Three Minds On Digital Marketing @ Organic

Nintendo launched their Wii News Channel this past weekend and now lucky happy Will owners can spin their globe for world news as supplied by the Associated Press.

What makes it more appealing to view syndicated news on your television as opposed to broadcast news or online destinations? The interface, features and control of course...afterall, this is the Wii.

With the remote in hand, users utilize the globe to navigate world news and can view local news volume based on paper stack height. In addition, viewing modes include a slide show feature which automates news presentation by filling your screen with headlines and a tour around the world.

Chad Stoller

Market research firm Compete, recently released a list of the top December 2006 online destinations in regards to "time spent online."

While social sites dominate the list, the online destinations of Bank of America and WalMart are also in the top 20.

Derek Chew

I often spend time looking for music videos on YouTube, however finding them takes time.  I came across this site the other day - it provides links to almost every music video on YouTube.

The experience is simple and functional - a list of links.

Baron Conway

Aqua Teen Hunger Force fans are keeping the Boston Bomb Scare buzz alive with some just-in-time entrepreneurship.

Get your mooninite t-shirts here or, step up to the plate and place a bid for an actual weapon of mass deception.

The current bid is $242.50 with just over 23 hours to go.

David Freedman, Trevor Jones and Michael Miller

I’ve been in love with Swiss Chalet for….well, an awfully long time.  And over the last few months, I fell in love with their online ordering system.  But it looks like just my love wasn’t enough, because now they’ve upped the ante with their new  Group ordering system.

You start off with a "master orderer".  He puts in everyone’s e-mail address who are going to participate in the order (it saves this list so you don’t have to re-enter the e-mails every time you order), and the site sends e-mails to each of them, with a link they can click on to put in their order.  Very cool, but that’s not the best part.  The BEST part is that the master orderer sits back and watches, in real time, as the status of the order changes.  The page refreshes every 30 seconds or so, and it lets the master orderer know which members are online and doing their orders, and once their order is submitted, it lets them know that they’re done, and the total of their order.  The master orderer can even set a submission deadline, and send a reminder e-mail in case somebody hasn’t yet ordered! 

Once everybody has ordered, the master orderer sends off the entire order off to Swiss Chalet with a couple of quick clicks. 

Brilliant!

And here’s the icing on the cake: We did an order with 7 of us today, and it arrived in less than 30 minutes. 

To quote Adam Kahn: “From www.swisschalet.ca to the lemony wetnap in 30min – every one of them EXCEPTIONAL!"

Check out the demo and if you live in Canada, share the experience with your co-workers in the office.

Daryl Brewer

Fresh off their USA Today Super Bowl advertising poll victory, Budweiser has flipped the switch on Bud.tv

This could turn out to be one of the biggest stories in advertising this year. Anheuser-Busch will spend over $30 million this year on this online video network. The site is as easy to use as Youtube (well kinda) and features short films like “Finish Our Film”. This mash-up of reality show and making-of-a-film documentary produced by LivePlanet, Matt Damon and Ben Affleck’s production company.  Not surprisingly most of the videos lean towards 25-year guy humor with high art concepts like “Replaced by a Chimp” in which a chimp tries to do a real job.

This is a new play on one of the oldest tactics in marketing known as branded entertainment. P&G started it in the age of radio with the soap opera (little know fact: until recently most soap opera actors were employees of P&G as P&G owned the soaps!). There have been many attempts by marketers to create content online that provides a contextual envelope to advertise their brands. This is far and away the most ambitious venture of its kind.

A-B intends to tread carefully in how they promote their brands. They are acutely aware of how easy it would be turn off their audience with excessively blatant promotion. You’ll know it’s for Bud brands but it will be subtle s, so they say.  For me the most interesting thing is the ROI model. $30 million is about 5% of AB’s ad budget and their goal is to reach 2-3 million 21-34 year-old guys per month (lets say 24-36 million exposures per year).  That works out an average of $1 to get each customer to spend time with them. Even compared to a 30 sec spot on the Superbowl that’s expensive. Hopefully each prospect will spend lots of time on Bud.tv, giving A-B the opportunity to put lots of ad exposures in front their customers.  I hope it works.

What do you think?

Adam Turinas

Budweiser took the Super Bowl advertising crown in the USA Today consumer poll with its "Crabs" spot, however, it was Bud Light that won the Tivo Championship with the top two spots.

Taking home the crown were "Language Courses" and "Rock, Paper, Scissors."

Tivo used a base group of 10,000 of its 4.4  million subscribers as the basis of their study.

This is the fifth year that Tivo has measured Super Bowl activity. Reebok's Terry Tate: Office Linebacker was the first winner.

Chad Stoller

I recently saw this great post on one of my favorite blogs, Proper Course. This blog on sailing is run by a veteran blogger, Tillerman, one of the leading (if not the leading) bloggers on this sport/activity/hobby/lifestyle. Tillerman recently was asked to participate in a discussion on how to increase the popularity and traffic to a blog. He posted snippets from over 20+ active bloggers on what works.

In short, it’s about “the community stupid!” It’s about commenting on other people’s blogs, putting up stuff that fosters discussion, posting frequently, extending out to other communities where there are other people that share the same interests. Above all – It’s about sharing.

In the words of zen, another sailing blogger:

“Bloggers write to share, not reward. Most times they do not even get comments.”

Adam Turinas

Image: courtesy of surfstyle.

Social networking sites like MySpace are really starting to get used and abused by us marketing shlubs. To wit, the newly unveiled (I am not making this up) campaign from the embattled folks over at General Motors' Pontiac division: Friends with Benefits. Yes, blink a couple of times and then read it again: Friends with Benefits. The basic premise is that you buy a Pontiac G5 and then register your new whip on the General's shiny new MySpace page. Then you start pestering your friends to buy the same car and register it on the site. As this social networking ponzi scheme expands, GM starts handing out the gifts. Once membership of the (blink again) Friends with Benefits community reaches 100 people, they all get $100 VISA gift cards. A thousand members? Then GM breaks everyone off the $1,000 maximum prize. Not the worst idea, but OMG. The name makes me, like, totally ROTFLOL.

But questionable marketing taste might be what they're angling for up in the Ren Cen these days. One of the more talked about commercials of the Super Bowl was the Lonely Robot spot. Though well executed, the spot (about a suicidal robot) was perceived as being more than a little crass for a company that is laying off factory workers by the thousands. Maybe next year they can have an ad where the robot gets an early retirement bonus and loses his house. That would be sweet.

Daniel Turman

Update: General Motors is deleting the images of the robot jumping in the river. It appears that they are bowing to the unanticipated backlash from the tens of thousands of suicidal ex-employees living in the Detroit Metro area.

Xnet, a small European VOIP software company just released a (Mac-only) iPhone-inspired desktop client called iSoftPhone (turns out it's basically just a reskinned version of its MegaFon app, the existence of which I was previously unaware).

What makes it worth downloading is its easy interoperability with multiple SIPphone providers. The benefit to the end-user is that one can make calls on multiple networks to take advantage of the cheapest provider for each type of call, i.e., local vs. international.

I already had a Gizmo Project account, so I was able to configure iSoftPhone to use my existing SIP address and make calls. It immediately recognized the microphone in my iSight camera and the call went through perfectly on the first try.

According to the web site, iSoftPhone will begin offering an SMS feature soon.

It also just looks nice on my desktop, though it makes me wish iPhone's June release could come sooner.

Daniel Modell

Design Within Reach is again soliciting votes for their annual champagne chair design contest. The artful competition inspires modern design aficionados to create gorgeous and inventive chairs using their festive New Year's party castoffs. You can vote for your favorite before this Friday (02.09.07) when the contest ends.

Cast your vote here.

Angela Di Pietro

Here's a wonderfully elegant story told by Michael Wesch, Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Kansas State University.  Its the story of our online lives and how it has evolved to embrace community and collaboration.



Thanks to Patrick Dunphy for sharing with us.

“The job of media — and, for that matter, government, business, and technology — is to bring people together to find distributed and elegant solutions to their problems. That is not web 3.0. That’s society 2.1. And we’ve only just begun.”

This is not a quote from Clinton, Gates, or Branson.  Rather, it was said by Facebooks Mark Zuckerberg to Arthur Sulzberger the NY Times.  Here are some other interesting articles that capture the scene from the leading world economic forum and show how interactive media was a major topic of discussion.

http://davosconversation.org/

http://www.buzzmachine.com/

http://www.businessweek.com/innovate/NussbaumOnDesign/archives/2007/01/from_experience.html

http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/alan_rusbridger/2007/01/davos.html

-Paul McConnell

I recently came upon this touching article about the the coming of age during the golden age of video gaming in the 80s, written by Wil Wheaton (anyone remember Wesley from Star Trek: TNG?).

"Come with me, for a moment, back to the days when a quarter really meant something, and take a look at some of those games and places . . ."

(Note: Some content on the linked site is NSFW)

Paul Seid

What is Pipes?

“Pipes is a hosted service that lets you remix feeds and create new data mashups in a visual programming environment. The name of the service pays tribute to Unix pipes, which let programmers do astonishingly clever things by making it easy to chain simple utilities together on the command line.”

Either way, Yahoo! is blowing up the interweb today with the launch of this new web service. Check it out and share your mashups.

Jason Law

AdAge reports on a TNS study today that "GM slashed ad spending by more than $600 million last year, a drop so stunning it should convince even the staunchest doubters that the age of mass-media marketing is going the way of the horse and buggy."

Betsy Lazar, executive director-advertising and media operations, said through a spokeswoman that "the automaker is continuing to shift more dollars online and that she believes TNS underreports digital spending."

Peter Kim from Forrester asked me if I believe this statement is a vote for digital. He felt that decline has more to do with GM's overall financial difficulties.

I think its a combination of several things:

1. GM's financial difficulties
2. Major shifts in the industry away from mass and TV to more targeted and measurable channels
3. The huge importance of digital / interactive in the automotive space (80+% of people use the web to research their purchases before walking into a dealership)
   

Read the entire report here.

David Feldt

E-walkers will need to pay better attention in New York State or they may walk away with a $100 in addition to a new meeting notice in their inbox.

A New York State senator is proposing legislation that will fine pedestrians $100 if they cross the street while using their BlackBerry, iPod or other electronic device that may distract them from a safe street crossing. Senator Carl Kruger (Brooklyn district) is reacting to three Brooklyn area street crossing accidents which have resulted in death, since last September

According to Senator Kruger:

"This electronic gadgetry is reaching the point where it's becoming not only endemic but it's creating an atmosphere where we have a major public safety crisis at hand."

(image is property of ABC)

Chad Stoller

On his personal blog, Mark Cuban recently discussed brand "fanboy culture."

Mark waxes on comment bombs and the positives and negatives of these obsessive communities. He adds that it is a marketer's responsibility to manage their own fanatics, especially when these communities are threatened by a rival product/brand, under attack by a rival community or when their own brand (and ultimately mission) fails to meet their own hyped expectations.

Chad Stoller

I came across this wonderful video by HappySlip. It highlights how, today, a passionate consumer  has the tools / the ability to reach out with a personal message that is more sincere and believable than a piece of corporate generated advertising.

Steve Jobs was asked to describe Apple in an interview a year ago.  His response was:

1. Apple is a company that takes complex technology and makes it easier and simpler to use
2. Our goal is to stand at the intersection of technology and the humanities

It’s about empathy and understanding consumers, not about selling to them.  In a post-modern world, companies no longer really own their brands; it’s consumers who mold them; shape them to their needs.

Watch this video and see this all come to life.

David Feldt

In case you missed it, Ryan Block of Engadget posted a "hands-on review" of what passengers may expect if Virgin America gets a chance to run routes in the United States.

In addition to getting a tour of a vessel, there is an extensive review of the in-flight entertainment and communication experience which includes passenger to passenger messaging and persistent play lists that will be restored every time you fly VA. If Virgin gets a chance to get off the ground, we are looking at a 30,000 foot exceptional experience.

If you've had it with the current state of air travel, sign the petition to help Virgin America get off the ground.

Chad Stoller

On February 14th, Google's homepage displayed a Valentine's Day themed logo that drew a surprising amount of attention.

The blogosphere was abuzz with posts about the mystery of the "missing" L. Internet marketing guru Seth Godin even noticed something awry and wrote on his blog, "Oops." (Tip o' the hat to Virginia in the SF office.)

After posting the above image on Flickr, it received over 1000 views in under 12 hours.

I'm usually a fan of the holiday logos, but at at first glance, I also read it as "Googe". (Interestingly, Google does not own googe.com, though they do own other typo-domains such as gooogle.com and gogle.com.) It soon became apparent to me and many others that the L was, however subtle, simply the stem of the chocolate-covered strawberry.

One of my favorite comments was from a blogger who thought that the G and L getting together on Valentine's Day was romantic.

Google finally posted on its own blog, "those with true romance and poetry in their soul will see the subtlety immediately."

Of course, they've got the monopoly on all things beginning with G, so they could just put up a blue G and a picure of wind-up chattering teeth and everyone would still know it's Google.

To me, all this chatter just serves as proof of how much Google is loved.

Here's a fun link to Google's past theme logos.

Daniel Modell

One of our sister Omnicom agencies, Design Forum is a leading innovator in retail design.

Their chairman, Lee Carpenter, wrote a great article in a recent newsletter about what he learned in 2006. There was one piece that I thought was very relevant to the work we do and the challenges we face with our clients:

“Courage is a process: Last year, one of our biggest, most successful retail clients taught us this lesson as they willingly worked with us to optimize space – in spite of some deeply ingrained business habits that were clearly hell for them to break. I’m told some of their executives broke into a sweat as we worked through this rigorous process that requires you to let go of something in order to get something better. Well, sweat is the natural reaction when you ask a successful merchant to give up linear feet. Very, very tough stuff, especially when your numbers are really great. It’s the equivalent of Tiger Woods changing his swing after he won the Masters*. As it turned out, the client’s numbers are getting even better.”

It’s nice to know we are not alone!

*Tiger Woods really, really did that.

Adam Turinas

Bill Marriott, Chairman & CEO of Marriott International has recently started blogging. In my view, he has captured the true essence of what blogging is all about (telling stories, listening, learning, engaging in a dialog, nurturing the community and sharing one's passion) and I love reading his posts.  Jonathan Schwartz at Sun may have some stiff competition on his hands :)

In character with Bill’s love of talking, the blog offers an audio link so you can listen to Bill’s story in his voice.

His first post, on 01/16/2007, entitled “Uncharted Territory” (quoted below) received 80+ comments at last count - not bad for a first post!

Here’s Bill on why he’s entered the Blogosphere:

“I’m venturing into uncharted territory as I launch this blog. A year ago, I didn’t even know what a blog was — until my Communications team began telling me about all the blog traffic on travel and tourism. Now I know this is where the action is if you want to talk to your customers directly — and hear back from them. Soon we’ll add an audio version of the blog. That’s how I’m most comfortable: telling stories and listening.

Pioneering new frontiers is how this company was built.

Blogging will allow me to do what I’ve been doing for years — on a global scale. Talking to the customer comes easily to me. I visit 250 hotels around the world every year. This year I’ll be traveling once again to China where we have 27 hotels, 16 under construction and many more in our development pipeline. At every hotel, I talk to associates, from housekeepers to general managers, to get their feedback. I call it “management by walking around.” Like my parents, I value the input from our associates at all levels. I make lots of notes — and my best ideas almost always come from our people in the field.

Our 143,000 associates are truly the people who make Marriott a world-class business. I want to share some of their stories with you in future blogs. We are a company that is built on opportunity, and that foundation has made us successful.

Bottom line, I believe in communicating with the customer, and the internet gives me a whole new way of doing that on a global scale. I’d rather engage directly in dialogue with you because that’s how we learn and grow as a company.

So tell me what you think, and together we’ll keep Marriott on the Move!

This blog allows us to hear from you and build on the community that we’ve nurtured for 80 years.“

David Feldt

For those of you, like me,  who can't get enough of Super Bowl ads and who love to reflect back on past Super Bowl ads like the famous Bud "Wazzup" series, the New York Times has built a cool interactive tool just for you. It provides an analysis of ads from 1984 thru' 2007.

The humor index has been on the rise and 2007 sees 72% of ads featuring humor.

Want a quick reminder of the "irrational exuberance" of the dot.com boom? Look at the pets.com ad in 2000.

Enjoy!

Using GPS tracked cyclists and lots of video to create a really immersive experience.

Remember Quokka sports?

And one of the best Flex based apps I've seen to date.

http://www.amgentourofcalifornia.com/docroot/tourtracker2/index.html

Jim Bachalo

A friend recently sent me a link to Cute with Chris,  a quirky three-minute video web series featuring user-submitted photos of pets. The webisodes are quickly becoming a sensation among animals lovers for their offbeat humor.  Written and hosted by Chris Leavins, the show is like a video version of the popular web site cuteoverload.com. The script and delivery is funny and unexpected, and videos often come with hilarious disclaimers such as "Warning: This episode contains cat sexuality."

I am hooked—it’s funny and it has adorable pets. The show also does a lot to save homeless animals as many of the critters featured are also available for adoption to residents of Los Angeles. Episodes can also be viewed on MySpace or Itunes.

Angela Di Pietro

Using empathy to drive process

By Misha Cornes

I don’t know a lot about makeup. When Organic started the pitch process for a major pitch for a cosmetics company, I thought Bobbi Brown was married to Whitney and that MAC was a line of Apple products. How could we get smart about women’s cosmetics? The answer was to immerse the team in the lives of women who use the product.

We canvassed industry experts, talked to salespeople in department stores, filled a war room with shots from beauty magazines, and ran intercept interviews at makeup counters. But for me, the ‘a-ha’ moment came from talking directly to a customer in her natural environment. I was out at the home of a retired school teacher, getting a tour of her apartment and asking almost as an aside about the brands she cared about. She was on a budget, and she talked with pride about various bargains in her kitchen and living room. When we got to the bathroom, her sink was filled with Clinique and Prescriptives products- all bought at full price from a department store. “These are essentials,” she said. “I would never skimp on any of this.” I understood in an instant why cosmetics are an $8 billion-a-year business.

It’s moments like this that help explain why Organic, an interactive agency, has made empathetic customer research an integral part of our process. We use ethnography and personas to help our clients uncover hidden insights that lead to groundbreaking ideas.

Vidmeter is a simple video tracking service that allows you to track all views and comments for free across all the major social video networks.

http://www.vidmeter.com/

Jason Law

To say that online identity authentication has become a mess is like saying that global warming is a small spec in our distant future. With the slew of online services such as online banking, bill payment, photo sharing, and the tens of thousands of other password protected services that we use everyday; one person can have literally fifteen different logins at various sites all over the web.

While temporary solutions have sprung up all over the place in the form of software that stores your usernames & passwords, there’s still been a great need for a simplified, real world solution. That’s why some very smart folks got together and created an open, free framework for online identity, called OpenID.

The central idea behind OpenID is actually an idea borrowed from the web – what better place to look for a solution? Just as each website online has its own identifying address called a URL, with OpenID, so does each visitor to a site. A unique identifier called a URI (Uniform Resource Identifier) is assigned to you by your OpenID Provider. To login to an OpenID-enabled website (even one you've never been to before), just type your OpenID URI. The website will then redirect you to your OpenID Provider to login using whatever credentials it requires. Once authenticated, your OpenID provider will send you back to the website with the necessary credentials to log you in.

At the end of the day, not only does this strengthen & simplify the sign-on process of secure sites, but it also allows the user to specify exactly what personal information should be shared by their identity provider. While it has taken some time for the movement to get under way, it has recently gotten a jolt from the likes of Microsoft, AOL, Yahoo & Wikipedia, who announced that they would be supporting the open standard.

Max Zabramny

SimulScribe has come up with an elegant solution to one of my pet peeves – voicemail and the ridiculously laborious and time wasting process of retrieving voicemail messages.

I just signed up and tested the system and it works really smoothly. They provide you with a call-forward number that you program into your (mobile or landline) phone.  When someone leaves you a voicemail, their system converts your voicemail messages into text (using some very cool voice recognition technology) and emails you the transcribed message and a digital audio file of the message to your email with time-stamp and caller ID info attached.  You can now simply read and/or listen to your messages the same way you do with your regular email.

The company has been featured in the NY Times, WSJ and most recently in “The Next 25” in Business 2.0

David Feldt

Web-centric companies like Organic spend a lot of digital ink chronicling the ways that the Internet is driving cultural change.  Social networking in particular is a unique web phenomenon that has  profound implications for the way that modern humans interact with one another.

But after a vacation spent entirely offline, I've had a chance to think about the way that the web can simply reflect rather than drive popular culture.

A great example is product scarcity.  (Forced) exclusivity is an important trend in traditional retailing that is finding expression online, which is ironic since the promise of the web is normally about ubiquity and ready access of products and services.  Invitation-only Gmail was one of the first web-only services to break this rule.

But among hip-hop brands, particularly high-end sneakers and clothing, limited runs are standard.  At the Adidas Originals Store in Soho, for example, retailers hang up an article of clothing on a chalkboard and keep a running total of how many were sold and how many are left in stock.

And next month, New York's sneaker and sportswear pilgrimage site Training Camp will open the Complex Platinum Club inside the store.  A joint venture between Training Camp and Complex magazine, the store will sell limited-edition sneakers, cellphones, and other street status items to celebrities and tastemakers who qualify for VIP status.

The web's response is Privé, an invitation-only section of Forzieri.com, an online purveyor of luxury fashion goods.  Forzieri's best customers will have access to exclusives and limited editions of designer merchandise.  "It's like going to a popular night club," said founder Andrea Forzieri.  "When the bouncer refuses you entry, you want more than anything to get in."

I'm undecided about whether this is a good thing or a bad thing, but it's clearly a countervailing trend online that borrows from the offline world.  And are there other great examples of online exclusivity out there? 

[Photo credit: gillianleigh]

Misha Cornes

Apparently undeterred by Cartoon Network's Aqua Teen Hunger Force controversy, Toyota's Scion brand has launched an aggressive integrated marketing campaign in major metros around the country, including San Francisco's Bernal Heights neighborhood.  This gruesome guerilla poster points to want2bsquare.com, a mysterious and interesting interactive website. 

I love website experiences that require unraveling, although to be honest I usually get fed up and have to ask Google what's going on.

Tower of Grantville is a 30-second spot from Buck that also drives to want2bsqaure.  It was  briefly up on YouTube and Buck's own site, but has been removed for unknown reasons.   Anyone care to commment on the content or point to another source?  [Thanks James]

Misha Cornes

Remember Google Video? And what happened to YouTube?

Well, there’s a service being offered by BrightGIS that lets you promote three dimensional models of your business location within Google Earth. Its currently not an exceptional offering but one can see the possibilities.  They are also offering Google Earth 3-D virtual billboards. 

Are we about to see Google Earth morph into a SecondLife clone to be followed shortly by an announcement that Google has acquired SecondLife? 

What do you think?

David Feldt