innovation playground Idris Mootee

Eight Most Common Marketing Mistakes That You Should Avoid Making.

Every one is an expert in marketing these days. And with social media, everyone is an ad critic. Not entirely a bad thing, but as marketers you need know how to filter the noise. People need to understand the difference between STRATEGIC MARKETING, MARKETING COMMUNICATIONS and CHANNEL MARKETING. These are three very different things. The first one is strategic and is tightly linked to business strategy and decisions are made based on what and how to invest, the second one is about advertising (there is no social only advertising or no advertising only social..either way that's where we're going) and the third is about activations and promotions in the field.

I am writing this blog post while shopping at a Prada store. It is a good place to write about marketing because luxury goods companies such as Prada understand building brand equity, communicating brand desire and staging customer experience. I bought my new Prada briefcase and shoes for three reasons in the following order: 1/ Brand 2/ Product 3/ Experience. I see many great design but their brand is never part of my consideration. Product is great and I need to like it. The experience makes me feel like buying more stuff.

There are many myths in marketing despite it is a relative mature practice and companies are still making the same common mistakes. Every senior marketers and CMOs can benefit from reading this:

Marketing Mistake #1: Marketing is all about driving sales. 

Many people still confuse marketing with sales. Selling is only a part of the marketing function, but marketing is much broader than selling. It is not one is more important than the other. Marketing begins before a company design or conceptualize an idea or design or engineer any products or services. Marketing continues throughout the whole product’s lifecycle. Its mandate is the continued discovery of new ways to create, communicate and capture value. Marketing is not and should not be considered a cost; in fact it is an investment. Imagine if a business stops investing? If marketing cost is linked as a ratio-to-sales, them company will eventually enter a stage of stagnation and eventually decline (I am not saying there shouldn't be discipline in marketing resource management). But like any investments, it must provide a clear idea of how and when it will deliver a return on that investment. So marketing is a number of strategic investments and not just a cost item. The truth is any marketing dollars that are linked directly to sales improvement most likely are sales promotions that leads to discount and sometime brand erosion. The best marketing build brand equity and create demand. Field promotions, discount programs, sales incentives etc. are not marketing, these are sales operation expenses.

Marketing Mistake #2: Marketing is a department.

This is another common mistake that marketers make and that is to view it as a department within the organizational structure. And therefore marketing is the sole job of the marketing department. It is true that marketing is a function that’s organized within a marketing department. But if marketing thinking only happens within this department, I believe the company would not do well. Marketing is far too limited if it is left only to the marketing professionals. Progressive companies need to get all their departments to be customer oriented and focused. Marketing must be an integrated part of the entire organization, rather than a specific function. Successful marketing is the true integration of marketing, engineering, design, customer service, community management and operations beyond simply putting a multi-disciplinary team together. The team must be supported and managed effectively in an environment where each discipline respects and appreciates the perspective of others. Look at some of the most successful companies today and see who in the organization sets the marketing direction for those companies. More and more, it’s the CEO who’s also becoming the CMO while not officially although they do not usually carry that title.

Marketing Mistake #3: Marketing is all about the big idea and the marketing mix.

Marketing is often being marginalized to just coming up with the big idea and then managing the marketing mix and communications. Gone are the days of the Big Idea (Leo Burnett’s in the 80s). Many executives today still believe that marketing is about getting the “big idea” from their agencies and spending money effectively on the advertising and promotional mix. In another words optimizing your advertising dollars, will lead to a successful marketing campaign. It doesn’t matter what products they are marketing, many executives believe that the key to a successful campaign is to work with their advertising agencies to come up with big ideas to differentiate their product in the marketplace and win a few advertising awards along the way. The traditional marketing model is obsolete and many clients and agencies are still operating this way. Marketing is not about mix, it is about telling your story in the most authentic ways and the best way to do that is from their leaderships. The big idea is not about the advertising, the company itself should be the big idea! They missed it completely. And the marketing mix is not about the media, it is about orchestrating both mass and individual social conversation at scale.

Marketing Mistake #4: Try as hard as you can to sell.

For brands to sell they have to stop selling. Unless you’re on DTV or doing a tactical DM campaign. For brands to win the hearts and minds they so crave and to engineer brand desire, they must first earn those hearts and minds and tell people who you are and why you’re here. What is your purpose? Where does your company’s passion lie? What are your greatest capabilities, and what do you have to offer? What need do you see in the world that you are operating in? And you must earn your relevance through a view of the world and a perceived role within it that is a clear break from the bygone advertising practices of the 80s. Sell hard by selling less. Any advertising that tries too hard to sell will not work.

Marketing Mistake #5: Listening to your customers.

Today’s technological advancements have given companies the ability to target and talk to customers in a more precise manner. Yet, the new technologies allow us to listen to whatever is going on out there. Failing to use these tools effectively will result in companies totally disconnected with their customers. Social listening is not an option; it is the core of marketing intelligence. Don’t waste money on useless focus groups.

Mistake #6: Not listening to your customer.

This is the key difference between “Market Drive” and “Market Driving. Customer input is valuable in helping companies develop incremental innovation. However, customers are usually unable to conceptualize the benefits of revolutionary products, concepts and technologies. No market research will tell you what’s the next big idea. And no customers or your trade partners can tell you how you should do your marketing. Your customers can tell you the things that are broken and they want you to fix it. Listen to them. Make sure they know you are listening and make them happy. But they won’t create the future roadmap for your product or service. That’s your job. No you listen to your customers but you should never ask them what they want. They will tell you they want a car that self-drive and can fly.

Mistake #7: Making everything a CMO problem.

The average tenure of a CMO is 12-16 months these days and is getting shorter. No one wants the CMO job. The shortness of the typical CMO’s tenure is a tangible manifestation of corporate management's frustration with the inability of marketing to create economic value let alone the inability to drive change and transformation. Good marketing not only transforms customers but it should first transform the organization itself. Many CMOs are traditional marketers who are usually great advertising tacticians. Trained for years in traditional advertising, their primarily focus was in marketing communications activities to build brands. Many lack the strategic thinking and CMO must also relentlessly focus on unifying the disparate functions of marketing, operations, sales, service, and technology. For most companies, such integration suggests an unholy alliance of warring fiefdoms and silos, and that's precisely why the C-suite needs an individual with the power and authority to deliver the results. Marketing is about the customer experience.

Marketing Mistake #8: Marketing is a pure science.

Marketing can become over obsessed with logic and lost sight of the magic. Marketing has always aspired to be an “accurate science” status and has been searching for the best formula. Sometimes people are using fake science although data is becoming more and more important for marketing these days thanks for big data. Even with those data, we should not lose sight of the most important of marketing: magic, mystery and mastery.

 

We Have Proved Once Again That Brand Marketing Can Drive Social Change, Further Customer Engagment And Build Brands. And Won A Gold Award For Best Financial Service Marketing.

Aviva Canada just announced winners to Aviva Community Fund with half a million dollars payout to programs across the country. This is the second year of a very successful campaign created to use brand to drive social change. The Aviva Community Fund, a unique competition designed to lead, empower and support positive change in communities across the country, was first launched in 09 when we presented the idea to the client.

The idea is an open source idea platform for people to submit and decide how to use the money to drive real social change and provide positive impact to their communities. We are grateful to our client's team who worked with us side by side and our design and development team working day and night to accommodate the evolving needs of the program. This is year two and we won a gold award for this campaign. Great work team!

The sustainable impact of the idea or campaign is another proof to show that the world has changed so much since the early days of advertising. The events of the last decade and the Internet has made us aware of the challenges around us.

Advertising has always been the primary mechanism to create awareness and build brand equity, but it is not a question of which 50% of the money is wasted, it is a question of why 80% of the money spent is not building brand equity and merely creating awarness?

Our research shows that 79% of consumers are willing to change the brands they buy or if they believe their actions contribute to making our world a better place, and over 67% would help a brand “promote” (by using Facebook or other social media) if a good cause were behind it and is credible. Also, 73% of consumers (under the age of 35) said it is their mission to contribute to a better society and environment.

Among all respondents, “helping others and contributing to their communities” was cited as the second-most important source of personal contentment, after “spending quality time with loved ones.” Over 54% respondents are not fully convinced that corporate social responsibility advertising is credible when they cannot associate that with real action. The power of PR is diminishing when the program is not designed to engage consumers. This study was part of our ongoing research to look at how social causes can help brands which are low involvement in nature to drive engagement.

One interesting take away point, 67% of consumers are comfortable with the idea that brands can support good causes and improve our societies and make money at the same time. When is Wall Street ready to factor in a second or third bottom line into their valuation of companies? It is time.

Brand Talk on Love, Sex And Emotion. Marketers Love Drinking Their Kool-Aid.

Can a company/brand create such powerful emotive connections to make customers love them? Your advertising agency will be quick to say yes. I am not sure. I can imagine a few scenarios that it happens but is is very uncommon. Marketers like to convince themselves that you can buy ‘love’ and that’s the ultimate goal for great marketing. What's that book name "Lovemark"?  That's an example of advertisers drinking their own Kool-Aid. Yes, many customers can have a level of enthusiasm because we provide them with a great customer experience, is that love? That’s what I want to write about.

Neurologists suggest that the early stages of love are governed by parts of the brain that are used for goal-seeking and reward, and resembles obsessive-compulsive disorder. Such as the first time you look at an Apple iPhone, a Harley Street Bob, a Hermes Kelley, a Mercedes SL AMG and a Patek Philippe Calatrava.

Here's how our brain works, at the early stage of a romantic relationship sparks activity in dopamine-rich brain regions normally associated with motivation and reward. The intensity is proportion to the activity. Advertising doesn’t make them love your brand; they attract their attention and interest.

The part of our brain associated with emotion, the insular cortex and parts of the anterior cingulate cortex, are not activated until the more mature phases of a relationship. In the context of brand marketing, the emotive connections require consistence good customer experiences including the love and hate. Love happens as a result when the sum total of the interactions that a customer has with a company's products, people, and interfaces reach certain threshold. Starting from the moment when customers purchase a product to the moment when they unwrap the box and sharing their joy with their friends on Facebook.

Here's a myth. Love is not emotion, it is a strategic capability to gain happiness. And love by itself has no object. It is some invisible and unexplainable energy of consciousness sometimes we are not even aware of it. It is beyond form, yet inclusive of form. Love is a capability that can be developed, nurtured and learned. We develop this capability when we were very young. Over the years, we develop the ability to love and care for the other person(s) and sometimes even objects.
Emotion is a different animal. It is feelings (or reactions from our brain activity) that aroused as a result of stimuli. When you see something, you want to touch it, feel it and probably own it. Many people marry for the sake of convenience or benefits. The same way we are loyal to certain brands for the same reasons. Either because there is a lack of choice of simply the product category is of low involvement.

Sex, love and emotion are three different things. In an ideal world, they intersect at certain junction. Sex is not the single manifestation of love (although it can be one of them), regular purchase and consumption of a brand is not a manifestation of love for the same reason. Some people are always under the misconception that the manifestation of love is sex; the manifestation of loyalty is purchase frequency. Yes, it may be. But mostly not.

Take away for you for the weekend, emotion often gets us into trouble but we must recognize them as part of being human and accept them into our consciousness, where they need to be cared for and managed. And that cab be learned.

Have a great weekend and please share your thoughts.

Interaction Design Has An Important Role To Play In Our Future, It Has The Power To Transform Cultures.

There is two articles on IC today, one on Inc. magazine and the other in Globe and Mail. We're getting some good press coverage and we need to continue to make our story heard. In the meantime, we continue onto my journey of building global capabilities. Interaction design (IxD) will be a core focus, and I don't mean just web or mobile interactions. IxD will be one of the most important strategic capability for companies to build meaningful engagement and sustainable differentiation as part of their enterprise level experience strategy.

How would interaction design change in the next 10 years? It is a relatively new area of practice, beyond traditional GUI design or web interface design. Interaction design go beyond just the clicks and links and is becoming an indispensable aspect business design, product design and service design. Interaction design is traditionally define as the study of devices with which a user can interact, in particular computer users or screen related. The practice typically centers on "embedding information technology into the ambient social complexities of the physical world. I think the word 'device' will eventually become irrelevant. I think IxD is about to take on a larger mission -- empowering communities and transforming cultures.

Here's my point of view, traditional industrial design focuses on a product’s form and function, but interaction design requires very different perspectives and approaches for increasingly complex business and design problems. Think media industry, it is transforming itself from a traditional broadcast medium to an interactive one and this change will accelerate faster and faster extending their ubiquity and interactivity to devices, objects and spaces. Rapid technological development is introducing new types of functionality, for example to sense, feel, control, monitor, connect, search, respond and transact for different types of applications.

I am talking about the circle of influence with interaction design. How does interaction design transforms culture; it begins when a small networks of people simply start sharing ideas, feelings, hopes and frustrations etc. and that is when culture emerges. Their behavioral patterns, mindsets, emotional responses as well as aesthetics, rules, norms, and values that are being shared influence culture and as a result produce certain artifacts.

These 'virtual artifacts', through people’s interacting with them, influence cultures and facilitate emergence of new culture. Interactions then become transformative social mechanisms whereby these ‘virtual artifacts’ are made accessible or shareable through networks of communities further facilitating more connecting and sensing, their creations are further linked to specific interactional, locational, cultural and economic context.

The ‘virtuality of our everyday life’ as a result of the interactions powers up new creation and distribution of culture never before in the modern history of mankind. This is where the real disruption is for marketers and media producers. It is hard to distinguish one’s role at the complex juncture of creation/production and consumption in our everyday activities. Interactions of our everyday life take on new meanings. Interaction designer have bigger jobs to do.

My favorite French philosopher Jean Baudrillard (1929-2007) gave us the tools to understand the media society and counteract the total assimilation into capitalist overproduction. Truls Lie finds a previously unpublished interview he made when Baudrillard visited Oslo in 2000. "Disappearing", says Baudrillard, "should be an art form, a seductive way of leaving the world. I believe that part of disappearing is to disappear before you run dry...." An idea for all interaction designers, make sure you include a 'disappear' function in all your designs.

By The Standard Of The Late Leo Burnett, Many Of Today's Big Agencies Should Have Taken Their Founders' Name Off The Door. Here's A Tribute To The Loney Man Who Spent A Lifetime Behind His Typewriter To Come With The Big Ideas.

This week I was invited to speak on branding and marketing to group graduate students who are studying towards a master degree in branding. I shared part of my Advanced Branding Masterclass material, which covers the future of branding in the world of social technologies and connectivity. Their instructor (an advertising veteran who had a long agency career including Leo Burnett) raised a very interesting point, 20 or 30 years ago advertising agencies were in the business of selling “ideas”, today many are becoming audio and video factories. And he realized that our success is all about ideas. That is very true, who are the creators of “ideas” these days? Idea Couture is exactly about ideas, not only communications but strategic ideas…. be it brand, product, service, interface, interactive, and retail experience.

We have a good chat about the agency scenes in the 80s. I always remember the self-advertising of Leo Burnett in those days. I still keep copies of them including the one I scanned and posted here.  This is one that I really like is “When to take my name off the door” – Leo Burnett 1967. It was elegantly written. He was not only a great craftsman, but understand how to create a strong organization culture. “Creative ideas flourish best in a shop which preserves some spirit of fun. Nobody is in business for fun, but that does not mean there cannot be fun in business.”A lesson I learned from him it is always important not to take the fun away from work.

A while back I was invited to a private event involving top 30 global executives of an agency group. There were so much fear and unknown among them about the future of their business or industry. They struggle with the legacies that they carry but at the same time they know they are too big to adapt flexibly to the fast changing media scene. Media is being redefined on a daily basis and brands no longer have passive, anonymous audience whose behaviors are predictable.

We are moving to "cocoon of rich media experiences that follow us from one place to another and from morning till night. The penetration of iPad will be accelerating the “cocooning” and the open up creative possibilities of building longer pauses into our entertainment mix to allow for double screening or triple-screening. Imagine if future TV production adjusted to the reality of multitasking during long boring bits. This is exciting for many.

Agencies need to throw away these out-dated paradigms of CRM, direct marketing or public relations etc. And forget about integrated campaign and start from a clean sheet of paper. Advertisers were getting MTV lazy for a long period of time as they relied on sexy bodies, sound bites and spectacular effects and forgot about the big idea. Not that those 20 secs sight and sound are not entertaining, but we need more.

Tools change, technologies advance, new behavior emerges, media outlets proliferate but objectives don’t’. We need to engage, intrigue, connect, persuade, amuse, empower and entertain. Advertising agencies need to partake in extensive therapies to cure their MTV laziness and deflate their egos. This problem is systemic.

Agencies don’t understand strategy. They keep hide behind “brand building” and fail to understand the economics of customers and marketing. They overcharge for the execution and incapable of giving clients real strategies to engage customers and create customer value, both tangible customer value and conversational value.

Almost all big agencies only pay lip service to digital and don’t understand social media beyond throwing buzz words around. For them, they are just another way to broadcast their messages. They hire and a few digital thinkers who have no real authority, no resources, no real work, and use them as PR figure in front of clients. They farm out the work to little mom and pop development shops that undervalue themselves and lose credit for the work.

Agencies need to put communications aside for a second and start opening up their minds on new creative ways to build long-lasting human connections, between brands and individuals and among individuals. Everything that matters in the future of advertising begins and ends with three things: people and their communities and purpose. Go to slideshare to see some of my slides presentation on this topic. Big agencies need help.

Broadcast Media Is Reaching An Indsutry Breakpoint, And Hulu Is Fast Becoming A Key Part Of The New Industry Architecture.

Here are pictures of the Idea Couture team running several days of long sessions at the MIT.  Jeff, Partick, Adam and Cheesan were happy with the progress to date and I am so looking forward to see the first milestone. It is just a great project and a great client/partner.  Everyone is excited.

While we are on MIT, I came across some early research from MIT Media Lab on "Emotionally Reactive Television" , it is a very interesting concept. The idea was from the time TV was created, watching TV is considered as a static activity. TV audiences have very limited choices to interact with TV, such as turning on/off, increasing/decreasing volume, and traversing among different channels. The working thesis is that TV program should have social responses to people, such as affording and accepting audience’s emotional feeling with the growth of technologies. This paper presents HiTV, an Emotionally-Reactive TV system using a digitally augmented soft ball as affect-input interfaces that can amplify TV program’s video/audio signals. HiTV transforms the original video and audio into effects that intrigue and fulfill people’s emotional expectation. This is a super cool idea.

Some people think media should all be free. Just imagine a world where every form of media as we know is accessible for free. Is this the future? We’re reaching an industry breakpoint in the world of media, fight between pirates, broadcasters, entertainment labels, demanding consumers heats up, the stakes will get higher, and higher.

The convergence of PC and TV will accelerate. I’ve participated in debates and forums around the three screen convergence scenario in the telec industry. That means one provider who can deliver a converged/integrated video/entertainment experience to the TV, PC, and mobile device. This is the telcos’ dream. The idea is, you're watching something on your TV and you have to leave, you can continue to watch it on the go or so you pause it. Is this something we all wanted?

Analyst Laura Martin (Soleil Securities) crafted a worst case scenario for broadcast media. Martin believes Hulu will wipe out the network television business as we know it. In a recent report, she estimates that the online video hub will cost TV networks $920 per viewer in advertising if their audiences are cannibalized by Hulu. She believes the bulk of viewing on Hulu is indeed taking eyeballs from TV. It definitely makes some sense but there are still many wild cards.

Earlier In May she warned that the entire $300 billion market valuation of the television industry is threatened by the shift of programming from TV to the Web. Spearheading the overthrow of TV-as-we-know-it is Hulu, the premium video site backed by NBC Universal, News Corp. and Walt Disney that offers content from the 120 partners. Martin is very confident that Hulu will succeed in the long term. With more than 38 million monthly viewers who watched 457 million streamed videos, it is 6th-most-visited video site, ahead of competitors like AOL, CBS Interactive and the Turner Network, according to comScore.

Hulu is seeding the value migration for its TV network creators as more content that becomes available on Hulu, the more likely it is that consumers will cut the cable cord altogether. Together with that trend is the less attractive economics of online video to advertisers, which offers higher CPMs but fewer ads. The industry estimates that Hulu runs four ads each hour at a $50 CPM compared to 32 ads during each hour of programming on TV at a $35 CPM. ($1,120-$200 = $920). Hulu did not disclosed actual ad sales or ad rates.

The TV everywhere idea is not new. Except it is getting real. I am not sure if it is so simple. There is a lot of uncertainty about the speed of deployment of new technologies and services, and of their adoption driven innovative user experience design. Hence the implications for spectrum demand and management of all these changes are far from clear; and convergence raises the fundamental question of whether current service definitions will make any sense by the end of next year.

What's The Future Like For Wieden + Kennedy? Where Walking In Stupid Will Take Them Next? Dan Wieden Is No Ordinary Ad Exec, He's A Very Different Breed.

My people told me we had a problem. There was an error on the printing side and our 60-minute Brand Strategist Book (Limited Edition) was now changed to 80-minute (no one was telling us). I thought may be Morgan decided to further enrich the content, hmm he definitely too busy to do that. Probably not him. I jumped off the roof (actually the plane), went to the office and opened those boxes, fortunately it was only limited to the boxes. They did not add 20 min of content to my book. Who knows, someone just decided to add 20 pages of reading - sort of bonus chapter. So many things can go wrong.

I want to write about W+K. I think it is a very special company both work and culture.  Wieden+Kennedy is no question one of the world's creative advertising agencies if not the most, has a very unique culture and cool office spaces, you don’t hear me saying that often, there are usually more criticism coming from me. The question for them is where it should go the next 20 years. Are they on a selective building mode or packaging for sale mode? Or they are going to play in the social media sandbox and reinvent advertising once again?

When Dan Wieden founded the agency 20 years ago with David Kennedy, their motto was just one of many slogans found in this strangest of workplaces. "Fail harder" and "Welcome to Optimism" are two examples. I remembered I’d like their print ad so much that I put it up in my office in my LA office.  It is more than an ad. It meant something more to me.  It reminds me of what do I need to stay competitive. It has an emotional connection to me even though I am hardly a sportsman. They are no question one of the finest creative ad agency founded during the last two decades. There are lots of creative shops out there, but not one that institutionalize creativity like W+K did.

I love their offices, there’s a little weirdness but still quite traditional looking (unlike Mother) and there’s a padded cell for creative thinking on the top floor and a giant polystyrene statue called Nicola (crafted by the artist Wilfrid Wood). So what’s W+K’s future? In an interview with The Independent, Dan says the agency thrives on a culture "built around a friendly relationship with chaos", a concept represented by Blender Man.

"I think it's important that if you're going to be innovative, that there's not a process for everything. Sometimes it seems that if you're never lost you're never going to wind up any place new. It's only if you're willing to be completely fucked-up that you're going to do anything important.” That’s a spirit of innovation not commonly found in advertising agency.

The funny story about the Nike slogan “Just Do It’, he said it was no more than something to link a few commercials and never meant to take off like that. They just typed it out on typewriters, then blew it up, and put it on a board. It surprised everybody involved because it apparently spoke some truth that was larger than sport or advertising. It is a big idea even though they didn’t really expect it.

W+K is late in the digital game and I can’t speak to their current digital capabilities. Sure they are playing with it and have the same challenges as other larger agencies. The digital or now known as “social media’ challenges is a different game and probably clashes a bit with the way things are done there. They reckon that the most exciting creativity will happen in the mobile and social media space.

The good news is they are a little ahead than the JWTs of the world which are at least 3 years behind. I think the future of W+K will be very different from Ogilvys. David Ogilvy’s  goal was to professionalize the advertising business and create an enduring and respectable institution. David is more of manager in a traditional sense. On the advice of his banker grandfather, he adopted J.P. Morgan’s phrases — “Only first-class business, and that in a first-class way” and “gentlemen with brains” — as guiding principles for his agency. He is more of a system and structure person and understand the importance of growing leaders.

Dan is a very different breed. He strongly believes that the advertising discipline is not about money and business – it’s about creating a place for people in a compound way. It’s got to do with art and most importantly, building culture. He takes risk and willing to accept failure. In his words, “The secret of my success is failure and uncertainty”. That’s the perfect motto for innovation.

I look forward to seeing how they overcome the social media challenges, developing talents in the development world (India and China) and finding the people to power W+K forward into the next 20 years as the advertising elephants will continue struggle to learn to dance. Can you teach an elephant to learn to dance?

Dan believes that his job is to “walk in stupid every day” - to keep challenging the organization and himself, to seek out unexpected ideas, outside influences, and new perspectives on old problems. “…..but it’s the most important thing. Whatever day it is, something in the world changed overnight, and you better figure out what it is and what it means. You have to forget what you just did and what you just learned. You have to walk in stupid every day.”

The Rise And Fall And The Coming Transformation Of Madison Avenue. What About The Future Of Advertising?

WPP finally decided to fold (or merge) the agency Enfatico created only to serve Dell after 16 months of operations. I never quire understand the rationale and the logic of doing that. Now it will become part of Y&R This may have something to do with the current climate but it is destined to fail. I've never seen something like this can work and you might as well bring it in-house which we understand the pro and cons of doing that. From an agency perspectives, sure they will tell the client they can outsource the creative and production but with control over the agency's operations and may be some cost savings. Not sure how the cost savings can be real. It is always important for an agency to be independent of the client from both ownership and management. Large agencies are getting desperate to cut deals like this I supposed.

Madison Avenue has come a long way. Since the emergence of modern advertising in the 1920s, defined by the shift from text-based to visual advertising and the use of psychologically sophisticated messages, ads began to resonate powerfully with consumers.  Madison Avenue represented the new and the modern (until the emergence of social networks and media, they took away their cultural authority), and ads helped consumers figure out what they needed to live a certain lifestyle. Consumers were eager to embrace the cultural authority of Madison Avenue.

But by the late 1950s, things were changed. Along with affluence and increased security came an increased awareness and criticism corporate conformity in the workplace. The contradictions of 1950s culture were beginning to emerge, and one of them was the inordinate influence advertising and sales appeared to have in our culture. The big shift is they are far less influence in our culture today and technologies have taken over the role. The emerging social networks are still in its early days shaping how we connect, communicate and create social identities. This is the biggest threat of the advertising industry. I think they are underestimating the disruption.

A little history of advertising here. The collective work of the Frankfort School, mainly represented by Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer (and their classic 1944 piece “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception”) provided the intellectual foundation. The imperatives of the production side were central, and in both consumption and production, consumers were relatively powerless, even “manipulated” and victimized by advertisers.  In these accounts, the powerful and active agents were the big corporations, not individuals. Today, we can see that this is changing, with an over abundance of almost everything and the growing influences of social networks. Finally, power is switching over to the consumer. Is it  a bad thing?

Even though we are all trained from the earliest ages to be consumers, and though our identities are deeply bound up with consumption choices, social networks are gradually becoming the medium that define our identities. This is the world we live in.

A TV campaign can only go so far in building a brand. In fact, it doesn't build brands, it merely builds awareness. Social media enable advertisers to cultivate brand engagement where interactions take place. Power is shifting from mass communication to social interactions. In just a few years, you can expect the whole advertising industry to be in full crisis mode, driven by continuous innovation. Forward-thinking marketers are embracing new models, which are being shaped by digital media.

In this world, consumers will listen to marketing messages when and if they’re relevant to them. As TV audiences’ fragment and move to more portable media, TV will no longer be the prime brand-building tool. Marketers that excel will be those that recognize that they’re now in a service business. Many marketers also have competencies rooted in interruptive communications, which is declining in efficiency and more importantly, effectiveness.

Twenty-first century marketing will instead be only about customer engagement and adaptively integrated marekting (not a new word but hardly delivered by agencies).  The Enfatico story did represent an effort to tackle a longstanding industry problem. Big big marketers such as Procter & Gamble, Johnson & Johnson and Unilever are expressing frustration with the way ad and marketing firms are structured. Many marketers say it is tough getting different agencies to understand the new world order, let alone to make working together -- even ones owned by the same holding companies.

Big Advertising Agencies Are Needing Bailouts Too. Bailout Is Never Any Real Solution. This Is Part Of An Industry Evolution.

We had a great company Christmas party last evening and it has been a very good year. I am grateful and very proud of the people that we have, everyone is carefully hand picked, not only every one of them is smart, creative and passionate for what they the do and strive for excellence. The Indian food and musicians were great too. I think we should play live music ourselves next year. Should start practicing now.

The big three autos may get a government bailout, their agencies will not. But serious headwinds and oxygen masks are down for many. This is a very gloomy Christmas for our friends who work on the advertising agencies side. We need to think of ways to support these people.

Omnicom is preparing for massive layoffs, talking about 3,500+ of its 70,000 workers getting pink slips and I believe it already started this week. BBDO (An Omnicom agency with Chrysler business) is expected to be hardest hit. BBDO Detroit already laid off 145 people last month. Their client Chrylser is even cutting the CMO’s job. Deborah Wahl Meyer, CMO and VP, will leave the company, effective immediately, and her position is permanently eliminated.

For JWT's, their once vibrant Chicago office is now a shadow of its past. A few years ago this is a booming office as the largest office in the largest global agency network - 800 people and well over $100 million in billings. Top clients including Kraft Foods and Miller Brewing.  This place once rivaled Leo Burnett and DDB as one of Chicago’s shinning stars in advertising.

  For WPP, consider 10% of all WPP’s revenues are from Ford, and although Ford is in better shape than the other two, that’s like saying that the Andrea Doria is in better shape than the Titanic. Ford’s cost structure is not much better than the other two but better management. The 10% probably translates into a 5% cut.

What about Havas?  Havas' core agency RSCG is dealing with client defections at the agency's key London office. Euro RSCG accounts for 62% of the €1.5 billion ($2.16 billion) annual revenue of Havas. They will probably be merging many of their smaller offices. The plan is to improve coordination, as well as the quality of online ads. Internet spend is the only part of the ad world where spending is holding up best is how they see it.

This may be the perfect storm for big agencies to find ways to transform themselves. Big is a bad word these days. It is fine if the holding company is big because they provide capital efficiency and other benefits, but scale on the agency unit level is bad. It works against an entrepreneurial culture that is badly needed and the system and structure makes them slow to adapt to a fast changing world.  These advertising awards culture is motivating agencies the wrong way. JWT/Wunderman is one of the largest and naturally the most challenging. Wonder if we can ever teach these elephants to dance? Or if they could just walk a little faster that would help. Plus most creative people are polluted by all these advertising awards. Need rehab.

The need for ‘newness”, “coolness” and ‘youthfulness” (more attitude than age) in agencies are important. These young (or young a heart) people who are coming up in the industry are so naturally cross-platform savvy ad all the digital culture is part of their everyday lives.  You can’t train any 45 year old ad planner about this new culture. Even though they talk about it, they really don’t know what they are talking about. Talent is the no. 1 factor and barrier for ad agencies like the JWT of the world to transform themselves.

The future of the industry will consists of three types of player 1/ digital innovator 2/ advertising factory  3/ media procurement. I wrote a post on this last year which was a very popular one “Ad Agency's Disruptive Future? Can the Old Dogs Survive It?  This is an exciting time for small-to mid-size agencies. Imagine what Leo Burnett and David Ogilvy would do if they are starting their agencies as young men today. Big is out.

A Brief History On Modern Advertising. And If You Think Mass Advertising Builds Brands, Think Again.

Advertising is not going away, but it has very different strategies and tactics, traditional  "push/pull" marketing no longer works, and so are highly-touted customer relationship initiatives. Smart companies are those that are looking for marketing innovation as a new route to marketing performance. Many adv planners are using their antique toolkit that has long been outdated. Unlike advertising in the 70s, they attracted the best and brightest. Today they were the people who just want to hang on to the past. Marketing has moved on.

So how do marketers make interactive communications even more compelling than traditional communications? Today, if brands want to speak to lots of people, they have to do it digitally. It is 'speaking to' and not 'speaking at'. Speaking at people is what old media do. Social media allow brand owners to have dialogues with their customers, and allow them to speak to individuals and groups. It also means that brand owners and advertisers have less control over their audiences, and that the audiences can answer back. Today, three things matter: entertainment, interactions and information. This is where interactive marketing has the advantages.

Let me share with you here a brief history of modern advertising. Since the emergence of modern advertising in the 1920s, and the shift from text-based ad to visual adv followed by the use of psychologically sophisticated messages created a very powerful cultural resonance for ads among consumers. Madison Avenue represented the new and the modern (Madison Avenue was since replaced by social networks and social media), and ads helped consumers figure out what was needed to live certain lifestyle. Consumers were eager to embrace the cultural authority of Madison Avenue and the client brands. But by the late 1950s, they were feeling differently. Along with affluence and increased security came the critique of corporate conformity in the workplace. The contradictions of 1950s culture were beginning to emerge, and one of them was the inordinate influence advertising and sales appeared to have in our culture. .

The influential work by the Frankfort School, with Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, whose classic 1944 piece “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception” started the core of this intellectual movement for consumer critique decades ago. The imperatives of the production side were central, and in both consumers were relatively powerless, even “manipulated” and victimized by advertisers.  In these accounts, the powerful and active agents were corporations, not individuals. Today, we can see this changing as the over supply of everything and the growing influences of social networks. Finally the power is switching over.

The "de-legitimation" of modern liberalism, paternalist state policy and Keynesian economics combined to continue to undercut the consumer critics. The growth of corporate power was accompanied by an ideology that posited the reverse—it’s the consumer who is king and the corporation is at his or her mercy. Even though we are all trained from the earliest ages to be consumers and our identities are deeply bound up with consumption choices although social networks are gradually taking over as a reflector of our identities. This is the world we are living in. A TV campaign can only go so far to build a brand, in fact it doesn't build brands, it merely build awareness. Social media is where brand engagement is being cultivated and interactions are taking place. The power is shifting from mass medium to social interactions. In 3-5 years, I expect the whole ad industry will be in crisis mode just like the automobile industry today.

Michael Mendenhall, CMO of Hewlett-Packard, sees what's going on. He talks about how his organization looks at brand building, "Many companies continue to look at marketing in conventional ways -- from a mass-market point of view. Branding today is not about the media; it's about the idea. You need to dismiss the conventional way of thinking and start with an understanding of the value of each communication channel and how -- or whether -- it will 'engage' people. The idea should be the organizing principle, and it should inform everything you do to help consumers grasp your brand promise in whatever channel you're reaching them: the television, the blogs, the banner ads or the word of mouth." 

Innovation Is The New Management Consultancy. Design Is The New Advertising Agency. How Fuzzy The Boundaries Have Become...

I was meeting with a friend Adam Oliveira and his biz partner Adrian today and it is exciting to hear that they are starting a new digital agency. More and more people wanted to break out of the old agency mode. We can probably expect a big shift to digital marketing as we move in and gradually out of this recession. Digital marketing will shine through this downturn. (design illustrations by Ashley Payne)

Innovation Is The New Management Consultancy and Design Is The New Advertising Agency. This is a subject I've talked about for a while. I've been discussing it both publicly in conferences and privately with executives of agency holding companies. I wrote about MFA is the new MBA last year in my blog and it resonated with a lot of people.

Why Innovation Is The New Management Consultancy?

Innovation is the core of any business’s strategy. Hear it from P&G’s CEO A.G. Lafley, “Innovation is the key idea that is shaping corporate life, helping leaders conceive previously unimagined strategic options. Take acquisitions, as an example. Most are justified on the basis of cost and capital reduction: for example, the merger of two pharmaceutical companies and the global rationalization of overhead and operations and the savings from combining two sales forces and R&D labs. You can, however, buy earnings through acquisitions for only so long; cost-control, however necessary, is a defensive strategy.

Intel’s CEO Paul Otellini said on stage yesterday at the Web 2.0 Summit about why innovation is not only important but vital, "All the smart people I've talked to in this area suggest that the U.S. is in a two- to three-quarter recession, the current economic slowdown is the deepest one I've seen in my lifetime.” He predicted that morale may stay low for longer because unemployment may remain high even after growth has resumed. He believed innovation will still be on the way regardless of how far the markets fall.

Innovation doesn’t exist in design or business strategy, but the intersections of both as well as other disciplines including social sciences, technology, human factors and service design etc. Management consultant firm focus on the analytical side and lacking the creativity requires for innovation, not to mentioned the empathy element. Emotion. In analytical thinking, emotion is seen as an impediment to logic and making the right choices. In design, decisions without an emotional component are lifeless and do not connect with people

And for design firm, outside of the craft side, designers (or design thinkers) use the word design is a verb and not a noun. It's a way to frame, communicate, solve and visualize problems and so are best positioned to innovate. The challenge is the lack of business (and the economics of everything in general) and analytical thinking that makes it hard for them to understand the problem in business context and put together a compelling argument. Innovation requires skills that spans across many different disciplines.

Robyn Waters (formerly Target, now RW Trend) believed the importance of connecting opposites including left and right brain thinking, and measurement and intuition. She emphasized embracing paradox to drive innovation.

Why is Design Is The New Advertising Agency?

I love advertising, I love it when it entertains and make fun out of little things in our everyday life. But advertising is losing its glamor, or has lost most of  it already. The problem is we put too much time and money into trying to find a USP (unique value proposition) but not enough to create a better customer value proposition. All these me too products are relying on advertising to differentiate and in the end disappoint customers. It should not be about the ‘thing about the thing,’ it is about the ‘thing’. That's how design can come to rescue.

Other reasons makes advertising less effective is the fragmentation of media. TiVo, iPods, hundreds of cable channels, satellite TV and radio, podcasting, Web sites, consumer-generated media, even video games cut people's time and attention into thousands of teeny fragments. Advertisers have a harder time reaching large population segments. They spend more but reach fewer people. They used to reach the masses with buys on three TV networks; now, they must buy on 90+ stations to get the same reach. The other contributory factor is their overemphasis of demographics. Demographic targeting has long been the focus of marketing efforts. The problem is, it only tells you where customers might be, not what messages they might respond to.  They have such as difficult time putting their heads around the fast moving emerging media.

Design is the next advertising. Designers love to solve wicked problems, not avoiding it or cover it with fancy visuals and clever tag lines. Designers recognize that any wicked problems means big opportunities for customer experience innovation. Marketers that understand building true loyalty need to embed design into every aspect of their marketing. Infusing the marketing department with design principles can transform marketing, experience is the competitive front. For your next campaign, try asking for ‘design thinkers’ and not ‘creative directors’. You will have some nice surprises.

How Clients Are Showing Interest In Digital Agencies To Serve As The “Lead” On Integrated Marketing Efforts

Ad agencies are cutting people across the board responding to budgets cut from clients. WPP does not expect to see any significant economic recovery before 2010 which is likely be the case. In additional to cost cutting and recruitment freeze across much of the group, they are also announcing plans to relocate the company's tax base to Dublin, a move which the company expects to provide significant tax savings. With 37 acquisitions made over the past 12 months alone, there a lot of companies to integrate. Outside of the pool of smaller companies that they own, their blue chip holdings Ogilvy, Y&R (including Wundermann) and JWT (largest in the US) are becoming more and more irrelevant, these elephants need a lot of attention. On another note, there's a 51% chance that WPP will buy Razorfish from Microsoft, Microsoft wants to get rid of the digital agency but hard to justify a write down. The financial market is not in any shape to support an independent Razorfish, WPP is the only option. Expect an a deal closed in June. 

There are questions about whether these old school ad giants can evolve fast enough. Their thinking is 3-4 years behind and clients see that. And the interactive agencies, most of them are 10+ years old and have their own legacies. They now share the challenges that the ad agencies have and becoming part of the (banner ad and out-bound email) ad factory.

The lines between interactive agencies and direct marketing firms are blurred. Are more so the lines between interactive and traditional ad agencies are also blurring. Today Agency-of-Record Status can go to anyone. Global alignment of agencies is out. So what will the future hold for advertising agencies? Well, we’re beginning to see some of the trends unfold. I wrote about this ten months ago (we produced a report on the future of agencies and the evolution of marketing services).

Marketers seriously question the current and future relevance of traditional media & advertising shops. Will large agencies be able to evolve to meet the requirements of new technology? The answer is simply “No”. Can traditional adv agencies develop strategies that drive “customer engagement”? Definitely not. Their definition of engagement is watching your 30Sec TVC without changing channels. Our definition of engagement is “High involvement interactions between a customer and brand that strengthen the emotional, psychological or physical investment a customer has in that brand and act as advocacy for the brand”.

Perhaps the biggest hindrance of evolution for traditional agencies are organization structure and limitation of talents. The org structure was at least 50 years old if not more, it was not designed for cross-disciplinary collaboration. On the talent side, these agencies used to attract the smartest and the brightest 20 years ago, today those who work there are mainly mediocre (a few bright ones, very rare) people who doesn’t want serious (thinking) work. Their media and account management expertise does not necessarily translate well when faced with demand for technologically-based marketing solutions. Separating media and creative was a smart decision from a cost point of view, but seriously undermine the collaboration of creative media applications.

Traditional shops are slow to react, expensive, don’t get the Web 2.0 culture, and most often, “shooting blanks” and acting in defensive manner. Digital agencies (that go beyond digital) are not only being invited to pitch brands as agencies of record -- increasingly, they're winning. Clients just love the thinking and speed in execution.

More clients showing interest in digital agencies to serve as the “lead” on integrated communications efforts. The uptick is particularly visible among marketers in sectors such as entertainment, electronics, retail and some personal financial services. In short, clients are becoming less and less fixated on the type of agency handling their ad accounts and more on the “strategic capability” and “speed of execution.” In short, BRIGHT and FAST. That makes perfect sense. Clients just come to the realization that their company's plans were going to be heavily focused on digital anyway plus the fact that it can only go so far talking about your brands through paid media (communications), it is much better if you can get your customers to tell your brand stories in their own way.

Some wanted to see what's our office building looks like. It was declared as a historical building.The building is gorgeous. Here are some pictures below.

 

  

Will A New Breed Of Innovation Companies Eventually Settle Into The Realm Of New Product/Service Innovation?

 

The last few years we’ve seen a growing interest on “design” and “design thinking” although we don’t see MBA school rushing to teach using “design thinking” application in business problem solving.  Design influence has not only infiltrate B-schools, it has attracted the interest of ad agencies and branding agencies. It is a marketer’s dream to have products that do not require advertising, the balance of form and function itself that consumers recognize instantly, that's will never happen of it does it is rare. Even Apple needs to advertise so adverting is not going away. Except it's very nature has changed. Marketing, in the form of logos, packaging, advertising, and the ever-broadening fuzzy activities known as branding, has attained the status of necessary evil to build brands. 

We’re seeing some branding agencies (and adv agencies) are trying to get into products, some are doing a more decent jobs than others. There are some ex-agency creative folks carrying the banner of Corporate Social Responsibility consultants and all they can think of is the obvious. I think branding firm and even ad firm (with a few exceptions) are not right for the job, the same reasons why you won’t hire your lawyer to fix your customer service problems or your accountants to fix your technology problems. Mark Read (WPP corporate) reminded me that some 20 years back ad agency (Bates) helped De Beers to come up with many of the innovation. They pretty much invented the ritual and came up with phrase 'a diamond is forever' and that people have used diamond engagement rings ever since. But when the last time we’ve seen an innovation came from an agency?
 
Can adv agencies design great products and/or experiences? You would think so? Over the years they have narrowed their skills (rather than broadening) and their core capabilities were reduced to doing the following three things 1/ finding a unique way to positioning a products within its category 2/adjustments of minutia to affect the consumers’ perception of the brand 3/ maximize repetitive exposure and extend reach. Innovation is not a core capability. Deep customer insight is not a core capability (over reliance of traditional research is the problem).  Customer engagement is not a core capability (although they refer customer engagement as engaging through a 30sec TVC). It makes you wonder whether a new breed innovation companies will eventually settle into the realm of new product innovation and brand / communication innovation or even push into the space to deliver business model innovation.

The next big issue is “authenticity”?  Today this word carries extra meanings thanks to the Internet.  This is not something one can “buy” with big ad dollars. This is truly how brand differentiates and is strongly associated with trust, not just brands but also on a corporate level. Adv agencies (including interactive and direct mkt agencies) fundamentally operate differently and are not really good candidates for innovation and design explorations.

Next year will be a particular difficult year for agencies, WPP is making smart moves to buy Taylor Nelson Sofres for £1.1 billion ($1.95 billion), in a deal that will reduce WPP's reliance on advertising revenue  ahead of an expected serious downturn. WPP is the best managed companies among all holding companies and Sir Martin Sorrell has been talking for more than a years about steering his company away from the volatile ad market into research and other marketing fields with more predictable profits. This is the first big move. And a smart one. 

Google Is WPP, Omnicom and Publicis' Nightmare. Google Plans To Replace The Advertising Industry In Its Totality.

I was in London with clients last week and I also had a meeting with my friend at WPP head office (see picture of their modest head office which houses the best financial minds in the business)  We had a great discussion of how they see the ad world’s future. Despite of the challenges that big agencies are having coping with the digital world, they had successfully bring scale and scope to clients. After the meeting, I am asking myself the same old question: Is Google a threat to ad agencies? How real is this threat?

Google and even Microsoft are competing with ad agencies, not in a conventional sense. Google now owns DoubleClick, which makes it a direct competitor to holding companies such as WPP. Today WPP buys estimated $160m of ads space from Google. If Microsoft buys Yahoo, that it becomes a duopoly. Google’s market cap is $160-170bn, WPP’s is $15b and Ominicom is $14.8b, and even including Interpublic ($4b) and Publicis ($6b) we are looking at a total market cap of $43b, only 25% of Google’s. The four agency holding groups have combined revenue of over $33b, 50% bigger than Google. That gives you a sense of what the market is saying about how they see the future of agencies. Google can easily buy two of the largest holding company for $27b and essentially the largest advertising powerhouse that produced and placed 60% of the world’s ad. A fully integrated network that also becomes a monopoly.

The lines are blurring between the buyers and sellers of online media following (WPP's acquisition of 24/7 Real Media) and suggests that agencies may see online as an opportunity to re-enter the media brokerage business. If that’s the case, it would be a full circle for Madison Avenue, whose roots were established when early newspaper advertising reps like NW Ayer & Sons and JWT morphed into full-service agencies, and adopted a commission-based system that derived revenues from a percentage of media billings. That’s the circle of advertising. Not sure many remember that.

WPP last year generated roughly 46% of worldwide revenue from advertising and media with the rest came from marketing services. WPP digital services accounted for nearly 12% of worldwide revenue, still small but I can see this growing to 20% easily. Two months ago they made an unsolicited offer to buy market-research firm Taylor Nelson Sofres for $1.88 billion. The deal was rejected, but if it went through, it would make them the largest agency holding company in the world. WPP is best positioned among all holding companies in this space despite the challenges with traditional advertising with all big shops.

The competitive ground for the agency groups in the next 3 years will be ‘Digital and China’. Period. Those are the two growth pillars. The biggest problem in the industry is in the traditional media and old school ad agencies, there’s a serious talent and capability gap that no way can be filled, no matter how hard they try. Then there’s a big cultural problem as they are organized around creative directors. It is kind of a star culture; it is the opposite of the web. Our culture is not only collaborative and multi-disciplinary in nature. The opportunity is in the digital. Asking old school agencies to do bring digital to the core is like asking a sushi chef to prepare steak tartar, you think there’s no cooking needed for both. it simply won’t work.

Ad agency growth through consolidations became a common strategy for the last 20 years; the question is ‘size’ the competitive advantage and are large networks more productive? Agencies with global reach have the advantage of offering a single point of contact for coordinating marketing activities, improved efficiencies, greater coherence in marketing ‘voice’, and access to global talent pool. The Interpublic Group is the world’s first communication holding company set up to get around the conflict of interest issue. Member agencies could function autonomously and handle competing accounts without compromising client confidentiality. IPG is still struggling hard today. The total number of global ad agencies has been reduced from 8 in 02 to only 6 agencies in 05. I think we will end up having only 4 left in 2-3 years, ignore the tiny ones MDG etc.

The six current players comprise Omnicom and Interpublic, WPP, Publicis and Havas from France, and Dentsu from Japan. As for performance, Omnicom has the highest revenue and second highest revenue growth rate. WPP had the second highest revenues and the third highest revenue growth while Publicis showed the highest revenue growth with relatively modest total revenues. Havas showed both the lowest total sales and revenue growth. This give you a sense of how each agency groups are doing.

Can We Fix Marketing? Most Best Practices Are In Fact Worst Practices.

On average I received 2 calls a night if I am lucky enough to be having dinner at home and not traveling, these calls are properly timed so they know I will be having candlelight dinner with my family and that’s exactly the time for interruption.  This direct-to-consumer telemarketing business should never be allowed, the worst thing is they call you and put you on hold while they finish up their other call.  (Business-to-Business is a whole different story as often they do have a value exchange and conduct in a very professional manner). They don’t know or care what I want or my interest and only interested in a "yes" answer after reading their script to me. Is this (direct) marketing?

Dear direct/tele marketers, are you really proud of what you do for a living? You build your career primarily by using late night direct TV commercials targeting the elderly and the vulnerable. Direct marketing is in trouble as they kill million of trees and bombard our mail boxes with garbage that no one reads let alone buy. These marketing firms belongs to the same category to used car dealerships, both are in the business of fishing for some vulnerable folks and sell them something they don’t want, need or will ever use.

You think there's nothing you can do with the telemarketers, in most cases they don't leave messages and will simply call you back, resulting in an endless cycle of you not knowing who's calling and having to call back to find out--something you're unlikely to do.  Here's Web 2.0 answer to this problem, solution, introducing Caller Complaints, a crowd-sourced index of the phone numbers of law breaking companies that have called folks on the do-not-call list. Users list these numbers, what was being pitched--and the frequency of the calls. If you find someone else has already listed the number and shared their negative experience, you can pile on and leave your experience, which votes it up.

The most popular (or in this case unpopular) companies rise to the top and are tracked on leaderboards. Users can also browse by area code and what type of call it was, from political phone spam to prank calls and debt collectors. The idea is that there will be enough resources to help you get to the bottom of who's calling to either leave a complaint with your carrier or simply blacklist the number from calling again. So far the site has amassed nearly 200,000 number searches from curious call recipients.

Here's some advice to marketers in general, please stop describing your product/company/service as "world-class" or "state-of-the-art." State-of-the-art lasts about 30 days today and what does world-class really mean? “ The "latest technology” means something I need to invest 50 hours to learn how to use it. “Free” means you will end up charging my credit card if I forget to cancel the services and that’s what you’ve factored in your marketing plan.

Stop calling me to subscribe to your magazine or newspaper. I have something new at home called the Internet (it has plenty of free content just in case you don’t know) and I can cut and save any content for future use. Besides, I am already subscribed to 18 publications from Harvard Business Review to Wired Magazine; I don’t need a general lifestyle magazine because I don’t have a general lifestyle. You must be able to see the problem as the economics of direct mail are failing rapidly and it costs too much to mail, and fewer response.

Having said all that, there are still many smart applications of direct marketing including the Blackberry campaign below. I am mostly referring to the bad practices of the industry.

Stop knocking on my front door while I am in a middle of an important battle with my Halo 3. Stop telling me I need to buy this energy-protection plan or replace my windows. Only Microsoft can tell when to replace my windows, not you. Police in some parts of Nothingham, UK are setting up four "no cold calling zones" in a bid to rid vulnerable residents of uninvited doorstep visitors. I really like this idea. Householders are being asked to ignore uninvited callers - and put stickers in their windows telling potential doorstep sellers they are not welcome. They can report suspicious behavior to a special trading standards hotline.

And for those electronic retailers, stop trying to sell me that warranty. The odds are small that I will remember that I have a warranty, know where I placed the receipts, or even bother to file the paperwork. I was buying a MacBook the other day from a retailer and he was trying so hard to sell me their extended warranty and tell me it is better than Apple care because they have better service. They don’t even service those products. Now even if I buy a CD or battery, they still try to sell me warranty. I guess they sell everything else at costs.

Advertising is not working even when it migrates to the virtual world. When Coldwell Banker hung out a shingle on the site as “the first national real estate company to sell homes within the community.” The real estate firm is in good company. H&R Block, Adidas, IBM, Dell, Reebok, American Apparel, Toyota are among the dozens of firms already there.  More than 70% of the site’s users say they are disappointed with the marketing that goes on in SL, according to a survey by Komjuniti, a Hamburg, Germany, research firm. This could be because companies are approaching it like a traditional marketing channel. Advertising is still advertising, it is losing its power. These brand sites on Second Life currently look like they’re being treated in pretty much the same way as traditional ads.

Many ad guys still believes that television is still the most important medium and will still e the most important medium for the next 20 years because: a) people have them; including people abroad and b) people know how to use them. Now that’s the kind of BS from the old school ad agencies.  The engagement power of television has been drastically reduced and they have now been reduced to digital wallpaper. The future of advertising is NOT in the advertising; it is in “Service Design”. Service Deign is like advertising in the mid 50s, no one knows enough about but sooner of later it be turned into an industry. It will be the backbone of what “Engagement” is all about. There will be no creative director in that world as marketing communications will not be built on one cute idea, it becomes “experiential”. User Experience Director replaces Creative Director.

Most customer experiences today are simply revolting, sometimes disgusting, particularly banks, airlines, telecom and many more. The idea now is (instead of) just focusing on a 30-second TV spot, to start a simple idea to engage, empower and energize customers. These Three Es is the future. It is NOT a creative director’s job to come up with an idea; it is the multi-disciplinary creative class that gets the job done.  Advertising agencies need to move from a factory model back to the idea model, put down the 50 years legacy and collective egos (creative awards ) and look to the future. You are in the ideas business. We live in the age of the idea. “Service Design” is the new discipline for the manifestation of the idea business, not product design alone and "Social Networks" are where circle of trust will be formed. That's where the game is.

On a closing note, here is great guerrilla promotion for the DVD release of the movie Death Proof is gory, attention-getting and totally appropriate for the movie it promotes.  Marketing meets "Happening Performance Art". Have a great weekend.