Adwords Evolved

I don’t usually get too inspired by advertising. Some times it makes me laugh or pulls at some heartstrings, but it doesn’t really inspire me to look at the world in a different way. Then my co-worker Clark showed me this.

Converse just won an Effie for flipping Google Adwords completely on its head. In the past, if people wanted to sell shoes, they would by the Adword for ‘shoes’ or ‘footwear’ or if they’re feeling adventurous, ‘kicks’. Then if people search for “shoe” they’ll see the link. The more marketers buy the same words, the more expensive that Adword is. That basically means every shoe marketer in the world is inflating the price of the word, creating more competition for themselves, and probably not meaningfully reaching anyone. (When’s the last time you searched for shoes? You either hit the brand or you go to Zappos.)

Converse flipped the script, they started buying Adwords that their demographic were already searching on. How did they know what they were searching? They just looked at Google Zeitgeist. So now, when a teen is searching for ‘how to kiss’ they might see a link for a Converse mini-site. The mini site is a moment to connect, and it’s a link back to Converse (if they want it). The only way you get to pull that off is by intimately knowing your customers and knowing what they want.

I would expect that Google will start to price terms in Zeitgeist slightly higher (if they don’t already). I think this campaign will probably change the way people buy Adwords. It’s like human-centered media planning…what an oxy-moron.

The simple things

I started writing in this blog to see if I can make some sense of things. I kind of found that I was seeing tons and tons of content online, going through hundreds of blogs a day…but not really having anything to show for it, sort of the internet equivalent of watching daylong reality show marathons. I figured a blog of my own word would make me write more and refer less. I don’t post lots of links or photos here, I leave that for my tumblog. So far that separation helps me for just sliding headlong into reposting everything I see on the web.

But all the “sense making” gets so heavy and self-important. I admire people like my friend Soraya who’s running this experiment over at NeverBarefoot. She’s making sense of things and cataloging memories along the way. I bet the act of posting that photo each day becomes a mental diary for her.

Since I know lots of those beat up shoes, it really cheers me up. There’s a nice trick to the site too…it always maintains perspective, photos shot toes up are Soraya, guest feet appear opposite.

Tighten Up

60-degrees in Cambridge, dub music, and Friday….so happy.

Media brands that breathe

I’ve been thinking a lot about The Hills lately.

That show is one of those rare events where it’s hard to tell if the minds behind the show are genius or just lucky. (Since I dont’ really believe anyone is ‘just lucky’, I’m going with genius.) If you can get past all the playful, spoiled teen angst that is The Hills, there’s a pretty amazing phenomenon here. MTV has managed to build a media property that isn’t confined by the channel. I don’t think it’s necessarily a new trick, but this trick at this scale is pretty phenomenal to witness, (notice I didn’t say ‘watch’). Read the rest of this entry »

Hey Ryan: Is there a difference between a pilot and a prototype?

My colleague Ryan and I have a ‘blogger volley’ going. One of us poses an unanswerable question and the other offers some thoughts, it’s a good way for each of us to take some o the things we see and put some deeper thinking around it. This week I’m the ‘Q’ and he’s the ‘A’…here we go.

Hey Ryan, I think a lot about the value of prototyping. I’m always inspired by how much our society has advanced because people just built something and went for it. SUre they failed, but they dusted themselves off, learned and tried again. As we learned the mechanisms at the heart of those failures, we learned to prototype.

I think about those grainy black and white films loops of gliders crashing into barns in the early days of flight. I think about crude and scary medical instruments from the turn of the century. Diego’s even included it as one of his Inspiration Principles.

Prototyping has led to amazing products (and some services), but I can’t understand why those same mechanisms are so hard for business and organizations. Businesses like to talk about experimenting, but by the time enough people and money are committed to the research, it feels more like a validation. I run into a lot of business pilots, but that seems different than a prototype.

Can designers and engineers see something that entrepreneurs and managers can’t? How can businesses fail, learn and evolve? Have risk avoidance tools made prototyping more difficult?

Chinese Translation

My iPod keeps playing this tune at all the right times. Great music for a really nice spring day. Thank you technology.

I so called this.

So when the economy hit the skids, I started thinking about what could quickly change. What behavior have we adopted as a society that could quickly go away without a lot of pain? One of the first things I thought about was casual dining…America has been eating out a lot in the last decade, and I figured that could vanish pretty fast. The NYT reported as much this morning in this story.

In the last recession, there were scores of stories of small restaurants in San Francisco packing it in because they didn’t have enough customers to earn the bills. Then I started thinking…if these guys are hurting, what’s going on with The Olive Garden? (One of my darkest secrets is that I worked at an Olive Garden for a year of my life in undergrad. It was truly hell on earth, but I guess we all do things we’re not extremely proud of in college…)

Ironically, the year I spent in that place has payed me back in spades for the things I witnessed there (or didn’t witness). The thing about casual dining is that it’s built on the same principles as large-scal food production, it’s all about consistency and convenience. The restaurants would like to tell you it’s about an ‘experience’, but if customers were really interested in an experience they wouldn’t be heading toward a chain restaurant for dinner – they want a sure thing and they don’t want to have to do the dishes.

The problem is that building these restaurants became sort of an arms race for coverage. There was never one new restaurant opening up in a neighborhood, there would be five. Which also meant it would be hard to hire a capable staff, which meant it was hard to deliver quality service, which meant business wouldn’t sustain, which means they needed to open a new store for more growth…If you think about this race for coverage, I guess it’s not too surprising they estimate 20,000 establishments will close.

Well, that’s a lot of high-volume, highly designed food service real estate opening up, I wonder how someone could capitalize?

Bandcamp

I had heard of this site before and sort of shrugged it off, but I just watched a video that blew. my. mind.

Bandcamp is a service out of SF (I think) that works for grassroots music acts as a promotional + distribution tool. Basically, you upload you tracks and sell them…so what, right?

Well…there’s all sorts of nice interactions going on here, but I’m more blow away about how the interactions lead to some sort of ‘value creation’ (sorry, that’s what it is, yes I hate that phrase too).
- site functionality where you can see how many people have listened to a track in it’s entirety
- name your price sales model (with minimum prices…smart)
- Sharing music the way fans want to share, online linking (AND a way to track who’s linking/listening from where.)
- free download campaigns with track-able codes (and moo cards so you can get away from everything living online!)

There’s a massive paradigm shift going on here, using this site single-handedly creates new avenues to connect with fans and then manifesting the connection to mean something greater for the bands.

Record labels should stop worrying about p2p pirating and start worrying about these guys….

this site + a solid street team + and a good booking agent = game over

Video about the site here.
Special video about the online promo cards here.

Connected vs. Detatched

You know when you’re out with friends and you have that one extra drink that sounded like a good idea, but ultimately was too much of a good thing? That’s sort of how Twitter’s feeling to me lately.

Don’t get me wrong, I looove technology, and I love being constantly connected (probably to a fault). But what happens when your connected just for the sake of being connected? I read this quote from Sherry Turkle from MIT regarding Twitter on Gawker that crystalized things for me.

“It meets some very deep need to always be connected, but then it turns out that always being trivially connected has a lot of problems that come with it.” – Sherry Turkle

Online, there’s tons of ways to leave short status messages, IM status, OOO-auto emails, Facebook status, etc, etc….it’s short-span communication. I get that everyone wants to consume more granularly, with less commitment, but I think Twitter, like Friendster, will end up being a societal experiment. (Let’s play with it before we know what it’s for, after we learn what the media is about, it’ll be resurrected in a meaningful capactiy.)

I think it’s everyone getting sort of exactly what they asked for with Twitter, only they’re on the edge of realizing that it’s not as satisfying as actually engaging, thinking, and feeling. Now those deeper activities take more time, but they might actually be worth your time.

In some ways, I decided to start this blog because too much in my life had become rapid media consumption….you consume and consume until it’s not actually enriching. It’s just eye candy, it’s not actually content.

Then, just when I decide I hate Twitter more than the recession, I watch Evan Williams Ted talk and I’m inspired by all the ways people are using the service that actually isn’t self-serving.

…it’s all just so complicated.

HBR, Ikea & Betty Crocker

HBR recently launched its Big Ideas for 2009.

I like lists like this because they’re an interesting survey of what a decision makers (and publishing houses) think will be influential. There’s naturally a little sensationalism, but for the most part it’s informative.

I was struck by the Ikea Effect idea though. The idea is that through flat-pack, self assembled furniture, IKEA has tapped into the same sort of phenomenon that Betty Crocker captured decades ago in its add-an-egg bakers formula. On the surface that sounds plausible, but if you push on the idea a little bit, I think there’s something deeper at work.

Betty Crocker was about creating something, add an egg, mix, and bake…but there’s some magic and some transformation after that. The cake could be a little overdone, a little underdone; there’s a small amount of risk and some magic to the process. IKEA furniture is about assembling. The best you could ever do is to make a piece of furniture exactly like the piece in the store. There’s not even a hint of craftsmanship, it’s about shifting labor and getting cheaper, more accessible furniture.

It’s interesting how when you just analyze something externally, they can seem to fit the same needs. Only when you empathize and role play a little does the problem reveal a whole new layer of richness…