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CMO strategy in a downturn

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My newest contribution to the Razorfish Headlight blog is now live.   I tried to look at many of the different elements affecting sales and marketing decisions online and in America; I have a very strong perspective that there MUST be a strategic opportunity somewhere for a company seeking to create value.  

These recommendations could translate to other industries, particularly durable goods which are typically financed.  See CMO strategy in a downturn at headlightblog.com.  

Also this month are excellent articles on digital advertising by my colleagues Neal Gorevic, who writes about dealers using video advertising, and Blake Kimball, who writes about new media planning tactics.

McCain Is a Ford, Obama Is a BMW

This story from Ad Age says a new study of Presidential power found that  McCain Is a Ford, Obama Is a BMW. Other associations?

Voters associated Mr. Obama with BMW, Google and Target, while Mr. McCain was compared to Ford, Wal-Mart and AOL.

So, when Obama wins, McCain will have to sign off his dial-up connection, get in his Ford Escort, and buy Efferdent at Wal-Mart.

Jose Canseco- Blog Pioneer?

Reading Dale Tafoya's Bash Brothers: A Legacy Subpoenaed which has been fantastic so far, and I'm finding out all kinds of things about Jose Canseco. Like, did you know Dave Parker said about him at one point, "That man is illegal."

Bashbrothers

Awesome.

What really has me going, though, is that at some point Canseco set up a 900 number where he would record a message every DAY, and you could call in and 900-234-JOSE would give you daily updates on the mundanities of his life. 

If only there had been the internet.

Scary Queen Mary Hotel

Check out this video on travelchannel.com: http://www.travelchannel.com/Video_&_Photos/Video_Detail?lineupId=1387565775&titleId=1387552814

There is a big haunted house there or somethign.  Says one of the proprietors, "You don't really have to  try to frighten people...you just bring them down into the bottom of the ship."  Yeah, great idea, let's go down into the bowels of a ship and try to not get scared.

Crazy corners?  Jutting edges?  Weird doors?  Sounds and smells that are unfamiliar?  Check, check, check.  Rumors of haunting, crazy lights? check, check. 

On the subject of a mother's pride

My mom wrote me an e-mail about William B. Ayers becoming news again. 

I don't know if she intended me to start thinking about the relationship between the 60's political left and today's democratic party, but that's what happened.

Being infamous for pursuing "social justice" has been a sort of badge of honor in the political left since the 60's.   

While Obama is probably right to denounce acts of "domestic terrorism" I wish my generation was as politically engaged as many of Ayers' contemporaries (my mom?).  Some of it went too far, but the death of the political energy of the 60's is a sad moment for America.  It was one thing for Americans to feel oppressed by segregation, and Jim Crow, and the draft, but quite another, in my opinion, to be deceived, and it is this deception which characterized Nixon, and George W. Bush.  It is the system turned against the people, using the system's own rules, which is so corrupt.

John McCain, for all of his heroism and Maverick nature, is (dare I say this) bound up in the ruling cabal of the agents of this abuse, the Republican party.  Sarah Palin is ample evidence of this desecration of American values of truth, fairness,  objectivity, and reason, exchanging them for secrecy, corruption, and "gut".

I think a lot of Obama supporters are in a place where we can see the Weathermen, or the Black Panthers, as the youthful versions of political activists who went on to become engaged adults- well maybe some of them did.  Fox Noise would probably call this a very "northeast media elite" view, I suspect, but that's how I felt when this all came up during the primaries.    I want a president who has met some 60s radicals, and knows where he stands in relation to them.

The New Yorker's endorsement of Obama makes all these points better than I did.

The Choice:The New Yorker Endorses Obama

The New Yorker Endorses Obama.

At a moment of economic calamity, international perplexity, political failure, and battered morale, America needs both uplift and realism, both change and steadiness. It needs a leader temperamentally, intellectually, and emotionally attuned to the complexities of our troubled globe. That leader’s name is Barack Obama.

Agree.  Beards for Bama!

Dear Lance Armstrong, here is what I'm tired of

Tired?  Tired?  I'll tell you something, Lance Armstrong.  I'm tired of being tired of your ads.  I almost wish your silhouette were dancing and trying to sell me a mortgage I can't month.  At least those ads had some pizazz.

Dear_lance_these_ads_suck_a_lot

These ads are worse than the "still single" ads I see of Facebook.  Yes, I am, thanks for reminding me about how many weddings I went to this summer.  But at least those have hot chicks.  Sometimes.

McCain really did say that

New dueling Obama McCain ads on CNN reveal McCain sayoing he wants to deregulate health care just like Banking.  Really?

So I went and looked. The Obama ad I saw on CNN says McCain JUST PUBLISHED an article in Contingencies magazine that praises financial industry deregulation. The relevant except which you can't toatlly see in the ad is:

Opening up the health insurance market to more vigorous nationwide competition, as we have done over the last decade in banking, would
provide more choices of innovative products less burdened by the worst excesses of state-based regulation.

Uh, yeah, let's innovative products like we have in banking, because those worked out real well. Better Care at lower Cost for Every American (pdf)

Our financial crisis, this bailout, and Bush

This post kind of got away from me, but here goes.

I'm following up on a tweet I sent last night:

Mark my words: this treasury-led bailout authorization will be the patriot act of finance. Approved quickly and largely regretted.

A lot of great stuff came my way as I thought about this post.

via @mpakid, this gem in Huffing ton Post by Sen. Bernie Sanders (D-VT)    -  The Middle Class Must Not Be Forced to Bail Out Wall Street Greed.

These are the last days of the Bush administration, the most dishonest and incompetent in modern American history. It is imperative that, at this important moment, Congress stand up for the middle class and for fiscal integrity. The future of our country is at stake.

I watched Friday's episode of Real Time with Bill Maher, and Nation columnist Naomi Klein's book, Disaster Capitalism seems to speak directly to my point of the politicization of our disaster (dot-com bubble, 9/11, Katrina, others she points out, I still need to read the book and I'm not sure I'll 100% agree with it) recovery policies  to consolidate executive power and secure privilege and wealth for friends of the administration. 

The political friends of the Bush Administration over the last 7 years who supported the deregulatory policies which to some degree created this mess, have benefited enormously.  Could it be that the very people who benefit most from these bailouts were at the table helping to decide government policy?  Thanks but no thanks.

This is no less than raid on America. Taking advantage of the opportunity of the moment to rob us of measured, reasoned, policy discussions. The media don't help- Al Gore's Assault on Reason was an excellent treatise on that front.

NYU's jay rosen  via twitter referred to this episode of This American Life

NPR's Adam Davidson, reporter on "The Giant Pool of Money," agrees with me: the bailout is a huge transfer of power to the executive branch.

Mr. Davidson's piece yielded this (de)construction about the us vs. them reality:

Now, until this moment we had a theory that these two groups--the homeowners
and the people at the top of the chain, the investors--had no idea about each other. 
We actually learned they know quite a lot about each other. They just see each other
through a computer screen.

This conflict is the matrix, an artifice which has been pulled over our eyes to blind us to the truth.  We shouldn't be focusing on whether the homeowners or the lenders are the bad guys.  The "bad guys" are the ones who exploit the rules they asked for, and now require a bailout that they help to negotiate??

We're bailing out the people who claimed we needed to give them more room to operate.  To create impossible-to-value derivatives, who took out insurance policies on the uninsurable investments they made?  I'm not saying regulation is always the answer, but sometimes markets fail.  Anyone remember the blackouts in California in 2001?  Deregulation at its level best.

The NPR work makes it evident that there was just SO. MUCH. MONEY. $70 trillion. How much is that?

Think about all the money that people spend everywhere in the world. Everything you bought in the last year, all of it. Then add everything Bill Gates bought. And all the rice sold in China and that fleet of planes Boeing just sold to South Korea. All the money spent and earned in every country on earth in a year: that is LESS than 70 trillion, less than this global pool of money. 

It came from pension funds and all manner of private investment, and especially from nations with oil, and huge trade surpluses, and rapidly growing economies.  The search for where to put this money, to earn more than the absurdly low risk-free return (US Treasury notes, at 1-2% ish)  gave rise to opportunities to invest in the mortgage backed securities, and incentives to do crazier and crazier things.

I think a lot of people, particularly people like me who, "have never known a US economy that wasn't growing," might be grasping for what this is all supposed to mean, and how this all happened. 

There was a time when I thought I was pretty far ahead of the curve for even understanding what a CDO was, in 2006.  Probably only a few of my friends (which includes a few who tried lead generation and mortgage brokering, and a lawyer who puts together the contracts for the securitization of these mortgage pools) really knew about this anytime before 2007.  Or they knew parts of it.

I'm no expert, but I'm sure a citizen.  And this whole thing is a mess, requiring every bit of vigilance we can muster.  This $700 billion bailout is Disaster Capitalism.  It's crisis policymaking, especially given the proximity to the end of the congressional session.  The impossibility of disagreeing with this bailout is the same way we were blinded with the Patriot Act, which was then and is now an unreasonable incursion on the territory of essential liberty.

I'm a person. YOU ARE STILL A PC.

So, I was about to begin this post with a congratulatory note of sorts, directed at Microsoft's marketing dept.  I was briefly interrupted by a magical TD pass by Jay Cutler, but now I'm back. 

I went looking for the video of the ad I just watched on TV.  I am not going to describe it, but it was a reasonable effort, if a decade late (in internet time).  the first result I found was Microsoft's site for this particular campaign, http://imapc.lifewithoutwalls.com/ The glorious thing about this site, is that the first thing it tells me is I need Silverlight to view the site.  How can I "get into the campaign" if I can't even view the fun parts of the site?

So, I have news for you, Microsoft advertising campaign:  I'm a person. YOU ARE STILL A PC.   I don't see how this does anything except make people who own a PC feel a little better about what they already are, which is a person with a computer.    Windows just can't deliver on the feeling of life/computers just plain working- not even the advertising can do that!!  That's Apple's bag, sorry.   

Also, part of the campign was produced using Macs.  Awesome.  And the Broncos scored again.

Out with the old, in with the new...employees?

As someone on his second post-university job, this BNet post is interesting.  My father, or my grandfather, could have expected to hold a job for 20 years if he wanted to. 

And yet, none of my classmates would ever expect that kind of job security - we're constantly being told "that's not how we do business any more."  Goodbye, guaranteed career employment.  Sayonarra, pensions. No more "lifers" or going career.

This article quotes a Knowledge @ Wharton piece featuring the following company dilemma

“a talented and highly trained adjustor from another insurance company. While the hiring company provided high-end insurance with a strong emphasis on customer service, the adjustor came from a company that was more focused on keeping costs down… the adjustor just could not help himself from “nickel and diming” customers on their claims, even though that attitude conflicted sharply with the firm’s strategic direction and culture.”

Part of me thinks this is a pretty inflammatory article- heck, I clicked on it!-  I think the company referenced made a poor hiring choice.  The helpful approach to this issue would be about how to see a previous company's culture in the screening process. 

Any company worth its salt should be willing to make a significant investment training and retaining employees committed to the company's goals and culture.  This article makes me wonder how a firm that feels it is facing issues hiring employees from outside should react - on a corporate strategy level- by creating a talent acquisition program for young employees and giving them the impression that the company can secure their future.

I know big firms like GE and IBM have programs like this, and I know a few people who got offers in various rotational training programs for Wells Fargo or the like, but the thing is: most of them didn't take those jobs.  If you want to have a compnay whose profitability is driven by adherence to a customer service culture, you're better off following Zappos example than by worrying about where your employees come from.

Early aviation routes in Europe, bold entrepreneurs

Posting a link to a new blog I found via an old friend.  It's interesting how surfacing himself on Facebook led me to discover this blog; to all those who think they have had enough of FB, I say Bah.

This is a cool post  inspired by a map of early aviation routes in Europe (ca. 1929).  It's a reminder that many "utilities" like railroads and aviation had moments of entrepreneurial exuberance, booms, busts, etc.  And here we are now with essential transportation (air travel) encumbered by rising fuel costs, and Amtrak really only turning a profit on the Northeast corridor, until their cars break down.

What might this mean for tech?  I think we're realizing that we can survive exuberance and that there can genuinely be some great things to come from that experience, but that the cycles are getting closer together.   I read somewhere that the speed of the flow of information means that what used to take a generation takes less than a decade.  We're in for a ride!

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Marketing healthy foods is not like marketing regular food

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http://www.news.cornell.edu/stories/Oct05/book.wansink.ssl.html

 

Kind of dated, at this point but still an interesting idea that “Unfortunately, many people will not eat any better even if we can get them to pass a nutrition quiz."  In this particular case, inasmuch as I personally can make a good food choice, i might not always be in control of the meal's preparation.   Cornell researchers are studying this and other issues at the Cornell University Food and Brand Lab

This is probably why I like eating at The Pump so much.  I know that when I order grilled chicken, brown rice and black bean chili, that is exactly what I will get.  I know that I'll always get wheat instead of bleached flour products, and no butter or other unhealthy stuff. 

Other restaurants don't promise as much, so when you order their chicken sandwich, what kind sof marinades, condiments, sides and additives will you get?  I thought the idea of payting such close attention to the foods I eat was kind of creepy until I tried it.  Now, it's how I live my life.

 

I think in a lot of businesses there is a legitimate question about who should receive the marketing message- sometimes it’s not the consumer.

Let's Run Breast Cancer out of town!

I'm running in the Komen Race for the cure this September 14 in Central Park.

My mom rocks, and I'm running for her and for the idea that others can get the kind of care she received.  Victories are sweet, as are worthy endeavors.

With any luck, I'll also figure out how long a kilometer is.  Visit my race page to make a donation or to join me on the trail.

http://www.komennyc.org/goto/bsbnyc

Compulsory license for US music- similar to Britain's TV tax?

Interesting way of conceptualizing the search for a way for everyone to pay for music. In a “blanket licensing” scheme, everyone pays some money to their ISP which is then distributed to labels/artists. I think there is a sense that micropayments just aren’t going to work any time soon, so maybe this is a good alternative.

The BBC is funded by a compulsory Television Licence, which according to wikipedia is a kind of "hypothecation tax"  (Note to self: use hypothecation to win at Scrabble some time) which seems to work, though it requires some level of enforcement. 

Ultimately, the argument that

No civilized society, [Warner music consultant Jim Griffin] adds, can endure "purely voluntary payment for art, knowledge, and culture."

Amen to that.  We as a society are so litigious that we only deal in the extremes, it appears.  We've got the pirates vs. the record companies, with the the companies unable as a practical matter to recover from damages from every person with an "infringing use."   The strategy this far has been to sue anyone they can find "making available" files on a files-sharing network. 

In reality, if everyone paid a little, we might have a much better policy than no one (or a minority) paying "some."

Read the story, reported from the PFF's Aspen event, here "Functionally voluntary" music may lead to blanket licenses.

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Why Nothing is Easy until it's Tough first

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In a recent article I wrote for the Headlight blog, I wrote about data portability, but I was largely describing a world we're not quite living in yet.

What will happen first among a lot of services is that we will have lots of innovation, and many solutions to the same problem.  The strong solutions, and the solutions created by smart people, will coalesce into standards that arer adopted for the future.

We are at the point where the IETF isn't the standars body people are looking to now- instead of data communications standards, the battleground is at the application level.  Creating web applications with good interfaces is now a totally democratized effort.  his will mean chaos, probably for a while.  Competing standards.  Facebook vs. Google.  Social graphs vs. brute force indexing.  But eventually there will be shakeout.  It sure took a long time for the HD-DVD vs Blu-Ray wars to be over, buit that's what we are in for.  the only thing that is encouraging aboutt his on a web servicrews level is that from a cash perspective it is  easier for a user to make a choice among competing web services (typically because they are free).

But the subsequent shakeout shows us that even if the service is free, user attention and effort which goes into the serivce has value.  Users in a community create value for each other; they are paying for this servie one way or another. It is at this point, ewith userr value locked up somehwre, that the questiuon of portable data becomes important.  What now?