iPlot

The Truth about Marketing

Get real, marketers! In this skit about marketing campaigns, people narrate what they're really thinking, not what they should be saying.

Hat tip to Chelsea Holden Baker.

The Notwist: Where In This World

From the new album ("The Devil, You + Me") by The Notwist: There's no other band that sounds so claustrophobic and at the same time so open.

The Truth about A Cappella

One way to fight aging (and becoming boring), is to do things you'd normally never do: for example going to a suburban bookstore on a Saturday night for a reading on a cappella groups. So I went to Book Passage in Corte Madera last night where Mickey Rapkin, a journalist with GQ magazine, read from "Pitch Perfect -- The Quest for Collegiate A Cappella Glory," his heartfelt and entertaining account of blood, sweat, and tears in the universe of collegiate a cappella groups. He has sold the movie rights already, and if you heard the book excerpts he presented, you know why. There's a whole a cappella world out there that I had no idea of (just search for "a cappella" on YouTube), and -- ergo -- a lucrative market. Plus -- a lot of drama!

Rapkin had invited the a cappella acts Divisi (w) and Housejacks (m) to complement the reading, and it was a lot of fun to hear and see, aside from all the talented voices, a real human beatbox rock a standing room only audience in a shopping mall bookstore. One definitely got a glimpse of the passion and the competition that characterize this very special community. Divisi performed a few solid a cappella standards ("Fever") before demonstrating the full body of their unique sound with a whimsical interpretation of Imogen Heap's "Hide & Seek."

Here's an older recording:

Is a cappella, the most archaic form of musical expression, suddenly becoming a trend? No one says it better than Adam Baer in the Huffington Post: "If we are to learn anything from collegiate a cappella it's not that singing is a lower form of musicmaking -- and no, my mother, the pianist and choral teacher, doesn't believe this old, incorrect impression of her confused kid. It's that it's the most direct way the every-musician can get closer to sounds he or she can't stop hearing in his or her head. Would it be better if Rhianna covers were less prevalent than Benjamin Britten concerts? Sure. But maybe they're equal. Maybe that's good. And maybe it's great that there's a group of young people who don't intend to go into pro music careers out there, simultaneously trying to outdo each other with the most kick-ass version of the cheesiest song you've ever heard. Making music, when it's best, brings people together. It's collaborative. And if it inspires healthy -- and at times funnily unhealthy -- competition, well, all the better. What, we can have it in the political arena, but not on the community concert stage?"

Quiet is the New Loud

Rob Walker, the author of the just-released "Buying in," is a marketing connoisseur, an expert in reading the cultural underpinnings of commerce. In his Consumed column for the New York Times Magazine, he examines how technology shapes consumer culture and vice versa. In tomorrow's piece he elaborates on the history of headphones, and how their role evolved in modern society, from the first Bose set to the Sony Walkman to the iPod earbuds.

With the miniaturization of devices, the public exposure of personal space increased. I remember that when I was 14, I came home from school, had lunch, and didn't wait a second to lie down on my bed, put my clunky Sennheiser headphones on, and listen to an album I had just bought. Thomas Dolby's "Aliens Ate My Buick" or Prince's "Sign of the Times." I closed my eyes and forgot the world around me. It was a moment of total immersion and uncompromising intimacy, both with the artist and myself. I wasn't ready to share the music with anyone else until I had fully experienced and vetted every single note through the immediacy of the headphone connection.

Looking back, headphones seem to have anticipated the era of performance-enhancing body extensions that we may be entering soon, but at the same time they now appear like a nostalgic relict of a time when the supply of attention among young consumers was still excessive. Having their social function shifted from providing excessive to expressive intimacy, headphones have become a status symbol for consumers who want to consume in between or parallel to other activities, and who want do that on their own terms -- in public, alone; in a perfect manifestation of what psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan coined "extimacy." The album has dissolved into 99-cent units on iTunes, and the headphone experience has been succeeded by portable soundtracks for permanent distraction.

Rob Walker will read from his new book "Buying In" at the frog Design Mind speaker series in New York on June 11.

frog Design Mind Speaker Series Featuring Barack Obama's Videographer

The National Journal writes that when Arun Chaudhary was a teenager, his father asked him why he didn’t want to get into politics. "I can't, Dad," he recalled saying. "I have a funny name." Now Arun Chaudhary, the son of an immigrant Indian father and a Jewish mother, is as close to politics as one can be: He took leave from his day job -- professor at the NYU film school -- to become Barack Obama's videographer (or, so the official title, director of field production).

After 10 months on the campaign trail, Chaudhary has more than 850 videos posted (three of them below) on the BarackObama.com website and on YouTube. His short clips from Obama's town hall meetings, big rallies, and on-the-road moments draw an average of 10,000 viewers each, and they have become a main tenet of a campaign that has successfully translated the concept of web 2.0 (or however you want to call it), with its collaborative formats, micro-crowds, public deliberation, and social aggregation, into the realm of political communication.

A new type of political auteur in the age of YouTube, the 32-year old filmmaker has developed a unique style that is innovative, fresh, and -- like the candidate -- challenges convention. Obama's campaign is a networked, open-sourced, and interactive effort, as Henry Jenkins observed, and in this spirit of "from me to we," Chaudhary playfully (and with distinct irony) remixes elements of amateur-style video, traditional polit-documentary, CNN-b-roll, slick TV commercial, cinematic production, and behind-the-scene outtakes into a vibrant, eclectic, and authentic voice of the campaign that is bigger than the sum of its parts. As the maker of moving pictures of a movement, he achieves what every great documentary filmmaker wants to achieve: To document and write history at the same time.

Arun Chaudhary will speak about his work for Obama and his experiences traveling with the campaign in a special edition of frog's Design Mind speaker series on July 16 in New York. The event will be videotaped, of course.

More details soon. Save the date!

SFZero - A New Interface for San Francisco

Remember the movie "The Game" with Michael Douglas and Sean Penn as unlikely brothers, shot before the backdrop of vertiginous San Francisco?

Well, here's a a new interface for San Francisco: SFZero is "a new representation for the data that's already there. Your mind is full of /inaccurate/ representations that are affecting the way you use the San Francisco dataflow: steering you away from interaction and collaboration and towards unproductive reflexive data loops (forNext). SFZero designers are working double-shifts to engineer this next-generation interface that will bring you together with your cohabitants to experience the freedom that is /hard-coded/ into San Francisco's protocol."

Sounds enigmatic, looks enigmatic, and is enigmatic. I am therefore not sure if I fully get it, but in any case SFZero seems to be a new kind of ARG (alternate reality game) -- a "Collaborative Production Game," as they call it.

"Let Someone Else Plan Your Day! Release total control of your life to an anonymous source that supplies you with instructions and directions!"

How can you not sign up for that?

Ps. Hat tip to Chelsea Holden Baker.

50 Ways to Shrink Your Brand

I really enjoyed speaking at the eM8 conference in San Francisco on Tuesday. Not so much in keeping with the title of my presentation -- "The Shrinking Brand" -- my deck included 88 slides, and I think I used the word "micro" at least 50 times in my 45 minute long session. Fortunately, the audience was willing to stick with me, and I had a lot of good conversations following my presentation.

The main proposition was: The world is small. Life is short. But brands still want to be big and have a long life. Hence my advice for them: Shrink!

Here's how....

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Chinese Social Network QQ Outperforms Facebook and Co.

In case you didn't know: China scales. Let's take QQ.com as an example, the leading Chinese online social network. The site is reported to have more than 300 million active accounts. That is eight times the member base of Facebook -- and it's the same size as the US population.

What's also remarkable (and different from the Western social networks) is QQ's monetization. While Facebook posted revenues of $150 million in revenue for 2007 (and according to +8* a loss of $50 million), MySpace (purchased by News Corp. for $560 million) is projected to generate $750 million in revenue this year, and Bebo (purchased by AOL for $850 million) had revenues of just $20 million in 2007, QQ reported revenues of $523 million and an astonishing operating profit of $224 million in 2007. The revenue distribution is unusual, too: 60% of the revenue came from services like games, an additional 21% from mobile services like ring tones, and only 13% from online advertising.

Do added value services trump ad based revenue models?

Fantastic Voyage or Why the Miniaturization of Matter Matters to Marketing

["Fantastic Voyage," 1966]

The miniaturization of matter has long been a human desire, and viewing the world from a smaller perspective is the core of many novels and movies. The idea of shrinking people for the purpose of traveling inside another human's body, in particular, has been frequently used in animated cartoons, including The Simpsons, Futurama, Beetlejuice, and SpongeBob SquarePants.

One of the most entertaining pieces in this genre is Fantastic Voyage, a science-fiction movie from 1966, which -- albeit not free of some severe logical flaws -- has lost none of its original appeal. Fantastic Voyage tells the story of a CIA-led group of agents and surgeons who attempt to save the life of a dying diplomat. The medical team gets on board a submarine that is miniaturized to one micrometer in length and then injected into the diplomat's body. The group has just one hour to repair the life-threatening clot; after that, the submarine will begin to revert to its normal size and become large enough for the diplomat's immune system to detect and attack.

Micro is the new macro

What does Fantastic Voyage have to do with marketing? A couple of things: First of all, in the movie, shrinking the matter (that is, the submarine and its passengers) is the only way to reach objects that occur on an entirely different scale. The same is very much true for today's marketing: In the attention-saturated, atomized markets of today, audiences recognize messages and events only within the blink of an eye and on a miniature scale. They happen for nanoseconds in the always-on presence of today's perception apparatus but they rarely have staying power. It is not the billboard we're seeing; it is the ad embedded in the news feed on Facebook. It is not the TV commercial we're recalling; it is the intimate party conversation. But the clots that pollute consumers' ability to pay attention are so small that we have to down-scale our marketing programs if we want to remove them and reach the audience. "Scaling a campaign" has taken on the opposite meaning: it now means down-sizing messages and the way they are communicated. Think of the influential bloggers whom you want to have evangelize your brand. Identifying and engaging them is like finding the needle in the haystack, and you can't find that from the bird's eye perspective. Moreover, in a second parallel to the movie, the "window of opportunity" is smaller. Because of shrinking attention-spans, the slots for marketers to grab attention are shrinking as well -- you need to get the submarine out before it will revert to its original size.

Marketing 0.1

This effect suggests a very different time horizon for marketers. Rather than planning and conducting long-term campaigns aimed at rubbing in a consistent message through prominence and repetition, marketers need to stay above the fray (or below the fray) by consistently varying their message and diversifying their communication channels. Rather than relying on one major focused traditional above-the-line program, they need to employ a combination of different tactics below-the-line. I call this new model "marketing 0.1" (as opposed to marketing 101), and the charts below may help illustrate the contrast:

The only marketing program that matters: Identify the micro-verses of your multiple audiences, track their constant evolution, and provide content (information and entertainment) that is relevant at a specific point in time, for a specific person, in a specific context. Other than that, it's all tactics and only little strategy. Change your marketing mix every week, every day, every hour -- and your voyage through the customer universe will be fantastic.

The Phone Man

I know, I know, lots of videos here lately. I am a bit lazy if not brain dead. I just came back from SXSW and will post a recap shortly, but before that, enjoy this nice little piece on the attention economy: