Pearls From The Orient

My brother recently returned from a stint teaching English in Korea. He described to me a trip he took with his students to a sex-ed museum. He couldn’t explain why this was a school-sanctioned trip. Considering his students were all under the age of 10, I guess it’s just a more tolerant society. The entrance to this musuem was an enormous pair of women’s legs presented as if she was on her knees (wait, it gets better). The door to the museum was…ahem…in between the legs. It was a revolving door. Sadly, I don’t have a picture to prove it. Here’s something for Ma Beeb about the museum (at least I believe it’s the same museum). I won’t editorialize on this matter. It’s really up to personal taste.

I’m Feeling Rather Nauseous

Whether this is a sign of just how desperate the airline industry is for revenue or how advertising has finally crossed the line, US Airways announced today they will be selling ad space on the back of the air-sickness bags that inhabit the seat pockets of every plane.

Slated to start this fall, US Airways is still determining ad rates and targeting companies that would find this medium appealing. The ads could be for anti-motion sickness medication or other products immediately on the mind of someone when they reach for one of the bags. But Mr. Gee will look for a wide range of product advertisements to put on its bags. Resisting the temptation to revert to frat boy barf jokes, lets take a look at the pros and cons of this:

Pros –

• Captive Audience that’s generally desperate for stimulation.
• New medium sure to get some early attention.

Cons –

• Difficult to ensure product exposure. Those seat pockets are stuffed with airline magazines, safety cards and that’s before the passengers get there and fill them up with their own goodies.
• Negative association – Other than the motion sickness medicine folks, is this really how companies want their products perceived?
• Spoilage (a kinder, gentler frat boy barf joke).

If the airlines really want to capture new ad revenue, what about ads on the toilet doors (there’s inevitably a line and the model has already proven viable)? Or pilot announcements brought to you by Allstate (you’re in good hands)? I see some airlines have already partnered with hospitality/restaurant companies for their inflight meals. Couldn’t Sony provide the inflight earphones? Or perhaps the itchy and uncomfortable airline blankets and pillows could be improved with some Downy? If airlines really want to get into in-flight advertising, there are plenty of ways to go about it. What they’ve come up with just seems a bit

Tags: Marketing

1 Second Spots

An article in this weekend’s Toronto Star talks about the invention of a new method of advertising. Simply put, the concept involves one second ads. The time it takes the Road Runner to repeat its entire vocabulary is the same increment for which one radio chain is hoping to create ads – perhaps embedded right in your favourite song. The article goes on to explain how Clear Channel Communications is exploring ways to create ads that fit right in between two songs or even right in the middle of them to counter consumer disinterest in, and disengagement from, more conventional forms of advertising.

Both sides of the argument are explored. Those for arguing that the innovative approach will capture attention without being intrusive; those against arguing that not only is this intrusive but one second is not enough time to communicate a meaningful message for anything other than the most widely recognized brands. The article cites demo spots that have been created for McDonalds (‘I’m loving it’) and BMW for the Mini Cooper (simply a voice saying ‘MINI’).

I am inclined to give this a chance. It’s certainly innovative, though I agree with the impact counter-argument. I can really only think of the Intel mnemonic as an example of current advertising that could be readily converted to this approach. I also wonder whether consumers will be able to make the connection (as an aside, who else knows that the TTC subway door chime is actually the first three notes from the theme of Sesame Street?). This is going to be thump-you-over-the-head kind advertising. Initially favourable impressions will quickly sour if the advertising: a) isn’t creative and unique; b) interrupts the songs as they’ve suggested they may do; c) doesn’t capture brand identities in a compelling way. I’m really eager to see how this evolves….

Tags: Marketing, Advertising, Innovation

The Measure Of The Media

During a recent meeting with the head of one of Canada’s largest media buying agencies, the discussion turned to the topic of media measurement. We noted that the work of media agencies is part art and part science. The art is the skill of matching media with the advertiser and its brand(s) & the science is the quantitative research that now goes into understanding the audience that the media will reach. Greater attention is being paid to demographics and psychographics.

The media landscape is being littered with new providers and channels (just look at the social media explosion as one example). The Canadian Media Directors Council (CMDC) exists to “advance the effectiveness of media advertising in Canada.” The CMDC publishes an annual handbook (it’s packaged with Marketing) and provides a snapshot of media audiences and reach. It’s a good package, but is really more for marketers to understand the media landscape rather than a detailed research tool for the industry. What is does accomplish is to give marketers and media agencies a benchmark for accountability.

The advertising and public relations industries are under increasing pressure to be accountable for their activities – to demonstrate how they are contributing to a company’s bottom line. The Public Relations industry has long been able to side-step these concerns through measurement like media equivalency (determining how much a news story would be worth if it were advertising space) and by referring to soft data like reputation and image which is difficult to quantify. Plus most marketers, and certainly the finance folks that give them their budgets, don’t understand exactly what PR people do. But ad equivalency is inelegant at best and inaccurate at worst (it doesn’t, for example, take into account the tone of an article) and deferring to qualitative measures like reputation and awareness are really a cop-out with today’s technology.

Thankfully, and I’m sure in no small part due to the pressure business managers were putting on marketers and these marketers were putting on their agencies, the PR community has responded to this issue. The Canadian Public Relations Society and International Association of Business Communicators have partnered with industry practioners and a few companies that do this kind of thing, to develop a media relations measurement tool. There’s been a lot of buzz about this in the industry (the PR links on the side will take to blogs where there’s been much discussion on the subject). I haven’t tested this tool, but the overall response seems positive. Though discussions with industry people suggest they acknowledge there are limitations. But it’s a step in the right direction and should be applauded. Now the art of PR can have its own scientific revolution.

Tags: Media, Marketing, PR, Measurement

You’ve Got Voicemail

I recently received a voicemail from the good people at Ontario Consumer Credit Assistance (OCCA). They were calling to extend me an offer of a zero interest Mastercard. Anyone over 16 was pre-approved. They also offered me a free financial consultation having already helped 1000’s with their credit issues. They closed by wishing me a ‘stress-free day.’ Though kind of them, this did not make for a stress-free day.

I began wondering if they knew something I didn’t about my credit history. How can they offer a zero-interest credit card? Is this the kind of thing that a 16yr old should have? More troubling, however, was the fact that they didn’t call me directly to convey this important information. Nor did they call my home line. This message magically appeared on my cell phone’s voice mail. Now I’ve received these messages before from my cell phone provider. Generally, they tell me about exciting new deals or features they are offering.

This is the first instance I can recall where an outside organization imbedded itself in my voice mail. I began to wonder whether this type of activity is covered by the ‘ Do Not Call‘ legislation that is stumbling towards reality. A quick review suggests it isn’t. Perhaps I shouldn’t be surprised. I wasn’t called or faxed. I was just voice mailed. Is this a savvy marketer staying ahead of the curve? By the look of their website, I’d say no.

Apart from being rather intrusive, I have concerns that my cell phone provider is allowing this to happen. Is this covered in the terms of my service – can they just dump ads onto my phone without my permission (of course, I’ve long since chucked my contract)? I also question the value of this as a marketing tactic. They clearly haven’t done their research. I already have more credit cards than I need. I don’t have credit issues (that I know of). And I’m certainly not the type to respond well to invasive and impersonal mass marketing like this.

Technology is allowing the marketing industry and particular CRM to become much more personalized (good article in the June 5 Marketing on this – sadly you need a password/account to view it online). To build a relationship and sell me something you really need to understand who I am, what I need, what I look for in a product and what my buying triggers are. I’d urge the CCCA to go back to school before they do this again (and urge the unnamed cell phone company to re-evaluate who they do business with).

Tags: Marketing

2b Or Not 2B

A linguistics professor at the American University in Washington D.C has been studying the effect that e-mail, IM, SMS, and search engines are having on English. Naomi Baron’s Alphabet to Email: How written English has evolved and where it’s going explores the phenomena of web-speak – the abbreviations, symbols, icons, emoticons that we use online – and suggests, among other things, that technology and social factors (ex. primary education that sidelines grammar instruction) have allowed this linguistic offshoot to sprout.

The article I read reviewing Baron’s book also highlights other commentators and suggests that while younger generations embrace these shortcuts, there are really only a handful that are used widely and frequently. Online dialects are essentially slang and will never be widely adopted and influence a fundamental shift in the English language. This zip-filed lexicon suffers from the shallowness of what it expresses. The most common abbreviations represent blinks of the eye or mind. I think this is an interesting area of study. Shortcode language is our input into this media. But not the only one. Blogging, podcasting, rich media creative, anything Web 2.0 is designed to increase the content we are able to input/access/receive online. But here we are talking about multi-media. Does a hyperlinked word in a blog represent just the word we are reading in the context of that sentence or is it more because it functions as a conduit to another stream of information? What if it links to an audio or video file?

English does expand to accommodate this progress. I would be interested to know how many words are added vs. how many fall into functional disuse. Are we expanding or merely replace our modes of expression? And does one medium have greater weight than others (is a picture worth 1000 words)? Last year, a British professor translated the works of Shakespeare and Dickens into text messages to help students study for their exams. (need realPlayer)

Tags: Language, Social Media

Its All Greek To Me

I recently came across a posting by Boyd Neil on Hill & Knowlton‘s corporate blog. Boyd is the VP of their corporate communications practice and is arguing that social media is facing a language problem. The problem (for him and indeed me) is that social media mavens have created a new lexicon to describe their technology and activities. As a result,

“The language of many who are engaged and passionate about social media has become increasingly insular, self-referential and, dare I say it, almost cultish. The language of Web 2.0 is unnecessarily obscure…almost as if some bloggers who blog about blogging are satisfied just to speak to one another about it, and not proselytize in an idiom that actually explains and teaches.”Rather than harp on with a trite Tower of Babel reference (oops), I prefer to look at this in very practical terms. Web 2.0 has tremendous potential to revolutionize human communication. Indeed, an argument could be made that it already has. But it is in danger of becoming bogged down by a secret society mentality where knowledge and power is the exclusive domain of the enlightened. I share Boyd’s frustration.

Being new to the social media experiment, I am aware that I face a learning curve. I feel like a tourist armed with a phrase book – barely able to order a coffee without tripping over myself. I suppose the largest issue is that, as Boyd rightly points out, social media practitioners are in danger of scaring away the mainstream with this linguistic wall they have erected. I doubt whether this is deliberate or even if those who would be found guilty are even conscious of their faults. But the result is the same – a (growing?) perception that the technology is inaccessible, the practitioners are protectionist and it’s just better left to the techies and computer geeks. Encouraging signs can be found in the adoption rates among younger people and easy to use tools like this site. It may be troubling for companies who wish to remain relevant but are confused by the medium and its implications (I suppose this is part of the problem for Boyd), but there are certainly many out there who are willing to break through the barriers.

Language is somewhat unique in that it is both media and medium. It is the content and the delivery mechanism. But it needs to be accessible to be relevant, understood and influential. Language is only as good as the ways in which we can effectively use it and there are whole industries (PR, marketing, advertising) that try figure out the best ways to do this, and individuals who leverage language professionally (politicians, lawyers, and those who work in the industries mentioned). I’ll end by echoing Boyd’s call for the social media vanguard to become less self-referential and more accessible. This is the road forward for realizing the full potential and influence of Web 2.0

Tags: Social Media, PR, Language

News Byte

A philosopher, geneticist and farmer have concluded that the egg definitely came before the chicken. Now if we can just get a conclusive answer why the chicken crossed the road?

Tags: News

A Show Of Hands

I just opted-in to the national census. Since the last census in 2001, Statistics Canada has developed an online survey tool. There’s nothing groundbreaking in the technology – simple multiple choice and fill in the blank forms. But while sluggish beurocracy stains many government functions,this process was simple and quick. It took 20 minutes at best to answer questions that would have taken twice that time (if I was lucky) to fill out on the paper forms.

I’m not sure how common online census taking is globally. Some quick surfing suggests that neither Britain nor the U.S. collect census data through the web.

Canada seems to be doing something rather unique. I’m inclined to applaud this move. If the government is there to serve the needs of the people then part of its mandate includes delivering services in the most efficient way possible.

The government marketing machine is in full force. There has been print, tv, radio, online, and out of home (transit) advertising. The early stages of the campaign featured ads threatening an assault of pesky census takers if we didn’t comply. Focus groups hated preliminary concepts that concerned privacy and the legal requirment to participate. Sadly, we’ve been thudded on the head with those at the tail end of this campaign.

The census advertising was a little heavy handed, but it appears by the book and couldn’t help be noticed. Fittingly, the trial of Gomery inquiry villain Chuck Guite heard testimony (link tip – click on the ‘people’ link and then scroll up to the next story) last week that the work Groupaction did for the sponsorship program wouldn’t pass a marketing 101 class.

A First Time For Everything

After very little consideration, I’ve decided it’s time to get caught up in the social media movement. I won’t claim to understand it (and would be suspicious of anyone who says they really do), but there’s no denying it’s here to stay and is only getting going.

I suppose the right thing to do for a first post is to set out the scope of the blog. I know there’s a description on the side, but 500 characters is a tad limiting.

If I have an intent for this blog, it’s to give me an outlet for thoughts, ideas, ruminations, observations, frustrations, consternation, machination and even some optimism on the use and abuse of media.

I’m hardly an expert (though the one useful thing about the description is that it does show I’ve dipped a toe into the industry) but I do spend a lot of time surrounded by it, thinking about it and even making some money from it (full disclosure).

I don’t take myself or the world around me too seriously. I find that helps to keep things in perspective.

I will be passionate about certain things & utterly detached from others. I won’t claim to be balanced all the time – we all have our biases – but I will try to consider both sides of an issue.

I may contradict myself at times. But I don’t see this as a problem. If we didn’t change our opinions from time to time, we’d be boring.

I’ll also work at getting better at the blogger etiquette. I’m somewhat sheepish that this post doesn’t contain a single hyperlink.

Oh well. Next time.