Jaffe Juice

Awkward Emmy's

I don't know if you watched the Emmy's tonight. I've been time-shifting and room-switching to watch the baseball as well. At 10.15pm, I couldn't watch any longer. It was just too painful.

They could have cut out the 100 or so mini-series awards and just sent a U-Haul filled with statuettes to Tony Bennett's house to save about 1 1/2 hours of the 3 1/2 hour telecast.

Moreover, here are some of the new marketing reflections from the past loooong 2 hours:

• For the first time ever, Internet-content distributed via broadband (or something like that) was acknowledged with a Prime Time Emmy. In other words, web video. Cool.
• Current.TV won the award and making me tingle was our next President, Al Gore, who uttered those sexy words, "join the conversation" (I owe him $1)
• Current.TV's Award was presented via web chat with the founder of MySpace (also cool)
• This year the Emmy's were blogging. They apparently had 5 bloggers in the audience live blogging throughout the event. Pity they didn't let anyone know about this in advance...or maybe they did. I wouldn't know. Twitter would have rocked for something like this...
• Other than that, I must admit it was totally awkward to see how much passive aggressive dissing there was from the actors to the networks (almost along the lines of...what are you doing to our beloved medium???) The opening montage with the cartoons from Family Guy accentuated declining ratings, quality of content etc. and Lewis Black pummeled TV execs, news networks and the like for their constant interruptions, crawl and bulleted text
• This year, the Emmy's "experimented" with a theater in the round, but - as per my last post - let's just say, we hope they learn from this experience and come back stronger next year.

Oh and Ryan Seacrest was painful. They should have just renamed this telecast, American Idol.

Reflections from the iMedia Brand Summit

I just came back from the iMedia Brand Summit in San Diego, where I sat on a panel, moderated by Real Branding's Susan MacDermid, with IMC^2's Alan Schulman, Colgate-Palmolive's Jack Haber and Mediasmith's, Dave Smith.

The full write-up is here

On a personal note, it was so great to be back at an iMedia after about 2 years in the wilderness. When I left TBWA\Chiat\Day in June of 2002, iMedia's Rick Parkhill quickly approached me to be a part of his quarterly executive summits and over the next 3+ years, I performed a host of functions at these summits, including M.C.'ing, singing to the crowd, presenting creative showcases, delivering custom research and moderating various panels. It was also through iMedia that I began writing a weekly column, called none other than...Jaffe Juice!

Many old friends with new name tags (i.e. new companies) were there. Most have turned over 2-3 times...but all in an upward direction.

I also witnessed the dawning of a new era, where my once-colleagues i.e. fellow Media Directors are now Keynoting at iMedia. When I met Sean Finnegan, he was Interactive Media Director at OMD Chicago and now he runs all of OMD Digital...in fact he oversees a totally new unit called OMG Digital.

All in all, it was an inspiring trip and I thought I'd share a few reflections and learning with you:

• The community (both dedicated interactive and "traditional" or "integrated" folk) is largely focused on online as a core/media channel, as opposed to a larger, more inclusive umbrella covering the full spectrum of emerging and non-traditional approaches. Whilst the entire crowd cheered at Second Life being the most "overhyped" component of marketing today, when pressed (by me), it become apparent that almost all of these folk have never actually been in SL, let alone piloted any programs in-world
• Interactive is still looked at by many as a full blown "acquisition" medium. That's positive insofar that it is ROI driven, but negative insofar that this is still the tip of the iceberg in terms of representing the medium's full value. I think there's been progress  on the whole branding versus DR debate, however I'm still not convinced that we're looking at the new marketing spectrum through a "new marketing" lens i.e. marketing versus communication versus media versus advertising. We need to be factoring in relationship marketing, data, analytics, customer service, research, partnership...the list goes on
• On a different front, the whole concept of "failure" still holds us back from venturing too far from our comfort zones. We move one step forward...with such low tolerance for "failure", such that when we don't hit it out the park, we end up radically recoiling and taking 2 steps backwards for every forward step. Pursuant to my post about Vince Lombardi, when failure is looked at as an end unto itself, then perhaps it is failure...but when it is a means to an end, then it becomes a journey or path towards learnings/insight
  • As Tim Mapes, CMO of Delta, said, "Innovation = bold ideas that work; Mistakes = bold ideas that fail" - I guess we need to decide whether we're in the bold ideas business or not...irrespective of the outcome.
• I don't have the research yet, but apparently Yahoo! and Comscore issued some research recently that stated something to the effect that 90% of all comments are in fact good. On the surface, this is reassuring that only 1 in 10 comments are in fact, bad or negative. However, the more I think about this, the more it concerns me. It's always been true that the active minority of critics drown out the silent majority of satisfied customers/consumers. Today however, there's a complete this ratio might be 90:10 in favor of positive:negative, but it feels like 10:90. We absolutely need some kind of "levelator" to smooth out the full spectrum of noise.

That's about it for now...more soon.

Is the Internet - or its users - Dead and Boring?

Mark Cuban, the twinkle-toed maverick that he is, posits that the Internet is Dead and Boring.

In his post, he declares the following:

...the net has become...[a] utility. It has stopped evolving. Your Internet experience today is not much different than it was 5 years ago.

Some people have tried to make the point that Web 2.0 is proof that the Internet is evolving. Actually it is the exact opposite. Web 2.0 is proof that the Internet has stopped evolving and stabilized as a platform.

The days of the Internet creating explosively exciting ideas are dead. They are dead until bandwidth throughput to the home reaches far higher numbers than the vast majority of broadband users get today.

The Internet is boring. That is not a bad thing. In fact its easy to make the argument that its a great thing. That it has become the utility that the people who worked to get it started firmly believed it would. That it finally is the platform for any number of mundane applications that are easy to write and that anyone can use and trust. Just like wheels, printing presses, cars, TV, radio, electricity, water.....

Let me start by putting on (when was it ever off?) my marketing hat and agreeing with the boring part, but most certainly not the dead contention. Interactive agencies are for the most part, acquisition factories (literally and figuratively). The number of fierce and original independents is becoming anemic and in its place is an army of 1984-like clones, intent on replicating, duplicating and imitating old school worst practices in and across new platforms.

In a previous life, I used to be an evangelist on the part of nascent online creative, but for the most part I haven't seen a thing of interest in recent times...not coincidentally the same period that I haven't seen (or remembered) a single 30-second spot that caught my eye, kept my attention, won my heart and opened my wallet.

Boring is right on the money. Perhaps dead is actually dead on as well. We're quickly approaching a mainstreaming of the Web and with it, will come the inevitable commoditization of creativity and first mover advantage.

Now back to Mark. He's really referring directly to the Web as a "universal dial-tone", much like the tone you hear when you pick up those relics called land-lines. He's referring to the land line in context of game-changers like wi-fi, VoIP, in-world audio, dynamically switching iPhones (between wi-fi and the Edge network)

I completely agree with the challenge to upgrade and fast-track the ability to improve bandwidth. Upload times still horribly lag download times and until they equalize, perhaps the web experience will be dead and boring.

I also think that until we are able to make sure we put an internet connection (high speed, wireless) in the hands of every single consumer/citizen (and yes, that means a computer of some sort to accompany the connection), we will stay stuck in the dead and boring zone.

I'm not sure I agree with underplaying the impact and potential of Web 2.0 however. That said, I would contend that many Web 2.0 plays are just money making scams at worst - or  perhaps I should say, more solid bubble reincarnations.

If, as the saying goes, life is what you make it, then so too is the Web. And perhaps Mark's assertion that the web is dead and boring is really nothing more than a transferred epithet and if that is the case, then perhaps it is us that are dead and boring.

Time to prove Mark wrong and if we do, we will all be the better for it.

ATS #90 - Part 2 of the 3-way discussion on movie marketing with Kirk Skodis and Chris Thilk

This episode is sponsored by Real Pie Media and is part 2 of a movie marketing 3-way with Real Pie Media's Kirk Skodis and Movie Marketing Madness' Chris Thilk. Audio comments to +1 206 203-3255. Join the Jaffe Juice Facebook Group.

Direct download here

iTunes Subscription here

R.S.S. Feed here

2m15 - Chris and Kirk answer my part 1 question on which types of movies are most ripe for New Marketing

9m45 - Is there life after the 30-second movie trailer?

13m40 - The amazing SpiderPig (note: it looks like this group has been removed from Facebook)

18m15 - An open invitation to see "Balls of Fury" with me

20m10 - The new influencers - from Twitter to Ask a Ninja

27m40 - Winners & Losers: Chris picks The Simpsons Movie as his winner and Warner Bros as his loser for the rumors around the Justice League of America movie or non-movie. Kirk picks Mark Cuban as his winner (referencing his Maverick approach and also his Internet is Dead post) and HBO as a his loser for not doing more online to keep John from Cincinnati going. I choose  all the companies who have taken risks and experimented in this space as the winners and those who have remained on the sidelines as my losers.

47m45 -  A live call-in from fellow crayonista, Scott Monty with a question about what smaller budget movies can do in the new marketing world.

Links:

http://www.realpie.com

http://www.filmplug.com

http://www.moviemarketingmadness.com

Red-Band Trailers

Winner Mark Cuban's post

MPAA's 2006 U.S. Theatrical Market Statistics (didn't attribute, but stat resource used)
Evan Almighty/Die Hard 4 case study