Showers are awesome. They help me organize ideas and think of things in a fresh way. Now, finally, I can WRITE in the shower!
This is the product i’ve been dreaming of for years. I’m just…I’m just so happy right now. All they need to do next is a waterproof computer, and I can do ANYTHING in there.
It’s been kind of a busy past couple days, so just another short post for ya.
Thanks, again, to the MIT Advertising Lab I got this tip about our good friend Lonelgirl15. Now, I was never a Lonelygirl fan, even when people thought it was real it just wasn’t my style. But now that they’re totally and obviously fictionalized, brands might as well start placing products into the show, right? Wrong.
I have nothing against product placement, it’s just that to me it’s the lazy way out. Product integration, branded entertainment, I’m down with those. But when someone is talking about how they have issues with trust and then fawns over Ice Breakers Sours Gum?!! Give me a break. I mean, wow, I don’t have to even argue how poorly this was done, you can just listen to the cut from dirty to clean audio when they started talking about the product. If you need further proof you can look at some sweet screencaps below, and use them and learn how truly uncreative webshow placements can apparently be.
It’s sad to see what could have been a smart move be done with such little flair.
Call it a case of “great minds think alike” if you want, but both AdWeek and BrandWeek have printed articles (well, really they’re very similar articles by the same author, but roll with me here) about the weakness of marketers in Second Life. Last week, in case you missed it, I rambled on and on about this very topic in my first blog post.
Just throwing it out there.
I’m a little late on this one since it was posted to the MIT Advertising Lab last July, but Jaffe Juice wrote a post today about this incredibly smart European move to include Visa cards and a card reader into Monopoly.
Wow. I mean, despite the fact that you’re essentially teaching kids to do all their spending on credit card - which could lead to some serious debt in the future - I think this is really a smart strategy. You could argue that you’re really just teaching kids responsible spending, while tying your brand to the actual gameplay of a beloved game. I still remember trying to catch my brother sneaking money when he was the banker, I’m pretty sure this will protect against cheating: we all know you can’t cheat the credit card company unless you flea the country and go into hiding (you’ll never get my money, Toronto Dominion! NEVER!*)
This is widely different from creating a branded version of monopoly which differentiates itself based on an already existent fanbase (I’m lookin at you, Star Wars Monopoly.) In this case, Visa makes itself an integral part of this classic game. I’m really quite impressed, and I feel bad for the future of Discover.
*For the sake of newcomers to the blog, Toronto Dominion, and any potential employers, I am not currently on the run from TD Bank in Canada. Just making sure you know…
If there’s one thing my search engine lacks, it’s a chance for me to win stuff. Frankly, I’m sick and tired of having to find information without having the chance of winning a valuable reward! Finally, my dreams have been answered. I present: Kevin Federline’s Search Engine!
You can win valuable things, like a t-shirt. the chance of winning an autograph, or a real live 8×10 glossy of K-Fed (which I’m sure are quite hard to come by in La Ville de Federline.) This is, of course, created by the same people as Andrew Dice Clay’s Search Engine, where the one and only prize is the chance to win a PHONE CALL with the Dice man! WOW! I’m gonna start searching right away!
It’s a lot easier to sell a dumb idea to the client than the general public.
*UPDATE/CLARIFICATION IN RESPONSE TO COMMENTS*: Mark Martins commented that this seems like a clever business model. As much as this makes sense on paper, the fact is that when you’re looking for information, you want to get it quickly. Prodege claims they are “customizing and incentvizing”(sic) the search process, which is certainly true…but at this point in time, and especially with these examples, I don’t think it will resonate with the larger audience for a few reasons:
1) The prizes offered add very little value. You can search as much as you want, but in the end, all you will win is the possibility of maybe getting K-Fed’s autograph. I realize that I may not be the target audience for this prize, but the fact remains that you don’t definitely win an autograph - you only win the chance of winning one.
2) When searching, you ultimately receive a long list of paid advertising, and a query response that looks ugly and wonky, as if it was from the late 90s version of DogPile.
3) I want to trust my search engine. I keep going back to the tried and true because I know I will get to my results easily and quickly. I don’t necessarily trust searching with K-Fed.
If implemented properly, maybe given a better user interface and a better reason for searching, then certainly this could work as a business model. I especially like the countdown implemented that shows the last time someone was rewarded, adding to a feeling of excitement. But for now, I’ll keep going to google. (As a sidenote, a few months ago I would have said huckabuck which I believe is truly an innovative search engine. Unfortunately, they no longer act as a search engine, and instead give you PageRank information for your website.)
This is a bit of a change from most of my web-marketing talk. Let’s see how it goes.
If a brand wants to be extremely relevant to their target, then they have to fling themselves wholeheartedly into the sub-culture where they belong. Not 18-24 males, but really finding that truth to the shifts in society. If lucky, the brand can become an icon and be held in high regard by everyone in that group, integrating itself fully into their lifestyle.
American Girl is one of those brands that seemed to get everything right. They tapped into the pulse of every little girl, and sold them the perfect doll. You could then buy a multitude of outfits, even get the doll’s hair styled. Their marketing was tight, word on the playground started to spread (the original form of buzz marketing), and then American Girl dolls became the sought after plaything for pre-tween girls. They convinced the parents that all the money spent would encourage their child to “stand tall, reach high, and dream big.”
But for the icon-making machine to keep running, every cog needs to be in place to perfection. And, unfortunately for one little girl, that is simply not the case. According to her mom, a young girl named Etta was invited by a friend to go and spend $20 for a doll-hairstyling at the American Girl store in Manhattan. This 6-year old brought her favorite doll, one she had saved up for and bought herself. It happened to be from Target, and was only $29.99, compared to the almost-$100 price for an official “American Girl.” Little did she know her doll wasn’t good enough. Here’s what happened:
“This isn’t a real doll!” the stylist exclaimed. (Thank your stylist!–we never would have had the heart to explain it that way!). And to prove that a fake doll isn’t worth the plastic she’s molded out of, she refused to do the doll’s hair.
I’m not sure exactly what’s in it for your company, because you still stood to make $20 off of my daughter for doing the fake doll’s hair. I have two thoughts on that. Either her $20 wasn’t worth the same as someone else’s $20 (in which case I’ve learned something new too!) OR it was worth the $20 to you to be able to be the one to break the news to, I mean, to *enlighten* my little girl. You do promise to teach little girls, don’t you?
And she cried and cried and cried, and your stylist held her ground. That was a good lesson for her too. That feelings don’t have a place in “the heart of Manhattan’s prestigious shopping neighborhood” (another quote from your website).
I don’t care if it wasn’t the right doll, the best thing that “stylist” could have done was take the girl’s $20 and give the doll some nice hair. Why not accept someone’s money, even if it’s not an ‘official’ doll? You’re selling an experience, one that involved the girl waiting in line for a few snips of scissors. My most recent haircut was less than $20 (see below), so it’s not absurd to accept any doll that would be willing to spend some serious cash.
I know that there are probably lots of people who bring all sorts of ridiculous dolls and stuffed animals into the store, and there’s probably a policy. But when there’s a little girl crying her eyes out, don’t you think it’s time to put that policy aside and just cut some hair?
Speaking of communities, I personally am not huge into buying stuff from Woot, where they offer a deal on one and only one product a day. But I LOOOVE Woot-offs (one’s happening right now.) They have a limited inventory, sell a product at a (usually) incredibly cheap price, and once everything is sold, there’s a new product and price waiting for you.
I like it because of the anticipation, the surprise, the fact that all comments are allowed and they’re usually pretty funny. I like it because even though I’m not going to be buying an HP iPaq, it’s good to know i could have bought one for only a couple hundred dollars. Plus, i’ve never really thought of buying a “Bag o’ Crap” before until Woot came along.
It’s interesting to see how the comments in both Woot and a similar (but different) service, Smack Shopping. Smack lets users vote on what products they want to buy, and then sells a limited inventory (noticing a pattern here?) at a price that is constantly going down. If you buy too soon, you’ve paid too much. If you click too late, it could all be sold out. THEN, one lucky user (the one who guessed the lowest percentage of the original price that the product would be purchased), gets to spin the “Smack Wheel” and wins anything from a rubber chicken or $5 off coupon, to a Nintendo Wii.
Back to the comments: what I like to see is the users in both these communities trade barbs and comment whether or not they like the product. Sometimes you even see a “Hey, did I just see you over at Woot?” It’s real time, it’s communication, and it’s all in good fun. They’ve succesfully made internet bargain shopping a fun and social experience.
Simple, easy to understand, all the excitement of eBay without any of the waiting. It’s even exciting for me to watch as a spectator. And if that right product comes along…
These days you can create a community website for just about everything. The information architecture is there, but just because it’s possible doesn’t mean it should be done. Sure, I could give people a chance to post their own pictures and video to create a community of people who were once on the corner 72nd st. and Amsterdam. But will anyone actually go to it? Will anyone participate? Will it actually be interesting?
To me, it seems too easy to tell a company “we’re going to get lots of CSR opportunities and find the people that have a passion for your product/destination/etc.” A smart brand manager would know that there’s a good chance that their pack of gum isn’t a McRib. There are lots of products that people are actually fanatic about, and if you give your “brand evangelists” (or “sneezers” or what have you) the ability to actually feel like a part of the big-brand decisions, then that’s valuable. But if you want to tell me in an interview that your BIG IDEA for a NYC tourist destination is to let people upload their videos and photos from this location onto a site, I’m sorry but I’m not buying it.
The issue is that EVEN IF some people post their photos and videos, these aren’t the people that you want to reach. They have already heard of the place, and likely won’t be swayed to go back because they can look at other people’s pictures of the same thing they have seen. And prospective visitors aren’t going to be interested because what they’ll see are essentially the same photos over and over. This isn’t disneyland, there’s no inherent heart for this new tourist spot. You have to create something smart, something memorable, something fantastic! It has to grab the user and fling them into a world that will rile them up enough to get them excited to go, and looking at other people’s vacation photos isn’t going to do it. If I wanted to do that, I would go to the middle aged couple on the second floor of my building and look at old slides.
Don’t just try to create a community because it’s possible to set up the framework. There are enough community-sites that have no community out there, there’s no reason to waste your client’s time and money.
The AdCritic Interactive Email just pointed my way to a website for the Nokia N95 - Great Pockets. It’s a neat idea, since the phone’s got lots of gadgets they flip the script and start the site at a clothier who has designed clothing items with HUGE pockets, to carry everything from your computer to your camera and GPS. Fun enough, there’s a lot of video (not enough skipability in my humble opinion, which is another point in and of itself, but that’s for another post) and it’s pretty light-hearted.
When you say that you’re not interested in these absurd pants, you leave the store and are brought to a field, where they present the Nokia N95. You can explore the phone, do some other stuff that I didn’t pay attention to, and you can even win one (along with a piece of Great Pockets clothing for a friend) - and that’s where things start to go wrong.
I’m a sucker for trying to win stuff. I know that these companies just want to engage in some CSR and maybe some market research, but I’m cool with that as long as there’s a glimmer of hope that I can win something cool. In order to win, I entered my name and email address, along with the name and email address of the friend to whom I would give the Great Pockets clothing. Then all I had to do was enter my country.
Never did I think that selecting “United States of America” could be so frustrating.
The site designers decided that rather than a simple pulldown with a scrollbar along the side, they wanted the user to scroll based on whether their pointer was at the top of the tiny menu, or the bottom. My mouse ended up slipping a lot, which meant about TWO MINUTES trying to find “United States of America.” Even on a ‘clean’ scroll straight down to my country, I had to check a few times to see if I had arrived at my final destination.
Things that look nice but aren’t functional aren’t good design. Everything on your site, even the part where you select your country, has to be made with the USER in mind. Because if I’m not thinking of the user when putting a site together, then they’re gonna be gone.
That doesn’t mean don’t experiment. That doesn’t mean that new and unproven=bad. That’s just ridiculous. But when I leave a site and end my chance of winning something cool just because of something as small as a poorly thought-out scroll, something so simple that could EASILY have been made to both look good and behave well, then there’s something seriously wrong. Something SO wrong that I wanted to call up the designers and say “What were you thinking? Why?!” But then I found out they were in Sweden and I really don’t feel like racking up a phone bill or figuring out timezones.
So here’s the point: no matter how great something is, no matter how funny it is or how groundbreaking, the slightest imperfection can create a negative impact. It’s more fun to think of the big beautiful Seurat, but without putting work into every little part of the whole, it’s just gonna end up being a jumble and not a beautiful “Sunday on The Grande Jatte.”
Too many things get destroyed because of one small, avoidable thing. It’s just sad that Nokia could have my personal email and information now. Oh well, I probably wasn’t going to win the phone anyway. Besides, they shouldn’t claim it’s a “computer” when the phone doesn’t even have a QWERTY keyboard
I need a haircut. Pretty badly, actually. But I don’t have the same generic straight hair that everyone else seems to have: mine is big, curly, and poofy. Right now it’s more like a big shapeless mass, which I would think would be a welcome challenge to any talented hairstylist. I shouldn’t be getting the same haircut that everyone else gets.
But that’s exactly what happens. I’ve tried numerous times to speak to hair people (barbers, stylists, etc) about my hair options, because I see all these new styles popping up and I want in. I’m tired of having the same essential haircut from 10th grade to today.
Why is there no P2P network for people like me? There’s no goodpoofyhaircuts.com, but why shouldn’t there be? I can’t be the only one who has gone to expensive stylists and the barbershop across the street and has ended up with (essentially) the same haircut. I’m sure someone has gone through this before and has lots of great advice for me. Someone must know a good poofy-haired stylist out there. The information, the anecdotes, everything exists, but even today I don’t know how to find it.
I’ll be 100% satisfied with the web when I can go to online, ask what I can and should do with my hair, and get a solid answer and plan of action – or at least find someone who can help me achieve my hair goals (or a group of people, or an IM robot, or a poofy FAQ, or a helpful video) – within moments. Until then, I guess I’m stuck either growing my hair out until stylists can get a handle on my hair’s potential, or getting the same “brush forward, push back” haircut.
I tend to stumble around the web, and it’s a great way to experience it. But when will I be able to fly from point A to B while it informs me that point C might be a better option?
This post wasn’t just pure analogy - my hair’s getting pretty big.
