LaughlinOutLoud

You may have seen the story a few weeks ago of Armando Galarraga. A pitcher for the Detroit Tigers, his perfect game was lost on blown call by the first base umpire. The play (and its subsequent hundreds and hundreds of thousands of replays) caused a media firestorm. Should The Office Of The Commissioner reverse the call? How should the umpire be held accountable? And, if we have the technology to make sure calls – especially important calls – are accurate, why aren’t we using it?

That last one is a relevant question for marketers.

If we look critically at baseball, we may not need umpires any more. At least in the roll they’ve traditionally played. Cameras can determine whether the pitcher throws a ball or a strike much more consistently and accurately than any human being. Sensors can measure the relative impact of a foot hitting a base and a ball hitting a glove. Why not take advantage of these to make the game better?

But if we stop for a moment – and look at our own corners of the world – we are often guilty of overlooking the same types of progress.

Baseball keeps umpires on the field because it’s the way things have always been done. We don’t have that excuse in marketing. And just like baseball, some of the technology we would need to rethink how we do things already exists.

Unilever is using facial recognition software to help make low-fat ice cream more appealing. The United States Postal Service uses augmented reality to help you ship your package successfully. Google’s Goggles program let you search not only with words, but with pictures.

A question worth asking and, with the speed of new advancements, asking often: What technology aren’t we using?

What perfect game might you be erasing from the history books?

Being customer-centric is not a luxury. The empowered consumer is well-documented. So understanding his or her needs and motivations is more important than ever before. But that’s only half the battle. Most businesses are for-profit. So meeting – or exceeding – the consumer’s expectations can’t only be done on their terms. It is essential to tie consumer insights to business strategies.

One of my favorite recent examples of a job well-done is Ace Hardware and their ship-to-store model.

Study after study shows that consumers want free shipping. That’s not so much an insight as an observation (really, who wouldn’t want free shipping?) But rather than (a) biting the bullet and taking a lower margin, (b) upcharging the purchase to cover costs or (c) saying “no, it’s too hard,” Ace makes an offer that seems to work for everybody. FREE shipping… when you choose to Ship-to-Store.

And it’s working. In a recent eMarketer webinar titled, “The Advantages of Multichannel Marketing,” it was reported that 73% of Ace Hardware’s web orders are shipped to stores and these orders account for 80% of its online revenue. So, the numbers indicate it seems to be working for the consumer. And a noteworthy 33% of those customers who pick up an order in-store make an additional purchase. So Ace wins, too.

Ship-to-store isn’t rocket science. It just isn’t the way most marketers think of ecommerce. But the process to identifying this as an option isn’t a complicated one. Start with a consumer insight. Develop solutions that tie to both consumer needs and motivations your business’ strategic objectives. Execute. Win, win.

Addendum: In addition to free shipping, “ship-to-store” also addresses another consumer motivator – protection of time. Customers no longer have to be concerned of whether the product will be in stock when they go shopping – it will be, they made sure of it. Every week 25,000-30,000 Borders customers reserve online and pay in-store. A customer need is clearly being met. And Borders reports a similar figure to Ace Hardware – saying 35% of customers who pick up an order in-store make an additional purchase. Another win / win.

A very important anniversary passed last year. And as far as I’m aware, it passed with minimal fanfare. We were all too engrossed in Mad Men. TiVo turned ten.

I bring this up for a few reasons. First, it seems like a anniversary worth recognizing. (TiVo ranks right up there with the iPod, iPhone and Twitter for changing my life for the better.) Second, despite the drum beating by the doomsayers, the thirty-second commercial is not dead. (It’s changed. For the better.) Third, it’s worth acknowledging we were all – or at least I was – too busy to notice.

Habits are changing dramatically. Strategies, too. That’s not news. So it should come as no surprise that it seems we may be at the beginning of another revolution. By the end of next year, eMarketer projects 86.6% of US Internet Users to be Online Video Users. That would account for an almost 40% increase in five years. But the under 25 set is already blazing a farther-reaching path.

According to new report from Retrevo, 29% of the Under 25 set reports watching TV online “all” or “most” of the time. Include “some” in the equation and the number shoots up to a whopping 83%. This next – trend-setting – generation continues to watch TV. Four out of five of them just might not be using a TV to do so.

The revolution is being televised – in new and exciting ways.

For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.
– Newton’s Third Law of Motion

Forward motion, then, comes from seemingly opposing forces. In the business world, opposing forces can mean conflict. Multiple points-of-view, different approaches, opposing priorities. All coming together, hopefully, in the name of progress and a common goal.

A few weeks ago, I saw futurist David Zach speak at the Wisconsin Governor’s Conference on Tourism. One of his topics was the “battle” between design and measurement. I see these forces collide on a daily basis.

Depending on who you talk to, each is the future of marketing and is only increasing in importance. The reality is that both perspectives are right. Design and measurement are both the future. Design and measurement are only increasing in importance. Both are essential. And Zach provided an interesting framework within which to think about this friction when he pointed us to a memorable quote from 1949’s The Third Man, starring Orson Wells…

“In Italy for 30 years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love – they had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.”

Conflict doesn’t have to be bad. It can even be “worth it.” Seemingly opposing forces coming together can create great gains.

A recent post about social media on Clickz by Christopher Heine resurfaced last year’s mammoth of a digital ad story where Skittles took, according to critics, a “reckless” jump into the social scene. The well-known company replaced its website with an uncensored stream of consumer posts, filling their home page with content that any rational advertiser would see as corporate suicide – and they took a lot of flack. How could they make such a careless decision – leaving their website open for public vandalism and letting social conversations reshape perceptions around their brand?

The results? Well, beyond the large amount of publicity they gained through word of mouth buzz and coverage of their social stunt, “The brand increased its presence on the social site from around 600,000 fans, pre-Twitter-experiment, to 3.5 million by 2009’s end.”

Many corporations are calculated risk averters. Standards, rules, and processes are put in place to avoid any chance of threat, error, or failure – something that is most often associated with the “unknown”.  Social media – although having been around for a few years now – has a mountain of unknowns due to the transparency that takes place between consumers and brands.  I mean, what’s riskier than putting your trust in the hands of strangers – allowing them to push out messages you have no say over?

Apprehensive to abandon their control, many brands manipulate the medium to protect themselves from potentially harmful consumer messages. As a vehicle fully driven by consumer conversation and content, this ultimately stifles the potential of social media. Ironic how the piece of social that businesses are most scared of… is the secret ingredient that makes it so powerful.

It’s brands like Skittles who have fully embraced social media for what it is that are getting the most out of what it is powered to do. I commend brands like Skittles for their bravery. They put a trust in their consumers that few other brands have the strength to do.

Chat Roulette is another one of those things that I (a) can’t believe exist (b) can’t figure out the appeal of and (c) can’t seem to turn away from.

chat roulette from Casey Neistat on Vimeo.

The video provides a great summary of the newly-minted phenomena. For those who are new to the concept, it couldn’t be simpler. The website randomly connects you to a video chat partner. You chat until one of you moves on. (This act is called “nexting” and, at first, it’s hard not to take personally.)  You are then randomly connected with someone else.

The concept fascinates me. It’s the internet – anonymity + social networking + user-generated content + addictive behavior + sense of discovery – in a nutshell. More than that, it’s a real window into the global village. Real people. Real lives. Real grown men dressed in catsuits.

And, to me, it’s a great reminder. That people are not rational. They are not expected. And they are not stock images. Whether or not I’m ever able to carry on a real, live video chat with a randomly selected stranger (let’s just say I get “nexted” – a lot), it’s good to be reminded that they’re out there. And even when they have nothing better to do, most people have very little patience or attention for what you have to say.

Last Saturday, Dave Hanneken and I had the opportunity to visit the Diane On Business radio program to talk Super Bowl ads. It was my first time on the radio and I had way more fun than I care to admit. You can check out the end result, in the form of a podcast, at the bottom of this post.

Hear The Podcast

The essentials of advertising is the top result of 103,000,000 for a Google search of “the essentials of advertising.” It was written in 1921.

Growing up, the threat of something going on your permanent record was real. But, in the end, it amounted to a manilla folder in the filing cabinet of a principal’s office.

Things have changed.

Now we really do have a permanent record. As marketers, brands and people. Compliments of Google and Bing. Facebook and Twitter. Digg and Reddit. What your brand does today may be a click away from now until the end of time.

And that matters. McKinsey estimates that by 2011, the Internet will play a role in more than 45% of all retail sales, as either a research tool or a sales channel. Think about that for a second. Half of all purchases may be available with a pretty comprehensive record of everything your brand has ever done.

So the idea that, in this new age of technology, creativity matters less or that pitch-perfect execution isn’t essential is short sighted.

In fact, the stakes have never been higher. Who knows how long they’ll last?

But first, take a look at Ogilvy’s and Crispin’s new web-sites.

These are new designs that position both agencies as leading edge by using aggregated media stories about them and their clients as an opening screen.

I love the urgency and energy.  In both cases, the clutter that I’ve been fighting professionally all these years has become the organizing concept.  In a weird twist on Marshall Mcluhan’s insight of the medium becoming the message, we’ve seen the Bauhaus movement toward white space and simplicity yield to a supernova of design.  These sites are like trying to read the Congressional Record on acid.   Yet they work.

There’s a wonderful irony at work here.  Agencies are using clutter to demonstrate their ability to cut through it.  These sites serve as a vivid demonstration that the loss of control a lot of marketers are experiencing puts an even greater emphasis on ideas that elbow their way into our consciousness.

Maybe what we’re seeing is the transitional period from white space to white noise as a design maxim.

Earlier this year, I saw Daniel Levine speak. He used a phrase that has stuck with me since: The Tyranny of Transparency. The sharing of data and opinion is giving consumers insight that they’ve never had before. Right down to the street corner.

Consumers are more empowered than ever. This is a good thing. We can all embrace transparency by being better at what we do.

But that doesn’t mean transparency doesn’t have its irrational side. The latest Nielsen Global Online Consumer Survey asked over 25,000 consumers in 50 countries if they trusted a number of forms of “advertising.” The most trusted source was “recommendations from people known” at 90%. No surprise there. But number two was a tie between “brand websites” and “consumer opinions posted online,” which both registered 70% of consumers reporting that they either completely or somewhat trusted these sources.

So 70% of Red Sox fans are at least somewhat trusting of the opinions of anonymous Yankee fans’ online? Would they say that face-to-face sitting in Section 312?

While this pendulum will likely swing back at some point, these numbers are actually all “up” from an identical study done in 2007.

Technorati’s 2008 State of the Blogosphere reports that 82% of bloggers post product or brand reviews and 89% post about brands that they love (or hate). As I mentioned here a few weeks ago, 62% of consumers go online to share opinions.

If 70% of consumers are trusting of these opinions, your brand has a new high-level priority on its hands. You need to manage your brand’s reputation online. Or, clearly, somebody else will.