Redeeming Miles (on Twitter).

By
Steve Poppe
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Miles Nadal is probably the biggest name on the scene today in the advertising and communications business.  His holding company MDC Partners has been the only one with a positive stock performance during the global downturn. His spending on minority positions in small and mid-size shops with great leaders is what has built this empire. While the big holding company officers are watching their stocks depreciate, debating assets to sell, and arguing of which employment contracts to void, Mr. Nadal was roaming the planet seeking out smart people. The marketing business has always been powered by smart, forward looking people.

I’d love to go to school on Mr. Nadal and have followed him on Twitter for a while — but he is an awful Tweeter. His tweets are inspirational quotes from others.  Aristotle?  Come on Mr. Nadal!  Building a business by finding and enabling smart people is one thing, extending that into Twitter may feel an “authentic” brand play, but it’s so disappointing.  Better to quote your own hires.  Better more, quote yourself. Posting other people’s stuff is a rage but from people like you we need original thought. Personal Twitter accounts are best when steeped in one’s personality. Give us some of dat Mr. Nadal.  Peace!  

Think Bigger.

By
Steve Poppe
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0

The Center for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that 1 in 3 American adults is obese. Excuse the pun, but that’s a huge market.  Are airlines doing anything about it?  Yep, seatbelt extenders.  On a plane in coach when the person in front of you puts back their seat, if you have a big belly, you can’t open your laptop. You can’t open your laptop if you have a medium belly.

Besides clothing there are a ton of products that can be redesigned to fit the big form person. Beach chairs, lawn chairs, living room chairs.  Moving theaters should provide adequate seating for larger adults. Big is big business…just ask NBC.

Wal-Mart or JC Penny’s would be smart to create a store brand catering to the big. Peace! 

Road to a Trillion.

By
Steve Poppe
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0

A couple of weeks ago it was mentioned here that in order for Facebook to become the world’s first trillion dollar company it had to nail the privacy issue. Well, my fact-checker has determined that with the world’s largest company, Royal Dutch Petroleum (Forbes 2009) worth less than half a trillion dollars and only 6.8 billion people on the planet, the trillion dollar company thing is a pretty far reach. 

Bah, fact-checker. If Facebook can get everyone on the planet to fork over $147 U.S. they can do it.  One way to get to this number is to offer Facebook users an opt-in paid for account that is completely private.  No ads for tracking. No sale of collected personal data. No cookies. Like Ocean Beach, NY back in the day – the proverbial land of “no.” 

For $147.00 a year, Facebook actually might start themselves on the road to a trillion. Every journey begins with one schlep.  Or was that step? Peace.    

Privacy huh?

By
Steve Poppe
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0

What’s the life expectancy of a single 55 year-old man who buys a 16 oz jar of hi-test mayo every 2 weeks along with his weekly ration of 3 steaks, 2 sticks of salted butter, 4 cans of beans, lb. of baloney, a box of microwave Orville Redenbacher, 30-pack of Bud Light and a carton of smokes?  Good question.  If you were said man’s insurance company this info might be worth a million dollars.  If you were the HR person at a company thinking about hiring this gentleman, it might be worth tens of thousands of dollars. Purchase price for that that data? Probably pennies.

Privacy huh.  As more and more personal information is collected about buyers and sellers, marketers are being offered toolsets that help them sell more efficiently. More predictably. More accurately. It can be a good thing –but needs monitoring.   I’m no card carrying member of the Electronic Freedom Foundation but I do believe in their work.  I also think that the EFF and others like them will be playing a huge role in our lives over the next 20 years.  Were they offering a stock, I’d say buy.  Privacy is going to be very big business…because the lack of privacy already is. Peace!  

Ford For(war)d

By
Steve Poppe
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It’s a new world at the Ford Motor Company, or at least it should be.  The recession changed things.  The oil economy is changing things. BP has changed things. It’s time to let the Ford Explorer go. The move would be more than a symbolic gesture to the world that smaller, efficient cars are our future — it would give the company major cred as an agent of change.  I know the new redesigned 2011 Explorer will target 25 miles per gallon on the highway, but those are not exciting mainstream numbers anymore.  And touch screens aren’t a reason to buy a car.

The Ford Escape is your future in this class.  It has a nice design, momentum, and it’s in synch with your other newer smaller offerings, the Focus and Fiesta.

Make the 2011 Explorer your swan song.  A collectors piece for loyalists.  Then put your engineers on to designing the next forward looking new model… one that captures the imagination of the U.S. buying public.  The next Mustang. The next T-bird. A car that will lure back Toyota buyers. You have been playing offense and winning. Keeping the Explorer alive seems like defense. Peace!

Hire The Higher Ups.

By
Steve Poppe
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0

In a recent blog post, Paul Gumbinner, a friend and advertising recruiter, suggested NY unemployment in our sector is around 15%.  At one point I read there are 275,000 advertising jobs in NY which suggests about 40,000 are on the beach.

Between that, reduced budgets and digital and earned media shops rightfully requiring pie, one can safely say there has been a retrenchment in the ad biz.  As hard as it is to say, it has improved the business. The work product of ad agencies is improving; it’s more creative, meaningful, idea-based and friendlier — with the exception of all those ads about hitting on the Super Bowl.  Even the new work out of Kraft Macaroni and Cheese’s new agency Crispin Porter seems more wholesome. Roots! (Perhaps it’s all the bicycles and mountain air in Boulder.) And if you are watching a good TV spot and smiling, there’s a good chance you’re watching something from JWT. Quite a renaissance for them.  

It seems that all the pink slips got rid of many marginal players and a ton of haters.  The latter group can now be found commenting on Adweek and Ad Age posts.  Disruption (sorry Mr. Dru) has given way to heartfelt selling and that’s a good thing.  Money is creeping back into agency pockets and human resources calendars fill up — let’s hope we hire higher up the food chain. Peace.  

Smartphone Apps Flowing Like Mothers Milk.

By
Steve Poppe
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0

Milk Monitor is an application available from the AppStore. It allows iPhone (and possibly iPad) toting moms to tap and record their babies milk consumption. The data can be stored, reviewed and trended at a later date.  Apparently moms like to do this kind of stuff – typically using bits of paper and napkins when recording on the road.  If you have a baby on your shoulder tapping is better than typing.  If you are carrying a smartphone around anyway and recording this data helps – especially for fussy babies — this is a great application. Go iPhone!  Go app developer!

Application development at the smartphone level is like life on another planet.  There are currently 80 trillion apps (JK) for the iPhone today and about 6,000 for the PC (please don’t retweet, I didn’t count).  Now most iPhone apps don’t get used, but that’s not the point.  Some may. Some may help. Some will even save lives. And that’s cool.

Just as Twitter will open new doors for smart marketers, smartphones and their apps will open new rooms for marketers.  The application developers who think like people first and coders second are the ones who will win.  

The developer of Milk Monitor deserves congratulations two times: one for the app, one for the new bouncing baby she’s feeding. Peace!

Can’t We All Just Get Along?

By
Steve Poppe
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0

Here’s the thing: In marketing, part of winning is understanding your competitors’ weaknesses. Some marketers spend time shooting arrows. Others focus on building and presenting strengths — a less overt negative focus.  When I worked at a big NY ad shop with mondo-million dollar budgets, if the client wanted to do a formal acquisition program and use our direct arm, the agency begrudgingly agreed and teamed it up. It wasn’t quite Yankees and Mets — more like Mets and Binghamton Bisons (the farm team.)

As we saunter forth into the digital world we’re seeing more marketing silos grow daily. The silos will come down but it will take a while and a good deal of wealth redistribution in the meantime. Just as media was once siloed (print, TV, radio, OOH) and now better integrated, online and offline will come from one house.  Smart business people recognize this and are trying it out.  Ouch, they say, as the arrows hit them. Other smart business people are going negative, protecting their silos and they’re making money, if not friends. The web is often about removing boundaries. The sooner siloed ad, digital, direct and PR shops get on board, the sooner client market ROI and ROS (return on strategy) will hockey stick and change will really occur.   Peace!

How Stuff Works Online.

By
Steve Poppe
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0

Here’s how retail works.  You build, lease or buy a store, fill it with stuff, promote it and people come and buy its wares.  Or they don’t.

Here’s how TV works.  You build, lease or buy a program, fill it with entertaining or informational stuff, promote it and people come. Or they don’t.

Here’s how the web works. You build, lease or buy a site, fill it with stuff, promote it and people come and buy its wares…if you happen to be selling anything.  Sometimes the web is used to help people decide if they want to buy your stuff, because it’s sold elsewhere.  And other times the web is about entertaining visitors encouraging them to come back so ad revenue allows the site owner to buy stuff.  And sometimes still, a website is created to just simply to impart knowledge, altruism and community. 

That’s the thing about the web — visitors don’t always know if they are on a site to be sold, entertained or informed. Sometimes the builders of websites don’t seem to know either.  And when that happens the sites tend to provide a little bit of each.  And a little bit of each often leads to a lot of none. Fruit cocktail. Tricky stuff.  Focus is your friend.

New Car Smell?

By
Steve Poppe
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0

Joel Ewanich landed at GM with guns blazing.  GM’s new marketing head left a similar job at Nissan without having been there long enough to find the coffee machine. And his first act at General Motors was to replace Campbell-Ewald and Publicis with Goodby Silversten and Partners as Chevrolet’s agency of record.

Many of the snarks are saying “Why not hold a review?” and “He never even met with the old agencies” but the reality is Mr. Ewanich knows Goodby from their time together on Hyundai, be wanted Goodby, and he is in a hurry.  If he wants Goodby, why pretend to put the business up for review and waste everbody’s time and money?  Whether this decision turns out to change the market share for Chevrolet is still to be played out but I’ll give Mr. Ewanich credit for strong leadership. He didn’t vacillate publically or do the politically correct thing — he made a decision and is getting to work.

Goodby is a great shop. It knows consumers.  Gareth Kay was the planning leader at Modernista when Hummer was humming.  I don’t know Mr. Ewanich from Adam and though the Hyundai advertising may not have been crazy memorable, it absolutely delivered solid marketing ideas and results.  This move makes sense to me. But as fast as it was done, it can be undone. We learned that already.  Peace!

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