Influential Marketing Blog

IdeaBar: Adline - Priceline for Online Advertising

Booking travel for this past weekend, I was reminded of the brilliance of the business model that Priceline pioneered for travel booking.  In an industry where prices were known to fluctuate and most transactions followed a simple search -> buy -> sell model, they let the buyers set their price and allowed the sellers to decide if the price was acceptable.  That alone was not the brilliant part, though.  What Priceline inherently understood is that no seller would participate in a model like that unless they knew that their sales from other channels were safe from this price-focused approach.  So Priceline hides the identities of the sellers until you complete your purchase.  Simple, useful and innovative.

I read an interesting piece in a marketing trade talking about how advertisers were planning for the new year given there was likely to be an election year spending frenzy on television ads that would drive prices up and availability lower.  Scott Berg from HP was interviewed in BusinessWeek and made an interesting point about how advertisers need to be flexible.  His strategy is to move more spending online and leave standing orders at lower rates with regional TV stations to fill their ad slots once regional candidates drop out of races and leave more availability.  This is essentially the same model as Priceline - set your price and let the merchant accept or decline it.

So what about online advertising?  Most of that is sold on an inventory vs. expected traffic model, and for popular sites, it is sold far ahead of time.  As more and more do it yourself models of online advertising become popular (Federated Media, BlogAds, Google Adwords, and Facebook being the most notable examples), the idea of last minute advertising is not so hard to imagine.  What if there was a site like Priceline for online advertising (let's call it Adline, for fun)?  You could enter your flight dates, the demographic details of where you are trying to reach, the type of placement, and the maximum CPM you are willing to pay.  Placements would need to be rated on some sort of neutral system so you would not be overpaying for obscured inside page placements, as well as by relative visibility of the site, but the idea is that I could decide to do a five star ad unit on a five star site and set my own CPM.  The site could choose to accept or dcline my offer.  Could something like this work?

About the Idea Bar:  Working in a creative team, the life of our business is new ideas.  We come up with them every day for clients, but sometimes there are ideas that just don't fit a client.  They are too big, too different, or just not quite right. Inspired by John at Digital Influence Mapping Project, the IdeaBar is a category of posts that are meant to be "open source" and offer new ideas for marketing.  Take them and use them ... all I ask for is a link back to this post if you find these ideas useful and talk about them.  Read more IdeaBar posts on this blog.

IdeaBar: Statlicious & Quotelicious

I am a big fan and user of del.icio.us.  In fact, I am planning to do the entire index for my book in del.icio.us - sort of a visual version of that thing in the back of every book to help you find who is mentioned in it.  When it comes to seeking information, del.icio.us is a big source of information for me because I rely on the way that others have tagged and saved information to find relevant content.  It is the wisdom of the crowds in action.  The thing I recently realized, though, is that there are two things that I found myself searching for quite often, trying to use del.icio.us for, and getting frustrated.  The main problem with del.icio.us is that most of the content for a particular link lies behind a click.  While the tags describing content are often strong, the description that people enter is usually not as useful.

The end result is that you follow a link, but then are forced to scan the entire text of the page to find the one small piece that you were looking for.  The two situations this has become most evident for me is when I was seeking a stat or a quote.  Both situations are essentially a search for a single relevant line of text, instead of a full page of material.  So this leads me to the idea for this edition of IdeaBar ... what if there was a version of a tool like del.icio.us just for stats and quotes?  People would still save links for original source material, but the text of the quote or stat would be included automatically in the description.  The keywords would also describe the context of each quote or stat, making it easy to find. 

Quotes may be a bit book or presentation centric, but imagine a tool like this for stats ... every person who has had to pull together a presentation and use noteworthy stats to prove their point would probably find it useful.  At the very least, it would help me to more easily file the stats that I do find so I can use them later.  What do you think?

About the Idea Bar:  Working in a creative team, the life of our business is new ideas.  We come up with them every day for clients, but sometimes there are ideas that just don't fit a client.  They are too big, too different, or just not quite right. Inspired by John at Digital Influence Mapping Project, the IdeaBar is a category of posts that are meant to be "open source" and offer new ideas for marketing.  Take them and use them ... all I ask for is a link back to this post if you find these ideas useful and talk about them.  Read more IdeaBar posts on this blog.

Idea Bar: The Uber Business Card

I've been to a lot of conferences and tradeshows recently, and as most attendees of those types of events know, you get a lot of freebies.  The whole idea of many exposition halls is for companies to find ways to give away the right free crap with their names on it to that they can increase awareness of their solution among the right influentials and maybe even sell their solution or product to a few people as well.  I have long said that the companies who get the most benefit from events like this are the ones that no one has yet heard of.  For them, the awareness is often worth paying for, whether they can close any deals or not.  Yet in a sea of sameness where everyone is giving away pens, flashy light balls, or USB drives, how can you stand out?  One common way is to have the "uber bag" - which is larger or of higher quality than other bags.  Then attendees use your bag to carry around all the other free stuff they get, and you get the free branded exposure as they carry these bags around throughout the event.  That's pretty obvious, I think, so doing a whole idea bar post on that is probably not going to offer you much.

Yet what if someone extended this idea to another area of difficulty - business cards.  At most events, I collect lots of business cards, and usually I just create a stack and put them into my bag to sort out when I get home.  What if someone could create an "uber business card" which acted like a folder to store all your other business cards?  It could be expandable like a file folder, and sealed on 2 or 3 sides so you could slide in average sized business cards into it.  Plastic or card stock could be used to create the cards and because of the wider profile, you would have several additional 3-D sides to use for relaying information or placing custom imagery.  What do you think?  Could this be the next kind of card that Moo.com (or anyone else) should offer?

Photo Credit: "Business card loot from Blogher '07" from kerflop's Photostream on Flickr (by Jessica Wiseman, who also authors a great personal blog called Kerflop).

About the Idea Bar:  Working in a creative team, the life of our business is new ideas.  We come up with them every day for clients, but sometimes there are ideas that just don't fit a client.  They are too big, too different, or just not quite right. Inspired by John at Digital Influence Mapping Project, the IdeaBar is a category of posts that are meant to be "open source" and offer new ideas for marketing.  Take them and use them ... all I ask for is a link back to this post if you find these ideas useful and talk about them.  Read more IdeaBar posts on this blog.

Influential Marketing Blog Featured in Wall Street Journal

Many of you may have already caught this yesterday, but this blog was cited in the Recommended Reading  section of the Wall Street Journal yesterday in an article by Keith Huang.  As Jay Berkowitz from Ten Golden Rules shares on his team blog, my blog was one of 60 resources that they recommended to the journalist as part of their reading list and was selected from that list as a recommended resource for companies looking to "optimize their online presence."  Here's the writeup:

Influential Marketing Blog, rohitbhargava.typepad.com
Rohit Bhargava's blog is intellectual and educational. In a recent post, he discusses the art of stamp collection and how, even today, many smaller countries use stamps as a key marketing tool. He writes, 'Next time you pass a post office in any country, pay attention to how they are using their philately to promote the country, cater to tourists, or commemorate moments of significance.'

It is a great media hit and to be selected from a list of what I am guessing were 60 stellar resources is flattering.  I'm in awe at being included among the other bloggers and authors mentioned in the article - including Seth Godin, Steve Rubel, Matt Cutts, John Battelle, Chris Anderson, Joseph Jaffe, and Danny Sullivan. Thanks to Jay for including me in this great list, and to Keith for selecting to include my blog!

Idea Bar: Self Destructing Emails

People often ask me how long a blog post takes.  Some take months of collecting information, most take an hour or two, and then there are posts like this one.  A quick idea, written in about 5 or 10 minutes ... in this case, the quick idea came from going through my emails and realizing that I have way to many of them to delete.  I am getting more and more in my inbox, particularly as activity on my social networks and blogs increase.  The problem with all of this email is that it sits rotting in my inbox until I take the manual effort of deleting the ones I don't want anymore.  This led me to think about the emails that I get, and what I realized is that they all fit into two types.  The first are substantial emails about things that I care about and that I need to save and archive.  The other type are the notification emails.

It is these "notification emails" that make up the bulk of my inbox.  There are several types of emails that fit this category:

1. Blog comment or trackback notifications from Typepad
2. New friend requests from Twitter, Linkedin, Facebook, Flickr, etc.
3. News subscriptions, live NFL scores, blog post email subscriptions, etc.
4. CC emails where I am copied as an FYI but with no action required
5. Sales or promotional emails I have signed up for (ie - not spam)

All of these are types of emails that I want to receive BUT NOT KEEP OR ARCHIVE.  The problem with most email tools is that they do not let you make this distinction.  They let you mark emails as urgent or not urgent, store them in folders, mark them as spam, but not decide what you want to do with them automatically after you read them.  Of course, I could delete them after I read them, but I don't and this leads to email clutter.  Why can't I set up certain types of emails to "self destruct" (automatically delete) after a certain period of time?  My notifications of friend requests and blog comments would automatically delete 1 hour after I read them.  The sales or promotional emails would automatically delete after the expiration date of the sale has been reached.  Other types of emails would be ones I could set the self destruct time for (number of hours or days after reading).  Then I could read my emails and then have them go away without having to do anything (of course, allowing me to undo if something is accidentally deleted).  How cool would that be?

Idea Bar: The Universal Invite/Connect/Poke/Follow/Subscribe Button

I have a profile on just about every social network that I can find.  That doesn't mean I use all of them, of course, but I am starting to run into a very interesting problem that I have to assume others are running into as well.  The problem is keeping my social network synchronized.  I have nearly 250 contacts on LinkedIn, and nearly 100 on Facebook, and they are different.  I know most of those people have accounts on both, but if I am already connected to someone, it requires an extra step to connect again on another site ... which I don't take/have the time to do. 

Add to that the fact that now I have over 4000 folks who subscribe to this feed, but I am only connected to most of them through the fact that they read this blog on occasion and not through any social networks.  So you can probably guess where this idea is heading.  What if there was a universal button that I could just put on my blog to let someone connect to me?  Period.  And that button would let them send me an invite for LinkedIn, Myspace, Facebook, Flickr, Twitter, and whatever other network I choose to set up.  Then I could review the invitations individually and approve or decline them.  The only argument against this that I could see is if you want to keep your communities separate (for example use LinkedIn for business contacts and Facebook for personal contacts).  Still, under this idea you could still choose to only approve certain types of invitations.  What do you think - would this work?

About the Idea Bar:  Working in a creative team, the life of our business is new ideas.  We come up with them every day for clients, but sometimes there are ideas that just don't fit a client.  They are too big, too different, or just not quite right. Inspired by John at Digital Influence Mapping Project, the IdeaBar is a category of posts that are meant to be "open source" and offer new ideas for marketing.  Take them and use them ... all I ask for is a link back to this post if you find these ideas useful and talk about them.  Read more IdeaBar posts on this blog.

IdeaBar: Still Seeking The Great Semacode Marketing Idea

Gizmodo just posted a piece about how H&M is using semacodes imprinted onto Billboard ads in Europe for clothes to allow consumers to purchase an item of clothing directly from their phone.  I am a big fan of the promise of semacodes for marketing because they can offer a reliable way to let consumers interact with static outdoor ads and get more information or take an action right on the spot.  There are some obvious flaws in what H&M is trying to do ... most notably that I don't know of any woman who would see an article of clothing on a model in a billboard (especially after Dove's Evolution showed how these ads are created) and immediately decide to input her size and color choice to buy it.  But the idea of semacodes has lots of smarter potential applications.  Here are a just a few I could imagine for some smart forward thinking marketers:

1. Food and Lodging Recommendations - This is probably the most obvious application, as you are in a single physical location so you are most likely to agree to receive information for places to stay (if you are looking) or a good restaurant to eat at.  Any restaurant guide service like Zagats could easily use this as a promotion to share their content.
2. Personal Homing Beacons - Who hasn't been stuck in a new location and unable to describe your location to someone else who is trying to make their way there?  Street intersections are good, but sometimes that is not descriptive enough.  Imagine semacode lamp posts where you could snap a photo and essentially create a homing beacon for yourself for anyone to find you.  You could help your friend with no sense of direction find you through Google maps on their phone, or more usefully, order a Domino's pizza straight to the middle of nowhere.
3. Scavenger Hunt Style Promotions - As these rise in popularity, using semacodes imprinted onto locations or objects could enable a really fun chain reaction game where you find one clue and get a message telling you about the next one.  These would be indecipherable to people who do not know what they are, but provide essential clues to game participants.  For more interaction, a brand could even let people generate their own and generate clues for others.
4. HyperLocal Town/Suburb Info Guides - Walking into a new city with a Lonely Planet guide is great, but in smaller areas or suburbs, the infornation is often very little for travellers.  Semacodes printed into public spaces could bridge this gap by offering a way for local citizens to contribute content online and share information about destinations and attractions that no tourism book would likely cover.  Think more broadly about this, and it's easy to see how semacode marketing could reinvent how small towns or even suburbs market their localities as tourism destinations.

I am sure there are lots more possibilities for using semacodes - especially as camera phones become more common and people get more sophisticated about how they use their mobile devices to access timely and relevant information.  I will definitely be watching this space.

About the Idea Bar:  Working in a creative team, the life of our business is new ideas.  We come up with them every day for clients, but sometimes there are ideas that just don't fit a client.  They are too big, too different, or just not quite right. Inspired by John at Digital Influence Mapping Project, the IdeaBar is a category of posts that are meant to be "open source" and offer new ideas for marketing.  Take them and use them ... all I ask for is a link back to this post if you find these ideas useful and talk about them.  Read more IdeaBar posts on this blog.

IdeaBar: Magazine Subscription Coupons

I love magazines.  For someone who lives a good part of their life online, I read and subscribe to an oddly high number of them as well.  Of course, I could access most of the content from all these magazines online for free - but I do believe the experience of having a magazine that I can pick up and read on the go in places where I cannot get internet access is still worth paying for.  Most of the magazines I subscribe to are monthly publications (Business2.0, Fast Company, Wired, Conde Nast Traveller, and National Geographic) and BusinessWeek is my only subscription that arrives more frequently.  For each of them (with perhaps the exception of National Geographic), a big part of the reason that I subscribe is that I want the information first.  I suspect many magazine subscribers have a similar reason for subscribing.  Just like those who preorder books, the whole idea of subscribing and placing your order early is to get the information before everyone else, and certainly before non-subscribers. 

The problem I have with all of my magazines is that I don't get them first.  In fact, I pass several newsstands and a bookstore on my way to work, and often see the magazines carried there before they have arrived in my mailbox.  Now usually it is just a matter of days - but those few days matter to me.  If a band offered presales of tickets to a concert to members of their fan club, waiting a few days to buy would be unacceptable.  I am a fan of all my magazines, yet I don't feel as though I get a jump on their content any earlier than anyone who walks into a Borders to buy a copy.  The ideal solution, of course, is for them to send it and me to get it earlier ... but I know the logistics involved in sending out hundreds of thousands of magazines and I know sometimes its not possible.  Here's an alternative idea for this Idea Bar: magazine subscription coupons.  Instead of getting my magazine via the mail, I would get a coupon that could be used for the new issue and redeemed at any newsstand, bookstore or retail location that carries the magazine.  This coupon would ideally be emailed to me for a single use, and I would get it as soon as the first issues to retail locations are shipped. 

Of course, some people like the convenience of getting their magazines home delivered and would never go out of their way to pick it up - but for those like me who care more about getting it first, and are already passing several retail locations on our way to work, this system is low effort and would be ideal.  Retail locations would likely love it as well, since it gets more people coming in and increases the chance that you might buy something else.  Magazines could also use the couponing to get an idea of the most popular retail destinations for their customers.  Would this work?  Leave a comment and let me know what you think.

Special Note (08/01/07):  Welcome to those readers making their way here from the Fast Company blog post.  Coincidentally, I had posted this entry about the magazine business before seeing the link from FC Online, but if you read the magazine online or offline ... add your views here!

About the Idea Bar:  Working in a creative team, the life of our business is new ideas.  We come up with them every day for clients, but sometimes there are ideas that just don't fit a client.  They are too big, too different, or just not quite right. Inspired by John at Digital Influence Mapping Project, the IdeaBar is a category of posts that are meant to be "open source" and offer new ideas for marketing.  Read more IdeaBar posts on this blog.

IdeaBar: Fedex HyperLocal Delivery

This past weekend I spent most of the day on Saturday at home waiting for a delivery.  The promised window was between 11 and 2 ... and not surprisingly, 2pm rolled around with no delivery in sight.  The delivery was from Home Depot, but it just as easily could have been any furniture or appliance store in the local area.  For some reason, local delivery in this area (and probably most other areas across the US) seems to happen in one of two ways:

1. A store has its own delivery person and schedules that person to do all home deliveries
2. A store outsources delivery to a third party company who picks up the product and delivers it

Sounds pretty simple, but as we all know it is usually a nightmare.  In situation 1, the driver is delayed, can't find the house, has too many deliveries, or cannot be scheduled for delivery until some point far into the future.  In situation 2, the worst case is that the store has no idea where the delivery is after it is picked up and has no way to help a frustrated customer.  This is the situation I found myself in this past Saturday.  It got me thinking about home delivery and who does it right.  Fedex and UPS (and even USPS) have a far more sophisticated model for tracking every package, truck and driver.  They can tell you where anything is at any time.  Of course, they also run into delays and are not on time ... but at least they know where things are. 

What if one of those companies that does it right introduced a "hyperlocal delivery service."  Essentially a business to business solution, this would allow a company like Home Depot to use the logistics and technical savvy that Fedex or UPS have spent years perfecting.  Sound complicated?  Not really - as Amazon.com is already doing this for online retailers by offering their delivery process as an outsourced service and taking a cut off the top.  For Fedex or UPS, all that would be required is creating a way to pickup at multiple locations and integrating this with routes their drivers are already taking.  It's not easy, but certainly not impossible.  Fedex or UPS, are you listening?

About the Idea Bar:  Working in a creative team, the life of our business is new ideas.  We come up with them every day for clients, but sometimes there are ideas that just don't fit a client.  They are too big, too different, or just not quite right. Inspired by John at Digital Influence Mapping Project, the IdeaBar is a category of posts that are meant to be "open source" and offer new ideas for marketing.  Read more IdeaBar posts on this blog.

IdeaBar: Creationstorms

Over the weekend I revisted ShootExperience, a site that has the really interesting premise of getting people together in a single location at a set time to photograph in a community and share images.  Describing their mission as "helping people to rediscover their everyday environment and lives through photography,"  the site has launched the Connective Collective - a project designed to engage photographers across the world to share images around the central theme of WATER.  I love the ambition of this project and the concept behind the site - but the payoff of a Global Exhibition or winning online contests seems surprisingly traditional.  What about using the power of social media to amplify this idea even further?

Essentially, through their series of events - Shoot Experience has introduced what I would call a "creationstorm." A creationstorm is a call for individuals to participate in an event where they create imagery, video or text around a particular theme or topic and contribute it to a single location.  The real power of this concept is in how it amplifies the trend of users creating content by focusing a group of individuals on a specific location or theme within a specific time.  Imagine if all the photographs from the upcoming Shoot Toronto event were not only uploaded online, but also tagged in Flickr and del.icio.us, linked to reviews on Yelp, added to the Wikimapia project, offered as resources for filmmakers at TurnHere, and optimized for image searches on Google and other search engines.  This is the power of creationstorms.

For marketers in the travel and tourism industries, running their own creationstorms could become the key to building rich user generated content around a particular destination and offer hungry travellers images, stories and even video to consume as part of any online travel or entertainment related query.  There are lots of other marketing possibilities with this.  Imagine Starbucks launching their own creationstorm to get consumers worldwide to catalog every Starbucks location into a single gallery (or any retailer for that matter).  Hotel chains, local tourism boards, restaurants and tourist attractions all are other examples of services that could benefit from running their own creationstorms to fill the content void online.  The folks at Shoot Experience are already onto the potential of these creationstorms for corporate clients as team building or as part of PR and marketing activities.  If you amplify this idea with social media, it's easy to see that creationstorms have the potential to ignite the co-creation movement and help marketers harness this force at the same time.

About the Idea Bar:
Working in a creative team, the life of our business is new ideas.  We come up with them every day for clients, but sometimes there are ideas that just don't fit a client.  They are too big, too different, or just not quite right. Inspired by my colleague John Bell, the IdeaBar is a category of posts that are meant to be "open source" and offer new ideas for marketing.  Read more IdeaBar posts on this blog.

IdeaBar: The Secret Menu Item

There is a restaurant at the Hard Rock Cafe in Las Vegas called Mr. Lucky's 24/7.  As the name suggests, it's open all the time every day - but that's hardly unique in Las Vegas.  Their menu is like most other menus at cafe restaurants in hotels ... serving the usual entrees coupled with the typical Las Vegas style buffets with every kind of food you can imagine.  In a town like Vegas, it's tough to stand out for food.  But what everyone who has been to Vegas knows about Mr. Lucky's is that there is a special item not on the menu.  The "Gambler's Special" is a plate that includes a steak, three grilled shrimp, a choice of potato or broccoli, and a salad for $7.77 ... and only available for those that know to ask for it.  So here's the question: how many people do you think will go out of their way to get to Las Vegas, go to the Hard Rock Cafe, and make their way to Mr. Lucky's just to order that hidden menu item that is only available to those who know to ask for it?  Based on the reviews, I'm guessing more than a few.  This is the kind of buzz marketing that helps restaurants stand out.  It's the kind of thing people talk about.  It's the kind of thing that makes me dedicate an entire blog post to a restaurant that probably would otherwise be indistinguishable from any other Las Vegas cafe on or off the strip.  Now think outside of the restaurant business.  How much buzz could you drive by offering something outside of your usual "menu" that only the initiated customers knew to ask for?  What could you do with a secret menu item?

About the Idea Bar:
Working in a creative team, the life of our business is new ideas.  We come up with them every day for clients, but sometimes there are ideas that just don't fit a client.  They are too big, too different, or just not quite right.  Inspired by my colleague John Bell, the IdeaBar is a category of posts that are meant to be "open source" and offer new ideas for marketing.  Read more IdeaBar posts on this blog.

IdeaBar: CGM, the SuperBowl and a New Model for TV Advertising

The Superbowl is the real start to the new year for the advertising industry.  Just as the Chinese new year comes on a delay from the celebration of January 1st, the Superbowl manages to turn public attention to advertising in a way that is far beyond the other 364 days of the year.  As the approved Go Daddy spot nicely noted - "everybody wants to be in marketing" ... or at least pays attention to it, for a day.  Today on blogs, there are lots of lists of favourites and the "ad-meters" are hugely popular on YouTube, USAToday and many other outlets.  Many folks are talking about the rise of consumer generated media as the major trend to emerge out of this year's game.  I think that's true, but in a way that may not be often talked about.   

The most interesting thing for me was not just the fact that real people were producing ads for organizations, but that so many of the ads (consumer generated or otherwise) were so tapped into the event itself.  This is nothing new for the Superbowl - ads are produced specifically to launch during the game.  The Coke ad focusing on Black History Month, for example, noted the landmark moment of having two black head coaches in the Superbowl.  The winning NFL Network ad (which I felt was executed on poorly, but was still a great concept) focused on the end of the season and sad fans hanging up their NFL paraphanelia.  Ads like this evoked specific elements of the game, and worked better during the Superbowl not just because of the huge audience for the game, but also because they related to it.  Unfortunately, when it comes to most television advertising, there is rarely any contextual message that references the program the ad is running on. 

The problem with customizing TV ads in this way is that its just too expensive to create a diferent ad for each show or each audience.  It's easier to repurpose one ad for multiple uses.  But what if you could get a show's most passionate fans to do the work?  Imagine if an advertiser launched a contest to get fans of a particular show to create an ad for a product or brand to run during the show.  This has been done before - such as last year when Ford created a series of ads during the finals for American Idol where all the remaining singers did a music video together.  There was a new ad each week.  Anyone who was a fan of the show loved those ads, and never fast forwarded through them.  Of course, for American Idol, it's easy to justify having an agency create custom ads because of the huge audience it draws (like the Superbowl) - but what about smaller niche ad buys on smaller shows?

Taking this custom approach to advertising during daytime drama, for example, could yield huge dividends.  There are many other examples as well, such as popular niche cable shows like Top Chef or ESPN Sportscenter.  Engaging consumers in television advertising is not easy these days.  Aside from the Superbowl, there are no guaranteed audiences.  Taking a customized approach to advertising, using CGM and engaging fans of shows as a core part of an advertising strategy may just be the new model for TV advertising that helps the industry find the buzz outside of the SuperBowl.

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IdeaBar: "Beaconvertising" And New Social Media Phones

This post is not about the iPhone.  You might have heard that many people believe the latest innovation from Apple will not only revolutionize the mobile phone industry, but maybe even the future of mobile marketing.  Whether it does or doesn't, in the short term, it's easy to forget that ideas for innovation may come from elsewhere.  The Helio from Samsung is one of those kinds of products.  The interface and look of the phone is not necessarily unique.  Yet built into the phone are a range of smart features, from integrated support for MySpace Mobile, to full screen landscape video viewing.  The feature that I found most interesting, however, was the built in GPS.   

A core feature of this GPS service is something they have called the "Buddy Beacon" - a way of broadcasting your location to friends so you can find one another at any time.  This idea of the beacon is a powerful concept with many other applications.  Rather than most maps which rely on street addresses and turn by turn directions, the beacon can be a marker of location that offers a visual way for someone to find you ... or find a location.  It's a portable homing device.  What if retail stores could use this beacon concept for marketing?  The idea of "Beaconvertising" simply refers to the idea of broadcasting your location to customers in a way that helps them find you in the real world.  Now think about all the situations where as a consumer all you need is the closest location of something.  The closest place to buy diapers - the closest place to rent a movie - the closest place to fix a flat tire ... the list is endless.  These are purchase decisions made largely based on location - yet there are still only rudimentary ways to get this information on mobile devices. 

I should also point out that Beaconvertising is not just for the future - Business 2.0 reports in this month's issue about a few advertisers and campaigns, including an effort from Saturn to help customers locate their nearest dealership - that are finding ways to use Google Earth and MSN's competing services to drive users to their physical locations.  Jeff Goodby notes in the article that he believes "every retail chain will eventually do this."  As GPS phones become more common - the range of uses will continue to grow as well.  Keep your eye out for Beaconvertising through GPS - it just may become the next killer app (and opportunity for marketing) on the mobile phone.  Take that, iPhone.

 View all "Idea Bar" posts on this blog 

A Recap of 2006 on Influential Interactive Marketing

Let's start with a warning ... this is the "clip show" post where I recycle a lot of old material so if that causes you extreme pain, please close this window now and come back tomorrow.  For all the rest of you, it's the holidays and a quick glance around the marketing blogosphere will show that these clip show posts are in right now.  With nearly 400 post on this blog already, there is lots of content to choose from ... allowing me the luxury to conveniently ignore those posts from the past year that are outdated or that I just don't like anymore.  Here is a sampling of the rest:

Concepts & Ideas:
This is a collection of concepts and ideas that were introduced or discussed on this blog and then travelled virally to other blogs and were discussed elsewhere in media.  A good collection of ideas, many of which I still hope to implement on a client campaign (but haven't yet).

• Soundbombs
• Virtual Hugs
• Placecasting
• Widget Marketing
• Text Messaging Customer Service
• Tagging with Domain Names
• Social Media Optimization
• Automated Blog Translation
• Photopedia
• Human Search Filters

Rules & Guides:
These are a group of "Guy Kawasaki style" posts written in list format as guides to various topics from SMO to viral marketing.  It's a format I have always liked and you will probably see many more posts in this format going into 2007.

• Avoiding the Dark Side of Social Media
• 5 Rules of Social Media Optimization
• Signs Your Viral Marketing May Flop
• 7 Tips on Pitching Bloggers
• Golden Rules of Blog Etiquette

Presentations & Published Work:
Links to presentations given at industry events as well as guest contributions to other blogs.  There is some good powerpoint link bait in here, useful for those who are interested in any of these topics but couldn't make it to the events referenced.

• 7 Rules for Getting into Search (Search Engine Strategies Conference)
• 7 Tips on Pitching Bloggers (White Paper)
• The Human Side of Search (Search Insider Summit)
• Guide to Blog Marketing (SixApart Seminar) 
• Finding your Personality in Personal Media (Guest Column on Strumpette)

That's it.  Look out tomorrow for an all new post about what I think the top ten marketing ideas to watch will be in 2007.

Idea Bar: Marketing with Soundbombs

In this month's issued of Wired Magazine, there was a profile of Soundbombs, an innovative new concept designed to merge audio with physical experiences to bring a new dimension to just about anything from billboards to art.  As unique as the concept is, the distribution strategy is even more so ... with Felix Beck, creator of Soundbombs, noting that "one can apply for the purchase of a Soundbomb – only those who deserve a Soundbomb, get a Soundbomb!"  This has created significant viral buzz about Soundbombs and generated more than 2,500 requests according to the Wired article.  I love this concept not only for the idea behind it, but also for the distribution strategy that is keeping some amount of control and prestige behind the use of Soundbombs and keeping the artistic integrity of the concept intact. 

Contrary to what some might think, I don't believe this means that there cannot be any marketing implications or uses for Soundbombs that fit into the philosophy behind the invention.  Rather, this purity of the idea - when associated with the right brands - could create an immensely powerful marketing tool that adds to a customer experience, connects with potential customers, and shows an added dimension to a product, service or experience that could otherwise have been lost.  Here are just a few marketing situations I think could be ideal uses for a Soundbomb:

1. Street Donations for Charities - Imagine if you could amplify the message of volunteers soliciting money for charities by adding a Soundbomb close by offering more information about the cause before passersby are solicited.  It would certainly be an interesting social experiment to see if someone on the street is more likely to support Saving Tibet after hearing an emotive plea from the Dalai Lama ... 
2. Auditory Tourism - As tourists are walking by historical points of interest, adding Soundbombs could enhance the experience by allowing them to listen to sounds from the past that could be associated with a place.  Consider it a vastly more mobile version of the audio phone tour so popular in today's museums.
3. Virtual Instructions - For interactive kiosks, display stands, and coin-operated machines - sometimes the method of use is not immediately apparent.  In these situations, have a voice to proactively answer a common question or simply provide a welcome and offer guidance on the first step could be a welcome addition.  At the very least, you could use a Soundbomb to answer the common question of how to make an ATM (which already has braille instructions) easier to find for the visually impaired ... 

Have any other great marketing applications for Soundbombs that fit with the philosophy of the project?  Add a comment to this post and send an email to Felix to see if he agrees.

To learn more about Soundbombs, visit the website or watch a video of how soundbombs work.

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Idea Bar: Printable Micro-Region Maps

I hate unfolding maps.  That's where this Idea Bar post starts, because unfolding maps and trying to pinpoint your location is near impossible on those huge maps available from AAA or many others.  Google Maps and Mapquest are ideal solutions for turn by turn driving directions from one place to another, but they fall far short when it comes to exploring an area on foot or driving without a definite destination.  Throughout my travels in California last week, I found myself wishing for an easier online mapping solution that would allow me to get a single sheet printable map of a particular area.  The type of map that you usually find in tourism brochures, car rental offices or from a hotel concierge. One that fits on a standard sized sheet of paper, is easy to fold, and has information about the location of landmarks, hotels and restaurants noted.  One that is organized based on a region rather than a broad city or state. 

What if there were a site where you could download annotated micro-region maps like this of areas like Napa Valley, Old Town San Diego, or Santa Monica Beach?  What about for less common locales like Redondo Beach or La Jolla?  The ideal solution would be a mapping tool like Google Maps where a user could select a print area of a map (like you do in an excel document) and send it to the printer in a single page format that doesn't result in a hazy JPEG image where street names are barely legible, but a high quality printout where even smaller streets are visible. This micro region map would not only be legible, but annotated with store names, hotels, and tourist attractions.  On a quick web search, I was only able to find an expensive software solution targeted at the real estate industry called Flashmaps which offered some of this functionality, but nothing targeted for consumers or general online use.  Maybe we need Apple to launch iMaps and charge $1.99 per custom created map.  Of course, then they would probably only work for a single printout if you signed up for an iTunes account and only used printers approved by Apple ...

About the Idea Bar:
Working in a creative team, the life of our business is new ideas.  We come up with them every day for clients, but sometimes there are ideas that just don't fit a client.  They are too big, too different, or just not quite right. To view all "Idea Bar" posts on this blog, click here.

IdeaBar: Mobile Marketing with Virtual Hugs

One of the more interesting reports to come out of Wired's NextFest event held in NY this past weekend was about a wearable technology company called CuteCircuit and their "hug shirt."  The shirt uses bluetooth technology or mobile messaging through SMS to relay the sensation of a hug from one wearer to another anywhere in the world.  While it might seem like yet another technology toy with limited usefulness, the concept got me thinking about a new frontier of uses for wearable technology that integrates with bluetooth technology.  The most basic benefit of this is that a huge number of mobile phones already have bluetooth and this presents lots of integration opportunities.  Bluetooth hugs are just the beginning of the potential uses for this technology. 

By offering the benefit of touch and integrating it with voice, other applications could include virtual sight assistance for the blind, helping children away from parents for the first time deal with separation anxiety, and even add the dimension of touch to the webchat.  Even in the concept of the bluetooth virtual hug, another marketing application could be smart charities that offer virtual hugs from celebrities like Angelina Jolie or George Clooney for the price of a small donation.  Who wouldn't donate money for a bluetooth hug from Salma Hayek?

About the Idea Bar:
Working in a creative team, the life of our business is new ideas.  We come up with them every day for clients, but sometimes there are ideas that just don't fit a client.  They are too big, too different, or just not quite right. To view all "Idea Bar" posts on this blog, click here.

IdeaBar: Travel Guides On Demand

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In the midst of planning a trip to India, I am in the process of doing what countless others do when planning a trip nationally or internationally ... browsing the bookshelves and looking for the best books to educate myself about the destination and plan an itinerary.  For domestic trips, I definitely turn to sites online like Yelp.com or Turnhere.com for the first scoop on destinations, but for an international trip to a place like India - my first stop is still the bookstore.  Yet standing in front of the shelves at Barnes & Noble, I was faced with the prospect of lugging a 600 page book about everything in India around on my trip.  I would certainly do it if I was planning on going all around India - but on my trip I will only be going to Rajasthan, Mumbai, Delhi and perhaps Goa.  The huge book is too heavy, and I'm a light traveller.  I ultimately decided on the Lonely Planet Guide for Rajasthan, Delhi & Agra.  The problem is, there is nothing on Mumbai and Goa in the book, and I don't plan on going to Agra.

The experience got me thinking about the deficiencies of printed travel guides when it comes to customization.  Yet with the rise of publishing tools and turnkey printing solutions like Lulu.com, it seems the next evolution of travel guides should be to offer more customized solutions.  If I plan to go to Delhi, Jaipur, Mumbai and Goa - why can't I order a copy of Lonely Planet with all the basic information (getting vaccinated, etc.) plus only those sections?  I understand, of course, that for some travellers who may be making last minute decisions on where to go - this would not make sense.  But for those travellers who are relatively sure of their destinations, Travel Guides On Demand could offer a huge value to travellers.  Here are just a few of the potential benefits:

1. Makes travel guides more convenient for space conscious travellers
2. Increases the usability and usefulness of the guide
3. Solves the outdated guide problem

If this idea started to catch on, these on demand guides could also allow travellers to toggle their selections for destinations by what their interests are.  Imagine if the guides could include a sliding scale to allow travellers to select to only display luxury or budget accomodation, more images or less images, and off-the-beaten-track or major tourist destinations.  Even letting travellers reorder the content of a guide to match the sequence of the destinations they will be visiting would offer great value.  All this points to a revolution in the way we think about production of travel guides, and perhaps the publication of travel information in general.  And the end benefit for a traveller like me would be simple - a smaller, more useful and more customized guide for my trip to India (that I would gladly pay a premium for).

About the Idea Bar:
Working in a creative team, the life of our business is new ideas.  We come up with them every day for clients, but sometimes there are ideas that just don't fit a client.  They are too big, too different, or just not quite right. To view all "Idea Bar" posts on this blog, click here.

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Idea Bar: The Mobile Sales Assistant

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It seems like everyone has a mobile phone.  More than the iPod, more than the Blackberry, the mobile phone is becoming lifeline that people can't (or won't do without).  The rising ubiquity of the mobile phone offers many opportunities for marketers.  I have posted before on some such as Placecasting with Bluetooth or the role of text messaging in customer service.  In addition, there are many reports of more interesting hardware innovations in cell phones, such as the Glucophone designed to help diabetes patients manage their disease, or the Motorola Ming phone launched in China which features a business card scanner.  All of these point to the single conclusion that the mobile phone will become a greater part of all of our lives.  There are signs that this evolution may be taking the phone into the retail (real life) environment as well. 

This is the concept behind Scanbuy, a company that offers a solution to allow users to take a photo of a bar code on their phone and use their mobile internet connection to compare prices for that product online (and they also allow users to create a personal eZcode - mine is displayed at left).  While I love the technology, their model relies on getting consumers to walk out of the retail environment to "buy it cheaper online or elsewhere."  Every retailer hates this model.  But what if the technology behind Scanbuy (and similar services) could be used to enhance the retail experience rather than just offering a sophisticated way to find the best deal?

The Mobile Sales Assistant concept involves using a customer's own mobile phone to be a virtual assistant while he or she shops in a retail location.  Here is how it could work:

1. Consumer walks into a store and enters a Bluetooth zone
2. Consumer is invited to accept a bluetooth transmission with the "Mobile Sales Assistant"
3. If accepted, a small database catalog downloads to the user's phone for a temporary session (similar to a cookie on website)
4. Consumer then looks around the store, sees something they like and scans the bar code
5. The bar code is automatically recognized and product related data such as sales price, stock availability and other details appear on the user's phone
6. The consumer uses this extended information to better inform their choice
7. Giving the consumer all the information at the point of purchase leads to higher sales

This concept could roll out in a variety of industries and retail environments, including apparel (see images of clothes on real people and get prices), grocery (see wine details, rankings and tasting notes, nutrition facts), consumer electronics (see ratings for products, features, rebate information), toys (see related products, check against an Amazon wish list) and many other retail locations.  Of course, an idea like this does require an assumption of sophistication on the part of the consumer, but with technologies like self check-out and price scanners as options helping to make retail shopping more efficient, smarter technology solutions to assist customers during the shopping experience seem like a logical next step.  After all, who wouldn't prefer getting product information and current pricing on an HDTV right away rather than waiting for the teenage sales rep at Best Buy to "help" by reading the list of features on the product box back to you?

About the Idea Bar:
Working in a creative team, the life of our business is new ideas.  We come up with them every day for clients, but sometimes there are ideas that just don't fit a client.  They are too big, too different, or just not quite right.  Inspired by my colleague John Bell (who has a gift for thinking up smart and creative ideas), this post is the first in a new category on this blog that will be devoted to sharing these ideas through an "Idea Bar."  The posts in this category are meant to be "open source" and follow the guidelines generously introduced by Peter Mucha in the title (and philosophy) of his blog ... www.stealmyideasplease.com.

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