TV advertisers are finally discovering that YouTube + viral imagination = free media.
The good news for you is that money is not a barrier, which means that marketers of any size can play. But the rules are different, as they always are online.
Because media is free but attention is not (this is flipped from TV world) you need to make a different sort of ad for a different sort of audience.
1. Assume that the viewer has the attention span of an espresso-crazed fruitfly. That means slapstick, quick cuts and velocity.
2. Find a word or phrase that you can own in Google, that fits in an email, and that comes up in discussion at the cafeteria table or in the playground.
Castrol gets both rules right in this inane commercial.
3. Length doesn't matter. 10 seconds is fine and so is five minutes. Media is free, remember?
4. Challenge the status quo, be provocative, touch a social nerve or create some other sort of interesting conversation. In other words, a commercial worth watching.
Dove does both in this now-famous commercial.
Because of the power of free media, I expect to see a whole host of commercials that would never be deemed effective enough to spend big media money on, but that generate huge views online. Look for plenty of irrelevant slogans and catch phrases and off strategy content… anything for an eyeball.
Also, understand that this is out of your control. Once launched, what happens, happens. One commercial I know of caught fire and ended up with millions of views. The client then called the producer, screaming in anger. He wanted to be able to turn it off, to decide how it got used, who talked about it, etc. You can't. Once it spreads, it belongs to the community, not to you.
The biggest shift is going to be that organizations that could never have afforded a national campaign will suddenly have one. The same way that there's very little correlation between popular websites and big companies, we'll see that the most popular commercials get done by little shops that have nothing to lose.
April 27, 2009
First rule of decision making: More time does not create better decisions.
In fact, it usually decreases the quality of the decision.
More information may help. More time without more information just creates anxiety, not insight.
Deciding now frees up your most valuable asset, time, so you can go work on something else. What happens if, starting today, you make every decision as soon as you have a reasonable amount of data?
April 26, 2009
Michael Port’s latest manifesto ships tomorrow.
If you need a push to think bigger today and tomorrow, here it is.
I'm the first person to admit that compared to you, I have no idea what I'm talking about. You're there, doing what you do, and doing it with skill.
Let me be really clear: My job is not to tell you what to do. I don't know what to do. You do.
Not just me, of course. Everybody with a blog or a book or an interest in your success. Don't do what they say. Listen to their questions instead.
My job is provoke you into asking hard questions. Ask those questions to your boss and your co-workers and yourself. It's easy to show that self-aware decisions and thoughtful strategies outperform blind stumbling.
I don't have a lot of patience for this list of seven rules or that manual of how it's supposed to be or the step-by-step road map you can purchase today only. I think you'll do a lot better if you get optimistic about the future and cynical about pat answers at the same time instead.
April 25, 2009
Remember WordPerfect? This word processor dominated the world until Word wiped them out. How did that happen?
WordPerfect was the default word processor in every law firm, big company and organization in the land. If you had the DOS operating system, it was likely you were using WordPerfect. And, if the operating system in the office hadn't changed to Windows, it's likely you'd still be using it now.
What happened was that the change in operating system created a moment when people had to pick. They had to either switch to Word or wait for a new version of WordPerfect. In that moment, "do nothing" was not an option.
Do nothing is the choice of people who are afraid. Do nothing is what you do if too many people have to agree. Do nothing is what happens if one person with no upside has to accept downside responsibility for a change. What's in it for them to do anything? So they do nothing.
The key moment for an insurgent, then, is the time of "pick anything." That's why these are such good times for iPhone apps. That's why the beginning of an administration is a good time to lobby. When people have to pick, they have to confront some of the fear and organizational barriers that lead to the status quo.
It seems to me, then, that the best time for a marketer to grow is when clients have to pick something. Seeking these moments out is inexpensive and productive.
[Lately, this post has been paraphrased as, "Nothing is what happens when everyone has to agree." That has a nice ring to it.]
April 24, 2009
We no longer care what you say.
We care a great deal about what you do.
If you charge for hand raking but use a leaf blower when the client isn't home
If you sneak into an exercise class because you were on the wait list and it isn't fair cause you never get a bike
If you snicker behind the boss's back
If you don't pay attention in meetings
If you argue with a customer instead of delighting them
If you copy work and pass it off as your own
If you shade the truth a little
If you lobby to preserve the unsustainable status quo
If you network to get, not to give
If you do as little as you can get away with
…then we already know who you are.
April 23, 2009
Most marketers are busy trying to persuade people to buy their product. Confusion sets in, though, when you compare a pitch designed to get someone to buy any product in the category (you need an mp3 player because you can listen to music) vs. buying your product instead of the competition (ours is cheaper and bigger and better).
Are you trying to make the market bigger, or just grow your share?
When competing against a market dominator, your marketing generates more bang for the buck when you try to steal people who have already been persuaded to enter the category by the other guy. This is the Newton running shoe story. Nike sells fitness, running, camaraderie, effort, glory. Newton sells "buy us instead of Nike."
It doesn't pay for an insurgent energy drink to sell "thirst" because much of that marketing will just get people to go buy the brands they've always bought. The opportunity instead is to provide leverage at the last possible moment in the buying cycle.
Getting new people to enter your market is hugely expensive. There's no way I can persuade a non-book buyer to start buying books–I don't have enough time or enough money.
This thinking rarely grows the market, though, so it falls on the market leader to figure out how to market well enough to get people into the category itself. The critical issue is to decide which one you're doing. Are you working on whether or not someone should buy, or on which one they should buy once they realize a need? Do your employees have the same answer?
April 22, 2009
I did this talk about three years ago. [Higher quality version]. I have to admit that very little in the way of progress has occurred as a result.
April 21, 2009
My very first book is no longer in print. It was called "Business Rules of Thumb" and it came out in 1984 (not a typo). My thesis was that if you understood the hidden rules people used in business, you could do a better job of understanding your peers and working with them.
My hero Alan Webber has just written a far better, for more useful and far more original take on this topic.
It goes on sale today.
Ever notice that most car specs focus on acceleration, not braking? It's more fun to focus on getting fast than it is on getting slow.
How would you manage or market differently if you knew that you had to hit the brakes, and hard? Slowing one thing and speeding up something else.
Prediction: there will be no significant newspapers printed on newsprint in the US by 2012. So, you've got two and a half years before the newspaper industry is going to be doing something else with the news and the ads, or not be there at all. Does that change what you do today if you work in this business?
Insight! The newspaper industry is in trouble, but news is not going to go away, just the paper part. Those who are working hard to preserve the paper part are asking the wrong questions and are doomed to fail.
Prediction: 90% of your sales will come from word of mouth or digital promotion by 2011. How do you change what you're doing today to be ready for that?
Prediction: The effort required to outsource a task involving the manipulation of data of any kind will continue to decrease until it will be faster and cheaper to outsource just about anything than it will be to use in-house talent. What will you do today to ensure your prosperity when that happens?
Question: how come the Stanford Publishing Course special week on digital media isn't sold out yet? It seems to me that if you know the old world is about to end, you'd run like crazy to master the new one.
Going fast, doing your best and then slamming into a cliff works best for Wile E. Coyote, not humans.
April 20, 2009
