Three Minds On Digital Marketing @ Organic

In addition to highlighting the dubious talents and hilarious misfortunes of the population at large, online video is becoming a channel for thoughtful UGC that provides users real value not available on more mainstream channels.

A terrific example is DadLabs, a website created by four teachers from Texas. They developed hundreds of entertaining short videos concerning parenting issues that may not have been addressed before - and do it from a male perspective.

This has been a perfect fit for the internet platform since both the short issue-specific format (readily search-able) and audience (new fathers) are less suited for television.  And indeed DadLabs has proven successful, as in under a year they are already count Wal-Mart, Hertz and CapOne among their sponsors. 
 
Joshua Fischer

While I won't be experiencing the full value of this site until I visit Chicago or San Francisco next, I thought the idea was ingenious. Foodiebytes allows you to search for restaurants within a metropolitan area by naming the ingredient or dish that you are craving. With one click, I was able to find an authentic Italian restaurant serving the wild boar pappardelle I’ve been longing for since getting back to the states.

Marta Strickland

In order to propel the popularity of its already well-hyped web services program, Amazon has launched the Web Services Start-Up Challenge. The rules are simple, seven finalists have a limited amount of time to produce their start-up site using only Amazon web services, which are a set of tools to allow scalable storage and hosting of web sites and applications. The winner receives $50,000 in cash, $50,000 in Amazon Web Services Credits, and an investment offer from Amazon themselves – not too shabby.

Over the last year, numerous big names in the industry have been offloading all or some of their processing to Amazon’s new kid on the (web hosting) block.

Max Zabramny

Imagine my surprise when what I originally thought was an opportunity to view a Martin Scorsese take on an unreleased Hitchcock script, turned out to be a mockumentary done a la Spinal Tap.  Even better was the fact it’s actually branded content created to support Freixenet champagne.
 
An important note is that this was done by an academy award winning director, and a major commercial and a motion picture production company (RSA – Ridley Scott & Associates).  It shows that short form content distributed digitally can be a legitimate art form where both the craft of creating excellent entertainment and the business of building a brand can come together seamlessly.
 
http://www.scorsesefilmfreixenet.com/video_eng.htm
 
Chris Chavkin

Alex Frankel, a business journalist and a keen observer of the hidden cultural norms that drive corporate America, has a new book out.  Punching In: The Unauthorized Adventures of a Front-Line Employee chronicles his two years undercover as a barista at Starbucks, a UPS driver, and at the retail counters of Gap, Apple, and Enterprise Rent-A-Car. It's a great premise.  Who doesn't want to get the insider perspective on some of the most admired consumer brands?  Alex focuses as much attention on how these companies recruit and train to enforce certain cultural values as he does to the experience of the job itself.  For advertisers who are looking to turn their customers into brand ambassadors, it's worth thinking about how these companies systematically go about turning hourly workers into successful messangers of the brand.

I met Alex during his stint as an Organic copywriter (future research?), and I had a chance to ask him some questions about the book.

Can you talk a little about the genesis of the project? And why a front-line worker and not, say, an entry-level employee?

When I was about 17 I met a guy who had worked as a UPS driver and he told me all about that job. He told me specifically about how much he had been analyzed and examined by some scientists sent from corporate headquarters: They had measured things like how long it took him to walk an average package to someone’s front door from his truck. The level to which they cared about such things intrigued me and from then on I knew I had to work for UPS some day, and to live the brand. My goal was to work entry-level jobs on the front-lines of customer service so I could stand in as the face of a given company.

For an ad agency like Organic, it seems like a fantasy to spend time with a brand the way you did - to really live and breathe it (although Agency.com was ridiculed precisely for this when they did their Subway pitch). How did being a front-line employee get you inside the brand?

When you are a front-line employee you represent a brand, a company, to the outside world. You are a channel through which a company can showcase what it stands for and represents. By working on the front-lines, as I did, I was able to bring in my understanding of branding and corporate culture and then see how companies trained me and indoctrinated me into their cultures; I could see how they were making me into one of them (or not).

What were some of the more intriguing differences between the consumer’s perceptions of the brand and what you actually encountered?

I went in with a feeling that all the frontline jobs I was applying to were jobs that essentially drew from the same talent pool, but I was completely wrong. Someone who elects to work at Starbucks is a very different person from someone who gets hired and stays on for ten years at UPS. There’s a self-selection process in play that I had not understood and that surprised me greatly. As a customer, by and large you don’t really know how a company uses its employees and what their true roles are. In each place I worked I found examples of this intriguing: Gap workers are given many incentives to sign up customers for GapCards; when Starbucks launches a new drink it tries to convince patrons to buy them; UPS drivers must work their way up from loading trucks to driving them.

Star Wars fan?  Sneakerhead?  $500 burning a hole in your pocket?  Meet the Adidas Consortium Super Star, also known as the limited Star Wars Edition. 

Is it it just me, or is do we have vertical social networks to thank for crazy mashup products like this? Read more from Murris at Bayareakicks.com - even more niche than Sneakerplay.

Misha Cornes

The Popbitch(UK) newsletter reports this week that a senior music industry official in London told them that 2 out of every 3 music industry jobs in London will be made redundant in early 2008.

The newsletter goes on...

Well, looking at the charts you wonder how much of an industry is needed - people are buying classic Christmas songs, Mariah Carey, Pogues, Shaky etc, and there's a palpable air of boredom about heavily hyped acts like X Factor, Spice Girls and Kylie. The tune that's getting people excited is an old New Orleans soul track by Ernie K Doe, the soundtrack to the Boots advert. It's out on Souljazz records. None of the majors has shown an interest.

Here Come the Girls - the track in question - was released in 1970.

I have noticed that as we ramp up projects with video, music tends to be atmospheric, or worse, an afterthought. If Mother and Boots can use television to make a 40-year old soul track the Christmas number one in the UK (a big deal by the way), isn't it now within the realm of possibility for us - with our innate advantage in the digital channel where most people now connect with music - to do the same online?

Alex Churchill

Coming from New York, home of the New York Knickerbockers and their much detested owner and GM, I was particularly interested in the emergence My Football Club as an online social community that allows its members to own and control their own real live soccer club, Ebbsfleet United.  

This will certainly test whether a pure democracy (all 50,000 members votes count equally) of loyal fans can be more effective than the monarchy model of modern sports ownership.  
 
Joshua Fischer 

Lots of discussion at Organic last week about WPP's $4.5 billion deal with Dell. Thanks in large part to the personal intervention of Sir Martin Sorrell, WPP bested IPG on a seven-month pitch worth $150 million in revenue per year.   But the really eye-popping part of the deal- WPP agreed to form an entirely new, 1000-person agency to service all of Dell's marketing needs.

It's still too soon to tell whether Dell's approach will have a ripple effect throughout the industry.  But to us, there a couple of clear implications:

Clients are desperate to have a single, integrated offering
Sophisticated marketers are grappling with the multi-specialist model.  Their traditional agencies are not natural connectors, and they are not equipped to pull all the threads together. There are few true multi-disciplinary agencies to choose from, and Dell is using its market power to create a bespoke agency. To solve problems like Dell’s, you almost have to start from scratch, and that’s what Sir Martin is doing. 

Agency models come and go
According to Ad Age, this new agency instantly becomes a Top-30 marketing organization.  But there have been a number of big bang organizational models that clients have tried over the years.  At Apple, they had an in-house team in the mid-eighties, disbanded it for a number of years and then assembled a new team during the downturn. Consolidation with a single holding company was the choice for Omnicom clients Bank of America and Chrysler, although BofA's new CMO just put the media portion into review.  Nike was with Wieden for decades but shook things up by adding Crispin Porter to the roster.  Best-of-breed has been the defacto choice for Coke, McDonald's, and many other huge brands.

It still comes down to the talent
It's one thing to declare you are starting a best-of-breed industry, but another thing to actually staff it.  From an leadership point of view, WPP is being forced to pull key executives from other parts of their business to make good on their commitment.  For example, Mitch Caplan, currently CMO tasked with turning around Y&R, has been pulled to lead the transition team.  And if you were a rank-and-file WPP employee, would you leave your stable multi-client agency to work for a new shop solely dedicated to Dell?  And on the client side of the equation, there's no guarantee that changes to the executive leadership team at Dell won't mean another agency shake-up.

Do you think the bespoke agency model is here to stay?

Misha Cornes

(The "Dude, you're getting a Dell" campaign was done by DDB Chicago)

 
Apparently one of the hot Christmas gifts of 2007 for kids (or parents) who can afford it is the Pleo.  What is Pleo?  He/She is a pet dinosaur that moves like a real animal and displays emotions.  Take a look at the videos from www.pleoworld.com and you will soon see this is no ordinary robot! 

All of the people in the videos seem to have a real and genuine emotionally tied bond with the little critter.  Thus separating the Pleo from the Roombas or Robosapiens of the world.  From a tech perspective the robot has an open architecture so you can add sounds and behaviors as you wish.
 
For $350 you could have one too!

Sam Chesterman

A piece in the New York Times Year in Ideas Issue jumped out at me. Two-Birds-With-One-Stone-Resistance highlights research conducted at the University of Chicago that demonstrates people’s tendency to be reluctant to use something that serves two purposes, choosing instead the option that is designed with only a single purpose in mind. In the experiment cited, subjects were asked to fill out surveys with either a ball point pen or a pen with a laser-pointer. Only 17 percent of the respondents who were aware of the dual purpose of the laser-pointer pen selected it to fill out he survey, as opposed to about half of the subjects when they were unaware of the dual purpose of the pen. “Connecting one tool or method to multiple goals weakens the mental association between that means and any other goal”, says the article.
 
Why is this relevant? Think of the Google homepage. Does it do anything other than allow you to search? What about the Yahoo homepage? Where are users more likely to go to perform a search, a site that just does search or a site that has multiple purposes? Sites that stay focused on their core offerings are more likely to be considered by users faced with a wide array of choices than those that try and be anything and everything to customers. Photo credit: JumpinJack
 
Whitney Browne

I was sent this bizarre “Japanese ad” for Slusho. And here’s the weirdly adorable site: Slusho! – You Can’t Drink Just Six.

Is it a real product? Apparently not. It actually may be part of a viral marketing campaign for JJ Abrams’ Cloverfield movie, coming out in January. Considering his intricate online campaigns for Lost, this should come as no surprise. But what does it all mean? I have no idea. But here’s some speculation.

Something that’s been passed around the design crew that Jen Furman had “found” originally. ffffound.com is a visual blog put together by a selected group of designers that is still in beta mode (registration is disabled at the moment). New images that are tagged as favorites by this group are updated every couple hours or so.

I can’t stop returning to the site and am totally addicted to it (it’s also great for iphone backgrounds). Please take a look to find out more, I love it.

http://ffffound.com

David Paslay

I love this Australian campaign for Drambuie, a Scottish flavored whiskey. Unlike the decidedly PG-13 Shave Everywhere or Axe Effect sites, this is a campaign that lets the Internet be the Internet. 

The premise is simple: take a chi-chi drink to some rough Australian bars and film the honest reactions of local louts- bogans in Australian slang.  You get priceless quotes like "I guess I could drink this when you run out of everything else," and on down from there.

I love the fact that the brand is willing to make fun of itself and its too-precious image.  I think this kind of content would be too class-conscious for North America, not to mention too profane.  But good on ya to Drambuie's Sydney-based agency, The One Centre for taking a chance with the brand.

http://www.drambuieresearch.com/

Misha Cornes

I saw a commercial from GE yesterday and their message hit kind of home with me. They talked about how all electrical appliances in your home have the usual stand-by mode which wastes a lot of energy. My husband is a gadget freak and he buys every imaginable toy there is. Needless to say, we have a lot equipment in our house.

I did a bit of research on this topic today and came across this real simple, but nicely done demo about how to make your home a greener place. Did you know for example that you can save a ton of energy if you match the pot you're cooking with to the burner size? I never really thought about that, but for sure will from now on.
 
http://green.yahoo.com/pledge/

Sonja Scharrer

Dell has created a unique experience for the holidays that combines the influence of star power with the holiday spirit of gift giving.
 
Yoursishere.com is a site where you can choose a Dell product and send a gift suggestion to your friends/family.  You can choose from 6 celebrities and they will be your pitchmen (women) for the Dell gift you have chosen. 
 
The power of celebrity endorsement combined with a personalized message isn’t new.  Where it gets interesting is how Dell has setup the giving part of the process.  Their electronics offerings can be more expensive than one single person can afford to give to another, so you can setup an account with PayPal whereby people can contribute cash in lieu of a gift.  More along the lines of gift cards but using PayPal as the credit holder.
 
This is all tied-in by the pitch as each one of the celebrities mentions the option to give cash. 
 
It’s a different approach to gift suggestions that creates a entertaining experience to help your friends/family buy you, or contribute to the gift you want 
 
http://www.yoursishere.com/
 
Chris Chavkin

Looking for a way to give back this holiday season? Planning for Good is a global network of strategists and creatives who donate their collective brain power towards affecting positive social change. Every month, a new brief is sent out to local city groups, who work individually and in teams to solve a specific communications problem for non-profit organizations. Recently, I was fortunate enough to attend a meeting with Planning for Good’s local Toronto chapter where we had a lively discussion around the positioning of Live Earth’s 2008 Campus Program.

To learn more about the goals and history behind the initiative, view a truly inspiring video from one of Planning for Good’s founders, Edward Cotton. Also make sure to check out the the first deck of great ideas presented for UNICEF.

To get involved, find your local city group or start a chapter of your own. The deadline for the Live Earth Brief is fast approaching on December 17.

Ways to get started:

• Join the Facebook Group
• View the Life Earth Brief
• Find a Local City Group Near You

There are often brief periods where a product would be more valuable than ever before to potential customers.
 
Sometimes those occasions are predictable, such as pumpkin sales on Halloween.  Other times this period of increased customer demand is more uncertain, such as umbrella sales during rain storms.
 
The beauty of the Internet compared to other marketing mediums is that we have the ability to get the word out about our products at the exact moment (and highlighting the exact benefits) that there is an increased need. 
 
Below is an email I received at lunchtime during the first snowstorm of the year.  By being prepared and responsive, this company (which is an exceptional experience unto itself) will earn itself plenty of business today without spending a nickel. 

Joshua Fischer

There was an interesting article from the Wall Street Journal recently on the 5th taste, known as “umami”.

It is coming to be accepted in the Western world that in addition to our four basic tastes of sweet, sour, salty, and bitter, that there is a fifth taste that constitutes “savory” or a feeling of full flavor. Umami, a concept originated in Japan, is used to describe the taste sensation we get when eating something like cheese, meat, broth, mushrooms, nuts, etc. This may already be familiar to some of you, but for those of you who haven’t heard this before, it looks like you might be hearing a lot more of it in the near future.

From your high end restaurants to your packaged foods companies (Doritos, Nestle), everyone is interested in increasing the umami in their products, creating an umami taste bomb. After all while consumers are scared of chemical sounding ingredients like MSG (an umami catalyst), who doesn’t love some sautéed mushrooms on their steak or a little parmesan cheese in their tomato soup. Yum!

Marta Strickland

Really smart ad unit by Apple in today’s www.nytimes.com. Check it out live. Very clever use of the space.
 
Adam Turinas

For those who like math (not me!) there is this well known mathematical problem called the "Traveling Salesman Problem", which is how do you
calculate the shortest route between multiple destinations.

Well this Google maps mash-up claims to have solved it.  It is very easy to use - to add locations, simply left-click the map. The first location you
add is considered to be the start and end of your journey. To remove a location, click its marker. If more than nine locations are specified, a heuristic method is used rather than trying all possible routes. This means that there is no guarantee that the optimal solution is found.

http://gebweb.net/optimap/

For a more detailed explanation go here.

Baron Conway

If you’re a Web designer or IA, you’ve probably heard the following statements many times:

“Make sure everything is located above the fold.”
“If it’s below the fold, users won’t see it.”
“Users won’t scroll to view additional content.”

What exactly is this mythical “fold” anyway? It’s basically an invisible line on a Web page based on where the bottom of the browser likely will be within a given screen resolution. It hearkens back to the days of newspapers, when important content was kept above the fold of the newspaper in order to grab people’s attention in the newsstand. If you think about it, any given newspaper is usually a fixed size, and doesn’t scale to fit the content. Readers are drawn in by what’s above the fold of the paper, and flip it over or open it up to view additional content. There are visual cues to help people realize the newspaper has another side to it, and for most people it’s common sense that newspapers are folded in two.

So where is the fold on a typical Web page?  I would argue that it simply doesn’t exist. Much of the “page fold” misconception is due to outdated thinking – a misconception that users won’t scroll down to what they can’t see. But this thinking has long since been debunked by factual data and sound research. The “fold” adherents assume everyone uses the same size monitor, the same monitor resolution, the same Web browser, the same size icons in their browser, the same number of toolbars, the same size of browser window. Obviously there are too many factors involved to identify a consistent fold location. The mouse scrollwheel is now in common use by practically everyone who uses a computer (PC users have had them since 1996). And even back in 1997 Jakob Nielsen found that the majority of users had accepted scrolling and would do so to find additional content.

In an excellent study on page scrolling, Clicktale compiled data on how many pixels users would actually scroll to view additional content on a page containing scrollbars. Their study results were telling:

• Women are more likely to experience problems than men (53% vs. 48%), especially women over the age of 40 (when compared to men in the same age category)
• Men are nearly 20% less likely to recommend a store where they experienced problems than women. This difference is even more pronounced among men under the age of 40.
• Among the top problems that female shoppers experience, “lack of help when needed” is the number one problem (29%) and is more likely to lead to lost business
• The problem that is most likely to lead to lost business for men is when a product is out of stock
• Men, who have often been accused of being merely replacement shoppers, tend to be more utilitarian when they hit the malls and shopping centers. It's a mission. Get in. Get what's needed. Get out. Quickly.
• Women, on the other hand, generally like to look around, talk to sales associates and experience the shopping. They walk around, smell perfume, touch clothes, dab on cosmetics. They want attention and they want direction.

What would you do if you were assigned the Spam account?  Well Dustin Black and Dan Armstrong of BBDO Minneapolis decided to dive headfirst into Spam as a punch-line.  Their vision for Spam.com looks more like a Monty Python fan site than a CPG website. 

They also developed a separate launch strategy for what appears to be a new coffee table book, The Book of Spam, but is in fact another element of the overall campaign.   They reinforce the idea that it was written by wry fans with too much time on their hands through a couple of insanely time-intensive stop-motion videos.  Toastvertising, above, required 220 pieces of bread, a blow torch, and days of filming on the author's dining room table.

The piece de resistance, as far as I am concerned, was the casual email they sent to ThreeMinds announcing the project: "I just wanted to share a project I just finished" - four lines, no pagination, and not even a live link! It seemed so real and personal.  These guys really know their audience when it comes to seeding a viral program.

Misha Cornes

http://www.pillandpillow.com/growAXmasTree/

This is a fun way to send a personalized holiday message to a friend.

Marsha Haslinger

One of the more interesting winter events in NYC is the bi-annual ITP show. This "two day exhibition of interactive sight, sound and physical objects by the student artists of ITP" is an exciting foray into the not-so-distant future. As usual, the 4th floor of NYU's Tisch building on Broadway was packed with nerds and futurists eager to touch, hear, and feel the students' creations. This year's show was chalk full of visualizations, 3D spaces, wearable computers, and other interfaces.

Stefan Hehenberger and Adi Wagenknecht displayed their multi-touch table interface - CUBIT - similar to Jeff Han's display and the Microsoft Surface.

A haptic way-finder device called Momo is a brilliant new digital compass - guiding explorers by touch and feel.

Jabberjockeys, a pair of underwear that communicate via Bluetooth and cell phone networks is for a more adult audience, geared towards intimate couples separated by distance.

As usual, the experience left me hungry for more, and I can't wait to see what's on display in the Spring show.

Alex Bisceglie

Check out this great social networking site for moms.   Cafemom.com brings moms a little bit of MySpace, Facebook, Yelp!, Yahoo Groups, Yahoo/Google widgets all together in one place.  There are some heavy hitters advertising on the site, clearly acknowledging the importance of word-of-mouth for this target.  

And, yes, one of the founders is “Billy” from Melrose Place, who would have thought...

http://www.cafemom.com/

Lisa Yamamura

German car rental company Sixt found a way to turn Google paid search results into a rudimentary- but highly effective- form of banner placement.  They used the three lines of text to create ASCII art, in this case of their rental cars (mietwagen). The case study is here:

http://www.bannerblog.com.au/2007/12/sixt_ascii_text_ads.php

If you go to Google.de the campaign is no longer active, so it appears Google has already banned future uses.  Thanks to Jacob Ford.

Misha Cornes

Teens are engaging in online content creation more and more. Blogging is up, video posting is up. This recent PEW study shows that numbers in all categories across the board are up from 2004. This isn't really surprising, but some of the conclusions regarding activity level by gender and restrictions on accessibility are.

According to PEW:

“Girls continue to dominate most elements of content creation. Some 35% of all teen girls blog, compared with 20% of online boys, and 54% of wired girls post photos online compared with 40% of online boys. Boys, however, do dominate one area - posting of video content online. Online teen boys are nearly twice as likely as online girls (19% vs. 10%) to have posted a video online somewhere where someone else could see it.”

Uploading content allows teens to create an online dialog. Nearly three-quarters of all online teens have reported both receiving and commenting on content such as blog posts, photos, and videos. However, it isn’t so much about broadcasting themselves to the whole world as much as to their social circle. When it comes to posting photos, only 21% of teens say they “never” restrict access to the images they upload, compared to 39% of adults.

Marta Strickland

BMW just launched an all new www.bmwusa.com.   The main upgrades are a new much more visual configuration tool that incorporates images and 360's that represent every possible permutation, even down to such details as headlights are represented with a correct image of the vehicle.  The summary page is nice also giving you interior and exterior views.  The have added a bunch more video as well.
 
Bill Camp

The interactivity of Web 2.0 makes it ideal for another purpose: gaining insights into customer attitudes and behavior.

For about two years Charles Schwab has been recruiting groups of a few hundred customers or prospects to participate in ongoing online communities that provide real-time, iterative feedback to the company. Schwab uses the forums to get input on prospective ad campaigns, new products, and even names for mutual funds.

The online communities "give incredible feedback," said Jonathan Craig, a vice president at Schwab. "It's amazing how much people are willing to engage with you.  We literally just listen. That's where the insight is.”

One small example of how the forum gave Schwab a new perspective came in the community's critique of a prospective ad campaign. The ad trumpeted the ability to access thousands of no-load mutual funds through Schwab. The community's overwhelming response to the ad, Mr. Craig said, was "What's a load?"

More broadly, the online group had input on the design of a high-yield investor checking account aimed at that target market. Since April, Schwab customers have opened 65,000 such accounts, Mr. Craig said. Overall, as of the end of October, the number of people in this age bracket doing business with Schwab has increased 40% from a year earlier, he said.

"The community was a big part of the information-gathering that led to the actions that drove those results," Mr. Craig said.

 Joshua Fischer 

Jakob Nielsen recently posted an article on his Alertbox called, Web 2.0 Can Be Dangerous. I don’t have anything personal against Mr. Nielsen, but in general I find most of what Nielsen has posted in recent years a very dated and close-minded way of looking at the world of interactive.

The main point of his article is to prove:

“AJAX, rich Internet UIs, mashups, communities, and user-generated content often add more complexity than they're worth. They also divert design resources and prove (once again) that what's hyped is rarely what's most profitable.”

I think one can make an opposite case for just about everything he says...

Last week’s Entertainment Weekly contained a special supplement entitled “Best of the Web.”  It includes 25 sites for such well-loved franchises as Harry Potter, Indiana Jones, The Office, Lost, U2 and Star Wars.  Only thing is, these are not “official” sites, they are fan sites.  The brands themselves have web presences of varying depths, but here is Entertainment Weekly pointing out how much better the fan-created experiences are.  Why? Fan sites are unencumbered by corporate control.  Fans can find meaning, they can speculate on plotlines and deal out spoilers, they can traffic in rumors, they can even sometimes break news.  They can get emotional about their subjects.  They can criticize or give voice to fears.  They can talk about what else the stars have done that the studios don’t necessarily want to mention, from previous bombs to pending indictments.  Most importantly: they are created by people who genuinely love the properties, not the people with marketing jobs.  That passion is real, it is authentic, it is powerful, and it is infectious.
 
Studios used to try to put these kinds of sites out of business or co-opt and control them.  Not anymore.  Today, the marketers still do their own things, but they also look at these sites as partners, offering them assets and access (when it suits them), and using them as sources for how fans are reacting to trailers, plotlines, and star drama so that their sanctioned marketing programs can be made more effective.  And when they visit, I would bet that they reignite a bit of their own passion for the movies, for TV, for music, that made them choose their careers before the jaded-executive-machine that is the Entertainment Industry got hold of them. 
 
Matt Rosenberg