Home Blog Page 238

The Real “Situation.”

By
Steve Poppe
-
0

Before SI meant Sports Illustrated it meant Situationist International, a European movement intended to create social change through loud, startling political events.  Anyone familiar with the punk movement knows Malcolm McLaren (RIP).  Mr. McLaren sired the Sex Pistols, practiced SI and was a huge music and cultural catalyst.  In the 50-70s the Situationists were angry and focused on political change. When Mr. McLaren introduced punk to the world and NYC in the 70s he was angry but he was a lot more.

Just as Greenwich Village called to America’s gay and lesbian communities back in the day, punk placed a call to the country’s disaffected youth in search of their own Woodstock… and they came to downtown NYC in droves.  It was an interesting time, with lots of layered social texture. Mr. McLaren was a big part of this movement.

Marketing Situation.

A handful of marketing companies today attempt to acculturate products into our lives. Strawberry Frog, for one, is very vocal about creating “cultural movements.”  Experiential marketing companies such as Momentum look to jump-start change in new and unique product-centric ways thought events and promotions.  As the internet, mobile and geo-location grow in marketing stature we will begin to have more and more fun using these tools to drive sales — but let us remember Mr. McLaren: All tool and no movement can make for a soft, smarmy effort. Peace!

Important! Brand Names.

By
Steve Poppe
-
0

What’s in a name?  Everything.  Would Tiger Woods have attracted the same attention (hmm, hmm) had his name been Frederick?  Would McDonald’s have enticed as many coffee drinkers had they named it McCoffee?  Would the iPhone had the same penetration with the name Nexus?  Hee hee. 

Your brand name is your package…without the package.  A good brand name is critical.  I love my brand “What’s the Idea”? It’s active. It challenges thought. Has a bit of a NY edge. As a brand planner, it defines what I do: Find the business building brand idea. 

Zude vs. Mashpan

If brands are empty vessels into which marketers pour meaning, then colorful descriptive vessels have a head start.  I worked for a very cool web property called Zude.  The CTO used to say “dude” a lot and no one owned the Zs so that’s what we went with. Doh. Zude was the world’s first drag-and-drop, free form social computing property.  I used to say “If you can drag and drop and type, you can have a website.” There were very few objects on the web you couldn’t drag onto your Zude page.  I lobbied for the name Mashpan.  “Mash” being shorthand for mash-up and “Pan” meaning everyone, everywhere, everything. (Mashpan also sounds like a home brewer’s tool…and I like beer.)  Zude vs. Mashpan may have been a billion dollar decision.

Hey start-ups, sweat the name. And for those of you thinking about changing your name? Should you have a nice pour in your vessel already, think twice. Peace!

Digital Black Eye.

By
Steve Poppe
-
0

Last week a VP of human resources was telling me about a “digital strategist” position he was trying to fill. His was a digital shop whose roots were in SEO and SEM.  The client roster was a veritable Who’s Who and they were growing like a dookie but wanted to expand in the direction of web and application development and better compete against the likes of Razorfish, Big Spaceship, and R/GA.

Again, the job was “digital strategist.” Listen to what he had to say and I paraphrase: “Our digital strategists are hybrids and kind of hard to find.  They are part account manager, part technologist, ideation generator, account planner and handler of analytics.” Pause for effect.

First of all, this person doesn’t exist except maybe at the highest level of a company.  Good shops need 5 departments to do all this well. These disciplines are so different my head is spinning.  Here’s a technology word for this shop “scalability.”  And here’s a prediction: There won’t be any Cannes Cyber Lions or 4As Jay Chiat Awards in this shop’s reception area any time soon.  Worse, this approach will give digital shops a black eye. You might be able to search for these keywords online, but not on street.  OMG. Peace!

Meaningful Memorable Context.

By
Steve Poppe
-
0

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!

How to Charge for Social Media.

By
Steve Poppe
-
0

I was chatting with a friend at JWT the other day about how agencies can’t make money in today’s social media entranced marketplace  — and I may have solved the problem.  Here goes:

Say you come up a with a big engagement idea. It’s for a new product launch and you have created a fun video demonstration of the product.  A couple of graduate students from NYU did the production at a cost of $4,500.  You work at Publicis and know you can post the video for free and the mark-up won’t pay for the pastry at the presentation meeting.  How do you price it? Staff it? Measure it? Is it done under a retainer? Oy.

The answer is simple: You price it based on delivered reach, with a smidgen of frequency.  If the video is viewed 0-24,999 times (uniques) you charge $2,500.  If seen 25,000 to 75,000 times $4,500….and so on.

If the video is linked to another site, Publicis earns a bonus based on other site’s traffic plus the additional views. If the video gets played on TV or a big portal, another bonus plus those views. Think of the model as part SAG/AFTRA, part pay-per-view, part Nielsen Ratings.

Now that wasn’t that hard, was it? Piece. I mean Peace!

Corporate Social Media Departments.

By
Steve Poppe
-
0

I met with someone smart yesterday and shared my view that in the future large corporations will have their own social media departments — staffed with writers, videographers, photographers, coders and digital editors.  This senior strategy and innovation officer processed the thought, nodded in partial agreement, then noted that the level of creativity likely to come out of this type of group would be modest.  He was right. 

An internal social media department will do a good job of relating the corporate viewpoint, organizing proof and demonstrations of product value, and it will do so accurately… but in the end it will lack that creative oomph provided by an agency. And here, I mean a digital or a brand agency. 

That’s not to say internal social media departments won’t happen, they will. They already are.  But the talent level required to do it BIG, won’t be found on staff.  Sure, some implementation can be handled inside, but not the big honkin’ creative idea. Not the polished sight and sound. And agencies need to figure out how to charge for that idea? Beyond production and mark-up that is.  Does the answer reside within Google?  Hmmmm. Peace!

CNN and Militiagan.

By
Steve Poppe
-
0

CNN is tanking.  Its ratings are down. Its ad revenue is down. Fox News is eating its dinner. When I think of CNN I think Wolf freakin’ Blitzer.  Ask a middle age woman in the grocery store about CNN and she’ll likely say “Oh, that Anderson Copper.”  Ask your parents?  Larry King.  Ask a kid and the response will be “Isn’t that the Vampire Diaries channel?

CNN is at its best during crisis.  It is where people turn for the best coverage. That is where I went to watch the Tsunami not bear down on Hawaii.  CNN is the place for serious news, yet it has seemingly lost its way.   It must stop playing around with Twitter and touch screens and interactive maps. Most of its reporting takes place in the studio.  CNN needs some youthful exuberance. If Mark Zuckerberg can help found a bazillion dollar company, CNN can find some young interesting news junkies to rove the planet and kick up a story or two.

The Fix.

Here’s what management needs to do. Conduct market research among the next generation of news consumers –twenty- and thirty-somethings. Find out what they want, and don’t tell me a mobile news app.  Search for some rock star passionate journalism school kids hungry to make a better world.  Give them jobs.  Don’t go the eye candy route, that is so 1970s.  Hire Nicholas Kristof as a consultant then shutter the studio for 3 weeks and take CNN on the road.  Set up a remote desk on the back roads of Militiagan or Lubyanka subway station in Moscow. Fire a suit and hire a camera person.  Fire an accountant and hire a sound person.  Find the news to make the news. Take back what you once so proudly owned.   Peace!

Ogilvy, clams and uncle Carl.

By
Steve Poppe
-
0

Oglivy is running a contest in search of the world’s best salesperson.  The contest has its own YouTube channel and with lot of kids graduating in few weeks it is likely to generate lots of entries.  The winner gets a 3-month stint at Ogilvy One.

David Ogilvy started his illustrious career by selling vacuums door-to-door.  He once said, and I paraphrase, “Our business is infected by people who have never sold a thing in their lives.”  His point being, until you look a consumer in the eye while trying to convince them to part with their money, you haven’t practiced the craft.  Copywriters, art directors, coders need to leave the building in other words.

Clams

As a kid growing up on Long Island, I would never eat a hard shell clam.  Buried in the mud, looming like viscera on the shell, briny and showing an otherworldly rainbow of colors, clams weren’t happening here. Not until uncle Carl came in from the West coast, that was.  The rapture with which Uncle Carl slathering these babies onto his tongue, the giggles of enjoyment, the satisfaction in his eyes were not normally reserved for food.  His smile, conquest-like, following the downing of his hard shelled bounty were for me life changing. I was a convert within minutes. And I’ve never looked back.

Salesmanship

What does it take to “turn” someone from a hater to a fan? Salesmanship. That’s People, Place and Thing.  The People are believable spokespeople — an expert or someone really trusted.  Place has to do with context. Corona sells better on the beach. And Thing, the Thing is the tangible reason to believe. The Thing isn’t someone “telling you to buy” it’s the unique good the product offers when purchased or used.  In uncle Carl’s case the Thing was his palpable rapture.  Get all three right and you are selling.  Otherwise, you are just broadcasting. Peace!

1...237238239...314Page 238 of 314
© Newsmag WordPress Theme by TagDiv