Media Mandible

Brooklyn’s Gowanus Lounge has posted an interesting series of blog entries about an outoor apartment rental ad placement gone horribly wrong.

In placing an ad for apartment brokers above a community garden, the agency clearly thought they had made a perfect match: They were targeting neighborhood-conscious people with an ad aimed at neighborhood-conscious people. What could be simpler?

And yet, the agency didn’t consider that the ad itself would be exactly the type of eyesore that neighborhood-conscious people can’t stand to have in their neighborhood.

Physicists and anthropologists like to say that it’s not possible to observe a situation without changing it. If, for example, you go to live with indigenous people in the rainforest to study their culture, you will become a part of that culture. So what you’re observing, as an anthropologist, is what that culture is like with a person from a developed nation living in it.

It’s the same for advertising. You can’t just consider the target demographic in terms of who they are. You also have to consider them in terms of how they’ll react to your ad. Not the product you’re selling, not the ad’s “call to action,” background color, etc., but to the presence of the ad itself. To the fact that it exists, taking up a certain specific space in the consumer’s line of sight. Is that okay with them?

What are some ways this agency might have presented an ad for the same service, in the same location, while avoiding the hostile reaction?

garden spider (get it?) photo  by General Wesc

If I’m the first one to notice the similarity here, I won’t be the last. Compare Piclens, the photo and video browsing service, with the visual index of human memories that Christopher Walken browses through in Brainstorm:

I have tried to capture some of the weird similarity here:

…but you won’t really get it until you have actually looked at both the video above, and the Piclens demo.

Barack Obama is using LinkedIn’s public question/answer feature to ask LinkedIn users what they think America must do to stay competitive.

I doubt Obama is going to read all 3,000 (and counting) answers, but that doesn’t matter. The real subtext here is that:

a) He’s giving people a public forum in which to give him advice, and

b) He’s demonstrating that he knows how to use LinkedIn.

It’s also damn smart marketing, because asking a question on LinkedIn is free for members. He’s paying for the question to be “featured” and for some co-branded banners that draw attention to it. But that’s really not very expensive, given what’s going to come out of this.

Obama’s LinkedIn question, and all the answers to it, are going to just stay there, on LinkedIn, forever. People are going to read the thread, quote it, and respond to it elsewhere. It helps LinkedIn, it helps Obama, and if he becomes President, it may become an oft-referenced, or at least oft-reviewed, thread, in which case it will also be good publicity for everyone who participates in it.

Smart, cost-effective advertising, now matter what your politics are.

Right?

Ben Kunz has a nice post on Thought Gadgets about how much we reveal about who we are on Twitter, and how easily that information can be exploited by future employers, friends, clients, and brands looking for information and opinions about their products.

What’s interesting to me (and I’m sure Ben has thought about this too) is the comprehensive, one-on-one, tip-of-the-long-tail targeted advertising that is bound to come about through Twitter and similar services.

In days of yore (i.e. this morning), companies like MRI would actually pay members of the public to participate in exhaustive surveys, to be completed partly on paper and partly in person, in order to supply a massive pool of demographic, psychographic, and purchase data that could be used to target advertising.

But Twitter, Facebook, and other social apps will eventually remove the necessity for all that. For a while, the online user dealt with a simple tradeoff: get free content, but accept that you’re going to see ads.

Now there’s something else going on: (more…)

Think about the maneuver that’s really going on here. Advertising your product, by talking only about your competition’s product, and yet not saying anything negative about the competition. It’s an ad for the other side. In a case like this, the more sincere it comes across, the better it works. Part of what’s so effective about this is how difficult it is to argue with.

Can anyone name a case of this technique being used to good effect in private-sector advertising?

Here’s a video of my various failed attempts to download Firefox 3, despite all indicators that it should be easy.

It’s worth mentioning that, most likely, this was a web caching issue. It wasn’t just my local cache, though, because I IMd a friend across town before I made this video, and he too saw the FF2 pages. Also, the map page was showing “downloads” rather than “pledges,” even while the other pages were still showing FF2 as the main download.

It may have been as simple as someone at Mozilla forgetting to clear their cache, or perhaps they cleared it too late in the day, and the message didn’t propogate to the edge servers near me until later than it should have. This is not a horrible thing, and a few minutes after I posted the video, I started to see the correct pages in my browser. (I’m typing this addendum in Firefox 3.)

My frustration at not getting FF3 as soon as it was promised came only out of the fact that I was so eager for it. Now that it’s here, I’m happy. (The download numbers still trouble me a bit, though.)

Someone at the executive level recently attempted to console me on my unemployment by slapping me on the back and exclaiming “You’ll be fine. You’re a commodity.”

This put me in the uncomfortable position of having to either a) be insulted or b) tell myself that he had no idea what “commodity” means. (I opted for both, actually. Wouldn’t you?)

A commodity, in the business sense, has two basic characteristics:

a) People want it.

b) They don’t want it specifically.

Take this barbershop, for example (in my neighborhood here in Park Slope). The proprietors put a poster in the window illustrating the various hairstyles they offer. But they didn’t make the poster. They ordered it from a poster company that got the hairstyles from a barbershop in Baltimore.

What’s interesting is that the barbershop with the poster in its window (here in Brooklyn) makes no effort to hide the fact that it isn’t their poster. They don’t care. They don’t think that their customers should care either. You want a haircut? They have haircuts. They are not trying to convince you that there is anything special about their haircuts. They are admitting that they are a commodity.

The thing about commodities is, people aren’t picky about where they come from. They get purchased from the vendor that delivers them fast and cheap. So if you’re a commodity, then you are in demand, but you are never in more demand than any of the millions of other people who are, for all practical purposes, exactly like you.

I guess there are a lot of people in the world who aspire to be commodities. But I’m not one of them. Are you?

Although all the speakers from the FM CM summit are listed here, their names are not really linked to their own sites. Inspired by what Creative Times did for the attendees of the Brooklyn Blogfest, I thought it would be nice to actually assemble links to the blogs (or just sites) of everyone involved, where applicable. If you find a mistake, tell me, and I’ll fix it.

Speakers who have their own blogs, in alphabetical order by last name:

John Battelle (Federated) writes Searchblog

Gina Gianchini (Ning) writes Network Creators.

Henry M. Blodget (Silicon Alley) writes Internet Outsider.

Chas Edwards (Federated) writes ChasNote.

Darren Herman (Media Kitchen) writes DarrenHerman.com.

James Lamberti (Comscore) blogs at ComsCore.

Andy Lark (Dell) writes Andy Lark’s Blog.

Steve Rubel (Edelman Digital) has a “lifestream” in a FriendFeed.

Ian Schafer (Deep Focus) writes IanSchafer.com.

Debra Aho Williamson (eMarketer) writes Next Steps In Marketing.

Or, just use the Grazr widget below, with which you can read any feed, subscribe to any feed, or subscribe to all the feeds together as one. (You could also just bookmark this post, and check it once in a while.)

One of today’s panelists was CondeNet President Sarah Chubb, whom I used to work for (indirectly), when I was in sales, and ad operations, and web analytics, back in the day. She actually gave me a nifty ’star of the month’ award once, involving an email from her to all of CondeNet about stuff I’d done, and a $1,000 prize. I remember sitting in her office as she told me about the award, and being touched by how she was sincerely giving me all her attention, even though she was my boss’ boss’ boss’ boss. It was one of the few times that I spent really talking to her directly, but I valued it, and would think back on it later when she sent out company-wide emails, or gave a speech to all 200 (or so) of us at CondeNet, talking at one crucial point about the history of the larger (mainly print-based) corporation, and how we, the online division, fit into it.

She told a similar story today, but a more complete one, with a happy ending that I didn’t get to witness myself, but heard about from old colleagues, as the sister print publications that had so long contended with their strange online sibling, gradually learned to accept its worth and to make it part of their world…or to become part of its world. And neither is my world anymore, but…why not admit this?…I still care. It thrills me to find a new feature on Epicurious, and to think about the people and the departments and the processes that must have been involved to make it happen. I care about the fate of Flip, and I wait to see what they do with Reddit. And when, after years of CondeNast controlling Wired, the print magazine, while Wired was still owned by another company….when the online publication was brought back into the fold, I couldn’t help but think, Fuck yeah. We finally got it back. Even though I hadn’t been at Conde for almost two years, and even though I never worked on either version of Wired myself.

Anyway. Other memorable moments from today’s panels included Media Kitchen’s Darren Herman noting that “A lot of people need to either step down or die,” Wendy Harris Millard (President of Media at Martha Stewart) doing an extended (loving) impression of Stewart making fun of Millard, and Edelman Digital SVP Steve Rubel comparing social media to soylent green (the substance, not the movie).

This was a good conference. Not just smart people talking about smart things, though there was plenty of that. But, unlike most trade conferences, the panelists (to a one, I think) were sincerely interested in engaging the topic at hand, instead of shamelessly using it as a jumping-off point to shill for their own commoditized business. Maybe that’s partly because the businesses in question each bring their own special value, but it’s also just about the whole spirit of the thing. It was really nice to be at an event involving hundreds of people in the same industry that was not mostly comprised of bullshit, and I bet that such events are fairly unusual even across industries.

photo (of the S.I. Newhouse School of Communications) by Benjamin I.

If for some reason you’re not familiar with Federated or the conference, you’ll want to start here.

Some nice moments:

Battelle breaking off in the middle of his own introductory speech to say “I’m announcing a new phone,” momentarily disorienting at least 50 people in the audience who were, on some device or other, simultaneously following Steve Jobs’ 3G iPhone speech going on at the same time on the west coast.

Randall Rothenberg, President and CEO, Interactive Advertising Bureau, starting his speech with “I’m here to scare you,” and shortly after, standing in front of yellow writing on blue background: “Activists Hate Digital Media And Marketing.” (After a polarizing, us-vs-them speech, Rothernberg was the only speaker to leave the stage without taking questions.)

Jason Kilar, CEO of Hulu, pronouncing: “Your brand is what people say about you when you’re not in the room,” an astute observation that he topped a few minutes later with “Most websites look like Tokyo at night,” a potentially offputting metaphor for a number of reasons, although I thought the point was well made.

Of all the speakers, Louis Giagrande, Senior Online Marketing Manager, Samsung Electronics America, really stood out in a good way: articulate, frank, and insightful.

During the networking sessions, had some great conversations with Rob Walk of NovaRising, Michael Burke of appssavvy, and Daniel Mintz of MoveOn, as well as many Federated staffers and authors.

More detail after tomorrow’s session…right now I have to get to sleep, as it starts at 8:30am.

Note to self: Get a real camera.