Marketing Arena UPDATE

So I think I may have a neat presentation if not the breakthrough I was hoping for. I was going to ask Ana to come and present with me but I have just checked and it seems that a similar idea was presented by Serban from Headz last year. So, Ana, you're up there with the best since you and Serban got to the same conclusion :-) but I don's think it's such a great idea to do a repeat (irrespective of how much I agree with the idea)
Also, Johnny, they have made bacon flavored chocolate (read it in the newspaper today) so I am guessing bacon icecream is just round the corner.
I will post the presentation tomorrow and I hope people will find it at least sensible
Wish me luck!


LATER: so I did not win (bohooo) but I had some fun and was not too upset the hole in the flag idea won :-)
here is my presentation and will come back with update later

Marketing Arena

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Again the thrills of Marketing Arena

Remember last year? Marketing Arena and how you did help but we did not win because someone had an idea involving a hole? I mean come ooon!

Here I am again, again having to speak at MA and again, not really brimming with ideas. I thought of something and then realized the only reason I was thinking about it was that I had seen it done.
Plus, the organizers are asking me to write something worth placing in a banner [of course if you take the view that banners suck, then I don't have to try really hard... but I, unfortunately, believe that banners, when well made, work]
So now I have two challenges: make a presentation that will impress the audience AAAND get clicks...

bof. help. seriously

Inspire - help out

Picking up the subject again because I am left with less than 10 days and I have to come up with a genius idea for next year.
So Inspire is a conference managed by Evensys and they have a Marketing Arena where smart people are expected to predict the smart idea of the future.
I'm thinking:
- kindle meets iPod
- reusable one-song mp3s with bluetooth devices all over the city
- public auctions for URLs
- the death of twitter by Facebook status
- the death of microblogging outside social platforms

any other ideas? However, I feel I may be missing the point - I am supposed to think up innovation in marketing. But since I think marketing should be about creating value as opposed to creating tactics, I am somewhat stuck ...
Okay, how about this, I propose a bargain, whoever comes up with a good suggestion for this Arena gets to come with me and present it :-)

photo via (thanks)

Next year's great marketing ideas

will be presented at this year's Inspire. Inspire is an Evensys event, second edition and it features this neat mini event called Marketing Arena, where people in the world of marcomms come together with some futuristic ideas about what marketing trends might be in the coming year.

To my own distress :-) I will have to come up with a good idea this year and battle a bunch of famous people in advertising and planning. Last year's winner and her idea are presented here so you get a wiff of what MA is all about.

I might try to make this interactive and post some stuff here before actually coming up with the big secretive project so stay tuned :-)

ON randomness

I am again speaking at Marketing Arena in less than three days. And, as always, I am paired up with a bunch of creative people which lessens my chances of ever making an impression.

So this year (suspense!!) .... I am going with the same recipe: logical deductions from existing data. Which usually gets me in the exact same place as last year - someone from the jury stands up and says, yeah but somebody is already doing this. [Of course, the assumption behind the thinking there is that we will come up with fully genius, completely innovative stuff :D which is always enough to freeze your brain for almost two weeks before the actual event...]
but this year I think I might have something good... and I have also thought of a smart way to present it and am also leveraging the risk of someone saying, yeah been there done that, by actually making it clear that some really smart people are doing that already. It's on using randomness in marketing.

Stay tuned for presentation on the blog but also, you might want to come by because it will be fun :D

A question of space on the www

A while back I spoke at Marketing Arena about the idea of Noise Brands: short-term, opportunistic brands built, Japanese style, on whatever is trendy at the moment. My idea did not catch with the audience but another one involving e-books, e-readers and the ability to place ads and comments into e-books seemed more convincing.

Recently I have been thinking about where technology is taking us, and also how, as human beings operating in given spaces, we are able to cope with this.
Consider my premises, which are simple and straight-forward: we used to operate within large expanses of space (we see ads in OOH format, we build mental images of brands based on imagery spilled out on planes and huge frontispieces), we are used to receiving information on uni-vocal channels, (images from TV, words from written pages without any other con-textual information, teletext never really caught on, nor did in-built multi-screen viewing). And then along comes the www and we have to start dealing with smaller screens, more than one type of information per screen, changing information per reload, multi windows etc etc. This is confusing and unexpected for the human brain. My mother is unable to follow the scroll bar on the computer screen with a mouse and she cannot grasp the concept of windows. She also does not see, literally, any of the banners in any Internet page she opens for a very simple reason: she is looking for text because, to her, the Internet is... a bigger book. Hence she is "blind" to any non-textual content displayed.
And now, my question is as follows: is the technology supporting the Internet, with its limited spacial display capabilities, able to support the huge amount of information we are trying to place on it? The iPhone is a hit because it makes browsing easy: meaning its lets the user slide seamlessly among dozens of pages of information and mind you, that is NOT a small screen for a phone.
Why did I start with the e-book? Because I wonder - what with e-reading becoming the new hit and the Apple tablet on the way (fingers crossed) - if we are not trying to cram too much into a simple act already. With Google's visual search, live search and word tagging apps e-texts can virtually become an exploded wikipedia, with EVERY word operating as a pretext for extra information. This information can be referential or ad-driven. And then it will be up to the user to fight the flood.
And I hope also up to the advertisers to not abuse the technological opportunities.

Marketing Arena presentation

Ma 2009

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