Once Upon a Time

[excerpt from upcoming book, not yet titled]

Let’s face it. We live for stories. It sounds like a grandiose claim, I know, but consider these mind-blowing facts: Just under 50,000 fiction books are published in the United States in 2010¹.  About 12.5 million people attended Broadway shows last year³.  According to the MPAA, 1.28 billion films were watched in theaters in the U.S. and Canada last year².  Let’s think about that number for a moment. If the average movie lasts about 2 hours and if you stretched the time spent watching movies back into the past, it would reach back 292,000 years. That’s when Homo Erectus walked the earth. I guess that tells us that man first stood upright to reach the concession stand. The average American watches 4.72 hours of television a day⁴. They are watching fiction, reality shows and news. While not all shows are fiction they all seek to tell a compelling story.

That’s only the new stuff. On a lazy Sunday afternoon you find me laying on the couch watching old episodes of Law and Order. Every July 4th a Twilight Zone marathon graces the airwaves and, as if that wasn’t enough, there are multiple channels that exclusively or primarily air repeats from the “Golden Years” of television. Every year, successful novels find their way to the film releases. These are stories that are successful in one medium, migrating to another to find an even larger audience. None of these numbers take into account all the stories, scripts and productions that never even see the light of day. It is amazing to me the hours we spend telling and consuming stories.

But the question is, then why are brand marketers so bad a telling stories. I think because they approach it like someone talking about their family vacation. Sure, you're passionate about it and it means a lot to you but I wasn't there and I'm just waiting for you to shut up so I can talk. When we start to care about the listener (our consumer) then we might create great stories.

Android Launches In-App Purchases This Week

Android launching in-app purchases illustrates the continuing importance of building ecosystems rather than just applications or campaigns. Everyone who knows me is tired of hearing me talk about success in today's marketing world being about not lying or buying a monkey. By that, I mean success today is predicated on being authentic and bringing value (as opposed to using tricks to get attention.)

Building a platform or ecosystem, that offers continued user/consumer engagement means you have to be honest, if not, your audience discovers it and quickly moves on to something else. It kills sustainability.

Perhaps, even more importantly, ecosystems demand you consistently bring value. Buying a monkey is about being flashy, getting attention but with not substance behind all the tricks. If you want someone to shell out yet another .99 for an enhancement to an app you've offer the user real value.

However, this discussion must move beyond just mobile apps. This movement toward ecosystems should change the way we think about advertsing and marketing. So, uncross your fingers, send the monkey to a nice zoo and get serious about understanding what the audience really needs.

Let's Play Advertising

Today, I was chatting with a former colleague and the subject of a great site that we both worked on came up. We both expressed our frustration that a site with 700,000 accounts and 500,000 active users is getting little or no attention, either from the company or the agency. Imagine that, half a million users without any advertising or marketing. And yet, the agency spends their time looking for new ventures and businesses they can get into. 

CEOs always say they are looking for an opportunity where there's no competition. They try to convince people they are tired of competing. This simply is not true, they aren't really tired of competing, they're tired of losing. And instead of getting better, they want to take their ball and go home.

It's the weakest of the weak responses and it clearly illustrates that a company's leadership is just wanting to "play" business not be in business. Each time you hear someone talk about avoiding competition and you see them abandon their core position to try something else, just imagine them standing there, wearing their dad's suit that's way too big for them and shuffling along wearing their dad's size tens. Remember, by next week they will be running down the driveway, playing cops and robbers.

New Media?! Come On!

This is hard to believe but twice in the last week I've run across the term "new media." The first instance was when I was asked to be the guest lecturer at the University of Cincinnati School of Business. My topic was the effect of New Media on marketing. The second case was just today, as I was doing research for a presentation to some radio networks about using digital media as a way to create deeper engagements with their listeners. I was reading a newsletter about the radio broadcast industry and this was the headline, "New Media Is A Game Changer For Station Marketing Pros."

I just want to put this in context. Let's compare it to another new media and it's adoption, television. The first regular broadcasts began in New York in 1931, however, the first license for TV broadcasting as we would recognize it, happened in 1941. The Golden Age of Television is considered to be between the late 40s and 1961. So, the golden age began less than a decade after the medium became common place.

It's hard to nail down exactly when the digital revolution began, after all do we go back to Babbage's Difference Engine from the early 1800s or do we go to his Analytical Engine which came later. Let's forget all that and move way forward to the common person's adoption of the digital medium as a way to gather information and to communicate. Let's say the real revolution started when the first web browser was released and when an organization to further the development of this infrastructure was created. That would put us in 1994 when the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) was launched.

That being the case, we are now about a decade and a half into this revolution. We ARE in the Golden Age of Digital. So please, please, stop calling it New Media. That term gives marketers, publishers and broadcasters permission to dismiss this new fangled thing. And they do so, at their own peril. That kind of thinking would have permitted a 1950 marketer at Texaco to pass on sponsoring a comedian dressed in drag. What a mistake that would have been.

The Power of the Right Secrets

Throughout my career, I've been amazed by how often RFPs delivered to whatever agency I happen to be working for at the time, have made me nearly suicidal. It all comes down to the writer of the RFP copying, without thinking, previous approaches.

For example, whatever questions are asked by one of the participants are shared with all the participants. Why? You can tell far more from a person's question than from their answers. If you are on a date and the lady were to ask, "How much money do you make? What do you drive? What's the square footage of your home?" You have just learned an important lesson about the values of this person. The questions should never be shared with everyone. Never, ever, ever ever!

On the other hand, companies going through an RFP process almost never reveal who the competitors are. Again, why? Okay, here's another analogy. Imagine a football team practicing all week without being able to know who they are playing against. Would that game be one of the great clash of the titans. No, it would be mediocre football at best. Knowing the competing team allows for effective practice and preparation. The coach can watch game videos, look for weakness and plan a strategy. It makes both teams better by knowing the competition.

The point of an RFP is to ferret out the difference between the participants. By knowing who's on the field, an agency can point out the differences. If they are jerks about, well, you didn't want to work with jerks anyway, did you?

The truth is, this is a relationship business. The best process is to quit sending out RFPs all together. Instead pick the three agencies you might want to work with. Set up a half-day meeting with each. Give them the assignment of leading you through a creative brainstorming session. Then pick the agency. You will learn more, and know if they are fun to work with.