Jaffe Juice

sheep don't let sheep follow blindly (no wait, they do)

iPod has a competitor?????? Could it be true? Someone dares threaten the monopoly of Jobs? AND does it in an irreverent way.

What is the world coming to? I'm going to preserve my Nano in resin immediately so that it retains its value and fetches a high price as an old relic 5 years from today.

It's all for the new Sansa e200 from SanDisk. Although I'm sure Jobs will crush 'em like a paper cup, my only question is whether it works on iTunes.

Hat tip to Maarten.

Adicolor splashes creativity

From one Kelly to another (a real one). I met Kelly on a flight from Chicago to Jacksonville. She's opening up a cafe in St Augustine and I wish her the best of luck and will link to her when she's up and running.

She told me about these Adicolor long form content vignettes and sent me a link to them. They're damn fine, so check 'em oot.

I'd be curious to find out who created them, where they ran etc.

One degree of separation

Mitch (AKA Kelly) did a quick "5-questions with..." me for One Degree.

Here are his questions and my answers.

Taylor Hicks Takes It!

Congratulations to Taylor Hicks - your new American Idol. I gotta say, kudos to Fox et al for an unbelievable 2 hour spectacular production. Highlights included Katharine McPhee and Meatloaf in an unforgettable rendition of It's all coming back to me now, as well as The Hoff in tears when Taylor won!

I almost felt bad that I skipped through every single one of the ads. I almost felt that I should have watched at least one in appreciation of the incredible entertainment.

Naaaaaaaaaah.

Solve this riddle: When is a magazine reader engaged?

Answer: When they're in the toilet.

A new Starch study has seemingly deflated quite a bit of wind (hot air) from the sails of the ailing magazine industry. The study concluded that ads in high-engagement magazines performed no better than ads in low-engagement ones.

The double-barrelled hypothesis was simple (paraphrased): if readers spent more time/effort/energy reading magazines, then ceteris paribus they should spent more time reading and remembering the ads in it (and thus, high engagement magazines should outperform low engagement ones in the ad stakes - all a little too incestuous for me)

Starch divided 25 magazines into high-engagement, low-engagement and middling camps, defining engagement by the frequency with which they are read, time spent with each issue and how much of each issue gets finished. When it examined the percentages of readers who remembered ads across the magazines, it found no link between those scores and levels of engagement.

Why is anyone surprised? On one hand, all it means is that all magazines are in the same boat with respect to ad recall/memorability etc....which could be good and it could be bad. On the other hand, this clearly reminds us that content (edit) and commercials (ads) are as similar as chalk and cheese (I forget which is which)

Via Ad Age

gold rushes in where fools fear to tread

CBS announced a very interesting tie-in with the upcoming Burnett-produced reality show, Gold Rush. The premise is very simple: 12 trucks containing $100K and 1 containing 1 million smackers will be hidden around the US and viewers will attempt to uncover clues in order to solve the riddle and win the money.

Here's where it gets interesting...the clues will be dropped in CBS programming, AOL.com and commercials. In this regard, CBS will allow its advertisers to participate in the program/promotion/experience by teeing up their ads as antes.

I think this is awesome. Yes, there are some issues (such as scaleability beyond a once-off gimick, mindset with respect to expecting consumers to lean forward when they might prefer to lean back, as well as a question on whether consumers scouring ads for clues will distract them from the selling message; there's also the rather large Elephant in the room as to why AOL.com is stealing CBS Digital's lunch in this regard), BUT overall, this is one of the best demonstrations of engagement potentially done right, as well as best use of an Upfront methodology that I have seen to date...

I also wonder if consumers will "beat the system" by sharing clues as opposed to hoarding them. On such a mass scale, there really isn't first mover advantage (it's a bit of catch-22), but then again....greed is good.

I think I might play along as well...gosh, does that mean I'll actually consciously watch an ad? How 1999 of me.

Via Ad Age

Garfield on CGC?

Check out Bob Garfield's Ad Age critique on the CGC "Transformation" spot for Sony. It appeared on Current TV and was created by a 19-year old (Tyson Ibele) Garfield gives it ** out of ****.

His heading reads as follows: Sony's Transformation Spot isn't very Transformational and the subhead reads: Latest Consumer-Produced Work Gives Ad Agencies Reasons to Rejoice.

I wonder if he's really talking about CGC in general or specifically the Sony spot. Inarguably this is one of the better CGC efforts, so by definition if this one isn't very good (by his standards), what does that say about the entire category?

I got to catch a plane, so more commentary later...and possibly on ATS. In the interim, what do you think? Is Garfield on the money or off the mark?

It finally happened

In just one week, I bumped into marketers from both American Express (Montreal, CMA) and today, Fedex (at an AMA conference in Chicago)

In both cases I have examples in my presentations - for American Express, a disconnected and siloed form of how not to do integration and for American Express, the now infamous Fedex Furniture case.

Both times, the marketers approached me after the fact and we had great conversations.

Hopefully the dialogue will continue.

The Loyalty Index

I was quoted in the annual Brandweek report of the Brand keys Customer Loyalty Index. It's a pretty neat and extensive survey which essentially measures how well (or not) the brand(s) in question delivers on the expectations of its most loyal consumers.

You can download a copy here: Download LoyaltyIndex06.pdf

Take home quote: "They way they (Apple) treat customers is disgraceful," observed Jaffe. "Batteries, memory - in a way they've made a conscious decision to be arrogant and aloof...That is a very risky strategy."

The 1% rule

COTC writes this post about the 1% rule i.e. about 1% of constituents are typically responsible for the majority/bulk of content/contributions. The prime example given is WikiPedia: (as per WikiPedia founder, Jimmy Wales)

• 50% of all Wikipedia edits are done by 0.7% of users
• 1.8% of users have written more than 72% of all articles

I've been talking (up until now, anecdotally) to marketers about a version of this i.e. do you know the 1% of people responsible for 99% of your buzz? Now it seems this 1% rule is being supported on multiple levels - and in particular, from a content creation standpoint.

The post continues to make a very simple, yet important point: marketers focus on the mass - the 99%. Now of course it's critical for them to achieve varieties of scale in order to make their numbers, BUT perhaps it's worth thinking about the 1% as a means to reach, connect and effect with the 99%, as opposed to all that good money thrown after bad.