You know how I wrote the other day that "people make the difference" at Aquent? Well, a week later, I still think it's true!
But you know, it's not just me. When we ask Aquent employees what they like best about Aquent, they consistently respond, "The people I work with." Guess what? I would say the same thing. I feel peculiarly fortunate to work with a bunch of people who are smart, funny, and friendly.
For example, take our creative director, Mark Saperstein (that's a picture of him in his incarnation as an undead warlock). Mark is a talented and funny guy who actually proposed to his wife via a job posting on our website (she accepted). He's passionate about zombies, cannibals, and Conan the Barbarian. He's also an articulate, detailed, and sometimes harsh, I mean, "frank," critic of creative work.
Aside from frequently asking me to be less boring, blogwise, he's overseen some of our endlessly clever direct mail and marketing pieces like the ever-popular "furry" card, the infamous "valium" card, the mirror card, the cow, the beach ball, and the Kim Jong Il: "I Ate the Big Slab at Aaron's House O' Ribs" card.
Mark's sense of humor has sometimes been too "out" for corporate consumption -- like when he wanted to advertise our interactive staffing capabilities with a pixelated rendering of a hand making an obscene gesture -- but it's never been too "out" for me, and, gosh darn it, I love that MMORPG-playin', kimchee-eatin', plaid-shirt-wearin', anime-watchin', erstwhile-astronomy-lovin', "what art school did you go to?"-askin' guy.
I saw this video on DeanHunt.com. Well, actually, Dean posted a slightly earlier version of it. The one below dates from June 2007:
The main point seems to be that the world is bigger, more connected, and changing faster than we realize. It's interesting in part because it illustrates at least one of the points it is trying to make: originally created for a presentation to 150 people, the various versions have collectively been viewed over 5 million times on YouTube.
There are a lot of thought-provoking tidbits in here and I encourage you to find them for yourself. To save you a fraction of time, I'll share these two with you:
- By 2013, supercomputers will exceed the computational capacity of the human brain;
- By 2049, a $1000 computer's capacity will exceed that of the human race.
As the authors point out, it is very difficult to predict what will happen between the first date and the second. One reason for this unpredictability is something Vernor Vinge dubbed, "The Singularity," way back in 1993. As he wrote then, "Within thirty years, we will have the technological means to create superhuman intelligence. Shortly after, the human era will be ended."
In other words, once an intelligence greater than our own appears on Earth, the possible futures ensuing become as unknowable as the events occurring beyond the event horizon of a black hole.
Action Item: During your next job interview, ask the interviewer what plans the company has for The Singularity and the need to serve super-intelligent customers.
Back in 1992, our CEO wrote a letter to all Aquent employees outlining the four principles that guide us in the work we do. The first principle, and the one that has consistently spoken to me, is, "People make the difference."
OK. We're not the only company that espouses this value. In fact, we're not the only company for which it is true -- this slogan can be applied to many organizations, especially those which provide specialized services, such as doctors, lawyers, architects, tattoo artists, and so on.
But I'm on board with it as one of our guiding principles for several reasons. First of all, it's true in a literal way for us. We don't have a secret formula or patented product that makes us different or better. Aquent IS the people who work here and the people we represent.
Second of all, this is how our clients tend to see things. As I mentioned in my post on customer loyalty, the two things that matter most to clients of staffing companies, particularly niche-players like us, are (1) the people or talent represented by the firm, and (2) the relationship with that firm's representatives. (The latter also confirms the findings of Michael Lowenstein and others.) In other words, it's good to have a principle that actually reflects the interests of our clients.
In Part 1 of our podcast interview with James Intriligator, Senior Lecturer in Psychology at the University of Wales in Bangor, we talked about branding, loyalty, and consumer psychology.
In Part 2, we discuss personae and customer motivation, different neuormarketing approaches, and how understanding the brain can help us make more effective commercials (among other things, of course).
Listen in on our conversation by clicking on the Flash device below. You are also welcome to download an mp3 of this interview by "right-clicking" ("control-clicking," Mac-wise) on this link. You can also check out this and other Talent Blog Podcasts on iTunes. Heck, you can even subscribe to our podcast there!
A few highlights of the interview can be found at the following time coordinates:
01:50 - How to Get the Most out of Focus Groups
03:52 - Aunt Sally and the Straw Man
05:03 - Customer Motivation: Dreams and Aspirations (not just Fears, Uncertainties, and Doubts)
09:59 - Marketing and Branding from a Strategic, Artistic Perspective
11:55 - "There are a lot of good things you can do with marketing"
13:39 - Defining "Neuromarketing"
15:16 - Pros and Cons of Different Neuromarketing Approaches
17:15 - "If someone wants to pursue marketing from a neuromarketing perspective..."
20:44 - The Classic Mistake that Most Ads Make
21:58 - Another Classic Mistake
24:16 - Segment the Emotional and Attentional Aspects of Your Campaigns
She said it, at least in part, ironically. "Marketing? A science? Come on! What's next? Fishing?"
Marketing may not yet be a hard, or even soft, science. Nevertheless, scientists are indeed taking a hard look at marketing and beginning to paint a very interesting picture of how and why marketing actually works IN THE BRAIN.
James Intriligator is one such scientist. Having received his doctorate in psychology from Harvard for work on "attention," James did a stint as a consultant to the automotive industry, among others, before assuming a post in the Center for Neuroscience and Consumer Psychology at the University of Wales, Bangor.
I've known James for many years and decided to call him up when I wanted to get a handle this "neuromarketing" thing. He was kind enough to walk me through this emerging field as well as his own findings regarding brand loyalty (Hint: It kind of makes you act like a crazy person!), segmentation, and literally getting inside the customer's brain.
I invite you to listen in on our conversation. I think you'll find the discussion illuminating and, at times, even entertaining. (Where else will you hear people talk about "brand build-up," "brand flossing," and "brandectomies"?) I had a lot of questions for James and he had a lot of answers. For this reason, I've split the interview into two parts.
You can check out Part 1 right here by clicking on the Flash device below:
You are also welcome to download an mp3 of this interview by "right-clicking" ("control-clicking," Mac-wise) on this link, or check out this and all other Talent Blog Podcasts on iTunes.
A few highlights of the interview can be found at the following time coordinates:
02:35 - How Brands Build Up in Brains
04:06 - Ways to Quantify Brand Loyalty
05:06 - Brand Loyalty, Brand Familiarity, and the Attentional Blink
06:45 - Dealing with Excess Brand Build-Up
08:13 - How to Forge a Robust Representation of the Brand (in the Brain)
10:27 - What Counts as an "Experience" in "Experiential Marketing"?
11:40 - Problems with Product Placement
13:23 - Brand Loyalty and Brain Damage
17:43 - A Brand Is the Net Sum of All Experiences You've Had with a Product/Company
19:22 - The Web as a Branding Medium
23:09 - Segmenting the Brand
26:09 - The One Rule that Fits All Branding and Marketing Activity
Way back in late 2001, Adam Greenfield published an essay entitled, "The Bathing Ape Has No Clothes (and other notes on the distinction between style and design). In this essay, he posits "problem-solving within constraints" as an essential component of design. In fact, as he sees it, this component separates design most definitively from "style," which is characterized by a relatively personal, unconstrained creativity. That some designers, he cites Paul Rand and Saul Bass as examples, were, in spite of real constraints, able to develop a recognizable style, testifies to the level of artistry they achieved with their work.
Though he does not refer to it, Greenfield's essay was preceded by Jeffrey Zeldman's, "Style versus design: Why understanding the difference is what it's all about," which first appeared in 2000 (and was reprinted in 2005 by Adobe). Zeldman too emphasizes the real-world pragmatism of design over and against the modish self-referentiality of style. He laments that young web designers, along with design competition judges, fall for the trendy allure of style and thus overlook and avoid the less sexy, though more critical, challenge posed by plain-old usability. Eschewing a reductive "either/or," Zeldman simply states, "Not enough designers are working in that vast middle ground between eye candy and usability where most of the web must be built."
To show that this debate is far from dead, viddy this recent post by Eric Karjaluoto, provocatively called, "F--- Style." He echoes the positions of Greenfield and Zeldman by advocating "hardcore" design, which he defines as, "design focused on results." "This kind of design," he writes, "forces us to see ourselves as intermediaries, who facilitate defined outcomes. To do this, we consider and weigh business, marketing, communications (and other) challenges, and work to resolve them through design. The end-result doesn't have to look good, even though it might, but it absolutely must work."
We changed our name to "Aquent" back in 1999. It is pronounced with a long "a" (think: "agent") followed by a "kwent." The name has never been popular among naming pundits. About a month after we switched, Ruth Shalit, writing for Salon, said, "You could be forgiven for thinking that a functional, descriptive name such as MacTemps [our former name - Matt], for all its pedestrian clunkiness, might be preferable to a name like Aquent, which to the casual observer evokes something vaguely liquid, perhaps a mouthwash, and whose meaning only becomes clear, if then, when parsed by a listener who is profoundly familiar with the morphemic structure of Latin and ancient Greek." See what I mean?
Arcane morphemic structures aside, numerous commentators criticized the name for being meaningless, and Clay Risen, writing in 2002, gave it an "F." (He also pointed out, rightly though embarrassingly, that "... 'aquent' actually does have a meaning in English: It's a geological term for poorly drained human-altered soils--in other words, landfill," which many of our employees discovered when they Googled the name.)
After 9 years, you'd think that the ridicule would have died down but, sadly, it has not. As recently as this past Friday, Jim Ferry referred to the name as a "doozy" and snidely quipped, "Well, gotta go brush my teeth and rinse with Aquent. (Oh! They are a Temp agency? Nevermind.)" Ouch.
I interviewed Debbie Weil yesterday for a podcast on corporate blogging (which I'll be posting tomorrow morning - watch this space!). While doing a bit of research on Debbie, I came across her compilation of the "Best Top Ten Lists" for 2007. What threw me for a time-loop was this list of "Top 10 Tips for New Bloggers" assembled by the fellow who coined the term "blog," Jorn Barger.
Actually, it wasn't the list that threw me so much as seeing Jorn's robot wisdom weblog, which was the first blog I ever read (while sitting in the Aquent office in Osaka, Japan back in 2000). It reminded me once again that a weblog, now commonly called "blog," was originally defined by Mr. Barger as a collection of links documenting someone's travels around the web. The journal-esque form of today's blogs suggests that the genre has drifted somewhat from his original concept, according to which, as he puts it, "...del.icio.us is actually better for blogging than blogger.com."
In other words, blogging is about the links, not about self-important pontification, snide carping, or insipid personal reflection. (Thank the Heavens that I never indulge in such frivolities on this august and painfully earnest corporate blog!)
So, in the original spirit of bloggery, I present the following links upon which I have recently pointed and/or clicked:
We've been hearing about the credit meltdown and the bursting housing bubble for a while, but Fed Chief Bernanke was talking yesterday about a worsening economic outlook and even the President is finally copping to the notion that the economy "faces challenges". So what does this mean for folks who, for one reason or another, decide to work as "temps" (which, as I mentioned in my last post, is basically everybody)?
I'm not an economist or a policy wonk; I'm just a humble doctor of philosophy who has been working in the temporary staffing industry one way or the other for going on 20 years, but this is how I see it. Rising unemployment rates are rarely good for anyone, and if we glance back to 2001/2002, when a lot of people came to us looking for work, things weren't exactly hunky-dory. Be that as it may, there may be some upside for temps, at least in the short term, to an economic downturn.
Here's how it works, at least in theory. As the economy slows, companies start worrying about spending money. Hiring "permanent" staff becomes a dodgy proposition because you're adding an indefinite cost to your budget at a time when indefiniteness is more scary than reassuring. Still, you've got stuff to do and chances are you need to hire people to do it. So you turn to freelancers and temp agencies to find people who will work on projects and then leave when the projects are complete, thus making your costs more definite and predictable. In other words, towards the beginning of a downturn, temporary staff, thanks to its "flexibility," starts to look pretty appealing.
Many moons ago, a friend of mine sent me a book entitled, Disciplined Minds, the subtitle of which reads, "A critical look at salaried professionals and the soul-battering system that shapes their lives." I actually read the book straightaway, but my feelings about it were so conflicted that I kept them to myself until now.
The book is really two books in one. Part of it, the best part, is a detailed critique of the process of achieving a doctorate in physics and what happens to doctoral candidates along the way. The other, less convincing, part is a broad critique of the division of labor, capitalist society, and the role that salaried professionals play in maintaining and perpetuating the status quo.
Schmidt views the working world in classically Marxist terms in which there is an inherent, exploitative conflict between employees and managers. The problem for the managers lies in the fact that they cannot tell everyone exactly what to do all the time. Some jobs require independent thinking and creativity. "Beyond a certain point on such a job," Schmidt writes, "the worker faces a blank sheet of paper and th boss can't tell her exactly what to do. Here employers simply expect their creative workers to act in the corporate interest..."
Obsessed as I am with the reach of this blog, I wanted to find out if my last post about absinthe had gotten me any Google-love. Turns out the interweb contains a boatload of absinthe-related content, so Ye Olde Talente Blogge wasn't showing up in the first several pages. I switched tactics and did a search for "Marketing & Hallucination." My post shows up first! I sent myself flowers immediately.
Although the likelihood of anyone doing a search for those two terms may be small, it did return 266,000 results. One concerned an anti-fungal drug that had the side effect of causing people to see Wookies. As strange and intriguing as that was, I was more impressed by a site called Logo.Hallucination. (That link goes to the Logo.Hallucination "concept" page, if for no other reason than that the homepage contains some, er, "adult" imagery.)
The brainchild of one Christophe Bruno, Logo.Hallucination relies on neural network image recognition technology to scan images on the web, detect whether or not an image contains a facsimile of a copyrighted logo, and then sends a letter to the owner of the image encouraging them to contact the company concerned. The most amusing part of the "prank" is that the letter suggests that the company should pay the image owner for advertising and promoting the company's brand.
When I was in graduate school, one of my professors told us that his class would not be held on Labor Day, although the university did, and apparently still does schedule classes for that day, because it was the only holiday he had any respect for. (His respect for Labor Day was no doubt connected to his membership in the Communist Party.)
Although I did not share his political affiliations, I did share the sentiment. Look around you. Everything you see was made by someone (or by a machine built and run by a someone). The apartment or house you live in, the furniture you sit on, the stove you cook on, the sidewalk you stroll down, the car you drive in, etc. - all products of human labor.
This labor extends, of course, to the signs that guide you, the printed materials and websites that inform you, as well as the advertisements and packaging that beguile you - for design and the realization of that design too involve labor, work, making. Ultimately, it is because I admire, respect, and, in my best moments, count myself among people who make things, that I have a special regard for a day devoted to celebrating workers and their work.
Oddly enough, although Labor Day is about as secular as holidays get, I believe that there is something almost spiritual in the sentiment enshrined in it. To see what I mean, we need look no farther than the words used by Peter J. McGuire when he first suggested the establishment of a day dedicated to honoring those "who from rude nature have delved and carved all the grandeur we behold."
When I first saw this piece, I was wondering if the Dear Leader was going to take offense. I mean, he does have a million-man army and, apparently, nuclear weapons, so I wouldn't want to rub him the wrong way. Then I did a little bit of research about North Korea and found out that "under the wise flawless Songun leadership of Comrade Generalissimo Kim Jong Il all the ills plaguing the outside world dare not touch Juche Korea which is why all the Koreans live lives of complete blissful happiness that never even once suffers any dampening by the single reverse, setback, or fiasco."
Reading those words convinced me that Aquent, at least, had nothing to fear from the country "known around the world as the Land of Joy and Hope of the Utopian Socialist Workers' Paradise." In fact, once I saw this video, I kind of wanted to move there!
It seems like only yesterday I was making a snide comment about future Live Earth-esque concerts taking place on-line to reduce their notorious carbon footprints.
As it turns out, the folks at Zwinky were at least one step ahead of the Minister of Enlightenment. They hosted their own 24-hour concert event in Zwinktopia on Stage Z to coincide with the "live" Live Earth. This concert featured such diverse acts as R&B chanteuse, Kelly Rowland, and Scott Ian of the seminal thrash outfit, Anthrax. I have little doubt that it rocked you (meaning "one") like a (virtual) hurricane.
I strongly believe that anything I think or make fun of has already been thought or made fun of on the web.
It shows how out of the mainstream I am that I stumbled upon the Live Earth global concert extravaganza pretty much by accident Saturday night. I tuned in to the live concert stream via the Live Earth MSN site, and though I was viewing the feed in lowly Safari (yes, some people still use it!), I was able to catch some (to may tastes "underwhelming") performances. I'm an old fuddy-duddy, music-wise.
Live Earth, "The Concerts for a Climate in Crisis," were far more interesting to me in concept then in reality. Billed by its promoters as an event that "that will bring together more than 100 music artists and 2 billion people to trigger a global movement to solve the climate crisis," it apparently set a new record "by generating more than 9 million Internet streams." Even if that number fell short of the billions promised, it is still impressive and highlights the "world-wide-ness" of the web. Before the web, ubiquitous broadband, etc., the idea of a global concert actively viewed by millions would have been impossible. Now it's yesterday's news.
Even more fascinating than the global reach of the web, however, is its long temporal arm (or tail, as some would have it). The record broken by Live Earth had been set by Live8, which found that the majority of its streaming traffic, to the tune of 100 million streams, came during the six weeks after the event. Accordingly, the Live Earth folk expect 80% of their traffic to be post-hoc.
The fact that this live event will enjoy an extended lifespan thanks to the web, and that in fact 80% of its life will take place there, illustrates one way that web-based projects never-end. This point was made quite articulately by Gerry McGovern the other day in an essay he posted with the catchy title, "The Web is messy." It is the temporal open-endedness of the web that makes it messy. It goes on forever! A website is not like a commercial or a brochure that is completed and sent to make its merry way in the world. It is more literally like a living place that is changed by its visitors and occupants and must evolve to meet their needs and expectations.
As any parent can tell you - living things are pretty messy. Live events are as well - just ask the folks who had to clean up after the concert-goers on Saturday. Indeed, Live Earth was criticized for the energy required to put on the actual concerts, especially given the fact that some performers (referred to as, " The artists formerly known as huge carbon footprints," by Marina Hyde in The Guardian) flew private jets "halfway across the world to play," as the New York Times reported.
Is the next step for "green" activism a totally web-based, non-stop musical experience? Why not create a virtual, streaming concert made up of great live footage from bands of yesteryear? Wait, wait, I got it. How about "Second Live Earth"?
I wrote a post for the Daily Fix over at MarketingProfs wondering if careers in marketing were going the way IT careers went in the late 90's/early 00's.
At the turn of the present century, careers in technology saw a drastic rise in contracting, outsourcing, and offshoring. Although it seemed like marketing and creative were two corporate functions that couldn't be sent offshore, that is far from the case.
Similarly, ten years ago the idea of "contract marketers" seemed outlandish - who wants a part-timer managing their brand? - but given the fact that, on average, marketing managers are in their jobs for a brief 19 months (with the average CMO only sticking around for 23), these folks sure start to look a lot like IT contractors.
With more and more marketing departments consisting primarily of project and traffic managers who work with a pool of freelancers and agencies, a typical marketing career may soon be made up of a series of contracts and projects, rather than significant tenure climbing the corporate ladder at any particular company.
Does this assessment/prediction strike you as true or just more blogging baloney?
Attention Flash wizards and wannabes! The BBC brings us this interactive timeline of British History. It's a cool and slickly designed use of Flash, Check it out. You just might learn something! (For instance: Did you know that Bishop Wilfrid of York was expelled from his see by Ecgfrith, King of Northumbria in 678 CE?)
"Some of the study participants argue that interrogation should be restructured using lessons from many fields, including the tricks of veteran homicide detectives, the persuasive techniques of sophisticated marketing and models from American history." [Emphasis added]
Later, the article quotes psychologist Randy Borum saying the following: "We have a whole social science literature on persuasion... It's mostly on how to get a person to buy a certain brand of toothpaste. But it certainly could be useful in improving interrogation."
At long last, a way for marketers to catch the bad guys, instead of being the bad guys.
Thanks to Jim Kukral for the story behind that last link. Image courtesy of toothycat.
The word "icon" comes from the Greek word "eikon," meaning "image. " Put simply, an icon is an image, picture, or likeness that stands for an object by signifying or representing it. Historically, icons were used as signage to communicate larger ideas in shorthand for safety purposes, in religious texts or artifacts, or simply to facilitate the ordering of people's everyday lives. The images tended to be quite literal, only one degree away from the action, object or concept they represented.
With the introduction of digital tools, however, there was an added degree of metaphor placed between icons and what they represented; icons were used to reference an action or idea in the physical world that served as an explanation for an activity in the digital world. For example, you clicked on a picture of an envelope to access your email. This approach to icon design made sense as people were making the transition from the physical world to the digital. But for people born in the 1990s and later, who are growing up immersed from day one in the digital world, is this layer of metaphor a middleman they may not want or appreciate?
Al Gore did not invent the PDF (nor, as I've pointed out before, did he ever claim to invent the Internet). But last week he did serve as keynote speaker at the CRE8 Conference, which used to be called the "Adobe Acrobat & PDF Conference," hosted by Aquent Graphics Institute, Aquent's official training arm.
As severalcommentators have pointed out, although former-almost-president Gore did speak engagingly about global warming and what we all could do to combat it, he did not talk about the role of the PDF in that battle. Nevertheless, he was, quite against character, apparently very funny (seen here yucking it up with the president of Aquent Consulting, Nina Eigerman who asked him to sign her Mac):
It's easy to forget that there was a time when no one did the things that we do now.
Take blogging, for instance. 55 million people do it, it's a major focus of mine, and it's even part of my job, but there was a time when, believe it or not, no one blogged because it was not yet possible.
Now run the clock back 157 years to this date in 1850 when Nathaniel Hawthorne published his classic novel, The Scarlet Letter. According to the The Writer's Almanac, The Scarlet Letter stands as the "the first great American novel in part because it was the first great American novel that could reach a large audience."
Hawthorne's novel enjoyed a relatively broad audience and long-lasting popularity because it was among the first to be mass-produced (2,500 copies initially) by factory workers on steam-powered printing presses. Industrial, large-scale publishing, which I can hardly imagine not existing as I look at the many books, magazines, and newspapers littering my workspace, had finally become a reality.
Consider now that, when I "publish" this blog post, it will be available almost instantaneously to anyone on Earth with access to the Internet. Likewise, if you follow this link you will be able to read The Scarlet Letter in its entirety online. The publishing industry that catapulted Hawthorne to fame, while not yet dead, has evolved into something that would have been inconceivable to him.
The technologies we rely on as marketers become second nature. Then, before we know it, they're history.
You know how I wrote the other day that "people make the difference" at Aquent? Well, a week later, I still think it's true! 
Only labor's gonna give you something. - 
I wrote a 
