Greg Verdino

Do you feel Lucky... kid?

Lucky Brand Jeans, that is. 

This week my wife was in San Francisco for a conference and, with time to kill, she and a colleague made their way over to the Lucky Kid store -- apparently the only store of its kind in the U.S. -- to buy some designer duds for our three-year-old daughter.  Now, you could argue whether any toddler needs Lucky Jeans (my wife would say yes), but that's not my point here.

The floor staff looked like the staffers at many other retail clothing stores: in a word, teenagers.  But it was how they behaved that set them apart.  As my wife and her colleague browsed the racks, one of the staffers started a dialogue with my wife -- can i help you find anything?  can i help with sizes?  etc.

Here's where it got interesting.  When my wife told the Lucky staffer our daughter's height and weight, the staffer didn't simply confirm that our daughter would fit into a 4T, she said "wow, she's tall and thin!"  With this simple insight, the Lucky employee turned the shopping experience into something personal, comfortable and meaningful beyond "stuff on a hangar."  More dialogue followed -- about why my wife was in town, where the Luckster attended school, and even a bit about marketing (turns out the staffer is a marketing major at a local college.)  In essence, shopper and retailer built an instant micro-relationship beyond the product.

It's hard to tell whether this approach is driven by the corporate parent, the local retail manager or the individual employee, but it is a clear point of differentiation in a world where the shopping experience is often "blah" at best. 

Is this just superior sales skills?  Maniacal focus on customer service?  An extension of the brand itself - Seth Godin's "free prize"?  Or just smart consumer-centric marketing?

Of course, it doesn't really matter.  What matters is that my wife left the store with a story to tell, and she told it.  And now I'm retelling it to anyone who reads this blog.  I'd bet some of you may share the story too.  Having heard this story, some of us may go out and buy our kids some Lucky clothing.  And that's exactly how this kind of thing should work.

GV sighting: Tampa Tribune

Yesterday, Nielsen Media Research announced their plans to launch a ratings product that measures in-game ad exposures, as well as the impact of gameplay behavior on TV viewership.  I spoke with a reporter from the Tampa Tribune and provided my thoughts for today's article on the launch.   For more on Nielsen's gameplay measurement service, check out this article from Mike Shields in AdWeek (free for all today, may require registration tomorrow.)

Better business blogging

Over at MarketingProfs:Daily Fix, Ann Handley is blogging about some of the ways businesses can blog better (repeat that seven times, fast.)  Ann's post presents great advice for business and personal bloggers alike, but with many corporations getting blogging wrong (or simply not "getting" blogging at all) this is a fantastic primer and essential reading for any marketing pro or agency exec looking to join the conversation.

Second thoughts about Second Life

Over the past couple of days, a couple of blogs (like Organic's Three Minds and Digitas' own Digital Hive) have been yakking about Reuters' decision to open a virtual news bureau in Second Life.  Headed by veteran tech and media reporter Adam Passick (pictured to the left in avatar form), this new bureau will report on goings-on in the Second Life virtual world.  On Monday, WSJ reporter Emily Steel asked several of us at Digitas what we thought of this move.  Around the table, the general concensus was that three years from now we'll all look back at this as a vaguely ridiculous artifact of Web 2.0 euphoria.

But then I started thinking, maybe it won't seem so ridiculous after all.  Second Life is growing into a vibrant, if entirely fabricated and still relatively small and geek-heavy, community.  So in the grand scheme, is putting an embedded reporter here much different from putting an embedded reporter in Kosovo or manning a White House bureau?  Something is happening far from home, and we can gain an interesting perspective from a man on the inside.  Sure, it is a bit surprising that a major news bureau would act on this so quickly -- but not more surprising than major brands like Starwood and American Apparel setting up shop inside Second Life.  And sure, Second Life certainly isn't as important as those real world bureaus, but I'm sure you get my point.

I've been in the business of emerging media since the term referred to nothing more than Internet radio.  Naysayers scoffed at Broadcast.com's business model and didn't anticipate that consumers would really want to listen to audio over the web.  And of course Mark Cuban now owns the Mavericks...

As recently as three years ago, the notion of a global community aggregating around a series of shot form vide clips, posted anonymously to a public web site was quite literally the stuff of science fiction - this concept is central to the plot of William Gibson's 2003 novel Pattern Recognition.  And look at where broadband video in general, and consumer generated video, stands today.

So maybe Reuters' move will look ridiculous.  Or maybe it will look visionary. 

Perhaps it's time for all of us to tweak our avatars and get on board :-)  Here's my Meez avatar, which is actually a decent likeness.

 

Meez is a beta service that allows any web user to customize a personal avatar and then distribute that avatar on their social network page, blog, or other personal page -- hardly Second Life-ready but definitely a cool little bit of tech. 

Blog's eye view: Jaffe, Armano, CK, Kalehoff and me

The blogosphere is abuzz with talk about David Armano's "blog's eye view' presentation here at Digitas NY yesterday.  Putting a handful of heavy-weight marketing bloggers in a room together really underscores what I've always understood intuitively but had never seen in action.  In addition to David and myself, Joseph Jaffe, CK and Nielsen/BuzzMetrics' Max Kalehoff were in attendance.

I'm the new kid on the block, but these other folks have been blogging for a while now and have established loyal followings and marketplace influence.  Having said this, few (if any) of them had ever met in person - sure, they know each other through their posts and comments, but most had never actually stood together in the same room.  Until yesterday...

Here we are - Max, CK, Jaffe, David and me.  Incidentally, reporter Emily Steel from the Wall Street Journal took this picture - take that mainstream media!  ;-)

Despite the fact that these people were for the most part meeting for the first time, it was as if the group were old friends.  Blogging (or broadly, all of social media) is a conversation among people, and it although takes place in the ether and may be widely distributed (unfettered by geography and timezone) this conversation is every bit as real as one that takes place between two people standing around a watercooler.  Social media is all about relationships - real, virtual or somewhere in between.  And that's something that every marketer that is thinking about establishing a stake in social media needs to think about.

If you haven't already done so (ya know, because you were to rapt with attention as you read this post) follow the links throughout the post to see what the other bloggers are saying about the event - and to download a copy of David's presentation (from his site.)

When worlds collide

A funny thing happened on the way to David Armano's blogging presentation...  I was chatting with Joseph Jaffe, who I met in person for the first time today, when his Blackberry buzzed.  He checked his incoming mail and exclaimed, "Oh, you just made a comment on my blog."  And indeed I had - a few minutes earlier I hit Jaffe Juice, read today's post and commented that I looked forward to meeting him. I guess my feet were faster than the ether. :-)

Obsession with confession

Many digital moons ago, the PostSecret blog popularized the art of the internet confessional, but I'm sure the creators wouldn't have anticipated that their art project would spawn a number of imitators in the ad world. 

In the age of participatory media, where 15-minutes of fame is nearly ubiquitous (I have a MySpace page, a Facebook profile, a webcam and of course this blog), the lure of the anonymous confession seems to hold plenty of appeal for both exhibitionists and voyeurs.  Just one more way new technologies are being tapped to satisfy age-old compulsions.  So advertisers coopted the form in the interest of engaging consumers and tapping into the public consciousness.

Arguably, Method hand soap was the first to play into our confession obsession, asking women to "come clean".  Secret followed suit, prompting women visit their site "share your secret".  Both tap into the confessional format to promote hygeine products and, given their very nature, come across as a bit tawdry (which isn't necessarily a bad thing given that CPG has never been a category known for edgy marketing campaigns.)  If Method was first, they had the novelty factor working in their favor.  Secret's approach may no longer have been novel, but it was bigger, higher profile (it even included out-of-home executions that allows consumers to text their secrets to appear on Times Square billboards.)

Well, there's a new confessional campaign running now, to promote the upcoming film Fast Food Nation, based on Eric Schlosser's non-fiction expose of the unethical business practices in the fast food industry.  Well in the new media space, where constant innovation is a hardcore requirement, third time is not a charm... And in this case, the approach is ill advised and may actually work against the product. 

Fox Searchlight's unbranded Do You Want Lies With That micro-site prompts visitors to confess lies they have told "as part of your job."  (BTW, interesting qualifier and one that elicits such juicy tidbits as 'i told a caller my boss was out of the office when he was really sitting right there.'  Ooh - scintillating.)  After the visitor confesses their lie, the character voiceover reciprocates and confesses hers - that she is simply promoting a new film with an "important social message."

I've reproduced the basic flow below:

No doubt, the film has an important social message - yet the very nature of the consumer dialogue at the microsite trivializes that message by (1) comparing it to visitors own relatively minor indiscretions and (2) seems to correlate Fox's own "unethical behavior" of luring consumers into an unbranded sales pitch with the more signficant transgressions of the fast food industry (as depicted in Fast Food Nation.)  Very strange...

But wait, it gets worse...  Once visitors make it through this sequence, they land on the film's main web site, where it looks like someone vomited Web 2.0 all over the place.  RSS feeds? Blog posts?  del.icio.us tags?  A Tag cloud?  YouTube links?  Yup - the site has them all.  I've reproduced part of the page below (I cropped out the top portion of the page, which links to trailers, etc for the film) - and yes, that is a link to the ubiquitous and much maligned DiddyTV in the lower left of the screengrab.

I must confess - I found this entire approach to be wrong, wrong, wrong.

A little help from my friends

I am working on a presentation that I plan to use at a couple of internal Digitas trainings (and may ultimately repurpose into a client-facing document) to help agency managers understand how to best activate social networks and online communities to meet client marketing needs.  I'm going in with several hypotheses, including:

1) Brands need to be open, authentic and totally transparent if they want to be accepted by the communities they hope to influence and engage

2) Brands need to find their risk threshold -- the line between "policing the brand" and "releasing the brand" -- before deciding if, how and when they will play in social media

3) The most important "brand conversations" that take place in social media are those among consumers without heavy-handed brand intervention (e.g., digital word of mouth), and those that are directed TOWARD the brand FROM the consumer (not the other way around.)  In other words, give 'em something to talk about and then get out of the way; and when your customers talk, listen...

While looking for tidbits from the blogosphere and mainstream press to support my points, I came across this great MarketingProfs post by CK.  If you're reading my blog chances are you are interested in social media marketing, so you may find CK's post as useful as I did.  She writes mostly about how to play fair in the blogosphere but her principles apply to other forms of social media as well.

By sheer coincidence Hooman Radfar over at Clearspring Technologies sent me this New York Times link, which illustrates some of the right and not-so-right ways in which marketers are tapping social networks to promote their brands - making it clear why marketers would do well to heed CK's advice.  Happy reading. :-)

(And credit due to colleague David Armano for the visual representation of the social network.)

GV Sighting: AdWeek

Today's AdWeek features reporter Brian Morrissey's ongoing coverage of Google's YouTube acquisition.  I spoke with Brian last week and today's article references our conversation.  From the article:

"Only a small percentage of the 100 million videos served daily by YouTube are content adverisers would want to be associated with, noted Greg Verdino, head of emerging channels at Digitas.  And even then, standard placements, whether text or video in social media like YouTube, do little to tap into their community potential, he added."

Later in the article, I am quoted as saying: "Up until now, Google's video strategy has been lacking."

You can read Brian's complete article here [open to all today but may require subscription afer 24 hours.]

Buena musica social club

Last week I wrote about social commerce, the next wave of social networking that combines consumer recommendations and (sometimes) person-to-person sales, and has the potential to change the way wired consumers learn of new products, research them and even buy them.  Today, I am looking at the trend toward s-commerce in the music category.

A series of new music services look to pick up where MySpace left off, combining community, social recommendations and commerce to sell new music from underground and mainstream artists alike.  Pandora and Last.fm probably led the charge, offering dynamically generated music playlists that take into account your musical preferences along with the likes of other users that share your some of your tastes.  Early stage start-ups Qloud, Hype Machine and Haystack join the social music fray.  Each brings its own unique spin - Qloud's social search functionality, Hype Machine's aggregation of music blog recommendations, Haystack's MySpace-style community that brings together bands, listeners and a combination of professional and citizen tastemakers - in the interest of driving new music sales, particularly for artists outside the spotlight.

Power to the people, to be sure.  But listen to hundreds or thousands of recommendations from people you otherwise know little to nothing about and all you're likely to hear is white noise.  In a world where everyone has the power to be a tastemaker, who accounts for taste?  Sure, over time certain citizen tastemakers will rise to the top of the heap - consistent trustworthy recommendations will allow users to identify others who exhibit "taste we can trust."  But until that time, most of us will need guideposts.

In this area, it seems like Haystack has it closest-to-right.  Their planned inclusion of professional tastemakers (magazine reviewers, industry insiders, the artists themselves) gives listeners someplace to start.  Want to know what's hot in electronica?  See what Moby is listening to.  Really into The Living End?  Check out the other Aussie artists that The Living End recommend.  In the long run you might opt to follow the lead of a select group of true citizen tastemakers, people just like you that love the music you love.  But access to recommendations from professional tastemakers and other music industry insiders provides an easy way to get value out of the service before you're ready to trust that Jenna S from Hoboken NJ really does have good taste in midwesten indie rock.  And with click-to-buy functionality, Haystack promises to turn social recommendations into working s-commerce.  Interesting model and one that seems to hold some promise for music lovers and artists alike.

It is obviously too soon to tell whether social music services like Haystack, or any of the others mentioned here, will thrive -- and whether they will become a significant driver of new music sales.  But as retail music chains shut their doors and the long tail gets longer and longer, services that serve up guidance from professionals and consumers alike, in a way that is curated or filtered so that the cream rises to the top, seem like a smart path forward.