Hey, Ashley Todd...Rule Number One of Perpetrating a Hoax...

Don't go by the mirror in carving the B for Obama into your own face.

Thanks for reading, and don't forget to write.

Sarah's Clothes: Whom Should We Believe?

John: She needed them.

Sarah: I never bought them.

Campaign: She didn't want them.

Spokeswoman: "About a third of them have been returned, a third of them sit in the belly of the plane and are available to her and her family for special campaign events, TV appearances and ad filming. Another third was made available to her family for the public events during convention week.

My friends, what is the sound of implosion?

And also, my friends, may I point out that Louis Vuitton is...

F
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C
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Bacon CAN Go Aloft: Oldest Living Makes The NYTimes

Check out second to last paragraph:

http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/10/24/what-online-stores-sell-data-about-you/?hp

OK, OK, I sound kinda ignorant, but no publicity is bad publicity in my book!

My undying devotion for the link, Saul!

Tangible evidence that pigs CAN fly. And here's more proof!




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Vlad and Boris Serenade Sarah Palin

Now the Russians are making fun of her.

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Small Town Values Of The Real America ... From Wasilla, AK

Inspiration For The McCain Campaign

Viral Vid: Not Even My Dog Sleepy Can Do This

Dove's True Colors

More feel good inspiration from Dove.

Details Brings Us Gabe and Max in ManStyle!

Details has a funny new viral vid up entitled ManStyle. Do NOT try this at home.



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POV Thursdays: Q&A with Carol Phillips, President of Brand Amplitude

Carol Phillips, President of Brand Amplitude, is one of the people I most admire in marketing. Her instincts for helping brands better define their audiences and craft powerful brands through insights-based research have helped countless brands win in their respective categories. She sees things in data and consumer feedback that other miss entirely. As we enter an era where marketing dollars may well be less abundant for a while, it’s more important than ever that we unearth the facts and perceptions that will help our brands win. With that in mind, I asked Carol to give her thoughts on branding and segmentation in our dynamic digital marketing environment.

1. Can you tell us a little about your professional history?

Now that I am teaching college marketing, I realize how much of my career happened before time began. I started at Leo Burnett in the late 70’s, before Millennials were even born.

Hey! No fair. I’m the oldest living digital marketer. It’s my trademark! Anyway, you were saying…

So much has changed. What did we DO all day without a computer? (I am really not sure). I am very proud of the fact that I am still here practicing marketing. I advise my students that the job you will end up doing hasn’t been invented yet, so go study Theology or Theatre, not what BMW did 5 years ago. The elevator version of my career is market research (what we called Planning before there was Planning), Account Management for 5 mega-sized agencies, a brief dot com venture, Director of Communications for Whirlpool, and now President of Brand Amplitude. It is all going so fast.

2. What excites you about what you do for brands?

What I do for brands is help them understand who their best customers are, what they love about the brand, and how to use that insight to get more customers like them. Increasingly, this means I get to think about brands in the context of culture. The best brands don’t even seem like brands, they are a type of cultural ‘short hand’. The marketers may or may not have followed a strategy, sometimes the customer makes a brand their own without marketers even trying. Buzz marketing, viral marketing and product placement make it harder to tell what is an ad -- does it even really matter? Many of the best books on branding these days are not written by brand marketers, but by journalists and those in other disciplines. I am especially enjoying Buying In (Rob Walker) and The Culting of Brands (Douglas Atkins). The consumer has always ‘owned’ the brand, now they have more tools to claim that ownership. It is more challenging than the one-way conversation of years ago, but a lot more exciting and relevant.

3. What do digital marketers and traditional marketers have to learn from each other?

I really don’t like the underlying premise of this question. There shouldn't BE two camps. Digital marketers need to be grounded in marketing principles; they paint on a different canvas but human behavior hasn’t changed all that much. Traditional marketers know that the world has changed enormously; they have to be familiar with what consumers are doing now or they will become irrelevant.

4. What level of segmentation is useful for a brand?

Segmentation is one of those ideas that needs to be considered very carefully. It hasn’t reached the end of its useful life at all, but you need to take a fairly analytical approach. You can’t just guesstimate and divide the audience into three supposedly relevant groups and off you go.

Some have tried to ring its death bell, but there needs to be something between mass, which largely doesn’t exist anymore, and true 1:1, which still isn’t realistic for most situations. You need to be very careful -- most segmentation isn’t based on what’s really important, it’s based on superficial things we can easily measure and then translate into a media buy. The definition of a segment is a group of people who will respond differently to marketing. That’s always been a tough thing to translate into a media buy. I am beginning to think it makes more sense to market to the ways we are alike – commonalities are more meaningful to our purchase decisions than differences. There are still segments of discrete behavior, but the critical thing in digital is to recognize and strive for a sense of brand unity, while customizing messages in a cost effective manner. How’s that for a Millennial point of view?

5. What advice can you offer marketers that now have literally billions of data points available for examination?

Data is our friend, but it can only take us so far. Data is more useful in executing programs -- delivering the right message at the right time to the right person and measuring the result -- than designing them. I started out my career in qualitative research, where we used the rule of n=40. Assuming you have done the recruiting job right, after 40 people, you can be pretty sure you won’t hear anything new. That is still true in our decision-making research, 40 per segment. When setting strategy, I don’t think you have to deal with every bit and byte – go for insight. Then use data to make sure your execution is as effective as it can possibly be.

6. What are the digital platforms that will most impact peoples’ perceptions of brands in the future, like TV did in the past?

TV was (and is) a great medium for branding. Captive audience, full sight, sound and motion. High production value. Trusted source. How does it get better than that? I don’t think we will find anything to equal TV as a branding medium for a long time. That said, customer service may be on the way to becoming the big idea in branding. My friend, Lynn Holmgren, is charged with all customer service for Whirlpool. Whirlpool is approaching customer service as an investment in brand building communications. Zappos also spends deeply to provide differentiated customer service. I think these two companies have the right idea.

7. Why is there a disconnect between digital media investments and the time consumers spend with digital media?

See number 6. Seriously, I don’t think that digital media has the impact or reach yet to command TV-size budgets. Search is accepted as a ‘must’ have, as witnessed by Google's amazing cash reserves (why don’t they just go ahead and fund the bailout? They are sitting on $12Billion). But beyond that, everything else feels ‘experimental’. Social media isn’t really media yet, it’s just social.

8. Who is doing a good job of using digital media to build brands?

I think Red Bull is doing a great job. Also Victoria’s Secret PINK. There aren’t that many that stand out, and I am paying attention.

9. What advice can you offer to marketers anxious to build stronger brands through digital media?

My advice is to focus on getting the messaging right. If the message is relevant and likeable, it should not be that hard to find digital platforms that will connect with the audience. If the message is weak or not that compelling, you have a bigger problem than digital media. This has always been true; strategy and execution matter. I am reading Pat Fallon’s “Juicing the Orange: How to Turn Creativity Into a Powerful Business Advantage”. Every single one of the cases depends on an insight and brilliant creative execution. The BMW Films idea came out of an insight about the target, not a desire to leverage digital media. Sometimes it makes more sense to create a real world experience than a digital one. Marketers need to remain platform agnostic. It’s all about connecting with the audience.

Many thanks, Carol! I really appreciate it.

The Billboard Mnemonic Strategy

Another fine post from out intrepid Entertainment Editor in H-Wood, Steve Peace. Many thanks, Steve.

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What’s the last billboard you remember seeing? Two crop up in my mind. One is a billboard for a wedding shop that I see every day on Santa Monica Blvd. right around the 405. The other is a billboard for “Zack and Miri Make a Porno.” They have more in common than you might think. The wedding shop billboard shows a smarmy guy in a tux shirt dancing with a woman, presumably his new wife, with her back to the camera. She’s bare-backed and a sliver of chest sideage reveals that she’s also bare-chested. Classy stuff. I’m hoping they’re at their hotel room and not in their first dance at the reception.

You’re probably seen the Zack and Miri billboard if you live in a relatively large city. It’s got hand drawn stick-figure versions of Seth Rogan and Elizabeth Banks along with some text about the film. It’s very not salacious, even though you might expect the content of the film to be. Just the opposite of the sleazy billboard about marriage, traditionally a respectable subject. In the case of the wedding shop, the company seems to be betting that the arresting image will stick in the viewer’s mind (as it has in my case – bad brain!). Because it’s a retail business, out of home makes a lot of sense, being geographically situated close to the store. But, one might strongly question the amount of media waste (you can’t expect that any more than 5%, the U.S. average, of the commuters that pass by are in the market for a wedding dress – maybe even less for a hoochy momma wedding dress).

How good a deal is using out of home for Zack and Miri or for other movies, in general?



The Zack and Miri billboard doesn’t tell you much about the film. It’s got the names of the stars, the title of the movie, and the stick figures. How effective could that be? Arguably, not all that valuable as an isolated component of media, given that sight, sound, and motion provide more rich opportunities to sell a film. But, as a way to reference other components of the media plan, it is my theory that out of home is an incredibly good deal for movie marketers. The real value of a billboard is as a mnemonic device. In a well crafted movie marketing plan television will be flighted in advance of the out of home buy (unless the OOH is a teaser campaign, like, “Forgetting Sarah Marshall”) so that when the billboard is viewed – it reminds the viewer of the television spot. OOH then becomes a way to amplify the television buy, on the cheap.

And OOH is quite cheap. On average (according to Intermedia Dimensions) the CPM for OOH is $3.40. In comparison, an average CPM for Television across all viewers is $15.49. A conservative estimate of the time spent by consumers in proximity to OOH advertising is 6%, which represents the % of media time the average American spends on their daily commute. 12-24 year olds spend more time walking, riding bikes, and taking public transportation, making the % of time spent in front of OOH far higher than 6%, and those are the people in the U.S. that have the highest index against regular movie watching.

Based on how good a deal OOH is, and taking into account the average % of time spent in front of it, a movie marketer could make a rationale case for spending as much as 9-10% of their ad budget on OOH for large releases. Zack and Miri definitely got my attention and I only saw the trailer once.

Steve

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Post script. The Zack and Miri website offers a Pornstar ID maker that I availed myself of.



Not sure it worked out all that well for me, but give it a whirl yourself.

9 Viral Vids to Give You a Break From Wall Street and Layoffs and...

...Bill Ayers, and taxing healthcare benefits. We all need a breather from the stresses of the economy and politics. Enjoy. And if someone catches you watching, tell them it's vital viral marketing research! Without further ado:



9. Worst Best Man



I hope they did the pictures before the ceremony.







8. Little Gordon (Ramsay)



Actually a series of vids produced for Caterer.com, a UK-based job site for hospitality careers. It's a bit rough language wise, though bleeped.







7. Ninja Cat



I don't understand why people like this one so much, but them I AM a dog person.







6. The WebSite is Down



It's the classic fight: Sales versus IT. Warning: Rough language and pics.






5. Evil Baby



Gives new meaning to the evil eye.







4. Mark Wahlberg Talks to the Animals



Marky shows he's a good sport.







3. Take on Me - Literally



So sue me, I was young and carefree when the original version of this came out. This send up of it is more than a chuckle.







2. Sony - Dominoes



A gorgeous new TV ad people WANT to see!







1. Apple Versus MSFT: Money Pile



Computer wars score: Cupertino 1, Redmond 0.







Thanks for reading, and don't forget to write.

World's Number One Viral Video Is Located At...

The intrepid Youngest Living Digital Marketers have unearthed the world's number one viral vid here. You must see it 2 believe it.

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Ticked GOP Donors: We Want Our Money Back

From TPM, which got it from Politico:



See? There ARE people that think Sarah Palin should buy her own clothes, and Piper Palin her own Louis Vuitton purse!

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Apple Goes McCain? Tech Crunch Says Yes

Well, the ad wars between Apple and MSFT continue. This latest ad from Apple pokes fun at the latest ad camapign for Vista -- alleging a focus on fluff over substance. Tech Crunch calls it going McCain. You make the call.



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Real America Palins' $150,000 Shopping Spree On RNC Money

What your dollars pay for...

Saks, Neiman's and other stores. Just like Joe Sixpack.

Yes, Piper Palin has a Louis Vuitton bag. Whaddaya think, Joe the Plumber?

See the slide show at HuffPost.

White Paper Wednesdays: Pew Study Assesses The Impact of Communication Tools and Technology on Families

The great people at the Pew Internet and American Life Project have just issued a great piece of research on the effects of technology and new communication tools on families. The study is absolutely fascinating, so go here and check it out. The findings may surprise you, as in this excerpt from the results summary:

While new communication technologies have increased the amount of time some people spend at the office or working from home, few people see them as having a negative impact on family closeness.

Indeed, 25% of our survey respondents feel that their family today is now closer than
their family when they were growing up thanks to the use of the Internet and cell phones, while just 11% say their family today is not as close as families in the past. A majority of adults downplay the impact of technology at all: 60% feel that new technologies have not made their family any more or less close than families in the past.

Lots of great data and real insight. Download away!

Thanks for reading, and don't forget to write.

Need to Buy That Song? Shazam Will Identify It Through Your Celly

I don't know about you, but I walk around all day hearing songs that I want in my collection. But because radio has shifted so completely to gigantic song blocks, I often can't identify it and so the purchase opp fades away.

Lyric sites help, but lots of times you are on the go when you hear things. If only there were a way to identify songs...with my phone!

Ding! Wish granted!

Shazam is actually not at all new. It has 100MM users worldwide, but it's new to me so there you go. And they now have an iPhone app, so I'll actually be using it!



You hear a song, hold up the phone, and in a few seconds get the artist and track names -- everything you need to go and buy it.

The non iPhone version in the UK is 2 pounds a month, while the iPhone version is free and directly links you to buy songs on the iTunes store.

It's a great idea, and a win win for consumer and of course Apple.

Great "Back To Basics" Blog Post Over At Nielsen Online

I talk a lot about research here, and I wanted to alert you to an excellent blog post made by Charlie Buchwalter, SVP of Research and Analytics at Nielsen Online.

The post, made on the always-worth-reading Nielsen Online blog, draws parallels between the current financial meltdown and the state of research in digital, or perhaps I should say "research" with little quote marks around it.

One of the reasons I like Nielsen (all of it, not just the online part) is that they work very hard to develop sound research based upon accepted practices and ideas that have served research well for decades. This is not to say that they do not innovate but rather that they don't allow fads and a desire for certain outcomes to guide their product development processes. They innovate prudently.

When I see the Nielsen name on a piece of research, I have a great deal more faith in it.

Anyway, back to the blog post. The central idea is about how the exuberance surrounding the Internet has led some people to want and expect outrageous business results from the sector, with the result that stock prices (among other things) were bid up far beyond the typical P/E and other ratios would suggest are warranted. Similarly, in Internet research we have the same tendency, or at least some of us do. Want proof? When was the last time you looked at projections for the size of a market of a new digital platform that didn't grow 300 fold or so in five years? To be sure, some markets will experience that. But in many cases, I think exuberance has gotten ahead of horse sense.

Anyway, please give the post, and the blog, a read. Good stuff. Consistently.

Thanks for reading, and don't forget to write.

Classtell Brings Easy to Build and Use WebSites To Teachers

I was somewhat shocked to hear that my 13 year old nephew was required - REQUIRED - to build a social media page for class. It was on a special site, not FaceBook or MySpace, but it still surprised me. And then I began to see the sense of it -- a way to keep in touch with class activities, homework, and the like.

It still bugged me a little because of the potential predator aspect, but the site is password protected, and I guess I just have to face the reality that he is out in the real cyberworld now. Naturally that will be very good for him given the way the world is going, and he's a sensible lad, so the danger is remote. But I definitely feel for the fears of parents today.

So I wanted to tell you about a special web service that a Canadian company has developed for teachers called Classtell. The idea is to make it easy for teachers to develop a web presence that could organize information and communicate to students and parents.

The need is real. Presumably it means no more notes pinned to jackets, and greater communication with parents and kids alike.

Here's how they pitch themselves to educators:

Classtell was created because the options available to teachers for making websites weren't good enough.

Find out how Classtell is better:

EASY TO USE
Your time is precious. So every aspect of Classtell has been designed to be intuitive and efficient. This means you get to do everything, from setting up your site to updating it, as quickly as possible.

EASY TO ACCESS
Your Classtell site can be accessed via an easy-to-remember address (e.g. jsmith.classtell.com). Or, your students can find your site by searching for your name. And once they've found it, they can subscribe to your site to be notified of any changes via RSS.

USEFUL FEATURES
You can create an unlimited number of pages on your Classtell website. These pages can used for assignments, calendars, blogs, and more.

You also have one gigabyte (1GB) of storage space on your Classtell account to upload and share files, handouts and photos with your class.

BEAUTIFUL THEMES
You can use one of the beautiful, professionally-designed themes to change the appearance of your site.

GREAT SUPPORT
If you ever run into any problems with your Classtell site, or need help with a feature, send us an email and we'll get back to you in about 24 hours. We're happy to help.

TRY IT!
Don't just take our word for it — give Classtell a free 90-day test drive and see for yourself.

I am impressed that they have developed such an easy to use set of site builder tools. Teaching is no 9 to 5, and making it easy to use is absolutely critical for both adoption and continued use.

Here are a few screens of what a site can look like:

Presumably they have a number of other templates as well, but I like it that they focused FIRST on usability. Better design can come later as well.

The tool for building and populating a site with content is also very easy and efficient:





Pricing is very reasonable as well, which is a good thing because for American teachers at least, I'm guessing they will be forking over themselves. Districts that can't afford books won't be buying websites.

Anyway. The cost is $20 Canadian per year, which buys the tools, the url, and 1 gig of storage. I'm guessing that space limit will be going up in future so teachers don't have to constantly be deleting old docs to make room for new.

Sorry, marketers, this is an ad free environment. Which I am sure will make teachers and parents feel even better about it.

It's a nice platform, and I am guessing it will become quite popular.

Thanks for reading, and don't forget to write.

White Paper Wednesdays: Print Ad Creative Inspiration

What a wonderful collection of more than 40 amazing print ads -- ads to use as personal inspiration and a reminder of the importance of message simplicity. Check it out!

Creative Ads returns...

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: art design)

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White Paper Wednesdays: The Widgetization of Media

Gerd Leonhard presented this fine deck on widgetry at MIPCOM 2008. It's an excellent deck talking about, among other things, the emergence of mobile as the primary widget channel. It's a quick and entertaining read, one you should make.

The Widgetization Of Media by Futurist Gerd Leonhard (MIPCOM 2008)

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: distribution media)

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Powell Talks About The Campaign

Perhaps possibly two wars are more important than Ayers?

McCain's Relationship to Ayers: Must Watch ;-)

7-Eleven's Scientific Coffee Poll Shows Obama Ahead by 20 Points!

Always keen to find a hook, the team at 7-Eleven has come up with an innovative competition where customers reflect their political beliefs by putting their Joe in either a blue or red cup.

Well, apparently 7-Eleven's French Roast is Change We Can Believe In, because the current tally is 60% Obama, 40% McCain. Presumably the fine red state Americans are boycotting the coffee until 7-Eleven starts calling it freedom roast.

But as for the 20 point lead, all I can say is "Yay 7-Eleveners!"

Though rumor has it that McCain's cup suppression team is now filing an injunction in 5000 7-Elevens, especially targeting minority neighborhoods, and posting cup watchers who challenge every blue dispenser pull.



And Sarah Palin is hosting a cup burning at her upcoming rally.



Thanks for reading, and don't forget to write.

Yardbarker Promises to Connect The World of Sportsfans

I've sometimes wondered about the need for special interest communities -- as in, do we need them when we all have a profile on FaceBook and MySpace and Bebo and and and.

But there are passions that perhaps cannot be satisfied in general purpose social worlds. And a love of pro sports is most assuredly one of them. Is there anything...anything at all...that so captivates so many people. Well, OK, in American, religion probably outranks it, not so in the EU or Asia. But you get the point.

As you know, I am a believer in sports passion as a surrogate indicator of life passion, despite the fact that I myself am not overly interested in pro sports myself. But I see its relevance, and I see how caring about one thing probably translates into caring bigtime for other things. Which is why I like the Sportgenic network so much.

But this is a post about Yardbarker, a site the promises to connect fans and athletes alike in a freeform community that collects the best web content about sports and parses in ways that let you see the most relevant info and really participate in the conversation.

Here's their bark from their site:

About Yardbarker

Yardbarker breaks down traditional barriers, allowing fans and athletes to debate sports, read and write articles, and watch videos. In the Yard, even the famous athletes are treated like fans.

We feature thousands of sports websites and blogs, so you'll get news, rumors, photos and videos that you won't find elsewhere. We make it easier to follow your favorite teams, talk sports, and submit links to interesting articles found elsewhere on the web.

You don't need your own sports blog to join the discussion on Yardbarker. All you need is an opinion. But if you do have your own blog, join the Yardbarker Network. We will promote your site, increase your traffic, and put money in your pocket.

This is an ad network play targeting MEN ONLY that promises to offer sports fans with media presences, as well as niche sites, the opportunity to monetize their content and earn more money. Additionally, they offer ways for publishers to get publicity and traffic in addition to revenue.

The tough bit for them is that on the pro sports side there are already some very entrenched players like ESPN and SI, and Sportgenic, with its 20MM reach. Others have definitely struggled. They are trying to break down the walls between web properties, which makes sense in a world which is increasingly about bringing content to the user instead of making them come to you.

Sports is a tough slog for all the media players. But the site is growing, and is worth watching to see if they continue to grow eyeballs and keep them around for the long haul. Their secret sauce is the involvement of pro players. Which may be compelling, if they really participate.

Thanks for reading, and don't forget to write.

Yahoo Debuts New Profiles

CNET has an excellent post about the new Yahoo profiles, which are a critical early step to transforming Yahoo into an enormous social community.

There is apparently a large group of people who are ticked off about the change, principally because the debut of the old profiles blotted out the info in the old ones, so folks gotta type again.

But I have to say that the demise of the old profiles (not the info wipeout) was no big loss. As a matter of fact, it was no loss at all. Let's face it, the old profiles were very...1996. Now, this is not to say that the angry have no right to their annoyance. But the move is going to be a huge step forward overall for most users that participate, because it is the beginning of a new utility for our use of Yahoo. Here are a couple of screens of the new profile from the CNET post:





Thanks for reading, and don't forget to write.

BookingBug: Get Your Businesses Booked Online

Since something like 35 percent of every travel dollar is being booked online, its clear that people like the always open and convenience aspects of web booking a whole lot.

So the concept for BookingBug seems a natural. The idea here is to take the concept of online booking and reservations to virtually any business category.

Their largely self service platform offers merchants and service providers of all sorts effective ways to tailor a booking process especially for their business. Using BookingBug, the company can build a website, or simply download high function booking widgets to their existing web site. I think that sort of flexibility will be well appreciated. Check out the text from their site that discusses all of the customization options:

·         Use as your sole website, or embed within your existing website

• Create a website with one of our customizable templates
• Embed a BookingBug booking calendar in your company's site

·         Control if people can book, reserve, enquire or just see your availability

·         Have members lists and control whether members or the public can book:

• By week
• By day
• By fixed time slot
• By variable length time slot

·         Take payments on-line, or defer to billing in person

·         Offer your prices by:

• Time
• Day
• Week
• Year

·         Members' site for customers to re-book, request changes and update their details

·         Customize your public website:

• Wording
• Auto-reply email text
• Customer information requests
• Anything!

·         Scales up with your business requirements

• Calendar feeds
• RSS feeds
• Email
• SMS
• Communicate and integrate based on your business's style and needs

·         Scaling price based on your business needs

• Don't pay for features you don't use
• A BookingBug site will cost most small businesses only £5 to £10 per month

·         We're a friendly company ourselves! We value your input and welcome new ideas

• Join our community
• Tell us what you like and don't like!
• New features added regularly.

With that broad a set of options it's easy to see how businesses might find this model highly appealing.

Naturally a self serve model plans to get a lot of its traction from small business, and small business will only be interested in the model if the pricing is reasonable. Well, it is. Rather than reciting all the prices and stipulations, I'll just reprint their pricing chart below.



Now, this is a UK company, so it is only natural that they also offer a reasonable SMS notification service that tells the business owner when a booking has been made. The site has a US version though, so it could very well be relevant to 'merican businesses immediately.

Here's their Tech Crunch 60 Second Pitch:



Brass tacks: this is a great idea with a lot of flexibility to meet the needs of many businesses. And the self serve model means they can make serious money very quickly.

Thanks for reading, and don't forget to write.

Brash.com: Glam For the Lads

Massive vertical ad network Glam has launched Brash.com, it's new entry targeting -- get this -- men! Brash, which Valleywag called an imitation of GQ and Esquire -- actually they called it a pale imitation -- is the latest initiative from this polarizing web property.

Here's an excerpt form the ValleyWag piece:

Glam's whim-seeking CEO, Samir Arora, in his efforts to create the illusion of a game-changing new media company, is expanding willy-nilly into new fields, without the sustained effort or attention required, hoping that someone will buy his company before they notice all the failed initiatives that trail in Arora's wake. Our prediction: Brash will go the way of Glam's "wellness" channel, an initiative of Arora's wife, Rebecca Arora. Six months after its launch, Glam laid off all the salespeople involved in selling it, several sources confirm.

You won't be surprised to hear that my assessment is more generous. The idea of a men's network is a fine concept. Thing is, there are already several, including ESPN, which is a tough site to beat.

And the other thing is, while male advertising tends to get a lot of press, women do buy 80-some percent of stuff, so ad dollars may be a bit less easy to come by.

Now, Glam has taken on big guns before, most notably iVillage, but ESPN is rather...hegemonic. Is that even a word? But you get my drift.

My only concern for Glam is that all these initiatives distract management from the base business, and wringing out growth on the Glam network is going to get tougher over time. So, in sum, I see a new entry without a lot of differentiation taking on a powerful existing player in a business area that is new to the company, while the base business will be craving focus over the next few "lean" months.

Oh, and there's that other thing. If a company targets women and men, doesn't that make it a horizontal network? I ]'spect they'll find it particularly difficult to wrest dollars from Advertising.com and ValueClick.

Not sure this is such a hot idea...but then I poo-pooed Youtube when it launched, so I ain't infallible. By a long stretch.

Thanks for reading, and don't forget to write.

Motorola's Android Phone Coming "Soon"

Information Week is reporting that Motorola is feverishly working on its own Android phone.

An excerpt:

The unnamed Android-powered smartphone from Motorola will be like HTC's G1 in that it sports a touch screen and slide-out QWERTY keyboard, according to BusinessWeek. But the Motorola Android smartphone is expected to cost around $150 and will reportedly feature heavy social network integration.

While it hasn't been confirmed, more than likely this means the handset will have information from a user's Facebook and MySpace contacts integrated into the address books without having to launch a separate application. Adding credence to the report, Motorola even had a job posting on Monster.com, now removed, looking for software engineers for an Android "social smartphone."

Motorola definitely needs a souped up smartphone. Their share of new handsets has been in a nosedive for two years. I gotta say that a good phone at a $150 pricepoint might be just what it needs. Though I do wonder what sort of margin they'd have at that pricepoint, given that the phone will be touch screen and all tha'.

Date for the launch is unknown.

Naturally, this is also good news for the Goog. More handsets are essential to their open platform strategy.

Thanks for reading, and don't forget to write.

McCain and Batman's The Penguin: Separated at Birth???!

From Wonkette. Thanks for reading, and don't forget to write.

Here Come the High Fructose Corn Syrup Thought Police!

Oh My Lordy this is hilarious. Over at CrunchGear, writer Doug Aamoth wrote a review of a gadget called the Penguin Home Soda Maker that lets you...make soda at home. As shocking as that may seem. The writer included the following statement:

If you drink a fair amount of soda, carbonated water, tonic, and the like, then the Home Soda Maker is a god-send. It’ll save you from running to the store constantly and you’ll be creating far less waste, if that’s important to you. Plus, the non-diet soda flavors are made without high fructose corn syrup and the diet flavors are made with Splenda instead of aspartame. So if you don’t want to quit drinking soda cold turkey, this machine provides a relatively reasonable alternative.

You might be saying BFD. But not the High Fructose Corn Syrup Thought Police. They responded to the "misleading" statement with an eternal letter citing all of the scientific evidence proving that high fructose corn syrup (HFCS to the corny insiders) is just as delightful as other caloric sweeteners, an not any more obesity inducing than shuga.

I have to admit I love stuff like this. Though I was surprised that the group sending the letter is called the Corn Refiners Association and not The Highly Scientifically Scientific Academic Institute Of Corn Health Miracles or something.

I make no comment on HFCS. But I do think that the lawyers at the CRA should actually read the articles about HFCS before they send out their thought po po posse.

Thanks for reading, and don't forget to write.

Gist: Everything You Need to Create Stronger Business Relationships

I love it that innovation is coming so strongly to the email space. You know that I have practically made a burnt offering to XOBNI, and now I want to tell you about Gist, a service entering beta that collects a comprehensive swath of information on one screen about the people in your inbox.

So what's the value here? Well, think about the best salesperson in your life. Think about the best boss you've ever had. Remember how they had encyclopedic knowledge of you, your life, your work, and your interests and needs?

How is your husband Jack?
Thanks so much for sending that PowerPoint about semantic search to me.
You guys are about ready to launch, and I have a new product that will help...

Gist collects all of the info you need to have a comprehensive view of everyone you email with. Gist collects recent emails, attachments, company and personal news, stock prices, notes, and a variety of other stuff. So when you interact with that person you have a comprehensive view of what's happening with them and their world.









Don't you just love the idea of this? I've applied for the beta, and will tell you more when I am in.

Thanks for reading, and don't forget to write.

Boo Rah Gets a Rah From Me

I love UGC review sites. Love them. Sites like Yelp are a great place to find out about places you haven't yet tried, and if you can learn to take a more holistic view, not taking one review as gospel in other words, then you really can get a phenomenal perspective on a place. I bring up the holistic view, because I have friends that own a store, and their competitor down the block does patently transparent flame reviews.

So I was happy to learn about Boorah, a UGC site with a different process for collecting and providing such reviews.



The first thing I like about this site are the boo rahs, which are naturally thumbs downs and thumbs up respectively. They average the ratings and provide these fun little ratings thermometers:



But the real difference in this site is the use of what they call a Natural Language Processing system that helps collect reviews and parse them into topics that can be considered quickly as part of the reviews.

Here's their self description:

BooRah is the ultimate, personalized review guide providing consumers a smarter way to find great restaurants. BooRah's patent-pending natural language processing technology automatically summarizes a collection of online reviews from bloggers, professional critics and consumers, and allows consumers to search based on their personal preferences. By capturing the community vibe and social essence of existing online groups, and comparing the results to an individual's search criteria, BooRah delivers unsurpassed relevance with the broadest community reach.

BooRah's service helps consumers achieve their ideal dining experience by allowing them to search thousands of restaurants to meet their individual requirements. BooRah currently delivers pertinent information gathered from over 1.5 million online restaurant reviews in the top 20 metros across the United States including San Francisco, Los Angeles and New York.

Our system uses patent-pending Natural Language Processing technology to generate quantitative scores for domain specific attributes from plain English text, automatic summaries from most relevant user sentiments and enables a highly customizable search based on personal preferences. This technology can be extended way beyond restaurants and will revolutionize the concept of business and service search.

The reviews themselves are actually collected from across the web, making it a sort of Open ID for the restaurants reviewed. You can go to one place and see reviews from a variety of sites.

For restaurant owners, they offer free sign up, a unique dashboard that helps the owner track new comments and ratings, and a variety of paid marketing opportunities including advertising and a loyalty program that allows you to offer paid discounts and communicate with opt in users.

It's a great site, and one you should visit the next time you want to hear about any restaurant around.

Thanks for reading, and don't forget to write.

Yedda: Taking Web Q&A To Another Level

When Yahoo Answers came out, the serious web commenters poo-pooed. It was a site where regular people asked and answered questions, rather than snarky webizen experts.

As is always the case with insular naysayers, their impact on the success of the service was gigantic. Today, only TWENTY TWO MILLION people per month use the service. Which I think might keep this Yahoo subdomain out of the top 30, though not by much. Yes, that was sarcasm.

With 22 million regular people using this one service, it's natural that other entrants have taken their own approach to carving out a chunk of the curiosity business. And one of the best, in my opinion, is Yedda.com, a service that began in a basement in Israel and was more recently acquired by AOL.

Yedda is, in my view, just as democratic as services like Yahoo Answers, but it recognizes that we, all of us, have particular expertise and are more qualified to answer questions on certain topics than others.



Using these interests and personal knowledge as a starting point, Yedda filters the millions of questions so that you get to see and participate in the ones most relevant to you. Here's what they have to say about themselves on their website:

It's simple and fun to explore and discover We are building Yedda as a fun place to share, explore and discover knowledge - a place where you can connect with people having specialized knowledge or with people of interests similar to yours. Key unique values we’ve put into the user experience of Yedda:

Personalized

There are so many topics out there. At Yedda, we carefully select for you, based on your preferences, the questions and answers that are likely to be of interest to you. And, the more you use Yedda, the better we get at understanding your interests. So go ahead, personalize Yedda to match your interests!

Proactive

We like to think of each question you ask as if it's the single most important question. After all, it probably is to you. Yedda proactively invites relevant people to answer your question and continues to monitor it to make sure you get the best answers as quickly as possible

Smart

Yedda understands what your question or answer is about, and is clever enough to find related questions and answers automatically for you even if they're listed under a different topic.

Dynamic

We've built Yedda to be a dynamic, self-evolving system that adapts itself to the people using it. New topics and associations between topics are created dynamically by the community. Every question you ask or answer contributes to our understanding of what people really care about.

Free

Yedda is a free service! It's FREE because we are powered by the knowledge and the passion of our community. An amazing community of people, just like you, who have gained a lot of knowledge and experience and find great satisfaction in sharing it with others.

So, I went through Yedda, and found the quality of questions and answers pretty high. Now, I also like Yahoo Answers, though I use it more as a way of understanding public opinion on issues. I also like the proactive nature of Yedda farming out questions to self defined experts in those areas. It doesn't GUARANTEE a correct answer, but that's a given if you are using any sort of democratized information tool.

Yedda's traffic is about 700,000 uniques a month according to Quantcast, which is a lot smaller than Yahoo Answers, but the trend is most assuredly up. Here are the daily figures from Quantcast to show you that nice overall trend:



Anyway. Definitely give it a try. The people on the site are simultaneously knowledgeable and helpful -- and what better combination could there be for a service like this.

Thanks for reading, and don't forget to write.