Strange Commercial – Tranny Radio?

93 X, a Minneapolis-based hard rock station, has released a new commercial recently. The station is geared towards a predominately male demographic, so the use of attractive women in their commercial is understandable. What’s not is the way they use the women in the promotion. Beyond a woman as object critique, I’m surprised at the bizarre nature of the commercial. The women lip synch to songs that one might hear on the “X”, but they also lip synch the voices of the male talent – you know the crazy zoo crew team that helps you ROCK!! The clichéd lipstick lesbian/bi-curious, girl-on-girl titillation is then usurped by crazy tran-zaniness. There’s a new zoo crew in town and s/he means business. Austin Powers might watch the commercial and say “that’s a man, baby!” Is that what the X is looking for in their audience? Transgendered women ages 18 – 34?

I know, I know. The middle school mentality ad agency is saying “hey man, we’re generating buzz.” Fine, you have your buzz, but do you have higher ratings in a more attractive demographic?

Buzzes like a fridge

As I anxiously await my download of "In Rainbows", I'm reading reactions to Radiohead's approach to album sales. On Green Plastic, we learn other bands are going to allow more free music. Note the jumps in Radiohead searches in the post. I still thought we'd hear more about the free and preview items Wilco has done in advance of their past few albums. Bob Mould has some interesting thoughts about this topic on his blog.

UPDATE - 10/16/07
Looks like Radiohead has sold over 1.2 million copies of the album through digital download alone and made $8-$10 Million alread on the record...and those figures don't include the sales for the deluxe box set available later this year. More here.

How much would you pay for Radiohead’s new album?

Radiohead’s new album will be available for download. The announcement for the much anticipated album comes less than two weeks prior to its release. In what seems to be a twist on Wilco’s recent run of making singles and albums available digitally, via their site, before the physical release of the album. Here’s the Radiohead twist, you set the price! Yes, you set the price. You pay an additional .45 Pounds for the download cost – beyond that you set the price.

Here’s another example of the Web changing traditional commerce models and a great example of strengthening one’s brand. I hypothesizing, but believe that most (or enough to make if viable) Radiohead fans will pay a reasonable rate to make it worth it to the band (who is releasing this without a major label). And what if they only cover the costs of the download? Who cares?! The real money for bands is through touring. They don’t tour to support an album, they release and album to support a tour. Also, this novel way of approaching an album release and pricing will generate enough buzz to continue to expand and sell the Radiohead catalog. Even the old label wins here.

A few takeaways: (1) Leverage new media in meaningful ways, just don’t repeat the constrained old media in a new channel, you'll just screw up faster. (2) Remain authentic (see #1). (3) Continue to engage and leverage your base community and allow room

Thanks to Kyle for the article.

Hotel Chevalier

Honorary field agent Colin sent me a very interesting article about Wes Anderson’s new films. Yes, plural. Anderson, the director of some of my favorite movies including Bottle Rocket and The Royal Tennenbaums, is releasing The Darjeeling Limited in theatres and its 13-minute prequel, Hotel Chevalier, on iTunes later this week. The article does a fine job of explaining both films and their interdependencies, so I won’t give a synopsis here. In the name of balance, earlier industry reports said that the short was included in the festival release, but will not be part of the mainstream release.

I’m interested on multiple levels. First, as a fan of film in general Anderson specifically, I’m intrigued and would like to see it. I’m fairly certain that it won’t be some Guns & Roses Use Your Illusion I & II garbage, that was thrust at fans to make money and fulfill some contractual obligation. Two of crap is still crap – you could have boiled it down to one decent album, but instead…oh I digress. No, I believe Chevalier / Darjeeling will be another example of director as auteur... wait let me put out my Gallois and take off the black turtleneck. There much better. We can see more of Anderson’s vision which helps fans further appreciate what’s been done and what’s yet to come.

Secondly, as someone interested in new media and advertising, I find this as a novel way to bring online and offline together in a constructive way. From a brand perspective, Anderson never tries to be all things to all people. If so, he might be signing up Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson in Game Plan II: Cinnamon’s Revenge. While Anderson’s approach with the internet short might not be appealing to everyone, it should play to the base and could help expand to new fans interested in the buzz or compelled by the 13-minute story.

Finally, I’m interested in witnessing the continued progression online/new media is making as it knocks off the kings of the mass media hill. Newspapers who missed the net train are dying on the vine. Radio and the music industry are still trying to make sense of easy to access, on demand, digital music. Television becomes more fragmented and continues to lose viewers, especially among echo boomers. Now, movies are seeing their business change through technology – slowly through video, then DVD and now the Internet. I believe that the movie industry has been able to leverage the online channel in a positive way through the availability of trailers, intriguing promotional sites, and some great viral/guerilla campaigns. Done, right “old” and new media can work together to deliver an excellent customer experience.

Best of luck to Wes and his crew.

User Experience: Peter Merholz

Last week I was at a MIMA salon regarding user experience. The featured speaker was Peter Merholz from Adaptive Path. The subject of his talk was “Designing for an Uncertain World.” Outside of the technical difficulties with his Mac crashing (and they say Macs don’t get sick), it was a great presentation. The big ideas from his talk have implications for user experience, brand, and symbolic identity. Peter says the experience is the product. I agree. I feel that the desired experience for your customer should serve as an organizing hub. Mixing my metaphors, that organizing hub becomes the compass or star to guide you in times of uncertainty. It helps you understand, communicate and ground your symbolic identity. It helps you remember who you are, as an organization, and can prevent you from getting caught up in a features/functions commodity game. This applies to the customer experience across all channels and media. Your customer rarely makes a purchase decision in one channel – make sure your channels positively reinforce each other providing for a smooth customer experience.

While this won’t do the talk justice, here are some other take-aways from Peter’s presentation:
* Work from the user experience in (experience, features, data), rather than data out. What is the experience you want your customer to have? From there work backwards to see what it will take to make that happen.

* Big experience breakthroughs come from working on problems others consider solved. Some examples provided where one-button cameras, MP3/iPods showing the possibilities of mobile music, and TiVo showing us what is possible when it comes to recording television programming.

* The concept of working on problems others consider solved was utilized by Steve Jobs when describing the Mac in the early to mid ‘80s.\

* Don’t be all things to all people. That’s a recurring theme on this blog and I’m glad to see it applied to areas other than brand identity.

Unfortunately, the presentation is not online yet. It should be on the MIMA site in the near future. Other MIMA stuff of note, Jason Fried of 37 Signals will be a keynote speaker at the October Sumit.

The quality of the answer lies in the quality of the question

Covey may tell usto start with the end in mind. Drucker begged us to ask the question “what do we hope to accomplish?” John F. Finneran in an article on Gantthead.com reminds us to start with the question. When it comes to building business cases, it’s important to understand how we may create or generate value. It starts with asking the right question.

“Clever tools don’t mean good answers. Albert Einstein never used anything more complicated than a blackboard and the theorist of relativity also felt, “The formulation of a problem is often more essential than its solution.” And what is the simplest and the best way to kick-start formulating any problem, including a business case? A question.”

You can read the article in its entirety here.

Online/Offline & Quality Leads

Offline ads are helping drive online behavior. A recent study from Jupiter and iProspect highlight the positive, symbiotic relationship between online and offline channels, as well as maximizing and optimizing search.

"Search is no longer an add-on consideration for marketers," said Murray. "It is front and center. And while it is a powerful channel on its own, it's clear that its efficacy is multiplied when combined with offline channels."

Be Authentic

Greetings. It’s been a while since the last “Notes from the Field” post. No excuses worth posting – just wanted to acknowledge the fact.

Earlier in the month I was at a First Tuesday luncheon at the Carlson School. Lynn Casey, CEO of PSB, was the speaker. In the name of disclosure, I'm also working with some PSB employees on a web redevelopment effort for a client. Lynn spoke about how internet-enabled technology is (re-)defining PR. It was a good talk. I’m paraphrasing here, but the speed of the Internet is further forcing authenticity -- if one is going to ground and maintain a unique symbolic identity, they have to be authentic. The Internet, and consumer generated content, are Toto (the dog, not the band) to the digital image curtain.

A couple of take-aways:
1) Gen Xrs & Echo Boomers are now spending more time on the internet than watching TV. Does your marketing spend and/or understanding of media match this?

2) Be authentic if you want to protect your brand/symbolic ID.