Online ready

is important and means that when you prepare a piece of communication you cannot simply launch it out there and hope it will disseminate itself and mold itself on any media available. I am not particularly crazy about this content created for Jawbone but check out the endframe.

It's blog, Facebook, download, e-mail, link, digg ready. This means that your consumer will not have to google it for download, youtube it for embedding and all that. Presto, you've made someone's life easier and that, my friend, is being online ready.

Tyranny of the consumer

My work is a constant source of questions.
Today I was wondering how much we should be asking our consumers to solve for us. We ask them to rate our products, to decide on packaging, an communication, to evaluate our brand, to create content for us. Today, I heard that consumers can also be asked what product they would like the company to produce. Surely that should be a question the company must know in advance..
Or not?
I mean I understand the concept of crowd sourcing but truly if the consumer knows all and we only do what he tells us, what are being paid for? are we not slaves to a tyrant who's sometimes less informed than us? do we not suck ass? :-)
This deserves more thought.

Follow-up on post below

I have recently heard about the first blogger wedding from here. I find it intriguing and was wondering how much blogging changes relationships for those involved...
question of the evening...

Dating via online

There are different opinions on whether an active online life gets you more or less dates and shags. Someone once told me that his blog was a babe magnet, because dating a top blogger is, among online chicks, almost like dating a rock star.

Personally, I have not experienced much blog traction in that direction. If you feel the same, and you are a boy, BBH has the solution for you on Lynx's new website here, whose motto seems to be stop surfing the net like a loser and start hitting on babes.

You should definitely check it out, it's funny and at least it gives you some tips on how to escape the ubiquitous and oh-so-annoying "you've got lovely eyes", "excuse me, do you have the time?", "have we met before", "oy, darling, wanna see my flat tonight?"

For those who sleep too much

Planning news

Eerie things are happening in the world of planning. Or at least eerie rumors circulate.
Paul Coleman's blog is down or has been password protected for a week now, John Griffiths is supposed to have become a minister, Richard Huntington has joined Saatchi (okay, maybe that's not eerie in the UK, but for me it is)...
What the hell? ...

Niche is wrong (??)

I had a meeting with a very important man yesterday. He is the one who built Romania's first and, to date, the largest media empire. His company owns TV stations, radio stations, newspapers, production companies, you name it.

I was there to sell a positioning for one of his products. Mid introduction he stopped me saying "this is great but you are thinking about this the wrong way. I don't want you to focus the target of my magazine through a positioning that will wedge it into a niche. Your job is to make money, how will you do that if you virtually reduce your available target through a differentiating positioning. I do not want you to avoid targeting our competition's consumers. I want you to make a positioning that will target our consumers, their's and everyone else's. I want you to sell more not be different from everyone else. Be different but be FOR everyone"

I said "Sir, this is impossible. Targeting means segmenting, going for specific needs to be satisfied."

To which he replied "No. Needs need to be realized before they are satisfied. Your positioning needs to make everyone realize this is what they were needing."

And somehow this made sense.

For those who have no sleep

Jose Gonzalez




Zero 7

Convergence of content

The idea of content converging from off to online is not as remote as you might think to our fair land of Romania. The taking of offline content and reshaping it for online happens quite often with TV stations (protv, tvr1) who have had the luck to have onboard some decent online people.

It happens also with newspapers, with more success for Gazeta Sporturilor, a sports newspaper which has learned that it is not enough to place your offline articles online but treats its www version as a separate product.

What I have found interesting recently, especially while browsing Republik, a youth magazine, is the complementariness of offline and online in some cases. I found myself unable to read the magazine without having to log on every two or three pages to look for stuff online. There were literally tens of instances where the story in the magazine was incomplete without an online reference or where they simply told you, find this out by logging on to ...

I think that it is an interesting play upon the divide offline/online where offline content is trying to act like digital text by "linking" to online content. And by doing that it is also, slowly, adopting some of the other characteristics of hypertext meaning that it does not link only to itself (or its correspondent mother URL) but to other sources, virtually creating a universe of connected sources which provide a complete picture.

What you might be lacking is the speed of links but ultimately the result is the same. You merge your online and offline experiences to get the full story. And what is more exciting about this is that we are growing a generation which does not mind doing it because they have learned to piece things together. So, pretty much transmedia rulz :-)

Doing 1.0 well before moving on

Futurelab points me to this wonderful article about the dangers of tech fads. This author uncovers some of the hidden problems inherent in our desire to always get with the latest craze and also exposes the fact that, truly, we are unable to use Internet to its top potential.

I don't agree with a lot of what he says but you cannot help noticing that he has a point when he refers to irrelevant paraphernalia which get in the way of the apps usability - much like some brand generated sites which use a lot of shiny gadgets to mask the utter lack of content or relevance of the site itself.

I have recently asked a brand manager if he was not bothered that the average time spent on his site by a consumer was 45 seconds and that visits peaked during promotions and then dropped to almost 0. He said no, because the website was simply a tool to support his yearly promotion. But it was his only website :-(

I also think more and more that there is a point in what this guy says, namely: "The number of companies that chase the same advertising dollars as their only business model is a sure sign that we're at the peak of Bubble 2.0. It would be much more sustainable if companies aimed to create services that users valued enough to pay for." This is branded utility as first coined by the guys at Anomaly, I think, and it should be the way of the future, after all if we have clutter on TV what would prevent us from creating clutter on websites (I wonder if we will see some Internet regulatory body limiting the number of web banners on a page :-)

Anyway, read it cos it's food for thought

Product development misunderstood

Quote my younger planner colleague: "This client of ours has an uncanny talent for developing less performant products later than any of its competition. What am I expected to do?"

which only goes to show how capitalism is understood in Romania where it is still possible to come out with a useless product and still market it shamelessly

kindof connected to what i was writing below

Personal monopolies

The trouble with a monopoly is (among other of course) that it refuses consumer input as a source of improvement. You cannot change its ways because you have no other option. It's their way or nothing for you.

I have noticed however that we have a tendency to impose our own personal monopolies for reasons which pertain mainly to ill-targeted comfort.

For instance, I buy most of my small groceries from a neighborhood shop: the shop assistants often "forget" to put some of my groceries in the bag, to give me the receipt thus effectively overcharging me quite often and usually are unwilling to take any complaint I may have about the broken egg in the carton or the sour milk. Because they have discovered my weakness: i have made their shop into a personal monopoly, i come back even thought i don't have to because I have mentally convinced myself that i have no other option.

How many times do we do that? How many times do we refuse to take a stand because it's more comfortable to do so? How many times did we go back to the same bank although they failed to explain some missing funds or the "new" interest rate?

The thing is that the more personal monopolies we establish the less checks brands have. And leave a brand unchecked and it will do some nasty things to you, because, as a good friend was telling me, they are not here to make sense, they are here to make money. And money is just figures :-)