Category archive: Marketing

Friday, February 24, 2006

The Ad Agency of the Future

Piers Fawkes of PSFK fame blogs on If! about a lecture delivered by Virginia Commonwealth University students at If!’s Future Marketing Conference yesterday. The students’ topic? The Ad Agency of the Future:

Agencies no longer work for the client, nor the consumer but the brand. We’re not ad people anymore. We’re brand agents. Not even art directors and copywriters anymore - we’re brand agents, the students told the conference. We need to change our focus, we actually sell ideas and we need to remember that. If you use this as the focus, then you can come up with ideas for pr, packaging, products, advertising, stunts and even advertising.

In order to do this, media people need to be brought back into the agency to help us connect to the consumers. But we need clients to trust us.

Finances also need to be restructured. The client and the agency should have significant overlap - sharing the risk, investing in the idea. Current compensation is a result from the tradition of being an agent. Agencies will empathize with a client’s business if they are involved - dreams.

Therefore, there is a shift in purpose, investing in the client’s business.

Giving away value disrupts the state, too

Gervase Markham, who blogs at Hacking for Christ, works for the Mozilla Foundation, a non-profit “dedicated to promoting choice and innovation on the internet”. He writes about his recent encounter with a UK Trading Standards officer:

They had encountered businesses which were selling copies of Firefox, and wanted to confirm that this was in violation of our licence agreements before taking action against them.

I wrote back, politely explaining the principles of copyleft – that the software was free, both as in speech and as in price, and that people copying and redistributing it was a feature, not a bug. I said that selling verbatim copies of Firefox on physical media was absolutely fine with us, and we would like her to return any confiscated CDs and allow us to continue with our plan for world domination (or words to that effect).

Many people would find the official’s reaction to that surprising, but they don’t call them disruptive technologies for nothing. 

"Giving away value disrupts the state, too" continued...

Thursday, February 23, 2006

Qumana: Is Dumb the New Phat?

Readers don’t care about technology ... it just has to be easy and work, according to Tris Hussey, Chief Blogging Officer for Qumana (I’m using Qumana’s blogging software to post this). He goes on to say something I’ve been thinking a lot about, and says it well:

John Jantsch has some insightful commentary on RSS today.  It’s a truism that within a group, new words, concepts, and practices emerge and these become to the keys to entry into the group.  RSS this is one of those things for many Internet users.  Does my mom care about RSS?  No, she just wants an easy way to keep up on my blog (I don’t think she reads it often ... that’s okay because she’s busy teaching Sex Ed in the public schools).  I really like these two paragraphs in this post and I think it says it all:

You don’t do this by trying to convince someone that [RSS symbol] is the de facto standard for an RSS feed. Maybe someday, but I doubt it, [RSS symbol] will mean something to everyone, but right now it says to some, “I’m a blog snob and this is the only way you can subscribe to my blog so, if you don’t know what this is then, go away."

What’s deliciously ironic is that Qumana has been roundly criticized by these very blog snobs for being a “dumbed down” product. For a good summary of what Qumana is, read Michael Arrington’s original, friendly, review.

I find Qumana to be extremely smart where it counts--which is in streamlining the small, repetitive motions involved in posting to my blogs. When I click the link button in the WYSIWYG editor bar, the field auto-fills with the last thing I cut and pasted. This may not sound like much, but when you are writing a post with a half-dozen links, cutting the number of clicks per link in half and reducing the mouse-mileage by half as well is absolutely brilliant. Qumana creates exactly this kind of gestural economy throughout. In Typepad, the category default is set to a single category; selecting multiple categories is a chore. In Qumana, you check the categories you want, with no control key to hold down, and no false distinction between single and multiple categories. SixApart should have corrected this annoying hurdle long ago. Guess they’re just not “dumb” enough.

It takes a pretty dumb bunny to think that complicated = sophisticated. There are three reasons to write your blog posts in html: it’s faster; you can do more stuff; you think it makes you one of the cool kids.  I’ve had about enough of this geek chic mentality--it fosters bad design. Good design is sleek, user-transparent, dumb as dumb can be.

"Qumana: Is Dumb the New Phat?" continued...

Spyware is as spyware does

Mike at Techdirt writes about marketing companies trying to shake the slimy reputation that goes with screwing users:

It’s really amazing how much time various “marketing” companies that surreptitiously have their apps installed on your computer have been spending lately trying to improve their image, if not actually improving their business practices.

...The problem here is that the marketing companies are defining spyware in a different way than average users are. The average user defines it as “crap that I don’t know how it got on my computer, and is slowing it down with marketing info, while probably collecting data on everything I do.” The marketing companies take a much more… nuanced view. They consider their apps to be “adware,” whereas spyware is only the more malicious variety. The problem is, users don’t distinguish. All they know is they didn’t ask for this software, it’s slowing their computer down, and they want it off. What’s most telling of course, is that the marketing companies are spending their time working on the PR aspect, and not making their products any less sneaky and underhanded in how they get installed.

Jeff Jarvis on enabling community

Here’s some free advice for you from the creator of Entertainment Weekly, Media Guardian columnist, former president and creative director of Advance.net, Condé Nast’s online arm, and current consultant to The New York Times Company and others.

You don’t want to own community. First, because you can’t; the community owns the community. Second, because then you become responsible for all the community’s sins: See MySpace having to hire a safety czar who, presumably, will tell people not to be stupid enough to meet strangers and get murdered…

What you do want to do is enable community. You want to leave control and responsibility at the edges — because that’s where it is anyway — and bring people together with information and each other. The web is the social application. The challenge is to find ways to bring people together in ways they couldn’t otherwise do themselves.

Unlike a lot of free advice, Jarvis’s is definitely worth more than what you’ve paid for it.