Somebody has to do it.

And since it seems like no one else is going to step up, I’ll go ahead.

I was exposed to it when I was a kid. But it didn’t strike me that anything was amiss at the time. (The reason for this is simple: kids are dumb.) It wasn’t until I had kids of my own and was subjected to the story over and over and over again that I began to see the cracks.

I believe it was a month or so ago when I was reading the story to my youngest daughter when I finally hit a wall. “Enough is enough”, I thought to myself. I finished the book knowing exactly what I had to do.

I have to call bullshit on Cinderella.

There is plenty of totally solid evidence to back me up on this. One of which is the laughably half-assed (cruelly cock-teased?) magic performed by the Fairy Godmother.

“Hey, here you go! Isn’t this awesome of me! I didn’t lift a finger for ump-teen years while you toiled away in rags in a basement but now I’ve decided to help! I will do a bunch of magic and make it so you can go to the ball!!!! I know, right?!?!?

“But wait – there’s a catch! For some reason I have decided that my magic will run out at midnight! Pretty cool twist! Yeah, you’re right, I suppose I could have just made the magic permanent. Or heck, used my magic to turn the stepmother and stepsisters into banana slugs or something. But I think this way is much more fun! Don’t you?!?!?!”

But this isn’t even the bit what finally got my goat. That bit would be the glass slipper. Let me count the ways.

#1 It’s a shoe. Made of GLASS. Someone with magical powers has decided to conjure a shoe. Did this magical person choose leather? Canvas? Hemp? No. This magical person chose GLASS. This magical person is an asshole.

#2 The rest of the magical clothes disappeared but the slippers remained. This magical person is an asshole with a sick sense of humor.

#3 This next bit, specifically, is the part that sent me stomping from my daughter’s room. In part because of the sheer lunacy. And in part because I hadn’t realized it any sooner.

Say you are a Prince, and you have just danced and fell in love with a mystery woman. She runs off, leaving only her GLASS SLIPPER behind (I could easily do a “3a” here about the wisdom of chasing a gal who wears shoes made of GLASS).

You know you have to find this mystery woman. But alas – all you have to use for identification is her SHOE. What in the world do you do?

Well the first thing you do is realize that you have something far better than a SHOE to use as identification. Remember the part where you danced with her for hours on end? Now think back. Did you ever, during these hours and hours of dancing, notice what she LOOKED LIKE? I’m thinking that maybe her ACTUAL FACE would be a better form of identification than her shoe size.

So maybe the Prince is an idiot, and somehow this logic escapes him. However the dude is surrounded by minions, footmen, butlers, etc. Did this not occur to any of them? And if not at first then certainly while they were going house-to-house throughout the entire kingdom trying a SHOE MADE OF GLASS on any gal with five toes.

I mean c’mon. Surely at some point All the King’s Men were been charged with, say, capturing some sort of outlaw. When All the King’s Men put up “WANTED” posters do they list the outlaw’s shoe size? Or do they use a PICTURE OF HIS FACE?

Now is it possible that in the original version of the story Cinderella was wearing some sort of mask? I guess so. But if the internet has taught me anything it’s that the internet would never lie to me: a Google Images search for “Cinderella at the ball” returns exactly ZERO photographs of the fair princess with anything covering her face.

If the Prince is too dumb to choose FACIAL RECOGNITION over MATCHING SHOE-SIZE he deserves a poison apple or bachelorhood or worse.

As for Cinderella, despite the overwhelming evidence, maybe she doesn’t bitch about her Fairy Godmother because she’s a glass-slipper-half-full kind of girl. Maybe she figures going to the ball and getting even one dance with a Prince is pretty awesome and that it would be selfish to expect any more.

But then isn’t she slightly concerned when the Prince and his Footmen show up with the slipper? Like “DUDE! Hey! It’s me! Look! Up here! At my FACE!”

Never mind. I’ll calm down. They deserve each other. But tonight at bedtime I’m reading her the dictionary.

Solid as Sears

Bloggers write about stuff all the time. Take my word for it — they do.

One interesting approach that has come out of all this “web” “logging” is when marketers position themselves as an authority in a certain field. Let’s call it the “Kaiser Effect”, as Kaiser have made (to me) the most memorable effort in this space.

They don’t beat you over the head with a hard sell. They simply present info on a topic where they have a vested interest. And then let the consumer take it (or not) from there.

Sears (footwear division) as a video on their website, with some helpful advice on which type of running shoe is right for a given set of conditions. The video primarily lives in the thick of the e-commerce section of their site. But then a funny thing happened – they also put the video on YouTube. It’s branded as Sears of course. But it’s interesting that they decided to choose more or less neutral territory.

Did Sears do this as a result of advice from some or other marketing agency? That sounds like a thing that could happen.

And oh yeah, here’s the video in question:

http://www.youtube.com/user/SearsFitnessFirst#p/a

Big Thinking Small

A friend of the program writes:

“The Giant Global Advertising Concern, whose name appears on my paycheck, was recently approached by a Giant Internet Outpost about a problem they are having. It seems The Digital Populace is not using their Product to the extent that they would prefer.

“By way of background I should mention that a Top Brass Gentleman with a Funny Accent and Interesting Pedigree had recently given a talk at this particular Branch of the Concern. He spoke of many things. One of which was, when faced with a challenge, make sure you are leaving yourself open to new ways to solve.

“Specifically in Marketing, don’t always fall back on Thee Olde Wayse. **Sales are dropping? QUICK! MAKE A NEW TV SPOT!**  Etc.

“In fact, maybe sometimes the problem lies with the product itself. Maybe it is simply not giving The People what they want. Need. Etc. And Bigger Thinking becomes necessary. (Is it easy to approach The Client with something they didn’t ask for? No. Is it The Agency’s job to provide The Best Counsel? Yes.)

“So back to the Giant Internet Outpost and their problem. So the Advertising Concern is given an assignment, which is to make people spend more time with the Product. Can you guess what the Concern’s reaction was?

“Their immediate (and only) reaction was to make a bunch of ads. QUICK! MAKE A BUNCH OF ADS! THAT’LL LEARN ‘EM!

“When it was brought to the Leadership of the Concern that MAYBE, just MAYBE, this wasn’t the only path to take … crickets.

“It was suggested to the Leadership of the Concern that MAYBE, just MAYBE, the problem was in the Product itself. That it needed a Strategic 3.0 Re-Jiggering to better provide what The Digital Populace is looking for (that The Outpost might need to Adapt in Order to Survive). The idea being that some of The Concern’s energy should be put toward something OTHER than MAKING ADS.

“More crickets. Totally ignored. Instead they just went out and Made More Ads.

“Bummer.”

–Name redacted by request

Chet

Chet. Chet. Chet Lemon.

I would like to start off by acknowledging that yes, this is the 2^nd post in a row borne of a New Yorker article. Does this mean I am bucking for a job as a (somehow, miraculously) worse-haircutted Gladwell? Nah.

I’ll paste the link to Malcolm Gladwell’s latest below. He essentially takes Facebook and Twitter to task for being lousy at fueling (the? a? actual?) revolution. It’s a good (if long) read, if for no other reason than the interesting summary of how the Greensboro lunch-counter boycott was hatched, executed, and spread around.

His contention is that Facebook is a wonderful tool for leveraging “weak ties” to, say, spread the word about some general cause or issue. But that when it comes down to something in serious need of concrete action Facebook is the proverbial knife at the gunfight.

My impulse was to jump to FB’s defense (yeah Zuckerberg, you can thank me later). But I don’t think Mr. Gladwell is entirely off-base. However I will offer that just because Facebook HASN’T been used in this way doesn’t mean it COULDN’T.

Just because I only use my sledgehammer to crack lobster doesn’t mean it couldn’t also be used to knock down walls. You don’t shake your fist at American Telephone & Telegraph for the conversation you overhear on the bus about what Mr. Whiskers has been doing all afternoon.

Is there evidence of an instance where FB was used to organize/promote/initiate a protest and it failed? Not that I know of. The problem (if there is one) lies in the lack of an event. There has been no test of FB in this arena.

And the only case-specific examples Mr. Gladwell provides are apple/orange occurrences where the Facebook efforts actually worked. Is he saying that because FB has worked in “weak ties” scenarios it couldn’t work in others? Isn’t this a bit like saying Derek Jeter couldn’t possibly be good at soccer because he’s good at baseball?

Facebook and Twitter are just part of the issue here. Not only was there no internet in 1960, there were also no cell phones or 24-hour cable news stations. If an initiative was to succeed, it depended upon old-fashioned close ties and interaction in large part because that’s all there was. You can certainly make the case that having close ties to the movement was the main thing that kept it alive but by the same token being able to reach sheer numbers of like-minded people could have provided both energy and bolster.

I’m kind of flinging arrows at the hedge here (vague Gladwell hair crack #2?), and I haven’t the research to entirely back up all this yapping. But grinding an axe at Facebook and Twitter for not saving the goll-darn whales?

Don’t blame the tools. Blame the workers.

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/10/04/101004fa_fact_gladwell?currentPage=all

[[  On a very-likely-only-interesting-to-me note, the article refers to AT&T as “A. T. & T”. I assume this is a mistake – ? The Greensboro students attended North Carolina A. & T., so I’m guessing the copyediting process was muddled due to several mentions of the college.  ]]

 

[ Originally published at the Conspiracy Media Group International Web Log. September, 2010. http://conspiracymediagroup.wordpress.com/ ]

 

It could always suck more

The September 20^th issue of The New Yorker has a really interesting piece on James Dyson, inventor of vacuums by the same name. Definitely worth a read, for a bunch of reasons.*

What jumped out at me initially was the description of how he brought his first model to market. At the time the marketplace was full-up with brands hovering right around the $99 mark. So when Dyson decided to enter the fray with a model costing three times that amount how did he do it?

Not with flashy graphics or even a list of product attributes and advantages. He did it with a story. A story about cleaning his house and becoming frustrated with the ways in which his vacuum was underperforming. And how he rolled up his shirtsleeves and invented something better.

This approach is interesting, and seems to make sense in other categories as well. If a spirits brand decides to go after a higher-end niche you don’t see a bunch of ads with dudes exchanging high-fives in a parking lot. What you’re more likely to see is a story about quality, about how the product is aged, where the ingredients are sourced from, etc.

The New Yorker article also talks about Mr. Dyson’s belief in engineering, and how it should fit hand-in-glove with design. “All our engineers are designers and all our designers are engineers”, and “the engineering leads the design”. Hey that’s neat.

But my question is this: does all of this have to automatically lead to a high price tag? Mr. Dyson talks at length about the need to shift back toward manufacturing, which is all well and good. But so far all we have seen Dyson hang his hat on is The World’s Most Expensive (and therefore Best) Hatrack.

Encouraging folks to get their hands dirty (to MANUFACTURE, to INVENT) is dandy but where does utility come in? How does this angle apply to the pedestrian goods we need and use everyday? Inventing and building a better mousetrap is an admirable goal but is it a business model if the shelf price is three times that of the competition?

Maybe Dyson would say “Why yes. Yes it is.” Create some sort of fancy Brand Mythology around your Mousetrap 2.0 and customers and mice alike will come running. Hell I think the marketing would actually be kinda fun to work on.

But what I’d like to ask Mr. Dyson about is using these powers for good. I’d like to see some of this same shirtsleeves go-get-‘em attitude combined with a more “for the people” product or product line.

The article makes passing mention of the automobile industry, pointing out the steel-clad division between engineers and designers. But what would happen if you mashed all these notions together and got a bunch of designer/engineer hybrids working on, say, an affordable hybrid? Get these brainiac Designgineers™ to work on every part of the process, from design to materials to manufacturing. Thus making it both better AND more affordable.

Plus I’ll bet someone could gin up a really good story to bathe it in.

(*Article by John Seabrook. Abstract here: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/09/20/100920fa_fact_seabrook )

 

[ Originally published at the Conspiracy blog. September, 2010. http://conspiracymediagroup.wordpress.com/ ]

I’m Your #1 Fan

Imagine being able to claim, with proof, that you were first in the door. You saw THAT BAND back when they were playing small clubs, etc., etc.

There is obviously an appetite for trumpeting. Checking in on Foursquare, posting on The Facebook, Twitter, et. al. And this seems to be the horse that many brands have ignored, in favor of the cart.

“Wait … what cart?” Ok fine. The cart being the creation of a Social Media presence simply for the sake of a Social Media presence (as well as the subsequent obsession with the raw NUMBER of fans). Point being, make your presence about the CUSTOMER. Or to quote our old pal Bob Lefsetz, “the best way to get people to spend is to make it about them”*.

Lefsetz also mentions Farmville. How much $$$$ they’re making as a company, and how people love to share their FV accomplishments. Farmville has figured out how to both get people to spend their dough, and how to still make the experience about THEM.

“Under the cap” rewards programs were a pre-internet version of this. I remember collecting 7-Up bottle caps with letters underneath, in hopes of spelling out some or other message. I never got anywhere with this but even if I had, other than standing on the porch and hollering there was no convenient way to brag.

It seems natural to expect more and more brands to leverage this type of participation, and to marry this participation with some form of trumpeting. Foursquare badges, fan bragging rights, virtual rewards, etc. All tied, of course, to the spending of actual money.

Construct a program that’s free to join, and that has some inherent value in and of itself. A concert calendar app, links to behind the scenes footage, somesuch. And then offer exclusive goods, discounted tickets, othersuch. Plus of course, make it cool or fun enough that people can’t help but tell their friends.

I recently flew cross-country, wife and three kids in tow. On the way east we flew Delta, who impose a fee for all checked bags. On the way back we flew Southwest who let us check 47 steamer trunks without so much as batting an eye or charging a red cent (I’m exaggerating here. I think we only had 34.).

However my point isn’t simply about the fee itself. It’s more about the way it was done vs. the way it COULD be done. Here’s the breakdown, from the Delta website: “First checked bag: $23 if checked in online, or $25 at the airport. Second checked bag: $32 online or $35 at the airport.”

That’s a lot of bread. And not a lot of savings if you check in online. This WILL make me think twice before booking another Delta flight. But if you tell me I can get deeper discounts if I check in via Foursquare at a Delta kiosk? I might change my tune.

Maybe not the best example of the “cool factor” alluded to earlier, but you get the picture. With some stuff (music being the example that springs to mind) the internet has pretty much ruined it. Once people sniff that they can get it for free you can’t put the toothpaste back in the tube. But if there’s stuff people need or want, and that they’re gonna pay for anyway?

Grease the skids. Offer rewards. Make it about them.

*Inspiration for this post came from the following by Mr. Lefsetz: http://lefsetz.com/wordpress/index.php/archives/2010/09/03/quote-of-the-day-9/

 

[ From the Conspiracy Media Group blog, September, 2010. http://conspiracymediagroup.wordpress.com/ ]

 

Who’s Got Next?

In the beginning there was America Online and there were chatrooms and websites and it was good. Everyone was sending “electronic mail” which was nice and then they were sending “e-mail” which was even better but then we started sending “email”, and well, that was the absolute BEST.

Napster had a decent run there for a while there, didn’t it? But Napster of course ruined everything, by convincing people that they could have something they love, something they need, for free. And now anytime we have to pay a red cent for ANYTHING digital we are up in arms. But alas it was too good to last and Napster never really figured out a way to make it as a legit business.

Which brings us to The Book Face. Originally conceived as a way to digitally remove people’s faces and preserve them in book form, it was soon re-strategized as the world’s largest storehouse of 80s haircut photos.

In digital terms Facebook actually grew pretty slowly. Unlike Napster you heard about Facebook before you were allowed to have it. And this forbidden fruit vibe made it irresistible. Pretty soon you were using it for everything you used to use electronic mail/e-mail/email for — pictures of your kids, long-lost videos of that cool band you used to like, your cat’s super-cute fall wardrobe, you name it — you aint e’ing it you’re F’ing it.

But lately doesn’t it maybe kinda feel like we’re at a “what’s next?” phase? Maybe it’s the privacy stuff, maybe it’s Diaspora, maybe it’s natural/digital selection, maybe it’s all (or none) of the above.

Speaking of Diaspora, the open-source for the Facebook alternative is now available. Is this the FB-killer? Could be. The screenshots look awfully familiar but sometimes that’s the way it is with digital innovation. Zuckerberg even called Diaspora a “cool idea”.

I could end way wrong on this but Diaspora feels like a band-aid. It’s an open-source patched-up version of something everyone already has, which is possibly something everyone will flock to. But not for long.  I feel like the next move will be something with mobile at its core. Like some sort of Facebook/Foursquare/Twitter/Pandora mashup, built FOR mobile (rather than a mobile version of an existing dealie).

Marketers like to tell their clients to spend $ on Facebook in large part because that’s where their audience is. This is also true with individuals. Sure we all have outlier holdout friends but they’ll buy the Farmville soon enough.

But by the time they do will the party be over? Clearly there’s been a sea change at Facebook, and that Zuckerberg fella has decided that it’s as fun and challenging to figure out how to monetize the thing as it was to create and nurture it. Fine. It’s his baby. And hey, he had a pretty good run.

 

[ First posted at the Conspiracy Media Group blog, 10/2010. http://conspiracymediagroup.wordpress.com/ ]

 

Traverse to Infiniti

The other day I watched an episode of  “The Office” on Hulu. It was brought to me w/ limited commercial interruption by the New Chevy Traverse. Then later I watched another episode, which was brought to me by w/ limited commercial interruption by the New Infiniti QX.

Ok “The Office”, what gives? How can you stand there and tell me you stand for one SUV then turn around minutes later and tell me you stand for another (vastly different) one?

I’m kidding. Sort of.  It did remind me of a conversation I had w/ my friend John a couple months or so ago, about context & content. He had just finished some ads for Miscorosft, and was talking about where they would be placed.

Instead what we have (on Hulu at least) are basically the same ads you see anywhere. On the most basic (digital) level there’s Gmail. Where the context of your email messages dictate which ads you see. And while this is certainly not apples-to-apples w/ TV spots on Hulu there’s still a point to be made in here somewhere.

What John and I thought might be neat-o was this idea of Hulu ads being custom made for key shows. Let’s take “The Office”. Wouldn’t it be nifty if Depot Max hired some (actually funny) comedy troupe and they did something at least loosely based in an office scenario? Not to try and out-Office “The Office” or anything, but simply playing to a known common interest of the audience.

This is starting to happen on other shows and networks (“Mad Men” being the prime example), but I think Hulu (and its advertisers) are missing a boat. The typical Hulu format (3 ad slots) seems to be screaming for some 3-part ads (beginning, middle, end). The structure is already in place, so why not cram some sort of story-arc spots in there, w/ applicable content & context to match?

With Facebook and Twitter and all the ways in which people connect w/ the brands they like, there has been much (e-)ink spilled about how advertising has to adapt. Not going to go into that here but let’s just say the days of ONE GIANT COOKIE CUTTER AD seem to be numbered, if not over.

So maybe it’s not that far from “Traverse to Infiniti” after all. But I can’t recall a single thing about the trip.

 

[ The original Lucky&Best blog was lucky enough to first publish this fine piece of journalism. Way back in September of 2010. ]

 

Whither the dot-com?

So we’re preparing to overhaul the CMG website. You know the one, it lives over at http://www.conspiracymediagroup.com/ . So in the course of planning the redesign we did some poking around on “the” internet to see what other agencies were up to on their sites.

 

One of the places we landed was Campbell Ewald (http://www.campbell-ewald.com/ ). They’ve done something interesting with their site, and while not the only example of this approach, it is the one we will be using as our conversational starting line.

 

Instead of, for example, a typical “work” section they have a bunch of links which lead the user to other places. Click on “motion” and up pops a CE YouTube page with a bunch of their TV work (interesting to note that the YouTube pages appears within the existing CE website framework). Click “still” and a new window appears with the agency’s Flickr page. And so on.

 

This touched off a bunch of conversations around the office. The first was a general “why the heck did they do this?” Was it to position themselves as web savvy? (“Look everyone – we have a bunch of delicious tags!”) Or did they simply believe that this approach was the easiest way to catalog their work? We also had discussions about the display method saying as much about the agency as the work itself, about the opening of a new window vs. keeping it in the CE framework, and about man’s inhumanity to man.

 

Which ultimately led us to this question: if we had it to do over again today, would we spend a lot of time/energy/money on a traditional .com agency site or would we simply stitch a bunch of other sites together? It still seems necessary to have something up at the .com (email address will use this extension, people will naturally search there, etc.), but what?

 

What are the characteristics of content one might house at a .com site? At a Facebook page? Company blog? Twitter? YouTube? Et. al. Maybe the .com site acts as a portal or hub? Or does this just end up fragmenting the experience of visiting a brand online?*

 

You could certainly tell an interesting story by stitching together a bunch of channels. Have a basic description on your website, then link out to the other places where your brand lives. Done a bunch of videos? Where else would they live but YouTube? Written volumes of fascinating and insightful missives on the state of the industry? Why a blog of course!

 

In other words do we go out and create channels or pages in all (or at least some) of the most popular internet hangouts or do we set up shop at our own .com and wait for people to come knocking?

 

You get the picture. As mentioned earlier we are in the middle of rethinking the CMG site, and all of these questions and approaches have been rattling around in our brains. The discussions have been great, and have led to some really valuable examinations of and ruminations on web design, content strategy, and digital behavior.

 

We’re still figuring out what we feel is the best approach in our particular situation. And we certainly welcome anyone’s thoughts on all of this.

 

*These issues will be looked at a little more closely in Part 2 of this post. If I ever get around to it.

 

[ August of 2010. Is when this originally appeared. On the Lucky&Best blog, naturally. ]