From Simple. Organized. Life.

MUST READ FOR THE WEEKEND

“We will stop printing the New York Times sometime in the future…” says the NYT publisher.

STUFF TO READ

Look at the “stone age” of digital signage. Very interesting.

Ken Goldberg from NEOCAST is at it again, continuing to show why he’s so darn smart.  Looking at last year’s predictions & making some new ones.

Some perspective on combining mobile with digital signage.

5 Lessons From the Social Media frontline.

Drive slowly, or you’ll hit the little holographic girl.

Summary of Forrester’s “State Of Customer Experience 2010″ Report.

Billboards That Can See You. From Japan.

STUFF TO AMUSE

Best interactive experience of the week: Turn off all your computer apps. Load this and enjoy.

Inception Trailer – Audio completely a capella. Hilarious.

The YouTube Time Machine. Enter a year, and it brings up video from that year.

Ebert’s 100 Great Moments in Cinema. How many of these have you seen?

Arthur C. Clarke nails the year 2000…in 1964.

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Besides, you know, just staying open for business...

My answer: Winning the customer. No, this is not “find six ways to engage the customer so that she’ll say nice things about you.” I mean, “WIN THE CUSTOMER.” Do everything you can possibly imagine to get that customer to give their irrational loyalty to you and no other competitor so long as you both shall live, ’til death do you part!

Or 'til you need to find a new partner...whichever comes first.

Okay, so this is the most important challenge for any retailer at any time. But the economy has created a paella of retail experiments and initiatives designed to keep the customer in the store and the store in the black. Here are some ways to do that:

Know Thy Customer. There is no excuse for not knowing your customer. You must know them, and everything about them. Give them what they want, and you have a customer for life.

See, how she leans her hand upon the product! (sic. sort of.)

Simply The Best. Do one thing better than anyone else, and target the customers that want that particular thing. No retailer can compete with the likes of Walmart on price, or Amazon on inventory, so the retailer needs a unique proposition. I recently read Jeanne Bliss’s new book “I Love You More Than My Dog.” In it, she writes about Memory Creation:

It means knowing what memory you want customers to have and making the decisions to prepare your people and your operation to deliver it. Memory creation – creating indelible remembrances of the customer experience – is the currency of your brand.*

Whether it’s customer service, an amazing product, or the way it’s sold, there is opportunity out there to be better than anyone else. Find it, and exploit it. And create loyal customers with it.

Make Your Brand a Reflection of Your Customer. Don’t just put a logo on a window and call it your brand. Embrace your customers, satisfy their needs, then shout that from the rooftops. And don’t stray. Just because some new bright, shiny object or services comes along doesn’t mean you need to own it. Jack of all trades, master of none – so very true.

Make Your Employees Your True CEOs. Make them the real operating officers. Give them anything and everything they need to deliver. Brian Dunn, Best Buy’s CEO, once said, “What we do to motivate the blue shirts will be far more important than any advertising we ever do.” And he’s right. Advertising only gets the customer in the door. The employee is the reason they stay or leave. The more flexibility, tools, and authority you give the employee, the greater chance he has of getting and retaining a customer. Believe it or not, the single biggest factor on shareholder price is the employee. And it today’s connected world, people LOVE to write about the good, the bad, and the ugly. Which category do you want to be in?

Seriously, how much fun would it be to see THIS GUY at a genius bar?

Is this list exhaustive? Hardly, but fall and holiday marketing budgets and campaigns are being built right now. And before the end of the year, we’ll see  more retailers pushing daisies. Ask yourself if you’re doing what it takes to win that customer. If not, you have some work to do.

*I’ll review this book in an upcoming post.

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This is a terrific way to get people engaged with a brand. And Kraft and MonsterMedia took the essence of the product – the elbow macaroni – and created a fun and engaging interactive. Very well done.

But here’s the problem. This doesn’t sell Mac and Cheese. That’s the point. Right?

These interactive screens were placed around the country (Chicago, New York, LA) in high traffic areas. And it looks like it got a lot of audience engagement. But did it sell any Mac and Cheese? Here are three reasons why this is a challenge:

Where Can I Buy? One of the most important tenets with digital engagement is the viewer’s ability to act upon what she has just experienced. The takeaway here is not the smile, it’s the brand impression. She needs to move that impression forward on the path to purchase. But if she can’t, the impression is lost as soon as the next bright, shiny object enters her field of view.

There Is No Takeaway. Unlike the Smile Happy Ice Cream campaign that Unilever created, this doesn’t give the viewer any takeaway, like the product, or a coupon, or a QR code for their mobile device to really open the gates of communication. With an immediate return, the customer connects the impression with the result – the product or access to it. This creates an indelible mark on the viewer’s mindset, and provides marketers with real data on the success of the device.

Using a Shotgun When You Need a Sniper Rifle. These were placed in high traffic areas to get viewer engagement, but I’m willing to bet that a large percentage of the people who interacted with it aren’t really Mac and Cheese fans. Sure, you’ll get a massive amount of people who will try it, making the numbers sexy, but if those viewers are not customers of Kraft or Mac and Cheese, it’s an inefficient execution. The value of each impression is much lower because of the high traffic strategy.

In the end, someone has to pay for this (yes, I know it’s the customer, but bear with me). As these devices become more prevalent in our culture, so too will the need to justify the expense on the marketing budget to create and deploy them. This is advertising, and advertising is made to get people to buy. If they don’t buy, these devices are no more than costly wet noodles.

Ba dum dum.

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I see...that my advert...errrr...train is late!

In order to know what kind of content fits, you need to know where people are (or where they are going), and when they are there. You can build your demographic profile, then you can complete the equation: Impression = Right Content + Right Place + Right Time. We continue to develop ways to know where people are so we know how to engage them; the moving target is the hardest part.

Last week (June 15th) Transport for London announced that it was releasing all the travel data about the city’s transport infrastructure – the tube, the buses, the river services – to allow web developers to create applications making it easier for passengers to track the transport system. Previously, this information was available but with restrictions on data usage for commercial gain (read: licensing!). Now, it’s an open API that anyone can use to develop apps for the internet, mobile devices, or anywhere people want to know if their bus is on time.

Yesterday saw the release of a real-time tracking application that pinpoints the locations of London’s underground trains. Using Transport for London’s API, Matthew Somerville created a tracking system in only a few hours. It’s not without bugs, as Somerville freely admits on the page, but it is a huge leap ahead. (He means the application has bugs, not that the underground has creepy crawlies.)

Bonus: We will know when the apocalypse is due to arrive.

This leads to the application of digital signage. We want to know where people are, and when they are there (wherever ‘there’ is). If we pair demographic profiling with these two factors, we can develop targeted and engaging content, generating incredible value for an impression.

No content has impact if no one is there to watch it. By tracking the traffic with arrival and departure times across several thousand points in a given city, we can better schedule content in the right place at the right time. Campaigns will have greater impact across geographic locations.

Advertisers should be all over this to make part of their current and future plans, as brands seek to find new ways to reach their audience.

The Picadilly Line to Cockfosters isn't due to leave for another 30 minutes. Another pint?

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Yep. I had music too. The theme song to "Barney"

I made sure that every single time the Padres (and in later years the River Cats) hit a home run, the exact same song was played as the batter rounded the bases: Land Of 1,000 Dances by Wilson Pickett.

At a point during the season there would be a discussion about changing the music to add variety to the experience. The theory would be to use different music for a home run, or a player, or an event. The music would be based on the theme of the night. For example, if it was Fiesta Saturdays, where everything in the park had a Hispanic theme, we would use Hispanic themed music for everything. I did not agree to changing the music.

The simple reason is that a home run is a brand.

There are certain moments in our lives that have a very specific soundtrack. Like a visual brand, the audio identifies the event. Every time you hear that song, or that sound effect, nostalgia hits you like a kick in the shin, reminding you of everything about that event.

1982. My First Dance. "Open Arms" By Journey. I kissed a girl for the first time. Then I got kicked in the shin the first time. Every time I hear "Open Arms," my shin hurts.

In some cases, brands have simple notes that emote the brand. Think about Apple’s computer startup, or AOL, or NBC. Every time you hear those sounds, you know exactly what is happening.

A brand’s foundation is consistency, whether it’s a logo, a color, or an audio signature. When creating an experience for a customer or viewer, the factors that create a successful experience contribute to the branding of that experience. These factors should be taken seriously, and developed. When you try and alter what is a recognizable feature of a brand, you alter the customer’s perception of the brand, and you risk ruining the brand.

The point: Altering core brand identifiers is not a good strategy.

The ballpark was no different. There are several parts of a game that have a soundtrack: foul balls, cheers, player intros. . .and home runs. The reason a home run has a single audio identifier is to associate the audio with something great. This has two benefits to it. First, the crowd associates the song with the event. So whether you’re in the stands, at the concession, or in the restroom, when you hear the song, you know exactly what has happened. Second, the song becomes nostalgic outside the sporting event. To this day, I cannot hear Land of 1,000 Dances or Hell’s Bells without mentally drifting back to warm summer nights at the ballpark.

I make sure I have something cold on those warm summer nights. Then I drift. . .

To this day, eight years since I have worked a Padres baseball game, I can still recount the events of a game based on audio alone:

Picking up the Padres game in the bottom of the eighth inning:

Megadeth: Symphony of Destruction (Phil Nevin coming up to bat)
John Fogerty’s Centerfield (Nevin ahead in the count)
Land of 1,000 Dances (Nevin home run)
No Audio (Tony Gwynn batting. He never wanted an at-bat song. He didn’t like them.)
Gwynn third out
end of 8th/top of 9th
Hell’s Bells (Trevor Hoffman enters the game)
One Bell (First out)
Two Bells (Second out)
Gettin’ Jiggy Wit It (Final Out, Padres Win)

In contrast to bad audio spoiling an experience, especially in a noisy environment, good audio has the ability to tell the story and brand the event when visuals cannot.

The ultimate challenge for any experiential advertiser or marketer is to know how to use audio and how the audience will accept it. That is not easy to accomplish, but the effective audio branding can have as much impact on the experience as effective video.

Or you can have the all-time saves leader come into the game to "Hell's Bells." How's that for impact?

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