Cool Marketing Thoughts

Here’s a picture of the loot of today :) After all, what would a marketing event be without swag? In the Flickr set from the Emerce eDay, I’ve also added two dozen of other pictures from the morning train ride, and from the event itself at the Van Nelle factory in Rotterdam. Surprize of the day was without any doubt when I met Hans Mestrum at the end of the event. Too bad we didn’t saw each other earlier. Maybe next time there’ll be time for a beer and a chat. I hope so.

Tulips, a coffee mug, decorative USB lights, mints from Commence and Dedigate, a Google bag, some key rings, some key rings with ribbons, a dozen of pens, Google notebooks with “I’m feeling lucky” on the bottom of each blank page, energy drinks and post-it notes, an ice scraper for the windows of the car, my oxygen feeder from the oxygen bar and a pair of sweatbands for the wrists.
Nice treasure. Cool day.

/ eDay site /

All five posts in a row:

° Live From eDay: Google Earth Keynote
° Live From eDay: Second Life
° Live From eDay: Two Sessions
° Live From eDay: Jaffe Juice
° Live From eDay: Ben Hammersley

All posts have been cross-posted on i-wisdom.

Ben Hammersley, a globe-trotting lunatic in a kilt and wearing army boots, has some deeper insights in the way life is going. He’s been around the world and apparently he’s quite the rebel. Tune in for some thoughts:

We’re undergoing a new Renaissace. The original Renaissance was a time of great change, a time of new technologies and great breakthroughs in art, sciences and medicin. Let’s talk about human development. Art, for example: ‘caveman goes shopping’ – a suggestive drawing of a wall painting from the Stone Age, picturing a caveman who pushes a shopping cart. Human development is a thing that is going up and down in cycles. From cave-painting to Michael Angelo’s “The David”. There’s a rate of change. A rise and a fall. Things start up pretty low down, blossom up and then go back down again. After the Romans, we had the Dark Age; After the Dark Age, we had the Renaissace…. and so on until today.

Something weird is happening today and has been happening over the past ten or fifteen years. The human society is undergoing a change that has never happened before in the history of human beings. Technology has always been a bit self-limiting, up until today. Computers aren’t like horses. At first horses were wild and unpredictable until some started domesticating them and then saddle them so they became means of transport. Computers are unique. You use today’s computers to produce tomorrow’s computers. You never get to the point like with the horse where you reach the maximum of its capacity, and unless you started breeding them with five legs, that’s the end of that.

We’ve got a technology that can’t slow down, it’ll only get better, it builds upon itself. IT changes everything else in our lives. It’s a chain reaction.

“Information Technology builds upon itself and facilitates every other type of progress.”

A new form of collaboration: a new set of challenges for everyone. It’s like being Gallileo’s best friend. Our grand kids are going to sit on our knees and we’ll get to tell what the internet was like when it first started.

The point: we’re lucky bastards, we’re at the beginning of a new revolution. We get to see it evolve. This is the only revolution that isn’t going to slow down and stop. It’s completely changing our lives as we know it.

But, we’re also unlucky bastards, our grandchildren are going to ask us: what did you do at the beginning of the revolution mommy? And you, grandfather, where were you at the very start of the internet? That brings us to the message of today:

We’re reconfiguring human existence. We start tomorrow, after the drinks.

–

So, that concludes a very interesting day. It was very well organized, the food was good and talks were of a very decent level. I learned a lot and got some more insight in different forms of marketing. I saw a lot of new interesting things and I’ve gotten a lot of new ideas. And that was the entire purpose of the day.

/ eDay site /

Existing traditional media is in troubles. The 30 second spot is taking its last breath. Broadband & wireless networks initiate an endless offer. Digital video recorders made it possible to simply skip the commercials. The consumer become more intelligent, more sceptical and more critical. Merciless, he looks through the offers, if he can still remember the commercial due to the overload. So we need new ideas to connect brands and consumers.

Introducing new marketing:

Jaffe: It’s irrelevant whether or not the 30 second spot is dead. The book says: there’s life after the 30 second spot, which means: there’s more out there. Traditional advertising is represented by three colors: print, tv and radio. Right now, instead of three colors, there are 93 colors out there, as a metaphor. We as consumers owe it to ourselves to understand, explore and integrate them. We need to explore these colors, these channels, to figure out how and when we want to use them, explore them.

Nothing is linear anymore, nothing is one way. Everything is part of something bigger. Everything is part of ‘conversation’. Everything has another meaning than the obvious one you see or experience.

In the olden days:

• Companies lied
• Companies pretended they were deaf
• Companies surrounded themselves with “Yes-Men”
• Companies coasted on being “part of the chasing pack”
• They focused on the “median consumer”

They never focused on the influentials, the innovatives. The mediocre consumer who never fought back, who never participated was (and in most ways still is) the target audience of many brands.

You think the olden days would be in the past, but no, the olden days are for many companies: today.

Pepsi: win a 99 cent download on i-tunes, 1 in 3 wins. Error in this form of thinking: if 1 in 3 wins, that means 2 in 3 are losing.
One consumer figured out that if you tilt the bottle 25 degrees, you can see the code. He puts it online on his blog and all of the sudden 1 in 1 can win. That’s consumer power. Marketers have become powerless. They run behind consumers that outsmart them, tryinh to hit them with a blunt object until they are numb. But it backfires.

Reach ° Connect ° Effect

The key is ‘wireless’.

In the early days, if you pissed off a consumer once, he’d tell 15 to 20 friends. If you made him happy, he’d tell 7 friends. Nowadays if you piss off a consumer once he’ll say: “screw you, I won’t tell 15 to 20 of my friends, I’ll tell 100 million of my closest strangers.” The ‘New’ consumer is connected anywhere and anytime on their terms.

Average consumers spent 7,5 minutes with the subservient chicken. That equals 15 commercials. The media defines itself. We read papers, we listen to the radio and we watch television… but we interact on the internet. Internet is the integrator. The web makes into a whole by connecting all the different parts. It unifies and unites the big idea by offering a way to distribute it immediately.

We can’t look at the web as a medium. It’s whatever the consumer and marketer wants it to be. Calling it a medium is limiting the possibilities of it.

The web is not sold out, it creates unpolluted new iventory every day. CGC causes the web to get bigger and better every day. Media sellers should no longer hold you hostage. There’s new and other ways to get in touch with consumers, to channel your message.

Of the IM generation i.e. those born after 1980, 62% of the content they consume comes from people they know personally.

The many to many model: all the conversations that go on a once. As brand you can be invited to join the conversations, to participate to catalyse and maybe even make it better. You can use multiple channels at once and interact with an exponentially growing number of consumers.

Refers to ‘Red Paperclip Guy’ aka Kyle Macdonald. From ‘A’ via C,D,E,F,G,H,I,J,K,L,M,N and O to B (from the paperclip to the house via a lot of different people). It wouldn’t have worked if Kyle would have been sponsored by some brand who bought him the house. The story wouldn’t have been the same. It worked because it simply was ’sincere’ and ‘honest’. It was 100% consumer generated.

Ultimately new marketing is a state of mind, it’s a culture shift. Don’t take the 30 second spot and put it online like that. Participate in conversations and try to capitalize the outcome.

It’s what I’ve never seen before that I recognize. – Diane Arbus –
It’s what they do recognize, they shut out. – Joseph Jaffe -

End of keynote / Panel discussion starts here.

/ eDay site /

First of all: Check out the pictures on Flickr, there’s over 250 already and it’s growing every hour.

Session: Pete Blackshaw, CMO Nielsen Buzzmetrics

Working title: Dancing With Megaphones

The fastest growing media are those who are designed and styled by the consumers, and those media consumers use to share everything which each other. These channels form the marketing, advertising and research landscape. Thanks to the explosion of blogs, message boards, online review sites, camera phones, podcasts and online video, consumers all over the world can vent their opinions, attitudes and feelings about companies, products and brands with a never before seen force and presence.

Along the way they leave a digital trace of ’stars’ and ’scars’ on corporate brands, corporate identities and brand equity. Good news for the marketeer is that CGM can be measured and quantified, and that the output of this analysis can be used for strategic decisions in the entire marketing mix from new product launch to advertising effectiveness.

Pete Blackshaw overviewed the entire field CGM, and discussed a number of cases from brands in the relation to CGM.

Classic case mentioned: Dell vs Jeff Jarvis.

The Jeff Jarvis factor: “We don’t want anyone to have a bad experience, whether they’re a blogger or anyone else. The broad body of evidence suggests that those experiences are rather anomolous, even though they’re completely unacceptable to us.

26 % of all search results on brands point to user generated media. – Negative input can have serious consequences.

Next: A bit hard to summarize. Creatives from many agencies talked about their inspiration and the interactive work that triggers good ideas inside their minds as they see it.

Cool presentation from Sam from These Days and also really impressive input from Glue London. A lot of good input, about twenty cases per person at high speed. Too much to even begin to sum it up. Sorry. You should have been here ;)

/ eDay site /

David Fleck, VP Marketing from Linden Lab talked about Second Life.

He Started with a slide from Amsterdam in Second Life, the Amsterdam simulator is very popular in the online game, due to the 16.000 members from The Netherlands who’ve joined.

What Second Life is and how to use it in your own business:

The goal was to create a place where people could come to in interact. Users are building communities and coming together.
Big investors have backed up Second Life, because potentially it was going to be a shooting star, and it has proven to be so.

Second Life is built on three big stones:

1. Community – interact, socialize and network
2. User created content – users can create buildings, goods, services
3. Market place – Monetize, buy and sell goods

Second Life doesn’t want to be compared to other MMO services, because when joining you decide what you want to do by yourself, there’s no ‘parcour’ to run through. You don’t have to sell stuff, go through levels to achieve something. It’s a free world.

At this time, the world of Second Life is 20.000 hectares in size which is actually the size of the city of Boston. This territory is worth 15 terabytes in data, which Fleck suspects to be somewhere around 2400 DVDs of data, should it be turned into a standalone desktop game. Plus: keeping up isn’t possible. It’s constantly evolving. DVDs would be outdated the moment they are released.

Tipping point was late last year when Linden Lab realized how big in size and how massive all the content was. Conversations at the Linden Lab: “have you seen this or that?” others would reply: “no, when was it created, I’ve never seen it.”

Making money in Second Life is possible. The amount of money that travels hand to hand is about 6.4 million dollars a month. Fleck expects that 75 million dollars worth of goods and services will have been traded by the end of this year. There’s an internal trade organisation called Lindex where users can exchange Linden Dollars for real dollars and vice versa.

48% of the registrations in Second Life is outside the US. Fleck expects 1.000.000 users before the end of this year.

Emerce article about Second Life caused a huge growth in Holland thanks to visibility and awareness. The average growth rate in Holland is 60% per month. That’s huge.

The business model isn’t about creating content. Users create, Linden Labs delivers hardware and everyone is invited to participate in the created content, that’s how it works. The art of creation in Second Life is unfortunately limited to the ‘technically skilled’ people. Designers should understand how to create 3D models, work with patterns etc. People can learn how to do it, but mostly it’s the same people who create. Most new users only want to use what’s there. The stronger the design skills/programming skills, the more advanced the outcome would be.

Different content is being created, some is really good, some is really bad. Who decides what can stay? Linden Labs doesn’t interfere. Users are free and are being left alone. Other users can suggest changes, but nobody has the rights to remove content, except for the creator. That’s why some content looks awesome, and other content looks more average.

Cases:

Duran Duran enters Second Life, creates an island to perform ‘live’ in this digital world. Other bands are to be announced by major labels.

Real example: an artist rents space in club in Second Life (hires the stage for a night), then he streams music from his room at home in the real world to the bar in Second Life, he entertains people, promotes his music and interacts with ‘virtual listeners’ who are in that club at the time. They can buy the music on CD, which the artist can ship in real life.

Harvard will be teaching classes in second life // many other colleges are there as well. [CyberOne is the first Harvard course to be offered in a virtual world and the first course open to the public.] – [read more]

Brands: American Apparel opens store, designs it after a real store in Tokyo. [more info here]

How they uses POS tactics: users come in store, buy pair of jeans in Second Life, get voucher with 15% off to buy pair of jeans in real store.

Yahoo, simulcast a conference in Second Life, ‘mirrors real life’ conference on the web so that other people can attend it too – be it through their digital alter-egos. [example of simulcast]

American Cancer Foundation – Relay For Life fundraising:

A virtual character went around, asking for donations and after two days gathered 44,OOO dollars, which is more than is collected in a small town.

Working rule to establish a location in Second Life:

Users buy land. Users then go to the developers, because they don’t always have the tools or skills to create what they want to have, so they contract the services out, just like in real life. There are agencies who function as the middle man. Users can go to the agency, and this will contact developers for designing ‘on command’. Developers can contact agencies to market the designs they’ve made.

Can you be banned from Second Life, is there censorship?

Bad behavior will be punished, there’s actually a prison in the game and it’s a designed to look like an big cornfield. Prisoners can run through the field but are deprived of all their online rights. They cannot leave the field until the punishment is over. They can also sit in the middle of the field and watch black and white public service ads from the 50s, which are endlessly looped.

You can’t die in Second Life, but I know a guy who committed suicide in a rather original way. He created a fridge and made his character go sit in it, then he closed the door. That was the end of his life in Second Life.

/ eDay site /