Link Love

A bunch of great posts from all over worth checking out this weekend:

Noah Brier has a great post called Brands in a World of Costless Interaction that's all about the changing nature of marketing (e.g. The Real Digital Revolution™)

CK, who usually writes about much weightier stuff, shows off a clever little video that's well worth the three minutes it'll take to watch it.

Adpulp has a tweet from Critical Mass' David Armano on why agencies have such a tough time with social media.

Matt Dickman has a great piece on his techno//marketer blog about the Google Hot Trends service, which lets you see the search terms garnering the most heat on an hourly basis. I've bookmarked this myself and it really is pretty fascinating.

Daily Biz looks at the pitfalls of User-Generated Content and using the "hope" method of creating viral-type buzz.

Ad Broad bemoans the lowly status her agency gives its interactive department, while Jane Sample offers a business-driven reason why.

Mack Collier on the much-discussed benefits of "free" in regards to the TED conference.

BBH London's Scamp offers up a new Tuesday Tip on How To Get A Pay Raise.

Deep Focus' Ian Schafer (or rather, Nick Braccia, his fill-in for the week) offers this insight into the new, new things in gaming.

And finally, for a great non-ad-related read, Daily Fix editor Ann Handley has her own blog called Annarchy where this very funny story about an airport shoeshine appears.

One More: A bunch of people in and around the ad/new media industry have put together a site called 192021.org that's all about the rise of the megacity and its effect on society at a number of levels. If you get into geeky socioeconomic stuff the way I do, you'll love it - be sure the check out the bit that shows how the list of the world's 20 largest cities has changed over the past 1008 years.

Enjoy the weekend. It's almost Spring.

Mini Love

So a friend of mine came home the other day to find a shiny black box on his doorstep. It seems he'd recently bought a Mini Cooper and the box was a gift from the company.

A week after he'd gotten it, he was able to recite to me, in fairly good detail, everything that was in the box (mostly toys-- a foldable model of a Mini, adhesive word puzzles to put on the car's windows, a deck of cards.) He was clearly thrilled and this is a veteran ad guy with a healthy degree of skepticism, not some wide-eyed dilettante.

Mini is well-known for its innovative follow-up programs with customers. (Another friend got a toy model of his Mini a few years back, and was similarly delighted.) But more than delighted, these guys have become what the kids call "Brand Evangelists." In just a few short years they've made Mini into a Prom King Brand™.

What's more, they're also illustrating another Toadian premise: Total Branding* - the idea that everything is an opportunity for branding, from your store to your uniforms to your sales receipts to (in this instance) your follow-up material.

It's the best way to ensure you'll never hear your customers say "I like you, but... Your Brand Is Not My Friend™"

*I'm working on a catchier term for this.

The Re-Education Of Bob Barista

So Starbucks announced today that they'd be shutting down all their stores for three hours today so that they can "re-educate" their baristas in the "art of espresso" and otherwise get their mojo back.

It's a clever move for Starbucks, sure to generate a whole lot of press and it shows that they are committed to improving their product and service in a way that rings a lot truer and more authentic than any ad campaign ever could.

As if to ensure that the event gets even more press, rival Dunkin' Donuts is promoting 99 cent drinks today, the synergy of the two events should prove too good for most editors to pass up.

There's also this quote from Schultz:

We are passionate about our coffee. And we will revisit our standards of quality that are the foundation for the trust that our customers have in our coffee and in all of us.

And while some may question the wisdom of putting your shortcomings on display, I think it's the perfect strategy for a brand like Starbucks, a brand consumers view as very focused on product and experience. The "re-education" seems authentic to them, whereas if say Dunkin' Donuts had done it, it would have seemed forced.

Creativity Is Relative

I’m convinced that one of the main stumbling blocks agencies have in regards to new media is that the best use of these media rarely involves anything we currently consider the domain of the creative department.

Most—like the Twitter example in the previous post--- are promotional in nature. (Unless you’re a Prom King brand™, you’ve got to do something to get people to engage with you, especially in a brand new medium.) And they rely on consumers or celebrities or other third parties to create them. They’re clever in a different way—they provide functionality for the consumer and give them something they can use or utilize, as opposed to traditional advertising which provides news for the consumer in an entertaining manner.

Faced with this unfamiliar paradigm, traditional agencies are shying away, since they have no way of judging whether this is “good” or not, no way of gauging whether they’re doing it “better” than anyone else.

Which is the wrong way to look at it. Right now, the main thing is to be doing it before anyone else and doing it right, which is in fact, very creative. As users become familiar with the media and the novelty wears off, traditional creativity will indeed become a factor. But right now, it’s all about being the first one to get people to actually engage with the technology in a way that actually provides value.

Twittering As The Ultimate Ad Vehicle

The more I twitter (tweet?) the more I see its value for advertisers. Not for consumers, mind you, because your average Joe has no need for a service that basically replicates the group email or Facebook status update.

But for advertisers of a certain bent, it may prove to be a windfall.

Allow me to explain: The most successful uses of Twitter I’ve seen are tweets from reporters who are “embedded” at actual events, e.g. Hillary Clinton’s hotel room the night of a primary or the Giant’s locker room when the won the Super Bowl.

That makes sense, because Twitter’s gift is that it allows you to follow the conversations and thoughts of people who don’t want to hear from you. Ergo, I can sign up to receive Katie Couric’s tweets as she sips wine with the Clintons and she doesn't need to agree to receive mine. This gives me the illusion of being an “insider” and having information that my friends don’t, while relieving Couric of the burden of listening to me drone on about advertising.

Now like most new media, this isn’t something that works for every brand. But if your brand has some sort of connection to an event (e.g. you’re Reebok and it’s the NCAA Final Four basketball tournament)—even a remote one (e.g. you’re Coke and it’s Oscar night) and you can find someone whose tweets would be relatively insightful/entertaining to more committed fans, then you’ve got yourself a blockbuster idea. I mean what if, say Coke had gotten Perez Hilton into the Oscars and he was tweeting about the show for them. That would certainly draw a crowd. Even more relevant would be Reebok getting someone like Charles Barkley (Barkley could read the phone book and make me laugh) to tweet about the Final Four.

And that’s all the free thinking I’m giving away today.

Web, Well Done

Props to Adscam proprietor G. Parker for calling attention to this website* for Dutch department store Hema. The product page is very cleverly done, almost a TV commercial in and of itself.

Now granted the site isn't particularly functional (you can't actually buy anything) but that seems more a matter of not having the back end up to speed rather than a conscious decision to avoid e-commerce: it's not hard to imagine the site working as is, only with hardcore functionality added on.

This is the sort of "always on" branding more companies should be doing, where even mundane things like e-commerce sites and store receipts are branded. It adds value to the brand because it makes the consumer feel cared about--someone thought it was worth it to do something this clever for me, the customer.

Nice job.

UPDATE: AdBroad had called this site out about 3 weeks ago. That's what I get for not clicking through ;)

*Wait a few seconds for the page to load - you'll see what I'm talking about.

McMansions Are The New Tenements

In keeping with this week's class warfare theme, there's a fascinating article in this month's Atlantic Monthly by Christopher B. Leinberger that posits that today's exurban McMansion communities are tomorrow's slums.

The gist of Leinberger's argument is that we are turning back to a preference for more urban living, which means that city centers and older, more affluent "railroad suburbs" (those with actual town centers built around a commuter train station) are going to continue to become hot; while isolated McMansion communities with lots of cul-de-sacs but few amenities, are on their way south. Leinberger's prediction is that as owners are unable to make their money back on their (shoddily built) McMansions, they will take to either abandoning them or subdividing and renting them, creating isolated ghettos far from the notice of the chattering classes.

In other words, American cities are all going to become a lot more like Paris, where the lower classes are isolated in housing projects in outlying banlieues. 

There are myriad implications for marketers if this shift happens, both in terms of the type of products desired by people in urban settings who rely on public transportation and in terms of the actual urban settings themselves, where people are able to actually walk places. Off the top of my head, that means greater emphasis on outdoor advertising (bus shelters and train station posters) and word-of-mouth.

Since the first part of the equation-- the wholescale gentrification of urban areas-- is already well under way (check out the number of poor people in Manhattan or San Francisco today vs. ten years ago) Leinberger may just be on to something.

More Toad

The New York Times' Michelle Slatalla is not finding any Twitter converts in her house. Check out my take on it at Beyond Madison Avenue.

Thanks to Toad's Sixth Reader for calling my attention to this bit in Campaign (the UK's answer to AdAge or Adweek) where they call out a comment I made on ScampBlog about Grey London's choice of a digital creative as their new agency ECD.