Jaffe Juice

Your mission in life: to suck the least

It's unbelievable to me how many industries fall into the universal suckage category. Case in point, the wireless/cellular category. Cingular (part of the new AT&T) bills itself as the network with the "lowest amount of dropped calls". The airline industry talks about the most on-time arrivals or departures.

Here's a thought: how about not dropping any calls or arriving and departing on time ALL THE TIME.

Corporations fall into a death trap of believing that consumers don't really have choice when it comes to a subset of providers who all subscribe to the same low bar of service and/or expectations. This might be true in the short term, but it also lays the table for a hungry, aggressive, intense and innovative challenger brand to wreak havoc on the incumbents.

MaxJet and EOS Airlines are two such examples.

So too will be wi-fi and VoiP-ennabled skype phones and the like, which deserve to steal the lunch of the lazy and lethargic wireless providers.

Remember the famous line from the movie Rounders (paraphrased): when you sit down at the poker table, look for the sucker. If you don't see them, get up and leave immediately...because the sucker is you." I would think that the exact opposite holds true today. The table is frequently by suckers and sure enough, a savvy player will sit down soon enough and clean up....

From the sublime to the ridiculous

I'm heading down to giving a keynote at the DTC Perspectives Conference in D.C.

Here's one of my slides which basically shows that the virtual world of Second Life and the Pharma space are more closely connected than one might think...except for the fact SL has meaning, purpose, relevance and value.

Is ANYONE paying attention?

Ford's tagline: Bold Moves

Fidelity's tagline: Smart Move

Hyundai's new tagline: Smart Moves

Has it come down to this?

MVB Face-Off: The Finale

It all comes down to this - The Final match-up and it's not between who you might have thought...

It's a cinderella story ending with Beyond Madison Avenue up against media-upstart, Wired, for the top dog honors.

BMA shockingly defeated yours truly in a WHIPPING that has my rear ending still stinging. In the other semi-final, Wired edged out Swami Godin in a much closer call.

And instead of the Bold and Beautiful, it will be the Bald and Egotisticial fighting for 3rd and 4th place: Seth Godin versus Jaffe Juice.

So all that is left to do is invite you to vote one final time, after which I will close the book on the 2007 MVB's and figure out some kind of prize in the process.

Click here to take survey

On the road again...

Thought I'd give a quick update on my comings and goings over the next couple of months. Hopefully we can meet up if you're local or attending of the following conferences:

• DTC National Conference - Washington D.C.
• MIPTV - Cannes
• CUES Nexus Conference - Dallas
• Sydney, Australia - "Spread the Love" Speaking Tour, sponsored by TCO. If you're interesting in "booking" me for a speaking engagement, send me an e-mail to jaffe [at] getthejuice [dot] com
• Conference sponsored by Microsoft in Sardinia, Italy

Who's your digital czar?

Adweek has an article which highlights the latest round of me-too posturing from Agency-land:

Both holding companies and individual agencies are tapping high-level strategists to serve as digital czars in hopes of catching up to the obviously changing media landscape.

The article cites recent moves by the likes of Ogilvy, Publicis, MDC Partners and Goodby to hire "czar's" to run their digital capabilities and also references the consequences of not doing so (such as Nike's Wieden departure)

In all cases, the shops insist bringing in a high-level strategist is not a sign of digital weakness, but a move to coordinate efforts, both on behalf of clients and internally, with the goal of placing digital at the core of their culture.

I'm not being skeptical about bringing in digital superstars to lead interactive at all, I'm just saying that clients needs to do 3 things first:

1. Look beyond the window dressing. You need to be convinced that the entire organization has fully bought into digital and is committed to a future with interactive as a core component (if not THE core)
2. Has said czar been empowered to do their jobs or are they nothing more than puppets?
3. Who is your digital czar? Without an equivalent in your own organization, how exactly do you expect your agency to be successful?

As Bob Greenberg says in the artlcle:

"Every client is going to have the same kind of situation happen within two years. [Agencies] have to indicate to their clients, to their staff or for real that they're making an investment into digital."

No doubt, we will see more czars being appointed (or is that annointed) in the weeks and months to come. I am still surprised how little the largest holding companies are doing to follow suit. With the exception of Publicis and most recenty MDC, IPG, Omnicom and WPP have been virtually non-existent in terms of like-minded moves. Bizarre.

MVB winds down; MVP starts up

The MVB Final Four is almost done and I should have the Head to Head Final pairing for you within the next day or so.

To date, I haven't used this podium to ask for your support, largely due to the fact I was the organizer and I also wanted to see how far I got. That said, if you would like to support Jaffe Juice as a contender for the Most Valuable Blog, now is your chance. I'm up against the Zack Johnson of Blogs, Beyond Madison Avenue.

Vote here for Jaffe Juice.

For those of you new to this blog (I've uploaded quite a few new names from conferences I've spoken at recently - welcome!), the list of MVB's represent a great resource to use as a shortlist of blogs to review and subscribe to. They represent a great ecclectic and diverse array of opinion, commentary and insights on the changing field of marketing.

The full list can be found here.

Also, Kevin Behringer is running the Most Valuable Podcast tournament as well and Across the Sound - The New Marketing Podcast is paired up against the Accidental Creative (another great resource) If you'd like to vote for ATS, you can do so here, but more importantly...if you are relatively new to "new marketing"; if you have not subscribed to any podcasts...and in particular marketing ones...take this oppportunity to review the "field" of 16 and experiment with the choices on offer. You'll be glad you did.

If we are all brands, when are we going to be added to Wikipedia?

Yesterday at Podcamp NYC, on a live recording of Across the Sound, Lynette Young was talking about how her Second Life alter-ego, Lynette Radio, has become a brand. If you think about it, every blogger, podcaster, YouTube producer or Second Life resident is becoming his, her or its own brand in some way, shape or form.

Well, if that's the case...why not start to contextualize the brand equity and integrate it into our vernacular. Hey, it worked for Google and TiVo!

I've started with five people I know. I'll let you carry on from here. Please remember this is in good spirited fun. PS I can't wait to see the various interpretations of "Jaffe" :)

The intern came in the other day with a few novel ideas on how to make the workplace better, but I quickly Verdinoed him

Verdino = To prematurely poo-poo a new idea

With 3 hours to go before the big pitch, we were still lacking a game-plan; what we needed was a means to Rubel our selling proposition into an ordered and logical flow

Rubel = To organize pragmatic and useful ideas into a bulleted list

The new supervisor in the corner office is way too guarded; he keeps ideas to himself instead of Scobelizing them throughout the workplace

Scobelize: The act of sharing freely for the greater good of mankind

My new personal trainer is awesome. She Chapman’s the hell out of me in every session

Chapman: A take-no-prisoners no-bullshit approach to life; (v) To cut the crap and focus on the prize

I could kill that new snotty kid who just moved into the neighborhood. He always gets in the last word and out-Jarvises me in front of the girls.

Jarvis: A bull's-eye, wry and snarky assessment of the situation; (v) To quickly call a situation for what it is whilst leaving a hell of a hangover

Anatomy of Top Marketing Bloggers

This is a very interesting post from Kevin Hillstrom's MineThatData Blog (nice name!)

As someone who works with brand marketers (and monitors various blogs for brand pick-up), Kevin dissected 188 posts from Mack Collier's Top 25 Marketing Blogs (I am 21st) and concluded the following:

• Only 14% of the posts are about brand commentary, about 60% of these articles were negative or critical.
• The top 10 marketing bloggers were largely negative when talking about a brand.
  • Bloggers 11-25 were largely positive in their commentary about brands.
• When talking about marketing strategy, this group of authors was positive by a margin of 2:1
• There is a difference in writing style between the top 10, and bloggers 11-25. The top 10 were more promotional, overwhelming more critical of brands...

One logical explanation of the difference between top 10 and 11-25 is the public visibility, perception and expectations. Negativity attracts more attention than praise. Put differently, being more controversial or heated will lead to more discussion. In addition, leading blogs have got to work harder and certainly need to be more focused and single-minded when it comes to maintaining their position - "links of the day", "top hacks", "lists", "shorter posts" and news headlines are going to "sell" better than longer, more discursive posts.

That's one hypothesis and it is a generalization - one size does not fit all especially in the good old blogosphere, but it does give interesting insight into blogger outreach (which I suspect is the inspiration behind Kevin's post in the first place).

If you're engaged in blogger outreach in any capacity, you know as much I do that you approach your outreach by starting at 1 and working your work downwards. You're prioritizing based on "quantitative reach" and what Kevin's analysis infers is that it could be a catch-22 i.e. the larger the blog, the more likely the response to be negative.

Kevin was "surprised" that marketing bloggers were in fact less negative (snarky?) than he would have suspected. As John Moore from Brand Autopsy (one of the MVB's) points out in the comments section, what might be construed as negative could also be interpreted as constructive criticism.

Mash-up of New Marketing

I just got back from Podcamp NYC. What a great experience to see such amazing people like Chris Brogan, John Havens, Christopher Penn and of course fellow crayonistas, Steve, CC and Lynette.

I sat on a panel on the subject of Social Media Convergence and Virtual Worlds with Adam Broitman (pictured on stage courtesy of my Sprint Ambassador picturemail), Greg Verdino, Mark Wallace and John Swords. Fellow panelist, Greg Verdino, wrote this terrific recap post, with multimedia - including the video of our panel! Now that's real-time turnaround.

I also had the pleasure of recording the 75th episode of ATS live on-site with about 8 listeners who became co-hosts for an episode. It was awesome. You can download the show here or subscribe to the podcast here.

Don't forget to join my ATS twittergroup for episode updates and live call-in details.

Voting is also open for the Final Four MVB's (Most Valuable Blogs). Make yourself heard!

Also, a heads up that David Armano just had an article published in Business Week (how old school can you get (grin)) on a subject close to my heart - the conversation economy. Check it out and also this