A Wider Net

Thanks to InfoAesthetics, I have found a new periodic table of brand development and marketing terminology. Go to this link, and mouse over the elements.
Wicked.

Isn’t it amazing how a periodic table can geek-up just about anything?

Every now and then I store ideas for the blog for later use. Here’s one I’ve been sitting on that I know you’ll like.

Sue Pelletier put this on her terrific MeetingsNet blog, Face2Face, a little while ago. Bad PowerPoint is one of my pet peeves, so I’m happy to reflect it to our readers.

If this video resonates with you, and especially if it makes you angry, then here is Seth Godin’s Really Bad PowerPoint post. His e-book, which was once available for free on Amazon, is even better. I just realized that I have posted the link to that PDF twice now. I guess I really want you to read it. Seriously - I really want you to read it. There. Make that three times.

Inspired by this post at Golden Practices, which was inspired by this post at Daily Blog Tips, I finally got around to pruning the categories on this blog. Believe it or not, in about a year we had just under 200 posts in 69 categories - clearly too many categories. While the advice helped, I found it difficult to reduce the number of categories below 30 but I will continue to look for ways to simplify. I hope the effort makes the blog easier to use. The search is always there if you need to find something more specific. I didn’t follow all the tips: most posts are filed under multiple categories (something I wish I could do with my printed materials, too).

If I removed any of your favorite categories, like Advergaming or 3D, let me know with a comment or email and I will consider adding it back. If you have any new categories under which you would like us to write then also, please let me know.

I’ve been meaning to post this link to Adrant’s coverage of marketing groups and their facebook participation.

Facebook still enjoys meteoric growth, in a clearly more meaningful way than Myspace, despite the fact that Myspace continues to add more members each month than Facebook. I guess the predictions that the masses would leave behind Myspace for facebook or Bebo were somewhat premature.

Regardless, check out the Adrants article - it links to several Facebook pages of interest to marketers. You must be a member of Facebook to view them, of course.

For those meetings and marketing programs that use taglines like:

“Developing Greatness”
“Opening the Future”
“Appreciating Greatness”
“Message in a Bottle”
or
“Greatness Over Time”

The wine bottle USB drive. An ingenious disguise, if you don’t want your polo buddies to know you’re a geek.

The trick behind car sales has always been to put the prospect in the car. Even if that meant taking a picture of them and photoshopping them into the car so they could visualize themselves driving it. Now, Toyota and Microsoft have taken it to an odd extreme. They have released a free game on XBOX Live that puts you in one of several models of Yaris, the hip series of customizable cars they hope will be popular among gamers. It puts you in the car - virtually. I seem to recall this being done very poorly with the Ford Focus in an online Alias-themed game, after that car was awkwardly thrust into the popular spy series (like, spies would drive a Focus?)

The difference here is that they haven’t placed you in a regular Yaris - this is a Super Yaris. Is it false advertising when you virtually place someone in a virtual car that, unlike it’s real world counterpart, can scale walls, collect weapons, and blow up enemies?

I like this a lot more than the crappy and intrusive product placement of the Nissan Rogue in the latest season of Shark. I wish I could see which one ultimately realizes the best ROI

Update: I noticed comments like this in the forums: “It is absolutely horrible. This made me hate the Toyota Yaris, a car I had no opinion on before today.” Sure, awareness is part of the sellingprocess, but if you’re going to appeal to a gaming market and try to influence them to buy your car, you may want to make the game not suck.

Whenever I stroll the toothpaste aisle or the peanut butter aisle in the local mega-supermarket I often think we have too many choices (at least in North America). That doesn’t apply to Presidential candidates, of course, when we are given 2.1 candidates to choose from and we end up with walnut brains like our current nutjob, even though we technically didn’t even give him the most votes. But when I was reading Choice, Seth Godin’s short but sweet commentary on the difference between “then” and “now”, I had to agree that choice is where it’s at.

I’m not sure if we need a hundred toothpastes, or a thousand flavors of high-fructose corn syrup, but we do enjoy having choice. The need for choice is obvious in the changes in web marketing. Gone are the days where a flash-based website did all the driving. Now users demand small bites of web content in easy to browse arrangements, even though they increasingly need a crowd of content raters helping them make their choices.

But, oddly, the age of choice hasn’t caught up with events. Exhibitions - yes. But try to find the elements of choice in a user conference or sales meeting. Here it’s still about sit back and be spoken to. You can choose your sessions. You can choose your muffin. But you sit and watch a general session. For how much longer, I wonder?

The nearest equivalent I can think of is movies. They’re about the same length as a general session. You sit and you watch. And with increasing numbers, people are choosing to have a remote control in their hands instead of a frighteningly over-priced bag of artificially buttered popcorn. At home, we control our pace, our volume, our seating position, our food choices, and our breaks.

While the movie industry scrambles to keep people in the theaters, will we have to do the same in live events? Maybe not to the same extent, but we will do well to understand those issues and respond to them with choices.

The choice to sit through some or all of a session.

The choice to watch some or all of it online later, or on my phone, PDA, PSP, or PMP.

The choice to listen as part of a crowd or speak as part of a conversation.

The choice to hear about a solution or to be part of the solution.

The choice to present another PowerPoint slide show full of words or make a lasting visual impression

Look what popped up at Neiman Marcus: Jeff Han’s Interactive Touch Media Wall, from his company Perceptive Pixel. Prices start at $100,000.

This reminds me of the days when Sears used to sell cars in their catalog, along with underwear, blenders, shingles, and radios. Perhaps Neiman Marcus has identified a mass market for ultra-high-end interactive walls?

Regardless, I’m delighted to see it there, because it may mean we’re a little closer to being able to get one into our clients hands. Since Microsoft has declined to sell Surface (a product reported to be designed by Jeff Han’s group) to anyone but a select group of launch partners for now, this appears to be the best opportunity to sign up for one for your trade show exhibit, lobby, demo room, or museum.

While you’re shopping for six-figure interactive media walls, be sure to add slippers , sunglasses, and a fine carpet to stand on while you use it.

Oh, and the interactive media wall apparently qualifies for free shipping. Hold them to it.

Found (believe it or not) on UnCrate

IF: You have a great RSS news feed for your internal staff. But they’re running some kind of software - financial, business, CAD, etc - and it consumes their whole screen all day. They can’t see little popups and they have no room on-screen for widgets. Your feed gets lost in email and you want to make sure everyone sees it immediately. They need this information, and they need it now. Where do they display it?

THEN:

Pertelian. A tiny USB display that you can program to display whatever you want. Your RSS feed of critical news, for example.

I just (finally) got around to playing with one. It works very well. The range of things you can display is very impressive. Setup is a little clunky and requires installation of Microsoft J# (why?) but I imagine they have a way to roll these out for enterprise users a bit more easily.

Other things you can display:

Finance rates, Stocks

Weather

Mail

Sports Scores

Network Statistics

Computer System Statistics

Call Center Stats

Foodies know what I’m talking about - an experience isn’t limited to the payoff. In the case of dining, the experience includes the anticipation based on the reputation of the chef and the restaurant, the ambience, the service, the scents, the sounds, and of course - the actual tastes, textures, and aromas of the food. But the presentation - the act and result of plating the food in a fashion that makes the meal look almost too good to eat - plays a role in that experience. Maybe presentation doesn’t affect taste as much as the bouquet of a fine red wine affects it’s reception by your palate, but it does affect the overall experience.

Take this ginormously over-engineered ring box below called the Euricase. It’s a box. It holds a gift item of value. And it might just be more interesting than the item itself. One thing is for certain, it is going to profoundly affect the experience of receiving this gift.

Inside the luxury container is an LCD display that cycles through a series of photographs. In the case of engagement rings, it would (I assume) feature photos that prove to the would-be ring-bearer that “yes” is the only correct answer to the ensuing question. Post-wedding, one would probably insert images of the wedding, as shown in the example or, more wisely, keep those “pre-proposal proof-you-should-say-yes images” in there to help answer the inevitable question years later “what was I THINKING?”

As LCD, OLED, and other display technology gets leaner and cheaper, this sort of living, active surface can be incorporated just about anywhere.

I would love to make a VIP pitch package using something like this - where the proposal, boards, and other materials are packaged within a video-encrusted case. Glittering and alive, the package would tell my story immediately upon opening. It would also make a terrific way to give a long-time employee a service award - their gold watch would be surrounded by vivid memories of their long career - something they can re-use with their family for years later.

In retail and exhibits, this type of package would make a great demo station for just about any premium product from jewelry to cellular phones. Gummy bears probably don’t need this level of presentation - they speak for themselves.

We do have a responsibility to make sure we don’t place these cheap displays in an application that could be considered a throwaway. In our (re)newly green-spirited culture we should make sure that the display has some residual usefulness after it’s role as a one-off “wow”.

Counterpoint: Ok, part of me wants to simply shout “Come on! Isn’t the ring enough, already?” I guess I like the packaging for applications when the “ring” isn’t enough.

Via Everything USB