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.
Many of you may have already caught this yesterday, but this blog was cited in the Recommended Reading section of the Wall Street Journal yesterday in an article by Keith Huang. As Jay Berkowitz from Ten Golden Rules shares on his team blog, my blog was one of 60 resources that they recommended to the journalist as part of their reading list and was selected from that list as a recommended resource for companies looking to "optimize their online presence." Here's the writeup:
Influential Marketing Blog, rohitbhargava.typepad.com Rohit Bhargava's blog is intellectual and educational. In a recent post, he discusses the art of stamp collection and how, even today, many smaller countries use stamps as a key marketing tool. He writes, 'Next time you pass a post office in any country, pay attention to how they are using their philately to promote the country, cater to tourists, or commemorate moments of significance.'
It is a great media hit and to be selected from a list of what I am guessing were 60 stellar resources is flattering. I'm in awe at being included among the other bloggers and authors mentioned in the article - including Seth Godin, Steve Rubel, Matt Cutts, John Battelle, Chris Anderson, Joseph Jaffe, and Danny Sullivan. Thanks to Jay for including me in this great list, and to Keith for selecting to include my blog!
I am a passionate hater of Ticketmaster.com. Paying a surcharge to a site whose main purpose it is to make it difficult for me to complete an online transaction seems wrong on every level. Imagine you were forced to make every travel booking for any hotel you ever wanted to stay at through Expedia.com. That's the equivalent of the monopoly Ticketmaster has, and it's amazing in our world of increasing choice online that an old world monopoly like theirs has managed to last this long. Here's my latest frustration:
If you can tell me what this CAPTCHA actually says, I'll give you a million dollars. Just post your best guess, along with your swiss bank account number so I can wire you the money if you're right ...
Update (08/10/07): Here are two other CAPTCHAs that I got when going back to search for tickets for another show one day after writing this post (no joke). I never realized CAPTCHAs could be so well branded, but at least they're honest ...
Now all they need to do is work on their poor spelling.
Good advertising is based on insights ... a singular idea or truth that gets to the heart of a product or brand. The trouble with insight, though, is that it comes in two forms. There is insight that can help you to create a great communications message - and there is insight that can help you do your business better. They are not usually the same. And when they are confused, you have a situation like Shell's Eureka film - part of their Real Energy campaign. There are more than a few people who have talked about how the film has been well executed. It's hard to argue with that, as the film is compelling and well produced - easily watchable despite being a 9 minute long commercial. The method of distribution (inserts in Wired magazine) and postings on YouTube of the short and long videos of the film also make sense (though it didn't take long for someone to post an embeddable version to get around a request to disable embedding on the original Shell posted video). The problem comes in the strategy and is actually very simple if you think about it:
Every oil company is trying to be green and get more goodwill from consumers.
People in general are afraid that oil companies are exploiting the earth, oil will run out and prices will keep rising.
The conclusion most competitors have drawn is that marketing and communication needs to focus on positive non-oil messages such as what they are doing to fund alternative energy sources. Of course they are getting more efficient about drilling for oil ... everyone expects that because it makes business sense. Unfortunately, broadcasting a "eureka moment" of an engineer getting the idea to create a flexible oil drill to suck oil deposits out of the ocean like a teenager sucks a drink through a straw is not a great choice for a consumer message. Even the online landing page for the campaign does little to help the cause, outlining that the flexible drill was necessary to "prevent all that precious oil going to waste." Some could argue the oil was fine where it was, but ultimately the unintended message they send is: Shell cares about inventing new technologies to suck the earth dry.
The irony is, once you delve into the film and learn about the process and the benefits, there actually is great value in the method for the environment in terms of being able to use fewer drilling platforms and produce less waste. It seems to be a great technology advance for Shell as well as the industry. Yet the visual of an oil company slurping every last drop of oil from the earth through their superstraw is exactly the wrong way to portray the industry and Shell itself. This was obviously a eureka moment and a great business case for Shell - something shareholders are likely to love. Using it as the hero story for their consumer marketing just seems like a bad idea no matter how well produced it is.
Watch the video:
Full Disclosure: BP is a longstanding Ogilvy client, though I am not currently part of the BP team or participating in any ongoing work for BP.
In case you hadn't heard - Ask.com has a new advertising campaign through their new partnership with Crispin, Porter & Bogusky (CP+B) focused on making a hero out of the algorithm. The idea behind the marketing strategy is described on their blog:
If you get great search results, you don’t care why or how you got them. But for more than 80% of searches, there can be more than one right answer. And even when there is one right answer, there’s more than one way of getting you there, understanding those results, or getting ideas for alternative searches. For these searches, the editorial voice of your search engine matters. Search isn’t the commodity it may, at times, seem to be.
You might know CPB for their superfun and standout ad campaigns for Volkswagen and Burger King (including my favorite, the Subservient Chicken viral).We've been working with them to create a campaign that champions "The Algorithm" and how it brings good search to life--from plain old “ten blue links” to popular, algorithm-driven features such as Smart Answers and Zoom related search. ... So ready or not world, here comes the Algorithm, soon to take its rightful place as a household word, once and for all.
Um, ok. Obviously they are excited to be working with the "cool kids" at CP+B, which is great. And the campaigns that are mentioned were wonderfully creative campaigns that defined a new positioning for each client and offered something new and viral. Unfortunately, there are three pretty obvious flaws in this marketing strategy for Ask:
No one cares about the algorithm - This is a fact which they already note above, stating that consumers don't care how they get search results as long as they work. Everyone in the tech industry is trying to be more "human" with their advertising - but Ask inexplicably decides to go the other way and focus on the algorithm.
The algorithm is declining in importance - As anyone following the search industry knows, the rise of social networks and human filtered search mean the algorithm is not what is used to be. Even Ask notes above that "the editorial voice of your search engine matters." Seriously, does the editorial voice of Ask come from an algorithm? Not so much.
The core brand value or positioning for Ask is not about the algorithm - This is perhaps the largest strategic issue of this campaign, that it misses the mark in focus. Ask happens to be a search engine, but the core value proposition is not about the power of the algorithm. For years the company focused on user friendliness and having Jeeves as a personal assistant to navigate results. Quite simply, the algorithm is not what makes Ask unique.
Strategically, the campaign misses the mark pretty widely - and the only explanation for how it launched that I can think of is a marketing team getting blinded to strategy by a creative concept that they fall in love with (probably because of a great sales job from the CP+B team). Unlike most of CP+B's work, this is definitely not a winning idea. As Techcrunch recently shared, the execution doesn't seem too much smarter with their Unabomber billboards and incomprehensible microsite. Even Valleywag was confused. Am I missing something? This doesn't inspire too much confidence in Ask.
Blackberry's recent "Share Your Stories" campaign was inspiring for me, though probably not in the way they intended. I actually love my Blackberry, but their entire "Share your Story" campaign just struck me as lacking in any of the lessons many other marketers have learned about Web 2.0 marketing and what works in social media. The mistakes were so basic, that it led me to put together this post listing a few of them and some reactions for how they could have been avoided. As more and more consumers continue to find ways to interact with brands that they are passionate about, the popularity of UGC campaigns will continue to rise. Blackberry has such great potential to tap their own brand enthusiasts for efforts like this ... but they fall short in this campaign in several ways. Without further intro, here are some of the key mistakes and thoughts on how Blackberry might have been able to execute this campaign idea differently:
Mistake #1 - Not offering a payoff or incentive for users: Asking consumers to share their stories with you is one thing, but giving them an incentive beyond relying on their affinity for your brand is vital. This is not about turning any campaign into a contest with winners and prizes. The incentive could be as simple as guaranteeing that your story is shared with the most relevant people inside of Blackberry, or sending a personal email of thanks back. The point is, an incentive answers the question of why ... and without necessarily promising a financial reward as the answer.
Mistake #2 - Forgetting about photos and video: It probably seems odd in this time of popularity for online video and YouTube for any User Generated Content campaign to launch without some ability for customers to include their photos and videos as part of their submissions. Of course text based entry is easier - but for those customers who really love their Blackberries, why not let them submit images and video. Particularly when one of the coolest features of the new Pearl is the integrated camera.
Mistake #3 - Only promoting campaign through advertising: The way I found the campaign was through a banner ad on CBSNews.com (not exactly a hotbed for consumer generated content). Though I am unsure about their other online advertising efforts, I am fairly certain they missed the most easy promotion available to them - a link from the Blackberry.com website. There are always a host of reasons why clients decide not to link to their promotions from their own homepage, and the only reason I have accepted in the past as reasonable is not wanting to give up the real estate on a ecommerce site to a promotional unit. Blackberry has no such reason and should be promoting this campaign everywhere they can, especially on their own site.
Mistake #4 - Avoiding publishing contributions real time: Again, legal and filtering reasons are probably behind Blackberry's choice to not publish any stories immediately ... however as a consumer being invited to share my story and not be able to read anyone others before doing so seems odd. What is the plan for these stories they are getting anyway? According to the T&Cs, the only thing that's clear is that a consumer gives up all rights and control to any story they submit. The only way they could make it any scarier for a consumer to participate is by asking for a full driver's license number upfront like Bud.TV initially did when they first launched (which they have since corrected).
Does anyone have any other thoughts on something I might be missing here? Would love to hear more from other folks who are launching (or considering launching) new User Generated Content campaigns using social media and struggling with some of these issues ...
Apparently, the latest "innovation" in advertising is offering up ad space on the bottom of those security bins used in every airport. Despite fears that it might confuse people during an already confusing moment of separating liquids and laptops into quart-sized bags, it seems that airport authorities are ready to go ahead with the plan (according to a piece earlier this week in USAToday). After all, if consumers are used to ads everywhere else, it seems only natural to put them here too. But what are some of the more unique places with advertising opportunities that we are not tapping? Surely in this overexposed world there are other unused canvases just waiting to be decorated by the brilliance of advertising creative. Here's my list of a few that we might see sometime soon, some ideas on who the perfect advertiser for each might be, and an example tagline:
Hubcaps (Goodyear, Car Manufacturers, ZipCar) Nothing handles these roads like Goodyear.
Fruits and Vegetables (5aDay, WeightWatchers) Try this fruit with [product name here]
Bottom Logos on Beach Flipflops (to make footprints in sand) (Beach Resorts, Crocs)
Chinese Takeout boxes (Netflix) Would you like some Netflix with that?
Public Restroom Doors (Glade Air Fresheners) Glade ... if it stinks, we can fix it.
Grass/Lawns (Local sports teams, local elections, Residential services)
Airline seat backs (Portable DVD players or MP3 players) Watch your own stuff.
Movie Theater Popcorn Bags (Candy bars, Orville Redenbacher) Movie theater taste, right at home.
Printed Aluminum Foil (GE Ovens, Betty Crocker) The ultimate choice for baking.
Isn't this too much? Of course not! Consumers are still free to ignore the messages, aren't they? Anyway, I also have the perfect advertiser and tagline for those security bins ... Amtrak: "Next time, take the train."
Let's start with a warning ... this is the "clip show" post where I recycle a lot of old material so if that causes you extreme pain, please close this window now and come back tomorrow. For all the rest of you, it's the holidays and a quick glance around the marketing blogosphere will show that these clip show posts are in right now. With nearly 400 post on this blog already, there is lots of content to choose from ... allowing me the luxury to conveniently ignore those posts from the past year that are outdated or that I just don't like anymore. Here is a sampling of the rest:
Concepts & Ideas: This is a collection of concepts and ideas that were introduced or discussed on this blog and then travelled virally to other blogs and were discussed elsewhere in media. A good collection of ideas, many of which I still hope to implement on a client campaign (but haven't yet).
Rules & Guides: These are a group of "Guy Kawasaki style" posts written in list format as guides to various topics from SMO to viral marketing. It's a format I have always liked and you will probably see many more posts in this format going into 2007.
Presentations & Published Work: Links to presentations given at industry events as well as guest contributions to other blogs. There is some good powerpoint link bait in here, useful for those who are interested in any of these topics but couldn't make it to the events referenced.
I came across an interesting viral campaign for the upcoming movie "Snakes on a Plane" where users can go online and enter names to have a personalized viral message sent to someone spoken by Samuel L. Jackson. I have seen this viral talking idea before, such as with the "7 days left" campaign for The Ring 2 ... but in that case the promotion was not personalized. So visiting the site, I was expecting another smart piece of a marketing strategy from a film that has done well to foster a fan frenzy by reshooting scenes based on fan input, encouraging discussion through fan blogs like Snakes on a Blog and even a fan wiki. Sadly, this viral campaign is a disappointing example of what happens when movie marketers forget about multicultural audiences.
The first step in sending a viral talking message is to enter your name and your recipient's name. I first tried it by entering my name and my wife's name and came up with the error message "I can't say the name Rohit or Chhavi and still make a personalized talking message." Bummer, but maybe we just have tough names. So I went to the Social Security Administration's website where they list the 50 most popular baby names from any year (as registered by their office). I then tried two "ethnic sounding" names from 2004: Isaiah and Ava ... and got the same error message. This is like an online version of the experience every kid from another culture has when going into the tourist store to see all the personalized keychains and license plates with only names like James or Emily. Of course, those stores can't be expected to carry every name ... but in a viral campaign like this where technology serves the personalization, this should not be a barrier. Unfortunately a concept that could have worked well as yet another buzz builder for highly hyped movie online ends up alienating multicultural audiences and falling flat.
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.
