Well, Steve Rubel retired, so I threw my hat in the ring with Jaffe and I'll be the first guest host on Across the Sound in January. If I don't act too much like an asshole, and if I somehow manage to outperform three other industry luminaries (two of whom are good buds of mine), then I might have the gig regularly.
Anyway, we're recording tomorrow and I've got a huge list of industry issues and all sorts of happy crap I'd like to discuss. Wish me luck!
I don't care if you have the most boring business in the world. There's always something interesting going on that can provide fodder for some great stories.
I was looking at this article I found through Fark about Roto-Rooter. Looks like they put something out to let the public know about the five most interesting things they've recovered from drainpipes and trenches over the past year.
You can say what you want about Roto-Rooter, but this kind of thing is the perfect thing to blog about. If Roto-Rooter could have let the field staff write about the most interesting things that happened to them during the course of the day, I bet they'd have an interesting bundle of content after just a few months. Maybe not everyone would subscribe to the RSS feed, but it would help to make what on its face seems like a boring business more interesting.
Remember clipping services?
When I was a weekly humor columnist for The Ring-tum Phi at Washington & Lee, I penned a column that reviewed each and every one of the cheap wines available at the local grocery store, from MD 20/20 to Wild Irish Rose. Within a week, a letter from the Ernest & Julio Gallo company arrived on my desk at the Phi's offices. Evidently, Gallo's clipping service had picked up on my column (written in a college newspaper with only a few thousand circulation, no less) and had one of its PR staffers pen a response to my column.
We printed the letter in the next issue, along with a response from me. It was funny as hell that Gallo took enough time out to write us and set the record straight in a humorous way. (I had gotten some facts wrong regarding which cheap wines Gallo made.)
If you take a step back for a sec, realize that what occurred here wasn't all that different from a conversation on a blog. I published something in a tiny venue, Gallo had its feelers out and somehow found it, and they took the time to respond and join the conversation. The participation part is the tough part, but I find many advertising agencies are failing where PR agencies succeed - at least they have their feelers out and they're listening.
Some of the folks I converse with online who work for advertising agencies are amazed at the speed at which I respond to blog posts about me, my writings or my company. Others who work for agencies are always asking me how I find opinions and articles on certain topics, particularly the ones that are important to my clients.
One of the reasons is that I have a lot of custom searches saved up. Google News sends me an e-mail any time anything of significance is written about "Hespos," "Underscore Marketing," "Wading River" (my hometown), "The MathWorks" (a client) or any other number of phrases. I also have searches for these terms built into my RSS reader, so I'm actually subscribed to similar searches on IceRocket, Google Blog Search, Blogdigger and a few others. I get these updates via my Sage RSS reader on a nearly real-time basis.
So whenever someone writes a blog post or sends out a news article about me or several topics that are important to me, I know about it fairly quickly. From there, I can take my lunch hour or a spare few moments in between meetings to respond.
Not many folks are used to getting information this way, though. It may seem simple to me or to many folks reading this site, but a lot of people are plumb mystified by the notion of getting real-time search updates or near real-time news alerts. I can't picture doing it any other way.
Back to my original point, though. The fact that PR agencies are at least listening to the conversation means that they're a step ahead of the ad agencies in the conversational economy. Hopefully the ad agencies will start listening soon as well.
There aren't any serious threats to Christians' abilities to celebrate Christmas. They exist only in Bill O'Reilly's mind. (And even in his own mind, he's completely making stuff up.)
But that doesn't stop the Religious Right from getting all up in arms and trying to swing the pendulum completely back in the other direction. I've spoken to a few of my religious friends, and many of them are convinced that there's a war being fought with the PC police on one side, them on the other, and their right to celebrate their holiday hanging in the balance.
As a result, you see a number of people who you would normally consider intelligent writing in to whatever publications will run their letters, offering up arguments that essentially boil down to "Christians are the majority. Deal with it."
It makes me wonder where some of these people were educated. It was hard enough dealing with the notion of people failing to aspire to ideals that don't include freedom of speech (e.g. - the "dissent is un-American" debate still lingering today). It was even tougher dealing with the notion that many people really don't dig religious tolerance anymore (e.g. - post 9/11 Muslim-bashing). Now we see behavior that's indicative of people failing to understand that their own Bill of Rights protects them from the "tyranny of the majority" types of situations that are so well summed up by a "Christians are the majority, deal with it" attitude.
This all makes me think that we need to, at a minimum, send everybody back to history class for some lessons on the ideals to which our forefathers aspired.
It seems like whenever something distracts American office workers from their daily hamster wheel duties, whether that be a transit strike, reading blogs at work or the release of the latest Star Wars movie, the business press has to make a big deal about hypothetical figures totalling up how much the distraction is costing American businesses. I guess it sells more newspapers when one can point to an outrageously overinflated number and make a big to-do out of it.
In late October, Advertising Age claimed that workers would spend the equivalent of over a half million years in 2005 reading blogs, with the implication that this whole blog-reading thing must be stopped before it brings American productivity to a screeching halt and Russian tanks start rolling down Madison Avenue.
Enough, already.
My point of view on this issue is unpopular in corporate America. If anything, American businesses - especially advertising agencies and marketing companies - should be encouraging their employees to be active contributors to online communities. Doesn't matter whether those communities are blogs, message boards, discussion lists or whatever. Heck, they should be active netizens in general.
There are quite a few justifications for this. The first is that almost every company in America should be using the Internet to communicate in some way. Whether it's used for internal communications, external relationship management or some combination of the two doesn't matter. What matters is that staff expertise in the workings of the Internet benefits companies, no matter what business they're in. Period. How comfortable would you be, as a company CEO, asking someone in your company to give you advice on eCommerce if they've never, say, bought something from Amazon? Would you be able to realize an investment in a time-saving company intranet if none of your employees knew anything about using the web? Exactly.
Secondly, the relationships that employees develop online, whether they represent the company in any official capacity or not, are valuable in and of themselves. Those relationships pay dividends in many forms: saved time, information, human interaction, etc. I can't tell you how many times an online friend has fed me a piece of information I used in a client presentation, or how many times message board acquaintances of mine had offered great advice. Not to denigrate relationships by expressing them in terms of value, but what calculation of the impact of online communities on business productivity includes things like the 10 hours' worth of research someone saved you by e-mailing you a report they had put together? How many of those calculations include direct and indirect benefits of online social networking? None of them.
Lastly, (and perhaps you may not consider this valid), work hours and responsibilities have expanded over the years such that few people truly work 9 to 5 jobs anymore. I think the trade-off is a bit of personal time, whether that's to shop online, participate in an online debate, send and receive personal e-mail or what have you. You may disagree. I personally believe that people need time to have a life, and considering how much my company intrudes on employees' personal lives during the course of your average week, the least I can do is have a permissive work environment that's not going to get all uppity about people updating their MySpace pages at work or taking personal IMs and e-mails. As long as people get their work done and don't expose the company to legal liability, they can pretty much do what they want. YMMV.
It really comes down to this: As a communications guy, I want my people to be able to communicate and be plugged in. There's no way to operate in the space if you don't live it every day. The next ad environment, marketing program, distribution methodology, communications platform or whatnot that could be used to the benefit of my clients will be discovered or conceptualized by an employee. And the skills they pick up and develop in the normal course of simply being a netizen are partly responsible for that.
By way of example, I'm getting up to speed on MySpace in part through one of our employees here. She knows the ins and outs of the community, mostly through using MySpace to network and help her in her side job of promoting new bands. Why would I want to keep her away from MySpace during business hours? What she's doing now could help me come up with a marketing concept next week.
Of course, there are limits to everything. People need to get their responsibilities and tasks covered. I'd probably be pretty ticked if someone missed a deadline because they were exchanging IMs and not putting in the effort they should have as a result. But like I said earlier, if people get their work done, I have very few problems with them plugging in to online communities during the business day.
So when I see stories like the one in Advertising Age, I get a little tweaked because I think such alarmist stances solidify the status quo and make it tougher for forward-thinking businesses.
Receiving and consuming podcasts is hard. Not for the digerati, but for average Joes everywhere. The distribution mechanism sucks. It's bad enough that it's tough to find a podcast one enjoys, but then there's this whole thing about subscribing to it, which should be a one-click process, but isn't for most. (In fact, when I recently subscribed to Across the Sound, what I really wanted to do was download the current episode and all the back episodes so I could have them handy. I couldn't figure it out easily, unless I wanted to download each file manually and drag and drop it.)
In today's instant gratification society, people don't want to have to deal with that kind of complexity. I think it's probably one of the big factors contributing to low penetration of podcasts.
So why am I so bullish on podcasting?
I think the distribution model will change. I've written Spin columns in the past about how I expect digital audio players and satellite radio/satellite bandwidth to converge. Check out the latest Sirius portable. It's not quite the satellite iPod I envisioned, but it's close. It can already store, rewind, pause and save satellite content. How long before it can receive podcasts through satellite bandwidth?
So that's why I'm digging podcasting. The assets we've created today may be distributed in new and interesting ways tomorrow. When that happens, watch out.
Shelly Palmer missed the point in his Spin today. Forget for a second what tiered pricing would mean for access speed and think of what happens when telcos decide the Internet looks more profitable as a series of walled gardens. That's when we're truly screwed.
Just read Doc's piece. What he says.
We just had another ad sales rep call to tell us that an ad package we had planned to recommend to a client was no longer on the table due to competitive issues.
This happened to us with another client last year. The publisher in question had decided to take down our ads after the contract was signed and the ads had been running for three weeks.
It never bothers me when potential partners decline to pitch a piece of business. It bothers me when they claim they can pitch it, put inventory in front of us and then later pull out.
In today's case, we had asked the vendor THREE TIMES to confirm they could run our client's advertising. We asked them three times because we knew they had a service that was directly competitive to that of our client. Three times we asked and three times they insisted they could run the advertising. As our recommendation is going out the door, they call to pull out.
So, yeah...When we ask "Are you sure?" we're not asking just to hear ourselves talk.
So MySpace gave out a compilation CD at the iMedia Summit, which I ripped and stuffed on my iPod. It's a disc full of emo and power pop, which I strangely can't stop listening to.
I did want to share some lyrics with you. This is from one of the tunes by a band called New Years Day. The track is called "Ready, Aim, Misfire." Here's the chorus:
Shoot my Cupid out of the sky
Break off his wings and gouge out his eyes
Thank him for nothing, 'cuz that's all that he gave to me
Your love is my heart disease.
Whatever happened to "Baby, I love your way?"
Only an evil genius can make it possible for a sitting president to get up in front of the American people, admit he took the nation to war under false pretenses and insist that we were on the right track all along. If Bush gets away with this, he will have pulled the biggest bait and switch in history.
So who is the evil genius behind the curtain?
Just got an e-mail full of "Holiday Shopping Deals from ShopLocal" from the Chicago Tribune. Whenever I register for newspaper sites, I always make sure to uncheck the boxes for e-mail communication, so that I don't get "offers" like this.
But many times, I still do. And when I get something from what I consider to be a reputable publisher, I always unsubscribe.
Not so with the Chicago Tribune mailing. When I click the "unsubscribe" link in their e-mail, I'm told I have to log in with a password I didn't know I had in order to change my preferences and get off their list. Conveniently, the site pretends that the e-mail address it sent the spam to doesn't exist in its system, so I have to figure out what my user name and password are in order to opt out.
The Chicago Tribune should know that we have ways of fighting this kind of spamming behavior. The first way is through posting to my blog. The second way is by labeling their communication as Spam, so that everyone else who uses Cloudmark will have it labeled as Spam, too.
One of the reasons the Internet flourished out of the gate was that there was a built-in reward mechanism for individuals or companies who wanted to provide information and serve as an authority on a given subject. You would find people putting up websites to claim their little piece of intellectual territory where they could be an authority on a subject in a medium where the playing field was fairly level.
There were a number of benefits to staking your claim in cyberspace, not all of them tangible or directly tied to profit:
There are a few others, but I want to concentrate on these few.
When Google revolutionized search, it created a surrogate for authority, based on a number of factors like PageRank, the number of inbound relevant links and dozens of other parameters. Other search engines had come before Google, but Google was the first to make inbound links such a key component of its relevance algorithms.
Of course, this served the Internet well in Google's early years. Now, I'm not so sure that Google Juice is aligned closely enough with true relevance. The situation is harmful in many ways.
Inbound links factor so much into Google's determination of relevance that links themselves have become a commodity. If Google didn't exist, I wouldn't have to run two anti-spam plugins on Movable Type (and still have to clean out several hundred spam comments and trackbacks that manage to slip past the filters). Moderators for message boards and online community sites wouldn't have to dedicate so much time to cleaning out spam links. We wouldn't have this problem with spam blogs.
I'd like to propose to Google that inbound links simply matter too much. They're no longer a measure of how important people consider a given piece of information on the Internet to be. More like they're a measure of how far someone is willing to go to make a piece of information seem like it's important.
As content providers, many of us work our butts off for potential reward. Let's say I publish an article on Giant Purple Snorklewhackers one day, and I take home $100. (That $100 could be in the form of ad revenue, or in the form of less tangible things like intellectual capital, enhanced reputation, PR value, etc.) Then some spam blog comes along, rips off the article verbatim, aggregates it with a bunch of other articles about Snorklewhackers, and reaps the benefit of being deemed more relevant to Snorklewhackers. The spam blog does this not by producing content itself, but by running a stupid little script that scrapes content from the top search results and re-posts it.
In that way, spammers are stealing my reward from me. More precisely, they're diminishing the value of the reward I receive for publishing original content. It's as if I busted my butt to bring home $100 and looked over at my next door neighbor, who is happily running off perfect copies of $100 bills on his copy machine.
As anyone who has ever read Ayn Rand can tell you, when the reward is no longer really a reward, or when parasites and moochers chip away at that reward to the point that it becomes nearly valueless over time, the people who really drive the economy stop contributing.
There are quite a few things that can be adjusted to bring Google Juice back into alignment with true relevance. Among them:
Any of these would likely help. My concern is that I don't see any of them making headway right now. And the longer we wait, the more inbound links become the surrogate for relevance and the more the market shifts toward emphasizing substanceless links.
We need to fix this. Please leave your suggestions in comments.
I'm starting to worry about the repeated beating of the Online Video drum. The last two conferences I attended, everybody was talking about it like it was "the next big thing."
I'm hoping this doesn't usher in a second generation of shovelware TV commercials. At the iMedia Summit, one of the guys from Freestyle Interactive showcased some ads that utilized video, but still managed to offer up an interactive experience. One of the ads featured Tiger Woods and an impossible-to-win putting game in which Tiger himself reacted to the player's missed putts by taunting him. It was quite cool, but I doubt we can trust the rest of the interactive industry to put together ads along the same lines.
More likely, we'll see yet another wave of people putting TV commercials online. And it's going to breed another wave of resentment, not to mention that it will put advertisers off track and make them see the Internet as Just Another Broadcast Medium.
If you think that there aren't a ton of industry execs who would love to see "Shovelware 2: The Sequel," you're mistaken. There were plenty of them at the iMedia Summit, and many of them took exception to comments I made in private conversations that many agencies and advertisers are trying to make a passive medium out of an active one.
Despite the fact that it doesn't take much more than a good ad server to display online video assets, many of the companies that promised online video as an add-on are somehow still in business, charging anywhere from a $3 to $5 CPM to use "their" technology to serve it. I thought agencies would have gotten wise to the fact that these companies are unnecessary middlemen by now. In fact, just the opposite is happening and more online video companies are springing up. What are they pitching? Mostly the ability to play TV commercials online, whether that be in "pre-roll" or "post-roll" format, standalone video executions or interstitials.
Believe me when I say that many of these folks will do ANYTHING to cling to the broadcast model.
Remember that whole controversy over whether voting machines are secure? Looks like Black Box Voting has made some significant progress in showing that they aren't.
A test election was run in Leon County [Florida] on Tuesday with a total of eight ballots. Six ballots voted "no" on a ballot question as to whether Diebold voting machines can be hacked or not. Two ballots, cast by Dr. Herbert Thompson and by Harri Hursti voted "yes" indicating a belief that the Diebold machines could be hacked.At the beginning of the test election the memory card programmed by Harri Hursti was inserted into an Optical Scan Diebold voting machine. A "zero report" was run indicating zero votes on the memory card. In fact, however, Hursti had pre-loaded the memory card with plus and minus votes.
The eight ballots were run through the optical scan machine. The standard Diebold-supplied "ender card" was run through as is normal procedure ending the election. A results tape was run from the voting machine.
Correct results should have been: Yes:2 ; No:6
However, just as Hursti had planned, the results tape read: Yes:7 ; No:1
The latest version of BBV's newsletter says this all comes on the heels of the resignation of Diebold CEO Wally O'Dell, and an announcement of a stockholder class action suit. Further "hack testing" is coming up in CA. Stay tuned.
Gabe Samuels thinks I need to grow up. (Registration required) And now, I must fisk...
RARELY DO I GET TO use a cliché as aptly as I do in applying it to Tom Hespos' Dec. 6th question, "When Will Online Measurement Stop Playing Follow The Leader?" The cliché is this: Those who choose to ignore the past are doomed to repeat it. And the answer to his question is the title to this piece. Hespos' lament is old, tired and unproductive! It has been heard since the first ad hit cyberspace in 1997 in the now-defunct, groundbreaking Prodigy. It is thinking like his that has kept interactive from achieving its rightful place among major media for better than ten years.
Old? Yes. I've been saying that online needs its own metrics for 10 years now. (And by the way, the first ad hit the web in 1994, not 1997.) The main reason is that reach and frequency measure exposure, not interactivity.
Tired? Yes. I'm getting tired of saying this. And I'm also getting tired of qualifying my comments by saying that we should continue to move toward completion on the reach and frequency initiative, solely for the reason that certain advertisers absolutely need to see R/F, and I'd rather have them test online marketing with substandard metrics than not test it at all.
Unproductive? Hardly. The fact remains that reach and frequency are the wrong metrics because they measure exposure and not interactivity. What's unproductive about discussing what the next generation success metrics should be? Or does Samuels think that marketing is married to R/F forever?
The history of media is rich with stories about dauntless pioneers who felt, just like Hespos, that "their" new medium deserved--nay, must--force the market to accept new metrics. A couple of brief illustrations:
This isn't about egos. This is about measuring effects. And if Samuels wants to tell the world that the Internet is good only for exposing people to a broadcast message, than I can't help him.
The early cable TV pioneers, notably Ted Turner and John Malone--and legions of their disciples--made many a recorded speech about the fact that "cable is NOT TV" and that TV metrics like Nielsen's ratings were not only inappropriate, but actually harmful to their nascent medium. In those early days (circa 1980), they were lamenting in pain. And they continued to be in pain until they finally understood the realities of the world of advertising. They only started laughing all the way to the bank when Nielsen started measuring cable. It is now about thirty years since cable started selling ads--originally expecting, by the way, to get significant price premiums because it was such a "targeted," "engaging" and, yes, "interactive" medium. Nevertheless, the three "dinosaurs" and a thousand over-the-air stations are still in business doing very well, thank you. But nobody will deny that cable is now a force to be reckoned with--and nobody will deny that being measured with the old, "inappropriate" metrics is why.
There are so many things wrong with this paragraph, I don't know where to start. Perhaps we'll start with the big, honking non sequitur that essentially argues that because cable at first didn't want to be measured like television, that the Internet should just play nice and go with the flow, because everything will turn out great in the end and people will back up giant dump trucks full of money to our houses. Nah, that argument blows itself out of the water.
How about the gaping hole in this argument? You know, the one that you could drive one of the aforementioned dump trucks full of money through...the one that that assumes that exposure is the end-all, be-all solution for success metrics. Exposure is a metric for the broadcast model, Mr. Samuels. And if you didn't notice, the broadcast model ain't doing so well in this age of interactivity and engagement. So it logically follows that perhaps exposure ain't the best metric on which to base the entire future of advertising.
Even as I write this today, the absolute oldest medium, outdoor, is embracing "old" metrics. I would bet a couple of my own hard-earned dollars that it will pay off handsomely. Arguably, the second oldest medium, yellow pages, is also accepting reality after many years of denial. This medium, too, has listened to the market and is adopting a form of "old" metrics.
Yeah, well, you don't exactly see many billboards inviting people to spray-paint their opinion all over them, do you? Outdoor can embrace old metrics because outdoor executions are designed to reach people, not interact with them.
There is a simple, unbreakable law in marketing: the customer is always right. A product, ANY product starts selling well only when a seller stops his love affair with his own product, and listens to the market.
This is the only paragraph in Samuels' article that makes any sense to me, whatsoever.
So to reprise the question: When will online measurement stop playing follow the leader? When it IS the Leader. And when will THAT happen? When it grows up!
Well, I'd offer up that one sure way to make sure online advertising remains stuck in its infancy is to bind it to old, outdated metrics and evaluate it solely that way. So what Samuels is asking is impossible if we go that route. How convenient.
I'd argue it's television, radio, print and outdoor that need to do some growing up, since all they do is broadcast messages at an audience that expects interactivity. In this way, TV is a lot like the 2-year-old child who sticks his fingers in his ears and goes, "lalalala...I'm not LISTENING!" when we try to react to something he just said. So which medium is the one that needs to grow up?
In closing, I'd like to mention that Terry Heaton wrote a wonderful reaction to Samuels' piece over on his blog. I'd be really interested to hear what other marketing bloggers think.
Steve at AdRants posts that Boldmouth, a new word of mouth marketing agency, has come out of the gate by lambasting BzzAgent.
I jump-started a good deal of this controversy a few weeks back when I slammed the notion of covert agents in my weekly Spin.
The conspiracy theorist in me thinks that maybe this whole thing is just a stunt designed to bring Word of Mouth to the forefront of the industry's agenda. It will be interesting to see if this latest controversy takes off in the blogosphere.
Some of the most fascinating marketing-related conversations I have are with Dave Morgan, CEO of Tacoda. At the iMedia Summit, during the sponsored vodka tasting, we were talking a bit about "White Hat Brands," their cornerstone values and the advantages they have in the marketplace.
Trustworthiness is not something to be underestimated in the modern marketplace. In a world when most folks believe that the majority of the people delivering commercial messages to them are full of crap, people will tend to gravitate toward the trustworthy brands and seek out White Hat values in the companies they do business with.
The cornerstone values of a White Hat brand are consistent with many of the ideals of the Citizen Media movement and the Cluetrain Manifesto - honesty, transparency, a personal touch, willingness to engage in dialogue, willingness to admit mistakes, etc. As I was talking to Dave about this, it occurred to me that it's probably easier and more realistic to have a White Hat brand in the B2B space. The notion of having meaningful and honest communication with customers is, frankly, a bit easier to execute in B2B, where the customer base is smaller than in consumer marketing, and businesses are already concentrating effort on making their communication more meaningful.
This is likely why Dave's company has such a great reputation in the industry.
I wonder if the consumer market can take direction on this from the B2B market. In other words, if White Hat brands emerge from the B2B space, will consumer marketers begin to covet what they've built and begin to explore executing something similar in the consumer space?
Blogging light until I load up my new laptop with the data from my old one. Stay tuned. I didn't expect the Toshiba to go belly-up on me so soon.
Aviva Porres, born 6:28 this morning. 7 lbs. 7 oz.
Mommy Margaret delivered without painkillers (tough cookie). Pics to come.
Thanks, Lifehacker.
When this gets simpler such that the average consumer can easily get on board with this concept, picture everyone with PSPs and video iPods sitting around on wireless broadband connections, happily checking out stuff they Tivoed at home.
Sounds very compelling to me. Especially since I never make it home in time for "Lost."
So I made it to Palm Springs after some finagling of flights. (Despite leaving plenty of time for connecting flights, United took its dear sweet time and a bunch of us ended up having to switch flights and cram aboard an eensy puddle-jumper from LAX to Palm Springs Regional.)
There are plenty of familiar faces here, but also many people I've never met before. Kyle Shannon from Beyond Interactive sat across the aisle from me on the flight, but there were a few folks headed to the conference that I've never met before. iMedia is no longer "the usual folks," which is nice.
I went to the cocktail party last night and hung out with some friends, including Masha and Kevin, Lori Goldberg from AvenueA/Razorfish, JB, Hope and Wendi from Horizon Interactive, and a few assorted others. After the cocktail party, we ended up going to a casino for a while, just for giggles.
It's no secret - many of us are here (in part) to scope out potential employees and do some poaching. Some people I talked to last night and I were laughing at how openly we all advertise the fact that finding fresh blood is a top objective here. There's some great talent walking around, but there's also plenty of folks to steer clear of, to be perfectly frank.
I found myself rolling my eyes skyward a few times last night, listening to a few media buyers and planners sizing themselves up against one another. In a few cases, this involved comparing notes regarding where reps have taken them out lately, what boondoggle trips they've been invited to, and how much free stuff they've been able to extort out of sales reps. Such conversations reminded me of a serious "Come to Jesus" talk I had several years ago with a former colleague to explain that sales reps weren't his personal valet service. It wasn't terribly widespread, but I mentally crossed off a few potentials last night after getting the sense they wouldn't fit in at Underscore.
I'd prefer not to dwell on the negative, though. Rick Parkhill and his crew once again chose a terrific resort, and you can tell they chose the location carefully. It's been designed to free us from distractions so we can get down to business. I'm looking forward to the Aspen Group meetings today and addressing some of the challenges the industry has been facing.
Apparently, the RNC hasn't realized that I've switched parties. So they continue to send me Republican glurge, most of which gets filtered into my Spam folder by Cloudmark. Sometimes, before I empty my spam folder, I check out some of the e-mail I'm about to delete. Such was the case with this piece of garbage from Mehlman.
Dear Friend,Speaking at the U.S. Naval Academy, President Bush laid out the plan for victory in Iraq. America's strategy is clear: we will help Iraqis build a stable democracy, a strong economy, and security forces that can defend the Iraqi people and fight the terrorists. And we will never give in to the enemy by cutting and running before the job is done.
Read the President's complete Strategy for Victory in Iraq here [link removed, see below], and write a letter to the editor to spread the word about the President's plan.
In Iraq, our troops' heroic work is paying off. Iraqis will soon vote in their third democratic election this year. Groups that boycotted earlier elections are joining the political process. On the security front, Iraqi troops and police are growing stronger and more ready to defend their country. Increasingly, Iraqis are taking the lead in joint operations to root out the terrorists. As Iraqi forces stand up, our troops' mission will shift away from patrolling Iraqi cities and towards hunting down the most dangerous terrorists.
In spite of the incredible progress made by our troops, some in Washington still are proposing artificial deadlines for withdrawal. This is not a plan for victory. Cutting and running would send a message to the terrorists that our will can be broken, inviting more attacks on our troops and on our homeland. It would tell our friends that America is a weak and unsteady ally. So long as George W. Bush is our President, America will never return to the dangerous, pre-September 11th illusion that the terrorists can be appeased by simply turning our backs.
In response to the President's clear plan, Democrats like minority leader Harry Reid offer empty political attacks, calling the President's speech "tired rhetoric" even before it was given. Yet these same Democrats agree with key elements of President Bush's strategy, with Sen. Joe Biden writing that "we must forge a sustainable political compromise between Iraqi factions, strengthen the Iraqi government and bolster reconstruction efforts, and accelerate the training of Iraqi forces." That sounds exactly like what the President is proposing. These Democrats fundamentally agree on what needs to happen in Iraq, but they're attacking for political gain. Are these attacks designed to help us win the war on terror, or help them win the next election?
President Bush offers a way forward on Iraq, not empty political posturing. Read the strategy and spread the word in your community.
Sincerely,
Ken Mehlman
Chairman, Republican National Committee
I also clicked on the link in the e-mail and read what Mehlman calls "the President's complete Strategy for Victory in Iraq." Not only is it not "complete," but it's also not even a "strategy."
As a marketing guy, I've had to write more strategic plans than I care to remember. Some things that each of these strategic plans had in common:
Click on the link, and see that the Bush strategic plan contains none of the above. Here are some of the objectives:
* Short term, Iraq is making steady progress in fighting terrorists, meeting political milestones, building democratic institutions, and standing up security forces.
* Medium term, Iraq is in the lead defeating terrorists and providing its own security, with a fully constitutional government in place, and on its way to achieving its economic potential.
* Longer term, Iraq is peaceful, united, stable, and secure, well integrated into the international community, and a full partner in the global war on terrorism.
Notice none of these things is clearly defined. Certainly, none of these is quantifiable. Moreover, not one has a timeline. If I tried submitting something like this to a client, they'd have a conniption and fire me on the spot.
Not to mention that the rest of the document more closely resembles Republican talking points, trying to link Iraq with 9/11. I could tear into this thing for a month and a half, but rather than expend my energies on this piece of garbage, I'd rather cast my vote for "This doesn't meet any definition of a strategy. Start over."
I'm leaving at 7 AM Saturday morning for the iMedia Summit. I hate flying that early in the morning, but this summit promises to be a great one, so I don't mind. Rick Parkhill and his peeps always do a great job.
While I'm out there, I'll still have plenty of work to do remotely, but I also look forward to breaking out for a bit to do some geocaching. I'm bringing a few GPS units in case some of the folks at the summit want to join me.
This morning, we got an e-mail from one of the folks running the show, asking what we think the biggest issues facing online marketing are. My biggest one? "Many clients still want to broadcast TO people instead of interacting WITH them." I also cited the notion of an increase of ad dollars in the medium with not enough content to support it (unless, of course, we figure out the revenue model for Citizen Media in the next few months).
(BTW, "Citizen Media" is my new proposed term to replace "Consumer Generated Content," which I hate for several reasons. What do you think?)