The Sounding Board

Meme of the Month: The Harlem Shake

Shivering?  Feeling an urge to don insane outfits and flail around with impunity?  Sounds like you have a bad case of the HARLEM SHAKES.

The Harlem Shake videos infesting YouTube right now have little to do with the Harlem Shake, an 80s dance that’s…well, actually a dance.  The viral videos are all roughly 30 seconds long and set to Baauer’s “Harlem Shake,” each starting with a perfectly normal scene (an office, a military parade ground, etc.) with a single person dancing.  Then, at the words ‘Harlem Shake,’ **** gets real and everyone goes crazy – no really, watch the video.

 

 

How long until the enterprise adopts this as a kooky team-building video or an attempt to go viral, like they did with PSY’s “Gangnam Style?”  …I’ll give it a week.

So what do you think about the Harlem Shake?  Hilarious trend or another sign of the End of Days?

--John Terrill

Super Bowl XLVII – All about the Advertisements

 

 

New Yelp Features: Favorites, Photos and Fake Reviews

If you’re anything like us SpeakerBoxers, you love food. That's why last month, after we all felt sick from consuming 2 dozen Georgetown Cupcakes we won in HomeSnap’s Twitter contest, we started drawing up plans for an app called “Remorsel.” Our app was going to include user-based reviews of favorite dishes (or, in Georgetown Cupcake’s case, flavors) at local eateries in the DC area, including photos of said dishes.

Well, I guess we have a leak in the office, because somehow Yelp caught wind and announced some updates to their app today that clearly were stolen from our masterful plan that we never wrote down or really developed to any extent.  According to Travis B. (a Yelp product manager) in his recent blog post entitled “Yelp Menus: Connecting People with Great Local Food Porn:”

“I hate to break it to you, but your little problem is about to get much more serious thanks to the brand new mouthwatering Menus feature Yelp is rolling out today. We’ve combed the site to compile visual menus incorporating Yelp reviews and user-uploaded food pictures. Now you can not only read about that decadent chocolate raspberry truffle cheesecake swimming in a pool of hot fudge, you can see real users’ photos of said gut-busting dessert from every angle right alongside the menu item.”

Along with the graphics, they will also now have a “favorite dish” option that will show us the preferred dishes at specific restaurants. Since these new features accomplish everything we intended our new app to do, I guess we’ll have to go back to the drawing board on the app front.  Or, we can simply hope that one of the flavors we submitted for the Lays “Next Great Potato Chip Flavor” competition is a winner.

But, the new app features aren’t the only announcement Yelp made today. Looks like they’re also putting their foot down on fake reviews.  According to their official release, they’ve launched a pop-up consumer alert feature that will notify their users of businesses who are tooting their own horn, so to speak.  To punish the offending businesses, violators’ names will remain on “the list” for 90 days, dissuading them from continuing to falsify their businesses reviews.  Sounds good to me!

Targeting Your Audience

I’ll say upfront that I’m venting more than anything in this blog post. But I do have a point to make…

I am from Detroit and love my hometown pro sports teams, Tigers included. With that said, I’m running on very little sleep this month, but am not complaining since it was their run to the World Series that kept me up night after night. We fell short to the San Francisco Giants last night, and I went to bed sulking and scratching my head for answers. With a tear in my eye, I put away my World Series sweatshirt that my husband bought me at game three, and prayed I’d wear it in happier times next season. When the ninth inning concluded, I couldn’t have turned off my television any faster, and needless to say, I’ve since avoided all articles, videos and SportsCenter segments. But I never considered abandoning my personal email account. Maybe I should have.

I awoke to an email from a national sporting goods retailer (a place at which I shop regularly here in Detroit) congratulating the Giants on their World Series win and encouraging shoppers to buy the official championship shirt and hat. Needless to say, I stared at the email for a few seconds, muttered a few expletives and hit delete. I’m not a sore loser, don't get me wrong. But I just couldn’t believe that I had received that email. Like I mentioned, I shop there regularly, most recently buying Tigers apparel. In fact, just a couple weeks ago I purchased three team t-shirts for my out of town nieces and nephews to wear, hoping to spread some luck to the team. Pairing that type of purchase history with my debit/credit cards, all of which have Michigan billing addresses, it should be obvious that I’m not a Giants fan.

What’s my point? Know your audience. Understand the basics of their demographics and use the information wisely. Don’t group everyone together just because it’s convenient. Take the time to find out what interests them, their history (maybe pages they’ve viewed on your website, past interactions, social media activity, etc.) and how you can provide value.

Passionate Tigers fan? Yes. Unhappy customer? Yes. Deal breaker? No. I’ll get over it. After all, I do have some Lions gear to stock up on…

 

- Mary Evans

Babies on Facebook: A Global Threat

For too long, our social media activities have been under threat.  Not by malware or by unscrupulous data mining, nay, the greatest danger to our online habits comes in the form of babies.  Or rather, pictures of babies, if the response to Unbaby.me is any indication.

A browser plug-in, Unbaby.me essentially rips and replaces pictures of babies on Facebook feeds with, and I quote, “awesome stuff.”  Currently, this means pictures of kitties, but the code is flexible enough to support RSS feeds of other images, like puppies or Minuteman rockets.

The plug-in is apparently crushing it, with over 2,000 likes in its first 30 minutes of availability and is already cruising past 55,000.  But what does this say about social media habits in general?

In my mind, Unbaby.me is the next evolution of social add-ons or potentially even value adds for established networks, like Twitter or Facebook.  Imagine if Facebook offered you a pay-for-filtering option – maybe $5/month – that would allow you to specify content that you want to see in your feed versus hiding specific users.  Or, if targeted ads continue their insidious growth in the social world, maybe there the soon-to-be value-add will be an ad blocker, available for a low monthly cost.

Unbaby.me is a funny, some might say disturbing, bit of software that serves what may be a niche need.  But I think content filters are one of the many ways forward in social media, and could leave us with a new method of monetization for social network operators.

What do you think?  Are you up in arms about hidden babies or the lack thereof?

-John Terrill

Ford Rebranding Campaign “Goes Further” by Targeting Consumers and Employees

A couple of months ago, Ford Motor Company launched its  “Go Further” campaign – a clever series of ads that began by omitting the Ford name and well-known blue oval logo (See add below). After a week of anonymous ads, they reinserted their brand markers. Apparently, the idea behind this new campaign was that Ford felt its brand image was still a bit negative, and they wanted to show off their new, sleek designs without generating the current assumptions people come to when the see the Ford logo.

 

A Media Post article provided the following insights as to how Ford felt about the success of the campaign, citing that, “the new ‘Go Further’ campaign has done remarkably well -- name or no name. The launch ad was the number one viral video for the week of April 30, garnering 3.4 million views (which Ford says equals the average views from this year's Super Bowl campaigns). Also, per Ford, 40% of visitors to the GoFurther.com site clicked through to Ford.com; and 9% of Web traffic came from California, followed by New York. Texas, Florida and Pennsylvania rounded out the lead markets for the ads' ability to generate Web traffic to GoFurther.com. The sentiment was also 95% positive based on Twitter comments, said the automaker.” 

But, attracting consumers wasn’t all Ford was after with the new brand messaging. According to a recent Forbes article, “The company is exhorting its 166,000 worldwide employees to ‘Go Further,’ too, because executives believe that making Ford’s ‘internal brand’ consistent with its new external messaging can create profound synergies that benefit the company in significant ways.”   

Although external marketing typically takes precedence over internal marketing, I think they are equally important. Making sure employees know the mission and vision of the company is essential, especially for a company whose employees are face to face with consumers each and every day, selling the product. If Ford’s own employees don’t believe the brand encompasses “people serving people, ingenuity and the attainable” in “character, appeal and value,” as projected by the new “Go Further” campaign, it is hard to expect consumers to feel the same way. Internal marketing is something each and every company needs to take into account while executing rebranding or marketing initiatives. It’s not just the folks in the communications department that need to be on board – it’s the entire company.

What Your Beer Says About Your Marriage

"Our beer choice says WHAT?"

 

You've heard it a thousand times: Correlation is not causation.

Just because I wrote a love letter to Jessica Alba, and then nine months later she gave birth, it doesn't mean that my writing is some sort of magical celebrity aphrodisiac (although that would help to explain the Helen Mirren pregnancy).

But here's the trouble: We're now living in the age of Big Data. And in the age of Big Data, there's going to be a LOT more correlation -- bucket-loads -- while the amount of causation in the universe is likely to remain the same.

So how do we -- as a species -- armed with our new gigantic data sets, combat the well-documented tendency to fabricate meaning from insignificant, random nonsense?

Well, one way not to do it is with beer.

In February, Charles Duhigg wrote in the New York Times Magazine about how "companies learn your secrets." He was investigating how retailers use their monster data sets to predict significant life changes for their customers, and then market their products accordingly. As it turns out, newly divorced consumers tend to purchase different brands of beer.

To be clear, this is an attempt at predictive modeling, not assigning causation. But the central question is the same -- coincidence or insight?

I guess the cynical viewpoint is that it doesn't matter. If you can use data to segment customer populations effectively, who cares what the underlying psychological factors might be?

In this way, business intelligence is sort of like stereotyping. Sure stereotyping ticks people off, but it's a good way to make some crude, quick generalizations. Only trouble is… it ticks people off!

Just because you CAN market to consumers based on data-driven presumptive generalities doesn't mean that you SHOULD, or that your customers will like it.

Could this be one of those classic instances where corporations get dumber by getting smarter?

I can't answer that definitively right now, because Meredith Vieira is going into labor.

Microsoft Windows Phone “Up in Smoke” Challenge

Since CES in January, Microsoft has been holding a marketing campaign to drive attention to its new line of smartphones.  The campaign, called the “Smoked by Windows Phone Challenge,” invites anyone to bring his or her iOS or Android device into a Windows Store to compete against a Windows Phone to see which smartphone can complete one of several everyday tasks the fastest. Anyone who beats the challenge wins a special Hunger Games edition laptop valued at $1,000; “losers” have the choice of turning in their losing smartphone and receiving a new Windows phone.   Also, those who did not win the challenge are asked to pose for a photo of them with their losing device, along with a caption along the lines of “my [Insert Andoid or iOS device] got smoked in the Windows Phone Challenge”. 

I was surprised to learn about this challenge while I was strolling past a Microsoft Store last week on my lunch break.  Although I didn’t participate in the challenge, I did stop in the store and checked out some of their phones – which I was actually impressed with.  There’s no denying the phones are quick and I really liked the home screen display and camera features.   I was just really confused as to why I had no idea this was going on – until I got back to the office.                                               Harry McCracken / TIME.com

 

Upon Googling news about the competition, I was shocked to find the coverage was almost entirely negative.   I came across stories such as “Microsoft Apologizes After Botched Windows Phone Challenge”, “Windows Phone challenge attracts a bad element: Lawyers” and Is the Microsoft Windows Phone Challenge a Scam?

It appears most people think the competition wasn’t a competition at all, but a huge con.  I agree it wasn’t a competition, but a marketing campaign rigged to make Microsoft and their new phones look good.  Looks like it back-fired.   The few stories emerging of people winning and being denied their prizes have not been worth it.  I probably would have been impressed seeing the number of winners vs. the much larger number of those who did not win the challenge, but that isn’t at all what is being reported.

Despite the negativity surrounding the campaign, however, it did entice a few colleagues and myself to check out the phones.  I’m interested to see what information Microsoft releases following the campaign – how many people participated and how many free Windows Phones they gave out.  Although positive publicity surrounding their campaign would have been ideal, the fact that people are talking about it at all may mean enough people are paying attention to give the phone a try.  I definitely think there is a place in the mobile market for a third operating system, but we’ll just have to see if people jump on board.  

The competition, which was supposed to end last week, has now been extended until tomorrow, April 5^th.  

Apple’s Newsstand Rakes in Readers

With so many of us on-the-go these days, it’s only natural that we are constantly looking for ways to combine and manage our, for lack of a better word, stuff, under one device. Long gone are the days of carrying a cell phone, book, camera and laptop. (No, this isn’t a plug for an iPad.) But I came across some research regarding Apple’s Newsstand app, and I have to admit, I wasn’t very surprised when I read about the tremendous amount of money publications are making from iPad users.

While the app itself is free, there are subscription fees for most of the content available on it, and according to February research from Distimo, the top 100 grossing publications from Newsstand made more than $70K per day in the U.S.. While that’s a lot of money, you have to remember that people are cutting out of their lives door-to-door newspaper deliveries, print magazine subscriptions, and the like in order to have everything in one central location. So isn’t it only natural that everything washes itself out in the end, once you factor money, convenience and accessibility? I guess I just don’t find it surprising that people are removing the clutter from their lives and trading in hard copies for electronic. Instead, the study is more of a reinforcing reminder of what most of us expected to happen.

Per Distimo, the top five U.S. grossing publications in February were The Daily (an iPad-only publication), the New York Times, The New Yorker, National Geographic and Cosmopolitan.

If you’re an iPad user who contributed to that $70K number last month, what publications are you subscribed to, and do you still purchase hard copies of newspapers, magazines, books, etc.? What are the pros and cons of the two worlds?

 

- Mary Evans

Netflix Marketing Says I’m Not As High-brow As I Like to Think I Am

As consumers, we often think we want something when we really don’t.  Or what we really want is something completely different than what we think we want.  Or we kid ourselves into thinking we want something when, in reality, the choices we’ve made in the past point to wanting something completely different.

If that sounds confusing, check out some of the naming conventions Netflix uses to categorize the type of video content it offers its users.  “Critically acclaimed visually striking movies” is a nice example – that’s so specific it really doesn’t mean much of anything, at least not to me.  BUT – it’s supposed to mean something, because it’s supposed to be Netflix’s way of presenting content that is, supposedly, directly tailored to what an individual consumer is really interested in, not what they think they might be interested in.

What spurs these confusing thoughts on an otherwise peaceful Tuesday morning?  This Financial Times article on how Netflix “predicts” the type of content its users want to watch.  Apparently the company uses a complex algorithm that takes into account customer surveys, past viewing habits, and more, to create a personalized experience that is geared toward delivering what the customer is most likely to enjoy.

 

According to Netflix, I am nothing like this man

This is nothing new, of course.  Marketers have been doing this through various means – direct mail, for example – for years.  But what’s fascinating here is how Netflix is using individual customer data, compiling it into metadata, and regurgitating it in such a way that is remarkably accurate and one-to-one.  So while a person may say they want to watch Schindler’s List – past viewing habits indicate they really want to see what’s up on The Vampire Diaries (which, before anyone asks, I’ve never seen.  Seriously).

Netflix understands that the key to keeping its customers is to make the relationship with them as direct and personalized as possible.  It’s targeted and, because of that, highly effective.  They provide customers what they want, even if they don’t know it. 

Netflix missteps over the past twelve months have been well-documented, but there’s one thing they still know how to do, and that’s use a combination of technology and old-school marketing disciplines to create custom-made experiences.  It’s an approach worth emulating.

- Pete Larmey