25 cars a day
Peter Magelssen points us to CHOPIT!: The Seattle Times: Motoring: Putting the show in business.
Infomercials are not interruption media. They’re not really ads. They are product pitches that people choose to watch. Good for him.
Funny riff
Link: Things That Make Me Angry. Best advice on what you should be given to play golf:
a shovel, a pool cue, and a wooden leg
A marketing gig I don’t want
Not sure anyone does…
The FDA just approved the Gardasil vaccine, which protects women against cervical cancer and some sexually transmitted diseases. It’s a breakthrough that could save thousands of lives every year.
The thing is, it costs $360 and needs to be given by injection to girls before they become sexually active–about 12 is what they’re recommending. And, since it’s a vaccine, there are fears about long-term effects.
So, let’s try to imagine that conversation taking place across the dinner tables and examination rooms across America… The idea that parents can be reached and then persuaded to confront these issues, in our culture, is a little overwhelming.
A reminder that marketing is always about a lot more than just facts.
Squidoo now permits comments
Heath has the news: SquidBlog.
Learning from the primaries
So, the New York Republican Party just nominated a candidate that by every judgment is to the right of the party as a whole and far to the right of this very blue state. Odds of winning: close to zero.
And it happens all the time.
The same way a few people will write in to a magazine to complain bitterly about a new design.
It’s easy to confuse people who are passionate and loud with the majority.
The people who care a lot show up. They vote in the primary, or at the convention. They write letters to the editor and bash your products on their blogs.
If you want your idea to spread, you need these people. They are the ones with otaku, the ones who care, the ones who will take the time to spread the word.
But don’t confuse them with the majority. If you need to win an election or sell a ton of products, this group (call them the early adopters) will almost always steer you wrong. As Brad Feld said, listen to what they say and do the opposite.
Important to note the part in the preceding paragraph about "need." I think most of the time, you don’t need to have a majority. Most of the time, it’s deadly to even try. Catering to the passionate is exactly what you should do.
What do I find?
When I type your brand or your name into youtube, what do I find?
What about technorati? or flickr?
You can fix all three of these things today.
It’s easy to worry about Google rankings, but hard to change them. Now, though, there are dozens of horizontal search tools that you can populate yourself. They’re not hiding. Are you?
Authenticity
Craig Miller points us to: Hansen’s Clothing.
I believe in Duane. I’m not sure exactly why I do, but I do. Maybe because it feels like he wasn’t following a manual when he built this store. Maybe it’s because his dad was named Elmore.
Least sold
Brooke Browne points us to: VIN�ON.
After you click through on your language of choice, you’ll notice that they don’t just list their bestsellers. They list their leastsellers.
I love this.
Some people want to buy what everyone else is buying.
But some people don’t go to restaurants that are, "so busy, no one goes there any more."
What a neat way to point out the overlooked.
Welcome to the lightning round
It was always the best part of the game show. No buzzers, no banter, just as many questions as you can answer in a minute. Quick. Quick. Quick.
Well, now that we’ve got a billion-channel universe (with more than 300 hits on the ‘top ten’ hit list: popurls.com | popular urls to the latest web buzz) it’s always the lightning round. There are hundreds of the most important posts of the day, and the list changes constantly.
Which means that subtlety may seem dead.
You get judged by your headline or your layout, or the first line of your press release or the first beats of your riff. If the smartmob can’t figure out your story in two seconds, they ignore it or they make up their own.
If you want to please everyone, it helps to be clear, obvious and direct. And safe and predictable as well.
Of course, if you try to make it clear to everyone, the chances of having your story spread in the long run go down. Because direct is often not so interesting, especially to sneezers. And doesn’t always involve the joy of discovery.
So perhaps, the best strategy is to be a bit less obvious, a bit indirect, telling a story you can live with because it’s true, but a story that might take more than a minute to understand.
I actually think there’s room in this big world for both approaches. They rarely meet (Google’s did, I think–the simple search story was right there for everyone to see, while the more subtle elements unfolded over time) so if you try to do both at the same time, you’ve got your work cut out for you.
A lot of internal marketing conflict comes from camps that don’t have the words to describe which path they’re choosing. Being clear with your peers in what you hope to accomplish will help you roll it out. Of course, being subtle…