Jaffe Juice

Frog Off, Sony

Another Fake Flog. Another Mea Culpa. This time even more sickening that not fessing up:

"Busted. Nailed. Snagged. As many of you have figured out (maybe our
speech was a little too funky fresh???), Peter isn’t a real hip-hop
maven and this site was actually developed by Sony. Guess we were
trying to be just a little too clever. From this point forward, we will
just stick to making cool products, and use this site to give you
nothing but the facts on the PSP.

Sony Computer Entertainment America"

The frog in question was created by Zipatoni for Sony and begs the questions:

• Why did this need to be a blog...and a fake one at that?
• Surely, there were other approaches that would have done the job equally well, if not better?
• And if not, why couldn't you go about this in a considered and authentic way?

It boggles my mind how many mainstream marketers/agencies look at new marketing from the same one-dimensional, traditional, advertising based- and biased lens. When you think about it, it's no wonder that the inevitable outcome every time is fakeness instead of authenticity.

I agree with the folks over at Beyond Madison Avenue...this apology, albeit quick on the draw ('er that's only because you were found out!) is way too snide and snarky (note to marketers and their agencies: you don't do snarky well) and comes across only as arrogant and patronizing.

Gideon Television is my Hero

Big Brother rolls on in Second Life, but sadly Gideon Television (my reason for visiting the virtual house every night for a week or so) has been evicted.

He went out in style though, with a sequence so daring; so invigoratingly shocking that no doubt no one will be talking about it for seconds:

Instructions for the final rites were given - if our names were called, we were to descend the tube to a place where the survivors could pick carrion from the corpses.

A dramatic pause, and then Big Brother, his virtual breath reeking with a stench of pity, announced that "THE FIRST PERSON IN HISTORY EVER TO BE EVICTED FROM THE VIRTUAL BIG BROTHER IS...."

Beat.

"GIDEON TELEVISION".

As the mob went crazy, I bellowed "NOOOOOO", less out of anguish than to allow TheDiva to swoon on cue, as per our arrangement.

And here is where Big Brother came to realize that while reality may come to Second Life, some Television will always remain unscripted. Pulling my beloved Desert Eagle from it's holster (Razen was right, they SHOULD have strip searched me), I gave one final wink to Phaylen, put the barrel to my temple, and pulled the trigger. A fountain of blood exploded across the walls of my glass prison, a bloody finale that'll take days to wipe clean. I fell to the ground, and only those in the box with me heard my final whispered message. Maybe they'll share it with the housemates, maybe they won't.

And then, fade to black.

Brilliant. If only Reality TV was as good as unReality TV

Gideon's very thorough and insightful post-mortem on BBSL here, including how Endemol dropped the ball and 5 pointers to the future.

Gideon, you rock. You are my hero.

The Price of Popularity (yes, there is an actual price)

I was alerted to a website called Fake Your Space, which on first glance is a pretty whacked way to essentially buy popularity and in doing so, both support and destroy the B2C social networking business model of MySpace and the like.

It's a mash-up of pay-per-post meets MySpace where people can selectively purchase friends who periodically leave comments behind.

It's a bizarre thought, but not really when you think about the price of popularity.

On second glance, when you click on the "purchase or invest in" link ('er if I buy 3 do I get 1 free?), it seems like a pretty transparent (the bad kind) attempt at milking a domain name sale.

This alone is interesting i.e. building up an otherwise shill of a business in order to maximize the value of a domain name? Now we know what's in a name....

Surreal. What will they think of next...virtual worlds?

When context is so good, it's positively bad

Yesterday, I flew NorthWest to Detroit (I spoke at the University of Michigan's Ross School of Business in a speaker's series associated with The Yaffe - no relation - Center for Persuasive Communication)

I had the pleasure of meeting long time listeners/readers in the form of Derek Mehraban and Catherin Juon.

En route to the plane, I spent some time in the NorthWestern Lounge at La Guardia Airport (including some good surreal time in crayonville) and noticed a rather interesting promotion on the front desks of the lounge.

The promotion was for Zicam, a "homeopathic" cold remedy tablet (I've seen similar ones for Airborne offered at Admiral's Clubs), which you would think was perfect for the cold/flu season. That said, what does it say about flying, especially when one factors in the infamous "sick air" that gets circulated continuously en route.

I guess it would be the equivalent of a pop-up retail booth at departure gates selling life insurance...

I buy the Airborne promotion because of its "preventative" qualities/positioning, however the Zicam one left me....well....a little.....cold.

What's the optimal length (in seconds) of a pre-roll ad?

Zero.

That's the answer I gave to Executive Editor of iMediaConnection.com, Brad Berens, when he recently quizzed a bunch of interactive industry execs.

I told him that as long as I had any say in it, I would never purchase or advise a client of mine to purchase a pre-roll commercial on the Web.

It's a cheap imitation of a failing business model - it is intrusive, disruptive, one-size-fits-all, linear....you get the picture.

SMG's Digital Chief at GM Planworks, Curt Hecht, weighs in with a similar view reported in MediaPost.

The power of communal marketing

David Hachez shares some really interesting information in his post, "the power of Jaffe Juice as a traffic driver."

According to David, one link from my blog led to 45% of his daily traffic. On the same day, 93% of his visitors were new versus returning visitors.

David, it was my pleasure. Your content is great and so is your contribution.

Ineffective, Very Very Very Ineffective

The Citi commercials with Victor and Roman are really great...when fast forwarding through commercials, I'll often TiVo and go back to watch them multiple times. So what's the problem? It's the contradiction perhaps between creative and effective. Look, I have no clue if I'm 100% wrong about this, but I just get the feeling that this campaign (like many others) is too creative for its own good...OTT: over the top of the consumer, average average average consumer. It's the parodox of breaking through the clutter and ROI. (more at American Copywriter)

Death of the Portal

Digg this if you will...

As a context setter for this post, I suggest you read this Ad Age article which reflects Yahoo's Chief Sales Officer, Wenda Harris-Millard's self-serving bearish comments on "user" generated content, as well as the del.icio.us Peanut Butter memo, calling for reduced headcount at Y! by 15-20% amidst a "radical reorganization"

I'll come back to Yahoo! shortly.

I've been mulling over this idea for a while now and thought it would be an opportune time (as all the pundits begin making their predictions for the New Year) to offer up a thought of my own: I don't think anyone doubts that there is a massive realignment of the media powers that be in the overall integrated space. Within interactive however, this couldn't be more true when you look at the rise of the "new" portals such as MySpace, YouTube and/or Google and the subsequent demise - or metamorphosis - of the "traditional" portals.

My belief is that the days of the "portal" as we knew it are coming to an end. Yahoo!'s dominance is over. AOL's opportunity is over. Perhaps only MSN has a shot left.

Let me explain...

Take a look at the 3 portals in terms of their roots/heritage:

• AOL - for all intent and purposes, a dial-up ISP for newbies
• MSN - an ISP struggling to shake the shadow and stigma of being a technology company's bastard stepchild
• Yahoo! - the one true media company

To survie...one must change; to change...one must transform; to transform...one must evolve.

• AOL today is not an ISP, but a broadband-focused media network/company, but is it too little, too late? I've always believed that AOL has the opportunity to leverage an unprecedented treasure-chest of coveted content through its Time/Warner relationship, but to date we've never seen this capitalized on. In addition, AOL continues to spew out TV-biased advertising drivel (which goes completely against everything it should be standing for) without giving its consumers an iota of a reason to care; switch; find out more; convert. AOL's post Jon Miller response has been a "frying pan into the fire" AKA The reincarnation of Lloyd Braun in the form of Randy Falco from NBC. We wish you luck in preventing history from repeating itself.
• Yahoo! is a still a media company, but is it enough anymore? The company is beyond arrogant; it has relinquished its leadership role and fallen prey to the same greed and complacency from the dot com boom/bust. As Yogi would say, it's Deja Vu all over again. Of course Wenda is going to say what she said about the powerful and authentic consumer generated content space - her comments should be discounted 100% based on her own self-serving agenda:

"The question from a business standpoint is: How do you make money at this? It's fun, it's a blast, trying to figure this out, but I don't think anyone is doing it particularly well," she said.

Actually, consumers are doing it particularly well and brands are figuring out how to work with this without having to go through you.

The peanut butter memo is accurate in many of its assertions about Yahoo!'s situation analysis. One of the most telling focuses is the division between Yahoo, the traditional wannabee media company and the (in my opinion, most promising path forward) new marketing/social media/yes-Web 2.0 path forward. The two divergent/siloed camps are clearly at odds with one another.

We end up with competing (or redundant) initiatives and synergistic opportunities living in the different silos of our company.
• YME vs. Musicmatch
• Flickr vs. Photos
• YMG video vs. Search video
• Deli.cio.us vs. myweb
• Messenger and plug-ins vs. Sidebar and widgets
• Social media vs. 360 and Groups
• Front page vs. YMG
• Global strategy from BU'vs. Global strategy from Int'l

• MSN is now the go-to role model for the entire Microsoft company, coupled with its "Live" strategy connecting the dots between every asset - from desktop software (Office etc) to gaming (Xbox!) to online (MSN) to search. Ultimately this is just a leaf out of the "Web 2.0" (Google) distributed content (RSS) strategy...

Where does this leave us?

"If you build it, will they come" is now being replaced with "if you distribute it, will they read" or perhaps this should be restated as, "If they distribute it, they will embrace it"

So back to the dissertation: What is a portal really? It's a homepage. That's it. A homepage that has "high reach" properties which decrease DRAMATICALLY with every single click beyond.

• Today's portal home page is nothing more than a clunky mash-up of other people's content.  'Er, isn't that the same as an RSS Reader/Aggregator?
• Today's portal is just a shill to flood with 30-second spots that are not welcome on television anymore
• Today's portal is not scaleable (Sold Out of linear inventory) 
• Today's portal is redundant

Witness the inevitable extinction of an endangered species.

The portal as we know it today is on its way out of town. It begins with the gradual migration from My Yahoo or My AOL or My MSN to bloglines, google, vertical/targeted narrowcast mini-portals like MyAdFeed (that's what I'm using, in conjunction with bloglines) and the like.

It continues with a communal flash-mob embracing the best-in-class offering of the hour, at the expense of virtually all other substitutes. In CGC, it is YouTube. Who is number 2? Revver, Sharkle, Farkle, Barfle, who cares? Making this even worse is the fact, that we are dealing with - perhaps not fickle as Harris puts it - fluid and non-linear consumers. There are so few true barriers to entry and exit anymore, and even fewer reasons to believe and to care. As a result, consumers are "loyalless" and this does not just apply to portals, but indeed to most brands nowadays.

It ends with a democratization of content and a complete realignment and redistribution of power from the content creator (50 years ago) to the content distributor (10 years ago) to the content aggregator (today) to the content reaggregator (tomorrow - short term) and ultimately, content experiencer (tomorrow - medium term)

Short term, this will take the form of "network 2.0" (think one part Tacoda; one part Revenue Science; one part Podshow...but on a much larger and open scale) Any company that can figure out a way to eradicate the tyanny of "exclusivity", proprietary or closed-access will win.

Longer term, I feel it will contain a healthy and balanced mixture of conversation, slivercasting/long tail something and "3.d" (virtual worlds like SL) open-face access.

This is the direct-to-consumer path and its one where all the "UGC" takes over, without a care or concern about "monetization" and marketers.

Update: The peanut butter just hit the fan. Via Defamer today, "Former ABC Exec Lloyd Braun fails to make Yahoo! more like the network that previously fired him". COO Dan Rosensweig joins him.

Big Brother is watching you

Actually, you are watching Big Brother(s). The Second Life BB experience has begun and my voting loyalty has already been assigned to one Gideon Television, although I was bribed with a Corona and a joint along the way by another faction.

Like I posted back in November, it's a very cool extension of the BB brand/franchise and I'm intrigued to see how the various contestants do with their first challenge: building a Christmas Tree.

Also, the island is teaming with activity and presence (unlike most brand shrines right now)

Go Gideon...my money's on you to become the official Richard Hatch of BBSL.

Where's Waldo?

A pretty cool mash-up poster of the new marketing world in true Waldo style. Hmmm, where is crayon in the mix?

Thanks to David H for the discovery