I Don't Believe It

In Mississippi, an ad shop (the Cirlot Agency) has created a series of PSAs promoting the state. They're interesting; rather than do some bland stuff about the state's positives, they go right for the common negative perceptions the rest of the country has about Mississippi and tackles them. The campaign is called Mississippi, Believe It!

The ads are pretty good. The approach reminds me of our local Houston, It's Worth It campaign (also designed by a local creative shop) and as a resident of a place that's perceived negatively elsewhere, I'm sympathetic to what they're doing.

It's also a good business move, I think; potential clients in Mississippi not only get to see the agency's chops, but they will probably appreciate someone doing something good for the state.

That said... there's a problem with the ads.

Take a look at the "Yes, We Can Read" ad. It's a reference to the appallingly low literacy late in Mississippi. The ad points out that Mississippi writers have made great contributions to American literature. But most of the writers are from the past... and Mississippi has the highest rate of illiteracy in the nation. It's nice that the state produced Tennessee Williams, Eudora Welty, and William Faulkner, but if I need to hire a capable workforce there, what good does that do me?

Another ad is about health care, and points out that the first heart transplant took place in Mississippi. Something to be proud of, true... unlike the state's highest-in-the-US infant mortality rate.

The problem here, I think, is that they are highlighting things that have little impact on a business in Mississippi or a person who might consider living there. It's not an unreasonable approach, because hard data suggests that Mississippi is not an easy product to sell; it's a poor state with an uneducated work force.

What would have been a better approach? I'll point to the "Houston, It's Worth It" campaign again (for the record, I played no part in creating it). It doesn't talk about NASA or the oil industry or famous people from Houston. The centerpiece is ordinary Houstonians talking about why they love calling this sprawling, sweaty town swathed in concrete, with its flying roaches the size of hamsters and polluted air, home.

I'm sure that there are Mississippians who love their state and could bend our ears telling us why. Too bad we're not hearing from them in this campaign.

Tread Lightly in TheirSpace

As popular social networking sites like MySpace have grown, they've gotten the attention of marketers... and their users have noticed. One of their responses to the "marketing invasion" has been to make fun of those marketers.

MySpace users are growing disenchanted with the social-networking site because it's "becoming too corporate, overrun with ads, and less authentic," writes MediaPost. The article points to a dilemma that publishers of similar sites face: the measure of their success is advertising revenue, but granting marketers extensive access can undermine the authenticity and appeal that made the site attractive to users, and therefore advertisers, in the first place.

When you try to market in these venues, you've got to be careful not to sound like some ad guy in suit (even if that's exactly what you are). Look at what you're creating and ask yourself: if I were the typical user of this site, would I find it entertaining? Useful? Or would you think, Look, some corporate guy's trying to get my money?

We marketing types often kid ourselves about the interest people really have in our messages (generally, near zero, unless we can prove ourselves to them). So strip away the wishful thinking and take a good look at what you're doing; if you're not absolutely confident in the answers to those questions, keep working on it.

Guy Kawasaki on Dot Com Interviewing

If you've ever worked for a tech company, you'll enjoy this blog post about getting a job in Silicon Valley. (He says "Silicon Valley" but it applies to the whole industry; those people baked too long in the San Jose sun tend to forget the rest of the world exists.)

Some of the advice is good, and some is funny. When I read item 4, the "cast of characters," I started thinking of lots of former colleagues.

Enjoy! 

Don't overdo it

Everyone wants to be the best at what they do, right? And make the very best product? Seth Godin asks, is this a good idea?

The washing machine I used this morning had more than 125 different combinations of ways to do the wash... don't get me started about the dryer. Clearly, an arms race is a good way to encourage people to upgrade.

I wonder, though, if "good enough" might be the next big idea. Audio players, cars, dryers, accounting... not the best ever made, not the most complicated and certainly not the most energy-consuming. Just good enough.

In a world where people buy boots suitable for climbing Everest, buy kitchenware designed for chefs, and want that 125-method washing machine that Seth laments, his suggestion sounds radical. Yes, there's a niche for these best-of-category products, and there are people making good money there.

But most of us aren't going to scale big mountains, play our favorite sport like an Olympian, or cook like we're the premiere chef of Paris. And that's why "good enough" is an important part of the market.

Decide where you're going to play, and don't be embarrassed if the "good enough" segment is where you fit. Just make sure to design your product so that the price and the margin is good enough, too. And honestly, you may have a bigger impact on the world with what you do that the elites of your market - because the "good enough" segment will always be much bigger than the "best of."

Entrepreneurial Marketing Mistakes

From Seth Godin, a quick list of the top mistakes that entrepreneurs make in their marketing.

Numbers 1 and 5 bear particular consideration. When you've put your heart and soul into starting a business, it's easy to forget that nobody else cares. You have to make them care. And #5, failure to measure, is a mistake that gets made in all kinds of business. If you're not measuring, how do you know whether you're accomplishing anything?

Bloggers are a Public Relations Audience

Here's an interesting story from the Washington Post about how companies are targeting bloggers for PR efforts. Mentions on widely-read blogs - even if they're just widely read within a certain segment of their market - are valuable publicity, and so naturally PR firms are paying attention.

Of course, sometimes it's done very poorly - most of us get those pitches (there's one company in particular that sends me the same one about something about which I have no knowledge or credibility and in which I have no interest) and most of them are just terrible. But companies that do it right - with a light touch and by provided information that's actually helpful for writing about things we want to write about anyway - find it to be pretty successful:

When Nokia Corp. released its camera smartphone last fall, the marketing campaign cut back on news releases and flashy ads. Instead, the company sent sample products to 50 tech-savvy amateur bloggers with a passion for mobile phones.

The tactic paid off, as word spread online about the N-series phone, driving up sales and contributing to a 43 percent profit boost for Nokia last quarter.

"So many blogs picked it up that it blew out our server twice," said Andy Abramson of Comunicano Inc., who developed the blogging program for Nokia. "We were getting thousands of hits per second. When you look at the body of information that was generated around this, we knew we had something very special."

I get questions about blogging from clients, and I usually tell them that this - not launching some dull corporate blog - is the right first step in using blogging as a communications tool.

Dear Marketers, Nobody Cares

One of the great marketing mistakes: thinking your customers care about what you have to say as much as you care about it.

Customers care what you say when it's relevant and useful to them. And if they are sick of you, they'll decide how to end the relationship, not you. So is it any surprise that ReturnPath has found that nearly 80% of people "unsubscribe" from email by marking it as spam?

That should tell you one important thing: when you look at your email list, you must assume that it includes people who just don't read the messages you send, or who have them heading straight for a junk mailbox never to be seen. You've lost them. You weren't interesting. You weren't useful. You're history.

Consumers are funny that way; they do what they want, not what you want.

Your challenge is to stay interesting, and to remember that once you lose the customer, they're gone. Look at every message you send and ask yourself, If I were getting this, would I give a crap about what's in it? If the answer isn't a big yes, don't send it.

Meanwhile, though, you can hope that a day will come that customers are so in love with marketing that they download this. Don't hold your breath, though.

Carrots and Sticks

Cingular really wants its customers who are using old analog or TDMA phones to upgrade to GSM phones.

And who can blame them? They don't want to keep running networks based on antiquated technology - or simply a different system than the one they're investing in now - for just 8% of their customers.

Unfortunately, they've decided to encourage those folks to upgrade by force:

About 4.7 million Cingular Wireless subscribers with older phones will have to pay $5 extra each month as the company tries to prod them to get new handsets so it can devote its entire network to one type of signal.

The new surcharge, unique among the major U.S. carriers, will be added to bills starting in September, the company said Monday.

The problem is that nobody likes to be pushed into something, and Cingular has competitors. So if they are trying to make you change, why not change in big ways? Go find out what T-Mobile and Verizon and Sprint are offering. If you've got to get a new phone, why not see if a new carrier will work for you?

Here's the really sad part: these people are Cingular's most loyal (if not biggest-spending) customers. They're stuck with them for years, which is why they have old phones.

Wouldn't a better approach be to tell those customers the truth, and make the change a positive for them? How about telling them this:

We appreciate your business over the years. As technology as changed, we've moved to newer networks that give you better call quality. We'd like you to have the best service possible - and we want to eliminate the older network equipment to reduce our costs.

To thank you for choosing Cingular and help make this change, we're offering you...

And then give them some choices. A free phone (even the cheapest ones have got to be better than what these customers have.) A discount on their rate plan for the first year. A discount on a really spiffy new phone. The ability to change without signing a new contract (which may be what's kept some of these folks on their old phones - sadly, if you look cross-eyed at your mobile carrier in the US, you've committed to another two-year contract).

Cingular gets people off the old technology and can reduce costs. Customers are happy. Win-win.

Save the stick for the last holdouts - when you get to only having 1 or 2 percent of your customers on the old technology because they just won't change, they are costing you more than you make from them anyway. Use the carrot on the rest, and have customers who stay loyal.

Too bad Cingular has chosen the old telecom "charge 'em and charge 'em again" approach. If I were one of the other carriers, I'd be trying to figure out who those people are, and take advantage of Cingular's heavy-handed approach to steal them away.

Doing the Right Thing

The other day I wrote about the bad publicity Vonage is getting because their ads are being distributed (by vendors) through spyware. So I noted this story about Warner Bros. with some interest:

Via a partnership with Zango (the former 180solutions) the Warner Bros. website, an online destination for kids, has been offering free games via adware that Zango installs on users' computers. The catch: some of the ads that kids may end up seeing could be for porn, writes the Washington Post.

...

In a statement issued yesterday, Warner Bros. said Zango had agreed that "no one accessing Zango's network from the Warner Bros. site would receive inappropriate material." Zango spokesman Steve Stratz is quoted as saying the promotion of its software on the Warner site was apparently an "ad inventory mix-up," adding, "it's not our job to police the Warner Bros. site."

No, but it is their job to serve up the right ads for the right clients. Warner Bros. is doing the right thing by severing ties with a company that doesn't, or can't, adhere to property practices.

This could easily have blown up on Warner Bros. It pays to monitor what your ad vendors are doing.