A Better Course

• Microsoft Takes Aim at Google’s Ad Supremacy – New York Times
  Microsoft will be able to provide advertisers with a log of all the places on the Internet where people see ads before going to the advertisers’ Web sites. The data is based on individual computers’ electronic signatures, not individual people.
  (tags: advertising microsoft google strategy nytimes statistics metrics)
• FT.com / Companies / Media & internet – Amazon launches challenge to iTunes
  Bill Carr, head of Amazon’s digital media, said the retailer had “waited for some time” before launching the service because it had been clear that customers were confused by the variety of players and restrictions imposed on downloads.
  (tags: media music strategy amazon apple itunes ft)

• Why ‘Total Geeks’ Build Businesses Faster | Business Week
  The vast majority of these successful CEOs rated themselves as “total geeks”—22%—or the next highest category, “power users”—59%.
  (tags: business businessweek strategy technology entrepreneurship)
• Bringing PlayStation Back to Basics | Business Week
  “The competition for eyeballs and the competition for people’s pocketbooks is as intense as it’s ever been. I don’t think it’s any different than what we’ve seen in the past.” Interview with Sony’s Phil Harrison.
  (tags: sony technology marketing business strategy businessweek computergames ps3)
• Jackson Blog: Jackson Library: Stanford GSB
  Why does it take 39 ingredients to make a Twinkie, when you can bake a cake at home with six? The answer: shelf life… whipped cream filling is replaced with shortening, in the form of partially hydrogenated vegetable oil and/or beef fat.
  (tags: jacksonblog twinkie product food)
• As the Fall Season Arrives, TV Screens Get More Cluttered – New York Times
  “We do not want to invade in the viewers’ space so much that we intrude on their experience,” said Ms. Provencio. Promotional content on what the industry calls the “lower third” of the television screen is “the way of the world these days,”
  (tags: nytimes advertising america technology television broadcast)
• Pitchfork Feature: Column: Poptimist #8: Ape and Essence
  Maybe the gorilla ad marks a shift– an advert which cares about its music (even if that music is well-worn and corny) enough to add something to it.
  (tags: pitchfork music cadburys advertising marketing branding)

• Paying an Author and Putting Her Down – New York Times
  The paper bought excerpts from the book, putting money in Ms. Klein’s pocket for the privilege of knocking her down. The paper’s managing editor for comment said Ms. Klein’s influence in Canada justified reprinting her work, but her popularity requi
  (tags: nytimes publishing naomiklein)
• Seth’s Blog: Seven tips to build for meaning
  Context is built more quickly if people know where you stand and can plug that into their previous point of view. If you’re giving meaning, you’re also making an argument… one in favor of your point of view.
  (tags: sethgodin online marketing)
• Starbucks to give away music as new service starts | Reuters
  From October 2 to November 7 at more than 10,000 U.S. Starbucks locations, customers can receive “Song of the Day” cards redeemable on Apple’s iTunes store for a complimentary song hand-selected by Starbucks Entertainment
  (tags: starbucks apple businessdevelopement marketing reuters advertising)
• The Paul Newman of Punk Rock | Business Week
  Marketing punk rock is difficult. The segment isn’t driven by hit singles or radio airplay like most of the music business.
  (tags: hopelessrecords punkrock businessweek philanthropy marketing branding)

• Penny Arcade! – The Protip
  “I place greater value on enabling victory than actually securing it.” – Penny Arcade on Team Fortress 2 character classes.
  (tags: teamfortress2 computergames comic pennyarcade)

One of the conventions of Tube advertising – either in trains or on the platforms – is that there can be large volumes of densely written text about your product or service because the people who are looking at your advert at all (the ones who aren’t reading) have quite a lot of time and nothing better to do.

Nintendo’s recent tube campaigns have done this well. The headline refers to what you can do in a DS game and the train on which you might do that – the Phoenix Wright advert’s headline is “Solve A Mystery On The 8:15 To Paddington”. The text underneath varies slightly for each game, but it always starts in the same way; you’re commuting, you’re typically going to spend three years of your life doing that, how about spending the time better? It’s not as patronising as that sounds, but rather some fairly well-reasoned text about a possible problem and one of a series of possible solutions, all of which are available on the DS.

Nokia, it seems, are also trying to take advantage of their viewer’s location in their current Tube posters. The headline is “Expand Your Tube Vocabulary”; after this (on the advert I saw yesterday, which I assume is one of a series) is the phrase “excuse me” followed by a variety of pronunciations of “excuse me”. The bottom right hand corner encourages the viewer to “be more nokia”.

These are two adverts that are doing ostensibly very similar things – using the (potential) consumer’s location as a starting point for pointing out the advantages of a piece of hardware, the use of which could make that location better. However, there’s a significant difference between the two that makes Nintendo’s successful and Nokia’s far less so; the former is speaking to the location, where the latter is speaking about the location.

The point of the Nokia advert – even without the large volumes of text – is quite clear. This device is for talking to people, if people talked to each other on the Tube (to the extent of basic politeness) it would be a better place, therefore this device makes the world a better place and you a better person. But the link doesn’t quite work – there’s nothing this bit of hardware can do to make the journey right then better. Commuting would certainly be more pleasant with more politeness and less shoving (so the advert is technically correct about the reader’s location) but that is a far from compelling reason to buy a particular brand of handset.

Nintendo, by contrast, are speaking to a need that exists at the point the advert is being read – are you sure you want to be spacing out like this? do you really want to read adverts for half an hour every time you finish a book mid-commute? If you had a DS right now, you’d probably be having more fun.

Of course, these companies exist in very different spheres. Nokia are in a market that is both saturated and extremely competitive, whereas Nintendo are currently doing extremely well at reaching a largely untapped market for their products. Part of this has been about meeting its potential customers where they are in terms of the hardware they make, as well as their advertising. Proving that you know your customer’s needs and proving you can meet them are very different things; it would be good to see more thought put into the latter in location-based advertising.

• Face value | The brand of Clinton | Economist.com
  He has transformed himself into one of the hottest brands in the booming business of giving away money. This is a remarkable piece of rebranding, to say the least, for a man never blessed with spare cash to give.
  (tags: theeconomist clinton america branding)
• Neuromarketing » Nonprofit Marketing: The Power of Personalization
  Nonprofit marketers would do well to remember that the vast majority of their donors aren’t adept at converting statistics into a donation strategy, and that our brains are wired to respond more strongly to an individual plight than the same condition a
  (tags: neuromarketing marketing psychology)
• A Shopping Network Wants to Own the 17th Letter of the Alphabet – New York Times
  QVC is making a bid to rebrand the often-overlooked letter, betting that it can make the sight of the letter Q elicit not a laugh nor an immediate search for a U, but a feeling of delicious anticipation. “We’d really like to own the 17th letter of the
  (tags: nytimes advertising branding qvc)
• Bob Sutton: Do You Believe That You Can Increase Your IQ?
  if you believe that ability is fixed and communicate this to the people you lead in your organization, they will treat their performance as an “impression management” problem, and carefully avoid providing you with information that they are bad at any
  (tags: leadership bobsutton research psychology)

• Netflix: Flex To The Max | Business Week
  Today, Netflix is embroiled in an even tougher, two-front war: competing with Blockbuster for online supremacy in DVD rentals while also inaugurating a digital streaming service to compete with the likes of Apple. That’s one mighty gang of entrenched comp
  (tags: netflix leadership competition apple blockbuster strategy businessweek)
• Seth’s Blog: Blue jeans
  “A huge amount of marketing is about “in” or ignore. This is about “in” or “out.” By forcing people to make a choice, they created a conversation.” How can this be applied elsewhere? When would it be suitable to do that?
  (tags: sethgodin marketing conversation)
• Fortune’s Plugged In: Yoplait’s new carbonated yogurt – Sep. 18, 2007
  “Looking to make yogurt more palatable to tweens, Yoplait has come out with carbonated yogurt in a tube. Called Fizzix, this bubbly concoction is the latest entry in the fast-growing U.S. yogurt market.” It sounds disgusting.
  (tags: cnn america marketing food yoghurt product)

There are a lot of adverts for the Barclays OnePulse card in London recently, leading with a slogan that indicates that once you’ve got an Oyster card, a contactless credit card, and a Chip & Pin based credit card you really don’t need another card.

There are some things I like about this product and campaign – how unashamedly targeted at London (where, clearly, an enormous volume of young, affluent early adopters live) both are, and the obvious convenience of a card that combines the ability to travel, buy small items very easily and larger ones quite easily.

It’s the last point, though – the ability to make both small and large purchases – that makes me unsure about it as a product. It makes sense to assume that the same action – touching a card on a reader – should get you through the barriers at a rail station and buy sandwiches in Pret. In fact, these two actions are very similar in terms of the costs incurred. Buying an MacBook, by contrast, is quite different, and the idea that the same card that facilitates small, pointless impulse purchases (smoothies) might also facilitate the same thing on a much bigger scale. It’s not a card that does three useful things – it’s a card that does two very, very different useful things.

However, the fact that the action is different for the bigger purchase (entering a PIN number rather than swiping a card on a contactless reader) means that there is a meaningful division between the two types of spending. The metaphor I’d been using to think about what’s wrong with the card had been getting one fifty pound note when you wanted two twenties and a ten; it’s the same amount, but there are differences in the way you think about the units that make up that amount. The physical difference between the actions required to spend money on a large and a small scale maintain that division in a way that makes sense.

Of course, if you lose it and you don’t have any change on you, you’re still walking home from Oxford Street. But I wouldn’t expect them to lead with that as an advertising slogan.

• Seth’s Blog: Mean vs. Median
  “The typical (mean) American eats a meal at McDonald’s once every two weeks. But I never go and some people eat there twice a day.” Mistakes made in looking at web stats, and stats in general.
  (tags: marketing statistics sethgodin web)
• Google Program Enlists Mini-Sites as Selling Tool for Advertisers – New York Times
  The new widget ads represent a more aggressive push by Google to attract big brand advertisers who like flashy ad units rather than the simple text ads commonly run in Google’s ad network.
  (tags: google advertising strategy nytimes)
• With Economy Volatile, Financial Firms Start to Stress Stability – New York Times
  “Most market research we’ve done shows that when a stock market says, ‘Don’t worry,’ people worry,” said John L. Jacobs, CMO at the Nasdaq Stock Market. “We tend to be agnostic to a market condition because we’re here for the long term”
  (tags: nytimes marketing finance markets)
• Don’t Shout, Listen | Fast Company
  While Proctor & Gamble has made the use of focus groups and test markets into an art form, it has kept such interaction with customers tightly under wraps. The basic model: Research secretly, and carry a strong brand.
  (tags: advertising marketing web p&g fastcompany branding research)

Last week, I talked about looking at what your audience want from your product, and how to supply that. Fueled By Ramen, a record label who seem to be adapting extremely well to the new music industry, have traded heavily on something that might have been seen to be peripheral to the main product – many music fans don’t just want to listen to the music a band makes, they also want to be friends with the band.

This t-shirt starts with the idea that being in a band is having a gang:

T-shirts, however, are fairly standard band merchandise. It’s not possible to wear the same t-shirt every day – or if it is, it’s unlikely to win you any friends. If your band are going to be advertised as widely as possible, and the fans are going to feel as involved as possible, there has to be more to it than just an item of clothing.

That’s what I think is, ultimately, well executed about Fueled By Ramen’s marketing effort; if you (as a member of their core market) want to feel more involved with the band and label, that’s entirely possible. Given their (I would imagine) largely teenage market, this involved bringing out vast quantities of stationary across a range of bands – there is a fairly comprehensive range of stationary (all quite clearly marked as ‘Back To School’ products) as well as gym bags

and quite likely a wide range of other products that are not featured on the first page of the site.

It’s good marketing, obviously, because it means the fans actively advertise your band in as many locations as possible; but it’s also good marketing because the fans want to do that. Rather than throwing the message at an audience that may or may not care, it’s using the people who do care as a conduit for the message, in a much more subtle and effortless way than (for example) a street team.