Manhattan Marketing Maven

2 Personal Productivity Tools: Desperately Needed

In a self-service 24/7 digital world I need some serious help to keep my data in synch and to get all my fabulous gizmos to work with me rather than against me.

There are two tools that I desperately need. They may or may not exist. If they exist and you know about them I implore you to call, contact or cue me about how to get them. If they don't exist I beg you to invent them, mash them up or get somebody in India to create them fast. I hereby renounce all claims and future royalties.

Universal Address-book. The idea is to update things once in a single place and then quickly and easily share the data across platforms. I want a tool that will allow me to data enter and store my personal database of addresses and contacts on the web and download it with a click to every computer, phone, PDA and other intelligent device I have. I've tried to concentrate all my updates and changes in Outlook and though Plaxo claims to have a tool like this, I can't download it and can't seem to use it.

Global Cellphone Dialing Software. I want a software program that will know when to dial the extra zero and when to dial the access codes necessary to use all the stored numbers in my phones. Unfortunately the numbers I enter are keyed to the national system or to my providers' protocols. But when I travel, there's always an added access code or you have to dial 08 in-country versus 8 from abroad. I want a patch that will suss out this stuff digitally and automatically understand what I've got stored and do whatever is needed to make the connection, save me time and reduce my anxiety. 

If I could get, find or discover these tools, I'd have a lot more time to contact, connect or converse with all those people at all those numbers I've been madly collecting, storing and updating.     

Media Never Dies

TV killed the radio star. Cable knocked off TV. The Internet killed cable. Thus said the pundits. But real people add to and adjust their media use. Media never dies.

Now according to Knowledge Networks SRIs couch potatoes are being eclipsed by "Streamies"  --- video addicts chained to their computers who are much heavier online netizens than the average American. These people are fascinated by the growing quantity and quality of video choices. As evidenced by the heavy male skew -- 2/3rds more young adult men, twice as many older adult men-- the number and variety of moving porn images available online keep them coming back.

Teens are the biggest "Streamies." Forty-three percent of boys 12-17 and 40% of girls watched streaming video at least once during the past week. These teenagers spend 28% more time online than the average teen but their online viewing is not diminishing their TV/cable addiction.

For young adults (18-34) 36% of men and 16% of women are madly streaming video and spending 41% more time doing it than their online counterparts. And for real adults (35-64) 21% of men and 11% of women are investing time in online video, a whopping 67% increase over the non-streaming members of their age cohort.

A healthy amount of this viewing takes place during daytime, a testament to either the growing appeal of business content or the appeal of taking care of business on the boss's time, bandwidth and keyboard.

Is Howard the Only One?

I’m a Howard Stern fan. I’m a regular listener. I defected to Sirius for Howard. And over the years I have bought a ton of adds on his radio shows. But I can’t believe that “The King of All Media” is the only radio act that can attract young men to the dial.

The quick failure of David Lee Roth and his replacement by Stern wannabees Anthony and Opie suggests that either there is a colossal lack of talent in radio, a colossal lack of imagination among radio programmers or both. And while I love porn stars, fart jokes and putting dorks in humiliating situations as much as the next guy, it’s hard to believe that this is the sum total of programming that appeals to my demographic.

Is it possible a fast thinking and fast talking disc jockey in some third-rate market has been overlooked? Is it possible that there is no other distinctive voice or no unusual perspective on current events that could be brought forward? Are radio programmers as lame as the Democrats unable to find, construct or nurture talent?

New Versus Old Media Manipulation

Two closely placed stories in the Media & Marketing section of the Wall Street Journal point out the significant differences between old fashioned interrupt media and online opt-in media.

The February 15th advertising column celebrates a media scheduling innovation in which American Express ran three separate 30-second spots back to back during “60 Minutes” on CBS, “Lost” on ABC and “Law & Order on NBC.” In so doing they grabbed 90 consecutive seconds of attention from whoever was watching that commercial pod.

Radical huh?

Making Newsletters Work Harder

Every business seems to have a newsletter. Few have any news. And fewer still contribute to business growth. Most aren’t opened or read..

Why?

Most firms exert too little effort and have too little valuable content. Too much of the writing, design and strategy is done by rote. And while a monthly or quarterly e-mail “ping” might momentarily spark brand recognition or awareness it rarely provokes inquiries or engagement.

The premise behind creating a newsletter is still valid. A well crafted newsletter can establish a brand’s positioning; educate customers and convey thought leadership. It can also prompt and qualify leads, if and only if, best practices are applied.

Here’s the list of newsletter best practices:

Have recipients determine frequency, medium and content preference.

Track readership and serve content based on reader preference.

Customize where possible. Abandon a one size fits all approach.

Offer incentives for pass-along. Solicit ideas and input.

Accentuate your point of view, key executives or products

Aggressively seek interaction. Make it clickable and easy to respond.

Be personable. Write in real rather than corporate nonspeak – blog style

Address industry r competitive issues head on.

Make it fun.

Include a call to action. Give readers something to do in response. Think of your newsletter as an element in an on-going converesation

DRTV Gets Its Due

Direct Response TV advertising (DRTV) seems to be the fastest growing segment in TV Land. Sales are up 25 percent during the first half of 2005 to $1.2 billion, according to TNS Media Intelligence, a growth rate double that of cable TV. Sellers are reporting 100 percent renewal rates from DRTV advertisers like J&J, Pfizer, Orbitz and L’Oreal. Packaged goods and financial services advertisers who long disdained DRTV are now embracing it.

My...how things have changed.

Not too long ago DRTV was the late night and weekend province of the Ab Roller, Hooked on Phonics and Ron Popeil. It was, if you believed the white shoe ad guys, a sleazy neighborhood frequented by brands on the deathwatch, jobbers with leftover inventory and small time entrepreneurs running boiler room operations in search of quick and dirty wins.

Fast forward to a time of tight budgets, fragmented viewing, integrated marketing and creative executions that can simultaneously promote the brand and carry a call to action. Presto! The ugly duckling becomes a swan.

DRTV can be branded and responsive. DRTV is carefully tracked to yield a clear ROI. And DRTV at 40 percent of the cost of upfront or scatter inventory is still bought creatively to finesse network issues and zero-in on target audiences. DRTV reinforces brand awareness. DRTV drives phone calls. DRTV drives web traffic. DRTV provokes search engine queries.

DRTV has always done these things. This is nothing new to those of us who have toiled “below the line.” We can all enjoy a brief “I-told-you-so” moment, bask in the recognition for a previous undervalued media channel and savor a back-handed compliment for all those savvy media people who have mastered the nuances of DRTV.

Porn & Productivity

Are we just talking a good game?

New research on workplace behaviors and online porn suggest that things aren’t what they seem to be. Americans’ highly touted productivity might just be a chimera if you believe the stats developed by AOL and Salary.com. After surveying 10,000 American workers, they concluded that American business pay $759 billion for work that doesn’t get done because employees are surfing the Web and kibitzing with co-workers.

Anyone who has ever worked in an office knows instinctively the truth of this data. What’s funny is that HR people and managers actually budget for workers to blow an hour a day on random acts of personal interest. But employees admit to wasting double the amount of time, on average 2.09 hours per day. Using average wage figures, that’s an additional $5720 per year/per worker that bosses didn’t count on wasting.

And not surprising, some of that personal Web surfing, accept where large firms have blocked XXX URLs, is to porn sites, which now account for 18 percent of all web usage, with an average time spent per adult site of 5 minutes and 22 seconds per.

Whether we are at home or at home, Americans made 70 million unique visits to adult sites, spending on average 15 minutes per site visited during April 2005, according to Hitwise. That’s 42 percent of the total 164 million unique site visitors anywhere on the Internet in the same month.

So what does this mean?

The Europeans, who make fun of our maniacal fascination with work at the expense of personal time, might be as productive as we are but more honest about their attitudes than we thought.

Work is so dull for huge numbers of American workers that they check out even when present.
Do you suppose this underlies all those business magazine stories about the search for ideas, leadership and vision?

Time wasting is clearly part of our business culture, a pressure release valve that also enables informal communication, networking and conflict resolution.

Our Puritan conceit about repressing the influence of sex is a joke.

Pornmeisters continue to pioneer sales and customer relationship techniques on the Web that mainstream marketers only dream about.

Manga Goes Mainstream

Manga, Japanese graphic novels, and anime, Japanese animated films, have been a rage among American teens and tweens for several years. My daughter Allison has been reading and watching these stories of empowered young women --battling evil, competing in sports and school and negotiating the world of dating -- for several years. In fact, manga has been a huge industry and export from Japan for the last twenty years.

Now that US sales levels have reached $207 million in 2004, driven in-part by a steady investment of Allison’s baby-sitting earnings, CosmoGirl will launch a monthly manga strip entitled “The Adventures of CG” in conjunction with TokyoPop, one of the leading importers of this genre. GC (clever huh?), a college sophomore living in Tokyo, will be drawn in the wide-eyed manga style and will be a “spunky every-girl hipster heroine” – the kind of aspirational figure that has attracted huge numbers of girls to a genre (graphic novels and comic books) that was traditionally a male bastion in America.

Not only is the adoption of this form into mainstream media interesting, but the strip will be drawn by 25-year old Svetlana Chmakova, a woman with a decidedly non-Asian name, suggesting that not only has this form crossed cultures but that non-Japanese are embracing and morphing the form. Viz Media, another big manga house, will bring out a US version of its hit teen magazine Shojo Beat soon and will publish its greatest hits in English beginning this Fall.

And while you can find American-drawn adaptations of manga all across the Web, it will soon be at newsstands and book stores everywhere. An agreement between Dark Horse, another manga importer and translator, and Harlequin, the publisher of paperback romance novels, will produce manga versions of Harlequin best-sellers by December 2005.

So what does all this mean?

1. Globalization is working in every direction.
2. Kids usually know about and gravitate to these cross-cultural forms long before adults and main stream media types do.
3. Word-of-mouth is the most powerful form of commercial communication.
Girls still respond to traditional female themes but rally to and embrace characters that defy traditional female roles.
4. Kids expect multimedia on-demand. They expect their favorite stories and characters will be in book, online, game and animated formats accessible to them whenever they are in the mood. Before too long adults will expect the same.
5. Mythology, science-fiction, competition, success, the future, personal insecurity and the mysterious relationship between the sexes are endlessly interesting themes.

Will Big Brother Make TV Better?

Cable companies are testing software to target commercials based on what they know or intuit about you. Could Big Brother make watching TV better for you?

Technology exists to track what you watch. Data mining techniques exist to discover who you are and what you like. What if the two were married together and harnessed to a rules engine that served up messages deemed “relevant” to you. Would you sit through a commercial pod? Be less inclined to channel surf? Or actually be interested in the stuff they were sending you?

Naturally “relevance” would be a function of how sophisticated the data models were. But assuming they got it right or gave you a say in what was served up to you, advertisers could target not only by household but by set-top box. They’d know which set the kids watch and which one you watch and send different spots to each TV, even though they might be no more than 25 feet apart.

This could actually make advertising more valuable and useful to the average viewer and create a bonanza for cable companies, who could sell much more inventory in smaller discretely targeted batches. At this point the gating factor seems to be cost to cable operators and proof of technical accuracy.

Radio on the Rocks?

There’s something magical about radio. Everybody has two or three favorite stations. Radio is comfortable. Radio is convenient. Radio does it for you even though every so often you have to endure a track you don’t like.

Many of us have a genuine friendship with or a genuine animosity toward Howard, Imus, Rush and other personalities we’ve come to know through repeated daily encounters. Most of us have radio sound tracks embedded in our memories and rely on the radio as a free, mood-enhancing utility.

Yet radio is and has been the Rodney Dangerfield of media for sixty years.

Every new thing seems better than radio. Every new media grabs dollars from radio. Every new device will kill off radio.

The latest radio killers are satellite radio and podcasting. Both have generated huge hype. Though neither has yet collected significant or measurable audiences to threaten radio’s revenues. Plus the real benefit of both is the availability of niche programming and the absence of commercials.

But with almost predictable regularity the radio industry feels compelled to defend itself. And so the Radio Advertising Bureau (www.rab.com) , where I worked as CMO for five years, just put out a “Quick Guide to Dispelling the 8 Major Myths About Radio.”

Confronting “allegations” about commercial clutter, interactivity, reach among youth, creativity, branding, listenership and business practices, these two sheets make the case for radio using all kinds of data, some of which is ancient but still true. It reads like a desperate defense. And while the conglomerates that own the majority of radio stations won’t win any popularity contests, the medium is much more entrenched and enduring than you might otherwise think.

If this crisis runs like every other one, radio stations will adapt, convert and subsume the latest trends and hottest technologies. Some have already introduced podcasting formats. For addicts, paying for Howard, will be well worth it for others it will be a blessing to get him off the public airwaves.

And radio will go on loved but underappreciated.