Friday, December 29, 2006

The Coke and Mentos Meme

I expect that you're familiar with the dramatic outcomes from mixing Coke and Mentos mints. Tens of millions of people have watched thousands of different videos (almost 1,400 on Google Video alone) of people dropping Mentos into Coke bottles on all the major video sharing sites.



If you take a look at the search volumes for Coke Google Trends (below, in blue) there's a noticeable impact of the phenomenon. The global volume of searches is higher for Coke than at any other point in its history. The significance of this is hard to isolate, particularly as Trends doesn't offer a scale. For example, why would anyone search on Coke if they weren't looking for something like this? Coke, too, isn't the kind of brand that needs to benefit from increased awareness. It does, however, benefit from consideration and preference. Do these videos deliver this? If you consider Coke's efforts in digital music downloads and compare the quantity and quality of interaction with the brand I suspect that this meme is an extremely useful one for them.



Google Trends for Coke



Coke, however, is just half the equation. When you overlay the volume of searches for Mentos (below in red) on the graph from above you can see a brand benefitting by a whole new order of magnitude. Mentos does not have the awareness of Coke and these videos won't change that. I wonder though, if Mentos marketers are in the habit of taking regular ACP studies - if so I bet this phenomenon would be sufficiently significant to be measured.


Google Trends for Coke and Mentos

I chatted with a guy who works on Mentos in Europe and it sounds as though they're ecstatic about the situation, having had nothing to do with creating it. The impact on sales has been significant as well.

Sunday, December 17, 2006

Scrubs is Meme-tastic

Ever worried that one of your favourite comedies has been on television a bit too long? The same characters, telling the same jokes...

The TV show Scrubs has produced a voice-over homage to the Charlie Brown's Christmas - the animated special that has been played on TV in North America every Christmas for the last four decades or so.



Mildly amusing, easy to pass on, easy to broadcast, benefiting from celebrity and existing cultural references.

This is meme-tastic

Meme-tastic Project

I've decided to start keeping a little record of online marketing or content that is meme-tastic.

A meme is, roughly, a unit of knowledge. Memetics is the study of how memes are passed between people.

People, for instance, know they should plan ahead in part because of:

  • 'a stitch in time saves nine'
  • 'an ounce of prevention saves a pound of cure'

    These are good ideas that have an elegant oral/cultural vehicle that passes them along. They're meme-tastic (I've made that up I think - out of laziness more than anything else).

    My interest in this subject is partly due to the fact that it's a point of intersection of traditional and emerging advertising. Mark Ritson has done some really interesting work about how advertising effectiveness is drawn significantly from how people interact with messaging culturally - whether they ignore it or talk about it.

    There's a belief around the office at the moment that the best medium for broadcasting advertising that makes people talk is television. While this may not be entirely true (there are an increasing number of internet-based memes that people have in common), it is still mostly true. The exception in advertising (as opposed to PR) is online viral advertising - a sub-industry that needs a lot of work.

    Memetics is roughly related to viral advertsing. There are virals that are meme-tastic and there are virals that make everybody work a bit too hard. Bad virals sacrifice brand values in order to gain a foothold with an initial user and then over-incentivise people to spam their friends. A meme-tastic viral is worth sharing for its own sake and helps build a brand, attaching positive associations with the brand.

    The aim of my 'project' is to put together a list of good and bad examples for future reference. These won't necessarily be viral campaigns. There are two kinds of 'meme-tastic' communication.

    The first is where the idea/concept is brilliant or interesting - it fits perfectly with a social situation, a brand or a zeitgeist and people just want to pass it on. Take, for example, the way that everybody knows that Dell Laptop batteries have been blowing up, or how for six weeks this fall people have been saying 'Yagshemesh.'

    The second kind of meme-tastic communication is for idea/concepts that are a little bit more banal but where the communication is facilitated by a cunning mass communicator or a piece of technology.

    If you have any good examples I'd love to hear about them.

  • Saturday, December 16, 2006

    Technorati Find

    MC Hammer has a blog . Its most notable feature is that he signs off every post with "Hammertime".

    Monday, December 11, 2006

    Pilot Podcast

    We've done a small test with video podcasting via an online publisher that went live last week on the VNU network in Germany. HP has licensed what sounds like a nice piece of kit. It's a mouse that sits and charges in the pc card slot of notebooks and is bluetooth. VNU filmed a short review of the product and has posted it to a number of their sites.

    I suspect that, in the near future, this kind of initiative will go through PR agencies rather than media agencies. I think, though, that this little mini-campaign wil be a pretty cost-effective media buy. Advertisers are, on the whole, probably paying over the odds to drive people to their websites in order to deliver content to them. Video streaming in ads has been possible for quite a while but the barriers to execution were relatively numerous. You Tube, Daily Motion & Google Video have had a big impact on the feasibility of syndicating video and it's a great opportunity for advertisers.


    Zeddigital Conference

    I spent a couple of days in Marrakech last week at a 'summit' attended by representatives of many of our offices around the world. As an advertising network we're really picking up some steam. Unfortunately, I missed most of the sessions due to a meeting on the first day of the conference - Marrakech isn't that easy to get to, even from London.

    There were a couple of highlights from my half-day of sessions though.

    One was a presentation by Joel Lunenfeld, who's a SVP at Moxie Interactive a US-based full service digital agency that was recently acquired by Publicis Groupe. They have a strong client list and are doing some great work, joining up creative, media, web development and data mining. I'm sure that there will be lots of opportunities to learn from them.

    The other highlight was having a chat with Jarek Sosinski, a digital planner in our Polish office. Poland is a really interesting market to keep an eye on. It's rapidly growing into an economic contender and the impact is definitely being felt in the online advertising business. Jarek was telling me, though, that there are very few 'global' online brands operating effectively in Poland. Audiences are large and growing and usage is high but the only non-Polish brand that has succeeded in imposing itself is Google.

    I get the impression that Poles like to do things there own way - if sites don't develop Polish versions (English still isn't common for adults there) then they're sufficiently entrepreneurial to develop their own content. They have, for instance, their own portals, their own advertising formats and their own instant messenger technology.

    The market forces in Poland are such that things are developing at different paces than in other markets. Of all our offices they are the most experienced at engaging in forums and bulletin boards (i.e. User Generated Content 0.9). They're currently planning a campaign for one of our UK clients, advertising bank accounts to Poles planning to move to London.

    Jarek and I also had a chuckle about Windows Vista - depending on the anti-piracy coding in it Poland may well adopt it faster then any other market in Europe.

    A snapshot of London Web

    I had a pretty useful day of meetings yesterday with a client who was in town for a couple of days. He has a remit to test emerging media channels for marketing.

    We spent the day with people and companies that are ahead of the curve when it comes to embracing the development of the web. There is, I think, a lot of innovation going on in the UK and much of it is proving fruitful.

    We met with Google to talk about what they're doing beyond search.

    We spent some time with Katie Lee from Shiny Media . They're a group of Blogs that have posted some impressive figures with what has got to be an attractive audience to the right advertisers. There has been a lot of talk about how the internet 'democratises' publishing. Most of this talk is bumph but I think that Shiny are a great example of when it is true. With three permanent staff and freelance writers they've tracked 2.3m visitors in November. I wonder what ITV.com gets....

    Euan Semple spent about an hour with us talking about some of his experiences with using social computing as Knowledge Management and Internal Communications solutions. He's not, as far as I can tell, a technology expert but, more importantly, has gained considerable experience at overcoming the barriers and identifying the opportunities that organisations are faced with when they seek to implement these tools.

    Our final session was at the VNU UK offices in Soho. IT sites generally are responding bullishly to the way the internet is changing and VNU is no exception. They've been investing in video, developing new features, updating CMS, podcasts, etc... They're likely benefiting substantially from a couple of solid years of ad sales and also feeling the pressure to respond to changing platforms.

    All in all, it was a good day. A nice cross-section, by no means exhaustive, of a booming industry that is adapting quickly.

    Sunday, November 19, 2006

    Real World Wide Web

    I was in a meeting with Tim Kindberg this week. He works for HP in research and development at the HP Labs in Bristol. One of his projects is physical hyperlinks. This is by no means a new technology - it's already been put to use by the BBC and won an award.

    The idea is that physical objects could have a unique barcode printed on them that can be photographed by a mobile phone. The image leads to a unique reference point on the web which contains information. The technology was used as part of the BBC series Coast. Scenic walks were marked with posters that included these tags and linked to various pieces of information. You can learn more on the Active Print site.

    There are a couple of barriers to this technology taking off. Having seen it in action, though, I'm much more convinced than I was. Properly integrated into phones it could be very easy to use and very useful. The phone tells you when you've succeeded in capturing the barcode - a major plus for usability.

    There are, by the sounds of it, two major hurdles. The first is getting the appropriate software embedded into phones. The second is standardisation of codes.

    This technology has all kinds of possible applications. The 'barcode' could, in theory, execute any number of activities on a phone. It could probably replace phone numbers on business cards, for instance.

    It could definitely act as an easily traceable response mechanic on outdoor and ambient advertising. It could add real value to consumers and be easily trackable for media spend optimisation.

    Some of the ideas that Tim covered were:

  • real time travel information at bus stops and on train platforms
  • in-store promotions
  • response mechanism on outdoor
  • incentive delivery on outdoor to increase footfall
  • map download from online to mobile

    If you have another one, please feel free to comment...

  • Saturday, November 18, 2006

    Gartner Hype Cycle

    Has the buzz about Second Life been annoying you? There's a conceptual framework called the Hype Cycle developed by Gartner that I find useful most weeks at helping me figure out my views on 'hot' technology news.

    To be honest, I'm not sure how much rigour is behind it and I doubt that it's useful for definitive planning. It's extremely useful, however, in helping to maintain perspective, especially on new technologies.

    The fundamental concept is that most or all technologies go through five phases of development that see the level of hype peak long before the technologies themselves become useful. Between excitement and usefulness there is a period where most people are decidedly underwhelmed by the technology.

    If you take the mobile internet as an example, it was developed some years ago as a concept and there was a lot of excitement. This rapidly dissipated when people realised that WAP was really unimpressive and that no-one would be bothered with it. Now, WAP in its various forms is starting to make a comeback as phones have improved and people have found useful things to do with it.

    I'd highly recommend reading through the concept and then doing a little search search of the interweb to see what people have posted (neglecting copyright of course).

    Back to Second Life - companies that are making PR announcements or set up virtual shops in Second Life at the moment are very much taking advantage of the fact that the level of hype is extremely high. The vast majority of the value gained from these endeavours comes from association with the hype. There will be a severe drop in people's interest and the value to be gained from Second Life before there is any sustained interest from the 'general populaton'.

    Second Life

    There's been a lot of talk about Second Life recently. I wonder what the ratio is between people who've heard of it and people who have actually played with it (or, for that matter, people who have actually bought Linden Dollars).

    Second Life has managed to sell some pretty significant companies into giving them free PR. Reuters, Sun Microsystems and IBM have all made something of a big deal about being associated with Second Life.

    A lot of their success, I think, comes from the fact that the concept encapsulates so many different elements of the new web. It gives a physical (if virtual) dimension to web technologies and habits as varied as online gaming, instant messaging, chat rooms, Pay Pal and eBay for example.

    I feel like it's pretty safe to say that in its current form Second Life will never become 'mainstream'. The future of the web lies in its cross-over with the real world, not it's ability to make a virtual one.

    I do think that it's a step towards a viable replacement for conference calls (and instant messaging and chat rooms for that matter).

    I think it's worth mentioning that my former colleague, Barry Lee , is sufficiently bleeding edge that he was presenting 3-D net meetings as an exciting development about a year ago...

    Online Art

    My cousin Daniel recently completed a Masters of Fine Arts at the Chelsea College of Art and Design. Since moving to London five years ago I've enjoyed following his various art projects - he brings a kind of whimsy to his work that I really appreciate.

    He recently hosted a week-long art event on a small island off the coast of Croatia called Susak. Apparently it's a beautiful and somewhat isolated place. I've lifted some text from a forum site about the island:

    THERE IS ABSOLUTELY NOTHING WRONG WITH THE PEOPLE LIVING ON THE ISLAND!!!!! (I can't seem to stress this one out enough)

    So all of you that hear things about deliverance-type of weirdos and shit about mutants - You've been tricked. I can guarantee you that the percentage of strange people is far lower than in the town where you're comming from.

    IF YOU WANT FREAKS, GO TO THE FUCKING CIRCUS.


    The island doesn't really have roads so the all the locals have wheelbarrows to cart their things around. Daniel made a t-shirt inspired by this which you can buy from his site . During the Susak Expo Daniel undertook a project to paint as many of the wheelbarrows as possible bright orange. There are some great photos here . I'd particularly recommend clicking on the photo on the right of the old guy.

    Daniel has invited me to collaborate with him in a project yet-to-be-defined. Hopefully we can think of something cool...

    Monday, November 06, 2006

    Divining Rods III - Pôle Nord

    The acquisition of Pôle Nord by Publicis Groupe is very much of today's media zeitgeist. Not entirely unlike Rupert Murdoch's spate of acquisitions, it is 'old' advertising learning from new.

    Pôle Nord as a company has earned its stripes by servicing e-commerce companies. For those of us who have worked in online marketing for established companies, this is an impressive place to prove yourself. Established companies tend to be burdened by complexities of multiple corporate objectives and legacy systems. E-commerce, typically, has a sharp focus on a single bottom line - delivering the maximum return on what is usually almost 100% online spend through a single sales channel.

    This is the smithy at which Pôle Nord's tools were forged. As a result, they are very exciting. Word Catcher delivers unparalleled insights into SEM effectiveness charting brands against competitors within key categories in terms of volume of search terms and position on the listings.

    Click 2 Sale is sufficiently flexible that it is an ideal divining rod . It's an automated bid management tool that works with APIs and javascript coding to create a platform which allows advertisers to maximise their investment by delivering as much relevance as possible - matching a wide variety of 'post-click actions' to keyword data with sufficient ease that marketers can devote their time to adding the human touches which are so important to real relevance.

    The future of marketing will be when machines do jobs appropriate for machines, humans do jobs appropriate for humans and the rigour of e-commerce marketing meets the magic of 'old' advertising.

    Divining Rods II - Attentio

    I met today with Per Siljubergsåsen, one of the co-founders of Attentio . I first learned about Attentio from an interview of another co-founder called Simon McDermott on Podleaders , a series of podcasts that I'd highly recommend.

    Attentio is one of the tools that promise to deliver on the promises that remained undelivered-upon at the end of the last web boom. It has the potential (along with, presumably, its still small competitive set) to effective online consumer feedback the norm rather then the exception. It does so through facilitating the process of listening. It aggregates feeds from a careful selection of sources and gives a good snapshot of different web 'channels' (eg. news, blogs, forums...)

    The tool, in theory, allows a marketer to use a single interface to have a dashboard quantitative view of the buzz relating to a product or brand online and then to drill down to the qualitative - individual entries. It also aggregates volumes of postings relating to pre-set topics of discussion and identifies new themes.

    The tool in action seems to have more strengths than weaknesses and their business model looks like it has an interesting future. It looks like it has very good applications for tracking the effectiveness of marketing initiatives as the focus towards word of mouth (mouse) increases. It also has a lot of potential for feeding into product development.

    Divining Rods

    I saw three commercial proprietary tools for Web 2.0 in action today. The first two were developed by Pole Nord - a company acquired by the Publicis Groupe (my employers) last year. The third was developed by Attentio , a Brussels-based start up that aggregates online content into a 'buzz tracking' tool. All three were great examples of how it's relatively easy to develop ground-breaking tools in online marketing.

    In each case the tools differentiate themselves from the competition by facilitating the manipulation of data in order to provide actionable insights (how 'bout that for marketing speak).

    There is far too much data in the digital world and not enough insights. Great tools (and people who know who to use them) are too few and far between.

    Sunday, November 05, 2006

    Minor SEO Win

    I'm feeling very smug about my neo-logism. It will be a long time before Google recognises it as a word unto itself, in the meantime I'm happy to be top of the listings for people who search on "e-pisteme".

    Sunday, October 29, 2006

    Digital Integrated Marketing

    As part of the training sessions we had with him last week Mark Ritson led us through a case study about Walmart. Opinion is pretty divided about the values of Walmart but one of the things that they do undeniably well is information systems.

    There was an example of how customer data allowed them to discover that when a hurricane warnings increased sales of strawberry Poptarts dramatically. Their systems are so good that not only could they identify this trend, they were able to respond to it and ship more Poptarts to the appropriate locations. I have a cousin who used to run the supply chain for Green & Black's chocolate and he had a similar anecdote about Tesco's here in the UK. He loved doing business with them as a result.

    E-businesses have known for a long time that there is invaluable data in analytics and adserving spreadsheets. As online advertising grows and increases in importance, companies that have had little direct contact with their end-users have the opportunity to take advantage of new 'touchpoints'.

    There is so much data in online advertising that it's easy to get swamped by it and I've yet to come across an over-resourced web team. One of the things that I'm most looking forward to in my new job is unearthing the hidden insights that this data holds.

    Digital Integrated Advertising - A Case Study

    When I created 'Digital Integrated Advertising' as a tag a week ago I intended to use it as a description for a trend that I see as rapidly increasing. Online and mobile advertising have, at least in the UK, remained relatively silo-ed, apart from other channels. First mover advertisers have made attempts to run campaigns that join up digital and non-digital media, with SMS response or strong websites for instance. Digital channels, though, have mostly existed in parallel to other channels - either online driving traffic to a website or building up the frequency of messaging of an offline campaign.

    There are few campaigns that have succeeded in recognising that increasingly all parts of our life our digital. Last year, working with a number of agencies, we ran a successful and elegant campaign with British Airways that blurred these lines. We took excellent content that had been developed for a microsite about 'hidden gems' in London and developed it into a mobile guide to the city. This guide became part of an advertising campaign that ran in advertorials in Metro Newspapers across Europe and was also a very popular part of the microsite.

    It's really hard to quantify the impact that this element of the campaign had, or qualify it for that matter. But here's why I think it was award-worthy (it won an NMA Effectiveness Award and probably should have won more).

  • it can only have helped BA build its reputation as a forward-thinking, premium brand. Unfortunately there wasn't a great deal of quantitative evidence for this apart from its popularity as part of the microsite.

  • people are still downloading the guide from the microsite
  • almost all marketing research points to word of mouth as a key influencer. Having portable content on a mobile phone probably contributed to hundreds or thousands of conversations about travelling to London around Europe

  • we gave potential customers something of value out of advertising
  • it was an efficient recycling of content

  • Media 2.0

    There's a really interesting short essay from March 2006 on UX Magazine, a great little site that doesn't seem to publish often enough.

    The essay is called 'This is Media 2.0' and is a good review and set of predictions about the impact of Web 2.0 on media. In Media 2.0 there are opportunities for publishers who act as platforms for user generated content.

    Like most of Web 2.0 talk it sounds an awful lot like 1999 all over again. In fact, like most Web 2.0, there's a good reason for that - it's taken this long to get this far.

    Troy Young, the author, makes some good points and it's worth a read. It isn't exactly cutting edge now that YouTube is ubiquitous but it was written in March 2006 and so seems relatively prescient. He makes some predictions, one of which fits well with some of the work we're doing as an advertising agency:

    Media 2.0 companies will look to partner with brands, beyond selling audience, to offer value to community members. Media 2.0 will provide valuable opportunities for user research. Less reach, more partnership / affiliation.

    Planting Change on Widsets

    I recently discovered Widsets . It's a relatively modest site of uncertain origin that is doing something cool and relatively new. It's a bit like AvantGo 2.0. You download a client to your mobile phone and then you're able to subscribe to RSS feeds. They've also made it easy to publish your own feed.

    It's similar to a service in the UK that's been advertising on South West Trains (Commuter trains in part of London) called Mobizines . Mobizines also involves downloading a client to your phone and then subscribing to content. You can, by the looks of it, also subscribe to RSS feeds but the majority of the 'pitch' is towards established media brands like GQ and Glamour. The Widset client feels much leaner than the Mobizine one and loads more quickly and smoothly on my Nokia N80.

    I'm not sure how much I'll use the Widset client on my mobile but it looks like I have 5 subscriptions to my RSS feed (5 more than via the standard internet). I don't expect anyone to actually read the feed but you never know.

    I've you're interested you should check it out:

    Add to my Widsets

    Friday, October 27, 2006

    My own neo-logism

    It just occurred to me to search "e-pisteme". I'm really pleased with the word.

    I've carried out a Google search and there were no relevant listings.
    I also Yahoo!ed it to the same effect.
    And Wikipedia-ed it.
    Technorati turned up a blog called: http://giligil.blogspot.com/ that includes e-pisteme in a long list of e-words but it's since disappeared.
    Icerocket has turned up a total blank.
    Google Blogsearch has spotted http://giligil.blogspot.com/ along with my cunning link-farm ploy of using a disused photo moblog (it had a great deal of potential) to link to my neo-logism.

    If it wasn't for the almost complete lack of my SEO abilities I'd be 100% pleased about this.
    Roll over Baudrillard

    I'm starting to get this blogging thing

    Having taken spent many hours over the last couple years coaxing people through the complexities of online advertising, SEM and mobile marketing I feel like I'm pretty well placed to spot a communication technology epiphany. I've just had one. In theory I've known about blogs for a long time.

    I could appreciate that blogs, spamming aside, fit somewhere along a spectrum. At one end are the millions of failed spurts of creativity that result in 1-5 unread posts on a forgotten blog (I can claim three of these). At the other end are the online media brands that just happen to use blogging software as their platform (eg. Gawker, Cute Overload, etc..). I knew that there were plenty of variations in between but I figured that they were mostly people talking about niche interests or about blogging. I still think I was right but mostly missing the point.

    In a post that I found in an appropriately blogospherical way (through a trackback on a post I enjoyed), Chris Thilk has put together a really nice precis of the better understanding that I've come to this week.

    Blogging gave me a voice. It gave people like me a voice. Part of me couldn't believe it. I had a voice. I could talk about what I wanted, what movies I was watching, what irritated me about Illinois politics and any thing else that flitted through my mind.

    Old me says, "Brilliant bud, didn't you realise that you could bore people even more easily in the real world?" New me says, "Hold on, I'm reading this and it's interesting. I don't know this guy and I'll never meet him. This is an interesting 'conversation' that wouldn't have happened without blogging.

    I've been initiated. People don't just gain a voice in blogosphere, they also find ears - their own and those of others. The gaining of the voice is interesting too - in real life I'm relatively apprehensive about appearing self-involved. I'm not saying it's necessarily a good thing (it's still TBD) but this blog seems to be freeing me of that apprehension.

    And the reason that people blog so much about blogging (or podcast about podcasting for that matter) is that it is significant. In 'old media' you needed to step away from the technology in order to discuss the content (eg. Seinfeld chats at the watercooler). In 'new media' you need to step into the technology in order to discuss the content, and while you're in there you might as well talk about the technology itself.

    Wednesday, October 25, 2006

    Epistemological Shift

    I've been reading some research written by Mark Ritson in the lead up to some training he's doing for us at ZO tomorrow.

    It's great to see some words from my good old University days. It's not everyday you come across epistemological or ontological. It makes me feel like my degree was more than just fun.

    I need to spend some time thinking about blogs with an 'epistemologists' hat on and see if I can come up with something interesting to say. There is definitely a paucity of metaphors/analogies to deal with the complexities of blogging. I might save that one for a rainy day though.

    HP Blogging right?

    I just left a comment on a blog set up on HP.com by Eric Kintz , a VP of marketing strategy at HP.


    It looks like a really good initiative - a good way to get HP marketers thinking about the blogosphere. Most impressively, he invited a guy from Lenovo to comment. I've yet, though, to see anyone crack the complexity of blogging.

    One of the things that I find the most interesting about digital advertising is that the subtlest technological changes can have huge impacts. The difference between a blog and a website is not altogether huge but the impact is massive. Websites have changed the 'media landscape'. Blogs, though, change the communications landscape, which is a shift of a different order altogether.

    Tuesday, October 24, 2006

    Tired Metaphors I - The Purchase Funnel

    I'm working on a different way of approaching the concept of the 'purchase funnel'. I don't know if I'm just bored of talking about it or whether it's actually an oversimplification people's behaviour. I'm almost certain, though, that there is a 'friendlier' way for marketers to conceptualise their customer relationships (or webmasters their site traffic for that matter).

    Monday, October 23, 2006

    Steve Ballmer, Motivational Speaker

    I saw Steve Ballmer, CEO of Microsoft, speak at a Digital Advertising conference in London last week. He didn't say anything new or particularly exciting. He's a great speaker though, with more than a passing resemblance to classic Saturday Night Live Chris Farley character - Matt Foley, Motivational Speaker.




    Sunday, October 22, 2006

    The Passion Spectrum

    Kathy Sierra who is, apparently an eminent commentator on 'Web 2.0' recently wrote a post referring to another post written by Scott Adams (the Dilbert cartoonist - evidently also a blogger).

    Scott wrote that, in polling consumer opinion, the 'kiss of death' for a product or concept is indifference or mild approval. He says, relatively convincingly, that you're better off having a spectrum of passionate opinions, even if most of them are negative, as long as some of them are passionately positive.

    "The opposite of love," one of my flatmates in University once told me, in reference to relationships, "isn't hate. It's indifference."

    In the UK, Unilever are again making use of this spectrum of passions in an ad campaign for Marmite. They've gone as far as building a site devoted to what might be considered a 'basic' food stuff.

    I'm not sure whether I should be pleased or annoyed that they've included an online drawing tool. This is an online fad, presumably born partly due to an advancement in Flash, that I've been cataloguing with some amusement.

    There are, however, (literally) innumerable products for which people are mostly or entirely indifferent but buy anyway.

    A broad spectrum of passions, I suppose, delivers inherent brand equity. This is a nice plus to a marketer but by no means a requirement.

    Planting Change

    The more information available to us, the more effort it takes to organise it.

    This blog is, to a certain extent, an exercise in organisation. It's an attempt to:

  • develop a portable reference to the paradigms that define marketing communications in 2006 and onward

  • build a set of conceptual frameworks that help businesses respond to changes in technology




  •