Fizz from ConsumerPop

Smart Marketers: Shut Up and Listen

From "Socialized Media" by Tim Manners at Fast Company.  Manners gives excellent examples of what's not working and what might.  I think two key points he makes are valuable to any marketer - 1. listen and 2. add value.  You cannot go wrong by doing those two things.  I encourage you to read the whole article.

As one respondent put it: "If you sell (unless you are a very cool web app), you lose. Don't sell. As a marketer: network. Help people. Advise. Create value and add to the conversation."

Nobody has really figured out how to do that yet. But it's worth considering the possibility that smart marketers won't even attempt to be part of the conversation, much less interrupt it. It could be that the real marketing potential of online social networks is listening, not talking.

The point is, if we're not helping people live better lives, we are not helping ourselves. If all we are doing is interrupting people who don't have time for interruptions, we can't expect their attention. If all we are doing is annoying people who have zero tolerance for annoyance, we can't earn their trust.

If all we are doing is pelting people with endlessly irrelevant messages, we can't claim their loyalty. And if we can't claim their loyalty, we don't have a prayer of a positive return-on-investment.

We can run whatever media-mix model we like, but all we're likely to achieve is a marginal improvement on what is otherwise an unmistakable downward spiral of failure.

Because it Cannot be Said Enough

This article for RCR Wireless News by Laura Marriott, President of the Mobile Marketing Association, comes three ways to implement mobile advertising.  Sample line about why mobile advertising is fun and relevant?

What types of advertisers are using the text-based advertising approach? Credit-card companies, travel agents, florists, automotive manufacturers—the brands that want to be in front of the consumer all of the time.

Note that it's the brand that wants to be in front of the consumer, not the consumer who wants the brand in front of them all the time. 

Ms. Marriott is mindful of what consumers want when she mentions at the very end of her article

We must work together to build a sustainable channel, but let’s not forget about the consumer. 4INFO’s Thet tells me “our first and primary focus is on the consumer and putting the consumer experience first. Consumers are not opting in to have ads pushed to them.” Let’s collectively keep that in mind.  (emphasis mine)

Here is an idea - why not start with the fact that consumers are not opting in before devising all sorts of technologies to place advertising when...

the backlash I immediately received from consumers was extreme: “I don’t want that on MY device, my highly personal device, my mobile phone.”

(hat tip: likateria)

More Girly Efforts to Sell Televisions

I wrote a bit on BlogHer a while back about the mostly silly and sometimes offensive efforts to sell television sets to women by assuming that women are interested only in televisions as fashion and decorating accessories rather that functional pieces of technology.  The New York Times seems to egregiously harp on this idea.

Their latest notice is of Philips creating short films featuring luxury fashion brands to sell their televisions to women:

In early August, for instance, the Aurea campaign got under way with a seven-page insert in Vogue in Britain. The print ads, shot by a fashion photographer, Vincent Peters, show a model cozying up to a brightly lighted Aurea screen that mirrors her image. Instead of technobabble about HDTV, L.C.D. or plasma screens, the ads include only the Philips and Aurea names and the tag line: “Simplicity is a light that seduces the soul.”

“There is a lot of female coding in this advertising,” said Laura Jones, global client managing director at the advertising agency DDB, a unit of Omnicom Group, which worked on the Aurea campaign along with the media planning agency Carat. “Before, televisions have always been sold based on pixels or that sort of thing.”

Again, I'll use myself as an example.  I have a large, wide screen, high definition plasma set that is front and center in my living room and that I make no effort to conceal in an armoire.  It happens to be a Philips which I purchased after reading rave reviews in places like circuitcity.com and AVS forum.  Subsequently quite a few negative comments regarding product quality and poor customer service experiences have surfaced.  If I were buying a set now I would probably avoid Philips because when you want to watch a show you need a set that functions so ultimately the "technobabble" matters and associations with fancy clothes and jewelry do not.  Even to us girls.

Halp! The Internetz Iz In Mah Putter Reading Mah Mindz!*

Today I visited a blog I visit pretty much daily and embedded between the blog post was a little video ad.  Not remarkable in and of itself but it was for Priceline, focused on rental cars and featured William Shatner's "Priceline Negotiator" character working on behalf of a woman (check) seeking a discounted price (check) on a mid-size rental car (check).

 

Here is where it gets freaky.  I performed this very search last night.  And although I did not have Bill Shatner's nor his falcon of truth's assistance, I did visit the Priceline site.  Once these ads can not just follow my browsing history and appear to persuade me in case I had not completed my deal hunting and can predict what I will be searching for and show up on my favorite blogs in advance of my search, well not only will all pretense of personal privacy be completely blown and big brother fully realized, but I might actually then find that having my privacy violated is actually helpful because it means that I am truly shown just the ads I want to see.

*Apologies if I have mangled the lolcat language