Marketing Hipster

I was hanging out yesterday doing my usual Sunday regiment, laundry, catching up on work, emails and a little TV here and there. While I was doing 40 other things with the TV on in the background, a commercial caught my attention. It had a young guy in front of his computer at a coffee shop. A lipstick rolled and hit his foot, he bent over to retrieve it and handed it back to an attractive woman sitting behind him. When he turned back around his computer and the lipstick woman were both gone. There was no words spoken in this commercial and it ended with a URL, nowwhat.com.

I thought it was an interesting commercial and I did exactly what the commercial makers wanted viewers to do, I typed the URL in my computer. When I went to the web site, I discovered it was a commercial and web site for State Farm Insurance. When I entered the site and looked around for a second or two, one question popped into my mind, “Now What?”. Ok State Farm, you got me to your web site, now what do you want me to do? You have a cute little Flash movie here, nice, but I am assuming you would like me to maybe get interested in your home or auto insurance? If so, your web site failed at this miserably.

This is another example of taking the ball all the way to the one yard line and then not only not going into the end zone, but turning around and going the other way. Let’s discuss what is missing? First off, why should I switch my home or auto insurance to State Farm? What makes you different from my present providers of Allstate and Geico? You ran a contest for users to submit their own Now What videos on iFilm, I think that is great, but did you bother putting up your own commercials? I searched on both YouTube and iFilm, the place you ran your own contest, and neither have your own commercials for viewing or at least that I could find?

Though even more importantly than all of these questions, I believe the biggest error made was State Farm and their marketing agency not understanding the media landscape and falling back into what they have always done which is make TV commercials.

Technorati Tags: nowwhat.com, State Farm Insurance, videos, YouTube, iFilm

I think you need to take your mind out of the gutter right this second my friend. Blow it loud, blow it proud is the latest tag line for Kleenex Tissues. The first round of commercials had people pouring their hearts out to a total stranger on a couch in the middle of a busy sidewalk. Yea, that’s happened to me.

And now the most recent commercial has people on those very same couches, but this time instead of talking and crying, they are blowing their noses. I am not kidding, if you have not seen this, it is 30 seconds of people blowing their noses. Yum! I wish I could post it for you, but I have been searching online and have not been able to find a copy. If you happen to find a copy, send me the link in the comments.

I originally thought this post was going to be about the blowing your nose commercial, but as I searched for the commercial online, I decided to change the subject of this post. The first place I went to look for this video was on the Kleenex web site itself. When I arrived at the site, one question popped into my mind, “Who the hell created this site?”

For a consumer company like Kleenex to put a web site together like this is irresponsible to say the least and embarrassing to say the best. Let’s quickly go over my issues with this site:

1. By my count, there are three animated images on the home page. Could we have a couple more and then I can pretend we are back in 1999? Kleenex, what do you want me to do on this site? What is the goal of the site? Choose what it is and make that stand out.

2. There is absolutely no copy on the home page. The text are images. Why is that a problem? If you do a search in Google for Kleenex you will see the result below. “Facial Tissue products, expressions graphics, customer service, FAQs, product history and Kimberly-Clark Corporation links.” Wow, that is some description there. Since no-one bothered to put a title tag on the page and the whole page are images, Google had to use the bottom navigation bar as it’s description. Can you say enticing?

3. Look at the top of your browser and the name of this page is “Home Page”. Wow, thanks captain obvious. Does anyone outside of people who developed the site need to know that this is called the home page? What does that do for the users?

4. Since Kleenex chose to make the home page all images, it is a little bit on the fat side. Based on a couple of load testers I ran, on a cable modem or DSL, the page takes 2 to 2 1/2 seconds to load. Think of how long that would be if a consumer was on a 56K modem which is not out of the realm of actually happening.

I think this is yet another example of a corporation and it’s marketing company putting all their time and money into TV commercials and not concerning themselves with what happens after those 3o seconds are over.

Technorati Tags: Kleenex

We all should send a special thank you to all the spammers out there. Because of them, now anything that we do on the web, we have to type in a code to prove we are a live human and not a spambot. I totally understand why web sites need to do this, but what I do not understand is why do so many sites make the code so hard to read? Why do they need to make lines go through the letters and numbers? I am far from an expert on security, but I thought that as long as the code is an image, the bots cannot read it. If that is the case why don’t they make the images a better quality so we do not need a magnifying glass to try to figure out what the digits are?

Here are a few examples I have run into recently. Mind you, I have blown these up from their original sizes. I would love some input on why they do these like this.

I have written a couple of posts discussing my unhappiness with the Yahoo! Mail Beta. You will notice in the comments for each one of those posts, Ryan Kennedy, Yahoo! Mail’s Beta Evangelist was nice enough to stop by and comment on some of my thoughts. One of my biggest issues that I discussed in previous posts was the lack of information and communication Yahoo! Mail was providing us. Ryan pointed out in his comments that they have a blog focused on updating everyone on what is going on with Yahoo! Mail. I thought that was great, the only issue I had was the blog had not been updated since December 15th. DOH!

Well two days ago, the blog finally had a new post, hallelujah! Ryan announced the upcoming integration of Yahoo! Mail and Yahoo! Messenger. He also has a little video of how it will work. I would love to show you myself, but Yahoo is rolling this out “slowly” and my account has not been integrated yet.

After reading Ryan’s post and watching the video, I was sitting here wondering what my feelings were on this and I came to the conclusion that I really do not have any strong feelings on this one way or the other. It’s an incredibly basic component that Google has had since the launch of Gmail. I feel that this capability will drive no-one to sign up for Yahoo! Mail nor will it bring me or anyone else back to use Yahoo! Mail as our primary personal email account as it had been for many years.

One other thought that I wanted to share. When I was reading Ryan’s blog I noticed something interesting, he is not offering users the opportunity to comment on his posts. My question is why? Ryan how does someone call him or herself an evangelist if they are unwilling to hear and read comments and feedback by the people you should covet most, your users? True evangelism at least in my humble opinion is not a one way street, it’s two ways.

This is I think the third article I have written about Yahoo! Mail. Why do you think that is? Is it that I am just a big pain in the a**? Maybe, my mom would say so, but I would say it is because Yahoo! Mail is an application that I have used for a long time and I have/had some passion for it.

How many others are out there like me? How many others are slowly moving to Gmail, MSN or something else and taking the place of where Yahoo! Mail had been for years? What are you doing to get us back? What are the “WoW” factors of Yahoo! Mail? What is going to help me read and send email better and faster? You want my eyes and attention so you can sell ads, you are going to have to give me something worth using and right now you do not have it.

Technorati Tags: Yahoo!, Yahoo! Mail, blog, Yahoo! Messenger

As you saw from my last post, I had a little bit of trouble getting into Wal-Mart’s new movie download service. I like many other millions of people use Firefox as my browser and Wal-Mart does not support it. I would suspect the reason for this is that Firefox is open source which means they have absolutely no control of it and that scares the pants off of them. Even though my bank, my health care provider and my stock broker all support Firefox. Oh well, let’s put that aside for the moment, shall we…

Wal-Mart’s foray into online video downloads will fail and it will fail miserably. I believe this for several reasons, but the most important one is that it is Wal-Mart. You have to really take a look at how this service works. Once you buy a video and download it, you can only watch it on your computer or a “portable device”. Though portable device means only 13 devices that Wal-Mart supports and obviously, no iPod. You cannot burn the movie on a disc so the only way a user could watch it through their TV is if they have their computer hooked up to their TV. Now be honest, how many people who would shop at this service will know how to do that?

The difference in price is neglegable. The movie Departed with my buddy Jack can be downloaded for $14.88 or I can buy the actual disc online or go to Wal-Mart and pay $15.88. Is that dollar savings going to really make people download the movie compared to buying it online or in the store and actually having the disc that they can watch on their big screen TV and have forever?

I think it is grave leap to make from iTunes selling songs and even half our TV shows to Wal-Mart customers willing to watch a two and a half hour movie on a portable device let alone their computer. I think people are dramatically taking for granted that we Americans like to have stuff. We are stuff hounds and we like having that nice DVD case sitting up on our DVD rack waiting for us to have the craving to watch that movie again.

I give the over/under 6 months until this Beta is pulled and added to the Wal-Mart scrapheap where their online video ordering service that was supposed to compete with NetFlix already lives. What do you think?

Technorati Tags: Firefox, Wal-Mart, video downloads, iPod

I was reading an article this morning about Wal-Mart launching their movie download store. After I read the above article, I decided to click on the link to Wal-Mart and check out their store. I clicked on the link and here is what I got.

Wal-Mart the store that is for everyone as long as you are running Windows OS and have IE 6 or higher. If not, well sorry but, sucks for you.

I was reading here on some recent stats on browser usage and according to The Counter, for Q1 2007, Internet Explorer controlled the market with 84.04%. Mozilla had 11.30%, Safari 2.86%, Opera .56% and Netscape Navigator .06% . Now I am no math whiz, but by my calculations that means that Wal-Mart along with many other places are not supporting 14.78% of the population because they choose not to use the IE browser. Do you have any idea how many millions of people that 14.78% represents? Oh and we have yet to factor in that this “service” Wal-Mart has launched does not support people on Macs.

How does any company, I don’t care if your a behemoth Like Wal-Mart down to a start-up launch a new service and already exclude a nice portion of the population? Does that sound like a wise business move to you?

My next post will be discussing why this service will fail and fail miserably.

Technorati Tags: Wal-Mart, movie download store

While I was working for Dell, we had this saying that each one of us were sharks all swimming in a relatively small ocean. If anyone one of us started to slow down or stop, we would be eaten by another. It might of been a little over the top, but it did make the point crystal clear. Keep pushing forward, never stop, never be content.

A couple of months ago I posted a story on the new Yahoo! Mail Beta and the issues I had with it. As the story explained, I have been using Yahoo! Mail as my primary personal email address for many many years and it seemed to me that Yahoo! released this new Beta without any consideration of the customer experience people would have. The entire user experience on this application was terrible and to be honest, a bit embarrassing to release this as a Beta.

Since I wrote that story several months ago, I have been sending Yahoo! Mail feedback on all my thoughts, issues and suggestions for this new email application. They have a little feedback button, so I thought I would share. I believe I have sent them at least 6 different emails with thoughts and suggestions. These were not bitch emails, they were my personal suggestions on what could make their new application better. I received exactly zero responses from Yahoo! on any and all of my feedback. Not even a fricken form letter. And more importantly, in the last couple of months, I have seen absolutely no changes to this Beta release, nothing.

So what happens when a company turns it’s back on longtime brand evangelists as well as giving the impression that they are doing absolutely no work? They tend to become irrelevant and fade quietly into obscurity.

So what could Yahoo! do to rectify these issues with very little effort?

1. KEEP US INFORMED! – Send out a progress email to all members. You know a little status report. Tell us what you are working on, what’s going on.
2. KEEP US INVOLVED! – Just like how every open source application does today. Create a online request log that users can add feature suggestions and thoughts.
3. KEEP YOURSELF RELEVANT! – Show some sort of progress. Change something, fix something, let us know that you are still breathing.

You are running out of times around the track here Yahoo!. Personally, I see my Yahoo! email address becoming my spam email address if things do not change in the future. As always, I am here Yahoo! if you actually are interested in communicating with your users. Please send all correspondence to my Gmail email address. Sorry, I couldn’t resist.

Technorati Tags: Dell, Yahoo!, Yahoo! Mail, customer experience

Did you see the Snickers commercial named “Chest Hair” during the Superbowl? If not, you can watch it below. Now even though I am very in touch with my feminine side, I ask a very simple question. How does two men kissing followed by them tearing out their chest hair make you hungry for a snickers, let alone hungry for anything? It kind of made me nauseas to tell you the truth.

Technorati Tags: Snickers commercial, Superbowl

I posted at the end of the year, along with a great deal of other bloggers, predictions of what I think will happen in good old 2007. Well one of my top 10 happened today when it was announced that Michael Dell will be coming back as CEO of the company he founded, Dell Computer Corporation. As an ex-Dell employee and a great fan of Michael’s, I think this was the only opportunity for Dell to right their ship.

One of the greatest lessons I learned from Michael was how to be an effective leader.  He taught me to realize and accept that as a leader, you will not have all the answers. An effective leader is someone who can communicate their vision and hire people to surround himself with who will have the answers to turn that vision into a reality. Dell the company once had that, but as they grew so dramatically and so quickly, the environment of ownership and entrepreneurship changed causing many of the issues and problems they are dealing with today. They have an uphill climb ahead of them, but with Michael back at the helm, I for one am not counting them out.

Technorati Tags: Michael Dell, Dell Computer Corporation, effective leader

Recently I discovered this great blog through MyBlogLog called the The Art of Intimacy. It has nothing to do with marketing or the web. Jennifer, the author, just writes about life and love. What could me more important? I have always been under the mindset that it did not matter what the subject matter was when it comes to writing as long as it is well written and interesting; which this definitely is. I was reading this one post named “Be Tender with My Love” and a specific line really stayed with me. She wrote:

“For some there is a deep fear involved in loving, in sharing, in disclosing, and in intimacy.”

I was thinking that this quote could also be used when talking about marketing and advertising. People, especially these days, are cynical, just like when it comes to love. They have been hurt and annoyed and frustrated in the past with products and services they have purchased. Just like when your heart has been broken, you are more hesitant to jump into another situation that you are unfamiliar with and risk getting hurt again.

It seems that a lot of discussions both in the board rooms as well as the blogosphere is about how to get a target markets’ attention. Whether it be online or offline, how do we get people to come over to our store, web site, etc? I have come to believe that this kind of thinking is putting the cart before the horse. What should be discussed first is when we get potential clients or customers to check us out, how are we going to create a connection with these people? What is going to differentiate us from our competitors? In other words, how can we get them to trust us and hopefully love us?

There’s been a number of great articles out there on new and innovative ways to market to users. Though what I think is continually overlooked is what happens once we get the attention of those users? What is the customer experience? You can get all the attention in the world but if none of that attention turns into revenue, what was it all for?

Stay tuned for a follow-up on this.

Technorati Tags: MyBlogLog, marketing, advertising, love, potential clients, customer experience