Corey Brown points us to the latest: Google Trends: malcolm gladwell.
The stuff presented is fascinating. The links to press releases and news don’t mean much, but over time, they doubtless will.
The presentation is so clear, it’s a delight to play with. Not sure what you’ll learn, but it’ll be fun.
What happens when youtube gets selective and focused?
TurnHere.com ~ The video insiders guide to neighborhoods across the world.
The billion channel universe is here, and collecting the best stuff is a great opportunity.
The Chinatown and Pizza videos are especially good. Thanks to Craig and Erik.
Hugh gets us thinking again, as usual.
I want to extend this from "advertising" to:
In fact, just about any situation where the speaker is either uncomfortable and/or hiding behind a bureaucracy or anonymity.
The next time you get all formal or obfuscatory or snarky, ask a simple question, "If I knew this person and we were eating together in a restaurant, would I speak to them the same way?"
If the answer is no, why not?
Okay, both of my seminars, certainly the last ones before the summer, are now posted. The less expensive NY seminar is here: Seminars: The June 15 Seminar.
I hope you can make one or the other if you’re interested. I’ve already gotten some great applications the June 1 gig.
(not a typo).
Want to guess what these musical acts have in common?
The Rolling Stones
The Eagles
Elton John
U2
Paul McCartney
They each made more than $50 million last year, according to Forbes. They accounted for 40% of the top 10 acts. The long trail is what happened.
Same with products like Quicken, websites like eBay and chefs like Wolfgang Puck.
We’re so busy celebrating the hit of the moment that we forget that the real profit often comes from the long trail.
It’s easy to persuade yourself to shortchange the design of a product, or your investment in its engineering, or to manipulate the launch to maximize the short-term box office appeal of opening weekend. But the long trail proves you wrong.
The web compounds long trail thinking. A website might spike with short term traffic hits, but a great website builds on its traffic, rises in its search rankings and continues to bring in traffic, year after year.
The long trail explains why so many unprofitable movies turn a profit when the DVD comes out. The Shawshank Redemption got seven Academy Award nominations when it was released, but disappointed at the box office. Now, after more than 1.3 million reviews at NetFlix, it is one of the most enduring DVD hits ever.
The long trail is a reminder to invest like your product might just be around in ten years.
John writes in and wants to know why I don’t think much of focus groups.
A properly run focus group is great. The purpose? To help you focus.
Not to find out if an idea is any good. Not to get the data you need to sell your boss on an idea.
No!
Focus groups are very bad at that. Groupthink is a problem, for one. Second, you’ve got a weird cross section of largely self-selected people, the kind of people willing to sit in a room with bad lighting to make a few bucks.
What focus groups can do for you is give you a visceral, personal, unscientific reaction to little brainstorms. They can help you push something farther and farther to see what grabs people. But the goal isn’t to do a vote or a census. Any time your focus group results include percentages, you’ve wasted an afternoon.
…when you don’t know what to write.
Ads are expensive. Full page color ads, especially so. So are landing pages, when you count the cost of the traffic.
So, here’s one, an insert in my New York Times from Alyse Myers, SVP of the NY Times.
Dear New York Times Subscriber,
You’ve probably heard about our great new rewards program called TimesPoints. This free program gives you exciting new opportunities to …
and on and on for five paragraphs.
Or, this one from Wilson Audio, which sells $50,000 stereo speakers. From the top:
of tweeters and truth
There isn’t a marketer alive, who, when asked what they most desire, won’t tell you: a simple message.
I’m not making this up. I would reprint the entire ad but you would have to flee in pain. Here’s the last line:
To say that our new speaker is worthy of your attention because it boasts this or that tweeter would be, at the very least, a half truth. And that’s the whole truth.
Oh.
If you don’t know what to say, don’t say anything.
If you don’t have an ad worth reading and acting upon, don’t run it.
Alex Krupp asks about the McDonald’s redesign.
Sure looks like Starbucks. Will it work?
The other day, I walked into a Dunkin Donuts to buy a friend a muffin. There, in the center of the store, were six or eight seniors, clearly having been there for at least an hour. They were sitting in those classic DD plastic chairs, the kind that don’t move, and they were really enjoying themselves.
They had plenty of options, options that were virtually the same price or possibly even cheaper, but they like it there. Because that’s how it’s always been.
The challenge McDonald’s faces is not to be like Starbucks. Why? Because Starbucks is already like Starbucks. The challenge is to to tell a story to the existing McDonald’s fan, a story that combines fresh and comfortable with the stuff they’ve always liked and trusted (the place is cheap, and it feels cheap, which makes it easier to bring the baseball team…)
The question, and I don’t know the answer, is how does a regular feel when she steps into the new store? Better? Worse? Good enough to bring a friend next time?
Good for them for trying something. Now, if they test and measure, we’ll see…
okay, some people don’t like analogies.
I was deep into conversation with someone the other day. He was smart, well informed and totally lost as I tried to explain something to him.
I realized that every single time I used an analogy, he didn’t "get it." Instead, he started talking about the example in the analogy instead of the concept I was trying to get across.
Fortunately, I realized it and switched gears. The conversation was saved.
Marketing, at its core, is about teaching somebody something that they didn’t know. More and more often, we use analogies to teach abstract concepts to prospects. It’s essential to remember that some people aren’t wired that way. Yes, your shampoo may be as fresh as a daisy, but if I don’t think that way and I don’t like daisies…
The June 1 seminar is now ready for signups. First come, first served, 12 slots. Seminars: The tiny whiteboard seminar.
I’ll post the other seminar next week. Hope to see you there.
