Uber and Facebook Apology Advertising

Recently, I couldn't help but notice a strange similarity between a couple of broadcast ads that seem to be in frequent rotation lately.

The first one I think I saw was for Uber, featuring their new CEO. The Uber ad, "Moving Forward", talks about how they are changing and fixing things (I think that the one on YoutTube that I've linked to is one of a series). Then, there's the Facebook commercial, "Facebook here together". 

Facebook's message, bundled with images of happy people, is along the lines of "recently, there was a bunch of scary news about how the Facebook platform was used to grab all of this knowledge about you, but we're changing, improving our privacy policies, so it's safe to go back on our platform.

Essentially, both of these are heavy rotation commercials for the apology tours that both companies have been making. But you have to wonder, what's the goal of these ads? If you deleted your Uber app, will seeing the CEO saying he's making things better give the service a try again? While Facebook has made some real ads, have they made really substantive changes to their platform? If you'd quit using the app, would this commercial make you go back?

And if this type of ad is not for the people who left, who is it for?

Is it for the shareholders? Do we think that an ad like this is going to move the share price of the stock?

I think it's more about trying to build the foundation for a PR messaging point. Essentially, we're not just on the apology tour, we're SPENDING MONEY to say we're sorry and move forward. This is an effort to help support some changes that are, in some ways, minor changes that don't really impact the core issues that took them into apology-land. In essence, these are an effort to inflate the "fixes" in an effort to minimize the original harm.

Anyway, no grand take-away from this one. As I watched these ads, I couldn't help but reflect on whether I could recall other companies doing similar apology ads. I was trying to imagine what an IBM apology ad might look like. The closest thing I could initially think of what Domino's did with this where they call out quality complaints and promote their attempts to change. I actually liked this campaign -- I feel like there's a broad perception that Domino's pizza quality isn't high -- but I haven't purchased a pizza from them since... probably college. 

Then I remembered this "we're sorry" ad from BP after the massive Deepwater Horizon spill. Oops, I accidentally linked this to the Southpark episode where they were parodying the BP ad. Yeah, I think that's an example of how this kind of ad really fails.

SiriusXM's Lead Nurture Marketing Spam

Last year we bought a car with SiriusXM integrated into the audio system. As most new owners do, we activated the service for the trial period. While we were moderately amused, our usage was somewhat limited -- it's not like we're always driving long distances during the daily commute through Silicon Valley. For that reason, radio seemed adequate enough, so the cost of the SiriusXM service seemed excessive and unnecessary. By not signing up for the service, we got put into their lead nurture email system.

For the past 6 months, I've been receiving offers, but I've been a bit surprised by the frequency. For example, for their most recent series, I've received three emails over the past three days. Needless to say, the offer hasn't really changed materially. Essentially, their offer is a one-time teaser price of about $25-30 for six months, then you're charged full price until you unsubscribe. But wait, there's more -- they'll also let you have unlimited online streaming to your computer as part of the deal.

It strikes me as funny, because I really thought they might actually improve on their offer. Even funnier, juxtapose the email subject line with the reality that their offer doesn't really materially change. Here's a snapshot of some of their subject line teasers.

• You Deserve this Amazing Deal! Enjoy this Great Offer and FREE STREAMING. See Details.
• Congratulations you have been chosen to receive this terrific offer. We hope you enjoy it, it is tr…
• You Deserve this Amazing Deal! Enjoy this Great Offer and FREE STREAMING. See Details.
• FINAL Notice! Please Open for More Details
• Urgent Notice! Please Open for More Details
• Turn your SiriusXM back on with this great offer! | See details

Of course, FINAL Notice isn't really final either.

Today, after receiving the third email in three days, I had to unsubscribe. I know, that means I may miss "this Amazing Deal," but I guess we'll have to find a way to survive.

One Great Marketing Story: Subaru Markets to Lesbians

I just came across this article from the Priceonomics site, How an Ad Campaign Made Lesbians Fall in Love with Subaru. It's a wonderful historical study of how Subaru began marketing to lesbians along with targeting several other niche demographics. I'll let you read the piece as it's really good. As someone who has worked with Japanese businesses, it's also amusing from that angle as well. Definitely a must read.

SMX West Expo: Why do you charge for your expo?

So you're hosting a conference and you decide to charge for exhibition attendance, what's your strategy? Often, a baseline charge is a good way to make an event more exclusive, providing the exhibitors with a filter that reduces the number of people who attend simply to sell the exhibitors something.

Put differently, if you're hosting an exhibition, you're exhibitors would probably rank conference attendees as their best prospects, people who use the products or are in the industry as second best, and the least desirable being the vendors and businesses that attend simply to sell products or services to the exhibitors -- exhibitors, publications, consultants, shipping companies, suppliers. We've even had people come in off the street collecting bags of booth give-away stuff -- on occasion.

An on-site charge can go a long way to prevent this kind of traffic.

However, I'm trying to imagine the "bad" traffic in that mix trying to sell to companies exhibiting at a search marketing conference. Now weigh that against the potential "walk-in" customers to an exhibition that might actually benefit from the products or services that a company exhibiting there would display. If I were an exhibiting company, I would be pissed. Or rather, I wouldn't be a repeat exhibitor.

This is to you, sponsoring companies of the SMX West Expo -- I won't be visiting the expo because they decided to charge for expo admission. I don't know anything more about you or your business. Google, Yahoo, I didn't get to speak with your team there. AimClear, Alight Analytics, Marin Software, SEORadar, Moz, Yext -- I missed seeing your booth. If you were trying to reach me, your marketing dollars were wasted. Were I in your shoes, I'd express some concerns.

SMX West: The Secret Conference

As a marketing pro, I get a lot of emails promoting conferences. One of the great rules is that, if you go to a conference once, you're going to get email from the conference forever forward. I think that the last Macworld I went to was probably in 2010, but I still get emails from them every year.

That's what makes the SMX West conference even more baffling. Searching my inbox, the last time that I received an email from the SMX group was all the way back in 2011. Contrast that to the RSA conference where I probably get an email a week. There are two possible take-aways from this:

1. The SMX Conference marketing team has a strategy, and that strategy doesn't include emailing people to alert them to the conference. Perhaps they don't like email or don't want to spend on email. Perhaps they only know search. Or simply underscore the importance of search. Either way, at this point, if I hadn't looked for the conference I wouldn't have known anything about it.
2. I am not their target demographic. Sure I manage search marketing programs. Sure, I've been to their conference before. But maybe I don't spend enough. Maybe I'm not buying a particular set of tools that they believe in. Maybe I'm not somebody who's going to spend $2K on a conference. 

All of that being said, it's unlikely that I will be pointing out much of anything valuable in terms of marketing take-aways from this event -- except perhaps as a case study for the most invisible promotional efforts.

Facebook Can (and has) Manipulated You With Their Feed Algorithm

I came across this post from David Holmes over on Pando. It may have been in the news previously, but this was the first time that I'd seen anything about it. What happened, specifically, is that people over at Facebook undertook some basic experiments on their users. They modified the algorithm that delivers the feed to users, and for one set, they delivered more negative, less positive emotionally colored results, and for the other set, they delivered more positive, less negative emotionally colored results. As you might imagine, both groups essentially began echoing and amplifying the tone of their feed -- the negative group producing more negative content while the positive group produced more positive emotions.

The Pando post calls into question the idea that Facebook would simply experiment on it's user base like that, without any permission beyond the basic terms of service. And, while I appreciate the sentiment and feel that, at some level, there ought to be a deeper underlying set of online rights of self, I find the idea that businesses experimenting with algorithms without the consent of their user base to be wholly unsurprising. After all, much of this is the essence of serving online content -- A/B and multi-variant testing has been a common practice in online marketing for several years.

People want to believe that the content they are seeing is the same for everyone, that it's like a book. Once it's printed, that is what it is. But dynamic content, by it's fundamental nature, is manipulated.

For me, I see a much bigger danger implied by the Facebook study reference here. If you think of the ability to influence in this way, then the Facebook "scientific" paper is potentially a press release announcing their offering of an entirely new type of advertising. Imagine if you wanted to broadly shift public option. With the right amount of money and access to the right platform, you could pay for shifting the filter of the algorithm. This is not an Adwords type of program, accessible to anyone. Instead, it's a much more exclusive, strategic type of marketing. Probably expensive, with very limited availability -- like product placement.

Perhaps the scariest place for it, and it's most likely target, is with politics and political advertising. Consider how this type of behavior manipulation might be used for political influence. Depending upon who is operating the platform, how sophisticated they are with their manipulation, and what kinds of limits or controls that they place on this type of influence, the not-entirely-offbase conspiracy thinking can set your brain on fire. It makes you suspicious of any political content in the social media context; except, as Facebook has shown, people are manipulated without even knowing.

Clearly, it's an eye-opener and some serious food for thought. Is this where Facebook finally announces the real influence of the platform that they've been building, the platform that everyone has believed to be worth so much more than social media advertising has proven to be worth, to date?

Thoughts on why Apple's current ad campaign sucks

If you've watched much TV lately, you've probably seen this Apple ad.

Sitting around this weekend, it occurred to me what I really don't like about this campaign. In one word, melancholy.

From the quiet, sad little keyboard track to the shots of people having fun at a distance, the whole ad seems more like an excerpt of a depressed video diary. It's like the ad is saying, "I am a sad, disconnected viewer, looking into a world that I can't touch, that I can't participate in. The only sound I hear is the melancholy sound of my own world."

It's like, instead of selling Apple products, their goal was a PSA suggesting that you give up this connected world and trade it in for Prozac.

Celebrity, Image & Story: On Lainey, Gossip, and Branding

It is with a touch of reluctant embarrassment that I must confess... that I often find myself reading certain celebrity gossip blogs.

It's not that I find the lives of celebrities that interesting. In my early years in the corporate world, I started reading through the entertainment news in order to expand my awareness of pop-culture topics -- basic research into the things that the people in the office seemed to be interested in. Now I think of it as light reading to build your marketing vocabulary -- without some pop-culture awareness, it can really be a struggle to communicate across generations. Left to my own interests, my cultural vocabulary would be even more alien and disconnected than it was 20 years ago. 

Perhaps now, as you read this, you're thinking that it's just me, my dirty little secret. In reality though, an interest in celebrity is everyone's dirty little secret. But rather than just me providing an explanation, here's Elaine Lui, Lainey from Lainey Gossip, with her TED talk The Sociology of Gossip (here's an amusing profile of Lainey). If her presentation doesn't sell you on why you should consider reading her blog -- or at least not feel guilty about your interest in gossip -- let me connect a few more dots for you.

First, let's start by looking at the entertainment industry as Lainey relates aspects of it in her TED presentation. Behind the celebrities there are a host of publicists and programs, all designed around marketing an image, a brand, a project, or a media product. The entertainment industry is PR, advertising and promotion every day, 24 hours a day. It's a story that is also business, full of messaging strategies that succeed and true tales of tragic messaging failures.

From a business perspective, a perfect current events example might be the story of Paula Deen. From her ascent, to her food and her brand identity, Paula Deen rose through the Food Network promotional engine to become a significant national brand. While the style of food that she promoted wasn't particularly healthy, her brand image was used by a number of businesses to endorse their products. When it came out publicly that she had diabetes, it was a problematic PR moment, a speed bump for the brand, but it didn't cause the entire brand to collapse. Likeable and homey image continued to sell. Until the more recent revelations of her 'racial' past when the brand suffered a catastrophic shot and the endorsement deals began to collapse.

On Lainey Gossip, Lainey sometimes refers to the idea of the school for "celebrity studies". They've also put together several "career prospectus" pieces that take a look at specific actors, their image and their entertainment business activities, then speculate about their career and possibilities. Celebrities and their image are wrapped in story. Take Kristin Stewart and Robert Pattinson, the stars of the Twilight series. The gossip blogs (and perhaps the promotion arm of the movie franchise) built them out to be a couple. Demographically speaking, it was very popular with their fan base. At the same time, other gossip blogs characterized the relationship as fake, a PR construction to help promote the films. Then there was the "affair" prior to the release of the final installment and the controversy that surround that. On one level, there is the story. On the other level, there are the questions that should be running through your mind as a marketing pro -- how much of this is manufactured? How is it shaped? What are the elements that work effectively and why?

The Illusion of Brand Identity
Brand is a story. It is an illusion. It's the conceptual framework that makes something seem special or more unique than something else. Paula Deen's brand was a friendly, down-home, comfort-food image. But how about the real Paula Deen behind that image? What is she really like? Perhaps the court depositions and the racist phrases are closer to reality -- or maybe they aren't. In reality, it doesn't really matter whether they are true or not; rather, that they had enough energy in them to change the narrative, to shift our perception of the story. At the end of the day, do we really know Paula Deen any better or do we simply have new brand story, a new image wrapper?

Perhaps because it is such an integral part of their business, the entertainment industry understands how important narrative is to celebrity and brand. Whether it's a crafted persona for an action hero actor, fake relationships or controversies and meta-news, a broad range of techniques and practices are used to increase visibility and awareness. Sometimes they are used to mask product aspects, like the straight publicity relationship of the gay actor, while sometimes they are simple promotion devices designed to raise visibilty -- like the 'leaked' nude sex tape.

But what is really interesting, and Lainey addresses aspects of this in her TED presentation, isn't just the details or the execution, it's the story outside of the story. This larger story framework, the narrative that encompasses the details, is the story of culture. It's a cross-section of demographic beliefs and expectations, of social values. This is the story that we want to believe.

Every day we willingly consume a diet of lies, half-truths and illusions, all with the purpose of supporting an existing internal narrative. We romanticize actors and actresses, idolizing their mythical persona with no real connection to the actual person in that role. And whether it's a carefully managed media or simply a case of selective hearing, we only absorb the things that support our narrative.

Take the story of Lance Armstrong and professional cycling. For whatever reason, we imagine that we know and understand the world of bicycle racing. It starts with the narrative that we know -- individuals, teams, and equipment, with the story of the event taking place through a snapshot of one or two hours of video clips. We build a framework of characters, personalities like Lance Armstrong, who we imagine we know. As we watch the race clips, our character, Lance Armstrong, acts and performs in expected ways. When we read interviews, he says the same kind of things. Even his books support the character that we know. And, as we watch him perform in the video race clips, we imagine that there is a competitive event taking place. We gloss over the business, the traveling theater being orchestrated around a cast of hundreds of paid performers and a media infrastructure that helps sell the show.

But we don't really know what it's like behind the surface of the illusion. We don't know what it feels like to get up in the morning with sore knees and a sore butt and a 100+ mile race day to look forward to. We don't know what it's like to work in a job where your performance is on display, when you're told to ride hard at this point or go slow at another point. We imagine the world of performance enhancing substances to be one like Popeye eating spinach magically crushing his competition, and not a standard part of the day-in-day-out body maintenance for performers that play the contenders. We imagine a lot but there is so much more that we really don't know. Was Lance Armstrong a rule breaker or a legendary figure-head an industry? Did he play the role that he did, say the things that he said, solely for personal gain or was that his job supporting the business, the industry? Dots of information from the media machine allow us to imagine much, but we really know very little.

Imagination + Fame = Tremendous Value Multiplier
In the world of infomercials, we're familiar with seeing the product that slices, dices and makes julienne fries, but the real sell comes when we start imagining how we would use the product. In that moment, the product has become real in a very special way inside your mind. In your head, the product moves into an idealized version of reality and plays a role in the narrative that you construct.  In that same way, 'celebrity' connects with the imagination part of your brain.

One of the things that I found rather amusing when I first came across the Lainey Gossip site was Lainey's 'Freebie 5'. Here's the basic description:

A concept inspired by Friends which I’ve called the Freebie Five - a list of 5 'unattainables' you’d have permission to tap without consequence from your significant other should the opportunity arise. The key to the Freebie Five is fantasy, whatever turns your crank. My criteria, however, is also determined by celebrity. Two bit no-names, no matter how hot they are, don’t rank. Because while intelligence is optional, fame never is.

While I'd never heard of it prior to finding her site, I've since found references to the same core idea in other areas that suggest that the basic theme is more common than you might think.

But, over time, one the thing that you'll notice as you read Lainey discussing her list, is how it changes and shifts, often centered around events or movies or public activities. Across a broader cross-section of people, you'll also find celebrities who capture the spotlight, only to see that spotlight fade from the public interest some time later. We all know the idea of 15 minutes of fame. But why is it that excitement from the attention rises and falls? Why is it that someone can appear on the list despite little, if any, direct knowledge of the person -- no idea whether they smoke, whether they smell bad, or whether you can share a conversation with them.

The reality is that we aren't enamored with the actor or actress, we are excited by the story. When Lainey is crushing on Robert Downey Jr., it's not the person, it's the media presence. It's a persona assembled in her mind from bits and pieces like Ironman, red carpet events, interviews and stories. It's a idealized character that doesn't include the ugly bits of reality that we all carry in real life like snoring, garlic-breath, or whether we remembered to put the toilet seat down.

We need to build these stories. We look for the pieces to construct our world. It's part of the reason why Playboy needs to include the Playmate profile, so that you have the framework to connect the photos and the image to a character, to make it human in your imagination. It's a lot like the perceptual processes that take place with change blindness and the invisible gorilla -- taking the perceptual moments and building them into something that seems tangible and coherent.

Celebrity, Modern Mythology and The Hero with A Thousand Faces
In his works on mythology, Joseph Campbell explores the idea of the monomyth, the hero's journey, a basic pattern that is found in many narratives from around the world. Campbell held that numerous myths from disparate times and regions share fundamental structures and stages, which he summarized in The Hero with a Thousand Faces as "The Hero's Journey". While the structure of the monomyth exists in many books and movies today, the same kind of concept can be more broadly applied to celebrity gossip and popular culture. Examples of this can be found in some of the themes explored on Lainey's blog, aspects like celebrity relationships, motherhood, career strategies and public appearances.

As you watch the tides of celebrity day to day, what you can see is that these themes are more than just the minutia of life in the spotlight, they are often components in a media strategy, carefully played in order to paint the dots in a larger narrative. Some, like the announcement of Angelina Jolie's double mastectomy, are masterfully managed, while others can be seen as blundering media missteps. Others, like the efforts to address the media after photos of Kristen Stewart and Rupert Sanders were published, were not so well managed. Sometimes, celebrities shape a story and it resonates. Other times it fails.

Here is a great post on Jessica Biel posting a photo on Twitter before the Met Gala. Essentially, Jessica Biel published an image of herself getting dressed and talks about having a tough time zipping her dress. As Lainey summarizes sarcastically, "Jessica Biel, she’s just like us! She has dress and zipper problems too!" From a messaging standpoint, Biel has attempted to shape audience perception of her, but her message didn't align well with her existing narrative. Minutia, yes, but it's an equally important reminder about message -- imagine if Larry Ellison tweeted images of himself putting gas in an SUV and complaining about $4 per gallon gas.

At the same time, there's another media at work here. The Biel image was posted on her celebrity blog site. While Lainey picked it up and commented on it unfavorably, it's possible that there is another audience in the general population, fans that follow her, that go to her site. An audience where this message resonates. Traditional celebrity gossip was subject to the filter of publications and media outlets. Now, the celebrity is able to reach out to their audience and connect directly.

This actually underscores an important change that has been taking place with the increasing importance of social media. While most of us could probably care less about the relationship between the two leads in the Twilight movies, the series built a particularly rabid fanbase, commonly referred to as Twi-hards. More than just passive fans, this audience channels their energy into aggressively communicating their expectations for the narrative back to the studios, the media outlets and the broader public. They campaign like a media tsunami. Here's an example. But, perhaps more important than this type of audience behavior, is the impact that it has on the narrative. Did Kristen Steward and Robert Pattinson get back together because they romantically reconnected or because their Twi-hard fan base demanded that their relationship hold through the final movie? And if it conflicted with their personal values, how much pressure did the studio put on them?

But This Is Business. Who Cares About Celebrity?
We all want to imagine celebrity as this mythical cast, performing in a pantheon of media and activity that is removed from our real world. In that same way, when people encounter celebrities, they are often interested in taking pictures, getting autographs, and documenting their encounters with their legendary figures. Celebrity is also relative. Your CEO may be a celebrity in your business, but virtually unrecognized outside of your company. Many Silicon Valley people might recognize Marissa Mayer, Mark Benioff, or Eric Schmidt, but how many people outside of the business world would recognize their names or know if that sat next to them on a flight?

At the same time, celebrity is a valuable commodity. Notoriety can help you command a larger salary, be hunted by recruiters, or have your opinion be considered. While lots of friends on Facebook, followers on Twitter, or people in your LinkedIn network may not be a real measure of friendship, it does speak to some measure of communication influence. It is a measure of celebrity. How often to people turn to you for answers at work? How highly do the people that work with you in your industry regard you? You, the influencer -- this is an aspect of celebrity.

Celebrity is related to your personal brand. Your celebrity status is about who you are, how you promote yourself, and the narrative that people use to understand you. This is possibly the bigger lesson to understand from celebrity studies -- that the way people understand you, that the way they think of you is, essentially, a story. That story is a synthesis of who you are, and the role that you play in the narrative of the encounters that they have with you. Maybe it's your handshake, or when you talked about restaurants, golf, or wine. Maybe it's your cluttered desk, or the phone conversations with your girlfriend that everyone can't help but overhear.

Are you painting narrative dots that increase your celebrity status or making you seem like a trainwreck? Do you seem genuine in your interaction with others, like the stories of Robert Downey Jr., or do you seem nice when the cameras are on but hiding a mean, unpleasant personality like Reese Witherspoon's recent public drunkenness arrest in Georgia.

The Story and the Narrative Dragon
Here's something even more important to understand -- sometimes the narrative takes on a life of it's own. Sometimes you can't control the story, you are simply subject to the effects of being blown around by it. Take this example from the story of Sean Parker's wedding. Here, the story of his wedding started to catch fire as a story published by another media outlet. In several places, the Internet celebrity has attempted to change the narrative, to explain the events and shift the story away from "Sean Parker, anti-hero, eco-wrecker, redwood crusher and all around bad guy". What's more, while this story grew into a media storm, it started with an attempt to keep it private. According to Parker,

We chose a setting for our wedding that was a literal expression of our search for sanctuary — a place that was safe, private, and intimate. We chose a remote location (Big Sur), invited no press, and did our best to conceal that location from the press. We didn’t court attention — quite the opposite, we asked guests to check their cell phones and cameras at the door and we didn’t sell our photos to tabloids.

And yet, the story blew up. What may have started as the simple story of an ultimate nerd fantasy wedding,

a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to force 364 otherwise self-respecting adults to dress up in elaborate fantasy-inspired costumes, a feat of mischief that we were delighted to attempt. The Academy Award winning costume designer (for “Lord of the Rings”), Ngila Dickson, was our co-conspirator, and her brilliant designs exceeded even our wildest dreams.

transformed into a media dragon, a narrative monster. Here's how he describes what he took away from the experience:

The biggest mistake we made in wedding planning was forgetting about the media: that silent, invisible dragon breathing down our necks all along. Nothing has been more shocking to me than the media’s handling of this “controversy”: there were hundreds of articles written, and yet — incredibly — there was only one reporter who bothered to ask us for comment prior to publishing their story.

It's a story of dots, of tidbits crafted into a narrative. As noted earlier, we don't know the reality, we assemble a story from the pieces that we have available. In his critique of the media near the end of the piece, Parker talks about how, "social media has collapsed the traditional media roles of content producer, editor, publisher, and consumer into one and assigned those roles to literally everyone". This also holds true for what it means to be a celebrity, a public figure. As Parker notes, "the more we depend on social networks and other online services to share content with friends and family, the more we risk that our content inadvertently becomes public."

Ultimately, that's why you need to see yourself in terms of your brand, to understand yourself in terms of a media strategy. Because as much as people may want to imagine a world where our private life is not exposed or struggle to understand why Kim Kardashian is seen as a celebrity, this is our modern media. This is our modern reality. Sometimes you control the story. Sometimes, one little narrative dot can change the story and the story controls you.

Wrapping it up
If you've made it to the end of this long post, I hope that one of the take-aways has been an increased understanding of some of the interesting aspects of the celebrity industry. And, while it may feel a bit embarrassing to admit to reading about celebrity, you don't have to think lesser of yourself for it. If you do follow it and spend some time reflecting on the processes, themes, and aspects outside of the specific individuals, I think that you'll find yourself in a far better position to market in the modern world of social media. And should you become famous, you may want to keep these celebrity behavior tips in mind.

How Facebook Advertising Should Really Work

A while back, Facebook's stock price got hammered by their recognition that they were struggling to monetize mobile. Not long after that, more news came out of Facebook that they were focusing more of their advertising on retargeting.

The retargeting story was an admission that letting advertisers target audiences based on their profiles was a rather ineffective method that delivered poor ROI. With retargeting, a technique that had been used elsewhere on the web for quite some time, Facebook was seeing doing a better job of delivering conversions and seeing better monetization of their traffic. Across the online advertising world, there was sort of a collective, "duh". Among the analyst community, there was a small howl of, "what happened to the best minds of our generation?"

Fundamentally, the real problem here is that for all of the "potential value" of Facebook's big data, its massive volume of user tracking data is disconnected from its advertising programs. Think about that, Target knows enough about its customers to be able to determine how pregnant a woman is based on what they've purchased, but Facebook's most intelligent answer for advertisers is whether the user has self-identified as male or female on their profile page.

This is the great Facebook illusion. On the one hand, they have this user interaction platform that's great for harvesting user data. It's something that everyone talks about. And yet, for all intents and purposes, they haven't come up with a way to bottle that stream and make it easy for any advertiser to get a good value from it.

Contrast that with Google and their Adwords program. With Adwords, they came up with a way for advertisers to benefit from the underlying value and functionality of their platform, to integrate ads with search.

This is the "Unified Theory" problem that Facebook needs to solve. Admittedly, there are a host of challenges to balance, not the least of which being privacy and utility, but if the can crack that nut, then Facebook will be worth something closer to the hype. Until then, it's not much more than an Internet broadcast network.

Why Google Should Not Do Tradeshows

Add this post to the long list of reasons why I'm not expecting a job from Google. As a general rule, unless you're a comic, anything that makes you look like an idiot is probably bad for your brand. 

As someone who still finds my way to an exhibition floor now and again, I've seen my share of tradeshow sights. From big booths to small booths and busy booths to empty booths, I've seen a range of booth behavior -- attentive, bored, obnoxious, and drunk. But one of the most disappointing and frustrating things to encounter at an event is a booth that ignores you, that can't answer your questions, or exudes arrogance. And that pretty much sums up my experience with Google at tradeshows.

If you've encountered a Google booth, see if this matches your experience. Rather than being involved with the show, the people in the booth seem to be participating in a party that none of us are invited to. It's like you've invaded the space of some clique gathered at the university center.

I can only remember three times that I've actually seen Google booth staff show some signs of engagement in the event that they were participating in.

• The SMX Search Marketing Expo conference. This was sort of home court for the Google team and they actually sent people who could speak to their tools and products. And, while they weren't the most amazing booth staff that I've ever encountered, if you were grading Google booth staff on a curve, this was their dream team.
• At OFC/NFOEC, the Google Fiber team was out, trying to recruit telecom engineers. In their talent search, they were trying to collect as many leads as possible. So, when it came to trying to hire people, they were pretty focused. 
• I think I also remember them at one of the old MacWorld shows -- back in the day when Apple was still at the event and it was in Moscone South. At that time, I remember the Google booth guys running their charging station and talking about Google apps with people that walked up to the booth. I even remember one guy talking to some kid that was there with his mom. It's funny how that seems like such a contrast from my more common Google-tradeshow encounters.

But the worst part of the whole experience is that, even if you can suffer through be ignored and you stand around for long enough force an engagement, the people that they have staffing the booth appear to be unable to answer any questions related to the products featured at the event. It's like staffing a customer service desk, gathering a line of customers, and then proceeding to visibly ignore them.

When you create an exclusive work environment, your bound to build an air of elitism into the mix. But most people don't actually encounter real, live employees for Internet businesses like Facebook or Twitter. But what most retail B2C businesses understand -- something that's probably lost on the culture of the Internet business -- is that each employee is a brand ambassador and each encounter with the public is image-shaping moment. Most people will treat accidental encounters as just that, but an appearance at an event is a show. Do you really want ignorant, arrogant, and useless to be the adjectives describing your business?

Walmart and Ad Video Demographics

Have you seen some of these recent Walmart steak commercials? The Dallas one seems like it's in heavy rotation on my TV. What I'm struck by every time this thing runs is the casting and the production quality, the look and feel of this commercial.

The 'guests' at this 'steak-over' event are not beautiful models or 'elegant restaurant guests on a special night out'. Instead, the casting looks like they found a pool of extraordinarily average people. It's like they specifically went casting at the local church picnic or, as funny as it might sound, the local Walmart. Put simply, the commercial feels like it was shot by Walmart customers for Walmart customers.

From the 'host' to the lighting and the video, this commercial feels like it might have been put together by a local video company, not by a slick, high-end corporate marketing team crafting television advertising for one of the worlds leading retailers. And, in a way, that's what I think makes this such an interesting piece. This isn't an accident. This is design. Walmart didn't just get stuck with some crappy, poorly produced advertising, this is a campaign.

Advertising: Influencer or Scam

I came across this post the other day on Pando Daily, Advertising is Hated — and Failing, by Philip Bump. Here's how he opens:

People hate ads, with two exceptions: A) Sometimes one particular ad campaign will strike the public fancy, or B) Sometimes people happen to be in the ad business and, thus, are paid to like ads.

As professional marketers, we often get lumped into group b. Love it or not, some aspect of the advertising industry probably pays our salary, feeds us, and keeps us warm at night. Advertising is the superpower-creator that transformed Google into GOOG, and it's often looked to as the hopeful savior for next generation internet functionality -- we all just need a little radioactive spider or an intense dose of gamma radiation and we would also be kicking ass and taking names -- or at least, that's the theory.

Advertising is also the last lifeboat on the sinking ship of business model viability. It's the, 'we can't figure out a way to convince people to pay for this' approach. Take Twitter as an example. Millions of users around the world, it's been an instrumental communication tool in many recent global events. But they struggle with how to make money. And they have to make money because 'public good' became obsolete sometime after the creation of the first national parks. So they turn to ads.

Quoting again from the Pando post:

In general, people hate ads so much that they’ve made ad avoidance an art. A tool that facilitates skipping ads is now part of a standard cable sign-up package. There is software that removes ads from webpages. Ads are used as a punishment, such as in the case of Spotify and Pandora, which will intersperse their music offerings with ads unless you pay them not to. Their ads might as well be cobbled together like ransom notes out of various typefaces from the newspaper.

Why Ads Don't Work
Before Google Adwords, all advertising was the same. Essentially, it was a interrupt of your existing attention thread with the hope of drawing your focus into a thread for a period of time. Most modern advertising still revolves around this interrupt model. But people hate the interrupt. The interrupt is an intrusion, an invasion, and seldom a value add.

Adwords is an entirely different model. With Adwords you are engaged in a search transaction and the ads provide a supplement to the results. Theoretically, they are paid for and placed by businesses with some expertise in the content area, so your chances of landing on useful content are increased. And because Google used a content relevancy calculation to prevent spam from surviving in Adwords, you weren't usually assaulted by irrelevant content. Instead, it was a potential shortcut to content that you were searching for in the first place. At the same time, whether it's because of the way that they've changed their layout or because people are more selective about what they click, I've noticed that my Adwords campaigns don't produce at the level they did five or six years ago.

Modern advertising has significantly improved its content relevancy optimization methods. Platforms like Facebook know so much more about you that it's possible to deliver very targeted ads. But the real question for online advertising is not whether you can display them, but what do they do for the user.

People often want to look to print media for guidance, but display ads in print media can provide a visual break from text. Imagine giving someone who normally reads People Magazine a copy of a scientific journal -- they would be so bored, they probably wouldn't do more than flip through a few pages.

And as for ads in video, most of us that have grown up with broadcast television have an entirely different relationship with commercials. With broadcast television, advertising also functions as a brief intermission break -- run to the bathroom or to the refrigerator. It's a pause button in the broadcast of the live moment. These days, broadcasters have added so many advertising breaks that most broadcast television is unwatchable. And when you can download or stream the video -- and use the pause button at your discretion -- who needs the forced commercial breaks?

The Times They Are A'Changin
Consider General Motors recent move to abandon advertising on Facebook. In case you missed that story, here are some different posts that I found with some connect-the-dots elements in them.

• GM defriended Facebook over rejection of bigger, bolder ads
• Google touts its ad metrics as Facebook confronts hurdles
• Facebook: the collective hallucination

You can come away with a number of different perspectives on why they might have dropped the program. But however you look at it, their programs clearly weren't delivering enough ROI to make continuing a no-brainer.

In the early days of Adwords, Google's content network looked like a great deal for businesses. Here was an opportunity to do low-cost brand-based advertising in content relevant media. Unfortunately, it was also a big driver for the growth of content mills and click fraud. Put a different way, if you set up algorithm parameters where anyone can publish and get paid for ads, somebody else will set up a system to try and plunder that payment system. Put in a more web-modern way, as traditional media and publishing models were disrupted, we all learned that while it was possible to create an algorithm for relevant content, not all content is equal. In the end, what we also learned is that, in a B2B environment, content network advertising is a sucker's bet.

Ad Networks Optimize the Appearance of ROI
Perhaps the best example of of gaming the system comes from some old Techcrunch posts (looking back through my Blogger drafts, I'd written a long post about this, but I never published it). This post, How To Spam Facebook Like A Pro, details some of the ways that ad networks can manipulate the publishing system. It's a great read.

Big Data is a powerful advertising tool. For all of those things that Facebook knows about you, you can probably bet that they have a pool of users who are more likely to click on ads. If you wanted to serve up some hot juicy click-through numbers, it's a fair bet that you could run an optimized algorithm that's more likely to get your clicks -- even if it's just grandma who double-clicks on anything that moves. So if Facebook, the company that knows so much about you and your habits, can't convince GM that their ads work, what does that say for the little pop-up ad that screws up the interface on your phone and the company that's paying for that space?

The revolution is nigh. Sooner or later, the 'advertising' bubble will burst and everyone that has pinned their hopes on the economy of you-and-I-clicking-on-that-thing-that-we-really-weren't-looking-for-but-was-in-the-way-of-what-we-were-trying-to-do will be on the front-line of the collapse. It won't be a happy day. And worse, it probably also means that many of the services that you count on, that you know and love, will go away. All of their revenue (and any prospective funding) will dry up in the shifting winds of 'viability' fashion.

Or perhaps the rest of the world will evolve to match the ad-driven business model... your view of Yosemite will begin after the following 3 second video.

We Have Met the Idiots in Marketing

So the other day I found myself returning to the Pragmatic Marketing site, downloading papers and reading some of their content. If you haven't been there, it's an interesting visit and there's a lot of worthwhile content worth exploring. Essentially they are selling training for product marketing and product management, but they have a lot of content that helps explain the often misunderstood role of product management. Let me start by saying that the site is definitely worth a visit.

But one theme that really stuck in my craw was this notion of marketing being all about promotion, that marketing is the department with the coffee cups and t-shirts. I know what you're thinking, but while I recognize that a percentage of the business world believes this, what really annoyed me is the implication that we marketers also believe this. Like we're sitting around saying, "give us your silly new product and we'll take care of giving it the make-over. We'll make it pretty." Really.

Not to say that there aren't idiots and incompetents among our ranks. Or those that only see things in terms of promotions and programs -- "a t-shirt for every milestone!"  But don't go hanging this on the neck of everyone with a marketing title. If I had a dollar 38 dollars for every time that I've tried to get the engineering and product development people business focused on market needs, I would have pretty substantial chunk of money -- maybe not as much as Mark Zuckerberg, but enough to pay for a really nice wedding in my back yard this Saturday.

But it isn't just me who feels this pain -- product managers, a target audience of the Pragmatic Marketing site, feel this pain intimately. The downloads on the site are a siren song to their unfulfilled sense of order, calling to the underlying frustrations created by mediocre products and things that don't sell. And it's not their fault. Organizations often evolve cultural bureaucracies. Entrenched processes and the politics of people often prevent innovation -- or even streamlined process methodology -- from taking root.

Product and Marketing as Food
Like any great product, building an amazing dish isn't simply the result of one technique, one method, or one process. It's the synthesis of these in the right combination that brings everything together. Sourcing great ingredients is important, but without care, great ingredients can be overcooked or poorly seasoned. Every dish doesn't need to be finished in butter. Elegant plating may add to the appeal of a dish, but it won't rescue bad food. If the dining area isn't clean or is otherwise inhospitable, no one will enjoy the food. And your Mom may be the best cook in the world, but she's probably not getting $100 per person for dinner because there's no business around her, nobody invited guests.

Here's hoping that you work in an environment that has a holistic understanding of product and marketing, that can see the bigger picture and puts things in context. But whether you do your you don't, check out the Pragmatic Marketing site. There's some thoughtful content there -- regardless of whether the place you work will adapt to it.

In Search Of: the Underlying Strategy in Mobile Advertising

Perhaps your experience is similar to mine. Recently, I've notice what seems like an increasing number ads in the apps that I use on my phone. We all understand the basic idea -- mobile use is increasing, there is strong engagement with mobile devices, so more engaged eyeballs equals conversions and results... or at the very least, a more enticing opportunity for market program dollars.

While I can understand these app platforms looking for ways to monetize the software, realistically, the only times that I've clicked on them were accidents. I know I'm not the only one who acts this way, so it makes me wonder about certain aspects of the mobile advertising market.

Online Advertising Has Always Sucked -- Well, Almost Always
Before we go further, I should note that I'm rather skeptical about many aspects of Internet advertising. In the days before Google and PPC advertising on search, Internet advertising sucked for a bunch of reasons. Of course, that didn't prevent some of our colleagues from burning marketing dollars on these crappy programs. But for many of us in those days, Internet advertising was simply a B2B scam grifting marketing budgets.

Adwords really changed everything. Adwords was different because in many ways it provided consumers a value-added experience -- when they clicked through an Adword listing, they were interested in your product and often ready to buy. Adwords also set a new benchmark for ROI on advertising dollars with pay-per-click, an ecosystem that was designed to prevent spammy advertising noise, and a focus on blocking irrelevant content.

For a time, there was no better benchmark for advertising ROI than Google Adwords. But as the market matured, we also saw the era of click-fraud and of ecosystems devoted to farming revenue from Adsense. There was money there and everyone wanted a piece. But more than anything, what Google Adwords did was prove the viability of online advertising as a sustainable revenue engine.

Online display advertising had it's own drivers. While content publishers have looked for ways to make ads more like traditional print and television ads, it's been all about narrow-casting and individual user profiles on the back end. Similar to the spyware/malware elements that pioneered some of the display ad networks, today's Internet advertising networks collect user data and use that information to shape the content that gets pushed to the user across the entire ad network. Visit a travel site and you see travel ads on all of the web pages that you go to from there.

For marketers, leveraging demographic intelligence in online advertising can improve conversions. Of course, if you follow back through to the Scamville posts about Facebook/social network game advertising, this same level of intelligence can also be applied to manipulate users or potentially take advantage of marketers.

So What About Mobile Advertising
In looking at the ecosystem, the goal is think about whether this is a viable marketing outlet or yet another way to scam dollars from a marketing budget. And, if its a viable platform, for which types of products or markets. Beyond ROI or a specific advertising network company's sales pitch, it's important to build a theoretical framework of expectations.  

Let's start with a couple of assumptions. First, let's assume that some of the people directing these advertising programs have a strategy, a plan, use metrics, and see real ROI on their mobile platform advertising. Within the system, somewhere, there are probably people getting some benefit from these mobile ad programs. So, working from the other end of the spectrum and attempting to define some personas, under what circumstances would you click through an ad on your phone (other than accidentally)?

Most mobile apps are designed around very focused, narrow use cases. Get in, use the app, get out. If the ad is supposed to provide you with a gateway to additional information, why isn't that information integrated into the core functionality of the app?

One common approach for mobile apps is to place the ad close to the area that you have to click in order to enter text. Getting ready to type in a search term? Be precise with your aim or you'll click through an ad. I suspect that this design approach is a two-fold strategy that underlies a large percentage of in-app mobile advertising.

1. Artificially inflate click-through-rates to deceptively sell advertisers on mobile ad ROI. 
2. Create a nuisance tax for consumers in order to drive the up-sell purchase of ad-free platforms. 

The second approach tends to work like television commercials, popping a splash screen or video segment before the user is taken to the content or application functionality that they are seeking. If seen this approach used prominently in games like EA's Scrabble and applications like the Epicurious recipe tool. If most people are like me, they they are probably clicking through simply to get past the ad as quickly as possible or ignoring the video clip while it runs.

Again, I suspect that the key drivers for this type of advertising are the same as above with one caveat being that many of these types of ads contain poorly written code that causes the application to lock-up. EA's Scrabble, for example, relentlessly consumes battery life and I've even heard audio from ads running in the background even as the application had moved forward.

Mobile Advertising Strategy In Sum
At this point, I have a hard time conceptualizing a market or a product that would be a good candidate for mobile advertising. If I were directing an ad spend, I would keep my dollars out of mobile. Consider, even for the poorly implemented ads that caused problems with application hangs, I don't even know remember enough about the specific advertisers or products to be angry at them -- for a variety of reasons, the ads didn't even work on that level.

I definitely would not believe anything I was being sold when it came to mobile CPC. In my mind, if there is a case for mobile, it's probably a CPM placement, and even then, I have to think that there are better channels.

Marketing Nightmares: Picking Up Pieces of a Failed Start-up

"The first thing that I had to do was convince them that these brilliant 'product experts' who hadn't released a new product in four years were not the geniuses that they believed them to be."

Pardon my paraphrasing, but this is essentially quoting a CEO who was responsible for the turn-around of a noteworthy company here in the valley. For me, the quote speaks to an issue that many organizations face when you bring together two companies through merger and acquisition. It doesn't matter how colossal the company being acquired failed, you can probably expect to find a number of loyal believers who are convinced that they were doing it right.

My most recent encounter with this behavior reminded me of Gordon Ramsey's Kitchen Nightmares, but instead of making over a failing restaurant, I was dealing with updating a collection of outbound marketing pieces. As with most Kitchen Nightmares episodes, the product owners were convinced that their stuff was all great and it simply needed to be 'made pretty' -- a little face-lift to make things better.

Who are you kidding? I just watched you give a presentation, and right now it looks like you couldn't tell a story to save your life. For me, marketing is all about telling stories. But for some people, outbound marketing is just a series of check boxes. For them, that's marketing -- polishing turds and making them pretty.

Good Marketing is Passionate and Engaging
I once worked for a VP of Marketing who went on to be CEO. What he was able to do better than anyone else in the organization was tell the story of the company. Here was a guy who could take all of the little elements, the oddball technologies and patents, and frame it in a compelling story that explained why apples and oranges belonged together. He could speak technically to engineers and experts, or simply to those with less understanding.

One of the challenges with placing very technical people in a marketing role is that they often simply don't understand the important aspects of telling a story. Marketing activities are simply add-ons with little or no impact on the end results -- a check-box to be completed so that they can meet some customer expectations or resolve an incomplete MBO. It's the same mindset that assumes that a tablet with a faster processor or a USB port will outsell the iPad.

For many of these people, marketing communications is that nod you make to corporate operations, like adding a customer to your overpriced group dinner on your expense report. It's the nod that says, "you are the rock star and all of the product success is a result of you and your good 'ol boy network of industry associates." But as with many episodes of Kitchen Nightmares where the owner wants to be the star, success comes through hard work, thoughtful execution, and a quality product, not the theater of the individual.

Responding To A 'Make It Pretty' Moment
As a marketing pro, you've probably been through a couple of these 'make it pretty' moments over the course of your career. Perhaps it was the kind of event that went unnoticed by everyone involved, like the drinking, smoking or those other office behaviors that makes Mad Men seem like an alien environment. However, a 'make it pretty' moment should be equivalent to one of those events that sends Gordon Ramsey into expletive-censoring rant.

For the women I worked with in the marcom group at one large company, 'make it pretty' was a sexist comment with roots that went all the way back to secretaries and the steno pool. But even if you can't see sexism in the comment, a 'make it pretty' moment is team-crippling statement where one guy on the boat essentially says, "I'm more important than you and what you do is of little value."

If you think that 'make it pretty' is just a 'no crying in baseball' moment, then you've missed the point of this post. Make it pretty is divestment of ownership. It's a divorce from the quality process. It's the dysfunctional insanity in the opening episodes of Hell's Kitchen. A 'make it pretty' moment deserves a corrective response.

If you're in a leadership role, then you need to confront the issue. If you're a peer, you should probably discuss the issue with your colleagues, even if the comment wasn't directed at you. If the comment came from somebody you work for, then you might want to start sending out resumes and looking for a different work environment. And finally, if the offender is a client, your options are rather limited -- that's why I have a special place in my portfolio for very pretty client-mandated marketing turds.

How Many Emails Does It Take To Make You Call It Spam?

So I was looking at my email inbox the other day when something struck me -- on any given day, I get two to four emails from wine vendors. That's not a total count, that's a per-vendor count. Each wine vendor I've given my email address to likes to celebrate our relationship by sending me multiple offers each day.

And yet for the most part, I don't block these emails. I don't grumble in the same disgusted tone that I use for bulk emails from Consumer Reports or other companies that drip market to me on a weekly or monthly basis.

So my question to you is simply this -- are there vendors or markets that you participate in where you get more than one email a day from the vendor? Are they things that you have signed up for? Have you blocked any of them?

Disaster in Japan Reminder: The Importance of Crisis Communications

Our thoughts reach out to our friends, families and colleagues in Japan. In difficult times, we all want to try to reach out help. In business, it can sometimes be difficult for organizations to determine when to draw the line between business responsibilities and our human responsibilities. That's one reason why, beyond help and outreach, organizations should use this event as a reminder as to the importance of planning for crisis communications.

Crisis communications is a multi-dimensional organizational challenge. While crisis communications is often viewed through a PR lens with books devoted to PR communications strategy, crisis communications can be more broadly applied to all of the communications that take place during a crisis. Here's an example of some key things to consider from the FEMA web site.

• Employees: Be prepared to provide employees with information on when, if and how to report to work following an emergency.
• Set up a telephone call tree, password-protected page on the company website, an email alert or a call-in voice recording to communicate with employees in an emergency.
• Be clear on how their jobs may be affected.
• Management: Provide top company executives with all relevant information needed for the protection of employees, customers, vendors and nearby facilities.
• Public: It may be important to update the general public with calm assurance that all resources are being used to protect workers and the community. Being able to communicate that plans are in place for recovery may be especially important.
• Customers: Update your customers on whether and when products will be received and services rendered.
• Government: Tell officials what your company is prepared to do to help in the recovery effort. Also communicate with local, state and federal authorities what emergency assistance is needed for you to continue essential business activity.
• Other Businesses/Immediate Neighbors: You should be prepared to give competing and neighboring companies a prompt briefing on the nature of the emergency so they may be able to assess their own threat levels.

What this list helps to underscore is that crisis communications includes internal communications, external communications, and so much more. Not only does that mean your PR and communication tools, it could also depend on your customer records from CRM, your social media network, and more. It's also important to keep in mind that, depending on the scope of the disaster that you are trying to address, your access to some or all of these resources might be limited or non-existent.

Did this spark your thoughts? Ideas? Please share your thoughts -- that's a big part of planning.

More PR Follies on Techcrunch

I always find these amusing, and they also seem like worthwhile cautionary tales to share. If you're following Techcrunch, you might have already seen this one.

Seriously, Timothy Johnson, Your Idea Of How To Do PR For Clients Is A Joke

The Mythology of Product Positioning - Freedom, Rooting, and the Evolving Android Ecosystem

Right now, your head is swimming with lies and half-truths. But it's not just you, it's everyone that you know, everyone that you've ever met. You didn't plan it. It just happened because your brain is sucking up information like a sponge, absorbing the data your exposed to without the capacity or ability to effectively analyze it.

Every day, we are like a computer on the Internet connecting to web sites and servers that our computer thinks it knows -- we take in information from sources that we deem credible and assume that there are no underlying messages in the bits of code, no malware. Many established marketing practices count on this relationship -- from celebrity endorsements to astroturfing -- there are a wide range of techniques designed to "spoof" your information authentication credentials.

True, false, or somewhere in between, these pieces of information come together inside our heads, forming the mythology of things that we know (or think that we do). This mythology lives inside of our heads, providing structure and guidance for how we perceive things and how we handle new information -- our ongoing set of authentication credentials.

Product Positioning and Baseline Product Mythology
Most people don't make substantial rewrites to their knowledge mythology. With products and marketing, this often means that the first messages that they receive function as the ruler by which all future interactions are measured. Talk to someone about your iPhone 4 and they will probably ask you reception problems. If you talk with someone who doesn't use Facebook, they'll probably touch on privacy concerns. Sometimes these mythology memes may be constructed out of a single experience, "that company was late delivering my product once. I know that they are not a reliable supplier."

The battle for product positioning starts early, and those first experiences can be critical. If your price is too high or your product is too buggy, most people probably won't give it a second look. On the other hand, if you can create favorable impressions early, you can probably ride that mythology long past any connection to reality -- and the emerging market for Android phones is proving to be a great case study in that behavior.

Android Phones and the Myth of Free and Open
In the early positioning of Android phones by Google and the media, the meme was basically:

The iPhone is a closed system, limited and controlled by Apple. With Android, you have an open source phone OS that enables you to unlock any capabilities of the phone and use it however you want. All of those limitations that Apple has imposed like what software applications you can run on your phone are not limitations of Android. Multitasking, video streaming over your cellular network, Wifi hotspots -- whatever you want, downloaded from wherever you choose. 

Now, as you start to see Android phones propagating across the various carriers, you're also seeing where the carriers have applied the same approaches to Android phones that they have traditionally used for other phones -- limiting capabilities, locking the hardware down, and tightly coupling unique carrier-based software that can't be removed. Some have even opened their own application stores so that they can control that revenue stream. In short, they have taken the "open" platform and closed it. But, while it has some of the gadget-focused tech media upset, Android unit sales continue to race along.

Here's a link to a recent post on Techcrunch's "MobileCrunch" site. John Biggs has noted, along with a number of commenters, that T-Mobile has basically implemented a version of Android that prevents you from "rooting" the handset. If you try to "jailbreak" these handsets, embedded hardware will restore the unit to it's default state. MG Siegler has authored a number of other posts with concerns about the evolution of Android in the carriers' hands. The long and short of these concern's boil down to this -- that the carriers have looked at Android and recognized it as an opportunity to produce handsets with an advanced OS and minimal (if any) licensing fees.

What transforms this from a win-win for the carriers into a win-win-win is that consumers still see this as the free and open alternative to the iPhone. It doesn't really matter what the interface looks like. It doesn't really matter whether they would ever root their phone (or jailbreak their phone if they had an iPhone), they have already bought the sales pitch on the "free and open" OS message, and it will be about two years and a completed contract before they have the freedom to change their minds.

My point with all of this is that it no longer matters what the original position really was. It doesn't even matter if some (or most) Android phones just suck. It doesn't matter because, in their campaign to sell the "it's just as good as a xerox", they found a soft feature that they could promote and differentiate on.

The FTC Settles Another Case Over Reviews and Endorsements by Online Marketers

I was listening the Marketplace Money radio program on NPR, and they highlighted a settlement yesterday in the world of Internet Marketing and app review on Apple's iTunes store.

Here is a great link to a post that wraps up the entire story from the Citizen's Media Law Project (CLMP) -- it's worth a read.

They also highlight an earlier case where the FTC went after Ann Taylor Loft for creating an affiliate-based offering that provided bloggers with "a special sneak preview" that would then offer them a gift, followed by participation in a drawing for a special gift if they posted about the event. Here's a link to the Citzen's Media Law Project's post on that article.

However, if you're reading this, you might also be interested to note this comment from the CMLP in the Ann Taylor post:

As noted in CMLP's legal guide, after adopting the rule the FTC assured bloggers and social media contributors that it was not likely to pursue them for not following the disclosure guidelines.  Instead, the Commission said that it would target the advertisers who offer the freebies (PRNewser; Dow Jones Newswires). 

For reference, I've also included a link to the CMLP's legal guide, Is the FTC Really Going to Sue Bloggers.