Influential Marketing Blog

How "Location Shifting" Could Reinvent GeoTargeted Online Marketing

There's a pretty simple idea that could transform the landscape of targeted online communications, but no one is doing it ... yet.  If you have ever done any online marketing that has been targeted by geography, you know that there are pretty much only two ways to do it currently online:

1. Based on IP address of where the user is accessing the Internet. Notoriously unreliable because of shared servers and inability to truly pinpoint a user's location.
2. Based on a profile that the user has created indicating where they live. This is much better with two big assumptions ... that people tell you the truth about where they are, and that they are usually there (as opposed to travelling).

For someone like me, this system makes it impossible to target me on a geographic basis. I am always travelling, often using Internet through shared connections in multiple locations, and my Facebook profile says I belong to the San Francisco network (intentionally), even though I live in DC.  My email address has the word Australia in it and I registered it while I was living in Australia and never changed my region. There are a lot of other consumers like me, making it tough for any business to truly target geographically by relying on such uncertain data. The one solution with promise involves using the mobile platform to geotarget based on where a person physically is. This is good, but still incomplete because it doesn't allow you to predict where someone will be.  What if there was a way to geotarget your messages not to where a user currently is, or even where they say they live, but to where they will be?

This is possible today, because more than ever before, people are now broadcasting where they are going to be and what they are currently doing through social media.  Look at a platform such as Twitter, where people routinely update their status to indicate where they are and what they are feeling.  Or a travel site like Dopplr, which I use to update my upcoming trips.  To a degree, this is private information - but many people publish it live for anyone to see.  Location shifting means geotargeting your marketing communications based on information about location that your consumers are giving you or posting online.  As a result, if smart marketers started using this information, a whole range of things could be possible:

1. Banks could verify that you are travelling and not have to cancel your cards because of suspected fraud
2. Marketers could send special offers to people who express a particular sentiment in a certain location (eg - someone Twitters that they are hungry in Manhattan, and gets a Twitter message back with a coupon to a local pizza shop)
3. Car services could automatically update their drivers who are waiting for pickups
4. Your friends could invite you to events through social networks based on where you will be and not just where you live

What else could be possible with location shifting?  Let me know if you think this idea works.

Marketing In The Age Of Disposable Email

Some guy named Bob probably hates me. I don't know him and he doesn't know me ... but he's the unfortunate registrant of Bob.com and has used his first name for his email address. Yup, you guessed it - that makes his email address bob@bob.com. That also happens to be the email address that I have used for the past ten years to fill out forms that require an email address that I don't want to give. For more than a decade, Bob has been getting my junk email and to tell you a truth, I feel bad about it. That alone isn't the reason I've had to give up my use of Bob's email, though. The reason is that I can't pick up those confirmation emails that you need to click on in order to activate an account.

Recently, I came across a site called Mintemail that has found an interesting solution ... disposable email. This is essentially what it sounds like - an email address that is good for four hours, usually just long enough to use to register for a site, get a confirmation email and pick it up. The service has lots of smart features built in, such as automatically saving the email address to your clipboard so you're ready to paste it into a form. Every once in a while, there is a solution so simple you wonder why no one else has done it first. I love seeing things like that and this definitely qualifies. If you have a form that requires your audience to enter an email address they are not interested in giving you, it looks like you won't be able to rely on the confirmation email to get you a working email address anymore. In the age of disposable email, it looks like you're going to have to work harder to earn the right to ask for a user's email address. I suppose the upside is that now those bogus emails will bounce after four hours. I bet poor Bob wishes I found this site a lot earlier.

Link Credit: http://www.vqcdesigns.com/blog/

PNI: Introduction ... Get Your Exclusive Download!

As part of The Official Reader's Group for Personality Not Included, I just released a first look at the full introduction for the book on my Facebook group. If you're not yet a member, you may want to join now so you can get access to exclusive content like this, and find out first about all the great launch parties and activities happening over the next few weeks. Otherwise, you'll be a few hours behind when I post everything here. Here's the link to get the introduction:

www.personalitynotincluded.com/introduction.pdf

Though I feel a bit like a guy in a dunk tank encouraging people to hit the target ... if you have a blog and haven't had a chance to submit your 5 questions - make sure and send them to me so you can feature a virtual interview on your blog on Friday.  I know I'm getting dunked (so to speak) with another set of questions to respond to (I'm already nearing 35 bloggers I need to get back to!), but its all for a good cause (promoting the book).  And speaking of good causes, if need a great place to order PNI, or any other book - visit the Ultimate Marketing Bookstore. It's a store I set up to benefit DonorsChoose.org, a wonderful charity dedicated to helping teachers do the most for their kids. All the Amazon affiliate fees from your purchase will go straight to Donors Choose. Great books, great cause ... what more do you need?

Everywhere Mag and the Arrival of the User Generated Magazine

As someone passionate about travel and the travel industry, I pay a lot of attention to sites that are out there.  Travel has long been an active industry online, whether you talk about people's behaviour with increasingly booking travel online, or the slate of review and opinion sites that let people share their opinions about travel destinations. From Yelp to Driftr to Dopplr there are new travel sites that let you do just about anything you want and they are all great ... yet none have quite found the right formula to harness the one thing that travel enthusiasts like me all have in common: a passion for talking about travel and sharing my experiences.

Sure, I could post a review on Yelp or publish my own travel blog - but what about something a bit more ... substantial?  Something that I get a bit more credit for.  Travel magazines are usually substantial in that way because they do manage to capture the wanderlust that characterizes many travel enthusiasts and offer a real experience you can hold in your hands.  The problem is, very few of them build on the great content being created by individual travellers online because they have a professional editorial staff to do it for them.  Everywhere Magazine is a publication composed entirely of user generated content.  Every month, the editors select the best articles and photos (based on their editorial team and a system of voting on their website) and lay out a new magazine. This is brilliant for a number of reasons, but most specifically the costs they save on hiring a staff of writers and paying their expenses is put into the production of the magazine which is every bit as professional and beautiful as any other travel magazine likely to be on your coffee table. 

I joined the community and have several ideas for articles that I am just itching to write about, because they relate to places or things that I experienced and am passionate about, or tips for travelling better.  Either way, it will be interesting to see if this model of a completely user generated magazine could work in other industries.  Is this unique to travel because of the passion people have for writing and photography in this category, or could it work for any industry?  Anyone seen other examples?

Zero Sum Marketing

Are you familiar with the concept of a zero sum game?  It is a very simple, usually economic, principle which says that one person's gain results in another's loss.  For example, if a consumer has a budget of $500 to spend on Xmas presents (and sticks to their budget), then buying a $200 ipod means there is only $300 left for other presents.  Zero Sum might strike you as a pessimistic way of looking at the world, and it usually is.  More often than not in business, you hear cliches like creating a "tide the rises all boats" ... because thinking of things as zero sum is not popular anymore.  The only problem is, there are still real situations where it exists. 

I'm reminded of a story/joke I heard a long time ago of two guys in a forest who see a bear coming towards them.  Both are scared, but one guy sits down, takes sneakers out of his bag and laces them up.  The other guy looks at him like he's crazy and says "what are you doing?  You can't outrun that bear."  The first guy looks back at him and says "I don't have to.  I just have to outrun you."  Zero sum is like that - come out first or get eaten.

Here's a real example.  Last week I was trying to unlock a Nokia phone tethered to the AT&T network because some family would be travelling soon and needed to use the phone with a different SIM.  I spent nearly an hour going back and forth on the phone with a customer service rep, to finally extract a promise for someone to email me on Feb. 21st in the evening with the unlock code for my phone.*  Instead, I went online and found an unlocking calculator for free that let me unlock the phone.  For Nokia, there is an advantage to having tools like this in the market that make it relatively easy for a customer to unlock a phone.  For AT&T, there isn't.  Of course, I don't think that Nokia is encouraging sites like this to exist, but so what if they were?  If Nokia could foster a reputation for being less complex to unlock, wouldn't that be a good thing for the brand in the eyes of consumers?

Travel is another example.  It helps hotels, restaurants and local tourism if people have to spend less to get to their destination.  If you found a roundtrip flight for $100 or less, wouldn't you be more likely to spend more on where you stay and what you eat?  There are examples like this all around us, but businesses don't tend to focus on them because they are not good at isolating them.  I'm not advocating a selfish approach where you don't consider fair partnerships ... all I'm saying is sometimes the best marketing strategy you can have is to hone in on what helps you, even if it's not so good for the other guy.

* Note: I did get the unlock code by email - but only because I met their long list of requirements for contract length, activation time, etc.

Announcing The Ultimate Marketing Bookstore

Several months ago I participated in the LitLiberation Blogger Challenge launched by my friend Tim Ferriss to try and raise money for DonorsChoose.org (a site which allows teachers to submit funding proposals to ask for help doing something they don't normally get the funding for).  Around the same time, I started playing around with Amazon Affiliate links and made more than ten bucks on links by just using a few links on several blog posts.  That's only a small amount of money, but it got me thinking about the potential of using an affiliate program to generate money for charity in the marketing world.  Over the time that I was away from blogging, one of my side projects was to start contacting several influential people to see if they would be willing to participate in a new kind of bookstore - which I called The Ultimate Marketing Bookstore.  Today I am launching it (although I will resist the temptation to call it a "Beta launch").  Here's how I described the purpose of the site and what makes it different:

This site is different because it features all the reading lists of marketers that you already know and respect in one place.  From CEOs to marketing directors to top marketing bloggers - The Ultimate Marketing Bookstore lets you see and shop from all their reading lists ... and all for a good cause.

The way most of us find out about great marketing books is the same way that we learn about great products ... through recommendations from people we trust.  Most online bookstores are just categories of books selected by one or two people.  They are great if you trust those people, but they are not comprehensive. 

As I describe above, all the proceeds from affiliate commissions that this site generates will be donated to DonorsChoose.org on a monthly basis and I plan to try and spread the word in the marketing community about this new bookstore and will be adding new names on a weekly basis.  Here are a few reasons why I think this idea can work:

1. Collects a central hub of reading lists from marketers that are currently widely distributed online. 
2. Encourages marketers who are not sharing their reading lists to do so in an easy way.
3. Makes great marketing books easier to find and buy.
4. Creates a community of marketing book readers and allows them to contribute to a good cause
5. Offers a platform for new marketing books to get promoted to an interested audience

That's the initial idea, but I'd love to hear some feedback on what you think could make it better.  I am still reaching out to marketers to add their book lists, so stay tuned in the next few weeks as I will likely be adding lots more names to this list, and I plan to publish updates with money raised and associate this bookstore with a challenge on DonorsChoose.org so the amount raised (and what the dollars are being spent on) is highly visible.  Blog badges and other tools to promote the site are in the works as well.  Any other suggestions?

Note: A big thank you to all the people who responded to my LinkedIn question about which charity could be the best to support for this.  DonorsChoose.org was the most popular suggestion.

The Great Recycling Myth and Your Marketing Data

With all of the attention on global warming and what each of us could do, there is an interesting paradox that you may not realize which is happening right under your nose at work.  I was reminded of it again as I came across a Dilbert comic that sums up the issue in three short panels as only Scott Adams can do:

The short story is that what you think is recycling at work is very often a myth.  You may be diligently separating your garbage from your paper recyling, but at the end of the night when the cleaners come through your office, they just have one big trash can and it all goes into the same place.  A cousin of mine who lives in Austin had the same situation and it bothered her so much, she agreed to take the paper recycling out herself every week and now people pile it outside of her office.  Am I bringing this up to tell you to launch your own internal paper recycling army like she did?  Not really (unless that's what you want to do, of course).

If you think about it, the relationship between recycling and trash is exactly how you need to treat your marketing data online, by separating the useful from the not useful, instead of throwing it into the same database all together.  The irony is, in many cases your customers are separating this data for you (like the hapless cubicle workers) ... it's just up to you to keep it separate when you record it.  Less useful demographics in this model would be all the things you are used to capturing (gender, age, location, HHI, etc.).  Instead, you would focus on three different things:

1. Behaviour - What are they doing on your site and how are they searching or browsing?  What is the progression of pages or areas they viewed?  Where did they go before and after visiting your site?  How often did they return?  How long did they spend on your site?  What type of marketing do they respond to?
   
2. Conversation - What have they asked you about online or through email?  Did they call in and what did they ask about?  Have they written about you on a forum or a blog and what did they say?
   
3. History - What have they purchased from you before?  How often do they come back to purchase or browse your site?  What sort of items do they buy and who do they buy them for (if not for themselves)?

On a very basic level, these are the three elements of your marketing data worth recycling.  You probably noticed that most have nothing to do with what gender someone is or where they live.  What would happen if you just focused on these and tossed the rest of the data you are used to focusing on?

Related Post: Thinking Outside the Demographic

Spamments and Spamversations: How Do You Stay Out of Unwanted Conversations?

There has been a firestorm of discussion lately after Chris Anderson, editor of Wired Magazine and author of the long tail recently "outed" all the PR professionals that had been contacted him with anonymous spam style "Dear Editor" communications.  On a day where he had more than 300 of these, he finally decided he had enough and fired off a post banning those PR folks from contacting him and adding him to his blocked sender list.  The conversation has now been discussed to death on all kinds of blogs with most people essentially taking one of three viewpoints:

1. PR people are spammers and they deserve it.
2. Chris makes a fair point, but its unfair to publish people's email addresses or offer them no way to get off the list.
3. Chris is a self-important blowhard who should get used to the email because he's an Editor of a major pub.

At this point, I really don't think there's anything I can add to the conversation ... especially because I don't consider myself a PR pro in this sense and have never actually pitched a media person for anything.  I am a marketer, and the concept we deal with all the time is spam - or more broadly speaking, unwanted conversations.  It got me thinking about the different types of unwanted conversations we all must deal with today in a world where conversations are happening all around us and often directed to us whether we want them or not.  In my estimation, there are 5 methods of dealing with these unwanted conversations:

1. Filters, blockers and blacklists.  These can be a combination of automated features and manually set up lists.  Chris Anderson noted in a follow up post that he manually blacklisted all the emails of the PR folks that had sent him unwanted emails.  Personal blacklists in your email can be a great way to do this.  My blog also has a list of blocked words for comments like "viagra" and "casino."  Spam filters are increasingly standard to catch the usual spam phrases about body part enlargement and the like.
2. Barriers, verification and validation. The next stage of automated checking are CAPTCHAs, requiring a login in order to comment, or using some other method to verify that there is a real person trying to connect with you.  It is commonly used on blog comments to make sure there is a real person behind the conversation.
   
3. Ignoring or screening them. This is the time honored way, and usually works.  The only downside is that if the volume of these conversations is very high, it can get tougher and tougher to do this.  The other negative is that it is not very satisfying, as you don't get a chance to let someone know that their message was irrelevant and ignored.
4. Selective friending. With the growing number of social network profiles we all have, the real problem with unwanted conversations is that they can often come from "friends."  Once you have granted someone access into your circle, you have unwittingly given them permission to start an unwanted conversation with you.  The only real way around this is either to be more selective with your friending, or to take the rude route and either ignore the conversation or (gasp!) "de-friend" a frequent offender.
5. Closed Responses. This is often the last resort for unwanted conversations, and one that most of us probably find ourselves using more and more.  Closed responses are the ones that answer a question, but leave little room for follow up.  They are the best way to deal with conversations that you may be baited to join (by people trying to pull you into controversy) or conversations that for whatever reason you are not completely involved or interested in.

What do you think about these methods?  Are you using them all equally or is there one that you rely on more than any other?  Or perhaps there is a sixth method that I missed ...

The Best Marketing Book You've Never Read

One day I am going to write a screenplay.  I used to write plays, but to finally write a screenplay and try to sell it to Hollywood is a great ambition of mine that I will probably chase one day.  But this blog is most definitely about marketing and not screenwriting.  So why bring up my Hollywood ambitions?  I'm glad you asked. The main reason is because I recently discovered that one of the best marketing books that I have ever read just got a sequel ... and they are both probably titles that you have never heard of, because they are not marketing books at all.  The first and second book are both called Save the Cat! - but have different subtitles, and each is focused on helping screenwriters to create, market, and sell their script in Hollywood. 

The author, Blake Snyder, is a highly successful screenwriter himself and subtitled his first book "The Last Book on Screenwriting You'll Ever Need."  It's not an exaggeration.  Since that time, the book has gone on to be a best seller and has become the basis for screenwriting courses at Cornell University.  Blake just published a "sequel" called Save the Cat! Goes to the Movies: The Screenwriter's Guide to Every Story Ever Told which I ordered a few days ago and am waiting for Amazon to deliver so I can get into it.  But why am I recommending a guide for screenwriters to you for marketing?

For one thing, because his first book provided a lot of inspiration for me as I wrote Chapter 4 of Personality Not Included last month (you'll know what I mean soon) and the book overall is one of the more brilliant insider books about any industry that I have come across.  He has a blog too and his latest post is a brilliant piece of irony about the next version of his screenwriting software which uses his formulaic approach to help aspiring screenwriters follow the proven model to selling their screenplay. 

If you have any interest in improving your marketing writing, understanding more about how the Hollywood marketing machine works, or just grabbing an entertaining book that will offer some useful marketing and storytelling ideas - I highly recommend picking up the first Save The Cat!  Especially because now that the sequel is out, you had better get cracking on the first ...

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Blog Action Day: 7 Tips on Eating Differently To Impact Climate Change

One thing I can't resist is an ambitious project.  As a marketer, if there is a groundswell for something that I believe in or find interesting, I am highly likely to try and be a part of it.  That's why I join all sorts of groups, and why I try to lend my voice to causes that I believe are worthwhile.  The latest effort that I have been looking forward to being part of is also the reason why I'm posting twice in a single day ... something I don't usually do.  Today is Blog Action Day - something I have been promoting on the sidebar of my blog for several weeks now.

The aim of the project is to collect together all kinds of bloggers to talk about the environment.  The site featured a very smart way of letting bloggers sign up early and attaches a currency to being first in how all the blog participants are listed (in order of joining rather than by size of blog - so I'm in the 4001 to 5000 list).  The built in measurement of the site is also done through aggregating the readers via RSS, which they planned for by requesting the RSS link for every blog that wanted to participate when you signed up.  So far, it's a brilliant model for how to run a blog centric social marketing campaign - and the results are stellar so far.  The site boasts more than 15,000 blogs participating with an aggregated RSS reach of more than 12 million readers, and is publishing real time updates on buzz on the Blog Action Day blog.

Let's consider this reach for a moment.  One of the big measurement challenges in blogging is to equate an RSS reader with a regular old impression.  Impressions are typically measured on a monthly basis and multiplied out.  RSS readers are individual readers and therefore far more accurate.  I happen to believe an RSS reader is more involved than a regular impression as well - but how much more?  Even if you conservatively say it is worth 2x as much, this gives the reach of Blog Action day nearly 25 million readers.  On a single day.  That's pretty impressive.

But the point of this post is to talk about the reach but to talk about the environment.  My original thought was to come up with something new to say about it ... but while I was live blogging at the Corporate Climate Response event a few months ago, I published a post about tips for eating differently to impact climate change.  That's my contribution for Blog Action Day, republished below:

7 Tips on Eating Differently To Impact Climate Change

During a session run by Tara Garnett from the Food Climate Research Network at the Corporate Climate Response Conference, she shared a wide range of interesting research that was likely difficult for most participants to absorb quickly enough (and extremely difficult to keep up with for blogging purposes!). Luckily, FCRN has a fantastic research archive published online at their website and also provide links to an assortment of research from other groups collected into a single archive. One of the more interesting points Garnett raised was what steps regular consumers could take in order to change their own eating habits to make an impact on CO2 emissions. This is often a little talked about topic, and as Garnett noted, it is notoriously difficult to ask consumers to do - mostly because of the huge cultural significance of food and the difficulty of sacrifice. For many consumers, however, it may simply be a lack of information. For all of them, here are 7 tips Garnett shared about ways you can change your eating habits to have an impact:

1. Change the balance of what you eat (less meat and dairy, “lower down” on the food chain)
2. Choose seasonal field grown foods (require less storage, heating & transport)
3. Do not eat or purchase certain foods (including foods that are hothoused or those that are air freighted)
4. Reduce your dependence on the “cold chain” (get rid of the second freezer, choose less processed robust foods and do more frequent non car-based shopping)
5. Waste less food (improve your “food turnover” to eat what you buy sooner and reduce wastage)
6. Cook more efficiently (cook for more people and for several days at a time, use the oven less frequently)
7. Redefine your ideal for quality (be willing to accept variability in quality and supply

In addition to this post, here are a few other posts from this blog over the past year which may hopefully inspire your thinking and perhaps even inspire some action:

"Greenest Hits" From Influential Marketing Blog:

• The Greenest Sports Event on Earth
• The Marketing of "An Inconvenient Truth"
• Live Earth Includes DC, Thanks To The Native Americans
• One Hour No Power Campaign - And Other Ways to Save the World
• Wikimapia, Google's Green Summer and Marketing Mashups

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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!

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.

Barbie Fights the Tyranny of Toy Packaging

This past weekend, my son had his third birthday - a great moment in fatherhood for me because it's really the first birthday where he gets really cool toys that Daddy can spend an entire Sunday afternoon playing with.  I think I speak for all Dads when I say Baby Einstein doesn't really do it for us.  Give me a projectile shooting Batman doll anyday.  Unfortunately, a large part of Sunday was actually spent combating the diabolical packaging for most toys seemingly designed to keep the toys sealed inside plastic for life.  As most parents already know, if there was a nuclear war, most toy packaging would survive along with the cockroaches.  If you could make a protective bunker out of both, you'd be untouchable.

Mattel is trying to take a friendlier approach as profiled in this month's issue of Fast Company magazine.  Apparently, after extensive testing, Mattel learned that little girls don't enjoy watching their Daddy's crying in frustration after trying unsuccessfully to pry Barbie dolls from their impenetrable packaging.  They also learned that kids don't have the patience to untwist those twisty things and prefer to just pull at a toy to try and get it out (or fling it across the room if they are a three year old boy).  Hopefully they didn't pay too much for those insights.  The result they are coming out with, however, is the sort of packaging parents dream about.  Taking inspiration from food packagers, who have done a good job in many cases to offer easy access opening through single pull tabs, they redesigned Barbie packaging completely.  Now the package is easy to open, can be kept around as a storage container, and is something that girls can open themselves.  Better yet, it stands up to all the rigors of cross pacific travel that most toys make to get from their place of manufacture in Asia to a retail outlet in the US.  Apparently, that is the real reason for the iron clad packaging - so the toys remain in place after their rough international journey.

The whole example is a case study in addressing a pain point for your customers and making the experience better while still addressing the functional needs of the packaging.  I strongly encourage anyone who has any input into product packaging to read the full story in the magazine or online.  It's almost enough to make me go out and buy a Barbie.  Except that a small part of me still wants to keep that Batman packaging around ... you know, just in case that we ever need that nuclear bunker.

What If Consumers Could Generate Ads They Want To See?

Last week I sent myself an email to generate a Google text ad.  As any Gmail user knows, Google serves ads based on the text content of your email.  So corresponding back and forth with a good friend of mine whose wedding I will be attending in Peru next month results in several offers for Peru travel advisors.  Those ads are relevant, so I am likely to click on them.  Of course, the saavier among you is probably reading this thinking it's not so different from text ads on any search engine.  After all, if I typed in "lima, peru" into any search engine, I would get lots of ads.  The problem is intent.  When I am just learning about Lima, all I want is background information.  At the point when I am ready to purchase, I want to see offers.  Keyword advertisers are getting smarter about targeting intent, but it sometimes seems like banner ads are getting left behind. 

Often they are still purchased based on the demographics of a site overall and simply served in random order.  Most would agree this doesn't work.  But think about how a printed copy of the yellow pages works.  These are essentially filled with banner ads and organized by category.  What if there was a site where banner ads were organized the same way?  As a consumer I could enter by region, category or even individual product.  Going to the site would give me a list of banners with the current promotional offer that the vendor has on right now for whatever I am seeking.  The ads, in effect, could be generated by page based on a user's search terms.  This is consumer generated advertising - but where they are calling up the ads that they want to see rather than creating ads themselves.  Thinking even more broadly - what if you could also call up television ads from an archive to watch based on what you were interested in buying?  Would someone in the market for laundry detergent watch three ads back to back from three different companies before making a decision?  Maybe not.  But if I'm looking for a hotel in Lima, or a new car, or a digital camera, or a new kitchen appliance ... you bet I would.

The Not-So-Secret Way Virgin America Will Reinvent US Air Travel

Virgin is not in the business of music.  Or credit cards.  Or mobile phones.  Or space travel.  Though the brand has done remarkably well in translating its popularity from one business to the next - they are actually in the business of reinventing stagnant industries.  Just look at the track record of industries that they have entered and how they have done it.  Last week they announced the newest business they will try to reinvent, now that they finally have their long awaited approval in the US to start a new domestic airline.  A visit to www.virginamerica.com proves that they are already applying the "virgin way" to their business and standing out before any of their flights actually take off.  How can they do this?  Are they just smarter at marketing than the rest of the industries they enter?  Their "secret" is actually quite simple: they look at an industry that is doing everything the same way, identify the pain points for customers of all companies in that industry, and focus their business on doing those things differently.  For Virgin America, this means doing the following:

1. Having a unique personality.  With the exception of JetBlue and perhaps Southwest, few domestic airlines in the US could be accused of having an authentic and unique identity.  Virgin America uses elements from the subtle to the explicit to demonstrate their personality.  The cabin has "mood lighting" that changes throughout the flight.  The site lays out a promise to travelers on how Virgin America will treat you.  And, of course, the Virgin brand carries a certain inherent personality of irreverance and hipness that many consumers can connect with.
2. Enable traveller's gadgetized lifestyles. Every seat has a power plug for laptops, USB chargers for MP3 players, and will eventually have built in ethernet for internet access.  For longer coast to coast flights, this ensures that no matter which class of service you are travelling in, you will never run out of batteries on your device.
3. Eliminate the hand signals and call button etiquette problem. It can sometimes be nearly impossible to get a stewardess' attention on the flight and somehow it just seems rude to ring that call button all the time and expect them to come running.  Virgin America has an online ordering system where you can order your food and pay through a cashless system (also removing the need to carry around cash or exact change). 
4. Discounts without the discount airports.  One of the most frustrating things about "discount" airlines is that many of them use obscure airports like Sarasota or Buffalo.  So far, Virgin America flies from DC to LAX and SFO.  All big airports, all places that are not inconveniences to fly to or from.
5. Connect with fellow passengers. One of the saddest parts of travelling sometimes is that you can sit next to someone for 6 hours or more and never speak.  The greater tragedy is that there may be other people on the plane hungry for a good conversation, but simply sitting next to the wrong people.  Built into the back of seat console is something Virgin calls a "seat to seat chat."  Presumably, it only works for passengers who put their seats into "discoverable" modes, but a very cool idea nonetheless.

 

The Complete Gallery Of Simpsons Movie Marketing

In what may go down in history as one of the biggest integrated movie marketing efforts in the history of Hollywood, the pre-promotion for the upcoming Simpsons Movie is in full swing right now.  Unlike many other Hollywood promotions, the marketing for the Simpsons movies is going beyond billboard and print, beyond television, and beyond even interactive or viral.  This campaign has everything from creating your own animated avatar (that's mine on the left!) and having a chance to star in an upcoming episode, to winning the chance to get the premiere of the movie in your hometown provided you live in one of 14 Springfields around the US Vermont (the winning city ).  This post is an attempt to round all these marketing efforts up in a visual way.  Be warned, you might end up wasting an hour or more following all of the links below ... so read at your own risk!

• The Official Simpsons Movie Site
• Official Simpsons Marketing Partner Site
• Xbox Contest
• JetBlue Contest
• JetBlue Downloadable Movie Banners
• Be In An Animated Simpsons Episode 7-11 Promotion
• List of 7-11s Nationwide To Get A Kwik-E-Mart Makeover
• List of Simpsons Inspired Products To Be Sold at 7-11/Kwik-E-Marts
• USAToday Springfield Hometown Movie Premiere Challenge (UPDATE: Vermont Wins!)
• Simpsons MySpace Page
• Kwik-E-Mart in Burbank, CA Flickr Gallery
• Kwik-E-Mart in Dallas, TX Flickr Gallery
• Kwik-E-Mart in Orlando, FL Flickr Gallery
• Kwik-E-Mart in Bladensburg, MD (outside DC) Flickr Gallery
• Kwik-E-Mart in Denver, CO Flickr Gallery
• Kwik-E-Mart in Vancouver, BC (Canada) Flickr Gallery
• LAist Writeup of Burbank, CA Kwik-E-Mart
• DCist Writeup of DC Area Kwik-E-Mart
• Update: Kwik-E-Mart in New York City Flickr Gallery
• Update: Kwik-E-Mart in Las Vegas Flickr Gallery
• Update: Kwik-E-Mart in Mountain View, CA Flickr Gallery
• Update: Simpsons X Vans Custom Skateboard Shoes (via comment from rj at SneakerPlay)
  
  • Simpsons X Vans (Mr. Cartoon Design)
  • Simpsons X Vans (Gary Painter & Geoff McFetridge Designs)
  • Simpsons x Vans (Tony Munoz & Taka Hayashi Designs)
  • Simpsons x Vans (Futura & Todd “Reas” James Designs)
• Update: Simpsons Create 180ft Homer Chalk Drawing in UK Field (Via reader Mark Tong)
• Update: Ben & Jerry's Release Two New Simpsons 1-Day Only Flavours (Need an image if anyone has one)
• Update: Simpsons Mobile site offers phone downloads and first mobile game
• Update: Burger King Simpsonize Me Site to "Simpsonize" a photo you upload
• Update: Full story and fashion spread in Harper's Bazaar magazine
• Update: 4 Different Collectible Simpsons Covers for Entertainment Weekly (Via DeliFaks)

If anyone has any other links of marketing related efforts from partners, or other images from Kwik-E-Marts, please email me or leave a comment to this post and I'll add them.  Also, below are lots of images and screengrabs from these efforts -- enjoy!

The Simpsons Movie Poster (with every character from the show):

Simpsons - Create Your Own Avatar Tool:

Simpsons USA Today Springfield Challenge:

Simpsons Official Partner Page - www.seeyellow.com:

Simpsons MySpace Page and "Simpsonize Your World" Contest:

7-11 "Get Animated Into A Simpsons Episode" Contest:

7-11 Real Store "Kwik-E-Mart" Makeovers:

Images from Kwik-E-Mart Makeovers (images taken from Flickr Galleries referenced above):

Simpsons XBox Promotion (Winner of "Lamest Promotion" of the lot so far):

JetBlue Blog Takeover by Mr. Burns (Winner of "Most Unique"):

JetBlue City Destination Bubbles (brilliantly boils the essence of each city into a single Simpsonesque stereotype - 14 cities in total):

 

And last, but not least ... a real life Squishee! (from DCist post linked above):

Update: Simpsons X Vans Sneaker Designs (images from www.hypebeast.com & www.honeyee.com)

UPDATE (07/11/07): Vermont Wins USA Today Contest for Hometown Premiere

UPDATE (07/13/07): Influential Marketing Blog reader Christopher Trela shares this image of In-Theater Marketing from NY

Update (07/19/07): SimpsonizeMe Site From Burger King (with funny error messages when site doesn't respond):

Update (07/19/07): Simpsons Mobile Website and Mobile Meltdown Marketing Game:

Update (07/19/07): Fashion Spread In Harper's Bazaar (via FYI-Mag)

Update (07/19/07): Simpsons "Homer Erectus" 180ft Chalk Drawing at Cerne Abbas (via Influential Marketing Blog reader Mark Tong):

Update (07/20/07): 4 Different Collectible Covers for Entertainment Weekly Magazine

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Live Earth Includes DC, Thanks To The Native Americans

Today might be the largest simultaneous social marketing event ever staged - as Live Earth concerts light up stadium stages on 7.5 stages on 7 continents.  In case you're wondering, the "0.5" stage is right here in DC.  The concert taking place now is at the American Indian Museum after they offered their venue for a "Mother Earth" version of the concert.  Why this venue instead of the preferred larger one on the steps of the Capitol in DC?  Mainly because p