The land grab is officially starting. For the first time since the popularization of the Internet, the big news today is that ICANN is opening up the ability for the creation of new suffixes that come after the dot, such as .com or .org. The open application process lets any organization apply to be the manager of a new top level domain (TLD) and applications are expected for everything from categories and industries like .ngo (for charities and nonprofits) or .city (for cities). In addition, of the over 2000 applications expected (despite the $185,000 application fee), more than 2/3rds will expected to be brands who are registering their own brand out of fear of cybersquatting.
This may not matter as much as many marketers and brands think it will. In fact, here are five big reasons why as of right now this is an overhyped development in technology:
1. History hasn't been kind to TLDs.
Wouldn't it be great if you were in the travel industry to be able to signify your site with a .travel domain name? Or for career sites to use .jobs? Or museums to use .museum? Well, all of those top level domains already exist. How often have you navigated to a site that uses any of them? New TLDs don't matter until people's behaviour starts to change for using them.
2. Any changes are years away.
The application process will be open for the next three months, and then will close. From that point, experts are predicting that it will be at least another year or two before ICANN is able to decide which of the TLDs are approved. The most obvious proof that this process will take years? There are a bunch of new consulting companies popping up as experts who can smell money to be made in the interim.
3. Categories will require a shakeout.
When tags started becoming popular to describe content online, it was seen as great news. Now you could describe content in a way that would index it automatically. The only problem is that people use different words. Some people call a retail place a shop and some call it a store. Will more people use .shop or .store? How about .bazaar or .boutique? Until there is a single word, a TLD for a category really won't matter.
4. Google is still the kingmaker.
What most people are forgetting in all the hype is that a TLD really won't matter at all unless almight Google decides to list it in search results. So which TLDs get approved matter less than which ones Google chooses to index as part of their regular search results.
5. The web is now global.
In the early days of the web, .com (short for communications) was ok because the vast majority of sites were in English. Today the web is a different place. So TLDs that are in English may not see wide adoption globally. And different countries may use different TLDs. So the truly global TLDs like .com or .org may be few and far between ... and they may not be in English at all.
The fact that most retailers use the term "doorbuster" to describe their best deals from this weekend should tell you everything you need to know about the frenzied few days of retail activity that traditionally follows Thanksgiving day in America. Despite futile protests from lots of unfortunate retail workers who had to give up parts of their holiday, stores opened earlier on Thursday night for "Black Friday" and tried hard to capitalize on the extended hours to sell more stuff at deeply discounted prices.
Today the weekend is extended into the invented "Cyber Monday" where shoppers retreat into their homes or offices for another day of deal seeking. Amidst the excitement, some brands found great ways to stand out while others focused on the meaningless or insulting to try and capture attention. Here are just a few that stood out to me as a consumer and marketer watching the frenzy unfold:
BEST - Best Buy And The $199 TV
In terms of pre-buzz, Best Buy had the lion's share thanks to their hottest deal - a Sharp 42 inch HDTV for only $199. People waited all night to pick up one, and before you immediately criticize them - think of it in financial terms. If you have to wait for 12 hours to buy a TV that you can save about $600 on, you're effectively getting "paid" $50 an hour. It's strange reasoning, but certainly enough to keep someone in line to get a high value item - and enough to get lots of attention for Best Buy.
BEST - Virgin America and GiltCity.com Let You Name A Plane
It is wonderfully ironic that one of the best and most talked about deals of CyberMonday was for an offer that almost no one would ever actually buy. Virgin America partnered with Gilt City to offer up a plane for a charter flight for "you and 146 of your closest friends" for the small fee of $60,000. As a side benefit, you would get to name the flight as well. Seems like the perfect ready made publicity stunt for a small or medium sized business that could afford the fee to go after.
BEST - Dyson Special Deals
If you own a Dyson (which I do), you are usually part of a cult of believers ready to talk about the superiority of Dyson vacuums to anyone who will listen. You probably also know that they rarely come on sale, so when Dyson launched their special Cyber Monday deals, everything about it seems limited. There is an hourly countdown on their landing page. All of it is geared towards offering a sense of urgency. The promotional message and strategy is clear and simple: buy that new Dyson you have had your eye on TODAY (and in the next eleven hours) or you'll miss your shot.
WORST - Kohl's Rebecca
It may not be the greatest marketing strategy to remake a song that most people already thought was super annoying into a TV spot ... but it wasn't the song that made this spot stand out as much as the attitude it promotes. The lead actor does a great job portraying the kind of person you would hate to be in the same room with - she pushes an old lady out of the way to get into the store, grabs merchandise out of a fellow shopper's cart and seems only concerned about herself. You only hope their consumers were actually more well behaved on Black Friday night.
WORST - Motorola Droid Razr
Running almost nonstop during NFL games for the past several weeks, Motorola has created a brilliantly meaningless campaign for the new Droid Razr. Promising that "thin is no longer frail" and sharing that this phone is "too powerful to fall into the wrong hands" - the entire ad focuses on what some research must have shown would be the only things people care about in phones: that they are thin and light. While other phones promote the interface or what you can do with it, the Droid Razr is super thin and powerful in some indescribable way. I'm sure it would be great if you are in a Tron-style boomerang battle with a bad guy, but slightly confusing as a killer feature for a phone. I only hope Lex Luthor doesn't get his hands on this phone. I'm pretty sure those would be the "wrong hands."
WORST - Crazy Target Lady
The underlying message from the series of spots showing an overly excited crazy lady "training" for Black Friday at Target as if it were a marathon seems clear: you have to be sad, lonely and slightly crazy to be super excited about Black Friday. I have never been a fan of this sort of talking down to your customer or turning them into a parody. There are plenty of people who did stay up late and go into Target at midnight because they wanted to get some great deals and love the store. Does Target really need to make fun of them or turn them into crazy caricatures in a national TV spot? People usually have a hard time appreciating humor when it comes at their expense.
Clearly the list for best and worst could go on and on. What other retailers created memorable campaigns for better or worse? Let me know in a comment or tweet about them with the hashtag #cybermondaymarketing or #blackfridaymarketing.
Yesterday evening the Green Bay Packers won their ninth game of the NFL football season after winning the Super Bowl last year. They are the only undefeated team in the NFL and their quarterback, Aaron Rodgers managed a near perfect rating on the scale used to rate quarterback performance. It was the ninth straight game where he managed a rating above 100.0 - a recordmaking performance by football standards and took another step towards securing his place among the great NFL quarterbacks in history.
The man he succeeded, Brett Favre, was also on that list ... bringing back memories of a similar feat more than a decade ago where a quarterback named Steve Young took over from legendary San Francisco 49ers quarterback Joe Montana and led the 49ers to similar success. They are both great stories for football fans, but the bigger question anyone might wonder is what made both of these guys so good that they could overcome the considerable shadows of their immediate predecessors?
According to a recent article published in Pyschology Today, it might have something to do with a factor known as "mental practice." In a study with medical students, researchers found that students who had 30 minutes of guided physical practice on a new procedure followed by either 30 minutes more practice independently, or 30 minutes of "mental practice" performed equally well on tasks. In fact, one researcher even noted that "mental rehearsal can be even better than physical practice because it activates more abstract neural representations of physical skills (with less specific detail about the muscles used)."
Both Steve Young and Aaron Rodgers spent time on the sidelines watching two of the greatest quarterbacks in NFL history. They worked with them and learned from them. Most importantly, when their respective chances came to perform, they seized them. Of course if this were a perfect explanation, then any quarterback who plays backup to a legend would emerge as well - but they usually don't. Still, the idea of the importance of mental practice is one that can apply far beyond football.
Some of the greatest public speakers actively despise actual rehearsals. Instead they would rather "practice" in their minds. Champions of mental games such as professional poker, or spelling bees, or even TV game shows like Jeopardy seem to use a similar type of technique. The point is, when we think of practicing or rehearsing, we generally think of real life work. And that work is still important. Sometimes, though, the most important thing to improve performance might be more mental practice instead. In other words, there may be value in sitting on the sidelines even though it doesn't seem like it.
As many media outlets have reported over the weekend, yesterday Ashton Kutcher (the actor and first celebrity to hit 1 million followers on Twitter), walked past a television and saw that the longtime coach of the football team from Penn State University had been fired. As an alum of a rival school, he immediately tweeted about the firing:
The only problem with his rapid response was that it was only in reaction to a part of the story. As Kutcher later learned, the coach (Joe Paterno) had actually been fired over a scandal with one of his coaching assistants and child abuse. He quickly shut down his Twitter account, and then restarted it and apologized for his misinformed tweet ... but the damage had already been done. He had unintentionally blasted out to his 8 million followers a mistake that demonstrated his disconnection from all the overblown media attention that the scandal had been receiving over the past week.
“While I feel that running this feed myself gives me a closer relationship to my friends and fans I've come to realize that it has grown into more than a fun tool to communicate with people. While I will continue to express myself through @Aplusk, I'm going to turn the management of the feed over to my team at Katalyst as a secondary editorial measure, to ensure the quality of its content.”
Could it be that the real problem with something like Twitter comes from the fact that you have an individually controlled media platform that (in theory) could reach more than 8 million followers, without any editorial filter? As Ashton notes in his post, when an audience grows to that size, it may just become too much for a single person to handle.
Ultimately, his experience perfectly illustrates the exact same problem facing any brand which is actively using social media to communicate with their customers. At some point it becomes too much for one person to handle and you need to scale your team. I had an interesting thought about this exact problem this weekend as I went to see the new Harold and Kumar movie. There was a little girl cast in the movie, and the end credits showed that her character was played by a set of triplets. Using twins or triplets in kids roles for movies is nothing new, and it makes a lot of sense. One kid gets tired, you can just swap another one in since they all look the same.
What if we thought about scaling social media along the same lines? Not to create a group of robots who can't think for themselves, but to have a team of people who all work so seamlessly together that the customers can't tell the difference. The trick to doing this well, of course, is to not suck all the personality from your people in an effort to make them appear outwardly the same. It can be done through a combination of great training and empowering your people - but it is still rare to see.
In the meantime, desperate for an easier option, Ashton Kutcher promises to do the same thing that brands are doing ... outsourcing the management of his voice and hoping for a better result.
Last year when I spoke at a TEDx conference on reinventing marketing, I asked what I thought at the time was a relatively innocent question: "how many people in the audience feel that marketing is adding something positive to the world around them?" Of the few hands that went up, the majority came from people in marketing ... underscoring a gulf that has exponentially multipled in the 16 months since that talk. Today people around the world are launching full occupying demonstrations against big corporate brands and new research points to the US as the only country to see trust in all institutions decline from 2010 to 2011. The bottom line is we are fully into a modern believability crisis.
And it is not just a crisis for marketing people either. When we live in a world where people become skeptical of everything around them and wary of any type of manipulation, we all lose. Society itself becomes a tougher place to interact with others and survive in. People only consume news they agree with, compromise is seen as surrender and the bickering of politicians becomes just a precursor to a similar toxic dissent which may start to invade the rest of our lives and interactions.
If this seems like a doomsday scenario, the good news is that this week signs of hope emerged from some very unexpected places:
Though certainly colored by politics, Bill Clinton's new book Back To Work was profiled in yesterday's New York Times. In the review, reporter Michiko Kakutani says that Clinton "serves up a succinct common-sense argument for why America needs a strong national government, why both spending cuts and increased tax revenues are necessary for addressing the debt problem."
Also this week, communications agency Havas Media released a global study which showed that "only 20% of brands have a notable positive impact on our sense of wellbeing and quality of life." In the research which polled 50,000 people in 14 countries, they found that "most people would not care if 70% of brands ceased to exist (and in the US alone this number goes up to 82%)."
In a related point, they found that "nearly 85% of consumers worldwide expect companies to become actively involved in solving these issues (an increase of 15% from 2010)." The underlying message of the research is that companies must find a way to stand for more than just the products they make. The impact they have on the world around them is becoming increasingly important to increasing customer loyalty.
Today I am speaking and participating in BrandsConf, a conference all about how brands can rediscover their humanity. More than two dozen speakers will share their thoughts in short bursts of 5 or 10 minutes each on how to add more humanity to the way that large organizations communicate. It could not have come at a better time. This idea of more human brands is closely related to why companies matter more to people. Yes, a big part of it is how you choose to do business in the world and whether it is sustainable and responsible. The other important piece, however, is the people who represent your brand and the human connection they can offer.
The real battle today isn't one of perception ... but one of meaning. In a sense, this is the big problem I am writing a book about how to solve (Likeonomics) - and one that the many speakers today will likely cover. Ultimately solving it will require a new level of organizational vulnerability and commitment for them to be more human and more honest. Honesty creates trust, and trust leads to us changing the culture of business and our culture itself.
I saw this first hand last week at the Opportunity Nation Summit as well, where business, religious, political and media leaders came together to talk about the importance for all of us to create a nation of opportunity for everyone. For too long, as the summit shared, the zip code you are born in determines our future. That shouldn't be the case. Business has an important role to play in this revolution ... and it isn't to sit back and let the attacks fly.
In a skeptical world where honesty has become the most unexpected thing of all ... making your brand meaningful to your consumer's life comes first from finding a way to tell the truth when you answer the question of whether you are offering anything positive to the world. Being meaningful is the new secret to creating long term brand value.
A few weeks ago I was asked an interesting question about what inspires me. As I thought about my answer, I realized that for me it isn't a person but rather an action that I find most inspirational. The people around the world who have an idea and decide to do something about it deserve to be celebrated. Entrepreneurship itself is the thing that I find most inspirational.
Last night as I was watching all the media coverage honoring Steve Jobs and his life, it got me thinking that perhaps his biggest impact on the world wasn't just the products that he helped create, but rather in showing the world just how much people can achieve when they are inspired. Inspiration itself can be like that - a lightning rod that takes an army of smart people and helps them create something real. To me, his power to inspire came down to three things:
Passion - By all reports of the people who worked with him, he lived and breathed the products that his company would work on. He would call engineers in the middle of the night, stress over a font or color choice and sometimes micromanage those small details. Still because of that passion and desire to be involved in the day to day work - not only could he make the products better, but he knew the products so well that when it came time to introduce them on stage to the world he wouldn't need to rely on bullet points prepared for him by product specialists.
Purpose - With every new product release, you got the sense that Apple was focused on changing the world in some new way. The ecosystem that each of the products allowed, from new operating systems to iTunes to the billion dollar market for Apps were all poised to make a big impact on how each of us experiences the world. This was the higher purpose behind Apple, and you could see it through the products they released.
Simplicity - When asked by biographers about what made Apple so powerful, one thing Steve Jobs always pointed to was the fact that Apple had always been a company which made less than 10 products. This extreme focus on simplicity carried through in his conversations with employees and how he would present products to the public. Simplicity can inspire because you strip away everything that is unimportant. What you are left with is a big idea which can move people.
No doubt there will be countless books, articles and stories written about Steve Jobs and his impact over the coming years. For me, the biggest lesson I learned from watching and reading about Steve Jobs is the power of inspiration and how it can lead people to change the world.
One of the most legendary stories about Zappo's famed culture of customer service above all else is their longstanding business practice of paying people to quit. It is a perfect example of the power of counterintuition - that offering an incentive to leave will actually help you get rid of employees who would have lacked commitment and likely developed into underperforming employees in the long term. Counterintuition is like that. It takes something that initially seems crazy and illogical and flips it into a business strategy for success.
Perhaps no other company in recent memory has been quite as good at applying counterintuition to running their business as Apple. It is simultaneously a source of frustration for their competitors and confusion for business analysts why Apple is able to do business in a way that would surely be toxic for many other brands if they were to adopt the same closed approach to ecosystem, partners and social media.
Over the last week, media has iconized Steve Jobs and his impact on Apple and even humankind. Among the daily individual tributes are stories people share from their moments of meeting Steve Jobs and how Apple under his watch has become a master brand at using counterintuition to become the exception to nearly every rule in business. I have written before about the "real secret of Apple's success" ... but this week I have been thinking about some of their most counterintuitive business practices and what we all might learn from them. Here are a few to consider:
Control the uncontrollable. If you had to name one thing that has helped Apple get to where they are today, it is that they control more aspects of their product development, distribution, sales, marketing, usage and service than any other technology manufacturer. They have their own stores, a locked down software platform and ecosystem, no open standards, integrated product service, and exacting brand standards for how their brand is to be mentioned in any context. They rarely offer media access into the company and are notoriously guarded about anything they allow to be shared about their products or company. Elements that many other brands would consider "uncontrollable" are meticulously micromanaged and centrally controlled by Apple. As a result, they can reduce any potential for a negative customer experience because they have more control over the entire journey.
Forget the low end. Apple could never be accused of acknowledging that there has been a global recession. Their products are consistently and unapologetically for the "high end" and they are widely admired for their discipline as a company in making sure they are not producing too many products or compromising on quality in any way. In one story, Nike CEO Mark Parker recalled advice Steve Jobs gave him about Nike: "Nike makes some of the best products in the world--products that you lust after, absolutely beautiful stunning products. But you also make a lot of crap. Just get rid of the crappy stuff, and focus on the good stuff." Apple has consistently done that, and charged a premium for it.
Use partnership as a last resort. Apple is well known for controlling their communications and dictating what their partners are (and are not) allowed to say publicly about working with Apple. More than that, Apple's first thought in most situations is how they can complete an element of their product or sales and distribution internally rather than having to partner with anyone. While some other organizations see partnership as an opportunity, Apple uses it as a last resort when they have no other options.
Obsess over the little things. Generally, if you ask most people in business they will describe micromanagement as a bad thing. No one wants a manager who is always looking at every little detail - yet most accounts of working with Steve Jobs describe him as the sort of leader who stresses about such trivialities as font kearning and slight shade variations of yellow. This unwavering attention to detail translates into unique well thought out products, and it offers yet another argument for why, as my fellow Ogilvy colleague Rory Sutherland suggests in his brilliant TEDx talk, every company should have a Chief Detail Officer focused on "sweating the small stuff."
I am not usually a fan of curse words. As a Dad with two young boys, I've especially become very conscious of them as I try desperately to help my oldest make it to his seventh birthday without trying it out in conversation. We're just a few weeks away.
Still, for some time I've been thinking that it may have an underestimated value when it comes to marketing. The first time I thought about this was when reading about a wonderful social marketing campaign from Saatchi and Saatchi that was done close to 20 years ago. It was for an organization fighting childhood hunger on the streets in Canada (I think) and as the ad featured visuals of young homeless boys on the street just trying to survive, the following voice-over of a boy's voice came on:
"If I said I'm hungry, that probably wouldn't bother you." "If I said f*ck, it probably would." "F*ck, I'm hungry."
Those three simple lines stuck with me. At once they were a sad reminder of how desensitized we can get from the real issues in our world, and how we tend to focus our attention on the wrong things. The ad came back to me last week as I watched the online firestorm and conversation erupt from a single tweet sent by prolific blogger (and frequent agitator) Jeff Jarvis.
The tweet, in response to watching some of the posturing and deadlock in the recent "conversation" from politicians in Washington around the debt ceiling was short and emotional:
"Hey, Washington assholes, it's our country, our economy, our money. Stop fucking with it." (@jeffjarvis)
At the suggestion of one responder on Twitter, he then shortened the sentiment to a hashtag (#fuckyouwashington) which took off (read a great curated version of the full story on Storify). Over the next few days, the sentiment led to hundreds of thousands of retweets, interviews with mainstream media, and some backlash and indignation from DC-residents who took issue with the tweets directed at their entire city instead of just the politicians.
"Some wanted me to clean up the hashtag because it offended them. But as I tweeted in response, #dagnabbitwashington would not have had the same impact. It was the profanity about profane politics that made it take off, I believe."
His conclusion was the same one that led one of the world's largest advertising agencies to use the same profanity as a wake up call to resensitize an audience to the importance of a serious issue like childhood hunger. The big conclusion from both examples is a truth that perhaps we too often forget ... sometimes there is simply no substitute for a well placed f-bomb.
Australia has a unique problem that almost no other country in the world would be able to understand. With a population of just under 20 million people, the country is one of the few places on Earth that anyone might be able to describe as underpopulated. The vast distances most people must travel to get from their home countries to Australia is certainly part of the reason - and the long history of violence against the native aboriginal people (much like the US history with the Native Americans) has led to drastically reduced native population.
Until just the last few decades, Australia was a place which also held onto a fairly racist immigration policy - legislating first against all immigrants, then against Southern Europeans (such as Greeks and Italians), and then against all others until finally in 1973 the country finally adopted the same open immigration policy as most other developed countries of the time. Slowly, the country began to actively court people from all cultures to come to Australia. When I lived there from 1998 to 2003, I remember being struck by how invested the government was in getting people to join the culture and become Australian. They even had television ads where the call to action was "become a citizen."
Last year, the Australian TV channel SBS launched an interesting documentary series online designed to celebrate one sector of the immigrant experience - people who had come from Africa and built their lives in Australia. Told with an interactive website featuring videos of real people - the campaign offered an inside look at the success stories and real lives of African immigrants in Australia.
It is exactly the kind of campaign that every country should do more of. The immigrant experience is a critical part of the success of many countries, and recently it seems to be under a sort of undue scrutiny from many cultures as reactions to fundamentalist groups, potential terrorism and misguided fear mongering have led to a new rise in popularity for isolationism.
Preventing immigration is not the solution. Australia may have been one of the slowest countries in the world to realize the value of an open immigration policy - but now they celebrate it with campaigns like this one. Let's hope other developed countries can follow their example.
If you believe most global media, in less than 24 hours we will all witness one of the landmark historical moments of the past century: the Royal Wedding of Prince William to Kate Middleton. The importance of this wedding goes far beyond engaging those with an extended case of royal fever, though. Photographers are angling for the perfect career-making shot. Fashion designers are enjoying the spotlight as they get interviewed about the glamour of the event. Everyone, it seems, wants their own piece of the global hysteria around the wedding.
Over at the Harvard Business Review website, writer Rosabeth Moss Kanter made a convincing argument for the business value of the wedding and "Why CEOs Should Watch The Royal Wedding." One interesting effect of this attention on so many levels is that it has demonstrated a value in the little things which so often go unnoticed. For a brief moment, while the Royal Wedding captures the attention of the world ... the insignificant will take center stage. Who designed Prince Wiliam's cufflinks? What will the royal horses be fed? How long is the red carpet?
Each of these alone are completely trivial questions but in the context of a frenzy of excitement, they add dimension to an event that everyone can be part of. You may not camp out for days outside Westminster Abbey to secure a good vantage point for the wedding, but you can surely enjoy a bit of the trivia and perhaps even share it with your social network.
The Royal Wedding is reminding us that insignificance can be a form of social currency. When you know the secret of Prince William's cufflinks (whatever it may be), you are likely to share it wth others. And this effect is not just confined to the Royal Wedding either. The thing about insignificance and trivialities is that we often cannot help sharing them with others.
The brands who do a good job of sharing these types of stories (from the meaningful to the insignificant) are the ones who can more effectively arm their most passionate customers and believers with intesting ideas and content to share.
Rohit works at Ogilvy Public Relations Worldwide, part of WPP - a world leader in advertising and marketing services. The views expressed on this blog are his personal opinion and do not necessarily reflect the views of his employer or its clients.
