“Shorts” is a term used to describe short films. In a changing media landscape where we can now watch movies on cell phones, the duration of ‘short film’ is in seconds, not minutes.
But there’s another trend in going short –text ads in search engines. As reported last week here, Yahoo has cut down character length from 190 to 70. This is a trend worth watching this year, as advertisers begin to see mobile devices as a medium that deserves attention and ad dollars.
CMO magazine, by the IDG Group, is one of the finest, well targeted magazines for marketing folk. It was sad to receive an email to say that the pub is hitting the ‘pause’ button, as editor Rob O’Regan noted.
In a category where Business 2.0, Forbes, Fast Company, and Advertising Age’s Point magazine, and so many business/tech mags compete, this was refined work. How else could it have won magazine of the year, last year?
Let’s hope the publishers listen to their readers, and come back with a viable business model.
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We have all heard the great branding stories about Diet Coke. Not often do you hear about how confusing the mesaging could be. Fast Company ran this story in the September issue of the magazine.
It’s available online here. A chart is a great way to explain ‘the many faces of no-cal Coke.’
If you’ve never knew which zero calorie Coke’s brand message included a call to "flirt, laugh, dance, prance, giggle, wiggle," check it out!
Having said that, the Diet Coke site, is worth a visit, too!
As a follower of Apple innovation, can’t help noticing that the line "impossibly small" associated with the iPod Nano has the same ring as "insanely great."
Then, of course, there’s the long anticipated iTunes phone, ROKR, Apple’s alliance with Motorola. Cingular wireless will be the only mobile phone carrier carrying the ROKR.
Both were officially launched on Wednesday. Just watch as word-of-mouth takes over. Today, a google search for the word ROKR generated 2.2 million results. Already ‘Nano’ and ‘Apple’ yield some 6.3 million results.
I have been looking at database marketing more closely for an upcoming article, and discovered an amazing company that has managed to combine the power of social networks, with the power of databases. It’s called Jigsaw, which is a sort of a modern day bazaar where the buying and selling between takes place between not just ad-hoc visitors, but members who pay to be in the network.
But unlike other online bazaars, the product and the currency is data; Jigsaw members trade contact databases, and use 25 contacts to ‘pay’ for their monthly subscription! (They could alternatively fork out $25 a month)
And like Ebay’s rating system, members not management, keep the trading floor clean. Anyone can challenge the accuracy of contact information submitted –a neat twist to the ‘wisdom of the mobs’ principle.
We all go for communications and marketing conferences to learn about the new twchnologies and techniques. I often cover these things: Wi-Fi, Vbogs, Viral marketing, social networking…. endless ‘best practices’ and all that.
Take a look at this 2 minute message from Bono about why we should care about what he calls ‘extreme, stupid poverty.’ Briliant choice of words, obviously. But also very effective use of statistics in a way that won’t bore you. The Live8 folk, and all those ‘activists’ must have tons of data that prove their point, but if would be of no use if they don’t use it to make the message cna call to action resonate.
Bono snaps his fingers to illustrate how someone’s family member dies (of ‘stupid’ poverty) every 3 seconds.
Good discussion of customer retention in Fast Company this month. Another Peppers and Rogers piece on their favorite topic –Return on Customer –which is also the title of their latest book. The duo who popularized the concept of 1-to-1 marketing, dismiss the capital-is-the scarcest-resource mantra of the past, and say the scarcest resource is the customer. Isn’t that how Willy Loman would have put it? ‘Attention must be paid to this customer!’ But how?
Peppers and Rogers suggest treating different customers differently, because the technology is there to do it. They cite Tesco, the supermarket chain in the U.K. as sending out 4 million versions of a mailing (to 11 million households.)
At the intersection of Search and Podcasting I came across a site worth looking at. Landed.FM is a Internet radio site with a podcast site feature. But what’s really novel is how it supports the real company behind it, WorkZoo.com, a job board and search engine.
On first blush, WorkZoo looks a very bare bones site. (Don’t be fooled by the noticably weak branding and typography.) It’s amazing feature is the way it displays a map of the concentration of jobs in the arre you are searching! Technically called the GIS (for geographic information systems) this works off a sophisticated algorithm that allows the searcher to get more than just results or hits from a search engine.
You can move the cross-hairs of your target area on the map by moving the cursor (Say from Arizona to Colorado) and the results change. All this happens very, very fast.
The jobs are displayed graphically as color-coded dots. At the top of the page, you can then tweak the search fields to display results (a) by distance from the zip code you input, (b) by state, and (c) by how recently the jobs were posted. An advanced search is also possible but this lacks the ability to search in multiple zip codes of states, for instance. I would like to be able to use multiple key words, or sort by years of experience, salary etc.
Like Blinkx desktop search utility I discovered yesterday, WorkZoo saves time by simplifying the search process. By some coincidence, WorkZoo and Blinkx originated in the U.K. but are now competing on this side of the pond.
Apart from writing on branding (nothing more than attempting to preach what I practice!) I get a kick from evangelizing the ‘branding from within’ idea. Though it seems easy in retrospect, branding can be painstaking work. The realities of a branding project go beyond the pretty logo and cool web site, a lovely tag line, and some drop-dead ads. As a Marcom person I do all of the above, but that still isn’t even scratching the surface of what the branding game is all about. No one likes to hear that research has to precede a lot of the action. Customer demographics are changing rapidly as do their media habits and, consequently, their attention span. Branding in a fragmented, mobile world is not the same as it was even 5 years ago.
It’s easy to point out to Zippo , Bajaj, O2, or Nokia as examples of good branding across the globe. It’s different when one has to start from scratch, or –worse– reposition/redesign a week, poorly defined brand.
Truth be told, branding was the art / science of the mass-production / mass media / mass consumption age. In this everything-is-customized age the concept of ‘mass’ is obsolete. (If you missed Businessweek’s "Vanishing mass market" story, stop, and read that first!) Branding is not the one-sight, one-sound, one-sell straightjacket. Just ask McDonald’s, that is connecting with its customers by taking branding into areas outside of the restaurant experience. Branding isn’t simply about placing your logo in the most unthinkable places. It is about being relevant to the audience you are attempting to reach.
Harley Davidson famously stated that "we’re competing against conservatories and swimming pools, not other bikes." Meaning a Harley’s brand value is in ‘recreation’ not transportation. Which brings me to my famous queston:
"What business are you reallly in?" Seems like a dumb question on the face of it, when someone introduces you to his/her facility, where it is pretty obvious what they ‘do’ there. I visit Einstein’s Bagels with my 3-year old daughter on Sunday mornings, not for the bagels so much as the coffee. She enjoys a cinnamon twist, personally brought to her by the manager who just loves kids. What biz are they in? Is Amazon in the book business? I don’t think so! They seem to be in the online catalog & mall business. (see a previous comment). Is a bank in the ‘money’ business? Is the Fedex (actually Fedex-Kinkos) in the package delivery business? or is that the print business? They also offer teleconferencing! They have been busy rebranding, as you can see here.
There is a good case study of Pitney Bowes, a company that needed desperately to lose it’s ‘postage meter’ brand image, and communicate its real business –as a solutions provider in the document management business. PB’s rebranding campaign worked only after they got their employees to play a part in it.
Most brand experts focus on the external branding, spending very little time on setting the brand on fire from within.
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