarious behavioral marketing bots and black hat wizards.

To get a true handle on the Commission’s perspective, noodle on this nugget pulled from their post-rationalization case making for why this spooky behavioral marketing stuff must be pushed back into its bottle before it’s too late:

“One panelist also discussed how consumers often try to protect their anonymity by providing false information about themselves or deleting cookies from their computers.

Such actions suggest that significant numbers of consumers care enough about their privacy that, when given the opportunity, they will take active steps to protect it.

Whether consumers take such steps, however, may depend on the nature of the information and how easily those steps are understood.”

It’s telling a telling sign that, to the guys and gals who could soon be writing rules and recommending laws, routine cookie clearing seems as dark and mysterious as creating false identities.

Thru the Looking Glass

The third and final area of recommendations is where the Commission saves it most animated eyebrow-raising for, around what it calls “increased transparencies of data practices”. Here is the where much of the most chilling issues reside, a catchall roundup chockablock with alarmist insinuations and conspiratorial whisperings.

Easy, benign, doable recos for “consumer education” and “comparative privacy practices” are bundled up alongside suggestions for parents to have access to their “teens’ data” … consumer “discovery of non-consumer facing entities” (?!) … “consumer notice when data about them has been used to deny benefits” …

At weird, but perhaps purposeful, moments the report edges into the world of mobile and it is here that the Commissioners seems to come closest to truly jumping the tracks.

The report takes pains to justify their current investigations and recommendations as apart from previous efforts by saying that a simple registry – as recommend and adopted in the Do Not Call program – will not suffice for managing behavioral marketing data nowadays because there is “no such persistent identifier for computers”.

Mobile Mud

Fair enough until you get to the catchall section where the Commission starts lumping in “mobile” to the mix, and one is struck by their naïve lack of understanding that phones have become computers too. You had to miss a whole lot of meetings not to get that mobiles will likely be the primary access point to marketing messages and branded content in a year to two for most consumers. So we stand agog as the FTC presumes to shape legislation for behavioral marketing based upon “computers” which can’t be, um, tracked uniquely.

The mobile domain clearly both confounds and excites the commission. At one point they explicitly wag their fingers at marketers capturing and saving “location based data” and then with a flourishing blurt this question with its own implied answer baked-in: “Should the concept of universal choice be extended beyond online behavioral advertising and include, for examples, behavioral advertising for mobile applications?”.

Where to start… Mobile is online. Then there’s this --- every mobile phone (aka computer) does have a unique identifier. Actually, it has two – the Electronic Serial Number (ESN) and its Mobile Identification Number (MIN).

And the suggesting that “mobile applications” might require even more stringent ring-fencing troubles as well. When a consumer downloads a mobile app to their device they’ve already entered into an explicit opt-in relationship – any and all use of their data associated with an app I buy or download comes with a EULA-type agreement. Tick the boxes for both choice and transparency here.

You Break it You Bought It

The FTC makes clear in each section and its summary this message loud and clear: if the private sector does not implement effective reform voluntarily the FTC will recommend Congress do it.

So here’s our choice: Given the painful lack of this Commissions’ comprehension (after 12 months of research, roundtables and hand-wringing) of what behavioral marketing actually is, what it does and how it provides brands, publishers and consumers mutual benefits do we want to bet on a divided Congress with even shorter attention-spans being asked to take this up this coming year to decide every actors’ fate?

I don’t know about you, but I grow increasingly anxious, because unlike the Do Not Mail or Do Not Call or CanSPAM initiatives where all manner of industry and government guys got together and smartly solved for some obvious problems in marketing practices, this is not so simple.

Ominously central to the stated FTC’s rationalization for it taking this action is this: all their previous legislation for marketing industry practices were founded on solving for what they call their “harm-based approach”. But there on page 20 they present a very presumptuous and ill-informed “but”:

“FTC’s harm-based approach has limitations. In general, it focuses on a narrow set of privacy-related harms – those that cause physical or economic injury or unwarranted intrusion into consumer daily loves.

But, for some consumers, the actual range of privacy-related harms is much wider and includes reputational harm as well as the fear of being monitored or simply have private information “out there”.

Those last set of quotes around “out there” are “theirs” not “mine”.

I suggest there are two really big challenges we face.

The first is the tremulous footing FTC sets off onto a regulatory scavenger hunt with the declaration that their previous approach to regulating consumer marketing practices using a “harm-based” test simply won’t do in world where some consumers might fear their stuff is “out there” … and not because there’s any harm to it, but because they don’t understand how all this confusing stuff works.

The second, and this is what becomes painfully clear when you read this report, is that the FTC itself remains equally confused about all this stuff “out there”.

The implications are clear: the FTC has entered into the regulatory racket around what they perceive as a near-paranormal racket of behavioral marketing, and this week’s report served as their first formal, deafening salvo.

The challenge presents.

But I suggest we actually have a more significant challenge we need to face, own up to and solve, first. There’s another, even bigger problem, and it happens to be us.

We're Gonna Need a Really Big Boat

The marketing and advertising industry. All of us. Because chances are you didn’t read the whole FTC report and chances are equally strong you might have googled those various types of cookies I name-checked at the top of the piece. That’s ok, this stuff bleeds into pretty max geek territory.

But it doesn’t take a senior behavioral analyst to determine that this is because we don’t get it either.

That’s our biggest problem and the only good news I have is that at least it’s one we have the power to solve for – but we better get religion and we better get it fast and we better commit to working together. When you finish reading this piece.

I’m not suggesting all of us need to utterly grok the deep-science under the hoods of our behavioral targeting engines, segmentation models, personalization tools, predictive behavior models, A/B testing labs, media servers, ad networks – cookie flavors.

It would be nice if more of us did, but at a very minimum we all need to get our heads around the absolutely essential nature of this type of marketing to what we all do for a living. It is not just a ‘nice to have’ within our marketing communications and advertising arsenals. It is the future, the future is now and it is being refined and evolved as we speak, by the smarter and more opportunistic amongst us.

So if we agree why this matters, a reasonable question might be who this matters to. I suggest the answer is everybody.

· It matters to publishers, almost more than anybody else, if that’s possible. Everybody from the NYtimes.com to Gawker, from FT.com to the HuffingtonPost, from Facebook and Last.FM to all those AOL Path sites. Because if it becomes too expensive or too time-consuming or too litigious to offer your advertisers this kind of smart, personalized advertising inventory, two things happen: 1. you go back to dumb banners, at best contextually targeted and 2. your rate card cuts itself in half, or worse. After you resort to serving ungainly shed-loads of spammy ads on your site to keep your doors open, the predictable result is simple: your users, readers and visitors get pissed off and leave --- just ahead of your remaining advertisers. Oh and if you’re a niche publisher or site or community that is ad-supported, buh-bye.

· If you’re an advertiser, well, see above. Just when we were starting to get good about crafting, customizing and personalizing audience-relevant message and ads across our addressable media, we’re forced back into a weird MadMax like ecosystem which will blend the worst of 70s couch-based advertising with late 90s banner glut. All it takes is one consumer ticking a box to “opt-out from tracking” and whether you are Nike, Land Rover, Coke, Apple, Huggies, Hostess or Dove --- your “online computer based” advertising reverts back to the bad old days for that person – and the tens of millions more that might tick that box.

· If you’re an ad network, especially one of the new breed data-driven ilk that helped us figure out all this behavioral science, if you survive the massive shake-out and consolidation, you’re likely smart enough to help come up with the next great – legal - thing in consumer-friendly data driven marketing, so I’m not too worried about you.

· If you’re an agency, maybe one of the old line shops, you just might benefit temporarily from the panicky and confused shift back to the old- school, spray-and-pray models you still feel more comfy with anyway. But it won’t be too comfy for too long. Because the nascent emergence of post digital thinkers, channel and media guys will figure out how to respond to almost any kind of regulatory ice age with the same opportunistic, organic marketing chops we’ve been honing over the past few years.

· But there is a single actor in this great mix that will stand to lose the most should the FTC and Congress move toward the type of misinformed regulating this week’s report telegraphs --- the very people they presume to want to help.

Everybody else. All those Gmailers, and web surfers, and mobile users, and set-top TV viewers and Hulu fanatics and Bing searchers and Facebookers and Netflix streamers and NYTimes subscribers.

And make no mistake --- the time-lag between the behavioral marketing and ad-model collapsing for publishers and brand advertisers and paywalls going up on EVERYTHING is months not years.

To the Barricades

Perhaps you feel my position shades toward hysterical, and perhaps you’re right. Maybe I should just chill for the holidays, since us post digital guys are already exploiting fresh marketing frontiers and user behaviors across the organic marketing ecosystem which would still include contextual, temporal and personal profile targeting models.

But I can’t and I won’t.

Like I tell my students – all marketing is behavioral marketing. The behaviors vary by need state, but a good marketer gets up each morning to drive and sustain those targeted behaviors that engage the appropriate consumers with the value offered by the brands we present.

The emerging science of post digital behavioral marketing is the closest we’ve ever gotten to being able to almost completely reduce the noise in the system – for consumers. It holds the promise of allowing brands to move forever away from interrupting to being available. Anticipating, tailoring and personalizing the where, the when, the what and the why of consumer desire for the brands and products in their lives.

That’s a choice that shouldn’t be denied anyone.

And so, colleagues, we now have a choice: a choice to roll up our sleeves, head down to DC, join the industry groups campaigning for self-regulation, and participate in the upcoming commenting to let the FTC, Congress and all of our partner consumers know that we are ready to lead.

To learn more about how to get involved – now - go here and do it… http://www.aboutads.info/home/

Today, the new Tomorrow

2010-11-21T09:38:00.042-05:00

One of the most godawful tasks "strategists" are asked to perform is some variation on the "futuring" session. Mostly, I have well perfected the avoidance art for these occasions but the sands ran out for me last week. Between airport gates and hotel rooms I cobbled together a presentation for a client future planning day that, as much as this stuff pains me existentially, got me thinking.

If you've never attended one of these sessions, they are fairly breezy, borderline comical and often a stone-cold waste of everybody's expensive time. A know-it-all like me stands in front of a Powerpoint presentation crammed full of overheated, underinsighted statistics and projections from safe industry institutions like Gartner, Morgan Stanley, Forrester, Accenture and eMarketer.

There, with breathless fervor, these futurists for a day will proclaim the amazingness of the imminent technological magic show that is certain to change everything in ways just several future presentations ago we never would have imagined possible.

Ugh...

So two weeks ago I got the dreaded brief: lead an inspirational "futuring" session with a select group of clients, partners and agency colleagues. After a short, violent but ultimately futile wingeing outburst I slept on it.

Then, like you do with things like this, I procrastinated. I was given a piece of predictive research from one of the annointed companies that make these things up and after utterly dismissing it out of hand I took another look. This particular fabricated tea-leafing --- in a rare stab at transparent modesty --- shows you what they predicted last year side by side with their coming year's future gazing. Desperate for a seed to germinate my thoughts I spent some time trying to pull some actual truth from the data.

And there it was: if you looked directly at the predicted trends of coming wonder you miss it, or at least I did. I needed to do that trick where you sort of look just to the side of a thing to actually see and focus on the thing itself. I blurred my eyes and instead of the things on the prediction chart, what appeared instead were the themes that unified them --- it wasn't "cloud computing", or "mobile apps" or "contextual computing". No, these were but keys. The future their antic predictions were trying to paint actually was about three uber themes that almost every thinking marketing strategist - futurist or otherwise - would agree upon.

Queue the swelling organ music, and dig it:

Ubiquity.

Access.

Control.

What has been changing all around us with increasing rapidity these past few years is now accelerating with near-lightspeed momentum.

The presumption of presence ubiquity at the heart of a consumer's expectation that they can almost always connect.
The expectations, of this connected consumer, that they can and will access whatever it is they require - their data, loved ones, their job, their music, their bank, their pictures - whatever.
And most importantly, the confidence of individual control each of those consumers exert around the when, where, why and whats which filter & shape their ubiquitous expectation for all this access.

As I stared at those three words it struck me that they all added up to a single thing. A new math moment of 3 = 1. And the sum is not a channel or a medium or a technology or a connection or a bunch of servers or an awesomely expensive piece of device bling. And it dwarfs mere trends as, I suggest, it is utterly essential --- a brand marketing first principle perhaps.

It's Mobility the futurists should be pointing out, not the interesting artifacts of its affect and impact on everything else.

Mobility. Now I had something here, a hook to hang a suitably disclaimed "futuring" session on, and one with meat, meaning, veracity.

Mobility. Not as the poor un-funded stepchild subsegment within the advertising waste of "digital" budgets or channel planning.

Mobility as a way to rethink and imagine everything a brand would ever say or do again when it came to getting and keeping customers.

I started building my deck and things starting happening between that Westin-induced late nite epiphany and our group futuring day.

First, I needed a real and actual trend that might compellingly demonstrate not only the silly futility of trend spotting but also suggest what we graspingly see as trends are silvery evidence of actual consumer behavior shifts. Shifts, ignited and fueled by the increasingly manifest sense of ubiquity, access and control powering consumers thru their daily life cycles as humans in the world.

I found the perfect example sitting right beneath my nose, literally from meeting notes I had attended the week prior. We're developing post digital strategy for a popular luxury auto brand and it appears that the purchase cycle has almost halved itself in the past several years. Huh... Put that up on a slide in front of a bunch of brand marketers and ask them two questions:

1. Would you have predicted this?

2. What do you think is driving it?

The first answer serves to further undermine the empty promise of trend spotting, and those who aspire to perform it.

The second answer, I suggest, can only be explained by this new paradigm of consumer empowerment and fluidity --- by their behavioral progression, presence and power within the Mercury-fast evolution of the 21st century market ecosystem.

But back to me. And you, of course. I had another problem, a bigger problem, and maybe this nettlesome little futuring moment could serve as crucible for cooking up what I've owed everyone for quite some time: a way into and beyond this post digital today, into tomorrow.

I have pissed off and bored more than a handful of colleagues, friends and fellow striving mavens with my incessant trotting about atop my high horse, loosed daily from its post digital barn, braying a new thinking about all this stuff for the past year or more. Admittedly, I have been heavy on the sky-is-falling and light on the magical medicine.

Well, I've been working on a fresh and actionable brand thinking & behaving model - grounded in the essential brand marketing first principle of mobility and it was as good a time as any to preview this to an expanding industrial circle beyond my students and closest strategy colleagues.

This is the thinking and activation lens that had been missing from our battle-tested post digital touchpoint planning model, with it's obsessive requirement for retaining the consumer at the center of the plan throughout. But that was - rightfully so - all about the consumer. With this complementary lens, focusing on 'we, the brand', the combo offers us a way to consider how to re-think our approach to planning. What a brand looks like, what it sounds like. How it travels and behaves. Layer this lens over the human behavioral cycle model and we have the necessary tools for a new form of organic, optimizable communications planning method.

It's really quite straight forward, and the only slight pretense at innovation is this:

Instead of thinking about our products or brands or channels or media or budgets or anything else, we simply start - and stick with this:

blending combinations of our content targeted optimally to the consumer context to drive the desired connection which, when the time is right, leads to a commercial or value exchange.

In its simplest application, after we've developed our targeted consumer behavioral life cycle model and filled in the need states, we use this brand marketing model to map content into the most appropriate touchpoint to drive the targeted behavior leading to our short, near or longterm marketing outcome.

A like. A share. A registration. A download. A sale.

I'm not suggesting that this stuff all magically starts filling itself in, but, well, it sorta kinda does... especially once we start immediately behaving and optimizing accordingly based upon our ability to act and respond in always on mode.

Ok, as reward to those of you remaining geeks who haven't switched channels back to Gawker or Mashable, I took a stab at testing this model out on an existing campaign. Not one of mine, btw, rather, the recently commended Mobile Marketer of 2010 winner, Starbucks. Taking all manner of brazen liberties I reverse engineered their award winning program to test whether it could have been imagined using this type of approach.

You be the judge, but I think we're onto something. While I'm not quite suggesting your touchpoint and media plans will organically arise like photographs emerging amidst the darkroom chemicals and fumes, but, well, keep at it. They just might. Mine are starting to.

As evidence from the field comes back, in future pieces I'll share more practical applications of these planning models along with thoughtful war stories for how we stole our way into the market place to test & refine our stuff.

Oh, and you should know, I think most of the attendees in that airless conference room of the future enjoyed our little collision of today and tomorrow in last week's futuring day. Not only did they seem to grok the new math where everything, at least for the day, added up to the new "mobility" principle. But I think they also followed along when we backed into the Starbucks campaign to demonstrate a plausible & workable post digital brand behavioral planning model --- a model for layering in "mobility" as the essential planning lens across the human cycles of our living breathing consumers.

Alas, in a nod to the fading, great ossifying norms of futuring best practices, I included in the preso a few mandatory pieces of whizzy eye candy. One featured these really cool nano-fiber clad space robots. The other, more my speed, showcased an advanced beta testing of these weird energy-generating, auto face molding AR goggles from a Swedish collective that makes 4chan look like pre-Brooklyn hacker poseurs from the 90s.

Or maybe that was from another future meeting I'm planning to avoid about what the future might look like --- as though it could possibly end up being that much different from today, or at the very least or latest, tomorrow afternoon. They've all become so hopelessly entangled now, for me. How bout you?

Everywhere Else

2010-10-31T07:24:00.010-04:00

I spent four incredible days earlier this month in Abu Dhabi as a grand juror at the first annual World Summit Awards m-content global competition. I can sheepishly admit to have stood briefly in the Gulf, on the very early morning of day 1, but that was it. The rest of my stay was with 19 other jurors from around the world analysing, debating - sometimes strenuously - the merits and impact of each entry.

At the end we had winnowed down hundreds of incredible mobile content entries down to an even more incredible handful. The winners will be lauded and feted at a December gala back in Abu Dhabi.

I was struck by the human creativity and inventiveness that shown thru the mobile programs. I'm not talking about visual and design creativity, although that of course was usually stunningly appropriate to the brief. I am speaking of functional creativity, adaptive expression of the application's features. Human accessability. It's the sort of "creative" we in the marketing industry often confuse with the mundane aspects of "user experience" or "user interface" or "info architecture". It's what makes media and content infinitely consumable and embraceable by actual humans.

But it is - especially when it comes to the mobile touchpoint - an area where most traditional agency design teams fall short in exploiting this, most human-centric, of all media --- mobile. The melding of content, design, function and value within the teensy little mobile screen and keyboard remains an essential challenge for your typical advertising types.

But it is hasn't slowed down the rest of the world, the non-advertising side of the world, the world I saw, as if thru a previously hidden looking glass, in Abu Dhabi this past month.

What I saw there has convinced me that I have been living in a strange double-shelled cocoon indeed.

Not only have I been encased in the insular, thick (altho also, oddly, thin) -skinned world of marketers, most of them still embarrassingly stuck in their "digital" ghetto, but I have also been operating in the decidedly shut-in wrapper of a very US-centric view on what the mobile ecosystem is capable of supporting, igniting - enabling - when it is molded in the hands of people who happen to come from anywhere else but here in the States.

I saw, judged and was wowed by an array of mobile content, applications & websites that has made me take stock of what the channel and medium truly have to offer the world in the way of a transformational gateway into our shared futures as a planet.

A few stand out that will illustrate what I mean when I say the rest of the world - the non-marketing world, the world beyond my myopic corner of the US - has been accelerating at light speed to capture and build upon the essence of the mobile promise. The rest of the world, without sounding too pollyannish, is quite literally using mobile to make the world a better place in which to live.

There was an awesome mobile web-site and application shared freely by a Slovenian power plant to expose its massive amount of operational data - pollutant counts, energy outputs, raw materials throughput, waste output - to a host of interested constituents. From a click inside their pockets any Slovenian - citizen, power exec, politician, shareholder, journalist - can monitor the big seething energy plant pumping and humming next door.

Talk about using mobile to democratize data, corporate governance, environmental controls & community well-being. I was jealous of my Eastern European comrades for enjoying such rich transparency.

Then there was the incredible low-fi high-impact Eko, a breathtakingly simple mobile message tone system affording the 60% of India's citizens who don't have access to traditional bank accounts a way to participate in the kinds of normal commercial transactions you and I take for granted. Things like paying their rent or mortgage, buying things online, paying personal debts, purchasing grain and everything else.

All you need is a touch-tone mobile and a local merchant who acts like a bank branch for the hundreds of millions of Indians who never even saw, never mind had the luxury to walk into, one.

And one of my favorites, the, again, low-fi SMS-based application from miserably impoverished East Africa which allows rural farmers, previously shut out of participating in the agriculture economy, to do just that. Their entry ticket to this previously exclusive club? Any basic feature phone that allows them to check and respond to the price and demand of grain and other commodities - in real-time. No data plan or other broad band connection required and the commercial empowerment afforded by such transparent and immediate access to business critical information has the potential to transform local economies.

See where I'm heading with all this?

While we in America and Western Europe argue and contend over pufferies like $1million iAd campaigns, a proliferation of purposeless and disposable apps, and the over-heated waste pouring into mobile display with the same abandon brands exhibited 10 years ago across the fixed web, the rest of the world seems to be behaving quite differently.

From rural China to the Middle East, from sub-Saharan Africa to the villages of the Andes, the rest of the world seems to be quietly, but obstinately applying the basic rules of delivering consumer value, enhancing civic empowerment and accelerating distributed commerce in the service of exploiting the true power of mobile to transform their lives, their communities their economies and their world.

After many years in marketing I have finally found my calling. Once each week I teach a class of grad students a course in post-digital behavioral marketing. I can honestly say I have never had a professional experience that both so humbled and exalted me and my weekly grind.

Each Wednesday nite I walk into a midtown NYU classroom of about 16 students - most in their mid to late 20s and more than half not native born Americans. They come from the Indian sub-continent, from mainland China, from the cities in South America and from switched-on Singapore in Southeast Asia. There I stand, an American born (Irish blood) 50+ geezer spending three hours each week trying to convince them that they are entering a world of brand building and marketing communications that has almost nothing to do with the kind of advertising that made their adopted land famous.

I think they are listening. There is much to be learned. And more and more, I, the ostensible teacher, am the one doing the learning. Increasingly, that learning mostly comes only when I get on planes and travel and speak with, and shut up and listen to, and watch what other people are doing - technologists, designers, entrepreneurs, technocrats, marketers, NGOs, brand managers and educators - everywhere else but here.

Playing on the Monkey Bars

2010-10-05T08:21:00.014-04:00

I took my son Quinn, up walking in the woods and high rocks in our town, Montclair, two weekends ago. If my own memory serves and our recent scramble up the low mountains confirms, there is absolutely no better age to be than nine. Ok, maybe 54 is good too. They add up to the same - "9" - some numerologists would say the highest number.

I remember the utter glee and wonder and sense of somehow being secure amidst adventure that I felt when I was nine. I can remember the nun who taught us, the volunteer mom who came in for "gymnasium" once each week, the after-school "touch" football games, which was tackle without pads, before altar boy practice.

And I remember the monkey bars. They built a fresh, modest but new, set of playground pieces @ St Columbanus School in Peekskill somewhere back in the mid 60s and me and my fellow nine year olds were the charter cohort who broke them in.

There were always the kids who wanted to swing, and the lines formed and remained. Swinging has its special rush of wind and motion and dizzy thrill. And - altho i was never one of them - there were those kids who loved to pair up with just the right-sized (even steven!) partner and squat and lift, over and over, on the see saws.

But the monkey bars were different. They were nothing more than a simple cubed mesh of painted aluminum pipes and brackets. Designed to make it tricky but still possible to simply scramble and climb and - this was important - hang from.

Who doesn't recall that thrill of locking your knees around a high horizontal bar, and taking a breath before flinging your head backwards and over until it hung straight down at the ground and the blood fused and swoll towards your nine year old head?

It was funny and insightful, watching my nine year old in the woods last week --- here's a sample clip http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XnZp8zMtH8I and here's what we saw ----

I could tell by the way his caution was tempered by curiosity --- not the other way around, if you know what I mean - what sort of human kid he was growing into. I'm not suggesting he was one of the see-saw kids, but also not sure he's drawn with magnetic strength to the same repeat thrills his dad became obsessed with when he was nine and kept dropping backwards into the unknown and unseen space beneath him in that Catholic school playground in 1965.

I began teaching a course @ NYU this fall in what the dean briefed me was a "digital marketing" course within the Integrated Marketing masters program. I now have fifteen bright, eager and - almost to a person - highly motivated young professionals. Having cleared it with my director and dean, I told those young marketers on our first night that we "renamed" the course - at least for this semester we'd be teaching, learning, exploring and refining our "post digital" marketing chops. They seem to be responding well, and, as is usual, the teacher is learning as much as the taught.

I recently also went thru a pretty important life change this past month - never a dull moment when you roll with Kennon - which has me now launched, as of Saturday, out onto my own again, quietly and certainly and, if it's actually believable, happily (altho bittersweet) ending a 28 year marriage. More on this wondrous, scary and penurious new life stage in future bleats...

So I've been thinking a lot lately about risk, and caution, and curiosity; and exploration, and fear and opportunity; and how all these sensations and behaviors - in no small way - add up to who we are as people, as humans in a very complex and fluid world. On the playground, in the woods, in class, and in empty beds.

I've also been thinking a lot lately about that playground 45 years ago and closing my eyes and feeling - seeing! - the wold flip upside down and the rush of uncertainty and thrill of dangling and pride in controlling the pendulum of my young body tick-tocking in the self-created breeze ... as Sr. Theresa Gertrude came to the door and blew her whistle, calling us in, and one by one, we all trickled out of the playground and from the parking lot and small fields to line up outside the low brick modern school building for filing back into class, sullen heads dropped in disappointment at having a good play ended.

I don't know about you, but I was always the last kid to milk the final drops of swinging upside down from the monkey bars and had to be called out sternly and specifically by the gruff nuns. To this day, my bad behavior manifests similarly when I am, apparently, always the last person to "please shut that down, sir now, we're taxiing for take off" guy on the plane.

From here at my desk on Mad Ave I can look out on a new kind of playground, and I consider where we are in the brave and ever-blustery world of brand marketing and communications and I grow both frustrated and expectant. Large holding companies like the one I currently work for got to be big by carefully recruiting and retaining a high ratio of see-saw to monkey bar kids. In my Wednesday nite class in midtown, I can tell, after only 4 weeks, who the monkey bar kids are. Truly now, my recent life change has me thinking, man, I sure am grateful to have started out - and remained - a swing-from-the-knees-upside-down guy ... because when you look at life and it's myriad opportunities, challenges and rewards --- at least with my training and disposition --- everything's a set of monkey bars. And there's little difference between playing, working, loving and living.

What do you think?

Who wants to play tag? (This is how I distract you, and then dash off to mount and clamber up, and out across the bars. I'll be hanging from knees if Sr. Theresa and her whistle are searching for me to come back, and in.)

The Standard Chartered - HIV

2010-09-20T21:23:00.000-04:00

The Standard Chartered - HIV

The Death of Digital

2010-08-31T08:24:00.032-04:00

As summer draws with a wondrously dry yet somehow seeping heat to a lovely close in Manhattan, my mind turns towards the near future with almost gleeful expectation. First, there is my favorite season coming - the Fall, only weeks away. Autumn in the US northeast is my nominee for 8th Wonder of the World.

The other reason I am expectant - with slightly more trepidation but no less hope - is that I received invitations to a funeral this past month via two very different death notices for an old but increasingly in the way friend. Digital died this past summer and, if the stars and economy cooperate, I hope to be one of those lucky guys to throw a few final spadefuls of deserving dirt upon it's cold brow as the leaves turn and the air chills, to ensure it stays that way.

The first notice, and you may have seen this, appeared from the keyboard of the lost but still striving laptop of Chris Anderson, the hanger-on editor of Wired. Teaming with author Michael Wolff, Anderson published a piece with the grabby, hysterical headline: "The Web is Dead!"

If you read it, what the piece actually seems to mean to say is that HTML is going to be replaced by "apps" and that the "internet" will remain our trusty pipes for drinking at this evolved font imagined by Anderson and Wolff.

The second notice came from Initiative's Eric Bader and his MediaPost interpreter Mark Walsh in 1-2 combination punch conference presentation and trade piece. With startling clarity - http://goo.gl/iw8Z - Walsh channels Bader to suggest that "mobile" as game-changer, not just channel, should be embraced strategically not tactically when it comes to funding its growth in the brand's marketing ecosystem.

Bader's advice? Mobile budgets shouldn't be bled from the dying corpus of digital rather from the general advertising mix. Let that roll around inside your business / marketing planning brain. That's big thinking. If some of us are right, and the post-digital revolution across the marketing industry underway is to be fueled and imagined increasingly by smart, strategic integration of the mobile ecosystem, it's simply fool-hardy and fatal to nibble away at declining "digital" budgets to try to hasten this new day's dawn.

Let's face it, even the most switched-on brands never got past or even close to allocating more than 25% of their all-up annual spends to digital. As much hand-wringing and breast-beating this provoked in the agencies where I've worked since digital dawned, there's a very good reason for this damning caution: to many brands and the agencies who love them, "digital" never really added up to anything more than a lot of banners and buttons and landing pages... and well, more banners and maybe some videos and, oh, yeah - widgets, and now apps, yes apps! and maybe some more landing pages and product pages and --- um web-sites!

Do you see where I'm going with this? Anderson and Wolff are crying the sky is falling for the wrong reason, at the wrong time and aimed at the wrong crowd. This isn't about apps vs web, this is about the battle for salience, relevance and brand engagement in the emerging consumer-controlled ecosystem of the post-digital era.

As we suggest in the sketch below, the inflection point of the digital age lasted for almost 15 years, roughly from the 1995 birth of the commercial web, to, well, these past few quarters --- or earlier if your brand happens to resemble companies like Threadless.com or Mocospace or Karmaloop or, hell, Justin Beiber.

However you do the math, the inflection point is over and we're heading up another curve, a post-digital slope if you will. I'd argue that many of the rules of brand marketing have changed radically since the last slope --- the Don Draper curve which lead us up to digital's inflection point at its cresting end of that gauzey, boozy erstwhile golden age of advertising.

So, what's a brand marketer to do, to not simply prepare for this new era but play a part in creating it - when Homburg hats, skinny ties and retro flannel suits may not be enough?

First, I suggest we take at least one good-sized step back before briskly plotting at least two giant steps forward. I'd argue if Anderson & Wolff had thought about it a little longer, they might have realized the rather empty and facile nature of their central alarming theme. Saying that "apps" will kill the "web" is like saying the phone book should have killed directory assistance. It's just two different ways for consumers to engage with content and information - on their journey towards the brands & products they're looking for.

Next, I'd turn to the timely advice of Bader and Walsh who report on one rule that hasn't changed: put - and keep - the consumer at the heart of the brand program and campaign plan.

It's a good time to remind ourselves that advertising doesn't create brands, fabulous products paired with consumers who love them create brands. Does a consumer understand, know or care about the difference between a branded moment of engagement delivered by an app instead of a web page?! Let's agree: not so much.

In fact, in true post-digital fashion, check the majority of the comments in the Wired piece (http://goo.gl/v0Sn ) and I think you'll gain sufficient evidence to confirm that poor Chris Anderson is veering loopily close to the graveyard of ideas. I can see this one planted just a few headstones down from (my namesake!) St. Thomas Aquinas and his empty exercise debating angel counts on the heads of pins.

But back to Bader and Walsh and what all this means.

I'm heading to a mobile trade conference this week and speaking about money. "Specifically, Mr. Kennon, how shall we suggest divvying up declining brand marketing budgets as we prepare for our post-digital climb up towards the next summit?" I will be asked.

First things first --- from a customer acquisition standpoint we're talking about rethinking how all the brand marketing pieces fit together and where the new efficiencies and affects can be found. Take a fresh look at your behavioral targeting methods and segmentations; your media allocation and optimization strategies; your data capture and integration costs, processes and connections; your all-channel fulfillment journey and - this one is as critical as it is difficult -your deep post-digital integration between sales and marketing.

Turning to the keeping side of the consumer-centric equation, we must rethink how the new touchpoint mashup suggests an overhaul of everything else: your opt-in and engagement strategies; enhanced customer profiling and segmentation models; smarter & more social CRM; pervasive, and more distributed (again, more social) customer care; and of course a whole new investment in loyalty programs which fully accept and embrace one of the most important rules we learned during the tail-end of the digital epoch: our best customers are our best media.

What's "mobile" got to with it? Everything.

The post-digital marketer should be looking for the mobile touchpoint to serve as their anchor for a whole new kind of hyper-rationalized marketing. The time is now - Q3 2010 if you haven't started already - to re-think everything about how how your brand and product marketing, advertising and communications program are invested in; or, scrapped and re-imagined for the post digital marketplace where mobile is not just a channel, a medium or touchpoint - but your mobile brand becomes the idea itself.

With a mobile brand proposition as the center-piece of your post-digital marketing, another fundamental rule change can be optimally exploited: we no longer need to silo direct marketing from brand advertising. The mashup is there waiting for you to explore, exploit and own. Think about it: almost all communications can serve to deliver against both direct response and branding KPIs - and almost every other KPI in between. Blended, organic, seamless --- the mobile brand expressed and delivered is the closest we've ever been allowed to get our brands embedded into the utterly human, experiential fabric of our customers' daily lives.

Ok - what might all this look like?...

You’re a CPG brand with rich consumer-centric content surrounding your products --- so maybe you develop a sticky and viral mobile app, which monetises and amplifies your content and includes links to your e-commerce store or wap site, and you distribute it thru social and mobile channels with links that garner high visibility thru organic search but supported also with targeted SEM – including local mobile which drives to store, aisle and POS….

So you tell me: is this a brand campaign? Direct response? Drive to retail? CRM?

See what I mean?...

Mobile changes everything for a lot of reasons, but one of the most enduring is its power and affect as the most personalized and social touchpoint we've ever had in the arsenal. So many of the lessons we learned during the digital era, from social media and search marketing, can be applied to our post-digital, mobile-fueled programs to create a whole new kind of blended brand and direct advertising.

If you get this, or are even slightly inspired by this, run with it. Make it your own. You brand will win first in category, in market... win big and win long-term for your customers, your shareholders and your very own career in the brave new world of post-digital marketing.

So don't be distracted by nutty prognosticating about whether "apps" will kill the "web". It's asking and answering the entirely wrong set of questions.

More importantly, don't be boxed into thinking your new channel choices are about how much to dabble in "mobile" by nibbling at your previously under-utilized "digital" budgets. You are now operating in a decidedly post-digital world. The consumer's daily world and the marketplace where it plays out 24 hours each day have been utterly transformed by the 5 billion little computers in their purses and pockets.

Transform with them. Digital is dead, thank god. So, mourn with me, briefly --- and then let's make sure our post-digital brand marketing not only responds to the seismic evolution underfoot, but ignites and sustains a whole new generation of fresh brand and product love for the things we market.

Sunday Nite TV

2010-08-28T09:34:00.012-04:00

If you live in America or sometimes behave like you do, Sunday nites have moved on significantly since I was a kid. Granted, this covers a fairly long epoch, moving from Ed Sullivan and the Walt Disney Show thru to the Simpsons, forever (still!) anchored or launched by 60 Minutes. Sure there was the occasional decent made for TV-movie, but it wasn't until cable TV realized that, what had been treated as family remnant media for almost two generations of TV gobblers, could be used to reach a usually unreachable audience of more sophisticated, monied eyeballs that things changed.

Critically, for the media ecosystem, content providers and advertisers, these eyeballs not only opened up but remained open on these previously dark nites for high budget, big bang TV fare. And so it came to pass, just about the time Bill Clinton moved him and his girls up North to DC, that Sunday nite and TV came to mean something together that they never had before.

This is when the great post-modern era of adult TV entertainment started with a parade of off-beat, dark and stylishly adult shows like the Sopranos, Dexter, Six Feet Under and now - of course - Mad Men. Queue the smoky congas and sad syrupy strings of the most spot-on telegraphic theme music since M*A*S*H - here you go http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tPY7icwcKJ4

I've been traveling a lot lately, and much of these travels means spending time with people (granted perhaps a lot like me) but living and working and being in families in Sao Paolo, Moscow, Delhi, Helsinki, London, Mumbai, Amsterdam or Beijing. Sadly, often these trips have me either waiting at the gate (lounge!) or in the air on Sunday nites when everyone else in Montclair or the city is huddling around their flat screen fireplaces to watch Mad Men.

When I land I whinily kvetch about having missed yet another episode and ask whether anyone heard of or watches Mad Men. So far, colleagues in all these places eagerly nod yes and explain how they connive to get and consume the show, usually with more timely success than I do.

Like many of us, I also get to keep up (how did we ever live without spoiler alerts?...) with the general Mad Men buzz and thrum via online blogs and, increasingly, mainstream digital rags like Salon, Vanity Fair and my little backwater leftie screed sheet, AlterNet.

The main man @ Alternet, Don Hazen, published a pretty pained and exasperated complaint about the show and its popular affect on our core liberal values this week, and it got me thinking. Here's the link to his piece http://goo.gl/EQHA

First, well, I think it bears repeating and reminding ourselves that, as my teen daughters like to say "Uh, dad - it's a TV show". The great weekly communal reading of it as cultural tea leaves is interesting, but, well, it's a TV show. A fairly limited one in range and mostly dependent, I'd argue, for its wide embrace and success on it's abiding aesthetic.

But that aesthetic is essentially flat. It's one man's vision (with an observed heavy-up on the lame & limbless) for how TV shows can be made enduringly interesting, watchable and - importantly - talkable.

All the cultural signposting aside - altho I dare me, you or any of us to really see this content outside of it's cultural mis en scene, could you uncouple the Sopranos from North Jersey in the 90s?... - it's about a guy with a dark past who makes it big. Yet remains troubled, troubling and almost septically contagious for 52 minutes every Sunday night.

Or, at least for this viewer, whenever I can catch up via Graboid, usually at my desk, in the early hours, before the rest of the agency gets to work @ our shop on the very non-60s Madison Avenue of the aughts.

Here's the thing Don, Hazen, not Draper - sure, sometimes TV shows are a mirror, reflecting back at us the harsh or imagined truth about who we are, want to be, wish we had been. Think An American Family (the Louds), the Simpsons (still my favorite ever) hell, maybe Dexter fits this slot.

And sometimes TV shows are a study in plastic entertainment (not the Dupont kind, the art kind...) where we get to try on fun hats, pointed breasts, narrow ties and slacks for an hour each week --- together, in front of the TV and back in the imagined worlds behind our eyes.

For me, Mad Men is a startlingly fresh attempt to serve up the latter whilst - and I'd argue this is the truest testament to Weiner's art and achievement - masquerading as the former.

Moving thru Space

2010-07-22T22:28:00.005-04:00

I write this several days into an amazingly frenetic visit to India. Have been leading several post -digital marketing workshops for clients here, one in Gurgoan and another in Mumbai. I have never been to India before and one of the things to a self-centered westerner like me that leaps out is the way people move about in public spaces.

There is an almost wave-like quality to the public neaping, tiding and pooling of people. I must surrender to it when crossing the street or moving thru a line snaking into the great mausoleums of dead kings or maneuvering thru crowded lobbies towards the elevators when my inner lunch bell rings between meetings here.

It strikes me that this spatial unity is baked into people as an enculturating artifact. I think you end up with slightly different public space movement genes than I do when you grow up in a place so utterly different than the one I did.

This structural mechanism seems to connect us, when we're together. It makes it tricky for a new foreigner to predict the flow of people in an airport, on a street corner. I imagine it might even go beyond spatial into the truly cultural meta-form realm --- perhaps it is at work when we vote or arrange ourselves on a bus or across a sandy ocean beach. Or within a family sitting down to dinner or across the corporate pecking order suggested by a densely populated conference table

My colleagues - the ones I often envy and respect the most amongst the more recently invented marketing disciplines - who are information architecture and user experience testing and design experts would certainly have an opinion on all this. By copy here, I toss it out to them..

For the time being, I decide to concentrate on simply not getting run over by the cacophony of traffic which slices its near symphonically demonic pathways thru these crowded and aromatic Delhi streets.

But when I get back and think about how we also navigate and share and inhabit more virtual spaces, I must consider how much culture mixes in with the nature to predict the human movements and sensations of being together in space.

Re-intermediation

2010-07-07T06:16:00.020-04:00

How I let my Boy's Life and Maryknoll subs lapse without even trying

I was on a mobile panel last week and the topic was tantalizing: how can traditional publishers exploit mobile smarter, more efficiently and with greater opportunities for monetization.

I took a slightly more cold-eyed view - how can traditional publishers survive at all - and can mobile be a key component to a survival strategy.

As is typical in these events, I was the token agency guy. Although that can be a lonely brief it often gives me the running room to be as contrary or at least provocative as I wanna be. People - this is what gets me up @ 5 in the morning while others might still rely on alarm clocks.

My argument is pretty straight forward. Traditional, pre-digital publishers, from McGraw Hill to Conde Nast, the Wall Street Journal to the New York Daily News have, what's called in business school "a problem". Their traditional revenue streams are drying up, faster than sprinkler's mist in Midtown today (it's 103 in Central Park.) To make matters worse, their traditional models for everything else - from editorial and content controls, production and distribution, consumption and passalong and advertising itself - have all been utterly disrupted if not shattered by the interwebs.

Digital didn't kill the publisher star. But it created a nitemare dream from which the traditional publisher is fighting madly to awaken from.

Here's the thing - the problem for publishers isn't a failure to adapt to new technologies with more pace, smarts and efficiencies. It is an utter failure of imagination.

They have not even been disrupted by the usual suspects aka competitors, although they have passively allowed an entire new cottage industry to emerge which is totally eating their disintermediated lunch and it's called the AdSense network.

No, sorry --- "traditional publishers" have allowed themselves to be disrupted by one person, and it's the one and only person they should have been paying attention to all along --- the customer. The reader. The people previously known as "subscribers".

User behavior changed fundamentally and irrevocably when people stopped waiting for their news and sports and weather and business intelligence and entertainment and crop reports to land on their front steps each day or flicker into their living rooms each night @ 6 and 11.

It changed (and this started over 15 years people so stop looking shocked all you Denver Posts out there) when they simply started to get and consume this stuff whenever and wherever and however they wanted it.

On their laptops sitting on a train with me now. In their pockets on their feature or smart phones purring in silent mode in the pews at church. In their media rooms on their home Macs, fighting with their kids and spouse for dwell time. Eating a harried lunch at their desks in the dispatch office. On their shiny new tablets sitting at their elbow in the diner off the interstate.

But a lot more changed when it comes to the consumer behavior than just device form factor or time shifting of consumption. What they read and consumed was changing. Untethered from traditional media and touchpoint constraints, a new type of more portable more accessible content is being consumed. Think of Gawker and Glee videos on YouTube; the Onion and Seth Godin's blog; Ashton Kutcher's tweets and Shit My Dad sez feeds.

Do you see where I'm going with this?

But wait, there's more: not only have the core user behaviors changed when it comes to consumption, the fundamental shift in how they get to consume has moved from a unidirectional subscription model to a socially infused omnidirectional sharing model. More people will click on and read a New York Times article because they saw it in their social media life stream (e.g. Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, RSS feed, IM, txt and email) than will click on that link as 'paying' free but registered subscriber of NYTimes.com. But this is a good thing.

And then there is this: Google. Or more accurately 'search', the step-changing consumer behavior that changed everything, including, importantly, how publishers connectd content to their consumers. Talk about disintermediation.

To understand how search disrupted old school publishing businesses you need to look beyond just how Google aggregates content on its own or even how it indexes publishers' content and decides (algorithmically of course) who gets ranked and clicked to over whom doesn't.

Google makes its money - about 90% of it - through two types of revenue streams, both from 'search'. AdWords delivers the lion-share of that money, and these are the sponsored links you see surrounding the top and right of your organic results. But AdSense is the network of web publishers - hold that thought - where advertisers can also choose to serve up their ads, surrounding content everywhere across the commercial web.

If you read publications like TechCrunch or AdRants, Mashable or Baristanet (you're welcome Debbie) you are supporting their revenue model with your eyeballs. In many instances, these publishers are merely inserting an additional click in between the user and your (traditional publisher) content. They are essentially re-monetizing --- even pre-monetizing - your content or at least eyeballs that once might have been yours to monetize.

The participants in this disintermediation range from bloggers large and small as well as a new breed of affiliates who have mastered the mechanics of this new content distribution model with much more opportunistic acumen than "traditional publishers". And all of them have come to understand that the new publishing ecosystem also has a new central player that, as noted above, has disrupted everything, forever --- you.

The individual user in all this is central to the changing model and one way of viewing this change is in understanding how the new behaviors manifest themselves within the emerging publishing model. Let's call it it social syndication, named for both the way it spreads and the effect it has on the ownership, distribution, consumption and transformation of shared content across the mostly digital channels of organic human sharing.

Here's a before and after picture I dusted up for that recent mobile conference ---

So - how does all this make you feel if you're a traditional publisher still looking for a life boat or a life line, a reasonably managed exit strategy or - here's a thought - a breakthrough way of not just coping with this new world but maybe even having something to say about how it shapes and morphs over the next few years?

Let's cut to the chase: if you're a traditional publisher and the picture above applies to your current state of diminishing returns and vanishing margins, what's your strategy for re-intermediation?

To help jumpstart your imagination, a few examples of publishing businesses who get it and are doing something about it come to mind ---

First, I think of Hearts. Hearst?! That old gray West Coast dinosaur? Yes, Hearst. Why do you think Hearst just acquired iCrossing, arguably the most seasoned and venerated 'search agency'? If you don't get it, reread this post and call me. We need to talk.

Disney is another publishing brand that gets it, as demonstrated by AJ Rhodes recent presentation at the Mobile Marketing Association NY Forum. (And if you don't think Disney is a publisher, buy two search agencies and call AJ in the morning.)

What Disney is doing is literally pushing their vast publishing assets, properties and content out into the mobile digital ecosystem. Talk about following the consumer, they're getting it and doing it.

Readers of this blog will recall another recent example --- the New York Daily News which I wouldn't be caught dead paying for in the 100+ heat of a Manhattan news-stand today lands on my high-end smartphone every morning and I get to catch up on all sorts of tawdry and scintillating "news" I had almost forgotten even existed. Somebody is paying for my eyeballs --- and thanks for that.

And finally there's the great disintermediator of the music business - Apple. If you're a publisher, Apple is fast becoming one of your most significant competitors. They started with music, and of course are now in the apps business. But look! what's this?... It's something called iAds, a wholly owned user experience by Apple which, as a digital media/publishing vehicle, has the potential to become the most engaging distributed content the interwebs has ever known.

While, by the way, it replaces the traditional TV commercial as it recreates how content is sponsored, monetized, consumed and shared across the digitally connected networks of publishers, content providers, advertisers and - oh yeah - users of tomorrow.

So, if you're a pre-digital publisher, still flinching at industry trade events when colleagues or press ask "how's it going?..." what are you waiting for? Re-intermediation is your way back from the edge of the ecosystem of relevant publishing brands. If you move quickly you might just be spared the ignominy of setting up your own AdSense account on the journey towards your post-digital publishing career.

Old School Advertising, Dying a Loud and Expensive Death

2010-05-28T14:46:00.007-04:00

Everyone in my world is all atingle and oooooh-ish about the Nike Football ad campaign. You know the one. Here's the full 3 minutes...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=idLG6jh23yE

Me, I remain perplexed why brands and their agencies (not all, most...) keep thinking that the future of all-channel campaigns are about taking awesome TV spots and formatting them for mass, non-broadcast distribution.

This is pure whistling past the graveyard to me and when I read and listen to strategists and creatives waxing about how beautiful and powerful and brilliant and creative and beautiful and -- well, see what I mean.

It's a TVC. It's on YouTube. It's a sneaker manufacturer. This is brand advertising that's about one Fall season evolved on from those fabulous campaigns we see on freaking MadMen for crying out loud.

My new most favorite industry wag, Ana Andjelic, writing today in the usually rear-guard, deer-in-the-headlights AdAge says it better than I ever could ---

The problem is, we are today dealing with a completely different sort of culture in digital. Yes, the World Cup is a big and awesome event, but how it's going to play out in the lives of soccer fans next month is part of the emerging digital culture, and not some symbolic inspirational culture that Nike -- and other brands -- are so desperate to penetrate.

Digital culture is based on tools, incentive systems and ideas that have absolutely nothing to do with brands or cultural symbols. How people get inspired and motivated, how they identify with something, and build their identity online has refreshingly little to do with brand stories told through 30-second spots.

Precisely. Yet so many marketers and the brands we serve continue to insist the world has changed while behaving utterly as though it hasn't. And then pointing to ourselves and cooing on about how good and cool and fresh and compelling our shiniest new piece of old family jewelry looks when we wear it to big events like World Cups or Super Bowls or Tiger apologies.

What Ana is suggesting is exactly what we've been sketching up and testing theory against implementation for --- a new kind of brand and product marketing in this new, quite literally post-digital world Ana describes.

Ana even offers up a recipe of post-dig campaign ideas, suggesting specific ways of optimising the brand experience into the increasingly consumer controlled mash-up of experience, content, transaction, interface --- driving & serving desires, fulfillment, sharing & exchange.

Where's the behaviour change in the Nike brief? Where's the sweetspot pow! of emotional + rational response? Where's any indication that Nike has any idea what the fan experience - alone and amongst themselves - will be like for the next six weeks of World Cup mania?

Maybe it's just me being jealous - yeah, no, I haven't got tickets or plans to head to JoBurg and, worse even, "my team", the lads from Eire, got hosed out their rightful place on the pitch.

But let's not let that slow us down people, at least for now, fighting into the gale force teeth of big old dinosaur TVC+YouTube campaigns like Nike's ... it’s lonely work this, changing the world when it doesn't want to.

[We can] do it. Just...

Here's a link to Ana's full piece... http://adage.com/digitalnext/post?article_id=144140

Mobile - Hero Post Digital Touchpoint

2010-05-24T06:18:00.004-04:00

Here's a link to this month's column in Mobile Marketer...

http://www.mobilemarketer.com/cms/opinion/columns/6339.html

Key point is this --- mobile changes everything, if you're a marketer.

I know, I know, we (I!) said the same thing about Search 7 or 8 years ago, and then again about Social 2-3 years ago and now, well, yes, it's Mobile.

It really is. This time I mean it... think about it: where's your mobile phone - right now? I thought so. Is there a brand there waiting for your attention? Is it one of the brands you manage?

See? ... 'nuff said, let's all get back to work. We've got a lot to do.

The Social Marketing Manifesto

2010-05-19T05:57:00.003-04:00

We are moving beyond seeding, WOM, digital PR.
Our tools help us to engineer social contact with our brand by making our content & messaging more visible, relevant & authentic.
Social activation aims at engagement… which will spark advocacy, even love, for the brand.
Findability & sharability are as important as impressions and clicks.
We are precise --- social can be targeted, tagged, tracked & measured.
We do not work in a vacuum --- social is planned, integrated & optmised within the organic ecosystem e.g. ATL, retail, Comms, Care, etc.
We will take responsibility for driving incremental commerce from social.
We will rationalise shifting digital budgets from bought to social.
We will translate all this into demonstrable lift in the markets’ ROMI --- driving device & solutions sales, service activation & new active users – from social.
We are always on.

Context: The New King

2010-04-30T15:51:00.004-04:00

I grew up just outside New York City in a worn and already then weary town called Peekskill. I was a busy kid and contrary to my highly developed current sense of crankiness a sunny and typical child. For instance – I was an altar boy. I sang in the choir. I played little league (catcher!). I was a paper boy…

My paper route covered a hilly section of Putnam Valley just outside Peekskill and I delivered for the Peekskill Evening Star. Each afternoon at about 3pm, I’d wait for my bundle of papers outside of the local candy store, unpack, insert and load them up into my paper bag and set off on my red Columbia single speed up a big hill that began my route.

Several of my customers also received one of the two New York dailies --- either the Daily News or the NY Post. In those days you wore your politics not on your sleeve but on the masthead of the daily that I tossed through your azaleas and onto your porch.

Get the New York Daily News – you were either a NY City cop, knew one, wanted to be one or spent your time defending their right to be hard-headed – usually, then still, Irish or Italian – staunch defenders of the middle class, still unionized, conservative mass.

The New York Post ? – pre-Murdoch ruination – was the for the lily-livered lefties – maybe a union house, but if so, likely either teachers or one of those new-fangled white collar unions, like engineers or phone company (there was but one).

I was a Daily News kid. To this day I can tick off the sportswriters and tell you what page the most murders were usually concentrated on (2-3) how impenetrable the gossip language was for a kid and how – for this kid – you ALWAYS read the paper backwards, checking the Yankees or Rangers results and awesome pic on the back page and then reading back to front starting with the sports page jump.

I have long since stopped reading or even considering tabloids. The NY Times and eventually NYTimes.com won my heart away not long after the paper route was passed on to the next generation of paper boys. For the past many years I walk (we call it walking, it’s not, it’s something more like motocross on Kenneth Coles) across mid-town Manhattan twice a day and must pass at least 20 paper boxes with the indistinguishable tawdry, thrilling pix and headlines shouting from either the ‘News” or the “Post”. I never would consider picking one up for second, no matter how funny or witty the 100 point headline.

Then it happened. Sometime last year, doing a competitive analysis of mobile media properties , I subscribed to the NY Daily News daily feed. I get it via email, which – like many of us – I consume increasingly on my mobile.

So --- here I sit on a brilliant, crisp sunny Thursday morning in April swaying in my Jersey Transit commuter train seat, reading the NY Daily News – in all its skin-thin detail and tawdry hysteria – on my Nokia E72 smartphone. And loving it. I’m a kid back on the steps of the candy store slurping my Orange Crush and pawing at my precious pack of Yankee Doodles wondering if those could possibly be real breasts or fake.

What happened? How could years of habit, choice and the willful, obstinate journey to taste and high-browedness all unravel by my simply reading the same content in a different format?

The answer of course is relatively straight forward. Context is king. And - as my own personal memory-lane tour here reveals - it utterly trumps content for the coveted crown and throne.

As a marketer, this is no small insight for us to appreciate, analyse and attack. What sort of branded value – messaging, content, services, media, entertainment – do I have sitting on the shelf or in the pipe that is being massively mis-leveraged due to a myopic or less than opportunistic “context strategy”.

As a publisher, well, the NY Daily News maybe hurting in carbon-based circulation terms, but they are now selling a handful more impressions every day to somebody to serve this ex-paper boy’s wide open eyes.

As an advertiser or media owner, I better be thinking about utterly re-imagining my funnel, traffic and monetization strategies with a more finely-tuned appreciation for how context changes eveything.

I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about how the 21^st century marketer can understand and attack these dynamic, morphing mash-ups of content, entertainment, information – brands – are the new canvass upon which we must imagine, paint and optimise our marketing. At the heart of this emerging science of post digital marketing is a fresher, deeper insight into how context changes eveything.

Here’s the thing: we don’t always have the same type of controls we once had over our branded messages and value delivery in the context of this new mash-up. This is tricky new terrain which brand marketers, in decidedly post-digital ways, must re-think how to navigate. I posit that the mobile touchpoint is the essential, hero mash-up platform, where these new rules of marketing can – must – be tested and applied.

As I write this, I just checked the ‘mdot’ front page of the Daily News. Today’s lead story? Sandra Bullock is apparently done with whatever lout she had been currently tolerating AND she’s adopting a baby boy.

I most likely never would have known that – or cared to – if I didn’t look forward each day to a few stolen minutes on my mobile, consuming a type of news (and media and advertising and information) that I haven’t savored since I sat on that stoop in Putnam Valley waiting for my bundle of context – I mean content – to roll out of my boss’s van and head with me up the hill on my appointed rounds.

The Mobile Double Dutch

2010-04-19T10:26:00.006-04:00

I kerfuffled and spit-flecked my way thru at least 3 more trade pieces last week about the "is it real yet" hand-wringing over whether mobile has arrived. As usual, all these pieces (including one I was interviewed for by a business weekly you'd recognize) take the same facile and absolutely incorrect approach: trying to post-date whether it's the "year of mobile" based upon the amount of mobile advertising sold and served last month.

C'mon people, I mean, jzheeesh! --- I really think we keep asking and answering the wrong question with thin studies, smug pieces and fraught debates like this - including yet another this a.m. from Borrell - as though "mobile advertising" was an appropriate proxy for whether or when the mobile touchpoint had finally earned a central role in the marketing mix.

It ain't about "advertising" --- it's about mobile as a service delivery channel. Mobile as a content channel. Mobile as a customer care channel. Mobile as a communications channel. Mobile as a community channel. Mobile as an entertainment channel. Mobile as a navigation channel. And increasingly - this study's sample notwithstanding - mobile as a research and shopping channel.

It is frustrating, bewildering and so damn old-school for trade press and industry wags to continue to talk about mobile's ad spend share as a benchmark for its viability as a marketing channel.

Here's a quick test to see if you agree: Ask your self --- when was the last time you clicked on a mobile ad? Right.

Now ask yourself --- if you're a CPG brand or a personal technology brand or a drinks or pharma brand, how many customers of yours - prospective or current - have given you permission to engage with them thru their most personal of personal items, their phone in their pocket or purse?

Right.

I'll buy lunch in midtown for the first 3 colleagues who make mobile the center-piece of your next integrated marketing - um, I mean advertising - campaign. Only entries with minimal banners need apply.

Twitter, Water and Justin Bieber

2010-04-03T08:40:00.005-04:00

I was startled, yet not initially excited, by Twitter.com's sensibly new re-imagining this past week. After a few visits (I actually still go to Twitter.com in addition to push/pulling thru my stream and on my mobile) I got pretty comfy with it pretty quickly.

No-brainer but smart and welcome features like scrolling 'trending terms' (nice rollover integration of 'What the Trend' guys) and real-time-fed 'top tweets' right there alongside 'see who's here' promo of celeb and other top-wattage Tweeps.

But then I noticed something else - a search bar, there at the top. Before or even without creating an account or logging in if you haven't yet. That's interesting. Here Twitter moves a little bit closer to not just providing the content to be indexed by other search engines, but to becoming a real-time - public - search engine itself.

It made me think about what Twitter is and what it contains and how it works in the grand scheme of things and I began to see how our image of "lifestreams" - what socio-marketers call the mix of feeds we consume & crumbs we create, fingerprinted and clearly stamped "Me" - is actually a pretty apt metaphor.

"Streams" are almost exactly what they are as they meander and pool, push forward and sometimes flood, all depending on whats passing thru our social-digital world on any given day.

Twitter, to extend the metaphor, is kind sorta the water filling & powering this stream for many of us - whether we ever even visit Twitter.com or simply use it a two-way broadcast and syndication pipe for our own personal interwebs aqua.

But then I noticed something else on the new Twitter.com, pushed down to #3 only by the ineluctable force of this weekend's power duo - the iPad (#2) and Easter itself (#1, but of course not for long).

Justin Bieber.

Now I try to keep up, but I had to ask my kids about this and - none of which have Twitter accounts (yet) - my 12 year old Fiona swooned and moaned how marvy he was (that's me channeling Patty Duke, not her...) and my 15 year huffing and dissing his poverty of talent or cool. (That's Victoria, and she's got decidedly high-bar standards for everything, including me and Fiona. Especially for me and Fiona, actually...)

But Justin Bieber?... huh... I had seen him in the lower right rail for the past 2 weeks or so on the old Twitter as a 'trending topic' and it had been bothering me about who exactly he was and why I knew absolutely nothing about him.

And then there he was again - this time on THE ONLY MULTIGENERATIONAL network primetime TV watched in my home, American Idol (Go Crystal!!).

But Justin Bieber, again?... really? ... For the equally uninitiated, follow my lead and get caught up here ---http://www.lala.com/#artist/Justin_Bieber Btw - dontcha think Lala like totally rawks?...

Anyway, yeah, Justin Bieber. Trending in the top 10 of Twitter going on now for at least a week, maybe more.

Why does this startle me so?

It's simple: the Justin Biebers and all his LOLCats (sorry my horrified FriendFeed peeps) weren't supposed to be hanging out on Twitter, I thought.

Or, more importantly, relentlessly and with great near-hival synchronization, tweeting OMGs and LOLs and 'i want to have his children' or --- and this is why he's been able to hold his throne for more than a few hours or days --- "if you're obsessed with Justin Bieber retweet this 10 x a day!" wasn't supposed to be what Twitter was for.

Wow, that last one is good. Really good.

That's a perfectly sweet way to use Twitter to do what Twitter was meant to do --- amplify us. Connect us. Turn single dots into big messy nodes. Sell records, um, downloads.

Ok, cool. But wait, there's more... I thought there weren't any 12 and 13year olds on Twitter?! I thought they were all alternating between txting on their 3000 messages a month plans and Facebook IMing. Looks like that's not necessarily true, or at least it looks like it's changing rapidly.

It also looks like that, while the rest of us old-timers got Twitter birthed and crawling, the next generation --- late-millennials? --- will be gaming & schooling new uses for old water as they dive into the pool, check that, stream, alongside us aging wannabe teenyboppers and less-than-hip socio-marketing dads.

I need a drink... make mine a Poland Spring.

Being Brave vs Oh Behave

2010-03-20T09:46:00.008-04:00

Just read another promotional plug from a Forrester analyst, cross-talking a colleague's recent report on their "it's ok, people, heads back in the sand" advice on the perils of early testing of mobile couponing.

Here's my tempered rant/comment, with link to the Forrester blog piece following....

"Hey Shar,

I'm still baffled as to why Forrester insists on such adamant caution when it comes to such an important new touchpoint / media vehicle like mobile couponing. Shouldn't it part of your job to thoughtfully cheerlead for early testing & adoption? You must realize that brand and product managers read your recos like this and breath a sigh of timid relief that they have at least some temporary cover for not having the modest bravery required to lead / test / win, instead of wait / follow / lag when it comes to marketing innovation, especially in the rich green fields of mobile.

My experience tells me that these kinds of safety-first (dare i suggest luddite?..) recommendations are received by marketers and used to rationalize repeating the same old media tricks. When, instead, perhaps they might be urged by partners like Forrester to start investing in more opportunistic chances to beat new pathways to consumer consideration and choice in a very cluttered and noisy media marketplace.

I'd suggest that there isn't a single channel planner out there who doesn't believe - know - that someday soon mobile couponing will be an essential cross-channel driver of consumer purchase behavior. In today's economic climate and competitive ecosystem, what does anyone gain from a wait and see approach?

Perhaps rather than focusing on the challenges and barriers, reports like yours can be better applied to urging a more specific recommendation for how opportunistic early adopter marketers are already out there stealing the march from the more complacent .... the (temporarily soothed) complacent who instead use reports like yours to justify doing nothing beyond the safe old mix of banners, FSIs and traditional promotional media."

http://blogs.forrester.com/shar_vanboskirk/10-03-19-do_mobile_coupons_matter

What do you think?

Post Digital CRM

2010-03-13T17:22:00.006-05:00

I don't know what you do for a living but me, I puzzle over things like what's next in the world of consumer value management. I've come quite far from fronting bad Monday nite bands @ CBGBs in the early 80s....dontcha think?

Anyway, I’ve been noodling some thoughts about the future of marketing and consumer engagement and am working on a a. blog post b. manifesto c. article d. book about it all. Pick one, I can't

Here's the rough headline thinking so far...

In principal, almost every brand understands that driving customer value is “important”

2. In action, few brands – indeed whole categories are bereft of even one – currently seem to understand how to drive it, sustain it, balance it with enduring profitability.

3. The founding principles of ‘direct’ and the ensuing artifacts of ‘advertising’ no longer apply. I dare you, prove more than one or two out all the way to Spring 2010.

4. Even the more recent sciences of database marketing, relationship marketing, 1-2-1 marketing, etc. are chugging to slow and unproductive dead-ends in the face of the…

The post digital consumer in the 2st century marketplace

5. So, in a world of consumer initiated marketing, always on technology, split-second product choice, near frictionless distribution channels, embedded technology, mobile everything … brands aren’t dead, they’ve simply changed forever.

6. But if you're a brand marketer, damnit, it's OUR job to help them get and keep customers.

7. I suggest Post Digital CRM is the paradigm for supporting efficient and sustainable - and competitively advantageous - value exchange between brands and the consumers who can and will love them in this unfolding century.

8. It is NOT just about marketing communications, advertising and post-purchase CRM.

9. It IS about these and everything else – customer service, product design, service delivery, voice of the customers, sustainability/politics, editorial voice, channel theory, creative expression, competitive aggression, fault admission – pricing!

10. It is the new humanity of a brand in the post digital marketplace – and within the hearts and wallets of its customers.

Watch this space to see if any of this thinking gets to a theater near you any time soon. I'm on it. Wait here, and I'll be right back...

Where Search and Social Meet

2010-02-28T08:46:00.006-05:00

I know we keep talking about the power of search and social - SEO, SEM & SMO - for driving brand visibility and relevant traffic to our marketing touchpoints, but sometimes I wonder if everyone really and truly gets it.

This week, Google --- I know, I know: who woulda guessed --- made it really simple for people to get their heads around this concept when they announced they would be including fan page status feeds in their real-time search index:

http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/google_takes_first_shot_at_facebook_search_results.php

This is big and here's why:

Supposed you're a ringtone, apps and mobile media brand and you struggle to get sufficient page rank and link love for several of your big products. It's just that competitive.

You do all the right things with ensuring your web-site and campaign pages are all hyper-optimised, you synch up your SEM keyword campaigns with a good mix of generic and brand terms, taking some of the traffic burden off your organic optimisation. You even bite the bullet and work in some key affiliates to the mix.

Still, it's a bare-knuckle world out there and there's only one page one of Google, and that's where you want - need - to be. Preferably above the fold.

This week the increasingly suspicious-and-maybe-not-so-not-evil-themselves people @ Google just opened a huge door for you. For us.

Shall we take a brief step thru that door together?....

Let's say you've been doing the right and smart things with your Facebook fanpage, treating it like it was your brand's social home page, populating it with sticky content, recruiting fans and sustaining a dialog worthy of repeats.

And along with a clever use of YouTube where you've pushed and managed all your rich video content pointing lots of inbound links to Facebook, you've also got a daily Tweets schedule pushing promo traffic links into the socnets. So far, you've built a pretty good fanbase on your Facebook page.

Still can't cut thru to page one of the SERP? Well, that just radically changed this past Thursday.

Run, don't walk, to your brilliant copy writer, social channel manager & product guys and develop a daily status update schedule. It's a copy deck on a timeline, tied to your product and campaign schedule. Maybe 7-10 status updates each day, each one focusing brightly on 1-2 keywords you really, really want to be found for within organic search.

If your Facebook page has garnered sufficient authority - mindful we've not yet fully cracked the full code for exactly how Google views & assigns authority/page rank for fan pages - then chances are very good you can end up in the real-time search results for these targeted terms.

On page one of Google.

And the sweetest part is this: put yourself in the consumer seat. If you're searching and in the first 5 or so organic search results you see what looks like a brand home page, an AdSense feint, maybe a retailer, a Wiki --- and then a Facebook URL, which one will you click?

Right. I thought so. Me too...

So get busy, get visible, get found and get clicked on now by getting smart and opportunistic about how you REALLY, finally, use Facebook to drive marketing results for your e-commerce programs.

Not all a'tingle

2010-02-21T08:54:00.007-05:00

With Buzz Google makes a decent stab @ owning a piece of the lifestreaming business that Facebook, Twitter - and my favorite still, FriendFeed - have initially cornered within their various strands of the social ecosystem.

Four big problems/challenges I see, after playing with it since it launched nearly 2 weeks ago.

First, are the privacy issues, and they launched it, apparently, WAY before they had thought thru these. The default settings (and they have been scrambling to correct since launch) could expose not only the email contacts of those following you, but also your own email address. And this, of course, is exposed to the Google search index, making you very public, all of a sudden, with zero permission.

Second is the closed nature of the system itself. You must have a Gmail account to access Buzz. Now, I know almost everybody WE know has a Gmail account, but it isn't quite universal yet.

Thirdly, is the noise. If you're used to Twitter and it's powerful 'lists' feature or FriendFeed and it's incredibly smart threaded, nesting feature (and groups) or even just Facebook's feed with collapsible threads, you will be stunned by the awkward, run-on "noisiness" of the your streams within Buzz.

And finally, its all about syndication. A growing number of us post to our stream thru a single client (e.g. Twitter, FriendFeed, Tweetdeck, Facebook) with feeds then selectively 'fed' thru the universe of our streams. Buzz doesn't yet support this, as above re it's still relatively closed system approach.

It's all about "open" baby and regardless of their lip services, Google cares about selling ads a lot more than it cares about being open.

To this final point, Google is trying to expand its impression base for Ad Words and this, esp with its amplifier affect within Gmail, is a smart business move for the advertising giant.

But as a user, you will need to ask yourself whether checking another "in box" 30-50 times a day is a personal social media investment worth the return.

For me, so far, the answer remains not so much.

Here's a decent sampling of the opinions from the digiscenti on FF...

http://friendfeed.com/search?q=buzz&start=30

The Mashed Up Value Proposition

2010-02-08T09:27:00.014-05:00

[Image nicked from www.thehalfpat.com - thx guys]

I think we're entering a new era of value. Human value, brand value, product value, living value -- customer value.

As we fitfully - hopefully - emerge from the worst economic downturn in a generation, I think we are marking not only a cyclical economic moment but a more singular step- change which is the second phase of the digital living evolution.

The first 15 years of the consumer digital living ‘revolution’ was as disruptive and chaotic as it was exciting and value-laden --- for brands and consumer alike.

This next phase is an evolution of that disruption to a more settled state --- a state where consumers are a lot more comfortable than brands and product marketers in how to live in this converged world, how to navigate it’s terrain, how to extract and inject value according their increasingly personalised and immediate needs.

TT The brands that get this, first and truly, will be the new winners of this next phase, this “post-digital phase” of the consumer, brand and marketplace ecosystem.

T To get this – regardless of your category – a brand must learn some very specific lessons from the first “digital” phase of this revolution.

· Access is ubiquitous

· Content, media, applications & services have merged

· Consumer expect “free” more often than not

· Although access is everywhere, old-school toll-roads still remain

Most brands continue to plan, wage and react to the last war.

Brands ready for this post-digital fight are plotting to apply their lessons learned in critical, strategic ways ---

· The consumer day is fast exceeding 24 hours of consumption/input/output/productivity/entertainment (thank you multi-tasking)

· The ones to watch and engage with – regardless of your category – are the young.

· This emerging customer relates and engages with brands in very different ways than the traditional customer

· Value is king – the always on consumer cares more for the immediate and enduring value of the brand provisioning than for the ‘essence of the brand’ itself.

We are not fungible, but we are mashable ---- our value is now understood, requested, delivered, consumed and SHARED in a totally fluid, messy mix of other brands’ value

This mashing up of both perceived and real consumer value requires a brand to change the way we inhabit the competitive, consumer – post-digital ecosystem,

· We must create new elastic & opportunistic partnerships and synergies with our ‘frienemies’

· We must be prepared to sit in the back seat of consideration, as we optimise towards the front

· We must utterly re-assess our pricing strategies to map to this new value ecosystem

· We must re-imagine our true and deliverable value proposition to meet the consumer in this mashedup world that they are creating

This - the next and current generation of consumer - are creating this world of mashed up consumption, input/output, purchase, sharing every minute of every day. Smart companies - brands, marketers, NGOs, political parties - must become as ‘always on' as they are. This is, essentially, our new table stakes.

Those institutions that figure this out and get there first with a fresh, available, high-value repositioning of their core product/service and brand proposition – will win.

Technology Smechnology

2010-01-22T15:23:00.014-05:00

Ancient Forrester Social "Analysts" - Back then, they got out a little more often.

For a deeply committed Irishman (who just happened to be born and grow up in NY with my 1st generation parents) I coulda had a yiddishe mother. Oy - those guys @ Forrester really get my Jewish, I mean Irish up.

The most recent wrongheaded bleat from them is their "updating" of the their cheerily mis-guided 'Groundswell' promotional mechanism 'their social technographic' study and model. Sounds so fancy shmancy, dunnit?

Fuchachta i tell you!

The newest news is - are you sitting - Forrester has uncovered a previously unknown species of online consumer --- (can you feel the beginnings of a "persona" forming ...? No?... huh. me neither....) --- which they've christened the "Conversationalist". These exotic hot house flowers apparently, again, brace yourself Brigid, like to send Twitter messages and update their Facebook pages.

Are you kidding me? This is a good enough reason to steal expensive digital print inches on Ad Age from worthy things like the latest Leno time slot dirt or a decent Apple bitch slapping Amazon screed? Just so Josh "Sweetness" Bernoff can try to flog yet another edition of a book that was wrong and dated before it ever hit the desks of thousands of clueless wannabe CMOs... who wouldn't know a real customer segmentation model if it walked right up and gave them a front-side wedgie whilst singing the planners' national anthem in full voice! (It's a song by Pere Ubu. If you need to ask, you can never know...)

Ok, so here's the thing: this whole way of viewing consumer behavior within social streams is so, I dunno, 2005! Which is when I think – correct me if I err - this facile "ladder" construct was first imagined.

Now this is one lone voice in the decidedly un-Forrester-like wilderness, but my experience in developing and optimising SMO programs tells me that - as a planning or targeting model - this ladder metaphor, suggesting graduating degrees of socialness, bears almost zero resemblance to the way that people actually behave.

We're simply not a world of neatly bucketed 'creators' or 'spectators' or - especially! - 'conversationalists'.

Josh - you listening, bubeleh?...

A blogger ("creator"!) around vintage cars may spend a big part of their social day actually "spectating" aka lurking in social streams about technology.

A grandma who wouldn't dream of blogging or even tweeting, spends the majority of her online life posting pics of the grandkids and vacations and the cats to Flickr and sends emails with links incessantly -- many of which the kids retweet and reshare, and push thru their Facebook feed - amplifying Grandma's influence and affect considerably.

A teen who sends and receives 500 txts a day wouldn't be caught dead opening a Twitter account.

Which bucket - I mean rung - do these peeps belong in Mr B? Huh?!... [sigh]. why do I bother...

The warp and woof of our individual and communal social graphs may have been somehow pegged to "technography" in the mid-2000s, but, c'mon guys, the "technology" itself has become almost invisible, fungible – dare I say trivial in the few short years since. Mapping social behavioral characteristics to graduated scores of "technology adoption" is - I hate to be so pointed and harsh but - meaningless.

What matters, and what has meaning for us marketers, is how people behave in these social environments when they discover, research, talk about, share, engage with - our clients' brands and products. You don't need a ladder to help you plan for that. Or a fixed set of buckets to plop your customers into.

You do need, first, a robust listening program that can inform a very specific SMO program design - true to your brand's essence, promise and product set. A program with clear and agreed strategies with actionable - and measurable – SMO (and SEO!) tactics that can optimised and refined.

Then you need a test plan, a measurement platform & some decent optimisation tools. No ladders. Ladders?! Pipes maybe, I can even see using ropes, maybe, for certain tasks, but ladders? uh-uh...

Only by doing, testing, learning will a brand - and their marketers - arrive at a workable planning and implementation model for "social" --- one tailored for reaching, engaging with, activating and driving loyalists towards social conversion.

So, gosh, Josh --- I feel like I'm repeating myself, am i repeating myself? --- lose the ladder, my dear and lovely Forrester tweep. Maybe it's time for a new working metaphor (see pipes and ropes as above).

If I fail to convince, Josh, please just dig this: our next generation of consumers is growing up and into a world where the idea of "social technographics" will be about as foreign, meaningless and non-applicable to them as a fax a machine, a paper phone directory or my old Prodigy account.

Google versus everything

2010-01-22T13:36:00.003-05:00

As usual, the most salient, even tempered and relevant tech / digital writing writing on the interwebs is over on ReadWriteWeb. A great piece today by Kilpatrick gently critiquing the Hitwise "report" re Google vs Facebook.

Below is my comment on that thread but it also got me thinking of how much time the digerati spends wringing hands and reading tea leaves over Google v Apple and ... well, Apple v Google and now always not just versus each other but Facebook and Amazon and, well Twitter and Facebook and Amazon and uh, Apple and --- oy....we're obsessed with applying apposites as a dialectic towards analysis itself.

I reckon that's the nature of business writing as a spectator sport. Here's the link to the RWW piece -

http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/google_facebook_social_networking_search.php#comment-182395

and my thoughts below.

It's an intriguing question. On one level, who says that, just because in sheer page views, visits or usage, "search" gets edged out by "social" means as much as it would seem. What matters, is what people are doing there.

When I search either on a traditional search engine or on ebay or Youtube or Netflix or Craigslist, I am usually more inclined to be responsive to advertising or other types of commercial stim.

When I am tickling about in my Facebook or Friendfeed or Twitter worlds (and btw using realtime search in the latter two is where search is REALLY growing) I am utterly undisposed to commercial intrusion.

So Google shouldn't covet too strongly my time spent away from their SERP on Facebook. It's not like Facebook is taking money out of my pocket that might've supported an ad Words advertiser or two. In fact, FB's recent exposing of massive user content to the spider just indexed 350 million photos of people as they looked at least several years ago... that's symbiosis not competition.

What makes this not an easy either/or question is not only the distinct and unique behavioural components of conusme time spent in each domain, but also that other intriguing stat that the Hitwise data doesn't get at --- but potentially suggests --- what if this is not zero sum?

What if - like with other media - I don't consume less of one to consume more of the other.

You saw the study this week that measured teens' time consumption of new media / tech and when you add up their video, web, TV, txting, phone calling, IMing etc it turns out the average 14 year old actually clocks about 36 hours of digital infusion each day. (Man - if they had that in the 70s when i was a kid, I'd be 90 by now...)

But back to one of your first and most critical points Marshall re the questionable sky-is-falling interpretation of the Hitwise data --- further suggests that Google can't be too nervous, because arguably YouTube is a search engine first, a media company second and a social network third. Huh.

If we triple its count like that, the average 14 year is probably going to run out of time to sleep before Apple releases a tablet or Nokia releases free global sat nav. ; >

Toys for Post Digital Girls and Boyz

2010-01-20T05:34:00.008-05:00

At the risk of appearing old and outdated even before some of these opportunistic nuggets age-out ... here's my topline take on some of the areas we need to be pressing forward on in the coming minutes, hours, months...

TED Thread re Thinking / Doing

2009-12-21T13:42:00.002-05:00

Pretty interesting discussion going on over on the LinkedIn discussion group of ed knowitalls.

Here's my topline thoughts with the link to the thread at bottom...

In marketing there is constant tension between thinking and doing - but at least we have optimising, which I'd suggest is the critical third leg of value creation, at least in marketing.

Marketing is a messy system - with many variables some easier controlled than others. But perhaps not too dissimilar to product creation, systems management, solutions delivery, retail supply chain etc.

It would be curious to apply this model to other domains. In my world, ideas are actually the easiest part to do (and my favorite ; >). The doing part is a bit trickier as it involves manifold new parts, people and the variables increase.

Optimising is where it all gets worked out, or at least that's the idea. The abiding challenge is to ensure that each three stages are infused with sufficient levels of creativity and bravery and, sometimes even, intelligence.

http://www.linkedin.com/groupAnswers?viewQuestionAndAnswers&discussionID=10115817&gid=138801&commentID=9570425&trk=view_disc

Facebook Steps in It

2009-12-12T07:04:00.007-05:00

You gotta love how much, they like so totally want people to think of them as Google. Ironically, just as more and more of us are starting to think of Google as we did the old Microsoft (who, if you're as old as TK, you'll recall replaced the old IBM as being the mofo sinister and rapacious technology brand...) here comes Son of Beacon - new Faceook privacy rules introduced with Orwellian connivance and doublespeak.

Look closely at the new Facebook privacy rules and the curious way the increasingly treacly Feeps @ FB steer you towards setting "your" settings and ask youtself - what's wrong with this picture.

For today's lesson, I screen-grabbed above mine (in mid-edit), which I clicked thru to from their due- diligency 'takeover' announcement for users first visiting their page after this week's change and announcement.

Here's what I see, tell me if I've been reading too much Lenny Bruce lately: What the FB team has done with these radio buttons and their options is create a false choice environment - one where the user doesn't have enough information easily at hand to make truly informed choices. Choices about stuff that kinda sorta might matter a lot about who owns, uses and shares my FB data. And, to make things worse, they also put the psych on us out by changing the filter groups you can choose from within the different "privacy areas". Wtf?!...

So - and this is why they engineered the form the way they did - since you don't necessarily remember what filters were set for your "old settings", without the laborious effort (I did it, it's an ugly and confusing form, unlike this one...) of drilling down and revising all your privacy settings - the average user might be tempted to to defer to my "old settings" and be done with it.

But that's what FB wants us to do, (and frankly, as a selfish marketer, I kind sorta do too, but that's just the ROI-talking, I'll be better by the end of this post...). You see - you may not change the "old settings" but unless you read really carefully their "new rules" you won't know what sort of permission you may be granting without doing anything.

Ruh-roh. Do you see what I see? It's called "passive opt-in" and it is freaking totally uncool marketing worst practice. Dum-de-dum-dum...

Here's the thing: Facebook is a really really really really bad place for anything close to traditional brand advertising or even "social media". So FB struggles mightily for ways it can "monetize" it's members. Exposing their content and profiles and streams to public search indexing and marketers yummily opens up new and fresh opportunities for that potential monetization. Nom nom nom...sorry.

I'm all for them figuring out cool new ways to pay for keeping the clean and well-lighted space's lights on. In fact, if they were really inventive from a business and marketing standpoint, they'd concentrate on how to innovate and monetize the incredible property they picked up earlier this year and my fave socnet - FriendFeed.

But please, don't start being deceptive yet smarmily unctuous about how uber-privacy conscious you are. Especially when you use evil forms design infected with uncool marketing practice to drive people to make choices they might not otherwise make.

At least not just to increase the number of peeps who mistakenly expose their Facebook selves to hungry, venal marketers like me. Nom, nom, nom... I lied.

Social Manifesto

2009-11-11T09:18:00.004-05:00

1.We are moving beyond seeding, WOM, digital PR.

●

2.Our tools help us to engineer social contact with our brand by making our content & messaging more visible, relevant & authentic.

●

3.Social activation aims at engagement… which will spark advocacy, even love, for the Nokia brand.

●

4.Findability & sharability are as important as impressions and clicks.

●

5.We are precise --- social can be targeted, tagged, tracked & measured.

●

6.We do not work in a vacuum --- social is planned, integrated & optmised within the organic Nokia ecosystem e.g. ATL, retail, Comms, Care, etc.

●

7.We will take responsibility for driving incremental commerce from social.

●

8.We will rationalise shifting digital budgets from bought to social.

●

9.We will translate all this into demonstrable lift in your SU’s ROMI --- driving device & solutions sales, service activation & new active users – from social.

●

Eat your poetry every day

2009-10-30T21:43:00.008-04:00

We've got this elected vs appointed school board thang going on in my town (Montclair NJ 38k-ish peeps, 12 miles west of Manhattan). I'm letting it get to me.

So, tonite, Poetry Friday on one of my other lists, I often push a poem out. I reckon I'm still feeling a bit puckish and unruly, and so in that spirit I hauled this, an old perfectly problematic poem off the shelf of the recent canon for our eager ingestion and concern.

It's Howl by Ginsberg.

I haven't read it in a few years and almost completly fogot how he ends it - (If ever really ended it) with this twisted broken yet elegeaic sonnet form of a stanza III. (Wiki sez he sez it's "pyramidal, with a graduated longer response to the fixed base.")

^{It's a lament to a patient he met at a psych ward in Columbia Presbyterian. He calls it "Rockland". Just for fun, read it with "Montclair". It's almost like he lived here...or at least typed here. I know what you're thinking: this ain't no psyche ward. this ain't no disco. this ain't no fooling around. (Take that Jerry! Sorry...)}

Here's that final verse, with the link to the whole magilla following. Dig it: there in your own personal cottage of your Western nights...

III

Carl Solomon! I'm with you in Rockland  where you're madder than I am  I'm with you in Rockland  where you must feel very strange  I'm with you in Rockland  where you imitate the shade of my mother  I'm with you in Rockland  where you've murdered your twelve secretaries  I'm with you in Rockland  where you laugh at this invisible humor  I'm with you in Rockland  where we are great writers on the same dreadful typewriter  I'm with you in Rockland  where your condition has become serious and  is reported on the radio  I'm with you in Rockland  where the faculties of the skull no longer admit  the worms of the senses  I'm with you in Rockland  where you drink the tea of the breasts of the  spinsters of Utica  I'm with you in Rockland  where you pun on the bodies of your nurses the  harpies of the Bronx  I'm with you in Rockland  where you scream in a straightjacket that you're  losing the game of the actual pingpong of the abyss  I'm with you in Rockland  where you bang on the catatonic piano the soul  is innocent and immortal it should never die  ungodly in an armed madhouse  I'm with you in Rockland  where fifty more shocks will never return your  soul to its body again from its pilgrimage to a  cross in the void  I'm with you in Rockland  where you accuse your doctors of insanity and  plot the Hebrew socialist revolution against the  fascist national Golgotha  I'm with you in Rockland  where you will split the heavens of Long Island  and resurrect your living human Jesus from the  superhuman tomb  I'm with you in Rockland  where there are twenty-five-thousand mad com- rades all together singing the final stanzas of  the Internationale  I'm with you in Rockland  where we hug and kiss the United States under  our bedsheets the United States that coughs all  night and won't let us sleep  I'm with you in Rockland  where we wake up electrified out of the coma  by our own souls' airplanes roaring over the  roof they've come to drop angelic bombs the  hospital illuminates itself imaginary walls collapse  O skinny legions run outside O starry spangled shock of mercy the eternal war is  here O victory forget your underwear we're free  I'm with you in Rockland  in my dreams you walk dripping from a sea- journey on the highway across America in tears  to the door of my cottage in the Western night

Here's the whole Howl:

http://www.pangloss.com/seidel/Ramble/howl_text.html

Good things come...

2009-10-27T09:34:00.000-04:00

I always hated the maxim that ended "...to those who wait." Seems totally counter-intuitive that we should advise each other to "just wait" and good things will come.

But, like any other piece of faulty advice, sometimes it holds true. Hopefully, that's what we're now seeing from my very earnest, hardworking and eventually getting it really right colleagues at Nokia's Ovi Store.

It really is getting better and, although I know we've all been doing many things whilst appearing to have been waiting, good things are coming, as per this rip from eWeek today---

Nokia Tightens Ovi Store for Developers, Consumers -

http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Mobile-and-Wireless/Nokia-Tightens-Ovi-Store-for-Developers-Consumers-417147/asdas

Check it out. Maybe get the kids something for under the virtual xmas tree this holiday. My favourite and the most awesome FREE (till 30.11.09) app on the store is the music discovery and sharing app - Shazam, here...

http://store.ovi.com/content/71297C6100F28706E040050A85320443?clickSource=search

Big kids little kids

2009-10-23T22:43:00.000-04:00

Just a short blip from the heart of Montclair on the Friday before the Friday before Halloween me and the little guy, my 8 yr old Quinn, shook up the Boogie Bash at Hillside Elementary with our two man spook act.

My voice is broke from trying to sound like Michael Keaton. I think it worked. There WILL BE some kids in Montclair tonite that just might wake up screaming.

Our job is done. Who's next?...