Friday’s commentary with Jack Trout got picked up by Forbes.com itself this morning. (so did our picture)  We haven’t heard anyone else suggest that Microsoft do what we’ve suggested (for no charge we might add.)  But think about it. Putting a bunch of engineers who got MSN wrong in charge of fixing Yahoo isn’t likely to come up with any better results than they did the first time around.  Kill Live. Blow up the Yahoo building in Burbank. Dump hotmail into Yahoo.  Fire all the content people in Redmond — and get some good engineers working on upgrading Yahoo!’s search product.  Done deal.  Value achieved for Microsoft and Yahoo! investors.  Now Microsoft can play in closed system operating systems and in a more open source world.

Why us, of course

Seeking diplomatic immunity from advertising? Maybe brand ambassadorship is the way to go.

AdWeek reports on how citizen journalism and user-generated content, all the rage of 2007, is evolving into something called "citizen marketing", where branding and buzz is put in the hands of Joe Consumer.

Overall spending on citizen marketing is growing and
is expected to top $1 billion in 2007, up from $980 million in 2006,
according to PQ Media’s word-of-mouth marketing forecast. That number
is expected to swell to almost $4 billion by 2011.

These programs "hire" consumers, via incentives and
rewards, to act as part PR agents, part sales reps and part
evangelists. They mix the spontaneity of buzz building with technology
to instigate, guide and measure what repeat customers are saying to
each other about their brands.

Be careful, though. There’s a fine line between instigating and guiding  – and downright manipulation. See WOMMA’s Unethical Word of Mouth Marketing Strategies and be careful not to tread too close to that line. And also know how to keep it separate from
straight-up advertising and public relations and that it "requires a different mindset,
strategies and toolkit", according to Small Planet Partners. Hop onto the trend, but go about it with as much care as you’d use for any other aspect of your campaign.

How do you create and implement a successful online branding
campaign? Then, how do you measure it? While we’re at it, how do you
solve a problem like Maria?

There’s an article in Ad Age
that pinpoints the commonalities among the eight best online branding campaigns
of 2006, as
determined by Dynamic Logic. They measured success by awareness, persuasiveness,
and positive brand impact. Let me ask one more time: How do you hold a moonbeam in your hand? In other words, how do you measure these
things? With a click-through report? I
think not. Let’s table that issue for one moment and move onto the "things" themselves. (How very Imagist of me.)

They found that “the right ingredients for online ads” were:
Simple and visual. There’s too much else going on to try and
compete with crazy graphics and complicated text.
Front and center. No little tricks, we’re not clever enough
to figure these out. More likely, our ADD kicks into high gear when we’re
online and we just don’t have the time to mess around with gimmicks.
Align online and offline campaigns. Does this mean putting
your website on a billboard, or using a banner to direct consumers to an
offline promotion? Probably.
Incorporate video and rich media. Spinning McShakers,
dunking Oreos: put your message into motion.
Add interactivity. Duh.
But wait, how duh is that? We’re always talking about “interactivity
this” and “interactivity that” but will someone please tell me what that means?
Am I really going to be excited about being able to virtually add my Crystal Light On the Go
to a bottle of water? Well, yes. Herein may lie the secret to that little thing
that we don’t like to talk about: connecting the dots, Pee-wee Herman style, between user engagement, interactivity, emotion, and (drum roll please) Brand Experience. In holistic terms, “brand
energy.” Oh yes, a concept so new that Wikipedia
has yet to create a definition for it.

Here is their first draft:

The energy that flows throughout the system that links
businesses and all their stakeholders and which is manifested in the way these
stakeholders think, feel and behave towards the business and its products or
services.

Stakeholders? What about customers? The concept is that a
brand is experiential, and that businesses create value through all
transactions, i.e. “meaningful experiences.” But in order for the value to be
created, “people first have to have positive associations with the business
and/or its products and services and be energized to behave positively towards
them.”

This is getting way trippy.

What they are trying to say, in New Age terms, is that
online branding campaigns are about building an emotional connection, and you
can’t measure emotion. How do I love thee, asked Elizabeth Barrett
Browning. And even she couldn’t come up with a quantifiable metric. (Maybe she should have spent less time with Pope’s Homeric translations and more time with her web analytics textbook.)

As Jack Gordon explains in “Which
is Declining – Brands, or Branding?”

how consumers feel about your brand is more important than
what they think about your brand. It is precisely this emotional reaction to
the brand that leads to consumers spending more money for a particular product.
Understanding and reinforcing the brand’s emotional appeal is every bit as
important as understanding its functional benefits.

So, turn on the charm and get the consumer to love you. Then
“count the ways.” If you run out of fingers and toes, try Lovemarks.

Everybody’s doin’ it.

Jump off the bridge; go out and buy the new Apple iPhone, due to be released at the end of the month. Nineteen million Americans – about 9 percent of US mobile phone users – have expressed "strong interest" in purchasing the iPhone when it becomes available.

Combine this with Brandweek’s study that 46% of teens are fiercely loyal to brands – particularly Apple – with the iPod digital music player emerging as the top brand out of 47 tested that is "absolutely essential to teens." And they love their phones, don’t they.

Let’s inject some historical knowledge from Al Ries:

In the gold rush of 1849, prospectors checked their finds with Aqua Regia, a mixture of hydrochloric and nitric acids.

If a sample passed the acid test, it was the real thing. When Apple introduces its iPhone this month, will it pass the acid test?

In my opinion, no.

There’s nothing electric nor kool-aid about his (not-so-humble) opinion on why the iPhone will fail in his piece in Adweek  fittingly titled "Why the iPhone will Fail." Al Ries, the branding strategest and author that is best known for his (recurring) work with Jack Trout on Positioning, is going ahead and saying out loud what we’re all secretly hoping: that the iPhone will be a major disappointment (Point 1) and that when it does fail, that (Point 2) the blame will fall on an imperfect execution, rather than a faulty concept. But just as multiple parentheses does not a sophisticated writer make, a prediction of failure from a(n) (in)famous marketing professional does not an Apple Empire destroy.

What will crumble that empire, though, as paraphrased by a reliable source, is Microsoft’s heft and reach across multiple technological product types. In the end, Apple will just not be able to compete, and everyone who remains "fiercely loyal" to the brand is going to get left wondering why they’re no longer the Coolest Kid Around. Let’s face it: Bigger is Better.

Or, rather: "from the Long Beach Chronicles to the Wall Street Journal, they all know the G with the cut in his coupe, ask Bill Gates (yeah I know the Homie Snoop.)"

Effective
(adj.) producing or capable of producing an intended result or having a
striking effect; exerting force or influence; works well as a means or remedy.

Can
we apply this definition to advertising? Carla Hendra, co-CEO of Ogilvy tried
to capture the heart of the audience with a definition of “an effective online
ad” in her address at the FOOA conference, beginning with a few cryptic phrases
for us to remember like

Video is the new television.

Text is the new print.

Mobile is the
new outdoor.

Ubiquity is the new exclusivity.

She then asked, “Is Google the new ad agency?” A few stifled
moans from the crowd, like someone had said a bad joke. BTW, there truly was
anti-Goog tension simmering in Gotham Hall: when Kim Malone, director of
AdSense sales and operations spoke about adapting advertising models to the web
and started talking about Cost Per Action and video ads, the questions started
flying, and for a moment I thought the rotten tomatoes would to. She made sure
to inform us that she’d “be shot” if she let certain bits of info slip, which
only whetted our interest, in a non-jealous, friendly way of course. J

In terms of video, Carla’s sources tell her that “If it’s 9
seconds or less, it’s the King of Click-Through.” Other secrets: Size Matters,
Put a Face On It, and less catchy tips like logo placement right and above, get
to the point as soon as possible, and grab attention with rich media. Kid’s
play. 

But look at this example that she used to show the
logistical complexity of today’s world of democratized media, where “any
schmuck with a camera” (my words, not hers) can make a spoof that gets more
exposure through YouTube than the original ad.

Case study: Check out the Campaign for Real Beauty that produced Dove
Evolution and the subsequent, and more likely, Slob
Evolution.

Is spoof publicity still publicity? And moreover, does it
add, or take away from the effectiveness of the original?

Turns out, Blackfoot’s got quite a number of fans. The company’s focus on econometric modeling serves to give a more accurate representation of campaigns and their effectiveness. Martin Wesley notes that even "the branding folks like us."

I had a friend in college who, before going out at night, would give herself a pep talk in order to protect her (supposedly) fragile ego from the potential bashing that fraternity parties might inflict upon it. (Yes, she was from L.A.) She would stand in front of the mirror and ask herself 3 questions. The first two I will not disclose – just to keep you guessing. But the last one was, "Do boys like me?" To which she would smile sweetly and give an emphatic, "Yah they do!"

Overheard in the Blackfoot office: "Note to self. Buy mirror."

Good timing, Jason Lee Miller. In his March 7 article on Web Pro
News called “Know Thy Market: Beyond the Click-through,” he states that search
marketers tend to focus more on the click-through than their relationship with
their customer:

Think of it this way: in the cartoons of old, two characters
are stranded on a small desert island. It doesn’t take long until one sees the
other as a pork chop, and the pork chop doesn’t appreciate it one bit. If
customers become dollar signs in your hungry approach to them, they’ll sense
it, and avoid you the best they can. It’s important to eat, everyone knows, and
click-throughs and bottom lines are what make the whole endeavor worth it. But
there’s an art to seduction, and if achieved, loyalty results – closing one
sale one time has little bearing on long-term success. Success, ultimately,
takes closing many sales many times over.

Branding. Presence. Target markets. Starting to sound
familiar? Being in the right place at the right time, and, as Martin says, over
and over and over again. Search is overrated: “People don’t just go to Google
and type in a word they’ve never heard of.” How did they get to that point? A
social bookmark? Viral video? A blog? Finding those factors – and quantifying
them – is how things are going to work from now on.

The cold and rainy days of a San Francisco winter seem like years ago, but it was just last week that we took haven in the friendly offices of Blackfoot, Inc., to catch up with Founder and CEO Martin Wesley.

He explained many things to us, ranging from skewed metrics, to customized data architecture, to how to make business decisions at 9am. (We’re still working on that last one.) We found it to be an overall educational experience, and thought we’d share it with you, too.

So, turn off PBS, if they haven’t already declared bankruptcy. Tune in to AxleTV for the six-part series on Blackfoot’s integrated data analytics platform. It’s good stuff.

The
dynamic trio of Microsoft, Starcom, and Milward Brown have conducted a study
which unveiled a new villain in the movie of online advertising: the Ad
Avoider. Mike Shields of Mediaweek reports
that between 10 percent and 15 percent of adults 17-35 fall into this category.

The
active avoiders are young, they’re tech-savvy,
and they have a DVR to cut out the unwanted content. The passive avoiders go a simpler route – they tend to use media that
is untouched by ads, like books or board games. Well, I don’t have a DVR, and I
haven’t played a board game since it became uncouth to cheat at Chutes and
Ladders, but let me tell you something. The Ad Avoider? It’s me.

I’m
the one who “can’t be bothered with ads.” I find them “annoying.” No, worse
than just annoying; I think that advertising is evil and that whole industry
should be banished down to the eighth circle of hell to play with the other
falsifiers.

This
may sound extreme, not to mention hypocritical. But the point I’m trying to make
is that even the people who declare themselves the least likely to be affected
by media are still consumers, and they still have eyes and ears and fingers and
toes. (We hope.) Just because I am an Ad Avoider doesn’t mean I don’t know that
pork is the other white meat, that barbie is a babe, and that smoking
cigarettes will make me cool. (Too cool for school, in fact.) It doesn’t stop
me from buying products and services that I see advertised in the Right Column
or that coveted Shaded Row when I do Google searches, and it certainly does not
keep me from engaging in modern media.

What
it does do is make me more selective
about what I pay attention to, and in this sense, I am an advertiser’s dream.
Beth Uyenco Shatto, research director of Microsoft, reacted to the study by
saying, “This is the kind of stuff that keeps us up at night.” But honey, this
should be the kind of thing that makes you sleep like a Ambien-filled baby –
after a few glasses of wine. Don’t stress out about the fact that I don’t like
you. Use it to fuel your creative juices. You should wake up in the morning and think, how am I going to get Ana to buy my product today? Answer: my making it more customized, more relevant, and more interactive. (She already kind of said this; I’m just taking credit for it.)

Greg
Sterling had a really interesting post
on the subject. He said that in order to work through this issue of ad
avoidance, we have to change our focus and

Reach the right audiences when
they’re ready through directional media/targeting
Produce quality content: the
“product” must work or deliver as promised
Offer usability: accessing the information/product must be
simple and effective

and finally, the most critical point:

Take advantage of the recent rise of community and social
media: the community, especially trusted circles, filters noise but also
creates, in some circumstances, “social pressure” around adoption or product
use.

It’s
easier to get my attention if you’ve got the attention of or “sold” someone I
trust. People are using each other as filters for efficiency but also to cut
through the noise and clutter of all the marketing messages — which have less
and less credibility.

As
my ESL students used to say, “I am agree in a way that is total.”
Ad avoiders
like myself are a strange breed, but we’re not aliens. Come get me!

P.S.
In an effort to see what else was out there in terms of confessions, I did a
search and found some interesting results. Confessions of a… Community College Dean, a Hockey Fanatic (aka Bruce Carlisle?),
and a Cardamom Addict. I also
found some more savory results here.