February 29, 2004
u.s. mail
Hugh MacLeod
I'm a cartoonist.
I sell limited-edition prints.
I wrote a book.
I'm CEO of Stormhoek USA, which markets South African wine in the States.
I also draw private commissions.
Prints |
Opening | Current |
|---|---|---|
Bluetrain |
$900 | |
We Need to Talk |
$650 | |
Portfolio #2 |
$300 | |
NY NY |
$275 |
Archive for February, 2004
driving traffic
As an advertising hack, the thing I like about weblogs-as-advertising-medium is the control.
Also, having briefly worked in the magazine business, I know the perils of traditional media: having to keep an army of editorial and freelance people happy (not to mention paid). And then there are those dreaded paper, printing and distribution costs. All that trouble just to tell 400,000 nobodies that purple is the new black. Why bother?
My ‘blogvertising’ model dictates that the major cost to the advertiser is driving traffic to an environment where the desired outcomes (including the imparting of the advertising message) can all be achieved. The actual cost of creating and maintaining that environment is minimal.
Hey, guess what? Driving traffic is cheap and easy compared to the rigors of financing and maintaining a traditional media organ. And it’s also a lot cheaper than building and maintaining a good enough site where the desired audience will just appear on its own volition.
We all know that traditional advertising is far too expensive. We all know that banner advertising doesn’t work (0.01% CTR is the industry standard. One click per 10,000 people seeing it. Ouch…). And we all know that a traditional new media version of old media (the dreaded “dotcom”) is economic suicide.
The future of advertising is “simple and cheap”. But there are still too many people out there with an incentive to keep it “complicated and expensive”. You have been warned.
February 27, 2004
‘the independant’ loves young adam
Most glowing review of Young Adam I’ve seen yet. From The Independant (UK).
“Week in, week out, some dire British movie plods into a Soho screening room, puts its head on the block and waits for the critics to swing the axe. If it actually makes it to the multiplex, the public by and large ignore it — they’d rather watch something American, and you can’t blame them. Indeed, the idea of a homegrown movie that rates as a genuine artistic achievement, as opposed to a loudly fanfared event (such as Calendar Girls), seems almost outlandish, something so rare we might not even recognise it. Well, I’m happy to report that such a movie is now here. It’s called Young Adam, and it deserves your immediate attention…”
(More Young Adam links here)
I’m going to ask the producers to send me links for (a) where the movie will be showing, once it hits America in April and (b) somewhere you can buy tickets online. Makes sense, doesn’t it?
blogs as mass-advertising medium?
TobyZ made the following thoughtful comment on an earlier post:
“The problem with blogs for advertising — or anything else, for that matter — is that most net users don’t know what they are, can’t find them, and won’t ‘bookmark’ them.
“You’ve mentioned Gerber, for example. Google shows 1.7 MILLION hits for Gerber. Does it matter whether your blog is hit #415, #415,000, or #1,415,000? No one is going to find it from a search engine.
“The gateway to your blog (for me) is a link at the top of the adrants.com site. When that goes away, your blog ceases to exist (for all practical purposes), and you can’t control that.
“Blogs are for small groups of friends who are contributors. They can’t reach the mass audiences that traditional media provide to advertisers. Once I post this comment and leave, I’m gone forever. I won’t see any follow-up comments. I won’t see any ads you might put here tomorrow.
“Blogs is not an advertising medium.”
Oh, man, where to begin…
Well, if ABC, CBS and NBC had to follow the same economic rules as Toby assumes bloggers do, they wouldn’t be selling much “mass” advertising, either. All they’d have to show the public would be a lot of empty offices and ticked-off shareholders. But of course, they don’t follow these rules. And there’s a reason.
To get millions of people to sit down in front of a TV channel for any length of time and soak up all those advertising messages, broadcasters first have to spend big money. How much does NBC burn through in a single day? $100 million? Heck, “Friends” alone must be setting them back $10 million a week.
And every year those numbers keep getting higher, as people find more and more things to do with their time, besides watching Chandler getting it on with Monica.
But providing advertising on blogs is not free to the blogger, either. Besides supplying the content necessary to attract the advertiser, the blogger has to find ways to drive traffic to her site. That means media buys, among other things. And to get serious numbers isn’t cheap.
But then again, neither are sitcom actors, anchormen, journalists, TV producers, editors, researchers, Manhattan offices, camera operators, art directors, marketing managers, cafeteria workers, receptionists, and all the million and one things a big media company like NBC has to have in its arsenal before it has something viable to sell the advertiser.
Obviously, I can’t individually get the numbers “Friends” has. But knowing what I know, I can get a couple of million people to soak up my client’s message without too much trouble. Considering I don’t have Jennifer Aniston’s wages to pay for, I’m not complaining.
The issue isn’t whether media is “mass” or “micro”. The issue is always (A) how much trouble is it to get x people to your stuff/brand/media/message etc. and (B) what people do once they get there.
The line seperating “mass” and “micro” is an intellectual construct, it has nothing to do with economics.
If the blogosphere was willing to spend the same collectively per day as NBC in order to shift product on behalf of their clients, we’d see big, big changes in how advertising was done. 2 million blogs or so, $50 each on average? Hmmm…
shopping prefs
From Adrants.com: “A new study from Havas’ Arnold Worldwide Partners, Boston has found consumers still prefer brick and mortar shopping over online shopping. According to the study, Americans still prefer human contact. Among the findings, 63 percent prefer to shop a physical store for a gift, 79 percent for clothing and 66 percent for pharmaceuticals. Conversely, for categories such as booking a cruise and banking, the study found consumers don’t want human contact and would rather do these things electronically.”
So the internet is only good at some things, but not good at everything. Hmmm… reminds me of a few people I know.
amy langfield
The lovely Amy Langfield bought a box of Blogcards recently. In an e-mail to me a couple of days ago she said:
“Also wanted to tell you your cards were getting raves at this party I went to last night. Weird mix of people from banks and some artists. The artists loved them.”
Yeah, that made my day. Heh.
young adam in hollywood reporter
Hollywood Reporter REALLY liked the movie.
“Classic Hollywood film noir speaks with a Scottish brogue in “Young Adam,” an impressive second feature by David Mackenzie that takes its darkly existential cue from a forgotten novel by heroin-addicted Beat writer Alexander Trocchi.
“While Mackenzie, an award-winning short filmmaker, gets right to the murky heart of the genre, he also does extremely well by the efforts of his highly capable cast — in particular, the truly dynamic duo of Ewan McGregor and Tilda Swinton…”
Hey, Young Adam also won “Un Certain Regard” at Cannes.
I’m enjoying pimping the movie, I have to say. Of course, it’s made easier by the fact the critics and me both like the movie, and the director’s a friend of mine.
I wonder what I’d do if they asked me to pimp some real piece-of-sh1t, mainstream-pandering-feelgood-crapass romantic comedy. Oy vey, that would bite.
That being said, they probably wouldn’t. No point matching the wrong film with the wrong website audience etc.
(More Young Adam links here.)
young adam in latino review
A good review of Young Adam in Latino Review.
“The eroticism and exposure these actors partake in explodes off the screen in a bold way. The chemistry between them is so strong that they sneak off to grope or have sex with each other in the most peculiar and tiniest places on a barge where three people reside…”
Yep. Ewan and Tilda are verging on porn in this one.
(More Young Adam links here.)
internet now bigger than cable!
Jeff Jarvis: “Let’s repeat that again: The Internet is bigger than cable TV. And so the Internet should be getting a much bigger share of advertising dollars.”
Yes. This is huge. I’m going to go away and think about it some more.
“the kinetic quality”: the future of advertising
“The Kinetic Quality”: All products are information. The molecules are secondary.
(UPDATE: For more info go here: “The Hughtrain Manifesto.”)
The future of brands is interaction, not commodity. It’s not something you buy, but something you paticipate in.
i.e. a brand is not a thing, but a place.
Here’s an example: My former agency was pitching Gerber ( the US baby food company) a few years ago. During the pitch I told them “you don’t know a lot about babies because you make great products. You make great products because you know a lot about babies.”
Think about it. The average 22-year-old new mom doesn’t go into a Kentucky Wal-Mart looking for baby food. She goes into Wal-Mart looking for information. She wants any information she can get about how to be a better mother, and she’s willing to spend money to get it.
After she has the information, then she wants products that are credible extensions of the information. A good baby-food brand is merely an extension of good paediatric nutrition.… i.e. put the information first, and the products and sales will follow.
So what we pitched was turning their Wal-Mart shelf space into miniature “information centers”. We’d sell the products, obviously, but there would be other things as well– books, leaflets, CD-Roms etc etc. Basically, a young mother would leave Wal-Mart a lot more informed about babies than when she entered… and her shopping bags full of Gerber products. This is what I mean about “the kinetic quality” of a brand. A good brand offers immediate and obvious transformation.
If Mom doesn’t leave Wal-Mart a better informed mom than when she entered, then somewhere along the line Gerber isn’t doing its job.
Of course a good Gerber website/blog would enhance this process. The TV and magazine campaigns would be more informative than ‘selling’. All under the umbrella concept of “Healthy Happiness Hints”. Giving little parcels of managable information, communicated as “hints”.
My point is: the kinetic quality applies as much to package goods (baby food) as it does to media brands (The Economist, The Wall Street Journal etc). A good marketer understands this, and tries to tap into it.
In the old days, the three most important words in advertising were “Unique Selling Proposition”. To me, the three most important words are “By Interacting With…”
–By interacting with Gerber, she becomes a better-informed mom.
–By interacting with The Wall Street Journal, she becomes more tuned into the world of capitalism.
–By interacting with Apple, she brings her entrepreneurial dreams closer to reality.
–By interacting with McDonald’s, her busy schedule is made slightly easier by avoiding a lot of fuss over lunch.
–By interacting with Ralston Purina, she becomes more attached to her canine friend.
–By interacting with your brand, she becomes…?
A good brand is a two-way conversation.
What we bloggers know about the nature of information (a great deal) can be applied far beyond our usual diet of media, politics and journalism. Because all products are information. The molecules are secondary.
Which is why I believe this is a very exciting time for all of us.
[UPDATE:]
Jeff Jarvis (at Buzzmachine.com) has started blogging about the very same subject and mentioned this very post. Thanks, Jeff 
btw: I left the following thought in his comment section:
“My advice to clients vis-a-vis the internet is: the infrastructure is not here yet, but it’s coming. In the meantime, just start the conversation and keep it going. Make your mistakes and push yourself up the learning curve as fast as you can while the baby is still in its infancy. Believe me, when the next big wave begins (1 – 4 years?) you’ll be glad you did.”
pull advertising?
Fred Wilson, the New York VC assertively declared a while ago, “The push model of advertising is over. It’s over. It’s just a matter of time before people realize it. It’s toast.”
I’m about as clued up on next-generation forms of advertising as anybody, but I’m still confused by that statement.
Regardless of what advertising method may be in vogue at any given moment– TV, Radio, Websites, RSS feeds, Guerilla, Viral– the same question remains:
“I’ve got Product X that’s good for Y reasons. What’s the best way to get customers?”
And so you go out and push it. That’s what you do. If the bar rises, you jump higher. If the landscape changes, you get yourself a different map.
Technology may make reaching some people harder, some people easier. But Push Advertising is not going anywhere, because too many people (including Fred) have products they want other people to know about.
Still, one has to stay on top of things. I meet a lot of people who hope to one day be the next John Hegarty. Well, that’s great, but Hegarty’s “creativity” model is already 30 years old. He already had that idea, and put it into practice 3 decades before you. That train already left the station.
Interesting times we live in. Jeff Jarvis concurs.
Sally
One thing I think the Young Adam movie does better than the book is capture exactly how utterly grim Scotland was in the 1950’s.
Edinburgh certainly seemed a lot more grey when I was a kid than it does now. Not that I cared. I was too busy trying to getting laid.
Back when we were 18 – 19, Dave (the Young Adam director) and I used to go out a lot and try to meet girls. There was this one girl called Sally, who was a real firecracker. Sally was pretty cool by teenager standards. Badass-attitude girl, really pretty, but really sweet. Dave had this big, big crush on her. Sally would roll her eyeballs every time Dave came into the room. Dave was just too geeky for ol’ Sally.
I saw Sally the last time I was in Edinburgh. She works in a restaurant owned by a guy I went to school with.
We chatted for a few minutes. She’s doing OK. I told her about Dave and his uber-cool film gig. Yep, she rolled her eyeballs again. Heh.
February 23, 2004
RSS news
With some help from some friends, I fixed the code on the RSS syndication feed. The images load, the links work, it’s spectacular.
If you’re into RSS please go check it out. Thanks.
chupa chups pimpage
Damn fine lollipops. Suck like your life depended on it.
driving traffic
As an advertising hack, the thing I like about weblogs-as-advertising-medium is the control.
Also, having briefly worked in the magazine business, I know the perils of traditional media: having to keep an army of editorial and freelance people happy (not to mention paid). And then there are those dreaded paper, printing and distribution costs. All that trouble just to tell 400,000 nobodies that purple is the new black. Why bother?
My ‘blogvertising’ model dictates that the major cost to the advertiser is driving traffic to an environment where the desired outcomes (including the imparting of the advertising message) can all be achieved. The actual cost of creating and maintaining that environment is minimal.
Hey, guess what? Driving traffic is cheap and easy compared to the rigors of financing and maintaining a traditional media organ. And it’s also a lot cheaper than building and maintaining a good enough site where the desired audience will just appear on its own volition.
We all know that traditional advertising is far too expensive. We all know that banner advertising doesn’t work (0.01% CTR is the industry standard. One click per 10,000 people seeing it. Ouch…). And we all know that a traditional new media version of old media (the dreaded “dotcom”) is economic suicide.
The future of advertising is “simple and cheap”. But there are still too many people out there with an incentive to keep it “complicated and expensive”. You have been warned.
February 27, 2004
‘the independant’ loves young adam
Most glowing review of Young Adam I’ve seen yet. From The Independant (UK).
“Week in, week out, some dire British movie plods into a Soho screening room, puts its head on the block and waits for the critics to swing the axe. If it actually makes it to the multiplex, the public by and large ignore it — they’d rather watch something American, and you can’t blame them. Indeed, the idea of a homegrown movie that rates as a genuine artistic achievement, as opposed to a loudly fanfared event (such as Calendar Girls), seems almost outlandish, something so rare we might not even recognise it. Well, I’m happy to report that such a movie is now here. It’s called Young Adam, and it deserves your immediate attention…”
(More Young Adam links here)
I’m going to ask the producers to send me links for (a) where the movie will be showing, once it hits America in April and (b) somewhere you can buy tickets online. Makes sense, doesn’t it?
blogs as mass-advertising medium?
TobyZ made the following thoughtful comment on an earlier post:
“The problem with blogs for advertising — or anything else, for that matter — is that most net users don’t know what they are, can’t find them, and won’t ‘bookmark’ them.
“You’ve mentioned Gerber, for example. Google shows 1.7 MILLION hits for Gerber. Does it matter whether your blog is hit #415, #415,000, or #1,415,000? No one is going to find it from a search engine.
“The gateway to your blog (for me) is a link at the top of the adrants.com site. When that goes away, your blog ceases to exist (for all practical purposes), and you can’t control that.
“Blogs are for small groups of friends who are contributors. They can’t reach the mass audiences that traditional media provide to advertisers. Once I post this comment and leave, I’m gone forever. I won’t see any follow-up comments. I won’t see any ads you might put here tomorrow.
“Blogs is not an advertising medium.”
Oh, man, where to begin…
Well, if ABC, CBS and NBC had to follow the same economic rules as Toby assumes bloggers do, they wouldn’t be selling much “mass” advertising, either. All they’d have to show the public would be a lot of empty offices and ticked-off shareholders. But of course, they don’t follow these rules. And there’s a reason.
To get millions of people to sit down in front of a TV channel for any length of time and soak up all those advertising messages, broadcasters first have to spend big money. How much does NBC burn through in a single day? $100 million? Heck, “Friends” alone must be setting them back $10 million a week.
And every year those numbers keep getting higher, as people find more and more things to do with their time, besides watching Chandler getting it on with Monica.
But providing advertising on blogs is not free to the blogger, either. Besides supplying the content necessary to attract the advertiser, the blogger has to find ways to drive traffic to her site. That means media buys, among other things. And to get serious numbers isn’t cheap.
But then again, neither are sitcom actors, anchormen, journalists, TV producers, editors, researchers, Manhattan offices, camera operators, art directors, marketing managers, cafeteria workers, receptionists, and all the million and one things a big media company like NBC has to have in its arsenal before it has something viable to sell the advertiser.
Obviously, I can’t individually get the numbers “Friends” has. But knowing what I know, I can get a couple of million people to soak up my client’s message without too much trouble. Considering I don’t have Jennifer Aniston’s wages to pay for, I’m not complaining.
The issue isn’t whether media is “mass” or “micro”. The issue is always (A) how much trouble is it to get x people to your stuff/brand/media/message etc. and (B) what people do once they get there.
The line seperating “mass” and “micro” is an intellectual construct, it has nothing to do with economics.
If the blogosphere was willing to spend the same collectively per day as NBC in order to shift product on behalf of their clients, we’d see big, big changes in how advertising was done. 2 million blogs or so, $50 each on average? Hmmm…
shopping prefs
From Adrants.com: “A new study from Havas’ Arnold Worldwide Partners, Boston has found consumers still prefer brick and mortar shopping over online shopping. According to the study, Americans still prefer human contact. Among the findings, 63 percent prefer to shop a physical store for a gift, 79 percent for clothing and 66 percent for pharmaceuticals. Conversely, for categories such as booking a cruise and banking, the study found consumers don’t want human contact and would rather do these things electronically.”
So the internet is only good at some things, but not good at everything. Hmmm… reminds me of a few people I know.
amy langfield
The lovely Amy Langfield bought a box of Blogcards recently. In an e-mail to me a couple of days ago she said:
“Also wanted to tell you your cards were getting raves at this party I went to last night. Weird mix of people from banks and some artists. The artists loved them.”
Yeah, that made my day. Heh.
young adam in hollywood reporter
Hollywood Reporter REALLY liked the movie.
“Classic Hollywood film noir speaks with a Scottish brogue in “Young Adam,” an impressive second feature by David Mackenzie that takes its darkly existential cue from a forgotten novel by heroin-addicted Beat writer Alexander Trocchi.
“While Mackenzie, an award-winning short filmmaker, gets right to the murky heart of the genre, he also does extremely well by the efforts of his highly capable cast — in particular, the truly dynamic duo of Ewan McGregor and Tilda Swinton…”
Hey, Young Adam also won “Un Certain Regard” at Cannes.
I’m enjoying pimping the movie, I have to say. Of course, it’s made easier by the fact the critics and me both like the movie, and the director’s a friend of mine.
I wonder what I’d do if they asked me to pimp some real piece-of-sh1t, mainstream-pandering-feelgood-crapass romantic comedy. Oy vey, that would bite.
That being said, they probably wouldn’t. No point matching the wrong film with the wrong website audience etc.
(More Young Adam links here.)
young adam in latino review
A good review of Young Adam in Latino Review.
“The eroticism and exposure these actors partake in explodes off the screen in a bold way. The chemistry between them is so strong that they sneak off to grope or have sex with each other in the most peculiar and tiniest places on a barge where three people reside…”
Yep. Ewan and Tilda are verging on porn in this one.
(More Young Adam links here.)
internet now bigger than cable!
Jeff Jarvis: “Let’s repeat that again: The Internet is bigger than cable TV. And so the Internet should be getting a much bigger share of advertising dollars.”
Yes. This is huge. I’m going to go away and think about it some more.
“the kinetic quality”: the future of advertising
“The Kinetic Quality”: All products are information. The molecules are secondary.
(UPDATE: For more info go here: “The Hughtrain Manifesto.”)
The future of brands is interaction, not commodity. It’s not something you buy, but something you paticipate in.
i.e. a brand is not a thing, but a place.
Here’s an example: My former agency was pitching Gerber ( the US baby food company) a few years ago. During the pitch I told them “you don’t know a lot about babies because you make great products. You make great products because you know a lot about babies.”
Think about it. The average 22-year-old new mom doesn’t go into a Kentucky Wal-Mart looking for baby food. She goes into Wal-Mart looking for information. She wants any information she can get about how to be a better mother, and she’s willing to spend money to get it.
After she has the information, then she wants products that are credible extensions of the information. A good baby-food brand is merely an extension of good paediatric nutrition.… i.e. put the information first, and the products and sales will follow.
So what we pitched was turning their Wal-Mart shelf space into miniature “information centers”. We’d sell the products, obviously, but there would be other things as well– books, leaflets, CD-Roms etc etc. Basically, a young mother would leave Wal-Mart a lot more informed about babies than when she entered… and her shopping bags full of Gerber products. This is what I mean about “the kinetic quality” of a brand. A good brand offers immediate and obvious transformation.
If Mom doesn’t leave Wal-Mart a better informed mom than when she entered, then somewhere along the line Gerber isn’t doing its job.
Of course a good Gerber website/blog would enhance this process. The TV and magazine campaigns would be more informative than ‘selling’. All under the umbrella concept of “Healthy Happiness Hints”. Giving little parcels of managable information, communicated as “hints”.
My point is: the kinetic quality applies as much to package goods (baby food) as it does to media brands (The Economist, The Wall Street Journal etc). A good marketer understands this, and tries to tap into it.
In the old days, the three most important words in advertising were “Unique Selling Proposition”. To me, the three most important words are “By Interacting With…”
–By interacting with Gerber, she becomes a better-informed mom.
–By interacting with The Wall Street Journal, she becomes more tuned into the world of capitalism.
–By interacting with Apple, she brings her entrepreneurial dreams closer to reality.
–By interacting with McDonald’s, her busy schedule is made slightly easier by avoiding a lot of fuss over lunch.
–By interacting with Ralston Purina, she becomes more attached to her canine friend.
–By interacting with your brand, she becomes…?
A good brand is a two-way conversation.
What we bloggers know about the nature of information (a great deal) can be applied far beyond our usual diet of media, politics and journalism. Because all products are information. The molecules are secondary.
Which is why I believe this is a very exciting time for all of us.
[UPDATE:]
Jeff Jarvis (at Buzzmachine.com) has started blogging about the very same subject and mentioned this very post. Thanks, Jeff
btw: I left the following thought in his comment section:
“My advice to clients vis-a-vis the internet is: the infrastructure is not here yet, but it’s coming. In the meantime, just start the conversation and keep it going. Make your mistakes and push yourself up the learning curve as fast as you can while the baby is still in its infancy. Believe me, when the next big wave begins (1 – 4 years?) you’ll be glad you did.”
pull advertising?
Fred Wilson, the New York VC assertively declared a while ago, “The push model of advertising is over. It’s over. It’s just a matter of time before people realize it. It’s toast.”
I’m about as clued up on next-generation forms of advertising as anybody, but I’m still confused by that statement.
Regardless of what advertising method may be in vogue at any given moment– TV, Radio, Websites, RSS feeds, Guerilla, Viral– the same question remains:
“I’ve got Product X that’s good for Y reasons. What’s the best way to get customers?”
And so you go out and push it. That’s what you do. If the bar rises, you jump higher. If the landscape changes, you get yourself a different map.
Technology may make reaching some people harder, some people easier. But Push Advertising is not going anywhere, because too many people (including Fred) have products they want other people to know about.
Still, one has to stay on top of things. I meet a lot of people who hope to one day be the next John Hegarty. Well, that’s great, but Hegarty’s “creativity” model is already 30 years old. He already had that idea, and put it into practice 3 decades before you. That train already left the station.
Interesting times we live in. Jeff Jarvis concurs.
Sally
One thing I think the Young Adam movie does better than the book is capture exactly how utterly grim Scotland was in the 1950’s.
Edinburgh certainly seemed a lot more grey when I was a kid than it does now. Not that I cared. I was too busy trying to getting laid.
Back when we were 18 – 19, Dave (the Young Adam director) and I used to go out a lot and try to meet girls. There was this one girl called Sally, who was a real firecracker. Sally was pretty cool by teenager standards. Badass-attitude girl, really pretty, but really sweet. Dave had this big, big crush on her. Sally would roll her eyeballs every time Dave came into the room. Dave was just too geeky for ol’ Sally.
I saw Sally the last time I was in Edinburgh. She works in a restaurant owned by a guy I went to school with.
We chatted for a few minutes. She’s doing OK. I told her about Dave and his uber-cool film gig. Yep, she rolled her eyeballs again. Heh.
February 23, 2004
RSS news
With some help from some friends, I fixed the code on the RSS syndication feed. The images load, the links work, it’s spectacular.
If you’re into RSS please go check it out. Thanks.
chupa chups pimpage
Damn fine lollipops. Suck like your life depended on it.
