Location-Based Services and the Marketers that don’t Love Them (Yet)

I had just read this article about marketers not sure how to take advantage of Location-Based Services, specifically ones that are Social-Network based, and one of our Account people popped their head in my office to ask “What’s up with FourSquare?  Is it worthwhile? And is it significant for Marketers?”

Good questions all.  Foursquare allows you to “check in” to locations and awards badges for different user activities.  The Article correctly states that some restaurants and bars are already embracing it, but the activities and offers are still in early days.  Note the offer from Wow Bao in my building below:

Yeah – it’s a freebie offer, but I find it interesting that there is such a conversation about “is this interesting for marketers” and “how will marketers use it” – since it should make sense to pay attention to if you’ve got at least some of your audience that uses these kinds of things, and you’re worth having a relationship with in the first place (which, granted, is a big question for some marketers).

Here’s why: think about why restaurants and bars already jumped on the bandwagon.  They have to develop relationships with their customers – they don’t have a choice.  They don’t have a retailer that will put up POS material, or vast amounts of online ad spend (generally), and most of the places I’ve seen don’t do TV. For them, the relationship with the person in that establishment is everything, and finding new ways to prolong and enrich that relationship is the key to their success.  For them the only question would be “why would I not get involved?”

Now I’m looking back over the last 12 months and thinking about the times I’ve mentioned doing something like this for a marketer, and thinking “You know what?  My Client needs to break out from the shelf, their target is pretty well-connected digitally, they are not always getting the POS attention they want, or always deserve, they want more engagement, and since their relationship with the consumer is everything for them as well … so Why not?”

Bonus topic for further conversation:  How different would the strategy for the marketer be from what they use for Facebook and Twitter?

designing imperfection

Woody Allens said “If you’re not failing every now and again, it’s a sign you’re not doing anything very innovative.” Well, the next time your computer crashes, it might be worth to take closer look. Sometimes things you didn’t do on purpose reveal their beauty on second glance. I just ordered Designing Imperfection.

TechCheck Q1 2009 is now available!

TechCheck Q1 2009 is now available for your perusal.  Enjoy!

techcheck-q1-2009-cultural-fuel3

Snowing Billboards

Promotional billboard at bus stops in Norway that alerts you to skiing conditions at the Tryvann Winter Park Resort – by snowing.

When it snows on the mountain at the ski resort (located 15 minutes outside of Oslo), they send an SMS to the billboard and the signage starts snowing in the window area  A second message stops the snow show.

Source: http://www.toxel.com/tech/2009/03/21/tryvann-snowing-billboards-invade-norway/

Ego-branding benchmarks: Will strip for Penthouse if 100K people join my facebook group

Today, I was one of the last 10,000 people to be invited to join a group on facebook which has a sole topic: the lady who started the group will take off her clothes for Penthouse if she gets more than 100,000 followers.

It’s a pretty straightforward strategy of the “Lonelygirl” variety:  use combination of social media plus male insight (in this case: i don’t care if I am being used to make someone else famous, as long as she takes her clothes off). That’s the oldest value propositions in the book. Still, it’s a pretty cheap and effective way to raise awareness for your career as a model, or actually to raise awareness for Penthouse (or whoever is behind it).

Homelessness Crisis in the UK by Radiohead and Leo Burnett UK

Using Wii remotes to do, like, awesome stuff

I’ve been watching Johnny Lee for a while on youtube. Now this stuff might be inspiring only to the techy readers of this blog, but I certainly dig it quite a lot because it gives you a source for an number of new ideas of what you can do technology.

Johnny shares practical and prototypical ideas and uses of standard Consumer Electronic equipment, for free for everyone to innovate with. Here are three examples of him using the Nintendo Wii remote to do new things.

Johnny, you rock!

Digital Lifestyle Taken Too Far

When digital Lifestyle starts twitching my face, I am gonna slow down, I think.

Classical Music in the digital space: Symphony Orchestras on YouTube

Someone had a great idea. Take the most famous Orchestras in the world and have a worldwide competition of musicians on YouTube, where people vote for the musicians who should play a finale at Carnegie Hall.

http://www.youtube.com/symphony

Stop branding start participating?

In his coverage of Renny Gleeson of W+K, entitled “Stop branding start participating,” Rich Cherecwich quotes

“Agencies are built to make ads, not come up with marketing solutions and solve problems,” he said. “Marketing teams are built to approve ads, and publishers are trying to sell eyeballs, but what they need to sell is relevance.

and, citing social media as a way to deliver relevance:

In the search for the shared experience, brands have an incredible role to play,” Gleeson said. “They’ve always been the glue that binds. Now they have the opportunity to be the glue and part of the shared experience for the people who buy them.

How very true. Many, including us have said similar things. “The brand era is over, it’s the people era.” and “Acts, not ads!” are Leo Burnett mantras.  However, concerning the headline “stop branding”: really?

Before looking at Social Media as a solution to make brands relevant again (which it can be), I wonder why agencies and brands have had a hard time reinventing themselves.  Because I believe, regardless of what tools (such as social media) you are using, it will be a crap-shoot in terms of relevance for your brand, until brands and agencies have consummated and internalized one very basic mindset shift. It’s not so much about having to “stop branding” and “to start participating”, but it’s more like:

In the people era, it’s about doing something that makes a qualitative difference in people’s lives, not just saying something. Because delivering deeds and experiences that make a qualitative difference (however big or small), is branding for the people era.

Yet, agencies and brands haven’t adapted their business models and “creative delivery systems” to actually be doing something  instead of just messaging. And to top it off, even when they are doing something, it is usually so brand-centered, that it becomes a backfiring farce.  There are many such examples of brave attempts by brands and agencies to use “innovative” digital channels, such as social media, in the hopes that it will engage people with their brands again. The ones that happen to work, we all hear about. But there are many more attempts we don’t hear about. Why don’ t they work? Because moving to the people era doesn’t just mean picking the digital channel du jour, and applying your brand message.  Fact is, agencies and brands that have not internalized what their brand can mean in the people era, and will continue to try to use channels to force-feed their brand message. Brands are so used to being the sender of a message, that they don’t know how to let people message for them, but that’s what the ultimate consequence of the people era is. This is what Gleeson refers to when he says, “what brands need to do is grow the campaign out of an existing community, rather than simply drop it on top of a community.” 

So I agree that brands and agencies need to reinvent themselves. But it’s a shift that needs to happen, not a replacement of things.

• Brand era SHIFTS TO People era
• Doing things to people SHIFTS to doing things with people
• Brand message SHIFTS to Brand experience
• Reason to Believe SHIFTS to Reason to Interact
• Single-minded propositions SHIFT to allowing fragmented, multi-faceted experiences 
• Branding SHIFTS to delivering experiences that make a qualitative difference
• Creativity in formulating messaging SHIFTS TO Creativity in designing experiences 
• Brand Metrics SHIFTS TO People Metrics
• Consumer Insight SHIFTS TO Behavioral Insight

So, in summary, yes, stop branding the old way but start branding with an understanding of shifting brands into the people age. Only with that in mind, social media and other digital channels, as well as the traditional channels can serve purposeful strategies that are not left up to luck to succeed.