Jaffe Juice

I'll be in lovely Belgium from Thursday thru Saturday (in Ghent) for Stichting Marketing's Annual Congress, themed this year around the concept of Leadership, both old and new.

If you'd like to meet up, drop me an e-mail and let's see if we can set something up.

Anshe Chung, Second Life's land baroness has hit a major milestone: one million dollars (US)

Starting with just $10 to her name, she has built up an enviable (and influential) empire in just 32 months.

Anshe will have a press conference in-world on Tuesday and Divo Dapto will try and be there.

Congrats!!!

On Wednesday night, I attended the flash-mob hyped Jay-Z concert in Second Life on Pontiac's Motorati Island.

The set-up was sublime. Jay-Z would be performing on the Jimmy Kimmel Show and simulcasting the performance live in Second Life. In my mind, we would be watching Jay-Z's avatar hip-hopping around the stage, listening to the music AND simultaneously, people watching the Jimmy Kimmel show would be watching the SL concert i.e. two-feeds bouncing back and forth.

The reality was that Jay-Z performed in the street to thousands of fans (which meant his avatar was not even been watched, let alone controlled by him), Jimmy Kimmel barely mentioned SL and about 50 avatars (probably less when all was said and done) sat for almost 3 hours, bored out of their skulls as the feed was strictly controlled by lawyers who essentially only allowed 2 songs and about 30-second of show feed to come through to the Island.

For the first time since I started out in SL, I felt like a geek (in a bad way)

The whole experience was pretty underwhelming to say the least and the sad thing was that it was a tremendous opportunity for Pontiac to hit an integration home-run as they currently sponsor the music portion of the Jimmy Kimmel Show (Pontiac Soundstage)

I don't blame Pontiac (they can't be ecstatic about the publicity), their agency  or even Millions Of Us (although Rodica...manage our expectations better next time please!), although I do want to wag my finger at the various lawyers and no doubt producers of Kimmel who were allegedly going backward and forward in terms of minimzing and controlling the actual show feed in-world. To me this was just sad because of what this could have been for Second Life, Pontiac, Jimmy Kimmel and most importantly, Jay-Z (I wonder if he even knew this was going on in the first place...)

Highlights for me was my being bounced for running up to (but not going ON) the stage and doing my lame dance, as well as the informal after-party on crayonville Island afterwards.

More from CC Chapman

CC Chapman just got back from London where he attended PodCastCon UK. Included in his visit was an "ambush" from the Stealth Disco folks.

I love the whole concept...no clue where it goes, but I think there's something there. Anyway, it is Thanksgiving weekend so why not have a little bit of fun...

MediaPost reports that Universal Music has sued MySpace for (amongst other things) not adequately policing users from posting Universal-owned clips.

Put more legally: Universal alleges that MySpace enables copyright infringement by making available tools that allow users to upload and view videos as well as to distribute them by sending links to friends. 

'er, that's called the social web, Einsteins.

Look, there's no doubt that copywrited material makes up a solid chunk of the YouTube and MySpace (as the poster children for the - cringe - Web 2.0 darlings) bank of content...but suing isn't the solution.

Universal might as well sue the members of the MySpace community (and don't think THAT isn't coming) for simply sharing i.e. sending links to friends. After all, it is that act alone that leads to the so-called "rampant infringement" that Universal is suing over.

Bottom line...look at what happened with Podcasting and the Podsafe Music Network. Great content can and does come from anyone and anywhere. In fact, it is the discovery of the next U2 and Fergie through the band next door that arguably is proving to be just as appealing (or at least is becoming more and more that way)

Secondly, it's less about the type of content and more about the community and the act of sharing itself that is the real secret sauce.

Universal Music...like Hollywood...like the Broadcast networks...should be grateful and humbled that consumers are choosing to help co-promote, pay tribute to and display their content. It is this act that conceivably could lead to driving tune-in, ticket sales or paid downloads.

In other words, the establishment needs to figure out ways to work with the community; not continuously against it. MySpace, YouTube and the like are after all, just hollow shells (and rich ones I might add, which explains the real intent behind the lawsuit) that house the passion and dynamism.

What a great way to start the day...perusing through MediaPost to see today's MediaDailyNews (which I began my writing career penning a weekly Thursday article) guest column - penned by the artful George Simpson - titled, "Is it real or is it Jaffe?"

The satire begins with the following words...

WESTPORT, CONN. AUTHORITIES CALLED OFF a statewide search when local resident Joseph Jaffe, reported missing by his wife, was found alive and well in Second Life. Second Life is a 3-D virtual world entirely built and owned (well, rented, really, since it costs 10 bucks a month to live there) by its residents. Since opening in 2003, it has grown explosively, and today is inhabited by 1.4 million people from around the globe.

Now while I don't want the word Jaffe to become synonymous with virtual, everything else couldn't be more accurate (you have NO IDEA!) Time to issue this to the PR Newswries...

Thanks George...I'm still laughing :)

Jaffe, a new-media marketing consultant and famous author, told Over the Line he was sitting at his computer when he saw a virtual Rabbit take a watch out of its waistcoat pocket, look at the watch, and then pop down a large rabbit hole under a virtual hedge.

So amidst all the Edelman-Walmarting across America kerfuffle, which involved a blog alledgedly written by Jim & Laura, but instead was fronted by an organization called "Working Families for Wal-Mart", which is in fact run by the fine folks at Edelman...it turns out that the URL, www.workingfamiliesforwalmart.com had not been registered.

It has now........

D'oh.

A crayon client, GSD&M, has opened up Idea City in Second Life.

They've taken a position to give back to the community and are doing so by offering the following:

• Idea University lecture series - open to the public
• Tour HUD for newcomers offering a business and a culture tour
• The Design Center - an exhibit on becoming an expert builder in SL, using the guidance/expertise of the builders of Idea City, The Electric Sheep Company.

Other highlights include The Avatar Cannon (which launches avatars into the sky and let's 'em deploy a GSD&M parachute to guide them to land or a bulls-eye target) and collaborative noteboards that let people put up images/creative work/etc. on a wall

crayonville Island will be hosting Second Life's first (not my words) CaseCamp on December 14th at 9pm EST/6pm PST/2am (Dec 15) GMT.

For those of you not familiar with CaseCamp, here's the shpiel:

CaseCamp is an unconference for marketers. Following in the footsteps of BarCamp, and building on the model of DemoCamp, CaseCamp brings together people interested in marketing-oriented activites to learn from their peers via case study presentations. CaseCamp is structured on purpose. The goal is to create an independent forum for for great dialogue. Typically, a presenter presents a case (good, bad, ugly, lessons learned, etc.) and then a lively discussion ensues during a Q&A period.

You can find out more here, register here and if you're interested in presenting, contact Kate Trgovac, one of the organizers (along with Bryan Person, C.C. Chapman and Eli Singer)

I'll be there...

Colonel Sanders is at it again. And this time, by the likes of it, he's appealing to Martians who aren't as concerned about trans-fats as I guess we are.

It's an interesting play, which comes along with "The making of...", a hidden message treasure hunt and aerial shots.

Would have been even more delicious with a Google Earth/Microsoft application/functionality.

Sascha Baron Cohen, of the High Priest Cohens, is confusing the crap out of every conventional thinker or marketer right now. His movie, Borat, is a hit (to say the least) with (as of 11/15), $69million in box office receipts after just 2 x #1 weekends. With a production budget of $18 million, it's pretty safe to say that Will Ferrell has some competition on his hands.

Just after the (over)hype of Snakes on a Plane died down, this movie comes along and thankfully proves that word-of-mouth really does rock.

The Lefsetz Letter posts a great piece on Borat and relates it to the music business as well. What I love about it was that it was posted on the day of the release and it accurately predicts the movie being a hit!

Here are some (there are many) highlights:

If you want success today, create something good.  Seed the early adopters.  And then cease, or at least slow down, your marketing.  Because the more you beat people over the head, the less attention they’re going to pay.  THEY want to feel in control, THEY don’t want to feel tools of the system.  THEY want to embrace the project...

This frightens the purveyors.  Because they can nail marketing, but QUALITY?  Look at the flicks, they truly suck.  Ask the man on the street, he thinks music sucks TOO!  To the point where most people have tuned out, and the only people who can bring them back are their buds, who have a RELATIONSHIP with them.  Believe me, the marketers at Fox don’t have a relationship with their audience.  They THINK they do, but they don’t.

Hearing the movie’s good, I’m gonna give it a chance.  Then again, if Fox keeps trumpeting the story, they’re gonna kill MY word of mouth, I don’t want to work for the man.  And neither does the Net generation.  WE make the stars, not you.  Give us reasonable choices, WE’LL do the work.  It won’t happen instantly.  First week grosses, first week SoundScan numbers, are no longer important.  It’s about longevity.  It won’t take forever, because word of mouth happens so quickly on the Net, and we’re all in touch with SO many more people on a regular basis.  But it’s now our game, not yours, don’t ever forget it.

I'm so proud to share that we were featured in the Wall Street Journal today in a piece titled, Avatars at the Office.

Yes, you need a subscription, but I've pasted a few paragraphs below:

New-media marketing firm crayon has its primary office on a Second Life island called crayonville. Avatars of the company's nine employees -- which were created to resemble their real-life forms -- sit around a table in a brick-walled meeting room in the virtual office, complete with an agenda screen. At the same time, employees sit in front of their computers in their real-world offices, located around the U.S. and in England, talking to each other using Skype Internet-calling technology. The conference call allows employees to have voice as well as text communications with one another.

Any avatar that visits crayonville island in Second Life is free to visit crayon's meeting room, but the meetings are closed if employees are discussing private client matters. The company also has started to rendezvous with clients in Second Life but is still figuring out whether or not a get-together in the virtual world takes double as much time. "That is part of our experimentation," says Neville Hobson, crayon's vice president for new marketing. "How does it actually work? How comfortable are we?"

There are also a couple of photographs of a crayon status meeting and a Jaffe v Jaffe comparison.

For those who have a copy of the article, it's interesting to see the different agencies' reactions/commentary on SL...for example, Avenue A:

"For an agency, it is really more of a showcase, a bit of self-indulgence, a way to promote yourself to marketers that might be on Second Life," says Jeff Lanctot, vice president and general manager Avenue A/Razorfish.

Wonder if he's a resident or not...

I've always said that when it comes to "advertising", our job only begins when the "ad" is shipped off to the network, insertion is sent to the publisher or certainly when the banners are tagged and uploaded to the adserver.

It's a lesson that comes squarely from working in interactive - a world filled with metrics, measurability and therefore, optimization, reconciliation and course correction.

Now, as we enter a new age of engagement, experience and conversation (pick your cliche), there's going to be a new and I believe, critical aspect of every program, initiative and solution that we birth into this world: maintenance.

On one level, it is as it sounds: upkeep. But it's a lot more profound than that...it's about constantly feeding, nurturing, monitoring, responding and in doing so obliterating the traditional notion of a "campaign" and transforming it into someting that is potentially timeless.

Marketers and agencies are going to need to invest money, effort, energy, passion and more practically, hours into the maintenance of programs and this is going to have all sorts of implications on planning cycles, timelines, compensation and reward.

With this approach, "Subservient Chicken" could have become "Superior Chicken", as opposed to some of the more mindless "executions" that have come from Burger King since...

Note: Inspiration for this post comes from Colleen DeCourcy, Chief Experience Officer at JWT.

Fake blogs are not cool. Say it with me...fake blogs are not cool. Now write it down 1000 times.

PS This screenshot was the frog formally known as 4railroads

Had a thought about SL, which in many respects picks up on a very "Real Life" (RL) insight. When we have life experiences - vacations, family in town, trips to exotic places etc., we're all about immortalizing the moment and preserving it through film, photographs, video etc.

SL is the exact same.

The art and act of freezing time as it were and capturing the moment in a snapshot is not only extending the experience...and keeping it alive...but in more practical terms, feeding the long tail through Flickr, tagging, blogs etc.

It also very much counters any perceived limitations of yuckky reach due to sim restrictions etc. For example: crayon's launch had a capacity-filled 57 avatars on hand, but has since been shared with thousands upon thousands of others who not only didn't attend the event..but also aren't even in SL in the first place.

Anyone who has ever accused marketers of overdosing on their own kool-aid, being insular and/or being too close to their own brand obviously never worked for Bank of America (of which I am an inherited customer through Fleet Bank)

Have you ever heard of Michelle Sheppard? She's leading the team in the North East.

"Priceless!"

So come on y'all, please help Jim DuBois and Ethan Chandler get on the Today Show.

They deserve it.

Big hat tip to Thomas Sherman

As reported by Stuart Elliott in the New York Times, the state/outlook on client-agency relationships has taken a slight turn for the better, with more improvements than not compared to the same study (the Salz Survey of Advertiser-Agency Relations) results from last year, which pretty much hit rock bottom.

That said, we are talking about relative improvement from all-time lows.

As the article reminds us:

Madison Avenue is still struggling to adjust to profound new challenges, which range from adjusting to the rapid rise of new media to the difficulty of recruiting talented employees.

In addiiton, the survey also points out that there are still gaping voids :) between advertiser and agency perceptions, for example:

...when asked if there was more teamwork in their relationships than last year, the difference between the advertiser respondents who agreed (66%) and agency respondents (30%) was a record 36 percentage points.

The road to the future is pretty explicitly marked...and yes, it has new marketing written all over it. To win, advertisers and agencies alike are going to need to figure out a new way to work when it comes to mastering new marketing and the talent requirement that comes along with it. It's all connected.

There is just no way that the larger agencies (or advertisers for that matter) are going to be able to win by going it alone, applying a one-stop-shop methodology and/or trying to build robust and self-sustaining competencies in-house. They will need to partner, outsource or go the acquisition route in order to best leverage the dynamic and ever-changing range of opportunities (and challenges) associated with change.

And from a collaboration standpoint, expect the cliched "good ideas can come from anyone" to take on a larger than life meaning with unexpected partnerships and strategic alliances developing between, within and with advertiser, agency, publisher and gasp, yes even consumers. IP, DRM, royalties and compensation are all going to be royally mashed-up in the not too distant future.

...in Second Life dummy

Big Brother is coming to Second Life. It's a very cool extension of the real world (as opposed to Real World) franchise and brand. Props to Endemol

Conditions are that you need to be able to spend a minimum of 8 hours in the virtual house from December 1 - 31, which is a disappointment to many as it would mean they need to cut down their time in SL to accommodate :)

It's just a matter of time before American/Pop Idol comes to SL and with it, a glut of me-too reality programming to boot. And that's a good thing, why?

The following "adage" caught my eye in a recent issue of Ad Age. In a column called Adages written by Ken Wheaton (www.kwheaton@crain.com), I read the following:

Found! World's first example of blogger-related humility

...we received a notice from Brooklyn Brothers, who announced their own blog in a rather unique way. "Why is blogging like urinating in a dark suite? Because it gives you a warm feeling but no one else notices. Yes, the Brooklyn Brothers have entered the blogosphere. You can find out how little is on our mind by visisting www.thebrooklynbrothers.com/blog. Be among the twelve people (including relatives) to read our random thoughts." What's unique about this isn't the imagery. It's that rare realization by a blogger that so few people are actually reading.

Believe me, I can appreciate self-deprecation. Personally, I will not be stopping by to read "random thoughts" or what little is on the minds of the folk who work at Brooklyn Brothers. Yes, they got the attention of Ad Age...and yes, they got the ink (to date Jaffe Juice has not)...so perhaps, they do know what they're doing.

On the other hand, I'm not sure what to make of Ken's comments. Like the Brooklyn Bros, let's give him the benefit of the doubt. Let's assume he doesn't actually mean what he wrote...because if he did, he'd be cleary demonstrating his lack of understanding of what blogging, the blogosphere and social media are all about.

It only takes twelve good citizens to convict and sentence a man or woman to death...or conversely to set them free. The equivalent is true in the blogosphere.

Perhaps it's time for this particular agency to change their underpants and take a look at their log files.

I am proud to announce that I have just signed my second book deal with Wiley. My next book will be released in September of 2007.

I offered P&G Global CMO, Jim Stengel, the opportunity to write part of the book relative to what was on his mind and now I'm asking you the same.

Think of me as your personal authoring concierge.

What would YOU like me to write about? What do you think the market needs to know right now...and by market I refer to the broad-based/mainstream marketing/agency/publisher community (in that order)

"The long tail will not wag unless the head is fed consistently with fresh meat"

I don't know what Mr Anderson would say about this, but I've learned through my own blog that it is imperative to keep on posting regularly and consistently in order to stay "top of page". Just having the content and waiting to be discovered is not going to cut it anymore.

Ala picture-in-picture, this is what I call brand-in-brand and if you think about it, it's a great representation of a mash-up in terms of brands letting go of their stranglehold on their artificial guidelines.

Perhaps 1 + 1 does equal 3 after all.

From a blogging newbie at the Blog Business Summit via Horse-Pig-Cow:

"I asked the young couple what they do for a living and they said, 'Blogging and Podcasting'. I thought to myself, 'They don't look like deep sea fisherman.'"

Suddenly that Ask-A-Ninja analogy is making a whole lot more sense:

What happens when talk becomes walk? The walls come a tumblin' down.

In this particular case, the cracks are self-evident following the announcement from AG Lafley that P&G is "reallocating investments from parts of the communication plan that aren't working as hard for us, to parts of the communication plan that are working harder"

That's bad news for Television and good news for pretty much any medium with discernable measurement/metrics built into their backbone.

It also comes with an entire new can of worms in the form of the me-too clutter sheep jumping on P&G's bandwagon en route to invading an already overcrowded web, not to mention profound talent implications and commensurate challenges.

I have deja vu right now (perhaps I should do a search on my own blog), but my hope would be that P&G will take this opportunity to lead by example and invest smartly and solidly in the emerging and non-traditional sandbox that is new marketing.

I have a feeling this is inevitable.