Three String Bass

Hey, you with the short attention span!  Pop a Ritalin and invest 4½ minutes to watch this cool video.

Mixed Message

This post will start as another jab at the editorial and proof-reading capabilities of the Moncton Times & Transcript, but it gets much more philosophical towards the end.  (This is one of the rare entries of mine where I actually know where I’m going to end up as I start to write.)

This is from the financial section (ha!  more like the financial 6 sq in.) of a recent T&T.  Many people nervously track the financial markets these days, wondering if they’re going to retire to Florida or live out their lives in a van down by the river.  So when they glance at the headline of the “At the Bell” corner of their paper, it’s not exactly reassuring to see that the markets are “mixed.”  I guess it’s better than “down,” but not as cheery as “up.”

But look closer – it seems that Murray Guy’s definition of the word “mixed” is different from, say, everybody else’s.  Mssrs Merriam and Webster think that “mixed” means, “combining characteristics of more than one kind.”  So there should be more than one kind of status for the financial markets covered in this report.  Yet the states of all of them are identical!

I’m not accusing the T&T of deliberately trying to frighten the populace; I’m sure this was just an oversight.  But it did draw my line of thought back to the topic of the last post.  The media, in general, prefer to report on bad, sensational, scary stuff, and even spin stories that might not otherwise be so, in that manner.  Not that I’m blaming them, either – they just, in the words of The Kinks, “Give the People What They Want.”  (Full lyrics appended.)

So why are we, “the people” like this?  Why do we prefer to hear about bad stuff over good stuff?  Is it some latent evolutionary thing where we are at our highest level of excitement when we are afraid?  In the book, Life of Pi, Yann Martel writes about how, despite the ideas of PETA, animals are actually happier in zoos because they’re not at risk of being eaten every single minute.  I’m wondering if this is true – perhaps people, and animals, PREFER to be constantly on edge.

Discuss.

Give the people what they want

Well, its been said before, the world is a stage
A different performance with every age.
Open the history book to any old page
Bring on the lions and open the cage.

Give the people what they want
You gotta give the people what they want
The more they get, the more they need
And every time they get harder and harder to please

The roman promoters really did things right.
They needed a show that would clearly excite.
The attendance was sparse so they put on a fight
Threw the christians to the lions, sold out every night

Give the people what they want
You gotta give the people what they want
The more they get, the more they need
And every time they get harder and harder to please

Give em lots of sex, perversion and rape
Give em lots of violence, and plenty to hate
Give the people what they want
Give the people what they want

When olswald shot kennedy, he was insane
But still we watch the re-runs again and again
We all sit glued while the killer takes aim
Hey mom, there goes a piece of the presidents brain!

Give the people what they want
You gotta give the people what they want
Blow out your brains, and do it right
Make sure its prime time and on a saturday night.
You gotta give the people what they want
You gotta give the people what they want
Give the people what they want
Give the people what they want
Give the people what they want

When Pigs Fly…

… I will start to get worried about the Swine Flu.  Until then, I will merely suffer from the constant bombardment of Swine Flu updates from our staunch protectors, the fourth estate.

I stand a better chance of being killed by lightning than by H1N1, but CBC isn’t telling me to stay inside during thunderstorms.  I’m more likely to be killed driving to the airport than by the flu, but the Vice President of the United States is telling me to avoid planes, not cars.

The situation in Darfur is past critical.  The world’s economy is in the shitter.  20,000 people die every day because of lack of clean water.  It’s GUARANTEED that people will die today from the regular flu, which could have been prevented with a vaccine.

Yet the media can think of nothing better to report on than a disease that has so far infected 0.0000036% of North America’s population.

I looked up “terrorism” and it means “the systematic use of terror, especially as a means of coercion.”  “Terror” is defined as, “a frightening aspect;  a cause of anxiety.”  So right now, if you believe that:

a) the average person is more afraid of catching the Swine Flu that they are of an airplane flying into their building; and

b) the media use sensationalization as a means to attract readers/viewers/listeners; then:

the New York Times is more of a terrorist than Osama bin Laden.

Aggregators – Aggre-great or Aggre-vating?

In response to my recent post on Apple stickers, I received the following comment:

Stephen:
Congratulations on your Blog
I really like your writing style. Would you like to be a guest author on the Jacob Report? We have been voted one of the Top 100 Blogs in America, and we are assembling some of the best Blog Authors from around the web to contribute. We would like to include you as a guest author.
The Jacob Report is everything Sales and Marketing, and it looks like you would be a great contributor!
Let me know as quickly as you can please.

Andy Jacob

He has an interesting model here.  He gets a bunch of other people to generate (most) of the content for his site, which drives up its Google ranking and links, which drives up traffic to what is essentially an advertisement for him.  I don’t begrudge his cleverness — its win-win-win.  The contributing authors presumably get a little more exposure that they otherwise would; site visitors get some (occasionally) good insights into sales & marketing; and he gets more traffic.

He is not alone in exploiting this strategy – the top 10 blogs according to Technorati are ALL aggregators.  They all feature multiple authors grabbing content from all over the Web that meets the theme of their site.  They throw in a personal comment or two, and post many entries a day.  People who are interested in that content visit every day to see the latest stuff.

And it’s not just blogs – the highest-ranked non-search engine site (YouTube, #3) is the mother of all aggregators, with millions of contributors and thousands of new “articles” every day.

So should I be honoured that Mr. Jacob thinks enough of my work to add me to his stable of (mostly unfamiliar) authors, or affronted that he wants me to help him make his blog more popular? 

And amazingly, I can tie this back to bar marketing.  Let’s say your place has a particular theme: Irish, Sports, Country (as in music), Country (as in bucolic), Literary, Granola, Biker, Goth, whatever.  You should encourage your customers (blog analog = readers) to become contributors.  This could be by having them make art for your walls, bring in books that they want to share, help with the garden or houseplants, donate antique licence plates or mounted deer antlers, whatever.  By helping to shape the environment they essentially become part-owners, and therefore much more loyal.

This Really Pushes My Buttons

When I was in France last month, I noticed something that was different from here.  Well, actually many things, like for instance everybody spoke French, but this post is about just one of them: when you push the “Close Doors” button in elevators there, the doors actually close!  Immediately!  I’m not sure if you’ve noticed, but the same is not true here in North America.  As far as I can tell, pushing the Close Doors button here has absolutely no effect on when the doors actually close.  (Although the “Open Doors” button works just fine.)

I’m sure there’s a good reason for this – probably somehow safety-related or something.  But if the Close Doors button is useless here in North America, why even have it?  My theory is that it gives the elevator rider the illusion that they have control.  Being in control is a very good feeling, and one that marketers would do well to try and provide to their audiences.  Unfortunately, most marketing up until now has been about taking control away  from the audience.

If you were in control of your web experience, would you have pop-up ads?  If you were in control of your e-mail, would you ask for 100 Viagra emails per day?  If you were in control of your TV, would you have commercials?  Most of us would say, “no,” and that’s why we have pop-up blockers, spam filters, and TiVo.

But if we can make our message so compelling that people will ASK for it, and search for it, and come and get it, then we’re doing our customers a service, not annoying them.  We’re letting THEM push the button, and we give them what they expect (or more) when they do it.

A slightly-related, probably apocryphal story:  Apparently, in the early days of skyscrapers, a man who was building one visited the nearly-complete structure.  He rode to the top floor on the elevator and said to the project engineer, “This is unacceptable!  That trip takes far too long!  Make this elevator go faster!”

The engineer puzzled over how to overcome this challenge.  It was unsafe or prohibitively expensive to actually make the car speed up.  Nonetheless, when the building owner visited the site the following week, he found the ride to the top noticeably shorter and complimented the engineer.

The engineer had made only one change to the elevator – he had installed mirrors on the walls.

Abortion and other Reproduction Issues

DRM, for those of you who don’t know, stands for digital rights management.  It is technology that limits the copying of digital media like movies, music, e-books, etc.  Some people think it’s necessary to preserve the royalty stream for the artist and artistic integrity of the piece; some people think it throttles the spread and availability of art.  I will not weigh in on the issue in this post, as I have addressed it before.

No, this post is some advice for the anti-DRM crowd.  You should take a lesson from both sides of the abortion battle.  When the people who are against abortion started calling themselves, “Pro-Life,” what were abortion proponents supposed to do?  Call themselves “Anti-Life?”  Of course not.  Similarly, the other side won’t win any popularity by calling themselves, “Anti-Choice.”

So the people who believe in the free spreading of media shouldn’t say they’re “Anti-DRM.”  That’s saying that you’re against “rights,” and everyone know rights are good, right?  Human rights, right of way, Bill of Rights (US), Charter of Rights and Freedoms (Canada).

So the anti-DRM people have to find something to be “pro” about.  Like “Pro-Sharing” (weren’t we all taught as children that sharing is good?).  Or “Pro-Proliferation of Art.”  Or “Pro-Fans.”  Those will be tough for the DRM crowd to fight – who wants to be known as ”anti” any of those things?  AND, they’ll have trouble playing the same game – what could they be “pro?”  “Pro-Celine Dion gets more money?”  “Pro-You can only enjoy the stuff you paid for in the way we allow?”

Wow – the air sure is thin up on this high horse…

The Apple Brand is Sticky

Following on to Friday’s post about my frustration with getting my daughter’s iPod up and running, I have to dish some mad props to the Apple marketing people.

Apple’s prowess at design is not anything new.  The iPod came in a beautiful little jewel case with a Set-up Guide that Garr Reynolds would be proud of: about 6 cms square, 16 pages, 2 – 8 words per page, simple graphics, and lots of white space.  The iPod itself is also lovely, as is its docking station.

But it was the other thing that came in the package that is marketing brilliance.  It was a small sheet with two cute-as-buttons Apple logo stickers.  As we all know, most Apple consumers are raving fans of the company and its products – who better to arm with instantly-deployable advertising content?

And it’s more than just advertising – when an iPod owner puts that sticker on their schoolbook or cubicle or bike or dorm room door, they’re identifying themselves as a proud member of a special tribe.  Of course, there are many other ways of doing this – someone can have a Ferrari key fob (even if they drive a Yugo, they are saying, “I belong to the group of people that admire fast cars”), or a Lost  t-shirt (which says to the world, I enjoy having my mind messed with every week).

You should do the same thing for your bar patrons.  Make available some kind of identification piece that lets them show other people that they come to (or even “belong to”) your establishment.  The type of item would vary depending on the type of joint you run, and the type of clientele.  Young people might like ball caps or t-shirts or bumper stickers; older folks might like nice pens or key chains or business card cases.  You can look at the types of tchotchkes given our at trade shows for more ideas – I’m not going to do ALL the work.

I’m a Mac. And I’m a P.C.*

* Peeved Consumer.

Yesterday we gave our daughter a new iPod Shuffle.  It was partly to replace the generic MP3 player she used to have that died, and partly to celebrate (another) excellent report card.

So we already had a bunch of MP3s that I had purchased over the past couple of years (yes – purchased).  I blithely thought I could just transfer all the High School Musical, Jonas Brothers, Hannah Montana, and Lenny Kravitz(!) songs from my hard drive onto her new Shuffle.  So I did, then let the four hour charging period elapse.  When we took it off the charging station, presto!  Nothing!

My first thought was that our ancient home laptop (it only has ONE  USB port!) was incapable of delivering the charge to the Shuffle, and that’s why it wouldn’t play.  It never ocurred to me that there was no music there to play, because I could see the files that I had transferred sitting on the thing in Explorer.  So I brought it to work today to try my “real” laptop (SIX USB ports) on the job.  Nope – after four hours, the little “I’m not ready” indicator light was still blinking.

So I broke down and RTFM.  RTFM is short for “Read the f***ing manual,” which is what tech support people all over the world want to yell at DFUs every day.  DFU is “DumbF*** User,” the type of people who often have I.D. ten T problems.  Anyway, page 1 was “Download and Install iTunes.”  And one of the final steps was to “Click Eject before disconnecting” – the Eject button is in the iTunes interface.  I didn’t really want iTunes, since I buy my music elsewhere, had tried iTunes before and didn’t like it, and didn’t think you should need special software just to load files onto a peripheral device.  But whatever – it was for my daughter.

So I dutifully downloaded.  During installation, it made me reboot my machine, which I always hate, but again, whatever.  Upon startup, the wizard asked me if I wanted to automatically import any music file it found the the My Music folder on my machine.  I said sure, because I knew that the only files in the My Music folder were the ones I had just put there for my daughter.  Then I noticed it was actually grabbing EVERY MP3, WAV and other sound file anywhere on my drive.  This includes every Beatles song, a whole bunch of system alerts, a few dozen podcasts, the audio to some of my hour-long marketing lectures, etc.  So I had to spend the next 20 minutes deleting (one by one) every file that wouldn’t be to her liking.

Finally I was ready to push the music onto the device, and the manual helpfully said to click the “Autofill” button, and even had a simple drawing showing me where in the iTunes interface I could find it.  Except it wasn’t there.  Nor was it an option in any of the menus (basic interface design rule:  EVERYTHING should be available through a menu).  I finally found the right screen and the Autofill button, and 2 minutes later was listening to music.

I’m not anti-Mac or anti-Apple by any stretch – the first 4 years of my professional career were spent on Macs, and they were great.  But now I see how this whole zeitgeist that Apple has about simplicity can be annoying.  Sure, the close integration between the player, the download tool, and the store filled with available music is elegant and rich, but what if I don’t want/need one or more of the components?  They each shouldn’t REQUIRE the others to be there.  It’s like saying if I want to drive my Audi, I need to use Audi gasoline and drive on Audi streets.  I predict this model will not last.

Marketing to the Grey Revolution

Last night during House, I saw an ad for a new (well, new since last summer) cellphone.  It’s called the Jitterbug.  The ad featured sepia-toned young couples, dressed in 1950s fashions, dancing the jitterbug.  The Jitterbug cellphone’s main feature is that it doesn’t have any features.

It hasn’t got a camera, it hasn’t got video, it hasn’t got an MP3 player, it hasn’t got an address book, or a world clock or games or complex settings to configure.  What does it have? 

GREAT BIG HONKIN’ BUTTONS.

It also has a loud speaker and a background noise reduction feature and a well lit, large screen with text that appears in a big font.  Who would these features appeal to?  Perhaps people with failing vision and hearing?  Perhaps people who came of age around the time the Jitterbug was a popular dance?

It’s no secret that our population is aging, but it seems to me that marketers are slow to respond to this shift.  Most of the the ad spend still goes toward the coveted male 29 to 40 demographic.  Shouldn’t we be trying to lock in loyalty with 60- and 70-somethings now and try and keep them ’til they croak?

A bar could do this now by eschewing loud music and mud-wrestling nights.  By being a place to have a pint and a chat instead of hooking up with a hottie or getting pie-eyed on Jager shots.  Maybe even start a subtle campaign to be the preferred location to host a wake?  Or is that too grim…

The Hills are Alive…

…with the sound of mooing.  This is a full page magazine ad that ran last year in People.  (I was in my doctor’s waiting room, OK?)

What the heck is this?  The “Land of Lean Beef”?!?!?!     Who’s the agency genius that came up with that idea?  And then someone said, “Yeah!  We can build a beautiful landscape out of cooked meat!  Ooh ooh wait - we could make mountains!  With a broccoli forest surrounding them!  And for the snowy peaks we can use some vague whitish sauce reminiscent of semen!”

I LOVE beef.  About the only way you could make it unappealing to me would be to overcook it, make it look really stringy, surround it with the world’s most disliked vegetable, and masturbate on top of it.

Who do you suppose at the Beef Marketing Board gave final approval to this?   I mean, you don’t have to be a marketing expert to recognize an unattractive (almost nauseating) image when you see one.  What was it that over-rode common sense?  Was the aforementioned Stephen Hawking at the ad agency cooing in the beef executive’s ear, “mountains are manly and rugged and strong –  just like what our target demographic of 30 – 49 year old males want  to be.  And since the readership of People is mostly female, and they do most of the food shopping, and they want their husbands to be big and strong, too, it’s a no-brainer!  Cows will be getting slaughtered at a frantic pace!”

From the other end of the quality spectrum, my favourite  bit of meat marketing is from a steakhouse billboard campaign I saw a few years ago.  I can’t remember the brand now, but their slogan was, “There’s plenty of room for all God’s creatures… right next to the mashed potatoes.”