Marketing Hipster

NBC announced on Monday that it would join ABC and offer their prime time series free on Video on Demand (VOD) for a test on Cox cable system in several cities. Now the catch is that Cox will be disabling the fast forward button so that the same commercials that ran during the initial broadcast of a show will run again for anyone who wants to watch it on VOD.

This type of announcement just makes me crazy to be honest. I cannot believe that we are in 2007 and still these suits from the networks still just don’t get it! They have been living in their ivory towers for so long that they are under the ridiculous impression that they are in control. Hey Hacks, here is a bulletin for you. Please read it as you send one of your fourteen assistants to get you a Grande Latte, you are not in control. I along with every individual consumer is in control and there is not a damn thing you can do about it.

You really think disabling the fast forward button is going to accomplish anything? You really are under the impression that forcing or putting restrictions on users is anyway to treat your customer base? What the hell is a matter with you and what planet have you been living on for the last several years? Networks, you are losing market share every single year. Between cable, internet, Tivo and DVR, your ratings are at all time lows. People are watching shows when and how they want to watch them. But instead of understanding that and actually embracing it, you decide to continue your ridiculous tactics that has not worked for years by forcing users to do things that you want them to do.

Before you spend the millions on running this test, let me tell you the results. Your target demographic of 25-45 year olds will fall into one of two categories. Either they are technologically savvy enough to either have a DVR/Tivo and be able to fast forward through your commercials or they know where to go online to view the episode they missed. If they are not savvy enough, more than likely they already watched the show when it ran in prime time and you still lose.

Wake up network hacks and begin working on how you can provide us with entertainment the way we want to watch it and not the way you wish we would watch it.

Technorati Tags: NBC, ABC, Video on Demand, Cox cable system

I received a great deal of email from folks who had thoughts on my previous post, MySpace is Finished. Unfortunately, I wrote something that generated a lot of interest and my database craps out on me causing the comments not to work. But I do appreciate the people who took the time to drop me an email with their thoughts, thank you. Since others could not see all the emails I received and all the questions that were raised, I thought I would post a follow up.

Several emails I received said pretty much, “MySpace is free and you get what you pay for.” This I find very hard to agree with. Even though we do not pay to become a member of MySpace or any other social network for that matter, we as users give MySpace something far more valuable than a few dollars. We give them our time and attention. Think about the amount of time people spend within the MySpace walls and community? For a business that makes their revenues through online advertising, there is nothing more important. And for that reason alone, MySpace should have a singular focus on delivering the best user experience possible on their site for their members. In my opinion, not only does MySpace not deliver a good user experience, the web site has terrible navigation, atrocious look and feel and more error messages than a beta version of Windows Vista. How does a web site expect to continually grow when the product your selling, your web site, is broken to say the very least?

MySpace even after continued attempts has non-stop spam going through every facet of the web site. There is no enforcement or pro-activeness to try to stop the deluge of profile, comment and email spam. All of this adds up to only one thing, a terrible user experience.

What this says to me is that MySpace is forgetting who is truly important to them – their members! Because without you and I and the millions of other members coming on daily and updating our blogs, adding new content to our profile pages, sending emails to friends, etc, etc. They have no business.

Now let’s look at this in another way. I am assuming most of my readers are marketers. MySpace recently announced a new targeted advertising program that they call “Interest targeting” which they will be pulling content from members profiles and based on what that user has written on his page, MySpace will tailor ads towards that content. This should not come to a big surprise to anyone as everyone is moving into that direction. I guess my question is what type of company would actually take advantage of this service or for that matter any other MySpace service? Even if, my target market were youths as a CEO of a company would I be willing to risk having my brand being advertised on profile pages that could have a picture of a half naked woman on it or a guy with a picture of a swastika? Who would be willing to jeopardize their brand by advertising on MySpace?

This time I am hoping comments are working.

Technorati Tags: MySpace, social network, online advertising

I think one of the biggest challenges that companies both large and small are wrestling with at the moment is how to better engage with their customers. I think for many companies they are beginning to realize that the old stick your head in the sand and hope it goes away technique is just not working out and even more importantly, I think they are realizing that discussions and conversations are going to be taking place online about their company, products and services whether they get involved or not. Now that many are coming to this realization, the question is how do they go about engaging these online conversations while of course still protecting their brand and company?

At one time, I was under the belief that many of these companies don’t get involved out of pure apathy and lack of understanding. There might be companies out there that this is true, but as I have been working with larger and more established companies over the last couple of years, I have begun to realize that there are many other more complicated reasons on why companies are not engaging more with their customers online.

One of the issues that I have recently seen first hand take place is the risks that specifically larger companies take when engaging with people online whether it be in blogs, discussion boards or social networks. Unfortunately, we live in a litigious world which in layman’s terms means that you can be sued by anyone for absolutely nothing. And even though many of these suits are baseless and eventually thrown out of court, it still costs companies a great deal of money defending themselves from these lawsuits. I was having a discussion with a client of mine and he said something that stuck with me in regard to getting involved with these online conversations happening about his company.

He said, “There have been so many times that I have read something that I dearly wanted to respond to, but before I do, I need to weigh how much it will cost my company if someone sues us based on what we say compared to the any type of reward our company would receive from posting a response.”

It’s an interesting issue, one with many different facets to it.

So I have been a bit lacking lately when it comes to my posts as well as me responding to other people’s comments. I apologize for that and am absolutely going to try to do better. I thought I would start off the week with a question where hopefully can stir some great thoughts and debates.

I am doing a speech in front of the Charlotte chapter of the American Marketing Association on October 10th and I thought I would get your input and ideas as I put together what I want to say for my presentation. If you are in the area, please feel free to attend, I would love to see you.

So here’s the question. Is it a good thing for companies to try to engage their customers online? Does the good outweigh the possible repercussions that could come from it? And finally what are some of your ideas on how companies can engage online with their customers?

Technorati Tags: engage with their customers, online conversations

I hadn’t logged onto my MySpace page in several months. I saw via email that I received a message from a friend I had not spoken with in quite a long time in MySpace so I decided to login to see her message. As I logged into MySpace, the only thing that I could do was shake my head in disgust.

When I first registered on MySpace several years ago, I thought it was one of the coolest things I had ever seen in cyberspace. A place where you can communicate with friends, meet new people with common interests as well as listen to music that you could not find on regular radio. As I logged in today, what I saw was a once proud neighborhood in cyberspace now turned into a sleazy back alley filled with nothing other than porn and spam.

As I said, I had not logged into MySpace in quite a while so I had several hundred messages in my inbox. Out of 107 unread messages, 100 of them were spam from profiles that no longer existed. There were 17 new comments posted, 10 of them were spam of one kind or another including a guy selling iPhones and a couple of links that went to spyware sites.

As I was deleting these messages, I was really excited when several new pop-up advertisements were served to me, beating my pop-up blocker and causing several new daughter windows to be opened. Nice MySpace, good idea to serve pop-up ads to the people who are most important to you – your users.

I thought maybe since I was already logged in, I might check out the music section and see if there was any new music that interested me. Unfortunately, I tried to click on several different links and each link brought me to that error page that says the MySpace team has been notified of the problem. Could you imagine if someone was actually getting notified each time there was an error on MySpace? The guy would never have a second to sleep, let alone eat or go to the bathroom.

As I surfed around, I looked at the advertisements that was on MySpace. They were all the same things. “Click here to get a free iPhone”. “Which rapper is this a picture of?” “Get a free ringtone today!”. All the lowest kind of advertising by the lowest kind of advertisers.

It’s really sad to be honest with you. MySpace was such a great idea and had so much potential and possibilities. Unfortunately, the founders got rich and Fox would not understand social media if it walked up to them and introduced himself. I finally made a decision that I think it is not in my best interest to have a profile on MySpace anymore. I decided to send some last emails to friends with my email address so they can contact me outside of MySpace.

Tom, you are not my friend anymore and I hope all that money you guys got from Fox will ease the pain of knowing just what you could of accomplished and just how far you guys have fallen.

Nike as usual had put out a fabulous commercial promoting Nike Football.  Please view below.  And if anyone can tell me what movie the music is from, I would love you forever because it has been driving me crazy.  I thought it was Braveheart, but I think I am wrong.

Happy Monday folks. I hope all had a good weekend. I had a glorious weekend as finally after months and months of anticipation, football arrived back on Sunday’s! Life can now begin again for many of us.

During the NFL season, one of my favorite things to do on Sunday’s is hang out and watch football, bust on friends about football and pretty much just take in hour after hour of football. It’s a great life I know. Anyhow, during yesterday’s games, I saw something interesting that I thought I would discuss.

I live in Raleigh, North Carolina and over the last week or so, the news stations here have been consumed with a tropical storm named Gabrielle. This storm had the same odds of hitting us bad as I have hitting the lottery, but even though the odds of this storm even making it to shore let alone coming up here were slim, the news stations I guess had nothing else to report so they rode Gabrielle until she was dead and buried.

On Sunday, the storm came as close to the NC coast as it was going to get and the only weather it brought was some rain to the coastal towns which they along with us needed. No big winds, no hail, no flooding, just your ordinary run of the mill rain shower. HUGE news I know. Yesterday as I was hanging out watching football, I was amazed to see that not only once but several times, the local TV stations here broke INTO football coverage to pretty much tell us that absolutely nothing was going on.

I was amazed that there were a couple of news directors actually saying, “Let’s break into network coverage so that our “meteorologists” could report that the coast is getting rain and for 99.9% of our viewing area, we will see absolutely no change in the weather whatsoever.

“We are interrupting your regular scheduled program to tell you that we have absolutely nothing to report. The storm that we hoped to God would come a shore unfortunately did not, so um, there is nothing to worry about and the sun you see outside your window should stay just like that, well, I guess until it is time for the sun to go down…..”

As I was watching these idiots trying to be relevant, I was wondering, what happens when there actually is some kind of weather emergency? How much trust will I have in you when in times that I do not need you, you chose to stick your nose into my life? It reminds me of the boy who cried wolf. After the boy falsely cried wolf a couple of times, people did not believe him when he actually was telling the truth.

What do you think? Am I making a mountain over a molehill here?

About a week or so ago, I was debating with my fiance about Dell‘s recent launch of a new set of Inspiron Laptops that came in eight or so designer colors. I believed that people would see through this as nothing more than what I believed it was, window dressing. I could not believe that the deciding factor for people when choosing what laptop is right for them would be because they can get it in hot pink! It just seems mind blowing to me that someone would invest a $1000 dollars or more on such an important item like a computer and the color would be the biggest selling point. I told Leigh there was no chance in hell that people would fall for this.

Well, see Cord eating crow because from conversations that I had today with some of my ex-colleagues at Dell, the color Inspirons are selling like hot cakes. So much so, that several of the most popular colors are back ordered for several weeks. I keep on forgetting that the world is slowly coming to an end and more people are interested in what Brittany Spears is doing with her hair than who is running for the President of the United States.

So I am wrong, something as superficial as a pretty color plate on the front of a computer will actually sell more computers compared to a plain old black or white computer. Oh well, what can you do I guess, this is the world that we live in.

Today, I was emailing with a friend of mine who actually had ordered a pretty color Dell, but was very unhappy that her order was back ordered because her color was out of stock. My friend is a hard core techie who understands technology and computers. So I had to ask her, why oh why would you fall for paying more money for a computer just because it has a cute color? She responded very quickly and succinctly, “Because it matched my cell phone”.

What can you say after that?

Technorati Tags: Dell, Inspiron, Laptops

I could not resist this one…  According to a story I found on Reghardware, a new battery has been created that can be recharged using a variety of liquids including water and URINE.  That’s right folks.  Now before you run to the toilet and waste all that valuable urine of yours, you can grab a couple of batteries and recharge them with your own pee.

“Dubbed NoPoPo, the battery has been developed by the Japanese company Aqua Power System and comes in standard AA and AAA formats. Although, larger capacities for use as auxiliary power supplies have been rumoured.”

So many jokes I can make with this…..  Brain overloading….  Having terrible pictures in my head of my friends peeing into a AA battery.  I think I need to quit on this post while I am clearly already behind.

I just finished an absolutely wonderful book called Marley & Me by John Grogan. It a fabulous story about a families life with an absolute terror, but great dog they named Marley. If you have not read it, its a really fast read and a great story that works on so many different levels. The author speaks about even with all his faults, Marley the dog taught him so many things about life and how it should be lived. Specifically, he wrote about Marley’s unwavering love and loyalty.

Even though this dog was far from perfect and at times was a total nightmare, his positive qualities, his heart and his soul far outweighed the negatives. And when things were all said and done, this crazy dog had made a huge impact on the author and his family. He was a true member of the family that was loved unconditionally. After I finished the book, I was thinking about some parallels to this dog and this story to marketing.

It seems to me that this kind of loyalty and love is very rarely seen these days when it comes to customers and the companies and brands they do business with. In years past, there were brand names that absolutely owned the market. When you thought of a particular product or service, there was always one company that everyone knew and associated with. That does not seem to be around anymore and it made me wonder, how as marketers can we help actually getting that back?

My initial thought was that both we the marketers as well as the companies we work with are only looking at one side of the marketing coin and are pretty much ignoring the other side. We forget the multiple layers of what is the customer experience. For example, my focus for several clients recently has been developing marketing campaigns that will raise brand awareness and drive more traffic to these companies’ web sites. While that is definitely important, I believe there are numerous steps after that which are being either forgotten or not being given the attention that it needs. They include the following:

• What is happening once a user gets to a web site? I am not talking about basic analytics here, I am speaking about true path analysis to discover what is working and what is not.
• What do people really think about the brand I am working for compared to its competitors? How are we being seen and thought of and what we might do to change that thinking? What are people talking about?
• Post sale – how is a customer communicating to the company after a sale has been completed? What are delivery times? How is customer service? Is the experience not just good, but great so they will not only recommend our product, but rave to their friends and family, so that they will be a true customer evangelist?

Are my thoughts in line with yours or am I crossing the line when it comes to truly what our responsibilities are as marketers and what is not?