The "Respirator Idea"

One of the more frustrating things I’ve witnessed in my ad career (and one that I see repeated time and again from both agencies and brands) is what I call the “Respirator Idea.” It’s an idea that should have died because it no longer works in its current version, but it’s kept alive by people who have a vested interested in seeing something/anything get produced.

“Respirator Ideas” run the gamut from TV spots to websites to social media promotions and the one thing they all have in common is that you can tell that at some point they actually were good ideas.

But then the punch line got cut because it might have been offensive. The prize went from a two week Hawaiian vacation to two nights at the EconoLodge in Utica. Usability went from a site that did everything for you to “well, I’m sure they’ll be able to figure it out for themselves.”

It’s an unfortunate aspect of business in general: people rarely know when to pull the plug on something that was once a good idea. But it’s perhaps the most important skill anyone in marketing can have. Because someone’s got to be “the one.”

The one who says “No one is going to laugh at this.”

The one who says “No one is going to want to do this.”

The one who says “No one needs a site like this.”

The one who says “No one will post this to their Facebook page.”

And then actually step in and kill the project.

It rarely happens because of all the politics involved. All the small cuts along the way didn’t seem like such a big deal at the time. And a very influential group of people are still in denial about what the “Respirator Idea” has become. In their minds eye, they see the original idea, not the corpse it’s become.

And so it’s risky to stand up to them and say “the Emperor has no clothes.” You’ll be accused of being a negativist. A bad team player. An obstacle. You’ll make people look foolish and they won’t like that.

But someone must stand up. Someone who is going to look foolish no matter which way the decision is made. Because if you make the decision to cut the cord, you’ll also look brave, not cowardly.

And in today’s business environment, that’s no small thing.

KickApps Social Strategy Offering

If you've ever wondered just what it is I do for a living over at KickApps, this slideshow offers a pretty good overview of all the different things the KickApps social strategy team can do for your brand.

If there's anything you think we're missing or that we should develop some expertise in, I'd love to hear from you.

And the more you can share this with your Twitter & Facebook friends, the happier I'll be.

KickApps Social Strategy Offering

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Social Selling by KickApps - New on Slideshare

We've been talking a lot about all the things brands have gotten good at on the social web. They're listening, participating and all that... but they're not selling. It's a simple thing, but brands are forgetting that they are in the business of making money and their social media efforts need to support that business.

The slide share presentation lays out some easy-to-implement ways brands can bring selling back into the social web without sounding like a used car salesman.

Social Selling by KickApps

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Webinar Tomorrow: Social Media Integration

I'll be running an hour-long FREE webinar tomorrow here at KickApps called "No Social Site is an Island: The Key to Social Media Integration." Justin Chase, the other part of our strategy team will be joining me.

We'll be discussing the advantages of an integrated social media strategy, one that includes your brand's domain site along with your social sites.

Registration details are here.

Goats Are The New Monkeys (This Week's BeanCast)

Once again I join Bob Knorpp over at the BeanCast, my favorite marketing podcast, for the show with possibly the best BeanCast title ever "Goats Are The New Monkeys."

Also appearing are Rupal Parekh from Ad Age, Dirk Singer from the Rabbit Agency (UK) and Bill Green from Make The Logo Bigger

To quote Mr. K's write-up:

This group was feisty and ready for a debate!

Everybody came to the table with an opinion and no one was afraid to challenge what anyone else said. Which always makes for a great show in my book. We kept getting to unintended insights that would stop me in my tracks and force a whole new line of questions. Just awesome!

You can download the episode here

The End Of An Era

It's a given that the ad business has dropped in stature since the golden days of the 1960s. But that may have less to do with the vast array of scapegoats, everything from holding companies to banner ads, than it does with the products being advertised themselves.

The mid-twentieth century was all about creating unique images for fairly identical products. The post-war boom had left the US economy awash in new consumer goods and it was the ad agencies job to help consumers differentiate one brand of soap from another. Since most of the brands were fairly identical and equally useful, an effective ad campaign really could make or break a product. Thus the frequent use of humor and jingles, two memorable devices that helped drive home a brand’s key selling points.

And while CPG advertising is still alive and well, what’s really turning heads and shaking up markets these days are innovative new products that have no competitors. They’re often too complex to adequately explain in an ad: you need to actually experience the product—or the retail experience-- to understand the zeitgeist.

Take the iPad, for instance. You can read and watch all you want, but the key to the purchase cycle is actually touching and playing with one. What drives that is not advertising, but word-of-mouth: people spontaneously talking to their friends about how much they love their iPads. The guy on a train asking a stranger how she finds typing on it. It's not a product, it's a conversation piece and that's not something you could say about most mid-century packaged goods.

And so maybe that’s just it: advertising, the funny, entertaining, pop culture phenomenon that defined the 1960s, 70s and 80s, was a product of its times. It helped us make sense of a confusing array of new mass produced products and became redundant as media splintered and new products were more often iterations of old ones (e.g. Bud Light Lime) than entirely new categories.  Add to that the spurt of innovative businesses – everything from Starbucks to WholeFoods to Amazon— whose  unique end-to-end experiences helped differentiate them from their competitors, and you have the end of an era.

What follows, a world where consumer-generated messages and brand messages are integrated in a seamless loop, may not be nearly as sexy. But it may just prove more useful.  

"Suck Less" Works Too

Engineers and techies hate Verizon. They’ve got a list of complaints a mile long about the cell carrier, ranging from its insistence on filling phones with useless branded applications that duplicate superior third-party ones to the overall inferiority of its product line.

Marketing pros marvel at what I’ve heard described as Verizon’s “death wish” – the fact that the carrier has passed on opportunities that many have felt would have put its rivals out of business. (The iPhone, for example.)

Consumers, on the other hand, don’t seem to mind. They’ve focused on the fact that a Verizon phone generally does what a phone is supposed to do: make and receive telephone calls, far more reliably than any of its competitors. (This is especially true in major cities like New York and San Francisco.) For many people, that’s proven to be a far more important factor than the model of their phone or the clunkiness of its apps.

It’s an interesting paradigm: in an industry where consumers have little love for any of the major players, the company that’s focused on the basics has proven to be the gold standard.

That “best of the worst” theory doesn’t make for a sexy marketing strategy, but by actually doing the groundwork, Verizon has established enough word-of-mouth buzz to overcome its rivals marketing-based efforts at stealing the “best coverage” crown. And while no company should strive to be the least lousy player in the market, there’s a lesson in there about sticking to the basics.

Do Location Based Check-Ins Have To Be Real Time?

One of the biggest hassles of location based services like FourSquare is the actual process of checking in. You arrive at the restaurant, your friends are already waiting at the table and there’s not really a socially acceptable way  to whip out your phone and begin the 5 minute ignore-everyone-at-the-table-and-stare-at-your-phone process that a check-in often entails.

But what if check-ins weren’t real time? The original reason for making them real time was so that your friends could find you if you were out in a nearby bar. (It also played into the whole badge/mayor game thing.) Which is one reason to use an LBS, but far from the only one: more often than not we’re checking in from our office or the supermarket or a client lunch and no one’s really looking for us at those places.

What if location based services evolved into recommendation engines: here’s where I was today, I ate at Elm Street Café and recommend the artichoke soup. I bought a Calvin Klein sweater at Macy’s. They’re on sale this week.

Most of the time when I check in to FourSquare (or Gowalla, or Facebook Places) the results I’m seeing from my friends are several hours old anyway. So at lunchtime, I’m finding out where they had breakfast or drinks the night before.

A location-based service that was not real time would seem to have a number of benefits:

1. Ease of Use: I’m thinking most people would be more prone to “check-in” at the end of the day or whenever they had a spare 5 minutes alone and could input the highlights of their day rather than the random stops that comprise most people’s LBS check-in log. It also stops checking-in from interrupting a fun experience and forcing us out of participant mode and into reporter mode (e.g. the restaurant scene I laid out earlier.)
2. Deeper Engagement: Rather than just a rushed click to let the world know “Hey! I’m at the dry cleaners!” someone doing an end-of-day check-in is more likely to add tips and recommendations too, especially given that they’ve had some time to reflect on the day’s experiences. 
3. Increased Loyalty: If I’m bothering to check in at Elm Street Café after the fact, chances are I’m a fan of the place. And if they were to send me a coupon for a free artichoke soup, chances are I’d use it next time I went. That’s a lot more appealing than getting hit with random coupons from a store I’m already in, particularly if I’m checking in as I’m waiting on line to pay. (Which is often where I find myself pulling out my phone - not, as many have postulated, upon entering.) 
4. More Valuable Information: When checking in becomes thoughtful rather than random, informed rather than scattered, marketers (and other users) are provided with more useful information: did Bob check in from the dry cleaners because there was someone in front of him on line and he was bored, or did he check in to give them props for the way they iron his shirts? That sort of information is much more likely to be offered during a non-spontaneous check-in. 

There are still plenty of situations (concerts, conferences. etc/) where real-time check-in can be a valuable tool and I’m not proposing that sites eliminate it. I’d also think these sites would want to set some sort of limit (24 hours?) on how much time passed between visit and check-in.

I think eliminating the requirement that all check-ins be real-time would greatly enhance both the appeal and the value of location-based services.

If nothing else, it would make the process a whole lot easier.