Chocolate Cubed

Since President-Elect Obama was voted into office in November, I have seen people counting the days till January 20th, 2009, Inauguration Day.  There is a hope that on the 20th the world will change.  The economy will be better.  U.S. relations with the world powers will be better.  Everything will be better because President G W Bush will be out of office.  This  seems ludicrous to me.  Is this a result of the marketing genius that got Obama elected?  Is “Change We Can Believe In” going to be a let down?  I am hopeful that Obama will change the way government operates, but it cannot happen within the first 100 days.  

This got me thinking about marketing an unproven product.  Setting expectations too high could cause a huge backlash that could ruin a company or product.  Nowadays with twitter and ratings sites like yelp, a set of unhappy customers all responding to good marketing is hard to bounce back from.  Any tips to manage those expectations from the start without losing market share?  What about ways of fixing a fiasco?

As 2008 comes to a close everyone is talking about what is next.  What is going to define 2009?  Is it going to be a new widget?  a new phone? Will Apple come out with a new device that is all the rage?  Will Dell win back its share of the laptop market?  Is Obama going to change the world?  The fact that everyone is talking about it and is excited about something new is exciting in and of itself.  To me, this means our creativity is firing and innovation is abound. 

As a marketer, I read David Mullen’s 5 PR Predictions and think he has some great points.  I want to focus on his point about measuring people.  I agree with David that we will start measuring people instead of impressions, but I think it will go a lot further than that.  I don’t think the economy is turning around so quickly, which will cause companies to be very “bottom line centric”.  Companies will want to show how their investment in Web 2.0 has paid off and that will mean qualifying the active users/visitors.  It will mean developing ways to report how effective social networking tools are, like managing a twitter account.  Yes, twitter allows the company to talk to it’s customers one-to-one, but did that person buy something?  Did they click on an ad?  Did they refer someone?  How long did the cycle take? 

I think 2009 is going to be the year of the number crunchers and web analysts.  Maybe it is time to take a statistics refresher course.

At the end of last week, I was instructed by the SVP of Marketing, my client, to find a way to cut at least 15% of their SEM budget without risking too much revenue.  After slicing and dicing all the numbers and looking at the twenty different portfolios with thousands of keywords in each, we (me and webmetro) could only find 7.5% to cut.  I knew this wasn’t acceptable, but presented the findings and was of course told to find another way.  So back to the drawing board it was. Read the rest of this entry »

Over the last few days, the NY Times and the WSJ have been writing about Verizon Wireless’ talks with Google to have Google build a mobile search engine and operate all of Verizon’s mobile searches.  The talks started because Verizon couldn’t figure out how to create a single way to search from their phones.  In other words,  most Verizon phones make the customer use different search methods for each thing they are looking for.  So, if you want to search for a ring tone, you have one tool.  If you want to search for a game, there is another.  If you want an app, there is another.    Here comes Google to the rescue!   Read the rest of this entry »

A couple of weeks ago, I was sitting in a meeting at my client’s office discussing their different marketing campaigns and how they support each other.  During this conversation, the CEO used the phrase “Scientific Marketing” to describe how we were trying to analyze the different customer segments and market them more efficiently.   I immediately took note of the phrase and moved on, but I have been thinking about it since.  Is scientific marketing like marketing psychology? is it just another name for behavioral targeting?  should the privacy advocate in me be afraid of it?   Read the rest of this entry »

Yahoo! announced on Thursday of last week that by the end of August everyone will have the ability to opt-out of customized advertising on their network.  For those of you who may not know what “customized” advertising is, it is their behavioral targeting and remarketing advertising options.  To put it another way, Yahoo!’s systems track you on their network and deduce what you are interested in buying.  For example, lets say Yahoo! figures out that you are interested in buying a car (you visited a lot of car sites) and then you visit the Wall Street Journal’s site.  Since WSJ has many ads on the site, it is fair to assume Yahoo! has access to at least one.  Now that Yahoo! knows you are looking for a car the system displays a car ad to you.  So in essence, what this new opt-out tool will stop the car ads from being displayed.  My problem is that although you can opt-out of seeing the ad, Yahoo! still knows it is you because you can’t opt out of being tracked in the first place.   Read the rest of this entry »

This morning’s Editorial Notebook in the NY Times had a piece by Lawrence Downes titled A Disappointing Truth.  It seems I am not the only one thinking about the effects of marketing on worldly matters.  In my post last, I referred to Al Gore’s work and marketing efforts as positive and helpful to the cause.  Downes takes a more critical look and says that they are doing a poor job at marketing the cause.  Downes makes a good point, saying that we need new ideas and need to bring more of the best faces and thinkers together in a room to help.  He even made reference to the Axe body spray marketers, hoping they would run the campaign.  

For the climate issues, I think we should have the people who created the Truth campaigns do it.  They have been successfully riding a very fine line with their campaigns.  They are all witty, educational and make people aware of the hazards of smoking cigarettes, marijuana and doing drugs.  

On the other hand, for AI I would love the Axe or even the Mac marketers working on our cause.  They could make it sexy and cool and then all the kids would want to be working on it!

This post is kind of a followup to my last post on marketing AI.  I have been thinking of other causes that have been expedited or have benefited from good marketing and global warming came to mind.   Read the rest of this entry »

In this month’s AI Magazine there is an article titled “The voice of the Turtle: Whatever Happened to AI?” by Doug Lenat.  Doug lists what he calls the top 12 reasons why AI hasn’t taken off to its fullest potential and where many already expected it to be by now.  I am not going to address all his 12 points, I am going to focus on one:  The Media and the Arts.

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