Greg Verdino

Hey honey, waddaya think of the new shed?

Remember "QVC meets MTV" hipster shopping site Honeyshed?  I don't blame you if you don't.  They beta launched a while back to much fanfare and some not-so-hot reviews, only to go into hibernation before getting out of beta or attracting much of an audience. 

Well, they're back -- totally revamped and raring to go. 

Bankrolled by Publicis and billed as "Home Shopping for the Digital Generation," Honeyshed rolls on-demand videos of cool(ish), (at least somewhat) attractive young people pitching everything from t-shirts and panties to gadgets and DVDs.  The site comes with all the usual social media trappings -- viewers can review products, share them on social sites and even submit videos of themselves hawking their own stuff.  And has a clear, well executed e-commerce tie-in -- you can click through to the sponsors' own commerce engines to buy whatever you like or "stash" products you might be interested in buying later.  The content doesn't seem to be as weird and off-putting as I remember from the first launch, but it still has a clear post-YouTube sensibility (but thankfully, old school post-MTV production values.)

So will Honeyshed work this time?  That depends on whether or not the team can lure in enough paying sponsors interested in having their products showcased on segments.  No sponsors; no revenue; no content...  And if Honeyshed is gonna pull this off, they'll need to attract a sizable audience in the right demographic.

So the real question is: will the new Honeyshed appeal to the digital generation? 

Did the gang at Honeyshed get the tone right this time?  Will twenty-somethings log on for their daily dose of a hipper Home Shopping Network?  Will Gen Y and Millenials find the paid-for pitches credible, and does this even matter so long as it's clear that that's exactly what they're tuning in for?  Is this even how people shop anymore? 

Let's ask some of them.  I'm hoping that my favorite honeybee, a real live digital girl, a social media guy and the smartest USC marketing grad student I know will be willing to give it a whirl and chime in.  While we're at it, I wonder whether Aronado thinks Honeyshed is lucky or sucky.

And of course I'd love to hear from the rest of you too -- what do you think?

Check out the site -- it's live now -- or if you're really lazy, I've embedded a slideshow of screengrabs below [feed and email readers will need to click to the blog to see the embed.]

Honeyshed Sneak Peek

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: gregverdino verdino)

Disclosure: I used to work at Publicis-owned Digitas and personally know some of the current Honeyshed management team.  I left before Honeyshed launched and I don't owe them nothin'. :-)

Innovation is...

How do you define innovation? 

As Jon Burg -- a colleague from my Digitas days and an all-around wicked smart guy (pictured here wearing a top hat -- yes, a top hat) -- posits on his new blog, Future Visions, we all use the word but probably have very different things in mind when we say it.

Is it simply about being first?  About pushing the envelope?  About sparking a revolution or maybe just a bit of an evolution? Or maybe it's about combining two known things in a way that is totally new and unexpected.  I could go on...

Given the constant drive to innovate in media and marketing -- so much so that some clients bnus their agencies based on the magnitude of the innovations they introduce into the marketing mix -- coming to a shared understanding seems like a pretty good idea.

With that in mind, Jon has issued an open call for input -- check out his post and weigh in. 

He'd love to hear from lots and lots of marketing folks like you - and plans to bubble up everyone's input into some kind of graphical representation (watch your back Armano) that highlights the common threads, most commonly used phrases and the collective wisdom of the crowd.

I'll be sure to give Jon my thoughts - and to help spark the conversation, I'd like to put a call out to a baker's dozen of my blogfriends -- CC, CK, Cam, Darren, David, Drew, Gavin, Matt, Karl, Paul, Ryan,  Scott and Valeria.  I hope all of you (and anyone else reading this post) can help Jon out on this one.  He's a good guy -- really -- top hat aside...

I'm talking to you

The "Greg Verdino Talk Tour" rolls into New York City next week. 

Dialed In: Mobile Marketing.  On Monday June 11th (@6pm), I'll be participating in the latest Dialed In event presented by 212NYC Interactive Advertising Club.  In addition to me, this panel discussion will feature mobile experts from enPocket, Free 411, Millward Brown and Hachette Filipacchi.  I believe you need to be a 212NYC member to attend.

Explore Second Life.  On Wednesday June 13th (@7pm), I will be presenting my Second Life for Marketers virtual world deep-dive for the ThirdWay Brand Trainers speaker series.  This even is open to the public and advance tickets are available at a discount, so I hope my fellow New Yawkas can make it.

I'll be announcing more summer speaking engagements in the coming week.  Also, don't forget about MarketingProfs' free virtual conference on B2B marketing (June 13th) and you can always see where I'll be presenting by checking my speaking schedule in the righthand sidebar.

Look, listen and learn

Just a quick post to point you to the podcasts -- one video, one audio -- recorded at a couple of my recent speaking engagements.  Combined, they're loaded with great insights about digital and virtual marketing from key executives at Avenue A/Razorfish, Microsoft, Operative, Tacoda, American Cancer Society, Disney, Harvard Business Review and The Electric Sheep Company.  Click through and check them out.

Watch here. First up, you can see the video highlights from last week's NextNY "community conversation" on the future of advertising, courtesy of the gang at video and podcast production house For Your Imagination.

Listen here. Second, I somehow just came across the audio podcast from my Virtual Worlds 2007 panel on integrating real world and metaverse marketing activities, courtesy of the RezNation/SecondCast crew.

It's Rupert's space

The other 177 million of us just hang out there.  As MySpace faces off with widget makers, this is the message Fox Interactive Media is delivering not only to the partners/competitors/acquisition targets that make widgets and rely on established community sites for distribution, but to the advertisers and consumers that count on consumer-driven viral distribution for social media success.  Last week I spoke with Advertising Age's Abbey Klaassen about this very topic.  Our conversation is peppered throughout Abbey's piece in this week's issue.

For me, the bottom line is this:

It's bad for advertisers.  The holy grail of social network marketing is getting people to voluntarily pull our brands into their personal site experiences (e.g., their profiles) and help us spread our messages throughout the community.  But we're not simply looking at your community -- we want to create bite-sized brand experiences that can be distributed, without prejudice, throughout any community in which our customers participate.

It's bad for consumers.  Personal pages and profiles are all about self-expression. Anything that flies in the face of consumers' ability to create and distribute as they see fit will by definition claw back some of the control that consumers have seized since the start of the social media revolution.  It's all well and good to offer your members a suite of content tools (for video, photos, etc.) but as long as your members are creating and sharing content through other services, they'll want to express themselves by pulling that content into their profiles.

And at the end of the day, it's bad for MySpace -- but somehow the folks at Fox Interactive Media don't see it this way.  When you restrict advertisers' ability to connect with consumers as they see fit, the smart advertisers take their checkbooks elsewhere.  When you restrict consumer choice in an age of consumer control and virtually unlimited choice, at least some of them will go elsewhere too.  This allows tier two competitors like Facebook, Bebo and Orkut to gain some much-needed traction, and opens the door for savvy upstarts like Freewebs to steal both members and revenue.

So congratulations MySpace, by locking down your network and attempting to assert corporate control over your partners, advertisers and members you have officially become "old media."  Ironic, given that Mr. Murdoch has been getting kudos lately for his enlightened view on the shifting media landscape.  Time to put your money (erm, actually our money) where your mouth is...

This blog turned (top) 25 this week

I'm happy to report that I've cracked the Viral Garden list of Top 25 Marketing Blogs, coming in right at #25.  I'll wait to see if I can hold my spot on the list before I add the Top 25 badge to my sidebar, but in the meantime it's a nice milestone in my relatively short and checkered blogging career.  Thanks to my readers for helping me make it to the list. 

I'm brewing a "real" post and that'll be coming soon, but if you're looking for more smart marketing stuff in the meantime, the Top 25 is a great place to start (maybe there's someone on there that you're not yet reading), as is the Feedburner Marketing and Advertising group feed -- organized by Eric Friedman of Marketing.fm fame, the feed aggregates content from a few dozen blogs, including (as of this morning) mine.

GV Sighting: BusinessWeek points here

Nice pick-up by Bruce Nussbaum at BusinessWeek.  Cool.

GV Sighting: in MediaPost about Second Life

Nice bit of press in today's MediaPost Online Media Daily, holding forth on Second Life and the recently released comScore numbers about global SL usage. 

Co-hosting Jaffe's Across The Sound #77

I'm co-hosting this week's episode of Joseph Jaffe's Across The Sound podcast.  Jaffe and I have a lively discussion about new marketing, the accountability of CMOs, social media as a strategic component of any marketing campaign and why jetBlue, AOL and mainstream media are losers (but DraftFCB and Nikon aren't.) 

Recorded on Sunday morning while I stared wistfully out my window at the breaking St. Augustine Beach surf and wondered why I agreed to tape a podcast during my vacation, this is a rockin' hour-long new marketing tour de force (if I don't say so myself.)

Listen now

Leave your kudos here, your complaints at Jaffe's crib :-)

Up next: six media trends

Today, I'm speaking to Digitas's NY office marketing capability about new marketing and emerging media trends.  I'll be giving this same talk several times over the next couple of weeks -- after NY, I'll present this content to our Boston VPs and then a cross-functional group from Digitas, Digitas Health and Modem Media. 

I thought it would be fun to share some of my slides here.  They comprise just one section of my presentation, where I walk through six trends that all marketers need to know about -- some present immediate opportunities while others herald fundamental shifts in how people will come to consume media.  I cover off on the basics of emerging media and new marketing in other sections of the presentation, so don't expect to see social media 101, widgets, gaming, personalization or brand content creation.  Instead, this is the portion of my presentation where I give the audience a glimpse into the near future and take them on a guided tour of some next generation media properties (including some that won't launch until later this year.)

You may have already noticed that my "six trends" are really only "five" -- two are so closely related that they could be one.  Let's not get technical. :-)  Other than critiques of my shady math, I'd love to hear your thoughts.

Today's event has some added cool factor for me -- we're holding it offsite at the Helen Mills Theater.  Seth Godin will be speaking here next month when he brings his Dip Tour to NYC. Yo Seth, Greg Verdino wuz here. ;-)