Phone Tag Gets It

I had tipped the Social Path's David Griner off about a very cool app called Phone Tag for his "Cool Tool Of The Week" feature.

Even cooler: the first comment on his post was someone from Phone Tag, thanking Griner for the (generally positive) post and offering a free 30-day trial to his readers.

Clearly, someone at Phone Tag gets the positive spin value of responses like that and of giving early adapters and evangelists the tools and ammunition they need to keep spreading the brand love.

Very smart.

Phone Tag, which I credit Jason Heller and Ian Schafer for turning me on to, is indeed a very cool little app: For less than 40 cents a call, Phone Tag will transcribe your voicemails and email them to you, along with a .wav file of the actual voicemail. It's incredibly useful when you're in long meetings and other places where taking a call or listening to your voicemail would be rude, but surreptitiously scrolling through your Blackberry or iPhone perfectly acceptable. I've found it to be pretty accurate in its ability to transcribe correctly and quite prompt in its delivery.

You all should check it out.

Context Is To Chicken As Content Is To Egg

Matt van Hoven, the new(ish) Agency Spy, wrote a very nice piece yesterday and quoted me extensively. Me, Nick Law from RGA and Chuck Porter from Crispin, Porter & Bogusky, that is. (Talk about your unlikely trios.)

Anyway, here's a tease with a link to read the rest over on MediaBistro.

The clip above seeks to answer the question of which is more important: Context or Content. It's the sort of question that tends to get lost in rhetoric, but whoever answers it will have the fundamentals of advertising in 2008 figured out. Unless of course, they want to survive through The Real Digital Revolution.

We took the insights with a grain of salt, but wanted to share them with you, as well as the thoughts of Alan Wolk, another guy you should be paying attention to — or at least reading.

In the video, CP+B Chairman Chuck Porter said storytelling is the method "smart marketers" are using to reach their audiences. Rather than saying, "let's make a TV commercial," they're looking for that "really interesting idea" that will engage the audience.

"It's really become much more about story telling," said Porter.

READ THE REST HERE

Kids Still Love TV. (Ice cream too)

There’s been a lot of talk about the recent revelation that the average network TV viewer is 50 years old. Mostly of the “see—TV is dead, only old people watch it anymore” variety.

But my experience is that it’s not dead—far from it—it’s just fragmented. Because those numbers you keep reading about are just for the Big 5 networks—not for all television networks. And the truth is, kids don’t watch network TV anymore. They watch Disney Channel and Nickelodeon.

Think about it: when was the last time you saw a “family” type show on network television? You know, something like The Brady Bunch, The Partridge Family or even The Cosby Show? Most of network TV today is given over to bawdy reality shows and what I call “leer-coms” – adult situation comedies that (largely thanks to network censorship) are 22 minutes worth of leering, winking and innuendo.

Kids do not like leer-coms. They don’t get the humor and thus don’t find them the least bit entertaining. (Even well done versions of the genre, like Friends and Seinfeld, are beyond the taste level of your average 10 year-old.)

But flip on over to the marketing machines that are the Disney Channel and Nickelodeon, and you’ll find entire blocks of very popular programming aimed solely at the kid and tween demographics. From Hannah Montana to Drake and Josh, these are the shows today’s kids will look back on as the TV utopia of their youth. 25 years ago, these shows would have been on network TV. But thanks to fragmentation and the profusion of 1000+ channel cable boxes and households with multiple TV sets, kids and tweens now have their own channels and their own programming. Which is sad, in a way, because it's just one more thing that's no longer part of a shared national culture.

But not only are kids watching these shows to the exclusion of network TV, they're buying their CDs and going to their movies.

Because as much as these kids are the true “digital natives,” they still like to kick back and let someone else do all the work in terms of entertaining them. And because, just like when we were their age, showing up at school with the ability to discuss popular sitcoms still has valuable social currency.

Now how they watch these shows has changed- everything is DVR’d and time-shifted and a show like Disney’s The Suite Life of Zack and Cody might be on as many as 3 times a day.

But they’re still watching. And TV is far from dead.

"The Aesthetics of Viral" on MP Daily Fix

There’s been a whole lot written about why calling an online video “viral” doesn’t make it such—Scott Monty did an excellent take on it a few weeks back.

But what I wanted to point out here is that those videos that do go “viral” often aren’t what the ad industry’s narrow aesthetic would define as “good.”....

Read the rest here

One Size Does Not Fit All

The more I look at how The Real Digital Revolution has affected our relationship with advertising, the more I’ve come to realize how important it is to realize that the social media tools we recommend are very much dependent on the type of product we’re marketing. It’s too easy to fall into the trap of thinking that “social media” is a checklist of Facebook apps, blogs, widgets and “viral” videos. But it's not that simple. The interactions we want to have with familiar packaged goods products are very different than the interactions we want to have with products that are new to us. Both call for very different social media solutions.

To wit: If I am looking to buy anything from a camera to a car to a new pair of running shoes, I’m going to want information about that product, information on which I can base my purchase decision. Now that information can be anything from price to color to image to functionality to customer reviews. But it all falls under he category of things I didn’t previously know and want to be educated about.

With a familiar packaged goods item like Cheerios, there is no education. I know what Cheerios look like and taste like-- they’re the same Cheerios I’ve been eating for the past 40 some odd years. So unless you’ve got some new information for me, what you want to do is remind me that Cheerios exist and get some emotional connection going.

At some level, that frees up familiar packaged goods (FPGs) to be more creative in their social media executions. They’re creating an image (or reinforcing one.) Non-FPGs, on the other hand, need to head in the other direction and make sure that at least some of what they’re doing in social media works to complement what people are learning via Google by providing answers, links, explanations and follow-up.

So, for example, a brand like Hershey’s chocolate may decide to own Americana and base their campaign around a small-town, old time American theme (not advocating this, mind you, it’s just an easy example.) Now that can mean anything from sponsoring “I remember” message boards/Facebook apps where Boomers and Lost Gens can reminisce about their mid-century childhoods, to hosting a video series of the same on YouTube or Vimeo.

Which are all things a brand that’s not a familiar packaged good can do, but they also have to go the extra yard and make sure that they’re being the category expert, providing vehicles that their customers can use to learn more about the product- either from experts or from each other. So while a camera company can certainly host an amateur nature photography site, they’ll also want to keep someone on Twitter to handle any questions or issues that arise, maybe even have a question and answer page on their site to help educate and raise their "expert" status.

Subtle differences, no doubt, but as social media continues to expand, it pays to bear in mind that there’s rarely a one-size-fits-all solution and that the differences between the various social media tools are as distinct as those between say a TV and outdoor.

Lunar Eclipse

So in other ad blogger weekend news, Ben Kay, who wrote the most excellent LunarBBDO blog (aka "If This Is A Blog, Then What's Christmas") out of London, confirmed today that he has indeed decided to stop writing the blog.

For now, Kay wants to concentrate on a novel he's been working on, though he told me he may indeed revive LunarBBDO, which was a great take on the UK ad business, well-written and funny ("cheeky" I believe, is how the Brits would put it.)

The UK ad scene is interesting to watch because it's still very old media-centric and also because ads-- and the people who make them-- are more well know over there. Ben and Scamp can still do posts on "famous creatives." Which isn't something we can do over on these shores.

I wish Ben much luck with his novel-- I will keep you posted as to publication date when he sells it-- and he will be missed.

Plaid Nation Tour

Plaid Nation Tour - July 21, 2008 from Plaid Nation on Vimeo.

Plaid, the Connecticut based agency run by Darryl Brandflakes-For-Breakfast Ohrt, has just completed their annual summer Plaid Nation Tour. For those of you unfamiliar with this, Darryl and a crew (including Bill Green of MakeTheLogoBigger fame) take a bus trip for a week or so, visiting all sorts of interesting people along the way and documenting it all on camera. You can see the results on Vimeo (first video is above) or on the actual tour website.

This year’s tour is particularly worth checking out, since the guys meet up with and talk to a slew of interesting people, including Robert Scoble, Biz Stone (the CEO of Twitter and possessor of the absolute best CEO name ever—the Flintstonianness of it is just awesome) and Tony Hsieh, the Twitter-loving CEO of Zappos.com

The videos are really nicely done—I told Darryl he should try and shop them to one of the cable TV networks—and the longer interviews from the site are well worth watching too. I mean if nothing else, it lets you get to hear and see people you may only know from their online writing.

Worthy New Reads

David Griner, who writes for AdFreak, has started a social media blog called The Social Path. It's a very nicely done site that presents the seemingly complex world of social media in very user-friendly language, which, coupled with Griner's engaging writing style, makes it a fun read. Be sure to check out his "Cool Tool Of The Week" so you can stay ahead of the other kids.

The woman-formerly-known-as-SuperSpy over on AgencySpy has started a new blog called The Brief. It's not a gossip blog, but a clear-eyed look at the industry- both agencies and clients- with longer-form posts that provide both analysis and insight. Those were the sort of pieces that got her a following over on the original Agency Spy site and it's great to see them revived elsewhere.