DOUG SCHUMACHER

experience designer + writer

data

Creativing :: Tweet of the Week, Pissed off at Google, and Foursquare goes for the gold

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What’s going on in new media marketing, pulled from social bookmarking site Creativing.com:

Tweet of the Week

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P&G Launches eStore to Test Marketing Concepts – MarketingVOX

I’m curious to see what this ‘lab’ looks like from a features and development angle. It’s clearly designed for nimbleness, which will only be a growing trend as everything seems to be moving toward immediacy. From product development to brand experience to social marketing.

Fuck you, Google « Fugitivus

I’ve felt for a while that the tech industry is veering perilously close to blowing the top off the whole privacy issue. From location-based services to misunderstood social network sharing to cookie tracking, there are a lot of hot buttons, and people are starting to push them.

Twitter Is Still Growing Rapidly [STATS]

A week or two ago it was widely reported that Twitter was dropping off in popularity. However, they were gauging unique visitors to the site, and with so many people using 3rd party apps, like TweetDeck, that could have a large impact. The other key stat is obviously overall Tweets sent, and that’s where apparently Twitter is looking just fine.

Foursquare Inks Deals With Major Media and Entertainment Brands

Mobile is certainly heating up, and Foursquare is on the front burner. While Foursquare currently operates under the guise of fun and games, location-based services on mobile will likely soon be the way most people figure out what they’re going to do for entertainment on a given evening.

Wi-Fi Turns Arizona Bus Ride Into a Rolling Study Hall – NYTimes.com

Another good story on technology improving lives in a very simple way.

Google Liquid Galaxy live demo at TED [VIDEO]

Google connects 8 large LCD screens in a wraparound view to it’s Earth and Street View apps for an amazing voyage around what feels like a pretty small world. The trip from LA to SF beats any bullet train proposal I’ve seen.

Skittles | Experience the Rainbow

Very fun experience. The surreal carnival feel fits great with a product as quirky as Skittles. The long extended page reminds me of suck.com back in the day. It’s an unconventional format which defies most usability issues, but who’s really coming to Skittles.com for functionality anyway?

E-commerce and Facebook: Friends or foes? – BusinessWeek

Some of the good and bad of doing ecommerce on Facebook

Motorola Maintains Mobile Subscriber Market Share Lead – MarketingVOX

Amid the iPhone craze, it’s important to keep in mind that overall, there’s still a small percentage of users who have one. Thus if you want to go mass on mobile, you’ll have to go more lowest common denominator.

Creativing :: iPhone AR helicopter, smartphones and ecommerce, and a look under the hood of any website

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What’s going on in new media marketing, pulled from social bookmarking site Creativing.com:

Tweet of the Week

This is a new feature I’m going to add to this column each week.

140 Characters How Twitter Was Born

Ran across this story from Dom Sagolla, one of the original team that created and launched Twitter. Note how, despite Twitter’s relatively simple concept and technology, they went through a number of technical, UX and branding challenges. Scroll down the page past the book promo to see the original post

Parrot’s Remote Controlled Helicopter Takes Augmented Reality to the Next Dimension

This is very cool. A working mini helicopter controlled via the iPhone. If you’ve started shopping for me for Xmas next year, hint hint.

Social Media Not The Answer For Weak Brands: Branding Strategy Insider

I really like this piece on strategy v tactics. And while in many cases business strategy is, unfortunately, a foregone conclussion by the time the marketing department gets on the scene, it’s never too late to try to have an impact. As international borders vanish, production timelines shrink, and all businesses move closer to having perfect information, perhaps marketers will again get to spend more time in the CEOs office.

Ads Of Steel On Security X-ray Machines – Advertising Lab

Talk about niche targeting, these ads are recruitment ads for a security firm. The firm’s agents carry them in their suitcases. When their baggage gets scanned at the airport, the inspecting agent at the video monitor sees the recruitment ad. Not sure what the CPM is, but I’m sure these ads get noticed, as it’s certainly an attentive audience.

Marketing: Where Is Cause Marketing Headed in 2010? – Advertising Age

I think cause marketing makes a lot of sense for companies right now. Firstly, there’s our economic situation. There’s a lot of pain out there, and showing that you’re sensitive to it eases the underlying push of commerce. Secondly, tied to the first, cause-oriented messages are for the most part much less prone to cynicism and criticism. And that leads into social media. Not only are cause campaigns less likely to draw ire, but they’re far more likely to generate positive buzz in social media. And that’s something more and more brands will be considering the top reason for cause marketing.

Augmented Reality Statistics 2009

Some great stats regarding AR, webcams, video, Facebook, etc. Slide 4 is kill — 40% of Facebook vid uploads were via webcam. Though sites like uStream are hitting millions of uniques, live streaming doesn’t seem to be capturing that much attention. The 40% number would suggest it’s waiting for a ‘tipping’ event.

BuiltWith – Website Tech Analyzer

Ever wonder what techs a given site is using for their platform, analytics, ad serving, etc? Sure, you could view the source and weed through it. But this gives you the whole enchilada in a single search.

Wordle – Beautiful Word Clouds

Easy, and more importantly, graphically cool way to generate word clouds from any selection of words you chose.

TOPPS Enters The Virtual Goods Space Through Facebook

Topps moves into the virtual goods market with “Wacky Digibles”, a kind of reissue to the 70s product parodies, Wacky Packages.

37% of smartphone owners purchased merchandise via their phones in 2009

More data supporting the notion that, finally, this is the year for mobile.

Creativing :: ESPNs anti-social media policy, Facebook’s ad innovations, and change isn’t just for advertising anymore

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What’s going on in new media marketing, pulled from social bookmarking site Creativing.com:

ESPN Responds to Criticism and Publishes Social Media Policy

Previously I posted someone’s prediction that going forward, more and more companies were going to have a social media policy, which I certainly agree with. Perhaps no place will these policies be more interesting than with news organizations, who butter their bread by releasing news, often over social media networks. Here’s ESPNs policy, which basically says you can’t do on your own for free what we’re paying you to do. Sounds logical on first take.

However, this policy attempts to build a wall between professional and personal social media use. It may sound easy to a lawyer, but reality is a different ball game. And wouldn’t you want some of your best writers to promote their work to their personal networks, which can be very large? Lastly, if you’re wanting to hire a top writer who may have a blog following of 100k, which she can monetize, how much more do you have to pay her to drop everything she’s built up in social media for the past 5 years to come and write for you?

Why Digital Agencies Are Indeed Ready to Lead

Probably the longest ongoing industry debate to date. I’m not sure it’s a digital vs. traditional question at all. I think it’s definitely going to be driven by someone with a powerful digital sensibility. But I feel like while agencies are fighting over whether the banner or the TV spot should come first, the bigger question is, Should this all be lead by a product development, creative messaging, or media buying mindset? Following the money across a ten year projection isn’t easy. But then if the answer was easy, there wouldn’t be a debate.

Nikon Kick Starts Campaign via Tweet

Mind you, this wasn’t just any Tweet, but rather an Ashton Kutcher Tweet. With 3.9 million Followers, he’s demonstrating that not only is a large social media following a great weapon for negotiating film contracts, but for endorsement contracts as well.

Posterous Overtakes FriendFeed, Set to Overtake Delicious.

The stat is certainly interesting, although I find this a little apples-to-oranges. At least I consider Posterous to be pretty much a content posting tool, and FriendFeed and Delicious more social media platforms. If Posterous hits that magically nebulous thing called critical mass, though, the game opens up considerably, and they can become more of whatever they want to be.

Facebook Launches Friends Of Connections Targeting For Ads

I’m surprised this isn’t generating more noise. The idea that your network of friends is a remarkably accurate predictor of your own preferences should be a closed case by now. And this is one of the only mass scale ways to target the friends of someone who’s a Fan of anything from a movie to a tennis shoe to a car. Seems like a big leap forward. If you knew someone was a Fan of a movie, wouldn’t you want to talk to their average 120 friends to try and get them all to go see it? At least the one’s in the same city?

Microsoft to Include Video Ads in Loading Screens

I’m not sure I’d recommend to many companies to run ads during games, but the loading screens are another thing. They could even add value (imagine that). Of course, there’s the temptation to make game loading times longer to support longer ads. And I wouldn’t want to tempt anyone in need of more revenues at the moment. But at the core, in-game advertising is as inevitable as ads on cable television, which was once anathema to the concept of cable. At least this approach won’t have me seeing a billboard for a new 5 blade razor while walking through Renaissance Venice playing Assassin’s Creed.

LEAKED: The Facebook Ads API

When the subject of integration comes up, the discussion is always around messaging or media spending. It’s rarely about tracking and data. But there’s enormous power in that information. This news isn’t the onset of a revolution, but certainly a good indicator of where the business of performance tracking is headed.

Mountain Dew Crowdsources Agency Review and Selection

If a small business will crowd source a $50 logo, why not a $100 million campaign? This is about all you need to read to see a major trend in the ad industry unfolding.

What EA Sees in Social Gamer Playfish

Like the ad business, the gaming business is going less big idea, more a lot of little ideas. And of course, those myriad little ideas are ongoing, and take a lot of manhours to execute.

The future of business is in ecosystems

The reality is, business models everywhere are being flipped on their heads. This post from Jeff Jarvis (What Would Google Do?) shows that the clients are facing as much tumult as the agencies they’re working with (or maybe it’s ‘not working with so much’). It’s the same story from yet another industry. Keep it small, stay nimble, and don’t stop running.

Creativity and data: A marriage, if not a perfect one

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In this post, Seth Godin writes about taking the high road. I want to lead with his summary paragraph, because the high road is too often seen as prima donna boulevard.

“Data is your friend. And the data shows that the top blogs, top lenses, top magazines… they all follow the high road. If you need to be manipulative or non-transparent to make a buck, time to rethink the plan.”

My point is, for anyone in emerging media marketing, pretty much from here forward, the creative and the analytics are inextricably linked.

Campaign analytics have progressed to a place where very few people in a company’s marketing department are going to ignore them. Especially in digital media.

One of the benefits of analytics is that the more you understand them, the quicker you can assess the latest emerging technologies and how to create for them.

I break campaign metrics down into 3 sequential categories:

  1. Response
  2. Engagement
  3. Conversion

That roughly parallels the buying decision funnel.

  1. How does the customer respond to the general proposition you’re offering?
  2. Does that proposition keep their interest and cause them to dig deeper?
  3. At the end of the day, did they want the product? And if not, where did it fall through?

Campaigns today are fluid. Or at least they should be. The creative job no longer ends at campaign launch. That’s when things really heat up.

Of course, analytics aren’t perfect. People flush their cookies. They use different computers. The husband sends the link to his wife, who makes the purchase.

But marketing will probably never be about perfection. It’s about information that improves your intuition. It reminds me of a quote that fits digital marketing tightly:

“It’s better to be vaguely right than precisely wrong.”