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The designer of the Apple iPod was recently recognized on the Queen of England's Honor List for his achievement in the field of design. Jonathan Ive was given the distinguished title of Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire
Most Excellent!
No snowboarding today, it just didn't work out.
I did wake up to this view from my balcony.
Damn right it was a good day.
Post have been a bit scarce here for the last few days and my excuse is vacation. I am taking the last week of the year off to use up some days off, so my posting may be a bit irregular.
Anyway, I am enjoying the time off - I read "The Rum Diary" by Hunter S. Thompson yesterday. It is a great story and a book to be read. Also finished up "All Marketers are Liars" by Seth Godin. Another great read.
I am headed up to snowboard tomorrow - Hopefully I will bring back some great pictures.
Happy Holidays!
In a recent post, Seth Godin compares two different types of workout regiments and explains why one is more successful spreading its "idea virus" than the other - even though the more successful one, Crossfit, is almost killing people (people love that!)
The post ties in well with Seth's book "All Marketers Are Liars” which explains that the essence of marketing is the art of telling stories.
Crossfit has a kick ass story. It makes people want to be involved just to be a part of something so hardcore and cool.
Hugh over at gapingvoid has picked his favorite gapingvoid rant of 2005 - Onward, Slush Warriors.
This one strikes a chord with me since my girlfriend works for a big ad agency and I am always wondering what they are doing with all that big brand money. I am sure things get pretty slushy out there.
Not that there is anything wrong with that...
Sony has put out some really great PSP commercials lately that feature hilariously strange cartoons. I think the best is the one with the squirrels – watch it here.
What I really like about the commercial is that they tell you nothing about the product. There are no features, no actual pictures of the product, and there is no description of what the product is.
The agency that developed this ad realized something very important – by creating an entertaining and fun commercial they will be able to avoid boring their core audience and generate a buzz that could lead to new customers down the line.
Think about it. What can you tell a hardcore gamer about the PSP in a 30-second spot that they do not already know? Passionate video gamers know all about the whistles and bells of the PSP and have already made up their mind if they need to purchase one or not. Chances are you will not be able to create a successful 30-second informational sales pitch that will convince an educated video gamer to cough up 250 bucks that they don’t want to spend.
So the core market ends up being entertained. Maybe there is a little bit of attitude branding that will be attached to the PSP name. Good stuff. But what about the people who don’t even know what a PSP is? Isn’t Sony missing out by not telling them about the PSP and what it can do for them?
Not at all.
A consumer who is intrigued by the PSP commercials may hop online and look for a meaning to the commercials. Or they might go out and ask their friends/children/spouse if they know what a PSP is. Because the commercial’s message is so bizarre consumers will want to know what the hell a PSP is and why is like a nut you can play with outside.
Do you see what this causes? The uneducated consumer has started a buzz by trying to find out more about the commercial and the PSP. Whether it is just an online search or a discussion with their coworkers about the commercials, the consumer will be involved in an experience that is caused by the PSP commercial.
Whether they will be interested in buying a PSP when they figure it all out is not really the point. In the end, the consumer will end up with a lot more information than any ad agency could cram into a 30-second spot and an interactive experience too.
Brilliant work!
I am not sure which agency is behind these ads, but I must say I am impressed. I know this is not the first time people have used these concepts to market a product, but it is always impressive when someone pulls it off. Making a creative, buzz generating and truly funny commercial is not an easy thing to do. Most ads that try to be funny usually fall flat.
If you happen to know the ad agency that made these ads, please let me know the name. I want to send them over a box of nuts. The kind they can play with outside.
[Updated - here is the dustball commercial
That's right folks, it looks like we might know where Lynndie England got her practice for Abu Ghraib...
British researchers have found that little girls see Barbie doll torture as an acceptable and "cool" activity.
See the whole story from Forbes here.
Hi, I am Yahoo!. I control one of the most cost effective forms of marketing available. It will give you a better ROI than TV, radio, newspapers, or any of those other boring offline marketing channels. Don’t believe me? What if I can prove it to you? For a nominal fee…
I give props to Yahoo! for launching a new service in partnership with Marketing Management Analytics that will help advertisers measure the effectiveness of both their online and offline marketing efforts. Great move guys. That is why I like my Yahoo! peeps more than those folks over at the Plex – you do things that make good business sense (and you take me snowboarding.)
It always amuses me when I hear stories of executives who suddenly see what a cost effective form of marketing online can be. Like a buddy of mine who works for a big company in the insurance market. His cost per lead from a TV advertisement is $37. From online marketing it is around $10. When he showed this to the old farts who run his company they all had that “ah-ha” moment that online marketers live for.
With Yahoo! having the ability to prove the cost effective nature of online marketing (vs. offline) to companies who are just getting into the online space, they will have control over that “ah-ha” moment.
When that happens, guess who will be there to offer suggestions of how to better spend those marketing dollars?
Yahoo!, I love you guys.
Adrants has compiled its list of the top ten visited stories of 2005.
My personal favorite it "LEGO Get's Pissy About Brand Name." It seems LEGOS are just LEGO, no "S."
If you call LEGO "LEGOS" again, you might end up getting your legs broken by a bunch of guys with yellow heads. Then again, you can pop off their heads with your thumb...
Well, we are one week into our corporate blog over at my day job. Things seem to be going well and I think we have gotten to the point were we are going to promoting it. Not that I will do that here - Marketing Punk and the name of the company who pays my bills will stay quite separate, thank you very much.
Anyway, I ran across this blog post with a section entitled "5 Steps to Launching a Corporate Blog." The steps are:
I think we have points three and four covered pretty well, so I feel good about that. It is good to have support and I think the area we are focusing on, affiliate marketing, is interesting (at least to our target market.)
I am hoping number five, information leaks, are not going to be a huge issue in a company as small as ours. Then again, you never know.
You know, some days the news is just outright funny. My two favorite stories from today are the Static Man and Cheech the Screech.
Enjoy!
Seth Godin has a great interview with e-consultancy discussing the future of online marketing. Some of my favorite questions and answers are:
Q. About 7 years ago you suggested that banner ads would be finished by 2000. Well, we're still seeing them, but paid-search is now king. Is there a place on the web for display advertising?A. I was awfully close to being right, my friend. The value of online banner ads is close to zero. The best display ads are contextual, relevant and interesting. And not banner shaped.
Q. I guess that the majority of online marketers still perceive the web as an acquisition channel, rather than a customer relationship channel. Would you agree?
A. I would agree that they perceive it that way, and of course, they'd be expensively and dangerously wrong
I also found his explanation of his current project, Squidoo, very interesting:
Q. What's Squidoo all about?A. Squidoo lets anyone build a simple, free web page that points to blogs, online stores, maps and other information on a single topic—any topic. Each page can contain insight, bullet points, links, products and pictures, and each page earns royalties for its creator or for charity.
Squidoo leverages the power of personal recommendation. The site will eventually host millions of handmade ‘lenses’, each a focused, useful guide to some area of expertise, some glimpse of the net. Instead of aimlessly poking, a lens lets a user see the big picture—a human being’s big picture, the overview you need to get the meaning of the idea.
I really hope that the Squidoo concept succeeds. While search technology is getting better and better, I see the limitations of algorithmic search result from studying search engine optimization. The concept of passionate humans actually gathering, categorizing and organizing information for each other seems like a much more efficient way to do things in the long run. Not that search is going away, but take this example…
Imagine you are researching the life of Hunter S. Thompson. Would you rather go to Google or Yahoo, type in “Hunter S. Thompson” and then start mucking through the search results or go to a human created page that has links to all of the best information on the Web about Hunter S. Thompson? I am guessing you would prefer the latter, as would I. If someone has already done the difficult work for you, and you can benefit from it, why wouldn’t you take advantage of the situation?
Imagine how many people have done online research on the same subjects and have found the exact same quality, and not so quality, sites. Millions of people are out there gathering information online only to keep it for themselves and eventually discard it. Why not capture all of the effort to reduce the effort of other in the future?
Anyway, Seth is the man. Squidoo - keep on keepin’ on.
We just launched our first business blog at work and I am pretty excited about it. I have a feeling it is going to be a great resource to our target audience, internet affiliates.
Thankfully, my company seems to understand why we are blogging, but a cartoon just posted at gapingvoid.com really made me laugh. So what's blogging's R.O.I.??? Check the cartoon for the answer...
This beautiful site prepares you for life by helping you identify two types of people you run into every day, programming language inventors and serial killers.
Take some time and see if you can tell who is who.
SEO is getting some mainstream press with this Newsweek article about Rand Fishkin, CEO of SEOmoz.
Rand is looking like a true SEO Rockstar in the article photos, posing with his business partner and mother, Gillian.
I think my favorite quote in the whole story has to be:
If search-engine rankings are supposed to represent a kind of democracy—a reflection of what Internet users collectively think is most useful—then search-engine optimizers like Fishkin are the Web's lobbyists.
Hell, I bet Rand is going to get paid like a lobbyist after that article. Congrats Rand!
I ran across SmashMyViper.com on Adrants the other day. It looks like the Million Dollar Homepage clones are coming full force.
The premise of SmashMyViper is that you buy a pixel on this guy’s Web page, and for every 10 x 10 pixel you buy you can put an image, link, and you can do varying degrees of damage to his Viper. Anything from “keying” the car to throwing a brick to smashing the car with a baseball bat.
Great idea, right? I mean not only do you get an ad on his page but you get to break stuff. That has to be a better value proposition than the Million Dollar Homepage.
Well, actually this is one of the most half-baked versions of the Million Dollar concept I have seen so far.
First off, it is not like you are helping out a college kid trying to get through school when you put an ad on SmashMyViper. Who you are helping is some jackass (we will call him Richard Jones) who already has an expensive car and is willing to wreck it to make some money. Yeah, the Web site says that Richard is flat broke, but for some reason I do not get the feeling that Richard really deserves my hard earned money. Call me crazy.
Even better, Richard has decided that the best way to promote his site is to make a short video of him doing burn-outs with a original rap soundtrack song about keying his Viper. I crap you not. Watch the video for yourself and see. If he was going to spend the time filming something he should have taken out the Viper and made his own version of Girls Gone Wild.
Oh, and speaking of Girls Gone Wild, Mr. Jones has also decided that a good way to make his site “sticky” is to band together a group of “Smash My Viper Girls.” My guess is that the girls are either his cousins or were roofied some time this summer on the Jersey shore and convinced that being a “model” for the site is a fabulous career move.
Anyway, looks like the site has raked in a total of $600 so far. I hope Richard keeps his day job. I have a feeling at the end of this he will have a beat up Viper, a few bucks in his pocket to cover costs, and possibly a love child with a “Viper Girl.”
Of course, maybe he will make a million bucks and prove me wrong. I kind of hope he does.
I was in a great brainstorming session with some talented people at work today. I love the energy that comes from a good brainstorm and the way that ideas always become better in groups.
The main topic of our discussion was our entrance into the business blogging world with a small blog that is focused on helping affiliate marketers. The general idea is to give affiliates, those who work with us and those who do not, a place to go and get information about online marketing. While we see a great deal of value in this blog, we see it as a testing ground for our next blogging effort, which will target the business community that we service.
When we started talking about the potential for the business community blog, people started to get really excited, but it was not because of the blog concept itself.
The brainstorming session came alive with other ideas, add-ons, and services that could be coupled with something like a business blog that focused on our customers.
The excitement seemed come from the realization that with a communication form like a blog, our company was stepping into a realm where we were no longer just pushing product to our customers. The blogging concept acts as a virtual stepping stone to changing our business to one that openly communicates with our customers and provides our customers with the information and services that they need to succeed.
We saw that the real benefit to something like a business blog goes well beyond the start of “the conversation.” The idea actually takes us to a place where we are creating new business offerings that both our customers and employees can get excited about. The best part is that the new offerings that we create will no longer be dictated by what we think our customers want but what our customers tell us they want.
Of course all of this new stuff is a way off. We are launching our first business blog on Monday. We all see the blog as a starting point to something bigger and better. And that brings the real excitement.
![](http://static.flickr.com/34/71100997_e0211fffb9.jpg?v=0")
Holy crap! That guy left his coffee on top of his car! I better tell him!
That, ladies and gentlemen is what Starbucks wants you to do.
Reports have surfaced of a man driving around San Francisco with a Starbuck's cup permanently attached to his roof. When concerned citizens frantically try to tell him that he has a coffee cup on his roof, the man says "I know, Happy Holidays from Starbucks!"
So will this sell more double-half-caf-carmel-apple-strudel-machiado-capi-spressos? Who the hell cares. That crap is funny.
Hmmm...I wonder why they don't do that here in Denver...oh yeah, because it is -7 degrees outside. Oh so very cold.
Microsofter Kevin Briody kicks some traditional marketing ass with his post called “Great marketing doesn’t always start with marketers.”
Rock on Kevin. You hit the nail on the head!
The Bregar found this post entitled “The NEW music business model… people actually pay for free stuff!” It seems that a musician named Jane Siberry has turned her Web site into a place where people can come and either download her music for free, or pay for it. The surprising thing, people are paying for the music!
When you go to the music store there are four options to get a song:
Based on the numbers from the Jane Siberry music store, 52% of the people who have downloaded the songs have decided to pay for them. The breakdown of paying people goes something like this:
Definitely check out the post from Acland though, it is a really good one.
This is not new news, but I love the spirit of the site The Million Dollar Homepage…
Do you know what your homepage is worth? Well, Alex Tew, a 21-year-old English entrepreneur, is trying to make his worth ONE MILLION DOLLARS!!!!
Check out the, as of today, $822,000 Dollar Homepage.
The Million Dollar Homepage concept (as it looks like it will be sometime soon) runs on a simple principal – buy pixels for a dollar a piece in 100 pixel blocks, and put whatever image and link you like on it. Pretty straightforward, eh?
The idea itself is pretty simple, but it seems to be working great for Alex who, as the site says, is trying to pay for “university” (that means college in American (: )
Well Alex, I am not sure what the going rate is for university in Jolly-Olde, but I am guessing a million bucks will cover it. You might even have some beer money left over.
Now if you are done kicking yourself for not thinking of the Million Dollar Homepage concept first, you can use this tool to find out what your blog is worth. The numbers are based on Technorati data, so make sure you have some coverage there or you will be worthless. :)
Happy Monday.
It is always nice when someone else is able to diagnose your illnesses.
Back in March, Hugh McLoed over at gapingvoid coined the term “Business Porn.”
What is Business Porn?
Business Porn is just like Ordinary Porn or Real Estate Porn, except instead of it being about the women we wished we could sleep with, or the houses we wish we owned, it's about all those cool, lucrative, exciting jobs and businesses that we wish we had, instead of the normal, tedious, schleppy crap most of us end up doing to pay the bills.
So for all of my peeps who spend their time reading Fast Company, dreaming about the exotic jobs in the back of The Economist, and pouring over stories of entrepreneurs who are blazing trails in the real and virtual world, feel blessed. For today my brothers and sister, your horrible affliction has been given a name.
Now take the next step. Stop dreaming, go fourth, and make your own Business Porn.
John Battelle has an interesting post which points out how Google is starting to get a Microsoft-like reputation for being so big and ambitious. I would have to agree that Google is indeed on its way to getting a bad reputation if they continue to be reckless in their business decisions and treatment of the general public.
Let me begin by saying that I am all for capitalism and ambition. I think that any company that has had the success of Google should be commended. I think Google is doing wonderful things and has developed great products and an amazing corporate culture. They more than deserve all of the success they have had.
Now after saying that, as a person who works in the search field, I think the corporate personality of Google has gone from friendly to cocky over the last year and a half. No longer do I feel that Google is my buddy who is helping me succeed online. And I am sure there are many more people feeling like I do. Which for Google, is going to be a problem.
What annoys me about Google is the collective arrogance that is starting to appear from within the Google Plex. Let me give you an example…
At the Google Dance this year I got into a heated argument with a half-drunk Googler. It all started out when I explained to the Googler that a friend of hers in the AdWords Optimization department did an AdWords optimization for my company and afterwards we lost a large amount of our traffic. It was a fact, it had happened, and it was frustrating as hell for me. After telling my story, the Googler started yelling at me! She told me there was no way that could have happened because her friend was so good at his job. She would not listen to logic, the truth, and when I asked for her help, she refused. In her head there is no way that her friend could do wrong because they “do no evil.” I mean hell, how could they do something wrong? They work at Google!
Another great example is Google’s talking-head, Matt Cutts. Matt’s public persona is becoming less of the smart, nice guy and more the cocky guy who knows more than everyone else. I am sure Matt is not doing it on purpose and I am sure he is a really great guy. I would love to have a chance to sit down with him and talk. But this overall perception is really hurting the company.
The real issue is that when a high profile Googler like Matt gives off the cocky vibe, intentionally or unintentionally, the bad attitude trickles down. If that vibe trickles all the way down to the customer service staff of AdWords, your advertisers are not going to like working with you any more. I know I am at that point right now.
Now, chances are people won’t stop advertising with Google. They are one of the two-and-a-half shows in town (Yahoo is one and MSN is a half right now) for PPC. The problem is when people stop liking your company; they become more critical of you. And when you are as big as Google, the backlash is going to be a bitch.
Ask Bill Gates, I am sure he has a story or two.
Welcome to Marketing Punk. I’m James Omdahl and I am a Denver, Colorado based online marketer and blogger. This blog is a compilation of the things that interest me online and offline. Topics will vary from blogging to search marketing to finding passion in your life to art to pretty much anything else that interests me. Thanks for visiting, come back often, and please take the time to leave a comment and let me know what you think about my posts.
