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    A Challenge to Sharp Solar

    By
    Steve Poppe
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    The city council of Berkley, Ca just passed a program that will allow home and business owners to purchase solar panels to reduce energy consumption from the grid, while it reduces emissions and global warming therms.   The panels will be paid for through monthly property taxes, to the tune of about $180 per month – a number in the neighborhood of the resultant energy savings paid to the local electric company. Many other America cities are watching. Which brings me to solar power and Sharp Electronics. 
     
    Sharp, long been known for its AQUOS TVs, copiers and consumer and business appliances, is not really well known for being the world’s leading solar company, but it is, “providing more solar energy around the globe than anyone else.” Inventors of the LCD and many other breakthroughs, Sharp has an amazing R&D department.   Here’s a business winning challenge to Sharp:
     
    Design the world’s first solar power roofing tile. The tiles needn’t be small like current roofing shingles or large like tin roofs, they just need to capture the rays and heat of the sun, withstand 20 years of weather, and be fairly economical to own and install. 
     
    Sharp Solar, has an opportunity to be the world’s first truly green company…and it already has a mighty head start. Good luck. Peace!
     
     
     
     


    Chrysler vs. GM, Worlds Apart

    By
    Steve Poppe
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    Wild days are these. General Motors is going to Washington with hat in hand trying to get some gov’t cheese bail out money to help retool its factories to build more Chevy Volts. Late to the table with the new electric Volt, GM finally strapped on a pair and decided it was time to do something about its hemorrhaging business. 
     
    Chrysler, on the other hand, is launching the biggest ad campaign of the year in support of — are you ready for this — the Ram truck.  I’m not kidding. Is it any wonder Chrysler? Chrysler is owned by Cerberus Capital Management (capital, as in financial crisis.) Some dolt must have said in a marketing meeting “the Ram is our largest selling brand, let’s give it everything we’ve got.”   David Lubars (of ad agency BBDO,) Deborah Meyer (CMO of Chrysler,) and world class film director Tony Scott should all be ashamed of themselves. Does anyone hear a fiddle playing and smell smoke?
     
    GMnext is the signal General Motors is sending into the market. Good idea. And Chrysler is sending some cowboy shizz called the “Ram Challenge.” OMG!

    Best Buy Vs. MySpace Music

    By
    Steve Poppe
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    MySpace Music is doing some really smart things making music available for free to its social network members via MySpace Music, launching very soon. The idea that music companies might make more money from advertising than from actual sale of CDs and songs is pretty forward thinking…and believable. Think free TV model.
     
    But my money is on Best Buy who just bought Napster. Have you been to Best Buy lately? If Best Buy was a pie, close to half of that pie would be in CDs, DVD, Blu-Ray disks and other digitally recorded media. Another huge chunk of that pie is dedicated to the display and sale of the devices over which this media plays. 
     
    I would love to be the CMO of the new Best Buy because this is going to be the entertainment company. Best Buy will smartly leave content development to the experts and OWN the pipeline/channel to the consumer. WOW!
     

    FitBit ….A Little Bit (50 Cent)

    By
    Steve Poppe
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    The FitBit Tracker, an small Internet-connected device with a motion sensor, was introduced last week at the TechCrunch 150. (TechCrunch150 is an annual celebration and presentation of cool new tech companies.)  The FitBit Tracker helps monitor health when it is attached to the clothes by tracking and recording things like steps taken, minutes sedentary, etc.  It then sends data to a basestation, presumably placed in your home or office.  If you attach FitBit to your pajamas and sleep fitfully, that is also recorded. Very smart little gizmo.
     
    For those so inclined (not reclined) who wish to log on to the Internet and write down what they’ve eaten each day that, too, will be factored into your health report. Now I know many of us are often sooooo busy we don’t pay attention to the physiological signs of poor health, e.g., shortness of breath, aches and pains, listlessness, but come on now!  Do we really need a $99 techie reminder? If you look down and can’t see the FitBit on your belt, get out of the house and so something. 
     
     
     

    Graying of the Microsoft Geeks

    By
    Steve Poppe
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    Almost 2 years old, with gazillions spent behind it, the Zune media player has been an abysmal failure, capturing only 2% market share. It’s another bad example of Microsoft having Jobs-envy.
     
    Microsoft is not about music, it’s about innovation and execution in computing software and computing applications. This is where its future lies. Microsoft needs to put all the smart Zune people in a room, let them know very gingerly that the project is in harvest mode, find out what they learned from the exercise and what can be used for its next gen project. 
     
    It then needs to spend it time and R&D money identifying the next OS for mobile devices. Microsoft needs to think forward, not backward.  Mobile phones, smart phones, netbooks and even handhelds we haven’t yet thought of (GPS, language translation, money payment) are waiting for some unifying software and apps. That’s what Microsoft is good at. Not entertainment applications or advertising platforms. 
     
    The geeks are graying and thinking like people living in mansions.  
     

    Use This!

    By
    Steve Poppe
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    Usability, in technology, is the next big thing. I was over at my moms yesterday, trying to help her with the TV. It didn’t work because her remote (we had down-sized from 3 remotes) had a couple of dead buttons. While determining this, she pushed a bunch of buttons on the remote while I was pushing button on the TV (menu, video/TV, or guide) and we then entered the Large Hadron Collider black hole. It took us 15 minutes to climb out. 
     
    When a 78 year old woman can’t turn on her TV and watch a little American Movie Classics (AMC) you know we, as a society, are in trouble.
     
    Enter the usability economy. Smart marketers are going to spend millions on making technology easy to use and its already happening. There are lots of examples of products with easy out-of-the-box experiences: Wii, the Flip video camera, the new Peek (email handheld) and more to come. Technology that everyone can use is the next big thing. And usability testing, therefore, will become a billion dollar industry. 
     

    Emblem Health and Hill Holliday, Say What?

    By
    Steve Poppe
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    GHI and HIP, two New York area health insurance companies have merged. That’s the idea of the new advertising campaign from Hill Holiday. Oh, they have a new logo too. End of story. Have a nice day. You can find this big idea in OOH, print, and maybe even radio. I can’t remember any of the script.
     
    I call this “we’re here” advertising. It simply alerts the public that a company exists. If done well, it may even convey how to reach the company. “We’re here” advertising is lazy and gives marketers a bad name. It’s a blight on the GDP. All brands need an idea. Emblem Health hasn’t one. They have a typeface, though. Hill Holiday appears asleep at the wheel in NY.

    No quick fixes for start-ups.

    By
    Steve Poppe
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    Lots of start-ups headed by officers who grew up in the Internet age believe they can create successful consumer businesses with marketing budgets in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. “All we need is a good viral video, a good flash animation and some strong SEM (search engine marketing.)”   Poor babies. 

     

    Kellogg is touting the efficacy of its online ROI and says it will reallocate 10% of its TV production budget in that direction.  Very daring! Kellogg’s budget is $1B a year and consumers know the Kellogg name. No start-up, they.
     
    Now you can tell me that Google, when it started, didn’t do a lot of mass media advertising, and I’ll agree. But it gained awareness by other means. As a brilliant search tool, it created its own relevance and word of mouth and media coverage made Google a household word. Google broke ground and people needed it.  Start-ups with a good product – I said good, not great – need to create awareness with serious blocking and tackling. I’m not saying it can’t be done with a couple of hundred thousand in spend, but it is going to take the creative mind of one of the industry’s top five percenters…and those men and women don’t come cheap. See the conundrum?    

     

     

    MPA Needs to Trade Up Its Strategy

    By
    Steve Poppe
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    The Magazine Publishers of America is once again running an ad campaign to reverse ad page declines. The Fallon-NY work for the MPA run in 2005 was goofy and strategically off the mark creating futuristic portraits of how magazines will still be around when our dogs are robots. Mullen had the account for a bit and it, too, missed the strategic mark.
     
    Anne Bologna and Ari Merkin, previously of Fallon-NY and now at their nice shop Toy, are taking another crack at it. Using that humorous sensibility that works so well for their client Oxygen Network, Toy has created an MPA campaign called “under the influence.”  Unfortunately, it feels to me like just another trade campaign targeting media buyers with an efficacy message. It’s a campaign that jumps right to the end game: print ads work. It is a new twist on the advertising that the radio association, newspaper association, outdoor association, etc., have been doing for years. 
     
    The problem is people aren’t reading magazines; they are too busy, with too many other choices. The MPA campaign needs to get people to change their behavior — to make an appointment to spend time with magazines. And what are magazines? They are colorful, in-depth, analyses by brilliant writers who enrich and enlighten. Magazines make us smart, current, and provide stimulating thoughts. This is what the campaign needs to convey. I know Toy gets this. Sadly, the MPA’s paying constituents want a trade campaign that tells media buyers that magazines get results.    
     

    The New York Times is losing New York.

    By
    Steve Poppe
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    0

     
    The New York Times is missing a huge opportunity with its daily newspaper. The problem is the Metropolitan section. Today the section is 6 pages long and one of those pages is obituaries. An eighth of a page is advertising, and that’s a house ad.  I counted about 15 writers with the only recognizable name being Clyde Haberman, who owns the “NYC” column.
     
    In one of the greatest cities in the world, is there not more than 5 pages of news? 
     
    The New York Times has lost its way in local news and it is killing circulation. If you need local news you have to read the Daily News or the New Your Post. 
     
    I’m a big fan of Monday’s Metropolitan Diary, which always makes me smile and happy to be a New Yorker, but the rest of the week the section is a sham. Where’s the leadership? Where is the controversy? The human interest? The advertising? For goodness sake, this is New York. The Bumpus Mills Tennessee Guardian has more local news. Let’s wake up Mr. Sulzberger, Jr.
     
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