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    A Car Buyer’s Conundrum.

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    Steve Poppe
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    Here’s a conundrum. If you had to go out today and buy an American car would you feel  differently standing on a GM or Chrysler lot than a Ford lot? Ford, during all this economic tumult, has been standing on its own two feet. Sure it has crazy debt, lots of bad contracts, and big dusty trucks sitting on the back of the property, but it is still standing on its own two feet. 

     

    GM and Chrysler, on the other hand, are being propped up by the government; each chewing on billions and billions of taxpayer dollars, hoping to stay afloat.

     

    So here’s the conundrum, do you want to buy a car from a company – Ford – that has demonstrated a modicum of fiscal responsibility?  A company with enough foresight to hold off the insolvency dogs? Or do you want to reward companies that could not see what was right in front of their faces…companies demonstrating horrible management skills? Remember though, in the latter companies (GM and Chrysler) you are part owner. Your tax dollars are keeping them alive.  If Henry Ford were alive…

     

    Consumer targeting everywhere.

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    Steve Poppe
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    Cablevision Inc. is testing a targeted advertising delivery system in New Jersey that will serve up TV ads based on the demographics of specific households. A house at 74 Oak Street, for instance, with higher income than at 72 Oak Street may see a different set of ads. Homes with children may get more sugar-coated cereal ads than homes without. It’s the holy grail of ad targeting.  Should better targeted households outperform the norm in terms of trackable sales, and there’s no reason to believe they won’t, this practice will continue.

     

    Consumer data collection has increased in ways that we can’t even imagine. The programs we watch on TV, the products we buy on credit cards, the websites we visit, and the music we download are all gathered.  All this data creates a picture of us that makes predicting our purchasing proclivities easier and easier. This is some seriously big business.

     

    This may be good for some consumers but not for me. You see, I am a student of all consumers. It’s my job. I like to see selling strategy and selling messages targeting all consumer segments. How will I be able to opt-out of this targeting? Guess I could start by not moving to Jersey. Peace!  

     

    We Need a Digital Rights Management Czar.

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    Steve Poppe
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    I wrote an article for Newsday a year ago cautioning Lord and Taylor about their take-over of The Fortunoff Company. Today, for posterity, because Fortunoff recently filed for bankruptcy,  I visited Newsday to buy a PDF of the article.  (News should always be free in my book, but that’s a story for another day.) With a few extra minutes to play around thanks to my newly repaired Achilles tendon, I ventured into the Terms of Service section of Newsday.com.  OMG.  It contained 33 paragraphs, 262 lines of text and 2690 words — just about guaranteeing nobody will read it but corporate lawyers and people cloning TOS language for their start-ups.

     

    Here’s the paragraph that floored me:

     

    “You also grant TI (Tribune Interactive) the right to use any material, information, ideas, concepts, know-how or techniques contained in any communication you send to us for any purpose whatsoever, including but not limited to developing, manufacturing and marketing products using such information. All rights in this paragraph are granted without the need for additional compensation of any sort to you.”

     

    Having been involved in a social media start-up and partially responsible for the Terms of Service and lawyer budget, I can tell you first hand this stuff gets very boggy. It’s a legal sink hole.  Had Newsday or Fortunoff taken something from my article and turned it into creative or operationalized it at their stores, do you think my check box TOS agreement would hold up in court?  Not likely. You can drive a truck through most Terms of Service mumbo.

     

    Larry Lessig, an amazing mind and founding board member of Creative Commons, has the right idea about this stuff.  Were I Barack Obama, I’d take some of that AIG and GM money and appoint Mr. Lessig Digital Rights Management Czar — then I’d give him some serious legislative firepower and charge him with getting digital rights management right.  A good law in place, protecting all parties, will save the country billions in legal fees. (Don’t tell the lawyers.) Peace!

     

    Drama in Prime Time TV.

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    Steve Poppe
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    According to Ad Age last week, TV advertising is as powerful a selling medium as ever, maybe more so. The article cited higher average sales lift per gross rating point  compared to previous studies. The research, funded by Ball State, Nielsen Co. and research firm Sequent, even indicates TV is working against teens – who index high against social media usage. Very iInteresting.

     

    Oddly, network TV stations are not making money. They’re not losing AIG money, but they are getting dinged. So networks are putting out more low-cost reality shows, moving variety talk shows into prime time (Jay Leno on NBC is the first), and flip-flopping around new drama series like hot cakes. Cable TV programming is also poaching network dollars putting the networks in a bind.

     

    Where will it go?  Movies in theaters are making a comeback, as evidenced by amazing numbers the last few months, which makes me wonder if soon we’ll be forced to get our drama from the movie theater rather than the TV? I hope not. But near term, I wouldn’t be surprised if network prime time ends at 10 o’clock, and cable prime time starts at 10. Peace!

     

    Dell and Bartz. A Tale of Two Leaders.

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    Steve Poppe
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    I love to pay attention to great corporate leaders. They are decisive, make informed decisions and once you know what drives them are predictable. Always, they are always strategic.

     

    Were my parents to comment on Michael Dell’s fall from corporate grace over the years, they would whisper “Is he on drugs?”  He was such a good CEO and now he’s all over the place.”  I am not at all suggesting Mr. Dell uses drugs, but he did go from the number one business executive in the country to someone who is unpredictable, a follower, unfocused and seemingly lacking in discipline.  He needs to be hypnotized and brought back to those days in his dorm room at U Texas, so that he can find his vision.

     

    Carol Bartz on the other hand has moved into the CEO role at Yahoo!, a company which is more like five companies, and decided to “simplify.”  Bravo. Yahoo’s problem is that it has forgotten what it is, focusing instead on earnings, stock prices, business partners, platforms and, and, and… Ms. Bartz approach, after only a few weeks on the job, is less silos, less layers, fewer agendas, more focus, more Yahoo.  Today’s smartest marketers are simplifying.  

     

    Some Good Whacks by Nike.

    By
    Steve Poppe
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    What’s the idea with Nike? 

     

    Check out this new Weiden and Kennedy commercial for Nike Golf, a wonderful piece of entertainment that will not only make you smile but it will get you thinking about The Masters, green, green grass, and morning dew. It should even drive golfers into stores. Good advertising makes you feel something, then do something. This one made me lol and write a blog post. 

     

    Nike ads have always been good at getting people to “just do it,” and with Nike’s unfairly high share-of-market that’s been enough to keep them chugging.  When leaders pump the category they tend to win.  But leaders still need to make deposits in the brand bank and I’m not exactly sure, based on this spot, that I know why to buy Nike other than because Tiger does. And though that is probably reason enough for many, I’d certainly like to see some sly Tiger reference to the product here. Look down the shaft of his new wedge while walking into the locker room. Test the flex of the club… Something.

     

    That said, this is still brilliant work. The music, sound design (whack, whack), editing and brief were nearly flawless. Peace!

     

    Simply radical.

    By
    Steve Poppe
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    The few companies reporting any positive earnings these days are companies that looked ahead and made radical changes months ago. In a nutshell, they “simplified.” Those making radical changes now are a couple of quarters too late and will benefit with rest of the late majority.

     

    As a brand planner who listens to marketers talk about brand value I am often amazed by the lack of focus. Many businesses have built such complexity into their products and services that they can’t explain what they sell without an org chart and sprawling 300 word mission statement. (I once sat in a planning meeting with the nation’s largest home care company, and heard the CEO ask around the table of his senior team “What business do you think we’re in?”)

     

    There are two tools I use when developing marketing plans and brand plans. One – called 24 Questions — follows the money. Once shared with a billion dollar outsourcing division of Lucent Technologies, the 24 Questions was distributed to teams around the country only to return a month later in the form of 3 big-ass binders. (Complex enough?) The other planning tool delves into the brand and it’s standing with three constituents: company management, employees and customers. After all of this data is collected from both these documents it is boiled down. (This is where the brain comes in.)  What is revealed from the boil down process is, actually, pretty amazing: A simple but strategic selling idea. It comes from the core. It’s not overdrawn. It is understandable. What makes the idea so radical is that it is an idea. Peace.

     

    Newspaper 2.0 Takes a Hit.

    By
    Steve Poppe
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    What’s wrong with the newspaper business is the “paper” not the “news.”  And paper is also a metaphor for the old centralized news, ink and engine business that hasn’t really changed for hundreds of year.

     

    I posted yesterday about how Rupert Murdoch and News Corp are best positioned to transform the newspaper business.  No one else has amassed the resources and other media expertise to translate the news “paper” business into the news “digital” business. Microblogger sites such as Twitter have shown us a glimpse of the future, in terms of real-time reporting, but we all know that the best news and analysis come from professionals — with editors and fact checking as part of the equation. All of which in the digital age should be easier, not harder.

     

    News gathering and reporting are a special competence of news organizations; printing and distributing are not. The former must be brought up to date.  

     

    Today it was reported that Rupert Murdoch’s #2 executive, Peter Chernin, is leaving. Allowing him to go is a huge mistake. Mr. Chernin is the entertainment, social media, non-newspaper guy on the team. My timeframe for News Corp’s delivery of newspapers 2.0 was 2 years.  Jeff Dachis — a transformative executive himself – is on record as saying 2 years is too soon.  Now I wonder if it can be done in 4 years. Or at all…by News Corp. 

    Crossing the Platform

    By
    Steve Poppe
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    If anyone is in position to renew and reinvent the newspaper business it is Rupert Murdoch. First and foremost he is a talented businessman. Second he is willing to spend to learn. Check that, invest and lose to learn. Third he is daring. For a septuagenarian to jump in and buy MySpace with nary a friend request was a bold move to say the least.

     

    I applauded Mr. Murdoch for buying the Wall Street Journal because I expected him to take his understanding of the financial news business and marry it with the community building expertise he purchased in MySpace. Then, I thought, he’d build an online business property the likes of which we’d never seen — think LinkedIn meets Facebook meets the Allen and Company Retreat.  (Well, I may have over-thought that one. Hee hee.)

     

    But Mr. Murdoch understands news, the human condition and what people want in entertainment (Fox).   Within 2 years I expect him to make a big online move that will cross all these platforms. It will be news-based, globally branded, locally relevant, and will make reporters out of all of us. It will be huge. Peace!

     

    PS. Are you listening Jeff Dachis?

    Webertarians Speak. To Facebook.

    By
    Steve Poppe
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    When writing branding briefs and their little cousins creative briefs I find that key insights can come from anywhere. More often than not though, they come from the target or as I like to call it the Living Breathing Target. The target on the brief for Zude.com, the social networking start-up I worked for, was “Webertarians,” an marriage of the words web and libertarian.

     

    Webertarians rue the rules, restrictions and technological impediments that keep them from doing what they want on the web. Zude’s big breakthrough was the ability for regular people to build websites without knowing HTML — simply by dragging and dropping web objects.  The usability promise played out nicely to the masses who are not technically inclined. Those who are technically inclined are also webertarians in that they like open source code (free code not owned by Microsoft). Let’s just say there are a lot of webertarians out there.

     

    Today’s big webertarian fight is taking place on Facebook over the issue of “Who owns my stuff?” Facebook changed the rules for a few days and its users balked, so they contritely changed back their terms of service.  Facebook already understands the “webertarian ethos” or it wouldn’t have 175 million accounts. That said, it needs to work those ethos to its advantage – and quickly – as it tries to devise a monetization scheme. Facebook can’t afford too many more missteps or they will start looking like "the man."  Peace!

     

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