BlogSat

There are times while reading the Economist , that I've felt like getting up and cheering. That's right. Standing up, fist-pumping with my lips pursed determinedly and going "oh, yeah." (Look at yon baby pic attached.) Yes, I know I'd look ridiculous. I've wondered why, and my answer was generally because the magazine consistently says smart things with solid reporting and great insights I often agree with a lot of their views and analysis their sense of humor and whimsy (oh, its there!) works for me. I'd always believed that the main reason the magazine was able to elicit this response was because they often took a stand - not the writers - the magazine. Articles back people, or condemn policy, or make recommendations without equivocating. They always phrase it as "This magazine supports..." or "The Economist strongly condemns..." or "We affirm that .." But watching the Jack Dorsey Golden Gate bridge talk made me realize ho...

Increasingly, Google does some truly delightful marketing. :) I got these in the mail today: I thought this was cool! It was unexpected and delighted me - always something good to do to your users. Compliments to the eBooks folks who came up with this! If it were another company, I might complain that I don't read physical books as much anymore. :( even when I do, and despite years of my mother telling me to, I fold the page instead of using a bookmark. I suspect I'm not alone. the eBook store doesn't even sell physical books and by their very nature .... Bookmarks are not seen by others - the automatic evangelizing of the product doesn't happen. Sending this out will make people momentarily happy (Good!!), some like me will blog about it cos they're excited and create buzz (also good!!) but it ends there. Stickers are great for that viral push - especially if people put them on their tablets and phones and laptops (y'know on which they read those eBooks we just...

Phone 7 released today in NYC , and it rained (there's a "the Gods wept", or worse, joke in there somewhere.) Sorry, too easy. Jokes apart, the demos look pretty slick and I'm going to try to find the time to go into a store to check out some of the phones. Microsoft definitely knows how to do great launches. However one of the best parts of the launch is the ad below: both the premise and the execution by their ad agency (CP+B) . However, something seemed vaguely familiar about the ads. Looking back, the Bing ads follow a similar pattern - again great premise and great execution, and based on the same template: there's a problem, which is ruining everyone's life, and this product solves it. Its Marketing 101 really. Oh and also, we're smart enough to make the story funny. However, here's why the Bing ads didn't work: they tried to position Bing as solution to a chronic problem (" Search overload ") but the problem doesn't real...

A long, long time ago as an 19-ish-year old undergraduate student looking for sponsorship from companies for an event we were putting on, I was wrapping up a conversation with a Marketing Head from a local software company. They were going to be a sponsor the event, and as part of that have a recruiting/marketing booth that a few students were going to volunteer at. His parting comment; he looked me straight in the eye and said "Let's make sure there are a couple of pretty girls at our booth." I was caught by surprise, and was simultaneously annoyed (for obvious reasons) and grudgingly admiring (the man knew his audience.) There's nothing new or even novel about this. From time immemorial, its a tactic that's been applied to most obviously to cars, guns .... basically anything that you want us guys to buy. Internet banner advertising is all about trying to find a way to get the users attention through great copy and content/images/flash; and in a sad commentary o...

Promotions work; they're a great way to close that on-the-fence customer and differentiate your product. This one below (50 songs on emusic.com with a pretty cheap broom) was... shall we say unexpected. :) Call me silly, but I actually think its a pretty slick move by the marketing folks at both the broom company and eMusic, assuming it was relatively low-effort to execute on. Brooms are as close to a commodity as you can get (even the shiny, yellow one that I bought.) And eMusic is one of a few underdogs in the online music space. You need to take any the little wins that may be available. Anecdotally, I'm not sure how much the eMusic promo swung me in the direction of buying the broom, but it didn't hurt.:)

Interesting... More from Engadget here . I haven't really seen the phone that's being advertised (despite working at Google :)) and while I like the idea of a strong Android-based competitor to the iPhone, I'm always wary of positioning a product as something that is "better than... " or "in opposition to... " If you compete on (and even better) some features, but don't measure up on others (like usability, aesthetics etc.) you're going to take a beating. :) Also the "Droid does" line and horror-movie music at the end is clearly designed to appeal to a young, male, techy demographic. That's probably a pretty sound segmentation/marketing bet given the product, but its still impressive to see any phone company bet like that. :)

Woohoo, example of how competition benefits consumers, but also why competing on price is dangerous (especially when you're sitting on piles of cash!) C'mon Walmart! Lower the price one more time! :) From this SeekingAlpha article First blow: (10/14 - in the am) - Wal-mart announces they will offer 10 pre-release hard covers for $10. Walmart.com CEO Raul Vazquez is quoted as saying: "If there's going to be a 'Wal-Mart of the Web', it is going to be Walmart.com. Our goal is to be the biggest and most visited retail Web site." in this WSJ piece. Second blow: (10/14 pm ) - Amazon counters Wal-mart with $10 on each books and of course free shipping for Prime/$25 super saver. Third blow: (10/15 in the am) - Wal-mart lowers prices again to $9 Fourth blow: (10/15 hours later) - Amazon matches the $9 price target.

I love examples of being delighted by a service or product. This mostly happens when the service goes above and beyond and helps you do something much faster than you expected or gives you something you did not expect. I just picked up new spectacle frames about a month ago and here's what my optometry store sent me. Inside was a handwritten note by the doctor. You bet I'll take my business there the next time.:)

Great creative below that someone at work pointed out. I saw a similar, slightly less integrated ad running on Imeem today as well.

I saw two examples in good design today: HP Retail site. When a product makes it much easier for you to do something than you expected (in the process delighting you!) that's good design! Simple lesson from HPs retail site: When I went back to the site, I did think about checking out a printer I'd seen earlier and right there (well-placed on the right towards the middle of the screen) the site made it easier for me to do so. Good for business; good for the user. Gilt Groupe. The illusion of scarcity is a great way to make people feel like they're getting something special. Today when I wanted to test this retail site, they made me sign up and get on a wait list. Tastefully, getting back to me a letting me know within a day (just quick enough so that I don't lose interest) that I'd been "selected" to join. In general I'd have expected to be annoyed by the pretentiousness, but given the positioning of the site (secret discounts on high-end retail) my...

Hmmm....I'm a fan of good acting and good marketing and good advertisements...which is why everything is this ad from Microsoft makes me cringe. Its not a terrible idea in itself...I guess. Well, its a pretty terrible idea actually, but the execution is atrocious. The ad is badly conceived, horribly scripted, and the acting is so fake it makes the worst Bollywood melodramas seem understated. Yikes!

Ok. I've been shown Google ads for Chrome a bunch of times, even though I use the browser. I think that's a wasted ad, but I understand... However, I feel like being shown an AFV ad for YouTube while watching a video on YouTube (also, I didn't know we were doing ads for YouTube on the GCN . :) ), seems like a waste; Google lost the opportunity to show a better ad there. (Picture below)

I knew it would finally take something incredibly dumb to get me blogging again....and so here's something incredibly dumb. :) An Israeli defense firm apparently commissioned the video below as part of a marketing strategy. Yikes...

One of the more interesting decisions that the Chicago GSB ( oops Chicago Booth ) Marketing team made when I was in business school, was to well...actually market the school's full-time MBA program via very traditional magazine and online ads. In fact, I could seldom visit LinkedIn or Businessweek without seeing the ad. Top-tier schools weren't doing this for their full-time programs (the logic being they didn't need to be marketed.) So it was unusual when Chicago started doing this, but it seemed to be well received, and ulitmately successful. Here's some more on it. I loved the message the school had and the tone the ads struck. Clearly, it was a matter of time before other schools adopted this strategy, and the first I've seen is from the school just a few miles away. I have one problem with this ad. Its bad....its clearly inspired by Chicago's message, but its just much cheesier and cliched. And the creative...yuck! C'mon Kellogg...marketing is suppose...

Once again, the student of business in me is going "wow" , the student of life in me is going "really?" For reasons too personally confusing to get into, I started watching the Teen Choice Awards. Don't worry, I tore myself away after about an hour after convincing myself this was not age-appropriate behavior, and after all the teenage screaming started to get jarring. Also, I was multi-tasking at that time, so it wasn't thaat bad!:) Anyway, the genius of Murdoch's minions was to come up with an award for the best celebrity MySpace page (" Choice MySpacer "....really) The business gurus may sneer, but there _were_ thousands of teenagers screaming. Think about it; the Teen Choice Awards (and by implication teens and all the celebrities nominated) were endorsing one particular social networking site on a national broadcast. Now that's good marketing. I don't know how effective it'll be, but it certainly can't hurt. In general, th...

The only truly successful subscription-based online news service I know of is the Wall Street Journal I grew addicted to the Journal over a summer at b-school, and got the student subscription for my final year. I didn't renew the subscription, and then kinda waited to see if after the controversial acquisition they'd drop subscription on the site as Murdoch had hinted. They didn't; and so a few weeks ago after getting only the first paragraph of an article I really wanted to finish, I cracked and subscribed. I decided not to get the paper delivered though (just the online subscription.) The idea of more paper to get rid of around the house is scary I'm mildly annoyed that I had to spend some money to do it, but I'm really, really glad that clearly the WSJ has decided to stick with the subscription/paid-for model. I've said this before, but I do think that the whole " Content wants to be free " mantra and the idea of building distribution believing ad...

If I don't get distracted or busy, this should be the first in a short series of posts about stuff I learnt and/or enjoyed at the Google Faculty UnConference . The conference was a small gathering and had tons of breakout sessions and one keynote by Prof. Mohan Sawhney , which for me was one of the most enjoyable parts of the conference. Prof. Sawhney had some excellent ideas and structures, and was extremely entertaining to boot. I'll try to go through, and comment on some of the points he made. I'll start with the comedy: On choosing to speak without PowerPoint: "PowerPoint is a good crutch, but once you learn to walk you need to throw it away." Early efforts with brand marketing trying to use social networking: "It was a lot like teenage sex. Everyone had heard about it, nobody was really doing it, thought that everyone else was doing it, and when a few of them tried it, it was really,really bad." His contention was that branding (or rather marketers...

GigaOm post on TipJoy . Me likey: two powerful ideas I've always been bullish about, and sad no one's done them quite right (or got them to work) yet: Micropayments and Voluntary Payments on the Internet I like their UI and will try their widget if I ever get around to re-doing my blog like I once planned to. :) Do you think this works?

I watched a lot of the Speed Racer cartoons when I was growing up, so I made sure that I caught the movie on the first-day. I really liked it, but I think more because it kept reminding me of how much I absolutely loved the trailer than anything else. Its not a bad movie, but you'll truly enjoy it only if you were a fan of the show. Only then will the theme music , the demo of the Mach 5 features , the Rex Racer flashbacks not just be cheesy bits that work for kids, but goose-pimple inducing moments. That's why I think its absolutely brilliant that 49 episodes of the Speed Racer cartoon are on Hulu , and both they and the studio did a smart cross-promotion gig by putting them on the landing page on the first day. I'm surprised Hulu didn't do some better online ad buys to direct traffic to the site though....

Just noticed something.... Obama below didn't say , "clips on TV and the Internet." He said "clips on TV and YouTube." :)