Magnosticism

Great article on AdAge  (registration might be required, I can never tell what’s behind their annoying subscription firewall) that shoots holes in the tired thinking that marketing on the Internet is all about banner ads. The lemmings couldn’t be more wrong, says author Michael Creamer:

What you’re about to read is not an argument for making over web marketing as a factory for destination websites or for making every brand a content player. … This, however, is a call to give some thought to a question that’s not asked enough about the Internet: Should it even be viewed as an ad medium? After all, in some quarters of the broader marketing world, the habit of looking at advertising as the most important tool in the marketers’ toolbox is undergoing intense interrogation. Consider the growth of the word-of-mouth marketing business, premised on the notion that people not corporations who help other people make consumer decisions. Or look at the growing importance put on public relations and customer-relationship management both in marketing circles and even in the c-suite.

The same conversation should be going on around the Internet. Trends like those listed suggest the possibility of a post-advertising age, a not-too-distant future where consumers will no longer be treated as subjects to be brainwashed with endless repetitions of whatever messaging some focus group liked.

Nice to see someone at an advertising trade pub call out banner ads for what they are: an outdated attempt to replicate the past sins of the print world instead of creating something unique for such a transformational medium.

“Feeding frenzy” takes on a whole new meaning with 7/24 news cycles. Witness the Eliot Spitzer scandal. This guy was buried in a New York minute. My favorite tabloid covers:

You can even write your own NY Post headline.

Google News search results for “Eliot Spitzer” for March 11: 16,199

Google-indexed blog posts referencing “Eliot Spitzer ” on March 11: 2,160

Best jokes, compiled here.

Even advertisers are getting into the act.

Nothing’s more tasty to media folk than a holier-than-thou public figure caught with his pants down. The Steamroller gets steamrolled.

A new study from a research firm called Grunwald Associates indicates a significant shift in the media habits of children:

Sixty-four percent of kids go online while watching television, and nearly half of U.S. teens (49 percent) report that they do so frequently — anywhere from three times a week to several times a day. … The study reveals that 73 percent of TV-online multitasking kids are engaged in “active multitasking,” defined by Grunwald Associates as content in one medium influencing concurrent behavior in another. This trend represents a 33 percent increase in active multitasking since 2002. While kids are using more media, their attention primarily and overwhelmingly is focused on their online activities.

I don’t need stats to tell me about the decline of traditional TV among tomorrow’s generation; I see it daily in my own house, as my 17-year-old watches downloaded episodes of Degrassi on her iPod, as my 12-year-old focuses far more time IM’ing or fast-forwarding through DVR’d Celtic games than watching live TV, and as my 9-year-old runs around the house making videos and begging me to let him post something on YouTube, or as he surfs for PS2 cheats online, half-listening as Jimmy Neutron drones in the background.   

Sure, there are a few seminal TV events that the family feels obligated to watch live, like the Super Bowl or, to a lesser extent, American Idol. But today’s kids are edging - no, rushing - away from the passive TV experience. I do not envy network execs.
 

My Vonage phone crapped out on me again a week or so ago. Had a nice chat with Ezekiel the customer service rep, who troubleshot the problem and determined it was a faulty power adapter (for the second time in six months). He said they would send a replacement “in a few days.” Two days later I received an email asking me to fill out a survey about the experience: “Your feedback … would be extremely helpful in improving the process and providing valuable feedback.”

Well, I wasn’t going to complete a survey until I received the replacement part and made sure it worked. It arrived earlier this week, and the phone is functional again. Cleaning out my inbox today, I came across the survey and decided to click on the link to fill it out - and give Vonage high marks. “We’re sorry,” the web page read, “our records indicate your survey has expired.”

Another lesson in superficial customer care.

Companies are all over the map in their embrace/avoidance of blogs and other social media. Some, especially tech firms, have given virtually free reign to their employees to launch blogs and talk directly to customers. Others are paralyzed by concerns over governance issues and the possibility that some corporate blogger will disclose something that doesn’t adhere to corporate policy or catches the probing eyes of the SEC.  

Even the experts can’t agree on how to approach corporate blogging. In the true spirit of this new medium, a curriculum of sorts has organically sprung up for social media marketing. Start with Jeremiah Owyang, a Forrester analyst who posted on the “three impossible conversations for corporations” (1. Asking for Feedback; 2. Saying Positive Things about your Competitors; 3. Admitting You Were Wrong.) Good, solid advice for the social media novice. 

David Churbuck retorted that those tips are way too basic to be useful for most corporate marketers, who he believes are past the Blogging 101 stage and are seeking more advanced education:

This corporate blogging stuff isn’t a two headed chicken in the freak tent anymore. This is mainstream baby. Anyone writing posts about “impossible” corporate conversations has to step it up – talk about the serious stuff, like – contravening corporate policy by privately resolving a blogged customer support issue and having the blogger publically state the solution and thereby set a precedent for all future complaints. Let’s get into that one and you’ll earn my respect.

Challenged to provide his own advice (as someone who lives the stuff daily), Churbuck offered a couple of Blogging 201 primers: one on the risks of a no-questions-asked blogger appeasement strategy, the other a broader list of 10 topics that he’d like to see more discussion about:

1. Tool and platforms
2. Pronouns
3. Metrics
4. Rogue SMM
5. How to do SMM/SEO right
6. Going Uplevel
7. Organizational Ownership
8. One vs many
9. Review mechanism and buddy systems
10. The politics of being a know-it-all

The pundit and the practitioner have both agreed to dig into these and other social media marketing topics over the next few months, which is good news for any marketer trying to get his or her arms around this brave new world of “customer engagement.”

Of course, any curriculum would be incomplete without some backround reading: I’ve provided a bit of that with a dusted-off interview I did in 2005 with Lenn Pryor, who created the Channel 9 website for Microsoft in 2004 that serves as a touchstone for current social media marketing.

The much-hyped “Project Apollo” consumer research initiative is dead, MediaPost reports today:

“Despite a promising level of interest, we did not secure sufficient client commitments to make Project Apollo a sustainable venture for our two companies,” Arbitron and Nielsen said in a joint statement. “We are grateful to the companies, consultants and to the marketing and advertising agency executives of the seven Project Apollo Steering Committee members who helped us explore the cutting edge of media and marketing research.”

Conceived in 2004 by Arbitron and VNU (now The Nielsen Company), Apollo was meant to provide marketers with a “single-source” measurement of media and advertising, in order to show better linkage between advertising and consumer purchase behavior. Apollo had a few significant backers, notably Procter & Gamble, but the project seemed doomed from the start, considering its high cost to implement, its reliance on “portable people meter” devices, and its focus on TV, radio, and print media, with little more than lip service paid to online channels. A 2006 pilot encompassing more than 5,000 households and 11,000 people (presumably toting PPMs around their necks) apparently didn’t do enough to convince major advertisers to sign on for a commercial rollout.

As an aside, never has a “forward-looking statements” clause in a press release seemed so prescient:

This press release contains forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. The statements regarding Arbitron in this document that are not historical in nature, particularly those that utilize terminology such as “may,” “will,” “should,” “likely,” “expects,” “anticipates,” “estimates,” “believes” or “plans,” or comparable terminology, are forward-looking statements based on current expectations about future events, which we have derived from information currently available to us. These forward-looking statements involve known and unknown risks and uncertainties that may cause our results to be materially different from results implied in such forward-looking statements. These risks and uncertainties include, in no particular order, whether we will be able to:

• successfully implement the rollout of our Portable People MeterTM service;
• successfully design, recruit, and maintain PPM panels that appropriately balance research quality, panel size and operational cost;
• successfully obtain and/or maintain Media Rating Council accreditation for our audience measurement services;
• renew contracts with large customers as they expire;
• successfully execute our business strategies, including entering into potential acquisition joint-venture, or other material third-party agreements;
• effectively manage the impact, if any, of any further ownership shifts in the radio and advertising agency industries;
• respond to rapidly changing technological needs of our customer base, including creating new proprietary software systems and new customer products and services that meet these needs in a timely manner;
• successfully manage the impact on our business of any economic downturn generally and in the advertising market in particular; and
• successfully manage the impact on costs of data collection due to lower respondent cooperation in surveys, privacy concerns, consumer trends, technology changes and/or government regulations.
• successfully develop and implement technology solutions to measure multi-media and advertising in an increasingly competitive environment.

Single-source measurement is a critically important, yet critically complex, and therefore an extremely elusive goal of marketers. The millions of dollars wasted on Apollo won’t help the cause.

At client meetings today in Milwaukee, where - surprise! - it’s snowing. For such a supposedly hardy area of the country, the local news sure makes the populace seem weather-wimpy. The ABC affiliate extended their morning news by a half-hour to cover what amounted to a traffic jam on I-94 and generally slippery roads. Among the list of safe-driving tips they offered:

• Clear snow from vehicle before you drive
• Drive slowly
• Avoid skids

And the anchor added, with the tone and furrowed brow of someone who’s acutely aware of the seriousness of the situation: “Drive slowly out there.”

This probably speaks more to the state of local media than the fine state of Wisconsin.

Still recovering from the shock and awe of Super Bowl XLII. Shock, as in I can’t believe the Patriots lost, and awe, as in the Giants - my boyhood team of choice in the ’70s before I transitioned/bandwagoned to the Pats in the ’80s and ’90s - not just beating New England, but beating them up in the process. I’ve been out of sorts all day, still trying to make sense of it.

So I’m way behind (as usual) on the usual post-Super Bowl blather over the ads that ran during the game. Far better pundits have already weighed in. You have USA Today’s Ad Meter results [puking e-trade baby only ranks 15th - are you kidding me?], and BusinessWeek’s picks and pans (nice graphic treatment with the embedded ads), and the curious critiques of AdAge Ad Critic Bob Garfield (Bridgestone homophobia? screams that frighten children?), and countless other post-mortems that show just how focused we all are on unimportant things.

Spare me the debate over whether these ads actually provide any return on investment. Buzz trackers are off the charts for this event, and the YouTube effect no doubt makes these spots justifiable. The only one I’m truly perplexed by is salesgenie.com - a completely inane three-pack (3 spots!!!) from a dot-com that sells call and mailing lists. Double ick. Adweek provides an important piece of insight on these spots:  

Vin Gupta, chairman of Salesgenie … said that, like the previous spot, he conceptualized and wrote copy for the new ads himself.

So there you have it. Gupta claims that last year’s spot sent 25,000 folks scurrying to the website. He doesn’t say if they bought any sales leads once they got there. But why sweat the details? This is the Super Bowl, baby.  

Update: Churbuck concurs.

From a spam press release I received today:

David Hancock of Morgan jams Publishing offers the advantages of a New York Publisher without the drawbacks. His entrepreneurial publishing model gives authors control over their own books, influence over cover design, and most importantly, his authors retain full rights to their books and earn a 20 per cent commission on each sale.

Hancock teamed up with Glenn Dietzel of AwakenTheAuthorWithin.com, whose Entrepreneurial Authoring Program teaches clients to write a money-making book in 12 hours of actual writing time<emphasis by Magnostic>. Clients who complete the program discover how to write a book that is “entrepreneurially sound” and are guaranteed acceptance with Morgan James Publishing, without writing a book proposal or going through years of submission and rejection.

Dietzel’s Entrepreneurial Authoring Program and individual business mentoring teach clients how to create a book that is an entrepreneurially sound lead generator for a well-structured business. A book that is entrepreneurially sound naturally leads readers to interact with the author and continue to do business again and again. The book is specifically designed as an invitation to take part in the author’s other services. Special offers and free gifts of value to the reader are tucked into the pages of the book.

I once aspired to write a novel, but an “entrepreneurially sound lead generator” sounds much more romantic.

I’ve been getting the usual stream of spam comments on my blog, but lately they’ve followed a new trend: all the poseur/posters have Greek names. What’s behind this new tactic in the spammers’ playbook? Do studies show that people are more likely to click on links from Greeks? Why am I being subjected to the wrath of these ancient gods? Evripides, Athones, Aikos, please explain yourselves. Oh, never mind - I just jettisoned you to WordPress’ version of Hades.