If traffic to Go Daddy not spiking after the Bowl ad wasn’t enough, the fact that Snickers usurped the ‘controversial ad‘ position this year must be salt in their wounds.
It’s time the folks who churn out lame TV advertising for Go Daddy wake up and try something more innovative.
My colleague and fellow IABC member, Wilma Mathews gave me a calendar published by a research and creative services outfit, The Rogers Group, that deals with buzzwords. It was in response to a post had written about Death By Techspeak on a PR blog.
The calendar is full of them, with the intro how it was once possible to attend a business meeting and comprehend what people were saying, until "everyone started thinking outside the box and taking critical path to seamless world-class value propositions."
It features words such as ‘symbiotic realignment,’ ‘scalable exit strategy,’ and something called ‘robustivity.’ The funny (and scary) thing is, I actually know people who don’t think these words are funny.
On a related note, there’s a paragraph in the intro to a book Why businesspeople speak like idiots, that goes:
"we have robust networks of strategic assets that we own or have contractual access to which give us greater flexibility and speed to reliably deliver widespread logistical solutions."
It was from the 2000 annual report of Enron. Enough said.
Amazing, how when they’ve painted themselves into a corner, some companies try to sound profound. Verizon’s comment in TIME magazine, that "Wi-fi as a public service has serious issues like network congestion and security" is ludicrous. Of course some would defend their ability to charge for something that could be subsidised, or free, just like AOL did until it recently became free.
Here in Tempe, Arizona, municipal wi-fi is a reality. Around the world, cell phone companies are teaming up with wi-fi operators, as well. This picture shows how it’s taking shape in other cities.
On its blog, Direct to Dell, Dell came back fast on the post by Robert Scoble who posed the question as to why Apple gets better treatment, and Dell gets all the bad media karma.
The language (and hopefully the attitude) is largely influenced by the early Scoble
"We entered the blogosphere in part to take on negative issues. Will we make more mistakes along the way? Sure, but we are listening and learning
as we go. In fact, the blog is all about those conversations, and it’s
why I’m recognizing this debate that goes on about and around us."
Scoble’s comments are interesting, because Apple does get a pass, and great reviews. In a previous comment about the bad customer service his son got over a Macbook, he called on the heavywright media tech writers such as WSJ‘s Walt Mossberg to show off Apple for what it really is. (Note: Mossberg, who has been featured in an Apple ad, always acknowledges his Mac preference):
Hey, Walt Mossberg or Steven Levy, why don’t you call up my 12-year-old son
and write a column about Apple’s customer service failures instead of giving
them tons of praise about the new iPod cell phone that’s gonna come out at
MacWorld in a week?
So Dell would have relished this, and reader comments to their post. Speaking of which Scoble was accused of drumming this up for turning his son’s experience into a company face off, and doing it for the kind of traffic that Jeff Jarvis got for his Dell hell post. People see conspiracies in what they want to. If I write passionately about a great experience, or a bad one, does that mean I am going off at the deep end? This might turn out to be less of an Apple vs Dell debate and more about the reviewers and bloggers. Interesting.
Time’s editor, Richard Stengel’s observation about journalist’ fascination and fear of citizen’s playing the role of publisher, is obviously applicable to many other professions. Participatory, bottom-up media and user generated content does shake the tree at the roots, but YouTube notwithstanding, this isn’t exactly something new. Alvin Toffler (borrowing from McLuhan) gave a name to the phenomenon about quarter century go –he called us ‘pro-sumers.’ People who would consume as well as produce.
The ‘mirror’ on the computer screen of the Jan 06 cover of Time is appropriate to an extent –the it’s-all-about-me idea. But it doesn’t capture the other aspects about social media –the participatory aspect, the ability to create niches– covered in the story. Or the fact that YouTube isn’t about the watching, but the filming.
NBC’s Brian Williams raises that question often unspoken -the problem of me-ness, and the consequence on society when we miss the bigger picture. No, he’s not making the case for the old media (he’s a blogger AND an anchor who believes in the social media as a ‘window’ to the editorial process, not a mirror held up to the anchorman) but wondering if we are shortchanging ourselves in the process.
The idea that ‘Me TV’ would overtake ‘Must-see TV’ is getting closer, it seems, with the TiVo fix. It’s part of the new broadband-enhanced package where people can create or download videos on their computer, andmake them available to their friends who also use TiVo.
It works like this. You create a video about your vacation, save it in a TiVo folder on your hard drive, and the software converts it into MPEG2 vido format. Then, TiVo will let you to send that video to your set-top box, and make it searchable by others on your ‘private network.’ They have to sign up for a ‘Season Pass’ for this.
Beyond showing off your kids to grandma, we could apply this concept to small businesses, or groups, opening up a new way for video file-sharing. Companies could set up their own ‘knowledge channels’ that would be available across their network.
The humble stick phone may one day change the way we collaborate and learn. I am working on an article featuring YFonGlobal, a media company that, among other things, enables organizations to create what it calls communications venues. You know, what Intranets were once supposed to be.
Because YFonGlobal uses VoIP as one of the many underlying applicatons, it also loads its proprietary collaborative application (Windstorm) onto stick phones. Got me thinking, that an organization could host a knowledge-sharing program accessible from anywhere. Students will simply plug their stick phone into a USB port on any PC, in a hotel or cybercafe, and have the capability to interact with each other, and even instructors using all the collaborative tools loaded onto it. This includes free VoIP calls, of course. Yes, YFonGlobal is also involved in distance learning.
Speaking of online education, Bill Lanphear of OdysseyWare, a curriculum and technology company, is convinced that online education will soon catch up with the always-on student with Wiki-like rich-media applications that foster collaboration. "Students and teachers are writing blogs, making podcasts and creating their own vodcasts," he says. They are "moving like swarms of fish working in unison as
teams, seeking experiential learning, and using all forms of technology
for social networking."
So you have to wonder what’s keeping educators –and this includes companies – so far behind in knowledge sharing? Are they (a) suspicious that all these new media formats and sharing methods will detract from the content? Or (b) scared to death that administrators may never be able to keep up with all this new technology? Whatever the answer, Asking kids/employees to go to old media access points to engage in knowkledge sharing will not survive for much longer. Asking students to "park their cell phones, iPods, and
laptops outside the classroom" is ignoring reality –that "kids have woven
these devices into their personal learning spaces," says Lanphear.
On a related note, Pearson, the publishing/education company has announced plans to publish a business book titled "We are smarter than me" in wiki format.
Now here’s another novel way to do outdoor, breaking out of the one-dimentional format of advertising.
This 25-foot iPod in Columbus, Ohio, actually plays music.
At 800 pounds, even the white cords were built to scale. The best part for me is that it plays music off a real iPod Nano. No it’s not an ad for the iPod, but for Columbus Alive magazine.
For all who’ve asked, Ad:tech, New York was a huge invigorating event. More on this later.
However, the keynote by David Lubars was very disappointing. Keynotes are supposed to set the tone of the day or event, and this one didn’t. I’m a big fan of Lubars’ work, so maybe I was expecting more. The Ad:tech blog, which refers to his standard BBDO messaging (about ‘insight’) stops short of saying so much. But quite frankly it was just another chit-chat –in the Barbara Walter’s interview format– that didn’t say anything.
But Lubars almost deliberately understates the case for advertising. He came across as the kinda guy who’s vehemently on the side of the customer, not the client. "What worries me, what keeps me awake at night," he said, "is that we can piss off a lot of people." he was referring to the fact that anything can be a ‘medium’ -even a street sign. Anything can be an ‘ad.’
In the old days (when agency people rubbed their hands in glee at the possibility of putting logos on apples and people’s foreheads) getting a brand noticed was a billable opportunity. Now? It’s all about getting people involved. Or, to use the ad:tech word du jour, ‘engaged.’
But Lubars didn’t elaborate beyond showing some of the BBDO work. I threw him a trial balloon question to see if the ‘engagement’ virus had entered Mad Ave bloodstream, asking him if he saw Second Life a place where agencies would get creative. He practically dodged it. Another audience question got a softball answer. Was there a danger in losing control of the messaging, someone asked, speaking about marketers allowing customers to create or mash up their own commercials. "I don’t know," Lubars replied. I don’t know about you, but at a seminal event like this, I expect keynoters to say things that put a time-stamp on the state of the industry.
Having said that, Ad:tech was a remarkable event, choc-full of companies doing very specialized things in tracking, knowledge gathering, video, podcasting, social networking, mobile, and reporting. Many of them are risk takers, newly emerging from the eco-system of marketing, technology and advertising. After 2 days of listening to them and interviewing them, I was glad to have been here at an event that gives a lot more respectability to all of marketing and advertising.
Here are some broad themes I culled from the conference:
"Conversations matter" "
"Engagement is a symptom, not a cause" "
"Make stuff shareable" "
"Leave digital trails" "
"We’re smart, but the community is smarter"
And, of course,
"I don’t know"
Hoipolloireport 