whatstheidea. whats the idea

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Product placement is a funny thing; more often than not when you see a brand in a movie or a TV reality show it’s been placed there at a price.  Most of the time, those placements are heavy-handed and disruptive — not a good thing.  If a viewer feels the product has been curated into a story it suspends belief.  Kind of like bad acting.

When discussing commercial social media I often refer to the need for the brand poster – the person posting on behalf of the brand — to create a persona, complete with a tangible, obvious motivation.  For Zude.com, for instance, “Tip-Z” was created as a roving help person.  She assisted people with the drag and drop application, but she did so as a bit of a tippler. Hic.  So some of her help came out a bit garbled, goofy and funny.  Personality flaws aside, it made Tip-Z real.

Product placement on TV that doesn’t fit or social media personalities that lack personality underachieve. Content may be king but context is key.  One way around what Steve Rubel calls “The Attention Crash” is to create muscle memory for brands.  While others are out there shamelessly hawking product and services one on top of the other, smart brands are standing out because they create memorable context. Meaningful, memorable context. Peace!

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“Fall forward fast” is a marketing maxim many have followed with great success. Be bold, be quick, correct as needed. It’s a fist-mover approach and it was good advice back in the day.  But the Internet has sped things up a bit don’t you think? Fast today is a lot faster than it was 4 years ago.

Google Buzz was brought to market too fast. Is it correctable?  Sure.  Will Google take some heat? Sure. Will it recover, sure.  That said, I suspect there’s a little tainted blood in the Google bloodstream thanks to this effort and Google needs to take a breath.  When you launch a new service and the phrases “opt-out,” “disable,” “sorry,” “feedback” and “critics” become keywords of the coverage you have not done enough homework.  Google “google buzz”+”critics” and see what pops up.

Facebook‘s Beacon advertising program wasn’t thoroughly vetted before launch nor was the Google Nexus One, released before back-end customer care issues could be properly handled.

Overdogs.

Did you watch the Superbowl? Which team did you root for?  The overdog or the Saints? Overdogs are leaders.  They, more than anyone, need to be careful when bringing new services to market. Take a breath. Do some reconnaissance. Let power users spank the brand a bit (“brand spanking” is a great overdog research methodology). Then launch. Too much Starbucks, as Zack de la Rocha might say, “can killa man.”  Peace!

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Back with a flourish.

Back in the day, so the story goes, Smith and Wollensky’s Steak House was about to close its doors for lack of business.  Poppe Tyson and creative director Fergus O’Daly created an ad for them – a full page in The New York Times – with a life-size picture of a Smith and Wollensky’s matchbook in the lower right corner atop a small headline: “Finally a match for the Palm and Christ Cella.” The rest, as they say, is history.

Steak for Stock

Today in that same New York Times Smith and Wollensky continues its great run of print advertising with “Steak for Stock.”  Not sure if Alan Stillman (CEO) is still behind the advertising but it certainly feels like him. The “Steak for Stock” ad invites you to bring in valid stock certificates in exchange it for a juicy, aged and perfectly charred sirloin.  Can’t you just smell the certificate paper?

Smith and Wollensky has made a living with its wit, its wine, its relevance and its meat and spinach. I’m probably borrowing this from Ben Benson’s, another brilliant NY steak house, but Smith and Wollensky’s is, indeed, the quintessential NY steak house.  Great to see them mixing it up again.  Peace!

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Mitch Joel and Jaffe Juice’s Joseph Jaffe squared off yesterday in a podcast that was a good deal of fun.  Each agreed they were good friends but that was about all they agreed upon — save for the obligatory strokefest at the end.  Mr. Jaffe is a principal at Crayon now owned by Powered and Mr. Joel is president of Twist Image a leading digital shop based in Toronto.  Both are published (books, blogs and pods) and practiced “duelists.”

The discussion with which they played pong was “Is social media a discrete marketing practice?” Mr Jaffe says “yes,” Mr. Joel “no.” 

The crux of the debate is this:  Social media needs to be well integrated into the marketing and digital practices of corporations. Today, it’s not.  Mr. Joel says there are smart companies doing so and he’s right.  Mr. Jaffe says those companies are the “exception not the rule” and he’s right. Powered is betting that specialized shops – best of breed social shops – will be better positioned to make waves and earn low hanging engagements.  Mr. Joel believes that cleanest most likely social successes will come from integrated digital shops, and in the long run that is probably more correct.  But his approach is less promotable and less newsworthy.   Social media is the haps today.  There is demand for it and a social marketing swell surrounding it. 

Da Monies.

So where is the money in social media?  Tweeting buy the pound? Friending by the hundred? In strategy?  Yep.  Where is the money in the integrated approach? The answer is tweeting by the pound and building websites – a more lucrative approach.  

Win by Knockout?

No. Both arguments are very compelling. Mr. Jaffe and Powered CMO Aaron Strout are loudly breaking new ground. (There are supposedly scores of quiet social media agencies in NYC alone.) Mr. Joel gets it for sure, and though his sound bite is not as powerful he will probably have higher margins this year. Were I a marketing director and these two pitching my business, I’m sure the last one to present would win the business.

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Love is not a branding idea. Sorry Blackberry. You may be on to something with the notion that “like is mediocre” or “like is watered down love” as a campaign idea, but you’re never going to build up the brand tying it to the word love. So be smart(phone) and shut it down; get out while you can. Beatles song or not.

The strongest brand in the world today, Coke, would never have made it this far had Wieden and Kennedy been at the helm early on making ads about “happiness.”  Coke is a mature brand with some unique issues, I understand, and people know it Is a cola and Does refresh (Is-Does), yet as nice as the “happiness” ads are, and they’re good ad-craft, happiness is a second generation benefit. As is “love” for Blackberry. Fah, fah, fah fail.

The smart phone category is getting to be a real mess. Though I applaud Blackberry for its attempt at brand discipline and some good may, indeed, come of it — love ain’t it.

The Motorola “Cliq” has an idea. Or, it is the MotoBlur? Either way their idea is tied to the Does benefit of being “social.” The phone was built to social network (verb). The campaign line “smart gets social” works. If the Moto Cliq can continue to open a gap between itself and competitors in offering the ability to integrate all social networking apps with grace and ease, it will win some serious share. It will have an idea I can love.

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I love Twitter. When I try to convince friends of its breakthrough nature I often refer to the Iran post-election tweets that broke the story with pictures, video and real-time observations. The morning of revolt, I put my New York Times aside to patina (vb.) and read Tweets in rapt attention for 2 hours straight.

Today, I awoke to helicopters overhead, streets closed and sirens blaring. My wife who rode her bike through town after yoga told me there was a sheet on the sidewalk, which suggests badness. I tweeted. I hag-tagged my towns name. I @signed my local newspaper. Uun-gots.

Newsday.com did break the story, but close to 3 hours later. A women was hit by a car and heli-vaced to a trauma center. (Not sure how she made out, but my thoughts and prayers are with her.) The whole episode got me thinking though about how Twitter can help with stories like this and, perhaps, even assist in police work. As a form of consumer journalism it is certainly fraught with accuracy issues, but is a hella cool medium for real-time info. It will become a news medium, the question is when. Stay tuned. Peace!

twitter-logo

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