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.

Inside Lenovo's Olympic Blogging Program

This past week in the string of posts about the book coming out, I've been stockpiling ideas for "real" blog posts and wanting to write about them more and more. Thankfully now that I launched the Personality Matters blog, I will post most of the updates about the book there and refocus on marketing strategy and insights here. I can't promise I won't share the occasional post about the book ... but I know that you're giving me your time to read this blog because you want marketing ideas and you want lots of them. So this post is about one I'm particularly excited about.

The Ogilvy 360 Digital Influence team recently finalized the details to take the lead on what I would have to call my dream project. Those who know me know that I am what you might call a full on Olympic enthusiast. I went to college in Atlanta and was there for the 1996 Olympics. I moved to Sydney in 1998 and lived there during the Sydney Olympics, and my first son was born right in the middle of the Athens Olympics (during the women's marathon, ironically). So I've been there and seen it, and more importantly, I think it is a world stage that nothing else even comes close to.

Which brings me to this very ambitious project that we are helping Lenovo with. David Churbuck, our main client, posted about the idea behind the project on his blog and it is a brilliant summary of a big vision that Lenovo and David himself has for this project. Here it is in a nutshell:

The Problem: Media coverage of the Olympics has become about melodrama that is broadcasted as "real" stories. But those producers only choose the athletes who have overcome quadruple knee surgery and the lack of a college degree to become a world champion ... in other words, the extreme stories.

The Insight: What about the real athletes who spend every day training and working hard just to get to the Olympics whether they have a shot of winning or not?  Their voices could be the most powerful and this Olympics more than any other promises to offer the chance for them to do that.

The Project: We are seeking 100 potential Olympic athletes from around the world to all start and maintain a blog all about their experience leading up to and during the Games. In return, Lenovo is offering all participants the chance to use a new IdeaPad laptop for their blogging and help from our team to set up and maintain their blogs. 

This is a big project on a scale that is completely global, multi-lingual and very ambitious. Lenovo, to their credit, are not content to sit back with their sponsorship of the Olympic Torch Relay and Olympic Village (already considerable efforts) and call it a job well done.  If this is the year for Olympics 2.0, this program should be one of the best examples of it. Our main goal right now is finding Olympic athletes, so if you know any (or you happen to be one), please get in touch with myself rohit [dot] bhargava [at] ogilvypr.com or David.

Be Part Of The Personality Not Included Book Launch On March 28th

There are a lot of ideas for how to launch a book online. As I head toward launching* Personality Not Included this Friday, I've looked at most of them. Some authors create a group and ask all their contacts to all hit an online bookstore like Amazon at one time to create a surge in sales.  Others coordinate big launch events in the real world and aim to use those to propel interest in their book. Bigger books might buy advertising to announce a launch and, of course, there is the old PR method of blasting lots of press releases at people who may or may not be interested in the book. There is one big problem with all these approaches: none of them are very conversational.

A conversation does not start instantly with a big spike and then trail off. A really good conversation builds momentum steadily and eventually turns into something more powerful. So my aim today is not to create a short term spike, but to start a conversation about the central idea of the book - which is that personality matters, and continue it over the next few weeks and months. To jumpstart this conversation, I'm asking for your help - and offering you something in return.

My idea is simple: if you send me five questions that you want to know about the book or personality, I'll write you a response on Friday that you can publish on your blog. Let's call these virtual interviews (ie - interviews by email). You choose whether to post the interview on your blog or not after you get my responses, but I am essentially offering for ANY BLOGGER to send me interview questions and I will respond with answers that are NOT cut and pasted, but specific to your questions. I will send all my responses to you on Friday in the order that I get your questions, and I will link to all the posted interviews on Friday.  On Monday, I'll be running a competition on my blog to let readers vote on the Best Interview. The winner will get a signed copy of my book and a gift certificate for $100 from Amazon. Here are a few reasons you may want to do it:

1. For relatively little effort, you'll get a customized post by me that you can use exclusively on your blog
2. Your blog will be featured in my follow up post compiling all the interviews (getting you more visibility)
3. You have a chance to win a signed copy of my new book and a gift certificate for from Amazon.com if your post is voted "Best Interview" by the readers of my blog.

That's about it. I'll be answering review questions in the order that I get them, so please send me yours soon at rohitaustralia [at] gmail [dot] com and I will add you to the list. If you don't have a blog, you can still ask questions by leaving a comment on this post - there will be a prize for best question from the comments too. For the latest news about the book launch and access to exclusive content which you can't get anywhere else, be sure to join my Facebook group for the book if you haven't already and also follow the launch in real time by adding me to your Twitter follow list (Twitter ID - rohitbhargava), or friending me on Facebook (which republished my updates if you are not a Twitter user).

Update (3/26/08): Up to 25 interview requests in less than 24 hours ... thanks to all the bloggers for your interest - I'm hoping to make it to 50 request by Friday!

* The book bindery date is this Friday, which means the book is complete and printed and they will be shipping out to those who preordered over the weekend or on Monday (so you should have your copy by early next week). The official date when they will be in bookstores across the US and Canada is likely to be around April 14th - and the book will be released internationally about 4-6 weeks after that (across Europe, Asia, Australia). If you have a specific query about your country and when the book will be out, please send me an email and I can let you know.

10 Easy Ways to Piss Off A Blogger (from SXSW)

At SXSW yesterday, I ran a "core conversation" called 10 Easy Ways to Piss Off a Blogger.  This year at SXSW, these aptly titled "conversations" were a type of speaking slot where there was a round table and the challenge of engaging people in a discussion about a particular topic.  Mine was one close to my heart ... the best way to piss off a blogger.  I had created a Facebook event page before the session to try and build the buzz and going into yesterday I had almost 50 people signed up.  So I figured we'd get about 20 to 25.  After the session, I spoke to one of the participants who said he counted about 70 - so we had a really tough challenge of having a conversation with 70 people.

Learning from some of the feedback that came from a panel on Social Media Metrics that I had participated in a day earlier, my main aim was to make sure everyone walked out of the session with what I had promised them ... the 10 easy ways.  The format of the session was a bit different too - as there was no presentation or powerpoint, and I didn't walk in with the 10 ways.  Instead our aim was to collaborate, discuss and walk out with the ten.  I think we managed to make it to more than ten.  A few folks kindly offered to take some live notes and have posted about the ten, but without further ado ... here are the 10 Easy Ways to Piss Off a Blogger, as defined by a group of super smart and engaged folks who all made it to be part of this conversation:

1. Invite bloggers to participate in something and don't give them a chance to talk about themselves. This was what I opened the session with, followed by letting people around the group introduce their name and their blogs.  A list of people who chose to share their names and blogs is at the end of this post.
2. Pretend to be a "long time reader" when you actually just visited the blog once and read a few posts.
3. Use a blogger's content or identity without giving proper attribution
4. Send irrelevant information that exhibits no understanding of what they care about or fail to personalize it
5. Add them to a PR list and don't let them get off of it
6. Make it hard for them to link to something by hiding your content behind usernames/passwords, giving them uncertain directions or requiring them to take multiple steps
7. Ask for favors as part of your first outreach to them without building a relationship or earning the right to ask them to help you
8. Fail to identify yourself or falsely represent yourself as something or someone you are not.  This includes failing to mention something about your or your employer that is relevant.
9. Set an unreasonable expectation for a blogger and expect things in an unreasonable amount of time ... ie - sending informaiton and expecting them to post within a few hours.  Quick poll of our session showed that for the vast majority of bloggers, it's not their day job.
10. Get the journalism relationship right.  Some bloggers consider themselves journalists and others don't.  It was clear from the participants that this is a tricky subject, as some people also noted after the session. 

I think we actually ended up with more than ten, but these were the main ones.  I'm looking forward to hopefully hearing more thoughts from some of the participants as the SXSW haze settles and they get a chance to get back to their computers.  It's a crazy show ... lookout for a post here tomorrow on what I think has been the most interesting cultural and technological story of the show: the dominant use of Twitter.

Finally, special thanks to Aaron from Longstation and Steve Harbula (Director of Marketing for the Denver Broncoes) who were both kind enough to take live notes and post them almost right away after our session.

============================

Partial List of Participating Bloggers (from a list passed around - we missed many bloggers, so please add your name and thoughts in a comment if you were there and I'll update the post):

• Destin Joy Layne - The Green Fork http://www.eatwellguide.org
• Biray Alsac - Fitness & Technology Blog http://www.befitwithberay.com
• Beth Carls - K-Ized Mindoh! http://mindoh.wordpress.com
• Lindsay Yaw - Body, Mind & Soul http://www.bethree.com
• Sunil Doshi - http://blog.swiftmob.com
• Adam Brohman - http://amediacirc.us
• Brian Buser - http://www.minggl.com
• Daniel Englander - http://www.greentechmedia.com
• Meghan Warby - http://withoutayard.blogspot.com
• Ruth Ward - http://ruthward.wordpress.com | http://www.sxswm.com
• Jonny Goldstein - http://www.jonnygoldstein.com
• Eric Bryn - Real Estate Relativity http://www.realestaterelativity.com
• Heather Barmore - No Pasa Nada http://www.nopasanada.com
• Amy Bills - Bullblog http://www.bulldogsolutions.com/bullblog
• Eloy Zuniga - http://www.eloyz.com
• Aaron Long - http://www.longstation.com
• Greg Swan - Perfect Porridge http://www.perfectporridge.com
• Danielle Kozich - http://danipennsylvania.blogspot.com
• David J. Neff - Futuring and Innovation in Non Profits http://www.fispace.org
• Marjan Jindrich - Consumers Union Blogs http://www.consumersunion.org/blog
• Tara Anderson - http://iquitforlijit.typepad.com/i_quit_for_lijit/
• Eric Berto - http://www.etelos.com/blogs
• Jackie Huba - http://customerevangelists.typepad.com/
• Samantha Warren - http://www.badassideas.com

Also, thanks to Maura Welch, Sanjay Sabrani, Tracy Locke, Liz Link, Shannon McKarney, Gladys Kong, and many other participants who didn't add their names to the list for sharing their perspective as people who interact with bloggers and want to do it better.  We may have focused on ways to piss off bloggers, but clearly there is some great interest and emerging guidelines on how to end up with happier bloggers.  For reference, the guidelines from our 360 Digital Influence team that I mentioned to several of you at the session can be found here: http://blog.ogilvypr.com/?p=244

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Ironweed Films and The Secret of Repackaging That Works

Would you join a book of the month club?  How about taking the packaged tour to see the sights at a new travel destination instead of exploring them on your own?  There was a time when I didn't understand why anyone would choose something like that.  After all, if you can have all the fun of seeing a new place for the first time, why pollute it with a watered down tour designed for tourists (the one word no real traveller wants to associate themself with).  The easy thing to think is that packaged options are for amateurs.  And no one wants to be an amateur.  But then I went to the Outback in Australia.  For whatever reason, I ended up on an adventure tour instead of just getting a car and going.  I had already seen the Outback once by car exploring on my own.  This time, with a friend visiting, I took the tour.  Along the way, we took in a wounded kangaroo to drop off at a shelter and slept under a deeply coloured sky turned extreme by all the smoke from bush fires in the air.  Every experience on the tour was one I would not have had exploring by myself. 

The reason why I started with this story is because this weekend I was thinking again about the power of packaging when it comes to marketing an experience.  I spent the day saturday with a great team of people working on the marketing strategy for my coming book launch and one of the things we talked about was how to package the experience.  It got me thinking about the last packaged experience I joined ... a group called Ironweed Films.  The company has a charge to share great (and underappreciated) independent films with their members each month.  It is, essentially, a film of the month club.  What sets their experience apart, though, is that in addition to a single full length film, they also package it with 2-3 other short films and put a custom cover around the DVD.  The result is that you don't just get a single movie every month, you get an exploration of an idea or theme, played out over several films - and even the chance to take action on their website with a related activity for each film collection.  Past topics have included nature, abortion, elections, iraq, and the future of food.  What makes Ironweed Films stand out offers a lot of lessons on how to do repackaging right.  For those of you who have a service that you are looking to package, read these lessons first:

1. Offer added value.  The biggest thing Ironweed does is that they go through all the films out there to pair up films that explore similar themes.  As a result, each month you don't just get a single point of view on an immerssive topic, you get several.  In most cases, unless you were in the industry and looking for these films all the tme, they include films you might never have seen.
2. Don't forget about having your own brand. When you are repacking things from others, it may be difficult to create your own unique and memorable brand.  Where Ironweed succeeds is in designing their own brand that members can associate with.  Everything from the brown paper envelope with purple writing that the DVDs arrive in, as well as the numbering of monthly DVDs (kind of like episodic comic books) to give you the sense that each DVD is a collectible item add to the branded approach.
3. Make it about passion.  There are essentially two models for repackaging items.  The first is to repackage multiple things for convenience or to make more money.  The classic example of that would be those packages of 4 colors of peppers sold in the supermarkets.  It's all about ease for you, and they charge you for it.  The other model, and the one that Ironweed promotes, is building their repackaging around a mission to bring more independent films to more people (a cause they believe in).  As a result, the passion makes the site and service even more appealing.

Aside from my Outback experience, I am still not sure that I am a fan of taking the packaged experience when travelling.  That can still be a pretty inconsistent gamble.  When it comes to repackaging an experience though, Ironweed has a model worth considering.

Inside the 5 Badges of the Conference Caste System

At every conference or tradeshow, you get a badge.  I have a box full of them on my desk, an increasing number of them with the title of "Speaker" affixed beneath my name.  I recently had a conversation with some colleagues about the importance of being a speaker at an event.  Often, the most important benefit is not just the visibility of speaking, but the license that speaker tag gives you to have a conversation with other speakers.  If you think about it, the badges at a conference are like a caste system.  Your badge identifies which group you belong in and can often dictate how people embrace or shy away from a conversation with you. 

There are usually only five types of badges that you can get at a conference (listed in order of importance):

1. Speaker
2. Media
3. Sponsor
4. Attendee
5. Vendor

Being a speaker is usually the best choice, because it positions you as an expert at the event and you also have a chance to demonstrate your expertise in front of a subset of attendees.  Media is usually second best, because just about all the sponsors and vendors want to get media coverage.  Last week at an event like the Consumer Electronics Show, however, most people would agree that media was definitely number one because of the relative importance of media coverage to that event.  The interesting thing about "media" at CES (as well as at most other large events today) is that this group is usually divided into two categories: bloggers and press.  For CES, the blogger badges were gray, and the press badges were red.  Thinking this would be a good chance for a bit of a social experiment, I went and got both badges ... the blogger badge by virtue of my blog, and the press badge as a result of my writing being republished by the good folks at Digital Media Wire (sorry I missed the Insider event, Ned).

What did I learn?  Probably not surprisingly, the blogger badge got a lot less attention and special treatment.  It was an odd feeling to walk through certain booths first with my gray badge and then switch to the red one.  There were different rooms for bloggers versus press, and in the press room there was real food (not just snacks), rows of press releases that you could pickup and many invites for private parties or events.  Clearly, there is a gap in perceived value between bloggers and journalists from the organizers of CES, as well as many of the vendors exhibiting at the event.  It really is no different than a caste system where individuals are judged based on the color of their badges.  The question is, when will we see this situation change?  Already, there are signs that it is changing.  Most notably, the fact that there is a blogger room and blogger credentials at an event of this size at all.  The way I see it, in another few years, events like this will start to embrace bloggers and media on the same level and apply a similar criteria to who gets credentials.  This means the real metric will be audience and reach.  Regardless of whether you write for a blog or something else, your credentials will be based on the number of people you reach.  It's just a matter of time before it happens.

The PR Revolution Amazon's Kindle May Be Bringing

Do you have a Kindle yet?  All the buzz about the Wii aside, the most lusted after gift this holiday season for media pros may just be Amazon's new digital content reader called the Kindle (which sold out within 5.5 hours upon first release a few weeks ago).  The device may not have an Apple-esque level of sex appeal, but it does represent a huge shift in thinking that may just propel portable digital content and ebooks in particular to the kind of widespread adoption that digital music has already enjoyed.  For that reason, many people are calling the Kindle the next ipod.  If you are like me, you're probably fed up with hearing about how everything new is about to "revolutionize" the world of media.  Let's take a little reality check.  Not everything has the impact that they think they can have on the world of media.  There are a lot of voices out there. 

So what makes the Kindle different?  More importantly, what makes it something that you need to pay attention to today?  Here are four reasons why the Kindle may be bringing a PR revolution (for real):

1. It makes RSS a necessity. If you have managed to get by this far without using RSS feeds (or offering them to your content if you are a content publisher), those days will soon be over.  The way that Kindle users subscribe to new content is by adding RSS feeds, similar to how you can download music or subscribe to podcasts on iTunes.  This means having a web site is no longer enough.  If your content is not available in RSS format, you may soon be invisible.
2. It finally integrates the reading experience.  The problem right now with magazines, newspapers, blogs and books is that most exist in their own channels when it comes to reading.  This means you may subscribe to RSS feeds from a newspaper and blogs, and get a magazine and still buy books ... but you have to carry all of them.  With the Kindle, you can buy all or read any of these in the same place ... and even send your own documents to the Kindle so you can read them on the go.  It really can be a house for all documents of any kind.
3. It is puts a premium on real time information. For most of us, the types of devices we are used to using all synch with your computer.  In that sense, they are nothing more than glorified hard drives.  That's all the ipod is.  But the Kindle has built in EVDO wireless connectivity which means users are never left looking for a hotspot to connect and always have the latest information from their favorite media sources.  Think about this for a second ... if all media can be updated real time, then editorial errors can be corrected (rather than publishing apologies), and users have an increased appetite and expectation of media that is never out of date.
4. It takes advantage of Amazon's Library. The important thing not to forget about the Kindle is that it also has immediate full access to the full library of Amazon.com ... which means just about every book.  And with a direct tie-in to a user's Amazon account, you can purchase just about any book or piece of content Amazon sells instantly.  From an on demand resource shelf, this is phenomenal (imagine having the AP Stylebook available at a moment's notice). 

If you put all these pieces together, the interesting conclusion is that the Kindle may represent the first real product that challenges our perceptions about how people are consuming content.  Once this starts to change, the way that media publishers create and distribute their content will really change ... thus creating a new environment for PR pros to operate within.  Are you ready for a real time rss-based always on media landscape?  If not, now's the time to start.

Note: This post is republished from the original that was written for the 360 Digital Influence Blog.

The Dilbert Blog and the Danger of Blog Dissonance

The author of one of the greatest blogs on the Internet announced a few weeks ago that he would be posting far less often.  In a world where it seems that everyone (and their mom) is starting a blog for one reason or another, seeing one prominent and popular blogger decide to do it less often captured my attention, and it should capture yours too.  The blogger I'm talking about, of course, is Scott Adams - creator of Dilbert.  His blog serves up his signature wit in narrative form and offers his reasoned approach to highlighting stupidity in the world, both inside and outside of the workplace. 

Recently, he published a book compendium of his blog posts titled Stick to Drawing Comics, Monkey Brain! and noted on his blog that his original reasons for blogging were fourfold:

1. Advertising dollars
2. Compiling the best posts into a book.
3. Growing the audience for Dilbert
4. Artistic satisfaction.

Ultimately, he realized he was failing on two of these counts, and his experience offers an interesting case study of a situation where blogging may not be the panacea that many marketers today are tempted to see it as.  He notes in his post that though he gets great satisfaction from writing on his blog, he sometimes offers political commentary that some Dilbert readers don't understand or agree with.  His voice, in my opinion is a brilliant and necessary one on the wrong choices that society and politicians are making all around us ... but the problem that he faced was that readers and lovers of Dilbert did not necessarily translate into fans of his blog.  Invariably, he would get comments from people who would swear never to read Dilbert again because of what he said on his blog.  Right or wrong, the blog ended up lowering Scott's audience, not increasing it.  That combined with the fact that people were using RSS feeds to get around the ads meant that reasons 1 and 3 from his list of reasons to start blogging were not coming true. 

You can certainly argue with Scott's desire to make money on his blog or fault him for having the wrong expectations about what his blog could achieve ... but his example offers an important lesson about blogging.  Great content is not enough to keep and sustain a blog if your blog creates a blog dissonance (an inconsistency between your blog and your brand).  The power of blogging is that it can bring your identity forward to help you more authentically connect with your audience.  The problem for Scott is that the voice many Dilbert readers expect from him is the voice of Dilbert ... not the voice of Scott Adams.  For people like me, who think Scott himself is brilliant, we are likely to read the blog.  For other Dilbert readers, however, the blog is a different voice to that of Dilbert.  It is the classic writer/actor versus character problem.  It is why people still walk up to Patrick Stewart and call him Captain Picard, or why Michael Richards will always be Kramer.  It is also the reason why the Dilbert Blog, written in the voice of Scott Adams created a blog dissonance.  Free or not free, if your blog ends up having a different voice than what your audience expects, then you may need to come to a similar realization about your blog. 

Guest Post: Creativity 2.E

The Evolution of Creativity is Underway.  Which Side Are You On?
By David Armano

Are you a Planner who thinks about design?  Maybe you are a designer who obsesses about the business impact of your designs.  Or you might be an Information Architect who thinks about motion, transitions, multimedia, and uses tools like storyboarding and visual scenarios.  Or how about a Developer who comes up with the “big idea”? 

If you haven’t noticed, creativity is evolving. 

The perception of creativity itself is slowly but surely transitioning into a mutated and adapted life form.  In the traditional world, a “creative” person usually meant someone with savant-like talents excelling in a specific creative discipline defined by fairly concrete parameters.  Copywriters wrote copy.  Art Directors directed art.  There are still talented visual designers who can make anything look good.  Brilliant copywriters who can come up with that magnificent tagline which stops you in your tracks.  And don’t forget about smart, methodical Information Architects who devote their existence to usability and being an advocate for the end user.

These skills, talents and abilities are needed—no doubt about it.  But what’s also needed is the evolution of them—the next iteration.  But what does this look like?  An Information Architect who completely grasps Human Computer Interaction but can also think fluidly—can do things like rapidly create prototypes, facilitate user testing, understand visual design and occasionaly write copy.  This kind of individual possesses a multi-dimensional creative brain that has evolved over time.   

This type of mind is capable of creating customer experiences which provide competitive advantage in a fast moving world where customers are increasingly calling the shots.   

In this world marketing/advertising/technology/and customer experience all blur together.  So what does this mind look like?  I have a perspective:

With consumer behavior evolving toward a more empowered status—the definition of creativity has shifted from one-dimensional skills to a four-dimensional type of creativity that blends logical thinking with creative problem solving.  Individuals possessing this “New Creative Mindset” blend Analytical, Expressive, Curious and Sensual qualities into their thinking process.  The result is a holistic approach to creativity that is effective across multiple touch points and experiences.

Can an Information Architect embody this kind of mindset?  What about an Account Director?  I think as human beings we are all capable of thinking like this.  But as designers, communicators, marketers and creators of experiences—for us, it’s even more critical to become multi-dimensional creative thinkers and problem solvers.  I’m not the only one talking about this.  Tim Brown from IDEO evangelizes “Design Thinking” and “T-shaped People”.  Both principals are related.  Design Thinking encourages Designers to think past aesthetics and design simple solutions for complex problems.  T-shaped people have a core competency but branch out into other areas and can do them well (thus forming a T).  And of course there is the new kind of collaboration that comes with this—where we combine people with diverse skill sets who often times speak very different languages but need to come together to make their collective and diverse skills work together.  This kind of collaboration sounds easier than it actually is, because when you get a few T-shaped people together, they tend to “play in each other's sandbox”.  Translation?  Ego’s need to be unlearned.  In short, it’s not just about T-shaped people. 

It’s about how we work together to create something that people will want to use, experience and ultimately—compel them to take action. 

You could call this kind of collaboration—T-Shaped Creativity:

I don’t think that any of this is very new.  It’s been happening for a while.  In my time spent at agency.com, we developed pageless prototypes, pushed technology like Flash + Ajax and created human-centered “web applications”.  But with the rapid and pervasive nature of Web 2.0 going mainstream—it’s becoming mandatory to be able to think and execute like this.  Need proof?  Take a look at this collection of thoughts + work from a recent grad of the IIT Institute of Design.  Notice anything about how he approaches his work?  He’s a “designer”, but aesthetics are only one small part of how he exercises his creativity.  In fact, this brand of creativity is more like creative problem solving vs. the way many people still traditionally view creativity.  And what about the teams?  Aside from this evolved creative individual, what kind of team is needed to drive the next generation of communication, interaction and marketing engines?  There’s not a clear answer to this question, but signs are heading toward smaller interdisciplinary teams composed of individuals possessing complimentary skill sets and overlapping talents.


So where does this all go from here?  If you feel like you fit the bill, you’re probably thinking about how marketable you are right now.  And remember, we’re not talking about a “jack of all trades” here.  “Creativity 2.E” is not about doing everything and learning every application under the sun.  It’s about being curious, empathetic, analytical, insightful and expressive all at the same time.  It’s about being willing to do anything to get into the heads of your customer/user.  It’s about adopting new tools, techniques and artifacts to help make your case for creating the right kinds of communications, interactions and experiences.  So what to do if you’re feeling left out? 

Resist the urge to become defensive and territorial—put that energy into developing an acute sense of curiosity and optimism.  Become like a child. 

Participate in the emerging media.  Start a blog, update your site or if you don’t have one—set it up.  Dive into the digital social communities and be willing to do what your customers do.  Try methodology that you might not ordinarily consider.  PowerPoint isn’t just for presentations.  Flash isn’t just for motion.  Move past boxes, arrows, colors, layouts, charts, funnels, and metrics.

Creativity 2.E is both old and new—and like evolution, will continue to change and modify over time.  The question is will we?

David Armano is VP, Experience Design for the Chicago office of digital agency Critical Mass.  He also authors  the blog, Logic + Emotion.

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

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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10 Truths of Marketing in a Web2.0 World

I am in Austin today participating in the eMarketing Summit as part of the Innotech Conference.  I had the chance to do a lunch keynote presentation following Allen Olivo of Yahoo - focused on marketing in a Web2.0 world.  The presentation had a great crowd of engaged people and most (surprisingly) managed to stay awake despite my excellent spot right after lunch.  Below is the presentation I gave at the event, and I am told there will be a podcast of the presentation with audio synched with slides online in the next day or two so I will share the link for that as soon as I have it.

Update (10/15/07) - Read a Dutch Translation of this presentation from Enthousiasmeren

The Gun Is In The Wrong Hand

When you watch a film, do you notice which hand the character on screen is holding the gun in?  And if you do, would you notice if in a following scene, the gun happened to be in the wrong hand?  I guarantee you anyone who has ever worked on editing a film will notice this.  They can't help it.  When shooting the same scene over multiple days (which happens often), consistency is key.  It's usually even someone's job to check this.  The problem with noticing the gun is in the wrong hand though, is that it overshadows your experience of the film.  You have too much knowledge to enjoy it.  If you think about it, we deal with this tyranny of excess knowledge everyday.  Once you have flown business class, it's hard to accept flying economy.  After working as a waiter at a particular restaurant, it is nearly impossible to enjoy a meal there (once you know what happens behind the kitchen).

Would it be better to have no knowledge of a situation before walking into it?  One of the best movie experiences I remember having was going to see Confidence in Australia on its opening weekend.  It was the rare case where, somehow, I managed to make it to my seat in the theater with absolutely no knowledge of the film.  No one had recommended it to me.  I did not know who was starring in it.  I hadn't seen any reviews or trailers, or read any plot summaries.  I hadn't even seen a movie poster.  Walking into the theater and sitting down to watch that movie was a completely blank slate.  And I enjoyed the film in a way I can hardly remember enjoying any other, because I did not know what to expect.

Of course, when it comes to choosing a film to spend your hard earned $7 to $12 bucks on on a Friday night, Hollywood knows that most people don't want to go in blind.  They want to know what to expect, who the stars are and that they won't be disappointed.  This is why the franchise movies (Spiderman, Ocean's Eleven/Twelve/Thirteen, Elizabeth II, etc.) are so popular.  Because the movie studios are betting on proven idea.  This also explains why independent and small budget films have such trouble getting box office time and large audiences.  Small or new businesses have a similar challenge.  A consumer knows what to expect when they walk into Target or purchase a box of Oreo's.  Going against that knowlege is a tough thing.  But when you do, you can create an unexpected and memorable moment.  Giving consumers what they expect is overrated.  Sometimes the most powerful way to reach someone is by giving them an experience they know nothing about.

Thinking Outside the Demographic - Why Customer Passion Matters More

If you have been in marketing for any amount of time, you know how omniprescent demographics are.  The first question most marketing teams will focus on is "what's our target demographic?"  Demographics are what media is bought by and what media properties define themselves by.  Ask any online community about their core audience, and they will typically respond with a demographic like "teen girls 12-18" or "young men 18-25."  TV shows and movies do the same.  Brands take this information, match it with their research or intuitive belief in who their audience is, and decide what promotions to run and what ads to buy.  The problem with this system is that it asks the wrong question.  The question we should be asking is "what does our audience care about?"  There are a number of reasons why we need to think outside the demographic:

1. Creates a common interest. The classic problem with demographics is that you usually end up with more than one that is the target.  Usually, this means a brand will use language like their primary and secondary demographic.  But how do you link them together?  If they were already bonded by a common interest, it makes it much easier to determine how to reach them.
2. Focuses on real relevance.  The other issue with demographics is that they assume because someone is of a certain gender or age, that they will care about a message.  I know demographics get much more sophisticated than that, but they are still based on an assumption that may be flawed.  Focusing on what your audience cares about instead allows you to think more strategically about what messages would be relevant for them.
3. Avoids wastage based on assumptions. Perhaps the greatest benefit of this approach is that it helps you to avoid wasting much of your marketing dollars on trying to reach people who are in your demographic but may not necessarily care about your products or be in the market for them.

As a real example of this, imagine you are promoting a campaign where a brand is trying to raise money for breast cancer, the old demographic mold of thinking would be to target women 29-44.  Contrast that approach to one that focuses instead on everyone who has a personal belief in the issue and is vocal about it.  This could include women 29-44, but is just as likely to include a 15 year old boy who's mother is dealing with the disease.  The implication is obvious.  In terms of buying media, the shift required is creating more contextual marketing messages that touch on points and topics that a particular audience is likely to care about.  The whole point is that targeting by customer passion rather than demographics can make your marketing messages more relevant.  And at the end of the day that's what we all want.

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!

8 Unique Reasons People Like Twitter (And Why Microblogging Matters)

On the surface, capturing what you are doing on daily, hourly or even minutely (double meaning intended) basis seems like a useless activity.  Who has the time to send these incessant "tweets" all day long?  As it turns out, lots of smart folks with respectable jobs, but that's besides the point.  Driven by Mark Simon's dismissal of Twitter and my hectic travel schedule of 5 cities in 5 days last week, I decided to give Twitter a real test run and become an active user of my dormant account I created several months ago but never really used.  This post is a compilation of the lessons I learned about Twitter and an inside look at the appeal of microblogging and why smart marketers should pay attention to this trend and some ideas for the possibilities it offers. 

1. Broadcast Yourself For Real. This may be YouTube's tagline, but it really applies more to Twitter.  As you start sending these messages to update what you are doing right now and gain "followers" - you start to feel like you are broadcasting yourself.  When you're Twittering, you're on the grid and sharing your thoughts and actions real time.
2. Replace Invasive Instant Messaging. I don't use instant messaging at work, because it is interruptive.  Even when you set your status, you'll often get instant messages that are hard to ignore.  Twitter has the same qualities of instant messaging, without the interruptive qualities.  As a result, it lets you send quick short instant messages to people that they can view and answer when they have a moment.  I found myself quickly using direct tweets the way I might use instant messaging to ask a quick question to one of my contacts.
3. Build An Entourage Quickly.  With the easy import feature from Gmail and the relatively low barrier for following someone, I was up to more than 70 contacts in my Twitter account within 5 minutes of starting to use the site.  Not bad for a quick payoff, considering how long it would take to build a friends list of that many people for a new user of any other social network like Facebook or Linkedin.  Even better, the vast majority of people who you follow will start following you right away.
4. Get Satisfaction by Venting. Throughout the week last week I found myself occasionally annoyed at a stupid ad or a flight delay.  I would never "waste" a blog post on these topics most of the time, but found myself twittering them with great satisfaction.  Somehow, just sharing the negative experience of having to walk all the way to the last gate in the B terminal at O'hare made me feel better about it.
5. Always Find Out What's New.  With Twitter, I knew right away when Matt posted a photo of the guys from our panel at Promo Live, and when Gordon Moore finished his chat at IDF.  The running commentary of the latest news from my contacts was actually really useful and somewhat addictive.  Longer term, at the very least I'll be sending a Twitter update every time I publish a new blog post.
6. Fills A Gap Left By Blogging. Now that I have gained a few thousand consistent readers, I find myself considering more carefully what I write about.  The people who subscribe to this blog invest their time and expect to find something of use ... and there are often times when I abandon a topic because I don't have a strong point of view about it.  My blog has never been about pointing out things out there without some commentary.  Yet sometimes there is something that is interesting which I would just like to share a link on, but not necessarily write about.  Twitter is the perfect way to share those links and a quick thought without spending a whole blog post on it.
7. Highly Useful for Live Blogging. There are several events in the past few months that I have had the chance to attend and live blog.  For most, my live blogging consisted of taking notes during sessions, coming up with a point of view and posting a blog post on it.  This is what I did at the CCR event, and the Ogilvy Verge event.  At Intel's IDF and Promo Live, I tried using Twitter for live blogging instead and found it to be really useful because you can get your thoughts out much more quickly, you can really do it real time, and it forces you to focus on capturing the really key points.  I'll be Twittering many of my other upcoming events now as well.
8. Facilitate Meetups.  When I was heading to a media event after the first day of IDF, I was looking for bloggers to invite to the event.  Luckily Karl from ExperienceCurve spotted me on Twitter and suggested we meet up.  This is one of the earliest benefits that I realized some time ago about Twitter, but it was really nice to see it in action.  Imagine this blown out beyond cities to destinations and you can really visualize the potential power of Twitter.

So what does this all add up to?  For me, Twitter is a compelling platform that can easily become addictive once you start to use it ... a quality that many great sites share.  The marketing opportunity here is super simple:

1. Start following people that care about what you do
2. Respond to their messages where appropriate to start dialogue
3. Send consistent and substantial updates of your own
4. Use Twitter as a platform to inform your followers of news they might care about

Today the end of my week long experiment, I'll be continuing to use Twitter and I'd suggest you give it a go as well.  Now I need to go and send an update to my group letting them know this post is live ...

Branding the Subcontinent: India's Inspiring 60th Anniversary Celebration

Today is India's 60th Anniversary of Independence and there is lots of discussion on Indian blogs about the significance of this day and what it means for the country.  It will come as no surprise for admirers of the Bollywood film industry that India's culture is one driven by film and music.  The blockbuster Bollywood films incite passion amongst most people in India that is incomparable to any film release anywhere else in the world.  It is fitting, then, that the voices of this 60 year anniversary are not the politicians, but the artists.  In the only country in the world where films with local origins still far outpace Hollywood movies on opening weekend, the national identity of India is inseparable from its love affair with film and music.   

As an example, here are two (1 2) of the many videos floating around YouTube showing how the country is finding and projecting its voice and brand to each other and to the world. 

These may be a bit over the top, but they are clearly working.  In the 2006 Country Brand Index published by FutureBrand, India was the only third world country in the top ten list of the strongest global country brands.  Despite any social or political problems, there is a strong national identity for India and the country seems likely to move higher on this list of strong country brands this year.  Branding a country is an activity that is on a scale hard for most marketers to imagine, but at the end of the day is comes down to the most basic marketing lesson of all ... giving people something to believe in.

Note: If you want to continue your journey into India today, check out this great list of Indian bloggers (I'm in the Entrepreneurs and Innovators category).

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: