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    Heroes and Besmirchers on the Web.

    By
    Steve Poppe
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    Lionel Messi

    Will there be fewer heroes in the world because of social media?  I wonder.  Lionel Messi is a futbol hero — in Argentina and to futbolers around the world.  Back in the day (before YouTube and social) Messi would have been known to the world via a few video clips seen on TV, a couple of really positive well-told stories in Sports Illustrated, some bedroom posters and live game broadcasts and interviews. Heroes were made and packaged more easily then.

    But today, no one of note makes it under the radar.  One bad decision at a nightclub, one oafish treatment of a fan, an out of context insensitive remark and the luster is off.  It is human nature to have heroes — be they in sports, politics, music or religion. We need heroes.  They give us hope and aspiration. But jealousy and officiousness are also human behaviors and social media is filled with people so inclined.  Besmirchers. And all it takes is a few besmirchers to start a hero’s downfall.

    The good news is we are open to more global heroes than ever before because of the Web (I can’t wait to watch Messi play) and that’s good. The web needs to be a bit kinder and gentler, though, when it comes to comments and posts. The mission of the Web is to disseminate the truth, but for the good of the planet. Let’s dis the negative petty stuff. We need an emoticon to protest the negative stuff.  Somehow 🙁 doesn’t quite make it. Peace!

    Rubel and Scoble

    By
    Steve Poppe
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    rubel-scobleI’m a big Steve Rubel fan. A social media savant and thought-leader, Steve is on the road for a couple of weeks looking for new media insights. He visited with Robert Scoble yesterday and I’m sure for him is was a moment of truth. Steve has been following and emulating Robert for years because Robert is the heart and soul of social media. Robert’s passionate, thoughtful, encouraging and very juiced. (Not in a Balco way.) Robert is the Vasco De Gama of what’s new.

     While Mr. Rubel is on a cross country trek Mr. Scoble is on a minute-by-minute trek. He and camera man Rocky are probably responsible for 1 point of the U.S. GDP, I kid you not.

     If you don’t know who Robert Scoble is, please check him out. Don’t try to understand what he does or what he talks about (he is a mega geekus), just understand why he does it and how. Robert is an inspiration. Peace! 

    Marketing Disorganizations.

    By
    Steve Poppe
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    A new study published by McKinsey suggests that the quality of brand management is eroding around the world. One data point suggest over half (55%) of corporations polled are seeking to improve brand management. The culprits are globalization, staffing inefficiency, the increased use of digital media, matrix organization structures (many, rather than one boss) and the perceived need to put more specialists on brand teams.

    In a separate study, the CMO Council published this: 41% of client companies said they were working in a “moribund organizational culture“.  So brand management needs to be fixed.  

    How about the agency side?

    The CMO study suggested 35% of brand companies are unhappy with the integration and alignment of the agency networks with which they worked — so, agencies aren’t faring much better organizationally. At the 4A’s Jay Chiat Account Planner Awards this past year, there was some grousing that clients are fed up with having as many as four strategic planners in a meeting when all the agencies are brought together: one from the AOR, one from direct, one from digital, one from promotion. Add to that all the specialty services agencies must now provide and you can see the garden is growing out of control.

    It’s for this reason that mid-size shops have a leg up in delivering inline communication programs. (Not offline or online.) Mid-size shops have the ability to share and play together better — and they have better oversight.

    It may be counterintuitive but organizational innovation (and efficiency) is most likely to come from mid-size shops (read KBS Partners, Crispin, Straw Frog) than from the big boys and girls. And when that happens, the marketing companies will hopefully follow suit and better integrate. Peace!

    Virus Marketing

    By
    Steve Poppe
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    Everybody in the world of marketing wants to go viral. Ea-sy money.  “More video upload contests.  More Fothcbook  programs. More Twitter followers.”  Well, as web marketing gets more social, people are finding out big hits are not so easy. My first big viral memory was of the guys in white coats putting aspirin into hundreds of Diet Coke bottles and watching them spew in syncopation.  That type of magnetic content, though, is few and far between.  That’s viral marketing. Virus marketing is different and it can be found today in many SEO programs.

    It started with black hat cheating and has migrated to white hat bleating. Either way the SEO practitioners doing the dirty deed promise they can get you in the top 5 search results on Google for as little as $5-10,000 a month.

    And they can do it.

    How?  By ghost writing content and using off site partners to link to that content.  Scores and scores of them. Some call it link baiting.  I call it a virus. Welcome to the machine. It doesn’t sound that onerous to some…everybody’s doing it.  But to a brand nerd, it’s disastrous.  Rampant content writing and serving — on behalf of your brand — handled by onshore, off-shore, unsure? People who don’t know the brand culture, the brand idiom, the brand plan? If this isn’t a brand virus, what is?  It will take years to clean up this mess. Plus, as Google gets wiser to the practice and makes algo changes (as they did recently), baiters will lose key word rankings and ecomm revenue can tank in an instant.  This practice will spawn a new industry of SEO companies called “no hat search.” Peace.

    Car Companies Lack Ideas

    By
    Steve Poppe
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    Chrysler-Logo-old“Chrysler looks beyond BBDO for advertising” is the headline on Ad Age Digital this morning. BBDO has always done great work for Jeep, but Jeep was an iconic brand with a branding idea. The Chrysler brand doesn’t really have an idea. Ford doesn’t have a powerful branding idea. And certainly GM doesn’t. But GM doesn’t really need one because short of GMC trucks, you won’t find a car with a GM name on it. Volkswagen had an idea but let it slip away to the point where when the market was ready for the idea (small, efficient, eco-conscious), they weren’t there. Had they been, they might now be on their way to a defensible position as the world’s largest car company. Even Hummer has an idea.  

     

    When you possess a branding idea — also called a brand strategy — product design and innovation become easy. When you don’t, you change vendors, partners, ad agencies, and management. And that’s not much of an idea. Peace!

    Worldwide Inventory

    By
    Steve Poppe
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    barcode

    Google built a business, quite well I might add, on perfecting search and search usability. They funded the business with advertising.  The brand play was not to be the world’s greatest advertising platform (something Yahoo and AOL didn’t understand), it was all about search. 

    Back in the day (last week, hee hee) Google search was all about the Web.  Finding things digital.  This week, it’s about seeing and searching for digital things in the physical world.  So mobile apps and navigation are the rage. Google hasn’t led the way here, Apple has, but Google wasn’t first in search either.

    What’s next?

    What’s next is search for physical things in the physical world. Call it worldwide inventory. What is worldwide inventory and how will it work?  Not sure, but this cantaloupe sized brain of mine says it may have to do with barcodes.  Now you can’t put a bar code on an $11,000 hip replacement in Mexico (You can’t?) but you can put one on a $12.00 case of Honest Tea with torn labels. The ability for mankind to find real things, in proximity, with their smart phones is what Google will be doing over the next decade. And that hip replacement or $6,000 valve bypass in China will be something worth searching  for. Stay with search Google — it will soon be atop Maslow’s Hierarchy of needs.

    Worldwide Inventory may sound like a Pearl Jam song but it’s an Eric Schmidt song.  Peace!

    The ADD-ification of America

    By
    Steve Poppe
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    One of the biggest cultural phenomena in America today is what I call ADD-ification. We all have attention deficit disorder.  We can’t sit still and we’re always in a hurry.  When was the last time you drove your car without some form of entertainment — using the time to think?  Thought so.  

     Newspaper stories have gotten shorter, the chapters in our novels can be measured in paragraphs not pages, our meals come in microwavable packages, we even beep at people who sit at traffic lights for more than 5 seconds.  Why?  Because we’re in a hurry. 

     How many advertising or branding briefs today are predicated on the insight that we are all pressed for time?  I certainly have written a few.  

     Stress is at an all-time high I would imagine, but with the right meds, we can get by.  But hurry, the pharmacy closes at ten! 

     (I’ll be off for a few days, see you Tuesday.)

    Unbridled Web Growth.

    By
    Steve Poppe
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    Have you ever picked up a magazine containing 200 pages and thought it too bulbous to read?  

    Steve Rubel in a post today suggests “Space on the Internet is infinite. Time and attention, meanwhile, remain finite. Therefore, Digital Relativity will become a major challenge.” In his book “Cognitive Surplus” Clay Shirky suggests “as more of us become content creators rather than consumers, it’s ushering in a new age of enlightenment.”

    I agree with both sentiments, but also agree with Thomas Malthus in whose essay “Principles of Population” it is stated that overpopulation will stifle healthy planetary growth.  Says Malthus “The power of population is indefinitely greater than the power in the earth to produce subsistence for man.” 

    As the web grows as a source of all content with everyone and her brother becoming a content creator, will it not end up over-filled with the unimportant?  Will the songs of poor singers make it harder to find the Joss Stones? Will cartoon-like films bury the Coen Brothers?  The answer is yes and no.  Thanks to search engines, algorithms and relevance much cream will still rise to the top. But with too much content, it might be harder to find the gems. And, as is the case with the overstuffed magazine, it is likely that some may opt to not pick it up. There is an organizational opportunity here me thinks. Peace!

    The Brand Planning “Boil Down.”.

    By
    Steve Poppe
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    0

    boil-downThe real art of brand planning is in knowing what not to say. When brand planning, I use something called the 24 Questions to help find the money. Once the money is found, job two is how to position. For this a number of hunting and gathering techniques are used; tools that are now vastly improved thanks to the Web. Information is amassed about the product, the competition, corporate leadership, the market, and current buying culture. Then future buying culture is projected, based upon trends. Only then, does the “boil down” process begin. 

     The boil down is the point at which things are prioritized and edited. Evaporation occurs over time until only a powerful branding idea is left.  By itself, the idea may come off as mundane. But when presented to executive management along with the boil down logic, that’s when the magic occurs.  Marketing executives love logic and strive for simplicity, but are often too close to make it happen. A powerful brand strategy can set marketers free, but it is the logic of the boil down that sells it. Peace!

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