Greg Kuchmek, who is represented by Aquent's DC office, has been working on the web since 1994. That's when he was hired to help produce a webzine, Stim, started by Prodigy. [Editor's Note: For an interesting flashback to 1996, read Ty Burr's review of Stim, which he gives a B+, and Slate, which he gives a C+]. When that gig ended in 1997 he discovered that, "3 years web experience was amazing. I was 'senior' automatically."
Flash forward to the present and Greg now has 14 years web experience. If you want to hire someone like Greg (assuming you can find someone like him), what do you have to offer him? He has a broad range of in-demand skills: in addition to ground-up experience with the full suite of web technologies, Greg is also an able photographer, animator, illustrator, and writer. When he goes on a job interview, the pressure is on the interviewer.
What is Greg looking for and how can you convince him to work for you? Listen to his words:
1. Trust
I'm looking for an employer that respects that I have my skills and trusts me to use them. They hire me because I can do something and they can't. It's great when they let me do it.
It's not always like that. I've done jobs where the client was really looking over my shoulder and micro-managing. I understand that everyone's got their personal style, but when that's happening, I don't feel free to be creative and really do what I'm capable of.
2. Flexibility
I don't wear a tie to interviews anymore. I don't need to dress up at this point. I've also got a full studio at home, so I'm even kind of shocked that I have to leave the house! I guess I've been spoiled by working in places like Boston or New York where it's more flexible.
More than flexibility about where work happens, though, I appreciate it when there is flexibility around how things get done. There have been countless little jobs where they needed a photograph and I've told them, "Look, I can spend the day combing through stock or I can go take one." It's great when people are more open to the "I can do this right now" approach, than they are attached to the "this is the way we have to do it" approach.
Thanks to Google, I was alerted to an Aquent reference on a blog called, "Give, Get, Take, and Have." I don't know much about it, but, astonishingly, "This blog has often been found swimming miles from shore in the Indian Ocean." Go figure!
Anyway, the (possibly Canadian) author of this blog posted a link to an Aquent mini-site called, "The Business of Touch," which provides the world with annotated animations illustrating the proper mode of greeting people in a variety of countries from India to Czechoslovakia.
To that blogger, I say, "Thanks for sharing this with your readership!"
To everyone else I say, "If you or someone close to you is going to be meeting anyone in or from another country, please consult 'The Business of Touch' in order to avoid a potentially unpleasant and/or embarrassing international incident."
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.
I am generally bored by presentations, business, academic, or otherwise. I fidget, I doodle, and my comments or questions tend to fall into the "distracting/sometimes comedic" category. And while I've sat through my share of boring presentations, I will freely admit that I have likewise conducted some of my own. Moreover, I have known the searing pain and embarrassment of consciously doing so.
I've tried to play with the genre in order to liven things up. At academic conferences, I've eschewed the traditional reading approach and spoken ex tempore. In business contexts, I've used Godin-esque PowerPoints featuring provocative images and 5 words or less per slide, and I've even daringly presented without a PowerPointed net.
Still, I have yet to try Pecha Kucha. A Pecha Kucha Night is an event whereat designers present their ideas on design under rather strict limits: Each presenter gets 20 slides and 20 seconds per slide. If you do the math, you'll realize that gives each presentation 400 seconds, or a little over six minutes.
The founders of PK Night, Astrid Klein and Mark Dytham of Klein Dytham architecture, realized that, if you "give a mike to a designer (especially an architect) ... you'll be trapped for hours." At the same time, they wanted to create "a place for young designers to meet, network, and show their work in public." Incipit Pecha Kucha.
I'm loving the concept. Can you imagine a speaker telling you, "Yes, I'd be happy to present at your conference, but I refuse to speak for more than six and a half minutes"?
If that sounds like a dream come true, CALL ME! I would be happy to speak anywhere, on ANY SUBJECT, Pecha-Kucha-style. Even if I'm boring, the light at the end of the tunnel of boredom is coming atcha in twenty 20-second increments. So don't worry. It will be over soon.
Random searching in Google brought me to this site: Smashing Magazine. Created by two German fellows (they live in Germany, anyway), who claim that, "Our aim is to inform our readers about the latest trends and techniques in web-development - clearly, precisely and regularly," the magazine threatens to, and I quote, "SMASH YOU WITH THE INFORMATION THAT WILL MAKE YOUR LIFE EASIER. REALLY." Well, forewarned is forearmed.
I browsed through the "INSPIRATION" category and found this post on "Beautiful Handwriting, Lettering, and Calligraphy." You have to scroll a bit to get into the meat of it, but they have collected an amazing assortment of lettering styles and approaches.
Ever since I spoke to Erik Hauser last year I've been looking for an opportunity to speak with him again. He's optimistic, he's infectiously enthusiastic, and he has a lot to say on a lot of different topics almost any hour of the day or night (as anyone who follows the Experiential Marketing Forum knows).
Long story short, I asked him if I could interview him for this here podcast, and he amicably agreed. Rather than asking him to define "experiential marketing" for the umpteenth time, I thought instead it would be more illuminating to talk about emotionally connecting with brands, using experiential marketing techniques when searching for a job, and, of course, Gene Simmons. So that's what we did.
I invite you to listen in on our conversation. You can do so 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. Finally, this and other Talent Blog Podcasts are always available 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:
00:59 - Gene Simmons: The Genius
05:19 - You need a 3rd Party to serve as "Keeper of the Brand"
10:04 - You want to raise demand? Decrease the supply! (From Hydrox to Polaroid)
12:01 - The "outside perspective"
14:45 - The EMF: How moderating discussions increases their value
16:08 - Keys to nurturing a vital online community
20:05 - "Experiential" is a methodology, not a tactic
This is a snapshot of Modernista!'s new website. Yes, they are using their Wikipedia page as their homepage (though apparently Wikipedia took it down for a while due to this unconventional usage). They also use Google News for their "news" section and Flickr for their portfolio.
I'm not the first to write about this. PSFK wrote about it last week, as did MarketingVOX and others. Before that, a number of bloggers - Gareth Kay, Paul Isakson, and Tom O'Keefe, among them - weighed in both for and against this novel approach.
Some (like Mitch Caplan) found it "Brilliant. Brilliant. Brilliant." Others, like Mr. O'Keefe, were less impressed. The pro-camp sees it as the ultimate acceptance of Web 2.0 reality, in which your online reputation defines who you are. The cons see it as lazy, ugly, or just one step beyond what Zeus Jones had already done.
I think the difference between the Modernista! site and the Zeus Jones site is significant insofar as the latter is an actual site with links to Zeus Jones-flavored content, whereas the M! site is really just a widget leading you to M! content across the web.
At the same time, Modernista!'s move reminds us that, in spite of the spatial metaphor inscribed in the term, a website is not a place or a location. It is a set of relations between disparate elements. In fact, the elements related are often sets of relations themselves, such as Google search results.
This may be the reason that information architecture seems more cutting edge than graphic design on the web. When "sites" are reduced to their content, or even more radically, consist primarily of continually changing content from other sites, who cares about white space, color palettes, and buttons?
Seth Godin doesn't need my link love, but, just in case you don't follow the daily musings of The Godin One, I thought I would share. Key quotable quote: "Great jobs, world class jobs, jobs people kill for... those jobs don't get filled by people emailing in resumes. Ever." [Tip of the hat to my esteemed colleague, Erin, for this one.]
The other day I pointed out that brand loyalty mimics brain damage. Well, turns out that exposure, even subliminal exposure, to well-known brands can cause you to exhibit behavior associated with them. For example, this study demonstrated that seeing (or, strictly speaking, "not seeing") the Apple "apple" can make you more creative.
Gee, what does exposure to the Microsoft logo make you do?
Todd's knowledge of the digital media realm runs deep and, having worked with clients ranging from Microsoft and 3M to Starbucks and the Whole Earth Catalog, his experience is broad.
As far as content development and asset management is concerned, his message is this: "For many individuals and companies, their content (pictures, text, video, etc) is a mess, a liability, and a cost center. It takes focus and effort to turn the content from a liability into an economic asset, but the path is straight-forward and very achievable."
To find out just how straight-forward and achievable, tune in on the 27th. To register, just go here.
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."
The webcast will provide those who are new to the reputation management game with a comprehensive overview of it. For those already involved in search engine optimization and marketing, social media marketing, or the management of an organization's complex and constantly evolving web presence, Andy has a lot of practical, tactical, and technical advice that will help you make sure you're covering all the angles.
Finally, although the emphasis will fall on things that companies can do, should do, or are doing to manage and influence their online reputation, many of the insights Andy will share can be applied by individuals concerned with building and shaping their own online reputations.
In other words, there's something for everybody here so you owe to yourself to check it out. I mean, your reputation is on the line! Doesn't that matter to you? Don't you want to know that you're doing everything in your power to maintain it in the best and strongest light? Wouldn't you feel bad if your reputation was dealt a horrible blow and you could have prevented or avoided it if you had just attended this webcast?
Don't find out the hard way just how important your online reputation can be; find out the easy way how to protect and nurture it: Listen to the darn webcast.
Yesterday - February 7, 2008, in case you are reading this in the far, distant future - Aquent hosted a webcast on changes in creative technology (like InDesign, Acrobat, etc.), that not only have an impact on the type of creative work that gets done but also on the way in which it gets done.
The trends discussed by the presenters, Chris Smith and Jennifer Smith of Aquent Graphics Institute, ranged from the growing need to repurpose content for multiple platforms and devices to the emerging possibilities for collaboration and process improvement in creative organizations.
We got a number of good questions during the call but one that surprised me the most was, "What is XML?" It took me back because five or six years ago I was frequently called on to explain XML to our internal staff, in spite of the fact that I had no technical background nor had ever consciously used XML (it's all around us, so I had probably used it without knowing).
I was on the call as the host, so I portrayed XML as a customizable mark-up language that works like a universal translator on Star Trek. With it, you can tag your content in a way that can then be read or understood by a variety of technologies. Chris Smith put it a little more simply by describing it as a mark-up language that allows you to make content platform independent.
Any other ideas about how to explain XML to non-technical designer types?
I'm going to set aside my "career advice" hat for a second and put on my "marketing thought leader" hat so that I can briefly discuss some interesting things I noticed about the Super Bowl ads.
First, GoDaddy. For a few years now, they've been posting the "hot" versions of their notorious ads on their website. While last year the message was "marketing has all the fun," this year, the message seemed to be, "the hot ads are on the web." In fact, the commercial explicitly mocked people for watching the ads on television.
So, Interesting Integration Strategy #1: Create a television ad that is basically an advertisement for the on-line ad (which happens to be on your website).
Second, Under Armour. Apparently, as their Apple-esque ad ended, if you were on their mailing list, you received an HTML email allowing you to pre-order the future of the athletic shoe. The obvious assumption is that even when watching television, people are on-line, either via their cellphone, their Blackberry, or their household PC.
Interesting Integration Strategy #2: Supplement broadcast advertisement with immediate on-line call to action.
Gary Katz is the CEO and founder of Marketing Operations Partners. Gary is a thought leader in the emerging field of marketing operations, a field to which he brings both a keen intellect and a missionary zeal.
I caught up with Gary and recorded this interview with him, which I present for your podcasting enjoyment. In it, he defines "marketing operations," discusses the benefits of this approach as well as the challenges - both organizational and, for lack of a better word, psychological - faced by anyone trying to implement it within their company. Listen to what he's got to say and find out why he refers to marketing operations as a "cosmic universal force."
To get down to the nitty gritty, you can hear the podcast by clicking on the device pictured below:
You can also download the mp3 by "right-clicking" ("control-clicking," Mac-wise) this link here, or check out all the Talent Blog Podcasts on iTunes.
Highlights of the podcast can be found at the following time coordinates:
00:46 - What is Marketing Operations?
02:12 - What problems should the Marketing Operations approach fix?
05:00 - Marketing vs. Sales: Who's driving?
07:10 - "Sophistication"
10:31 - Ideal metrics
11:25 - Challenges faced by organizations when implementing Marketing Operations
16:30 - MO - A Cosmic, Universal Force
18:37 - Overcoming the challenges
21:40 - Getting C-level support
26:10 - MO: The future of marketing?
29:49 - The missionary sell
The writing is on the FunWall: Marketing is undergoing an unprecedented and overwhelming proliferation of channels. This isn't new news, naturally. It's been going on for a while, what with computers in taxicabs and digital bulletin in elevators and all. But it does seem like every day the web is adding another site, another portal, or another technology that will allow people to connect with each other and, by extension, allow marketers to connect with consumers.
So, in addition to your direct mail campaigns, your advertising (on and off-line), and your promotions, you, Mr and/or Ms. Marketer, need to figure out whether or not you should be blogging, vlogging, Twittering, or podcasting. How can you use Facebook and MySpace? How can you leverage LinkedIn and Plaxo? Where is your sim in Second Life? Your Halo tie-in? Your product placement in Grand Theft Auto? An what about that other cool thing you read or heard about but aren't even sure what it's for?
Everyone feels like they should be doing all or some of the above, but there are so many possibilities, and so much on your plate already, that it's hard to know where to start. To help clear the air and provide some sort of guide to the perplexed, I hunted down a couple of new media-savvy marketers and asked them quite simply: How can marketers best figure out what they should get into and what they can profitably avoid?
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.
In my last post, I floated out various reasons why people "temp" in hopes of dispelling the notion that people temp because they can't find permanent work. In this post, I want to debunk the myth of the "perm job" itself.
To get all heavy and existential, 'cuz that's how I roll, teachers from Buddha to Heraclitus have taught that change and impermanence are an integral part of existence and cannot be escaped or avoided. This applies to employment just as it does to living bodies and any object subject to entropic flux.
Everyone knows this intuitively, and yet, when we apply for or are offered a "full-time job," while we know that it won't be "permanent" like death, we assume the amount of time we will end up giving to the company is more or less in our control and practically indefinite. Indeed, this implied indefiniteness tends to separate the full-time employees from contractors who, as the name implies, work under a contract stipulating the terms and, more importantly, the length of their employment.
Of course, anyone who has gone through a round of lay-offs, downsizing, or re-organization knows that this sense of indefiniteness and permanence is an illusion.
Anyone watching Aquent over the last few years would see that we've shifted the emphasis in our marketing from "the world's largest talent agency for creative, web, and tech," back in 2001, to "a professional services firm that specializes in helping companies all over the world, across a variety of industries, make use of people, processes, and technology" with a "marketing and creative services group" that included a consulting and a technology offering in addition to staffing, to the current positioning of "staffing for marketing organizations" (which is fudged a little in the title of the homepage which reads "marketing and creative staffing at Aquent.com").
These shifts in emphasis have been driven by our desire to grow beyond our origins in desktop publishing and graphic design (both print and web). Truth be told, we still place a lot of folks in these so-called "creative" roles and probably have not yet exhausted the business potential of this space. Nevertheless, the organizational fact of the matter is that creative folk are generally working for marketing folk and creative services departments are frequently nestled within or otherwise adjoined to marketing departments. Given this arrangement, it seemed a natural extension of our business to expand beyond the edges of creative into the broader world of marketing proper and that is just what we've done.
I know I said in my last post that I was going to talk more about Aquent and give the folks who are Aquent more of a voice here. Believe me, I will. But it's sort of late in the day and I want to get another post up, so I thought I would talk about something else: Hate.
"Hate" might be a strong word in this context, but I've been getting some funny reactions from folks, friends of mine, actually, when I tell them that I am "in marketing." For instance, I ran into an old buddy this morning on the "T" and, in the course of talking told him that I worked in marketing. "You don't look it," he quipped.
That's sort of a benign comment, even a kind of backhanded compliment, I suppose, and I probably wouldn't have noted it if it hadn't echoed similar sentiments I've recently encountered. To be specific, last Wednesday, talking with friends over drinks I mentioned my role as a a marketer and my friends said, "We won't tell anybody." Again, fairly low-level, but a kind of a dis, nonetheless, and one I was particularly sensitive to because only a few hours prior to that, when told that I was a marketer, another friend had said, "Well, at least it seems like you still have a soul."
As part of the follow-up to webcast Aquent sponsored devoted to Seven Key Insights for Global Marketing and Brand Management, I called up Sarah Schuh who is general manager of Aquent's Multilingual Communications offering. Sarah has been working in the marketing translation and localization space for many years now and I thought she could help some of you out there with her experience and insights.
I recorded a podcast with Sarah and in our conversation she made one thing perfectly clear: when it comes to localization, translating copy from one language to the next is actually the easy part. Indeed, the real work happens well before any copy is handed over to the translators. That work involves clarification of your core marketing message, ensuring that this message meaningfully addresses a real audience in the target market, and planning for eventual localization when designing critical marketing instruments such as websites. There's nothing worse than having to add to the cost of translation the cost of redesigning your site to accommodate the expanded text produced by moving from English to, say, German.
To get down to the nitty gritty, you can hear the podcast by clicking on the device pictured below:
You can also download the mp3 by "right-clicking" ("control-clicking," Mac-wise) this link here, or check out all the Talent Blog Podcasts on iTunes.
Highlights of the podcast can be found at the following time coordinates:
01:08 - Does your target audience even exist in another market?
03:18 - It's not just words: How do your visual elements translate?
05:20 - Take localization into account when creating the original message
07:20 - Define the use of company terminology
10:00 - Plan for expansion of foreign text
12:08 - The investment in planning vs. The cost of getting it wrong
13:33 - What companies should look for in their localization partner
17:35 - The cause of localization disasters
20:39 - Is "success" just the absence of "disaster"?
Many years ago, I met a group of people who, having encountered absinthe in Spain and despairing of it's unavailability here in the United States, decided to take matters into their own hands and distill it themselves. The concoction they produced was beguilingly exotic, shockingly potent, and of questionable legality, having been banned here in the United States since 1912.
Well, time changes everything. The European Union has got rid of the various bans against absinthe's production and there are now two brands available in the United States (and many more in the EU itself). Not only that, there seems to be a full-on PR blitz letting everyone know that Van Gogh-esque feelings are just a milky green glass away.
The first story I remember seeing appeared in The New Yorker last year. That article focused on artisans like Ted Breaux who were trying, fairly successfully, to recreate pre-ban absinthe.
More recently, the stream of articles about absinthe has grown steadier. In early November, the New York Times published this giddy column on the "mystique and misery of absinthe." Then, at the end of the month, Time published this article entitled simply, "Absinthe Is Back," and posing the question, "Do you want to party like it's 1899?" Suddenly, you could find locally produced articles on absinthe whether you lived in Raleigh-Durham or in Salem, OR.
Although I'm sure that the PR and marketing folk working for Lucid and Kübler have had something to do with this, it can't hurt the folks like Picasso, Monet, Toulouse-Lautrec, Hemingway, and, uh, Marilyn Manson, have been extolling the virtues of this divinely devilish substance for the last hundred years or so (collectively speaking). I mean, with friends like that, who needs marketers?
Which makes me wonder if there aren't other contraband substances from bygone eras that we could bring back to the market by leveraging their cultural cache. I mean, who couldn't go for a frosty mug of laudanum right now? I mean, if it was good enough for Dickens, Wilkie Collins, and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, how could it not be good enough for us?
The upshot of the ARF et al. study was that advertisements which tell a convincing or engaging story more effectively make a positive impression on viewers than those that focus on positioning a product in terms of its benefits. Max Kalehoff insists that the real lesson here is not about advertising effectiveness but about brand effectiveness. Specifically, he says, brands need compelling foundational narratives that connect with people by distilling and embodying that brand's essence.
I believe that is just what I've been trying to do with this blog but, just in case that has not been entirely and intuitively obvious, please allow me to explain.
I came across two things yesterday that reminded me how much people don't want to be sold to and how even biology helps us resist the impulses that marketers, advertisers, and sales-folk wish to unleash within us.
First, on my "iGoogle," I'm pushed a "How to of the Day" from wikiHow.com. Yesterday, one of the featured "How to's" was this: "How to Resist a Sales Pitch." The recommendations are wise and vary from "Buy Nothing" to "Know Sales Tactics," though the most interesting one to me was, "Avoid getting the sales pitch in the first place."
Now I realize that there is a difference between sales and marketing, but this is a strong reminder that people want to actively avoid your "messaging," one way or the other.
Secondly, thanks to the Experiential Marketing Forum, I received this article on neuro-marketing which highlights what they call a "Don't Buy" button in the brain. Turns out that, since avoiding sales pitches altogether is not always possible, nature has taken care of us by fitting out our brains with a mechanism in the dorsal fronto-medial cortex that puts the brakes on impulsive behavior. The scientists involved say that, while it might not be proof of "free will," it is proof of "free won't."
Lesson 1: Advertising and "impulse-inducing marketing," my phrase for "sales pitches," are viewed by the general public with suspicion and provoke conscious avoidance behaviors. Moreover, these sorts of tactics run smack up against hard-wired impulse controllers in the brain.
Lesson 2: There's got to be a way for us to influence and manipulate people to behave according to our wishes that they don't instinctively avoid. Any ideas?
With the summit now behind us, Eric was kind enough to speak with me again on his impressions of the event. We also talked about Omniture's acquisition of Visual Sciences in the context of consolidation in the web analytics industry, upcoming events, and his plans to write the second edition of Web Analytics Demystified during Oregon's long, gray winter.
To hear our conversation, you can click on this device:
You can download the mp3 by "right-clicking" ("control-clicking," Mac-wise) this link here, or check out this and other Talent Blog podcasts on iTunes.
Highlights of our conversation can be found at the following time coordinates:
1:30 The real value of a conference or, "The Lobby Bar" Phenomenon
3:45 Regional variety and web analytics: East Coast vs. West Coast
6:05 Omniture, Visual Sciences, and the Future of the Web Analytics Space
9:55 Challenges to companies developing new web analytics applications
10:52 "Definitely go to eMetrics!" - eMetrics San Francisco 2008
12:30 Web Analytics is Easy: NOT!
Over the weekend I attended the second annual PodCamp un-conference here in Boston. It was great for a lot of reasons, chief among them being the chance to meet people I've corresponded with or spoken to, but had until then never seen in the flesh, as well as the opportunity to meet folks I didn't know before but am glad I do now.
On the "glad I know them now"-front, there were, among others, the "Hollywood Podcaster," Tim Coyne, Doug Haslam and Sandy Kalik of Topaz Partners, the "golden" Jay Berkowitz, and the "twisted" Mitch Joel.
While many folks at PodCamp made an impression on me, I would say the impression I've been wrestling with most vigorously was that made by Mr. Joel. Mitch's presentation was entitled, "Building Your Personal Brand," and, frankly, I wasn't planning on attending it until C.C. told me that Mitch was a great speaker.
If you are interested in other resources that help designers design more greenishly, aside from the links you'll find on the "101 Things" site, you should also explore re-nourish.com, which has an illuminating "Sustainability Toolkit" section.
The other day I had the distinct pleasure of speaking with Peter Rojas, co-founder of Engadget and Joystiq, and formerly editorial director at Gizmodo.
Although our conversation initially focused on the most, and least, successful ways for marketers and PR folk to work with bloggers, we ended up covering a lot of ground including the new Radiohead release, the blurry line between producers and consumers in an era of unlimited digital manipulation, the evolving concept of "nature," and the mass media's "sovereignty over consciousness."
To listen to our conversation, you can use the device pictured here:
There are some hidden gems in this podcast. Once it's loaded, feel free to fast-forward to the following treasures:
18:42 - On Radiohead's "brilliant, smart, well-played gimmick"
27:09 - Young people and the infinitely manipulable digital world
29:49 - The changing idea of the "natural"
32:38 - On starting the next "YouTube-Facebook-Microsoft-Google"
You can download this episode along with other Talent Blog podcasts from Switchpod
or iTunes.
Paul's book is an insightful, articulate, and information-rich overview of the new social media from blogs to YouTube and beyond. If you are a marketer and want to figure out how you can succeed in the new media landscape, or at least avoid some of its precipitous pitfalls, you should tune into the webcast and check out The New influencers.
As an added bonus, I recorded an interview with one of the influencers Paul profiles, Peter Rojas of engadget fame. I will be posting the interview as a podcast here tomorrow. I beg of you to do us both a favor and come on back to listen to it. You'll be glad you did.
I was checking out the buzz log over at Yahoo! and came across this ominously titled post, "The Webkinz Will Rise," about the collectible and cuddly phenomenon known as Webkinz. Apparently, "Webkinz" ranks in the top 100 searches on Yahoo! and buzz about the Webkinz.com site has increased tenfold over the last 12 months.
For those of you who don't know, Webkinz are stuffed animals, kind of like Beanie Babies, only bigger, and each one comes with a special code that you can use to visit your new "pet" on-line, buy stuff for it, dress it up, etc.
I refer to Webkinz and their world as "advertainment" because, well, that's what it is! The Webkinz animal gives you access to the Webkinz world, which is a multi-faceted, immersive commercial for Webkinz. In this way, it resembles the Pokemon revolution of 1995, when Nintendo created a video game that became a card game, a comic, a cartoon, a vast collectible menagerie, and a huge merchandising franchise. In a Leibnizian twist, every part of the Pokemon universe became an advertisement for every other part of it.
If you are a marketer with an eye to the future and you don't know who Erik Hauser is, you've got some catching up to do. Aside from serving as founder and creative director at Swivel Media, who introduced Wells Fargo to Second Life, Erik is also director of the International Experiential Marketing Association, and moderates the Experiential Marketing Forum, which he started up. As if that weren't enough, he additionally maintains a busy schedule of speaking engagements, writes a monthly column for Chief Marketer, and probably does a bunch of other stuff I don't even know about yet.
I got in touch with Erik because I was curious to find out if there was anything aspiring marketers should know about experiential marketing from a career perspective. During the course of our conversation, however, I realized that there was much more that they could learn from Erik's career itself.
"I just want to create. My whole life is a creation. I'm just a creator," he says.
Aquent recently held a large training event for out staff here in Boston (well, technically, Cambridge). In one session two product managers whom we represent talked about their accomplishments, what they are looking for in a job, and what sorts of trends they are seeing in the field of product management. Among other things, they claimed that companies are looking for "big growth from new products," and that, "New product experts can write their own ticket."
Since being able to write your own ticket is good, I was curious about resources available to folks wishing to move their career into the area of new product development, called "NPD" by those in-the-know. I came across an interesting thing or two.
First, i discovered that the AMA has a few articles on NPD best practices. Then I found out that there is actually an association, the PDMA, or Product Development and Management Association, devoted to improving "the effectiveness of individuals and organizations in product development and management." If you want to learn more about the NPD crowd, this site would not be a bad place to start, if for no other reason than the fact that it features an intriguing glossary of product development related terms such as "accidental discovery," "chunks" (sometimes called "modules" or "major subassemblies"), and "tornado," which I'm told is, "A mid to late growth stage strategy that follows the 'bowling alley' and which describes an often frenzied period of rapid growth and acceptance for a product category."
Finally, I recalled one of the product managers present pointing out that companies are not just interested in "line extensions." They are looking instead for products that "create whole new spaces like the iPod." I was a little disturbed to hear this since Marc Andreessen, who founded a little company called Netscape, recently wrote that "there is no such thing as a 'space'." Aside from the fact that this must lead to a lot of trouble when Mr. Andreessen enters a parking lot, it made me wonder, "Are companies asking for new product developers to do the impossible?"
A friend of mine passed this link along to me. It is a video of a software demo at the TED Conference back in March. The speaker is Blaise Aguera y Arcas who was demoing two software packages - Seadragon, which is used to browse large amounts of visual data, and Photosynth, which organizes pictures into navigable, 3-D spaces.
This stuff really has to be seen to be believed. It represents the future of how we will interact with visual data and also highlights that we are already creating virtual models of the world we live in by uploading content to websites like Flickr. There is also a cool example of an explorable, high resolution advertisement for Honda. Imagine if a picture in a magazine contained the richness of data you could find on an entire website. Mind-boggling.
Microsoft acquired Seadragon back in February. Aguera y Arcas makes a funny comment about that when people start clapping at the amazing things he's showing them. Have you ever attended a software demo where people burst into spontaneous applause?
The New York Times published an article yesterday on the significance of Apple creating the iPhone without a physical keyboard. While some may find this foolhardy - apparently humans have grown use to the responsiveness afforded by pressing keys with thumbs and fingers - others, such as Mark Rolston of frog design, see it as a move giving "software an increased importance over hardware in product design."
Oddly enough, this is precisely the point made by one Zachary Jean Paradis way back in January when he wrote, "iPhone - the death of product design." As he saw it then, "[The] iPhone presents us a singular moment at the end of the era of 'things' and the beginning of an era of information'."
He compares the iPhone to Motorola's RAZR, which he calls "a modern marvel of complexity, sculpting, and industrial lust" and "the pinnacle of product design." But he goes on to say, "The RAZR's sculpted beauty is also its limitation. It can only have a beautifully sculpted keypad with a set functionality. iPhone's large touch screen elegantly transforms it into whatever it needs to be: a keyboard, a widescreen movie viewer, a random access voicemail interface."
It's clear that with the iPhone, the task of designing what something can do has less to do with crafting its physical structure and more to do with bringing that structure to life as adaptive and manipulable information. As the difference between an object and an interface disappears, the discipline of interactive design, once a subcategory of computer design, assumes a dominant role in product design and development.
Gerry McGovern, an "authority on managing web content as a business asset," posted an interesting article entitled "Impediments to seeing information as a task," in which he makes some interesting claims on establishing the true value of content on the web.
His argument is summed-up in the following statement: "Until the Web, the act of creating content and the impact that content had on the reader were not really connected. But the Web opens up a window through which we can look and see if the content is actually delivering on its objectives."
McGovern's perspective is informed by the notion that web usage is task driven and that "[m]ore than anything else, it is content that will influence the successful completion of these tasks." Accordingly he concludes, "We need web writers whose first and foremost concern is the action their content will drive."
While I agree that the web allows us to apply metrics to writing, at least in terms of page views, feed subscriptions, comments, etc., I don't agree that the "completion of tasks" is the best measure of content value or that content influences the completion of tasks "more than anything else." Furthermore, I disagree that the goal of all or even most content on the web is to "drive actions" (unless we count as content the word "Continue" written on a button on an e-commerce site).
Within a business context, it goes without saying that we need to be able to evaluate and justify the things we do in business terms. At the same time we need to make sure that we are comparing apples to apples. Content <> Content. Entries in an FAQ are not the same as product descriptions, which are not the same as user reviews or the instructions for submitting a review. Content needs to be judged against its stated purpose, not against the general purpose of "driving action."
Greg Kuchmek, who is represented by Aquent's DC office, has been working on the web since 1994. That's when he was hired to help produce a webzine, Stim, started by Prodigy. [Editor's Note: For an interesting flashback to 1996, read Ty Burr's review of Stim, which he gives a B+, and Slate, which he gives a C+]. When that gig ended in 1997 he discovered that, "3 years web experience was amazing. I was 'senior' automatically."
Yesterday - February 7, 2008, in case you are reading this in the far, distant future - Aquent hosted a webcast on changes in creative technology (like InDesign, Acrobat, etc.), that not only have an impact on the type of creative work that gets done but also on the way in which it gets done.
I'm going to set aside my "career advice" hat for a second and put on my "marketing thought leader" hat so that I can briefly discuss some interesting things I noticed about the Super Bowl ads.
The New York Times published an article yesterday on the significance of Apple creating the iPhone 
