Christopher S. Penn – Marketing AI Keynote Speaker

Category: Advertising

Pixelated Business Marketing Conference

Pixelated Business Marketing Conference

A while back, Mitch Joel posted his Pixelated conference series, a collection of seminars and sessions from conferences that contain the “best of the best” for any set of topics. I’ve been so busy doing stuff that I never got around to putting mine together until now. This version of Pixelated is focused on Business Marketing – ideas from sales, marketing, branding, and new media that should help any business do things a little better.

If this were a conference, a real life conference, I have no doubt that attending it would cost you thousands of dollars, at least for the first sessions. Thanks to the exceptional generosity of conferences and events who post their sessions, you can enjoy some of the best content on earth without leaving your chair.

Treat this as an actual conference. Take a day or half a day to watch the videos and give them your undivided attention. Have a bottle of water, a notepad, and an open mind as you watch the sessions, as if you were actually there.

Rather than just a pile of videos, I’ve also added brief annotations about why I think each session is important.

Updated: refreshed for July 2010, with some new sessions from TED and other shows.

Pixelated Business Marketing starts… now.

Seth Godin @ TED: This is Seth’s newest set of perspectives, based on his book Tribes. The evolution of marketing from mass media to hero culture of sorts.

Rory Sutherland @ TED: An amazingly funny and insightful talk about the creation of non-tangible value.

Malcolm Gladwell @ TED: This session ranks super high on my list because Malcolm gets you to think outside the box. What product or service do your customers deeply want but don’t know it?

Joseph Pine @ TED: If nothing else, this talk should make you think about what experiences are and how to give them to customers, rather than products or services.

Dan Ariely @ TED: Dan’s book, Predictably Irrational, is the basis for this talk about how our decision processes are flawed, including why consumers buy things they really shouldn’t.

Garr Reynolds at Google Talks: Garr is the author of Presentation Zen, a phenomenal book that asks you to look at how you present information and how you can make your presentations better, more impactful, and less boring.

Avinash Kaushik at Google Talks: Avinash is pretty much THE bottom line when it comes to web analytics. In this talk he goes over a good chunk of his book and also talks about data-drive corporate culture and its importance.

Seth Godin @ Inbound Marketing Summit: Seth is a master marketer. His talk goes over how you can make your products or services more remarkable.

David Meerman Scott from Inbound Marketing Summit: David’s book, the New Rules of Marketing and PR, power part of this talk as he goes over how the ground is changing underneath traditional business outreach.

NEDMA: I talk about email marketing and social media integration.

Optimization Summit: I talk about the best practices of email marketing.

Inbound Marketing Summit: I talk about whether or not your business should be podcasting.

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January 21, 2009
Make your social media experiment useful

In reading the latest “controversy” in social media about Burger King’s ad agency tweeting on behalf of the client and the furor over authenticity and transparency, I came to this conclusion:

Burger King needs a new agency.

If you haven’t been following along, here’s the very short summary. CP+B is the agency in question tweeting as the fictional King character for Burger King on Twitter. Some social media folks object to a lack of disclosure by the agency, a lack of authenticity.

Here’s a different perspective on the issue: ROI. What in the world was CP+B thinking? I’d love to see even a back of the envelope ROI argument for creating a Twitter account for a fictional character to sell sandwiches, which is the whole point of Burger King.

Forget about transparency, authenticity, and whether or not an agency should tweet as a client. What in the world is the ROI or even apparent value of this initiative?

Here’s how I would have handled a client’s request to be engaged on Twitter: create a Twitter bot that you can message with your current location. It returns the three nearest Burger Kings so that you can get something to EAT, since the whole point of Burger King is to provide something for me to eat. I’d use it in a heartbeat when I travel. If Burger King and CP+B approached Twitter or social media in general from the perspective of being USEFUL, they’d get more sales and a measurable ROI.

It’s absolutely true that you can’t get precise ROI on social media. My work for the Student Loan Network means that ROI gets fuzzy, but the business connections, enhanced distribution of things like eBooks, inbound links, and other measurable activities are all improved by Twitter and social media. Can I put an exact dollar amount on it? No. Can I say that Twitter has improved the bottom line? Yes. Have I helped folks on Twitter get financial aid questions answered? Yes.

Be useful in your social media experiments. Don’t just do something in social media because it’s what the cool kids are doing. Do something that is useful, that serves a need, and your social media experiment will be a success.

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10 most recent blog posts of mine:

January 16, 2009
The evolution of marketing after search

Image via Wikipedia

The evolution of marketing after search

Search changed everything.

In the world of advertising, before there was search, there was only interruption. Put as many ads as possible in as many places as possible in the hopes that when a consumer needed something, your ad would be there and they’d think of you first. Spend a fortune on brand so that when a consumer had a problem that your brand could solve, they’d choose you. During the pre-search age, this strategy worked, largely because there was no opportunity for anything better.

Enter search. Search allowed consumers to indicate what they were interested in. Search allowed advertisers to know when a consumer was in the mood to buy, or at least in the mood to shop. Suddenly, instead of paying millions of dollars for impressions, advertisers could pay thousands of dollars for clicks, and the quality of the leads was better because the consumers had self-selected themselves as interested parties.

So here we stand. Search rules the roost. Google’s fortunes are built on it, and everyone is trying to improve search or improve placement in search.

Here’s the fundamental question: what comes next? Does search just get better, or is there a quantum leap that changes the game as much as search changed the game?

I believe there is a change ahead, and we can already see it in various threads. It hasn’t come together yet, but it’s there and happening faster than you think.

Predictive placement.

You see, we know a lot of information. TONS of information. Consumers self-publish information in volumes that marketers could never accomplish. All of MySpace, all of Facebook, all of Twitter – all of this is self-published data, most of it public.

Right now, we don’t yet have the computational capacity to do massive data correlation on an economical scale, though if I had to place a bet, I’d put my money on Google to do it first. Think about what that future might look like, though. We know products and services have seasonality, and we already have some data segmentation capabilities. Massive data correlation will let us aggregate all the consumer self-published data and slice it a billion different ways to determine what customers want, and when.

Consider what massive data correlation might mean – a 19 year old female customer logs into, say, a superstore online, and signs in with their Facebook key (just as you do now with Facebook apps). Instantly, the superstore correlates the data in their Facebook profile with the megadatabase and knows that this consumer, who likes Phish, Liz Phair, CSI, and Lost, and is from the North Shore of Massachusetts is statistically likely, based on thousands of similar customer records, to want and need a student loan in three months’ time. Based on their demographic and psychographic data, the megadatabase knows that statistically, this consumer will probably need to borrow between $12,500 and$ 14,300 in two increments, and based on previous purchase data, they’re likely to need their loan disbursements in the first week of September and the fourth week of January.

The megadatabase makes these notations in a customer profile, sets reminders, and on the first Tuesday of September, Facebook, in concert with the superstore, sends the consumer a message offering them a student loan for $13,000 that can be disbursed by the Friday of that same week – because in the background, the megadatabase has already secured pre-approvals. The consumer is amazed and delighted that Facebook and the superstore knew exactly what they needed, exactly when they needed it, and instead of having to choose a lender, they just go with the lender that was there at precisely the right time with precisely the right offering. The advertisement will not seem out of place, either – because it’s precisely timed, it will appear to be content, just as now, an ad for a service that you need is content, not an ad.

Sound farfetched? In the age of Google, in the age of social networking profiles with copious data, that day is much closer than you realize.

Welcome to the future, where marketing is there for exactly what your wallet can bear, with exactly what you want, to take advantage of the buying impulse the moment you have it – all backed up by massive databases.

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July 2, 2008
The Most Effective Marketing A Non-Profit Can Do Is Build The Database

The Most Effective Marketing A Non-Profit Can Do Is Build The Database

I’ve been seeing more and more “brand awareness” campaigns, especially for non-profits and social good organizations lately, and I genuinely have to ask – what’s the value of that? From tweets on Twitter saying “Raise awareness of the plight of…” to advertisements on MySpace like the one to the right, awareness campaigns seem to be everywhere.

What’s the value of awareness?

What’s the return on investment of awareness?

If I were a marketer for a non-profit, a social justice cause, or just about anything like this, I’d have to think long and hard about the value of my limited marketing dollars going towards headshare versus more actionable marketing.

Let’s take this Zimbabwe campaign, for example. Ask the average American to locate Zimbabwe on a map and you’ll have an appallingly low success rate. Heck, ask them to locate the continent Zimbabwe is on and you won’t do much better. Why advertise an awareness campaign on a predominantly US-centric web site to an audience that likely can’t even find the target, and advertise in a way that has no action?

If I were trying to market this campaign, here’s how I’d approach it. If MySpace is the venue where in fact the audience for this campaign exists, fine. I’d put up a simple widget, maybe some scrolling scary pictures of what Mugabe does to his people, and have a “sign the petition” form with slots for name, address, email, etc. right below it, and the requisite opt-in to the mailing list checkbox, pre-checked for your convenience. Maybe make it a Flash widget that scrolled and displayed the last 50 petitioners’ names and locations.

This widget would in turn feed a nice SQL database that would aggregate the petitioners’ data and dump it into a mass mailer like Blue Sky Factory (disclosure: BSF is a sponsor of one of my podcasts, Marketing Over Coffee) and start soliciting donations. Sure, we could print out a list of petitioners and drop it on a politician’s desk, but I’d bet it would be far more effective, once a huge house list was amassed, to offer a politician’s PAC an email to the constituency on their behalf in exchange for their vote/support/introduction of legislation.

Forget spending money on awareness. We live or die on our database. The database is a tangible asset that has real, stored value which we can use for barter, trade, or sale (assuming you have the permission of the audience to do so). If you have scarce marketing dollars, if you have scarce resources, building up a marketing database is one of the fastest ways to add value to your non-profit, stay in touch with your constituency, drive donations and funding campaigns, and make real change in the world.

Yes, you have to use your database wisely, perhaps sparingly, always with the privacy and security of your constituency top of mind, but having an effective database is an incomparable value.

In the information economy, the non-profit with the most information, effectively used, wins.

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June 17, 2008
Pitches that miss the mark

I got a hilariously off topic pitch from a PR firm today to the Financial Aid Podcast.

“Financial Aid Podcast Feature Topic – New Proposal Offers Free Cell Phone Headsets To Motorists Ticketed Under New Cell Phone Ban Law”

Christopher,

Here’s some information for a timely and interesting feature topic. The release below details how one company is launching a creative way to help educate motorists about the new hands free cell phone bans being implemented in more and more states nationally.

We would be happy to arrange interviews help in any other way further. If there is someone better to send this to can you please forward this to him/her or provide me with the contact information? Thanks and look forward to hearing from you soon.

Name withheld to prevent accidentally promoting this firm

I’m not sure where to begin evisceration.

First, the journalism outlet – the Financial Aid Podcast – is an internet radio show about financial aid. Has nothing to do with driving, cars, telephony, headsets, mobile phones, or hands free cell phone legislation. This isn’t just off-topic, it’s off-industry.

Second, how did you even find out about me? Yeah, I’m on lists like HelpAReporter.com and such, but if you’re pitching based on that subscriber list, Shankman’s going to toast your ass.

Third, when I read the actual release out of morbid curiosity, you as a PR firm missed the point of your client’s release. It’s actually an interesting story of sorts – the company is doing some cool stuff that might be worth talking about, instead of the generic, bland copy you sent along as a cover letter to the release. You need to hire a better copywriter.

I’d be tempted to add the PR firm’s address to the PR spammers’ wiki, but honestly, I don’t want to give ANY ink to the firm, positive or negative, and I kind of actually want to keep getting their press releases, just to see what additional, wildly off-topic releases they send to me. They’ll never get published, but at least they’re good for a laugh.

Of course, if I were this PR firm’s client, I might be questioning the ROI of using this firm. Just sayin…

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June 5, 2008
Ask, ask, ask
I’ve been looking again at MySpace, as a recent blog post detailed. One of the things I’ve been looking at is the depth of engagement. Is a friend relationship enough to market on? What is the value of a MySpace friendship?

Over the last five days, I’ve been sending out 200 messages a day or so to my MySpace friends, advertising the Financial Aid Podcast. It’s themed pretty basically:
- Thanks for being a friend of mine and of my show.
- Here’s three links to iTunes, Google Reader, and the site.
- Please subscribe.
How’s it been going?

I started with a Feedburner number of about 1,000. The show had been static around that number for a while, a couple of months at least. Today? Hit a new record – the last four out of five days.

Ask. Ask those in your network to get connected, ask them to take action, ask them to be more involved in your community efforts. If you don’t ask, you definitely won’t receive.
May 17, 2008
Still can't ignore MySpace

Lots of folks like to hate on MySpace. Sure, it has a web design that makes you cry sometimes. Sure, profiles can be ugly as sin and crash your browser.

But guess what? In addition to 300 million+ profiles, 110 million+ active users, and new data portability initiatives, MySpace has a messaging system.

You may say, so what, Chris? What’s the big deal about MySpace’s equally unpleasant messaging system?

The deal is this: what percentage of your emails get delivered? Not opened, not read, not clicked. Delivered. Get there in the first place. Do you know? Chances are good it’s not 100%.

For all its flaws, MySpace’s messaging system has 100% deliverability once you friend someone or they friend you. If you’re doing marketing on MySpace, you at least know the message is getting there. Read/acted on is different, but the same rules that govern whether someone opens and acts on your emails govern MySpace messages as well.

You don’t have to market on MySpace. You don’t have to pay attention to any social network – but chances are your competitors are.

May 13, 2008
Snapple Antioxidant Water tastes exactly like water doesn't
As a followup to my previous Snapple Antioxidant Water post, Deana over at Snapple sent me a sample pack of Snapple at the behest of Chris Abraham, who I presume is marketing Snapple to bloggers. I got a 4 pack.

Thoughts:
- It’s sugary.
- It tastes nothing like water, and a lot like Gatorade when you make it from the powder with more water than you should per scoop.
- In looking at the ingredients, the first two ingredients are water and sugar.
Is it good? I suppose if you’re a Powerade/Gatorade drinker, you’ll probably like some of the flavors. Personally, I’m more of a Red Bull/Rock Star fan than Gatorade for sugary drinks, on the premise that if I’m going to suffer the consequences of extra empty calories, I’d better get damn jittery from it, too. If Snapple made a “Closest Legal Alternative to Meth in Fruity Flavors” I’d give that a try, if for no other reason than the product name alone.

As for the antioxidant water? I’m going to stick to regular water now.

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April 14, 2008
Andrew Baron Selling Twitter Account, Database For Sale?
Andrew Baron Selling Twitter Account, Database For Sale?

Chris Brogan raised the question people should be asking about Andrew Baron’s eBay sale of his Twitter account.

What are you buying? What’s the value?

Laura Fitton said on Twitter: “you can’t sell relationships.” You can’t. But you sure as heck can sell data.

In the case of Twitter, you can’t export meaningful amounts of data from Twitter followers from Twitter directly.

If Baron put up his Facebook account, that’d be a different story, because I can extract real data from it – names, email addresses, other contact information. At that point, it’s a database, and we buy & sell databases all the time.

What would I pay for that? The going rate is about $1.50 per valid identity on the commercial markets - you can buy header files from credit bureaus with roughly the same data for about$ 1.50 a head if you’re buying in bulk. Experian, Transunion, Equifax – all of them are selling YOU already, at a cost far below what your personal worth is.

Companies are buying and selling your data all the time. I can’t give specifics, but of the companies I’ve worked for in the last decade, most of them bought customer lists at one point or another, and the sad reality is that your personal identity, information, and privacy are dirt cheap.

You are for sale.

A piece of Andrew Baron is for sale, as is his followers on Twitter.

He’s just being transparent about it.

Incidentally, if I were a current or future Rocketboom advertiser, I’d buy this account in a heartbeat and run some analytics on it. Who DMs or @s Andrew the most, about what topics, and are those people running media channels of their own that I should advertise on?

Also, you can’t export data from Twitter. But you can cross-reference data pools you already have with Twitter. A social graph of Twitter cross-referenced with your house list and other social networks will tell you quickly who participates in that account’s first level relationships. THAT has value to someone who wants to market to Andrew or his connections.
- Name? Maybe.
- Location? Fairly often.
- Friend count? Definitely.
- Follower count? Definitely.
Combine that with other data pools, and Twitter is giving me something truly usable, something that might be worth paying for.

With the right tools, if I started with a million address email list bought on the cheap from a broker, I could use social networks – especially high profile ones like Andrew’s – to cleanse my list and determine if the addresses were of value. Remember, you can’t pull any data from private or protected profiles publicly – but if you bought a high profile account, you’d gain access to those individuals who established relationships privately but are still hidden publicly. Value.

Oh yeah, and if you see a LinkedIn profile for sale, be afraid. There’s lots of usable data in there.

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April 13, 2008
Snapple Antioxidant Water is a Soft Drink

A few folks have been mentioning Snapple’s new soft drink, Snapple Antioxidant Water.

“Wait, it’s water, it’s not a soft drink!” I can hear Marketing shouting.

I beg to differ.

Exhibit A: water.

Ingredients: Water.

Serving Size: 1 cup (240ml)
Servings per Container: About 2.5
Calories per serving: 0
Total calories per bottle: 0
Total Fat: 0g % Daily Value (Fat): 0%
Sodium: 0 mg
% Daily Value (Sodium): 0%
Total Carb: 0 g
% Daily Value (Total Carb): 0%
Sugars: 0 g
Protein: 0 g
% Daily Value (Protein): 0%
Niacin (B3): 0%
Vitamin B6: 0%
Vitamin B12: 0%
Pantothenic Acid (B5): 0%
Vitamin A: 0%
Calcium: 0%
Vitamin E: 0%
Magnesium: 0%
Zinc: 0%

Exhibit B: Snapple’s drink.

Ingredients: Purified water, sugar, potassium citrate (electrolyte), citric acid, natural flavors, fruit and vegetable juices (for color), modified corn starch, calcium lactate (electrolyte), calcium gluconate (electrolyte), magnesium lactate (electrolyte), vitamin E acetate, calcium disodium edta (to maintain freshness), grape seed extract, zinc gluconate (electrolyte), vitamin A palmitate, EGCG (epigallocatechin gallate), manganese gluconate (electrolyte).

Serving Size: 1 cup (240ml)
Servings per Container: About 2.5
Calories per serving: 50
Total calories per container: 125
Total Fat: 0g % Daily Value (Fat): 0%
Sodium: 0 mg
% Daily Value (Sodium): 0%
Total Carb: 12 g
% Daily Value (Total Carb): 4%
Sugars: 12 g
Protein: 0 g
% Daily Value (Protein): 0%
Niacin (B3): 20%
Vitamin B6: 20%
Vitamin B12: 20%
Pantothenic Acid (B5): 20%
Vitamin A: 10%
Calcium: 2%
Vitamin E: 10%
Magnesium: 2%
Zinc: 2%

Lots of stuff in Snapple’s drink that you won’t find in authentic water, including the 125 calories per bottle.

Is it a good drink? That’s opinion. I haven’t tried it, so I can’t say. Is it water? Hell no. It’s got as many calories per bottle as a 12 ounce Guinness, a small soda, a 12 ounce orange juice, and infinitely more calories than unsweetened coffee, tea, or water. If you drink 5 bottles of water, at the end of the day, you will have consumed 0 calories. If you drink 5 bottles of Snapple, at the end of the day, you will have consumed 625 calories, or a Burger King Whopper (no mayo).

What does this mean from a marketing perspective? By calling it water instead of a beverage, drink, etc. – pretty much anything that’s not water – it’s inherently misleading. People who drink it without reading the label and believe that it’s a substitute for water are in for a surprise, especially in their waistline. And Snapple’s not alone, not by any means. Sobe, I’m looking at you. Call it what it is – a soft drink. It may not be carbonated, and it may have more vitamins than a Diet Coke, but it’s still not a water substitute, and drinking it in lieu of water, if you’re thinking about health and weight control, will unpleasantly surprise you.

Updated:

I did some quick checking around. I found that another beverage, based on the marketing tactics above, can also be called antioxidant water!

Yes, it’s true – with only 160 calories per bottle, plus healthy doses of polyphenols, as many health benefits as red wine, and the antioxidant ferulic acid, here’s my antioxidant water!

Please consume antioxidant water responsibly.

Fun experiment: of all the people who drink antioxidant beverages, how many could even explain what antioxidants are?

Updated again:

Snapple’s marketing agent is going to send me some of their antioxidant water for a taste test and review. I plan on reviewing Snapple, tap water, bottled water, and beer.

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March 27, 2008

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