Last week, a bunch of us here at POKE, had a very interesting experience. We routinely hold chat sessions to just talk to regular folks and understand their tech habits. On Friday, we had a bunch of guys come in for one such routine session. One of them was the Crazy James.
His story paraphrased, — He is trying to spread peace and love in the world that is consumed by materialistic desires and he will bike around the world for just $100. We checked out the above video on his myspace site. And we totally admit that this kid’s got balls. But once you get over that – it’s a load of bullshit that irresponsible brands contribute to and perpetuate. Let’s examine this a little more closely.
Crazy James, harped on about living how brands and advertisers were messing around with people, offering them too many messages, compelling them to buy stuff they didn’t need and in the end, contributing to this materialistic economy we live in.
Further in the conversation, when we asked him how did he decide on his idea, we learned that one night he was out drinking with American Apparel folks on the West Coast and the next morning, they bought him a bike and offered to sponsor all his clothes. He also mentioned that everytime he is ready to leave a city and bike to a new one, American Apparel issues a press release for him. He supposedly got his airflights sponsored by Virgin Air and when he met with us, he was living with an editor at Elle Magazine.
When he pointed out the glaring contradictions in what his is preaching and what he practices, he didn’t have a suitable response for us. We pointed out that for his rants against materialism, he was the ultimate poster child hawking a clothing brand, a bike brand, an airline and probably other brands we didn’t know about.
Again, no convincing argument on his end.
Finally, he did mention that he worked for his food. Why, we asked. Why not get that for free as well? No, he persisted because that’s a story for me and then I share it with my readers on my blog.
His website has no blog. And his myspace blog has a few entries and was last updated on Nov 5. Maybe he hasn’t eaten since and has no stories?
Our craigslist ad that he responded to had asked for 18 – 21 year olds. It was only after he left and we checked out his myspace page that we realized he was 23. Not that it matters. He did say that he picked up odd jobs to make some cash on the side and our little chat was gonna earn him $20.
Also as he was leaving he invited us to go visit him and his biker buddies in Central Park the next Sunday where they will all be parading around half-naked and clothed only in American Apparel underwear. Is American Apparel paying you to do that for them, we asked. And again, he fumbled really not knowing how to be his own PR agent.
Crazy crazy…James, the poor poster child for misguided brands. If you see as his video ends, he has several other sponsors and from the looks of it, it is a part of some virtual reality show. But if you ask me, it is a virtual show that’s already gone very wrong. And I pity the brands associated with it.
Especially American Apparel. I did think AA was one of the leading brands who had a vision and stuck to it. But after this experience, I get it — I get that AA is just another brand trying just too hard to be cool.
WSJ has a great article yesterday about the fashionable re-branding of the ‘Homeless’ brand. A bunch of Beverly Hills kids created a fashion label inspired by a West L.A homeless dude who has been nicknamed "The Crazy Robertson."
The clothing brand is sold in high-end boutiques like Kitson with the Crazy Robertson hoodies selling for as much as $98. John Jermyn aka Crazy Robertson gets 5% of net profits although he refused to accept cash and instead asked to be paid in food, liquer and paper for his art projects.
I’m not sure where I stand on this particular brand building endeavor. The entrepreneurial kids also set up a MySpace page complete with videos of Jermyn saying, "My name is John Jermyn. Welcome to my myspace.com website."
The whole venture strikes me as funny. But it is fantastic microscopic vignette of the various forms boredom takes and the various solutions we come up with to continue to keep ourselves fascinated.
This ad is just too cool to not share!
Go on, have a laugh!
One of the conversations that has been plaguing my mind since a few days is that of responsible marketing.
In this day and age, what is responsible marketing and what actions deem you a responsible marketer?
As a consumer, the answer is easy to point out: Don’t pollute my space and if you absolutely have to, keep me entertained while you do that.
A great example is watching TV shows on abc.com. Each 40 minute episode is interspersed with 30 second commercials, usually all sponsored by the same brand/ company. Each episode packs about 2.5 to 3 minutes worth of opportunities to entertain me and lure me away from the episode into wanting to learn more about your product, or buy it. And the funny thing is, because abc.com has been so nice to make their shows available online, I actually don’t really mind the commercial interruptions at all. It’s every marketers dream to have their consumer in a state-of-mind where they will not object to advertising, right?
But sadly, I’ve only seen a few brands do it right. Some companies try to get all funky and cram interactive games within the 30 seconds which frankly, by the time they load, the 30 seconds are done and I’m continuing with my episode. Some marketers have teh same ad play again and again every 30 second. My point – if you have my attention for 3 minutes, atleast don’t insult my intelligence by showing me teh same ad. Be innovative, create a story. Entertain me.
Lucky for those brands because I cannot remember the names of those that do it wrong. But I do remember the names of those that did it right. Great example: Sprint.
In 30 seconds, I learn how to sooth a baby, peel an egg, turbo park, make an instant sorbet etc etc
And by lord, I also remember the URL www.waitless.org
The waitless campaign, is subtly branded and superbly executed. They make my 30 seconds of interruption worthwhile, enjoyable and memorable. That’s not just great advertising, that’s a great example of understanding the consumer’s medium and creating an experience that is rich and meaningful for that medium.
That to me is responsible marketing.
PS – It would be better if Sprint made this videos available for sharing. Free the content!
Facebook has become a hot topic of discussion and scholarly study. Since facebook applications platform opened up, there are about 5000+ applications only with no real monetization channels. I have expressed my views before about the facebook applications — but there’s an interesting social awareness that is surfacing in this sphere: almost a sort of cultural megalomania.
People are taking pride in sharing their ‘bookshevles," movie interests, virtual gifts, traveled cities and causes. Essentially, all applications that allow them to display their ‘cultural worth’ or ‘cultural currency." I have been guilty of this as well — having toyed around with each of these applications and then removed them because I got lazy of updating my ‘cultural hall of fame’ or simply realized that others had more fuller maps and more gifts and more drinks from their friends and that I would just look lame with such a meagre supply of all of the above. It’s interesting to me that there is a visual metaphor on facebook for all kinds of cultural behavior people engage in — and that people are taking pride in & engaging in that sort of cultural bragging where they think of those graphics as trophies and reflections of who they are and what their online worth is.
It is also, a very strong tool for people to control and sometimes manipulate exactly what their online identity will be. I am hard-pressed to say this is new to facebook. It probably started when we first spent hours trying to pick the right email handle, the right icq name, the right AIM name, the right msn name….The handle reflects our personality and it a strong representation of our physical self into a virtual world. Online diaries, livejournals and blogs allowed to portray our virtual handle in the real world — and supplement it with constant data and feed to promote it, build it further and even, live up to it.
Facebook applications and facebook itself — by allowing visual and graphical representations of more than one aspect of our intelligent/ the culturally assimilated self, as taken this cultural megalomania to a whole new level.
And that’s the extend of thought I’ve given this right now —
what about you?
I had a weird notification on twitter today.
“Saawariya” is following you.
Saawariya is a movie. 
As a marketer, twitter marketing is one of the recommendations we often use for clients but I didn’t expect bollywood movie markters to be so savvy.
Only, I quit twitter because of such marketing campaigns destroying the network’s social stock.
Sigh.
Part of my frustration with this blog was because it had become a chore to maintain. Let me count, I’ve got a a facebook life, a dimisnishing orkut life, an email life, a work email life and a real life. It boggles my mind how we can keep a singular identity across all these contexts.
My boss added me on facebook a few weeks ago and I did not accept his invite until very recently — and I only did so because I was moving to NYC. My friends mother is on facebook and she added me — now that is a line I just don’t want to cross. I politely declined hoping she’d understand that I value my privacy.
These are worlds, I just am not ready to mesh.
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Now that Google launched Open Social – there’s even more talk about applications in general. Developers are having a field-day imagining how they can monetize and retire as happy silicon valley millionnaires. First came the email, the diaries, then the blogs, then the social networks — apps seem the natural evolution. And they are great, but
— they make profile cluttered. and ugly.
they are annoying after a while and it gets even more difficult to search for people’s walls. I’ve never used the private messaging (INBOX) function on facebook as vividly as I do now – it’s just easier for me to msg them instead of spending time looking through all the crappy apps trying to find where their wall is. And I find grace in the fact that I am not alone.
Danah Boyd made an interesting obeservation over an email thread. She said, I think that the main issue with Apps is that it’s clutter clutter clutter and it starts to feel like a new form of spam. Only spam that your friends invite you to.”
That’s an interesting obeservation, right? I think like splogs – there should be a new word of application spams – spapps maybe? But makes you wonder, exactly the kind of spapps will be unleased once Google’s Open Social is unveiled.
I both love and hate the tech industry. For all the innovations, sometimes I think they just make our life more difficult. I hate them for following like a stupid herd, the newest trend in town. And what’s really sad is they do it with so much passion and that they really beleive that their silly widget might be the next big thing. Sigh.
Almost overnight, I packed up my bags and moved to New York. (Technically, Jersey City until I find a kickass place in NYC) but yes, I’m in back on this side. Also, I am bored with my blog. Atleast with the way it looks, feels and just comes across. I also don’t like that it’s still called StyleStation — when that name, is in all honesty, a little crappy. So tell me, what do you think of this new name that I’m thinking of: Constant Beta.
(It was inspired from a quote by Bruce Nussbuam, Innovation Editor at Business Week)
I’m doing a bunch of fun branding/ advertising/ digital media related things in NYC. Mostly, my time is now spent on a lovely couch at POKE. (www.pokenewyork.com) I’ve joined this digital think-tank as a Strategist and am working with some very smart people on some very fun projects. You should check out our website and if you keep checking it often, you may see me on the couch. 
(Go to the site to see what I mean)
I was listing things that I want to do and I havent done yet and I figured that moving to NY was a step in the right direction. For your benefit, here are the other things that I want to do in the coming years:
1) Work in Asia. (In particular, India and Japan)
2) Go to grad school to study economics and social media.
That a good goal for now, what say!?
At the recent Temple Ad-Club speech, one of the students asked us about using traditional media to advertise online/ digital brands. I think it’s a brilliant and ironic question by itself. Because you see, you have a whole host of digital media practionners who still write and publish books and then you have a host of online brands that advertise on TV. Even though audiences that consume traditional media are fragmented and perhaps traditional advertising doesn’t have as many eye-balls anymore — it is certainly not dead. And here are two brands that I think are doing it right. chemistry.com and ask.com
I’m not a fan of comemercials that take potshots at their competitors on-air. I think its highly unoriginal and barely creative to do so. But the recent chemistry.com commercials perhaps may change my opinion. Have you seen them?
I’ve never used dating websites so I don’t know if eharmony really rejects people on those grounds. I thought there was a match for everyone… But then, take a look here. Apparently eharmony.com does reject people on unclear grounds. Their reasoning might be very valid – maybe they just don’t have the match for them. But chemistry.com — a new player in the online dating industry, used this criticism of eharmony.com to their advantage. By the way, chemistry.com is owned by match.com – the industry leader in online dating.
I don’t know if it is brilliant or sad – but these ads worked for me. I remembered the new brand, I remembered the commercials (because they are so damn good) and I correctly relayed this to the students 2 weeks after I had seen this ad. This, I think, is a great example of how to use traditional advertising to market to market an online entity.
The goal of sych advertising should be tri-fold:
- Good enough that people remember the brand name/ the dot.com URL
- They remember what the ad was about/ what the brand is about.
- Correctly able to recall the brand and talk to friends about it.
I doubt there is magic formula or the right recipie to achieve all the goals above, BUT —
I think a few elements to doing this teh right way are:
- Establish the sole distinguishing factor from competitor -(without really ridiculing the competitor please- that’s just something I am not cool with and would have no respect for a brand that did that.)
- Give audiences the "OMG!" moment. (OMG – taht’s funny, OMG – that’s cool.. whatever your OMG is) Have you seen the ask.com commericals? My reaction was "OMG – those features are so cool" And I did log on the site to check them out.
- Can you add to this? What other elements worked for you that you think will work for online brands taht want to use traditional media for advertising?
PS – I’m referring to the new ask.com commericals – where all you see are the website features. No annyong man singing and no references to alogorithins or complicated concepts. Just the website – and what it can do for you. I’ll post them here when I find them – right now, youtube.com has the old ones.
Life has been kind to me. I’ve met some amazing people who have taken a chance in me and given me the kind of opportunities someone my age can only dream of. And I strongly believe in passing it on . So something I am very passionately involved in is trying to mentor college students. It is a two-way street really — I pass on what I know and they always end up surprising me.
This past spring, I voluneteered my Sunday evenings and weekday lunches to mentor a few super smart college students that were interested in advertising/ marketing. Rohit Bhargava, VP of Interactive Marketing at Ogilvy PR and his entire team were kind enough to extend us some real juicy assignments to work on. And that’s when I really began to pay attention to how college students use the internet. Simply based on my observations, I was a little surprised to learn that most college students are not as social-media savvy as we digital media practioners think them to be. The most startling discovery was that college kids do not blog. (This is an observation, so if you have a different experience, please share) In hindsight, this doesn’t surprise me because when I was in college, I was pretty much the only one blogging among the people I knew. (And it was not so long ago)
Last night, Annie (Social Media Director at GPTMC) and I spoke to bunch of curious college students at Temple Unversity’s Student Ad Club. And we both thought it was very interesting out of 20 some students present at the meet, not one blogged. And only a couple read blogs. I have questions about this — and I’m returning to this group next week to sit with them to really understand how they are using the internet and all it’s social application.
Some other observations:
- They didn’t use or know of twitter but used the facebook status update very often
- Almost all of them were familiar with perezhilton.com — or his show.
- They were curious and a common question was, "what do you blog about?"
What do you guys think? Any insights you can share? I’m putting together a survey to learn more about how college students use the internet — any ideas on what should be in the survey?
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