apple
You are currently browsing articles tagged apple.
Earnings reports hit yesterday for Apple and Yahoo and followers were, respectively, happy and disappointed. Apple is really kicking it selling phones, computers and tablets (What else is there, food?) Yahoo is sliding along, selling ads and content. Its revenue was up, but net revenue – revenue after it shares da monies with partners – down.
Carol Bartz, about whom I’ve written some good things, is at that place in time in her tenure as CEO where her performance and the company’s momentum should just about be judged. If not now, certainly in a quarter or two. So let’s table that for the moment.
What Yahoo Should Do.
If Apple is doing so well and Yahoo just gliding via cost-cutting and reorganizations then perhaps Yahoo should take a good close look at Apple custies (that’s bond trader for customers). The account planners at Yahoo’s agency Goodby Berlin and Partners might want to follow around Apple users for a week or so and see what kind of 1s and 0s are passing over their phones, Macs and tablets. Do Apple users intersect with Yahoo at all during the course of the day? And if not, why not? Apple users are worth studying.
Yahoo’s Competition.
Yahoo and Aol (not Apple) are competitors… both fighting for the same cheese. They share the same content strategy so I enjoy studying them. It’s still neck and neck, with a slight edge to Aol. But both need an idea. A powerful brand idea, dripping with beyond-the-dashboard consumer value. I’m waiting. Peace!
Possibly Related Posts:
Tags: Account Planning, AOL, apple, Carol Bartz, goodby berlin and partners, ipad, iphone, mac, whats the idea, whatstheidea, yahoo
Slide 4 in Mary Meekers’s Morgan Stanley presentation entitled “Internet Trends 2010” shows the pace of mobile internet adoption. It compares iPhone/iTouch to that of AOL’s desktop, Netscape desktop and NTT docomo iMode; laying out growth by users, by quarter from launch.
iPhone’s Internet access tipped 86 million users in its 11th quarter – less than 3 years. Let’s just say the others never came close to coming close. (Check out the chart on slide 4.) Smartphone growth is hockey sticking. Motorola is starting to get it. HP bought Palm and should buy some corporate share. Blackberry is too big and too rich to fail, even though they’re getting a little paunchy around the middle. And we haven’t even started to talk about the software guys Google (after its trivestiture), Microsoft (drawing a blank) and carrier switch provider Alcatel-Lucent.
Ladies and germs, smartphones are the future of computing, commerce and community. They will dock next to monitors and keyboards, but they are the device. Think about the iPhone4’s new videoconference app. Wait for fingerprint apps, and galvanic skin response apps, sobriety apps…. Cool times, these. Marketers, put on your thinking apps (I mean caps), innovation awaits! Peace!
Possibly Related Posts:
Tags: alcatel-lucent, AOL, apple, blackberry, docomo, google, hp, iphone4, marketing, mary meeker, morgan Stanley, motorola, netscape, ntt, smartphone marketing, thinking apps, whats the idea, whatstheidea
Where to start?
The ads that will adorn the Apple iPad on April 3rd are going to be pretty interesting. First, if they are good, they’ll be more like selling applications than ads. Those who create selling apps rather than Adobe InDesign and static display ads (iPads don’t take Flash yet) will have the early wins.
Selling Apps
Selling apps that come from ad shops where the creative dept. was the lead (not the media dept.) will also win. That said, brands that team up on the selling app will do even better. Those who team the objective, strategy, measurement, idea, creative, digital production and follow-up are more likely to have an app than an ad. But that takes time, resolve and a new process…which is expensive. Did I mention time? If you started this week, you’re toast. The best iPad selling apps won’t be the result of a great piece of “creative” or creative media buy, they will result from cross-silo efforts.
Super Pasters
Just being there on April 3rd will be a win for advertisers. There are currently 200,000 pre-orders for iPads. How may of those people do you think have taken the day off? Exactly. Followers of What’s the Idea? know about Posters vs. Pasters. Well, in terms of the tech target, the first people seeing iPad ads will be Super Posters. Their blog posts, vlogs, podcasts and Tweets will abound. The iPad’s first audiences will be techies and those in creative businesses – a very viral and powerful target. And the world will be watching. Interestingly, the first big brands buying ads will be: Unilever, Toyota, Chase, Fidelity, and FedEx — not what you’d expect as a high indexing techie target. Korean Air, on the other hand, that’s a good fit. Should be very interesting. Peace!
Possibly Related Posts:
Tags: Adobe indesign, adveritsing, apple, chase, fedex, Fidelity, ipad, ipad launch, marketing, pasters vs. posters, toyota, unilever, whats the idea, whatstheidea
Blackberry’s current TV campaign built around the Beatles song “All you need is love” is goofy. Pretty to watch, great editing, hum it and smile – but it really has no inherent brand building value. And in a slipping market for Research In Motion, manufacturer of the Blackberry, this is not good thing. Enter a print ad today on battery life. The headline reads “Imagine falling in love with a battery?” Does anyone hear the “beep, beep, beep” of a truck backing up here?
The Blackberry is a stud phone. My son in college has one. My friend’s high school daughter has one. As does his wife, for work. Now we don’t live in “the valley” and I know that the kids might like an iPhone as an accessory, but they are sold on the Blackberry’s ability to get them on the net and text with grace and ease. Why? Because it works. It delivers. Blackberry owns the word “work” — in its two dimensions. Get on mass transit and see who is using Blackberrys. Fill up a gym with kids – put the Blackberrys on one side, the iPhones on the other. What do you see?
Research will tell you love is strong, but it’s not reason to buy a Blackberry. This is a difficult, difficult category for brand planners. I don’t have the inside track, but I will tell you this: “Love” isn’t it. Beep, beep, beep. Peace!
Possibly Related Posts:
Tags: "all you need is love", Advertising, apple, beatles, blackberry, Brand Planning, iphone, Research in motion, whats the idea, whatstheidea
The Apple Table launches today and it makes me think about its transformational nature. If the tablet is a combination of reader and iTouch as most report, with a few extra wireless bells and whistles, it should be quite so.
Some articles appeared yesterday that suggested print media companies will be developing reader experiences (RE – just make that up) to make reading digital content more enjoyable. Think the printed word with sound, video and geo-linking. But here’s my prediction — rather than embedding links in situ in a story, they will be organized at the end of the story or chapter, like a bibliography. The written word needs a flow and pacing. A thought stream. In both magazines and book form. Clicking out to videos, communities, maps, audio files, etc. while reading is a very ADD and though something we’ve become accustomed to in the digital world, a behavior that good publishers will want to minimize.
There will be great attention paid to Reader Experience over the next couple of years. It should be interested to see who establishes leadership. I’m thinking the MPA (Magazine Publishers of America) should step up. Tablet ho. Peace!
Photomontage: Robert Galbraith/Reuters
Possibly Related Posts:
Tags: apple, apple table, books, magazine, magazine publishers of america, mpa, RE, reader experience, whats the idea, whatstheidea
When I say I like Good and Plenty, it really means I like licorice. When I say I like Budweiser, it means I like beer. Granted there are lots of flavors of licorice and beer but the point is one doesn’t have an innate, built-in need for brands. (I said innate.) If I like Maytag, it means I like clean clothes. The iPhone? Staying in touch…with everything.
Some of us in marketing forget this, spending too much time on a distended version of the brand story. (“We must break though the clutter!”) But it is a product we are selling, not the story.
The way out this trap is by focusing on a product’s Is-Does: what a brand Is and what a brand Does. I came upon this notion when reading some branding literature while at McCann-Erickson. Eric Einhorn created a document exploring what a brand is and what it means. I rolled the “means” over on its side to make it more concrete.
For me the pursuit of the Is-Does became particularly necessary when planning in the tech sector where chief technologists have a hard time explaining their products in less than 50 words. Was Apple’s iPhone really a phone? For most marketers and planners, the heavy lifting is in the Does, but even here one can go off track. Does Coke really provide happiness (today’s strategy) or Does it provide refreshment ( real strategy). Find the right Is-Does and you tell better stories, create more loyalty, and sell more shtuff. Peace!
Possibly Related Posts:
Tags: apple, coke, eric einhorn, good and plenty, iphone, Is-Does, mccann erickson
I’m reading about Apple’s amazing 47% rise in profit and realize I’m part of the story. My son went off to college this August and he talked me into buy him a MacBook. Somewhat against it, being a price shopper and netbook fan, I gave in after lots of “beat down.”
The whole thing got me thinking about the back-to-school timeframe, a short period during which lots of laptops are purchased, especially by entering freshmen. Knowing when someone is going to purchase lets you create a thoughtful game plan. At what points does a marketer want to connect with a 17-18 year olds when it’s known they’ll be buying a laptop in August? Using what media? And with what methods of persuasion? That’s planning. That’s what’s up.
For expensive products like a MacBook, you can’t just send out a free-standing-insert (FSI) with a low price point in late July, though most everyone does. You need to begin the persuasion six months in advance — building to D-Day (the purchase period). Knowing the target intimately, knowing the media they use, the tools they employ, their rites of passage and their rituals – knowing all these things will help build an effective, targeted, and lower cost plan. Plan it up! Peace!
Possibly Related Posts:
Tags: apple, fsi, macbook, marketing plan, target marketing, whats the idea, whatstheidea
Apple’s App Store is the most successful store ever built. It’s exciting because it was built without hammer and nail, it’s only 9 months old, has 1 billion downloads, and is really just a drooling, cooing infant. I remember posting 10 months ago that Facebook had better watch out for the App Store because all developers writing apps for Facebook (for free) were going to drop it like a bad habit in favor of the App Store, where they would be able to make some Benjamins.
The App Store doesn’t have many employees — thank you software — and is the source of the most exciting innovation in all the world. If Apple isn’t the coolest brand on the planet, I don’t know what is. No sugar water here. Peace!
Possibly Related Posts:
Tags: app store, apple, facebook, whats the idea, whatstheidea
Recent Comments