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    3 hospital ads, one winner.

    By
    Steve Poppe
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    3 hospital ads appeared in yesterday’s newspaper. Here are their headlines:
     
    1. If every hospital in America performed as well as Hackensack University Medical Center, Finn (boy in ad) might be having this catch with his grandfather.
     
    2. When it comes to sports medicine, we’re at the top of our game.
     
    3. We’re advancing the treatments in gynecology. Along with the confidence of the women who need them.
     
    If ads are supposed to make you “feel” something then “do” something, only one of these headlines works.  Della Femina, Rothschild, Jeary and Partners (www.dfjp.com)
    continue to dominate in hospital advertising. Hackensack wins.
     

    More Freedom…in Social Networking

    By
    Steve Poppe
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    Thomas Friedman reported today in his New York Times Op-Ed piece that freedom is diminishing around the globe. For the first time since the cold war “almost 4 times as many states — 38 – declined in their freedom scores as improved – 10. The freedom score is a construct of Freedom House.

     

    If you have been following this blog or Zude.com in the press and blogosphere, you’ll note that one of the major tenets and brand planks of Zude is “freedom.” Zude competes in the social media, social networking sphere, a broad user-generated content category, born of open source and “sharing” doctrine. But as the category matures, I’m seeing big evidence that freedom is waning.

     

    Zude is not perfect, and our so-called “Webertarian” ethos cannot in every case be preserved, but our hearts are in the right place. The Electronic Freedom Foundation and others should applaud our efforts in data portability. And our desire to give everyone the ability to have a free, customizable web presence, especially the underserved portion of the population (non-coders, poor, boomers,) is more than noble.

     

    Competitors in this space, I feel, are drifting backwards in user freedom. More rules, more constraints, a tightening of the communities in favor of the “haves” are all seeping into this world. The category, like the globe, is moving backward and it’s a shame.

     

    Zude’s tagline is “feel free” and please know we will keep fighting the fight.

    Conspiracy Theory?

    By
    Steve Poppe
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    I wrote a few weeks back wondering if Microsoft’s play for Yahoo was a ploy to get Google involved; the result of which would be for Google to take its eye off the ball (freakin’ Mets) and its strangle-hold on the market.

     

    http://spoppe.livejournal.com/56590.html?mode=reply

     

    That strategy would have required Microsoft to have something up its sleeve — for which it was biding time. I’m not sure I was right, at least not that I can see today. Furthermore, while Yahoo is much more infirm than it was at the beginning of this struggle, it appears Google has added $4B in stock value since the takeover began. That certainly couldn’t have been an unintended result of the Microsoft play, if my theory is correct.  

     

    I may come off as a conspiracy theorist here, but still wonder if there is something going on. Time will tell. But for Microsoft, every day Google looks beyond its core in search and search ads, is an opportunity day.

     

    Storytelling and selling

    By
    Steve Poppe
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    News flash! The click-through rate on banner ads is shrinking. Hee hee. Even clicks on large size ads like the leaderboard will continue to wane. The creative is getting better, as is the targeting, but let’s face it, the units are not very compelling.
     
    The best creative talent in the selling business is not at online ad shops. The best storytellers, most “abruptive” thinkers, funniest writers and best artists, are not graduating college saying “I want to work at Organic.”
     
    Ad agencies ceded the online business to the digital shops and are about to take it back. Digital shops grew not because they knew how to do banners, but because they could develop landing pages, ad server strategies, tracking metrics and optimization plans while the rest of us said “Say what?”
     
    As social computing continues to take the lead in online traffic growth and banners become last year’s model, I look to the boutiques, then big agencies to take back creative storytelling and selling on the Web. Tom Carroll, are you listening?
     
     

    America has Voted. Finally.

    By
    Steve Poppe
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    Yesterday I wrote about the next big thing. Well, here’s an even bigger thing. America woke up last month and started buying smaller cars en masse. Out with the Tahoes, out with the F-Series, out with the Rams. Twenty percent of all new car sales in April ’08 were compacts. All the size-queen car buyers are beginning to see the light. But that’s not the next big thing.
     
    The business you want to be in is SUV and heavy duty pick-up truck disposal. In one year’s time, our country streets will begin to look less like Lubbock and more like Milan. So long as our cars don’t go meep-meep when we honk, I’m cool with it. JK.  In my minds eye, we’ll need a state the size of Delaware to dispose of all the SUVs and truck being traded in.  These big honkin’ machines have to go somewhere. I suspect they will be melted down for metal – a good thing – but what will we do with all the plastic?
     
    The business to be in is SUV and Truck recycling. And the day hasn’t come too soon. Take a deep breath.
     
     
     
     

    Mobile Uploads.

    By
    Steve Poppe
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    I posted yesterday about predicting the future, well here’s one. It may not be the next big thing but it’s coming. There are a lot of video bloggers out there today but only a handful of bloggers who like to post video in real time. My favorite blogger is Robert Scoble (www.scobleizer.com) and he loves posting video on the fly. He wears it like a badge. You can often hear him say during an interview “you can’t take that back the bits are gone.”  
     
    The time it takes for one video blogger to get home and upload a video file is the time it takes to get scooped, so more and more serious bloggers are looking for ways to upload in situ. Mr. Scoble uses a service called Qik. It’s probably the best option out there but the quality is sometimes sketchy. The ability to perfect mobile uploads of video, is the next big thing. 
     
    At Web 2.0 Expo, it was fun watching Robert walking down the street with one hand on his Nokia N95 video phone, the other on his battery charger — a necessity for any video blogger — watching the video send bars build. His eyes twinkled as he sent his message to the masses.
     

    GM Can’t Spin

    By
    Steve Poppe
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    Poor General Motors. They are cutting production, the second half of this year, of 140,000 heavy duty pick-up trucks and SUVs. What visionaries! What news! 

    I’m sure they’d prefer to be holding press conferences and issuing press alerts about some brand new energy efficient models and efforts in alternative fuels, but noooooo. GM is in the papers for announcing cutting car models that nobody wants. 

     
    Mr. Wagoner, McCann-Erickson, why are you hiding the good news? I know there must be some good news in there somewhere!
     

    Web 2.0 Expo — Old and New School.

    By
    Steve Poppe
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    Just got back from Web Expo 2.0 in San Francisco. Zude had a booth and it was packed all three days, and even one night with Robert Scoble stopping by http://scobleizer.com/2008/04/24/exclusive-first-look-at-new-zude-mashup-capabilities/. Zude is a social computing platform that lets users of any technical stripe create and manage their own web presence.  Web 2.0 Expo is an enterprise show favoring IT types, so it was pretty cool to see all the people lined up at the booth interested in our consumer web application.

     
    Zude recently attended two consumer shows: South By Southwest and Canadian Music Week, the demographics for which were generally younger than for Web 2.0 Expo. Two interesting observations about the demographic comparisons: the IT community was much more interested in social networking and social media than I had expected, perhaps even more so than at the music shows. And secondly, IT people still love paper. At SXSW the attendees were almost defiant in their desire to stay away from paper, yet at Web 2.0 Expo, we had to run out to Kinko’s a couple of times to reprint data sheets. Old school and new school. Interesting.
     

    Two Americas?

    By
    Steve Poppe
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    0

    I’m in San Francisco at Web 2.0 Expo and the price of regular is a millipede under $4.00. Yesterday’s newspaper reported that MacDonald’s monthly same store sales slowed for the first time in 5 years. Hmmmm. So, I posit, the price of gas and the lagging economy are taking a toll on the lower rungs of the demographic ladder. Less $4.00 lunches due to $4.00 gallons of gas. 

     

    Today’s paper says Apple had its best quarter ever. Mac sales are soaring. The iPod category is maturing, so says Apple defensively, sales were somewhat flat. They only sold 10.9 million units this quarter. Yahoo reported strong earnings and I keep hearing luxury car ads on the radio. Okay, they are used luxury car ads, but luxury nonetheless.

     

    The Economist says explorers may have found the third largest oil source in Brazil and that scares me.  

     

    We need a new president. 

     
     
     
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