Marketing Zombie Killer: Levis

Ad Agency Wieden + Kennedy = Zombie Killers
This is a special ad agency. It is as if Dan Wieden and David Kennedy rejected every ad agency cliche. Here is how they describe their founding:

Twenty-five years ago Dan Wieden and David Kennedy quit their jobs to start a different kind of ad agency. A place where people would come to do the best work of their careers. A place for creating provocative, interesting brands that people actually care about. That kind of advertising became known as "the work," and everything else came second. Before ego. Before politics. Before sleep. Before "the prudent thing to do." Wieden+Kennedy was created to be a place where the work came first.

Staying true to that mission, Wieden+Kennedy has helped create some of the strongest brands in the world and, in the process made clients like Nike, ESPN and Miller High Life a part of popular culture.

WOW. There is values based business and then there is Wieden and Kennedy. I think I am in love (lol). I went looking for who created Levis great Go Forth campaign and stumbled on two business visionaries. Shame on me for not knowing. Kudos to them for knowing. Thanks to everyone at W&K for Go Forth. Inspired work ladies and gentlemen and you are marketing zombie killers.



If I could speak to Dan Wieden and David Kennedy here is what I would say:

Dan and David it is rare an old marketing dog like me is STUNNED by advertising but W&K's Go Forth work for Levi is so magical, so incredibly beautiful I had to tell you. I wish you had the cameras rolling during your creative process for this campaign. I think The New Americans and Go Forth will be remembered for a long, long time. Great art doesn't die it lives on in its progeny. Go Forth will influence many. I think about it like I think of art (over and over again trying to understand its full meaning).

I apologize for this cyber-stalking, but I had to tell you how much your work means to at least one old marketing dog (lol).

Thanks, Marty Smith

Why Retail Prices Don't Exist Anymore (epilogue)

What You Pay
After writing several thousand words on Why Retail Prices Don't Exist Anymore I forgot the most important idea. A reader wrote confused. "If retail prices don't exist what do I pay," was their very good question. Duh, should have had a V-8 and started with this. When we buy ANYTHING we pay a contextually sensitive price, the price of the moment. There is a price range, but not a single price and this is true for everything we buy.

"If what you say is true then how can I do price comparisons," was another excellent question asked by my confused reader. Not sure she liked my answer. "You can't compare prices," was my simple answer. At least you can't compare prices with any degree of certainty of anything. I suggested two books to explain the psychology behind my answer: Paradox of Choice: Why less is more by Barry Schwartz and Predictably Irrational by Dan Ariely. Me suggesting books, I know what a shock right (lol).

Paradox shows how fruitless drilling prices can become. This reminds me of my mother, who I love very much but who is not an economist. Mom used to come home with $300 worth of groceries and with great pride explain how much she "saved" using coupons. Dan Ariely knows my mother and most humans. Predictably Irrational defines what one of my P&G or M&M/Mars bosses taught me. "Martin," I remember someone more powerful than me saying to a twenty five year old me, "people buy with emotion and they justify with logic." Yep that is what we do. Predictably Irrationality extends to our lives too. The Case Against Divorce makes a case for why much of divorce is emotional decisions back filled with logic. (That divorce ship has sailed for me, but I wrote the piece to help those who may be able to slow their divorce train.

Price Comparisons = Dumb
Comparing prices doesn't work. You are seeing prices created for you, created to trigger your predictably irrational behavior (buying) with just enough logic to justify your actions. Price comparisons are dumb also because, as Paradox points out, the time you spend to make the comparison INCREASES your costs. Searching burns up your most valuable thing - TIME. Guess how many people factor in search time to savings? Hardly anyone because we are, deep in our core dinosaur brain, hunter gatherers. Our ancient genes trick higher level functions. Who likes to do math anyway? If we did the math we would see many buying decisions are out of our immediate logical control. This sounds much too Freudian for a Skinnerian (and Eckhart Tolleian) like moi. We are not IN THE MOMENT when we buy STUFF. If we were in the moment we would tap into real cost and buy less STUFF. Mind you I am a Director of E-Commerce so I am writing against interest here. Truth will out is my thinking (lol).

I am also an entrepreneur and capitalist who understands the primal need to feed the buy narcotic. No worries, but call it for what it is don't fall into the trap of false logic created to get you to part with money. Don't tell friends how much you "saved". No, tell your friends you don't know what you were thinking but it felt good and was fun. Feels good and fun logic always makes sense (lol).

Yes, you will buy things online. Yes you will pay A price. Understand the price you pay is not a set point but a momentary price thought. Price moves around changed by things such as how you arrived on that page (from Google, email, or a shopping engine) and what the site's pricing algorithm is feeling at that moment. The all knowing OZ who runs the site you are shopping is segmenting based on every action you take. A click here and there is all most sites need to predict (my site is not this sophisticated....yet), with some degree of certainty, what you are going to buy today (or even if you are going to buy). VALUE your most important asset - YOUR TIME and give up to the narcotic if you want. We are all addicts here (to a greater or lesser degree). Just remember to be in the moment and feel good about the decisions you make (for whatever reason). Fun and feels good are always GOOD reasons to do things, even stupid things.

Peace,

Marty

Related Links

Why Retail Prices Don't Exist Anymore

Why Retail Prices Don't Exist Anymore 2

Why Retail Prices Don't Exist Anymore 3

Web Scale: Counting to infinity

Inventory As Advertising

Free Marketing In A Long Tail World (PowerPoint on SlideShare)


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Why Retail Prices Don't Exist Anymore 3

Market Makers
Some companies understand web scale and some do not. My post Web Scale Counting To Infinity discussed the Internet arms race. Online pages are king. The more pages you have the more search terms your site can support. More is important because of the Long Tail of Search.

The Long Tail of Search
Steven Johnson’s Everything Bad Is Good For You discusses how much more information we can comfortable parse now. He credits video games. Whatever the source we can shave a mountain of information down to its important components now. Johnson’s point is process is informed by tools used. The more we use Google the more Google-like we become. We may not be able to process billions of pages, but we sure know how to use tools whose purpose is to grant power over an Everest of data.

As we become more Google-like we change our search process. Our searches get longer; we add words and learn how to dive into the middle of a mountain instead of starting every search at the bottom. As searches go from broad macro to refined micro the number of words your site needs to have pages for increases. It increases dramatically. Keep rolling out a page here or ten there and your web site will be swamped by larger more sophisticated sites. These sites are Market Makers and they teach their computers how to create pages. They give up the now impossible idea pages are created by humans. Web marketing is moving to fast. Only machines can keep up. Consider these Market Makers:

Amazon: 242,000,000 pages indexed in Google

Overstock: 2,700,000 pages indexed in Google

EBay: 90,000,000 pages in Google

Barnes And Noble: 10,200,000 pages in Google

Cnet: 7,200,000 pages in Google

Inventory As Advertising
Inventory in this context is digital inventory. A company may or may not back up digital inventory with actual products. Companies may drop ship through a partner, refer you to an affiliate and have them fulfill the order, they may bring you in and attempt to bait and switch you to another product and they may actually have the product you happen to be looking at in their warehouse (thought this is becoming increasingly rare). Warehouses, you see, cost MONEY. Digital pages, a.k.a. digital advertising, costs pennies so smart companies want as many pages as possible as fast as possible. The long tail of search means your need to add pages to the Google index is an addiction your company will never kick.

Our company founder once said, “Martin inventory costs money.” “Yes,” I replied in an email, “inventory costs money when it is an actual thing but it costs almost nothing in its digital state.” A product’s “digital state” is, at it’s most basic, a product page with keyword appropriate copy and optimized for a long tail search term or terms. It is not easy to create an infinite variety of pages. This is why Market Makers use “business rules” and intense algorithms. Business rules tell code how combinations and recombinations should proceed.

Self Fulfilling Search
Do you think it makes sense to be ahead or behind on the long tail search scale? Really the problem can be attacked either way and I could argue for and against each camp. Ahead and you may create your own space. My site misspelled the name of a popular toy once. At first no one cared, but then the new name got traction inside the Google index. Our competitors started to create content for the misspelled product. Their auto-page generates didn’t ask any questions other than, “Is there search engine traffic going to the page?” Once that question is answered in the affirmative their auto-page engines trigger and out pops a page. In the beginning there were few pages and our site ranked high. As more SEO savvy sites created content AROUND OUR MISSPELLING we got knocked out of the first position. If you don’t think that is frustrating you don’t manage a semi-large web site.

Scale = Only Protection
If your competitor has more pages in the Google index than you they have an important advantage. Don’t let this happen. Win the page creation war or your site can’t become a Market Maker. Scale is your only protection from the invading mongrel hoard. Scale is the only way to dig a moat around your online organic castle.

What is a Web Market Maker
A Market Maker like the sites noted above are large enough to create a Google Black Hole. Amazon, I would argue, creates their own “baby universe” with over two hundred million pages in the Google index. A Google Black Hole is when a site is so large Google’s space-time fabric ruptures and a tornado like hole forms. Google wants to find and feed massive market makers. Once it sees a rip in its space/time fabric it may choose to INCREASE the size of the hole. Amazon and Google are dancing. Amazon creates relevant keyword dense pages at a faster clip than any other site and Google DUMPS search traffic down their black hole. This is a virtuous cycle. Google’s actions increase the size of Amazon’s dominance. Amazon helps Google by offloading massive amounts of search traffic.

Google allows Amazon and other Market Makers more SEO leeway than others. If you sense a symbiotic relationship between Zoo Keeper (Google) and the Lions (Amazon), Tigers (eBay) and Bears (Overstock) you win a raw steak. The virtuous cycle feeds on itself increasing the size and drawing power of the Google Black Hole. This is all happening at the speed of light (or faster) and if you aren’t looking you can miss it. The question is can our little 15,000 URL site create a Google Black Hole and the happy answer is yes…IF

Our site has 15,000 pages but only 5,000 are in the Google index. Each day 10,000,000 pages go up to the web. Only 10% of those pages go into the Google index. Put another way, your new page has about a 1 and 10 chance of getting into Google UNLESS you’ve architected your site well and Google views you as a valuable relevant partner. Once your site has enough content you will rip Google’s space/time and they will start dumping search traffic in your direction. You want this. In fact, you want this badly. Feed that Google Black Hole as fast and furiously as you can and you may eclipse your competitors for a very long time. Just remember faster and more is better than slower and fewer.

Related Links

Why Retail Products Don’t Exist Anymore

Why Retail Products Don’t Exist Anymore 2

Inventory as Advertising

Martin’s Long Tail (PowerPoint)

Why Retail Prices Don't Exist Anymore (epilogue)

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Why Retail Prices Don't Exist Anymore 2

Internet Trade Winds
The Internet is a Sargasso Sea. A sea bounded only by other seas. Constant organic movement lapping hither and yon never touching any shore defines the web’s clear blue sea. The Internet Sea is such a complex large biological phenomena it creates its own weather.

Fronts roll across the web. I remember looking out across a flat Texas plain as a child watching weather form, darken and roll toward our home. One day I watched a wall of water move across the back of my elementary school. One minute I was standing dry and watching a curtain of dark grey bits march toward me. The next I was soaked and running for cover.

Watch search.twitter.com, Digg, Newsvine or Delicious to see forming fronts, to track their movement through the web's space and time. Today is Thursday and Grey’s Anatomy is one of the top searches on Search.Twitter.com. Grey’s Anatomy is a good example of how the web doesn’t just create its own weather. Sometimes the web receives fronts formed “off world”.

Do something viral and you can watch it splash across the web. Some events pick up speed and density. The web amplifies them faster than any other marketing force. These are web twisters. They create a virtuous feedback cycle and whip force up to unimagined levels. Other ideas fade and die instantly. The web is the ultimate emergent system. ** Suggest reading Made To Stick by the Heath brothers to understand what makes an idea, also sometimes called a meme, stick and gain velocity. **

Weather forecasting is too complex to KNOW anything. Instead of weather statements we make forecasts because beyond sticking your head out of the window that knows what is happening now with the weather. Weather always happens NOW. The web always happens now too. Much like the weather, you only see a small part of what is happening online. Every day 10,000,000 new pages go online adding to billions. The number of variables means we have to use the same mathematical models weather forecasters use. When you do what I do for a living, Director of E-Commerce (actually a funny title because who can DIRECT the web) you learn to use and track advanced algorithms to see fronts forming.

Retail Prices = One Large Constant Weather Front
Retail Prices is a storm that blows constant online. Brands are the thunderheads. If you are a product creator or manufacturer there is good news and bad news. The good news is you’ve successfully built a brand people know and want. Bad news is you’ve successfully built a brand people know and want. Once your anonymous product has name recognition the web’s Market Makers (more on this in Part 3 of my Why Retail Prices Don’t Exist Anymore series), think of these "makers" as Jackals, will move in and shred your Suggested Retail Price (SRP).

You’ve built something makers want – a consuming public’s attention. Market Makers such as Amazon, Overstock and ShopZilla can be lazy. You’ve given them jet fuel needed. Pour a little of your band’s value on the fire and you will be able to see flames for miles. The fact that your brand’s fuel rods will be spent some day soon is not a Market Maker's problem. Another brand will come along. When I worked at M&M/Mars we said the good news is Wal-Mart loved our products. The bad news was Wal-Mart loved our products. Any mega-Market Mover may play the ultimate zero sum game – they win because you lose. Soon after they start burning your brand to the ground your will know who really wins (hint it won't be you). Your brand will be spent, your margins quashed just about the time the Market Mover sends you a letter. The letter will unceremoniously inform you that Market Mover, let's call them BIG HULKING WEB SITE, has decided your brand no longer fits their merchandising strategy.

Distribution Control Is Power
The first three years Found Objects, the specialty gift company I co-founded (you can see in the archive), sold Magnetic Poetry Kit we couldn’t get enough. Market demand was 30% higher than David Kappell’s ability to ship. This shortage created frenzy. By the forth year, buyers didn’t kid around. They planned their entire selling season quadrupling their orders to insure delivery.

Moving Magnetic Poetry Kit to a mass merchant in year three would have destroyed the tipping point in year four. Distribution options have grown, but plotting a course to sales and marketing success is harder. You can build a brand faster, but you may also burn it up in nothing flat. Riding web trade winds for a good long successful ride takes talent, skill and luck.

More on Market Movers tomorrow.

Related Links

Why Retail Prices Don't Exist Anymore

Why Retail Prices Don't Exist Anymore 3

Web Scale Counting To Infinity

Why Retail Prices Don't Exist Anymore (epilogue)

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Why Retail Prices Don't Exist Anymore

Manufacturer Confusion
Spent an hour explaining why there is no such thing as retail prices anymore today. One of our best manufacturers was upset with out site. We were 5% below this manufacturer's suggested retail price. Being 5% below what they called their MAP pricing generated an angry letter.

This isn't my first rodeo. I've had to write notes to other similarly upset product creators. My note explains what I know to be true. Price is set by three things: wisdom of crowds, trade winds and market makers.

Wisdom of Crowds
Sarah Perez wrote an excellent article about the hole in web's wisdom of crowds on Read, Write, Web entitled The Dirty Little Secret About the "Wisdom of the Crowds" - There is No Crowd. Her assertion is supported by Citizen Marketer, an excellent book by Ben McConnell and Jackie Huba. Citizen notes the "magic 1%" of users who contribute while 99% ride. Sara Perez ran across the magic 1% and decided it wasn't much of a crowd.

Content creation is different. It requires people to do something and we all know how hard that is. Crowd wisdom is a force online. Sophisticated sites incorporate crowd wisdom in complex algorithms. James Surowieki's influential book remains brilliant work, work used everyday by Amazon's "if you like x you will also like y", the dominance of product reviews on any retail e-commerce site (created by 1% or not) and algorithms you can't see that determine price, product copy and offers based on an almost infinite set of "come from" and "best practice" options.

This infinite variability is what is hard to explain to manufacturers. They walk in Amazon's front door and see a price that is close to their suggested price. I walk in the side door by subscribing to email or looking on a shopping comparison engine such as ShopZilla. Any site is only accurate to the minute you are looking at it and the method used to arrive. I know where to look. I quickly turned up how a single product on Amazon has 3 prices for the manufacturer who thought Amazon was within their price guidelines (or as close as Amazon is likely to get).

This infinite price variation revelation stuns product creators. Manufacturers believe they have some say in how the market treats their products. Here is the mean irony. If you are good and create a brand you will have LESS control over Internet pricing. Branded product pricing is what big sites fight over. Brands are used to set price perceptions. I see Brand X high on site Y and "they are high priced on everything" is the normal conclusion. The reverse is also true (low = low on everything).

Branded products make great lost leaders. Lost leaders are products used to "football" the idea all prices are low. This strategy is also called a Wal-Mart approach. Wal-Mart is famous for low prices. Wal-Mart uses advanced information management and distribution power to move the price of any "market maker" item below competition. Anything selling quickly Wal-Mart makes a point to have the lowest price. When I sold candy our M&M's "pounder" was a "lost leader". Wal-Mart sold 16 ounces of M&M's for $1.99. This was below the price I could sell pounders wholesale to small accounts. Want to see an angry buyer? Tell them about why their price for 144 pounds of M&M's is $2.30 a unit when they could buy the same product retail at Wal-Mart for $1.99.

Do your job, establish a brand and you will have less control over retail prices online. Another important point is there is no way to know what any product is selling for anymore. How many pages do you think Amazon has on their web site? Nope, you missed it. Amazon has over 200,000,000 web pages. Combine an impossibly HUGE number of pages with technology that allows prices to float, twirl and change based on any number of parameters and there is no such thing as a single retail price. There are millions of possible retail prices for every item. Q: How do you check an infinite number of prices? A: You don't. And this is why....

Retail prices don't exist anymore.

More on Trade Winds and Market Makers soon.

Related Links

Why Retail Prices Don't Exist Anymore 2

Why Retail Prices Don't Exist Anymore 3

Web Scale Counting To Infinity

Inventory As Advertising

Martin's Long Tail (PowerPoint)

Why Retail Prices Don't Exist Anymore (Epilogue)
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Yo La Tengo Me So Old

How am I fifty years old? Yesterday I was in college and the day before that prep school. Blink and 50 years flies by like a stranger in the night. I felt every one of my 51 years, if we are being accurate, at the Yo La Tengo concert Friday night at the Carolina Theater in Durham, North Carolina.

Yo La Tengo was LOUD. I unplugged my etymotic earplugs from my iPod and jammed them in my ears. I could hear Yo La Tengo fine even with these normally sound squelching earbuds in. Hearing their music is not as accurate as feeling it. The band’s sound was manipulated, synthesized, fed back and rolled around booming off the Carolina’s Theater’s stucco walls and up to the second balcony where myself and 19 people who knew more about Yo La Tengo than me listened and watched.

Yo La Tengo’s Ira Kaplan (lead guitar, organ, synthesizer), Georgia Hubley (drums) and James McNew (bass and synthesizer) may be as much MIT electronics engineers as musicians. There were only three amplifiers on a sparse black stage. There was a large long low electronics hub on stage left in front of Ira (on the viewer’s right). Every now and again Ira would crouch down to adjust a lever or button on the long silver mixing board. I suspect the secret to the band’s large loud sound using only a handful of small amplifiers came from chips inside the long mixing board at Ira’s feet.

I thought back to one of my favorite high school albums: The Allman Brothers Live At The Fillmore East. I’m going to include a picture and everyone reading this blog of a certain age will remember the black and white album cover. Bell bottom jeans, at least one tie-dyed shirt, a Peter Max poster and black light were required to grow up in the sixties and seventies. Throw in a lava lamp and you have the eighties too (lol). The album featured the band sitting in front of an army of huge amplifier cases with, and I only saw this thanks to my computer’s ability to magnify, Greg Allman giving the photographer the finger.

Yo La Tengo got more sound out of three amplifiers than all of the Allman Brother’s musical muscle. Hearing a huge wall of sound come out of a few amplifiers controlled by the band's onstage mixing board was my first SOT (sign-of-the-times) last Friday night at the Carolina Theater.

SOT #2: No Logo
Yo La Tengo’s “No Logo” attitude was my second sign of the times. No promoter introduced the bands (Endless Boogie opened for YLT). No company logos were present. Instead of a sea of logos, the band played on a sparse black stage with a large picture of artist Dario Robleto’s collage entitled Sometimes Billie Is All That Hold Me Together.

Dario Robleto’s art is why I wanted to hear the band. I read about San Antonio Texas based artist Dario Robleto’s collaboration with Yo La Tengo on my friend Wendy’s blog for the Nasher Museum of Art. Before heading to the Carolina I stopped by one of my favorite Durham galleries, Liberty Arts, a working foundry, to see Celestial Vessel created by Duke artist in residence Satch Hoyt. Hoyt's creation looked like an organized Rauschenberg. It reminded me of the Talking Heads album I forget to have Rauschenberg sign when I met him years ago in Chicago (Read Meeting Robert Rauschenberg and Selling My Rauschenbergs).











Satch Hoyt’s sculpture will be featured in the upcoming The Record exhibit at the Nasher in August 2010. My old friend and master metal smith Al Frega is helping Satch Hoyt create Celestial Vessel. Anyone who marvels at the metal work outside of Morgan Imports knows Al Frega’s artistic skill. I saw the massive boiler Al cut into pieces to make the railing along Morgan Imports BEFORE Al cut it out of the building's basement. How you could look at such a hulking thing and create the beautiful metal railing running across and along Morgan's parking lot and back to the property directly behind their main building I have no idea.

I met Satch Hoyt briefly and liked him. He signed a card and asked if I was an artist. “Yes,” I stammered betraying my schizophrenia on the subject. Can you call yourself an artist when you haven’t put brush to canvas for more than ten years? Satch didn’t mind my inability to ask him a sentient question. Say It Loud, another Satch Hoyt sculpture, reminds me of my friend and fellow Durham artist Jeff Goll’s work with books.

Yo La Tengo’s music grew on me. I liked its courage, scope and daring. The band is not derivative, but influences show through. I could see Talking Heads in the band’s intelligence, Miles Davis in Ira’s tendency to turn his back to the almost sold out Carolina Theater and Pete Townsend’s love of feedback and guitar gymnastics. Their music was loud for a fifty year old who used to be asked to turn his music down by Vassar Dean of Students Colton Johnson. Loud but good.

Their No Logo uniforms were consistent with an “Internet Band", a band created by their own tribe of web followers. A Google search of Yo La Tengo returns 9 million documents mostly related to the band not the translation, "I got it." Band members dressed simply preferring keds and worn jeans. Yo La Tengo controlled everything. There were a few helper roadies who tuned some of the ten guitars, but sound mixing was on stage creating an immediate feedback loop with the artist / musicians. Lights may have been controlled on stage too, but there were few gels and fewer lighting changes. Yo La Tengo is a self-supporting nomadic band, their bus was outside the Carolina, who controls the means of their production, publicity and sound with advanced electronics and the Web. Too Cool and a massive SOT. Just as Damien Hirst recently proved how superfluous art dealers have become, Yo La Tengo showed how needless record companies and A&R are in our interconnected Internet age. Rock on Yo La Tengo Me So Old.

More on Satch Hoyt soon.

Here is some of Al Frega's amazing metal work behind Mogan Imports in Durham.





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Power of Pull

WRITE FOR SEARCHERS, NOT JUST READERS

Most of us still write for readers. But in the pull economy, we need to also write for searchers. One way to think of it is that Googlers are looking for "how to get rid of roaches," not necessarily for "bug spray." We can suggest using Google Trends and Twitter Trends to learn how people express themselves, and map language accordingly.

Power of Pull essay by Steve Rubel

This quote from Steve Rubel's Lifestream blog is insightful. Steve, SVP, Director of Insights for Edelman Digital, is smart, on trend and fun to read.

Steve Rubel's Lifestream blog


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Twitter Plea

Twitter Reprieve
Heard from a nice HUMAN from Twitter support today letting me know @ScentTrail should be back in Search.Twitter.com in 24 Hours!!! YES! @Shoq was a tremendous help. Visit his cool blog here: http://www.shoqvalue.com/ and especially this post: http://socialsupport.pbworks.com/Shoq%27s-Twitter-Tips.

*** I messed up. Somehow I got @ScentTrail banned from Twitter search. This is not good and reminds me of the old "learned helplessness" days studying psychology at Vassar. There just doesn't seem to be a way to get back in good graces. Here is the letter I wrote to Twitter Support today after many attempts. ***

Hi guys,

I know you are all beyond busy, but I am hoping this email is going to a human. My twitter account @scenttrail is currently banned from Twitter search. My @ScentTrail account is not suspended (thankfully). I love your tool and would NEVER abuse it, but I am a fallible human who may have messed up, at least mathematically. I am dyslexic so spelling is atrocious. Without spell check you couldn't understand me (though I am getting better by writing and tweeting daily). I get excited, post something and then realize there is a goofy spelling error ("lean" the other day instead of "learn"). I delete my old tweet and put up the correction. Now, after reading your terms and reading forums, I know that such quick delete and re-tweet can look spammy. ** Just realized this sounds a little like my dog ate my homework LOL.**

It is very DEPRESSING to have done something you aren't fully aware of that you can't fix. I always want to do the right thing, but I can mess up. @ScentTrail is my little marketing blog ( http://scentTrail.blogspot.com ). I have about a hundred friends who follow me and I follow about as many. I will never be one of those ten thousand follower accounts, but your tool is invaluable for my buds and projects. Yesterday I wrote a review of the new Picasso show at the Nasher at Duke. The Curator asked me to use their hash tags and I had to explain @scentTrail is banned from Twitter search (ouch).

I know you guys are scaling so fast actually talking to me and helping a single user get back in search is probably a pipe dream, but I hope human eyes are reading this and they will help. The measure of a GREAT company is how you treat little poor web marketing directors like moi. Generosity and care always come back many times over. I promise to be grateful and more careful. I actually read your terms, so we are already ahead (lol). Hope you can help move @ScentTrail back into search. Thanks and if I can ever return the favor, please let me know.

Marty Smith
Durham, NC


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Web Scale Counting To Infinity

Web Scale: Be Afraid, Be Very Afraid
It was a muggy August day. I sat in the Baltimore Convention Center having a Deja Vu experience. It was “search day”. I felt dislocated. Everyone was talking in a scale that seemed overwhelming. Here my team was trying to get our top 10 keywords into Google while everyone around me was talking about their top 1,000 keywords. I knew where this familiar feeling came from.

Barnes & Noble’s Religious Experience
Several years ago I attended a similar conference. When I heard the head of Barnes and Noble inform the crowd B&N had more than a million stock keeping units (SKU’s). A million of anything seemed like such a vast number. How do you stock a million books into a warehouse? How do you manage a million titles all with different sales pockets, fans, audiences and prices? Think of the numbers. A million units with 6 books per title come to 6,000,000 individual things.

I had two visions. First I realized products were more than bits, more than printed pages bound sitting on a shelf. Books, and any and all inventory, were now forms of advertising. Books on the Barnes and Noble site created product pages. Product pages get fed to search engine spiders producing site traffic. Site traffic is another way of saying currency. Traffic = money. Inventory was advertising.

I didn’t start speaking in tongues or anything, but I had another vision. I saw a time when a million things wouldn’t get you in the minor leagues. I could see all the way to Infinity. I thought of artist Jonathan Borofsky who was trying to count to infinity. I could see how, as a web merchandiser, we would have to manage infinity.

A couple of weeks ago in Baltimore I discovered others were starting to share my religious experience. Even scarier, they were creating web marketing strategies based on merchandising out to infinity. I remember speaking to our owner about this concept. “Inventory costs money,” he told me. “Not in a digital state,” I tried to explain. In a digital state “selling” a product is some words on a server. He who has the most words on servers wins. Here is a dramatic demonstration of the Google word race we are in:

Pages in Google
My Company	Competitor A	Competitor B	Competitor C
5,000	20,000	10,000	303,000

Competitor C is actually a Traffic Arbitrageur, a content site who sells their traffic for advertising. If your answer to the question who understands Search Engine Marketing best is C you win a cookie. Traffic arbitrageurs must create search listings to survive so they are very good at it. They understand the race to infinity and are significantly ahead of an old-line catalog company where inventory is seen as costly. Traffic arbitrageurs sell bits and bits are cheap and getting cheaper.

Web Content Cost Problem
My site needs north of 1,000,000 words a year to be competitive in this race to content infinity. Even at $.10 a word we would need a content development budget of $100,000 to be competitive. We don’t have $100,000 to spend in content development. I had another sitting with a monk on the top of a mountain vision – we need an alternative way to create content, a cheap alternative to $100,000 for a million words.

Content Marketing Network Defined on SlideShare

Seeing the outline of a network supported by users, costly little, changing frequently and in tune with migrating flocking behavior or a fickle audience demanding infinite content at the Google drop of a hat. You know you are on to something when 400 people check out your slide deck and your competitors start moving in the general direction of your idea.

I booked a trip to visit my friends Susan and Tim Bratton in San Francisco in October. I bring this up because I noticed an interesting thing about Orbitz, the travel site. Orbitz takes the building blocks of their business, flights and seats, and mashes them into an infinite supply. You may think there are only X seats flying to a location at a certain time and you would be right. Doesn’t that sound like, “Inventory costs money.” Orbitz spins a set group into an infinite fractal by mashing, combining and recombining the data. Orbitz doesn’t care about how many seats exists. It cares very much about converting your butt into its seats. The best way to do that is EXTEND the supply using technology. You might say Orbitz doesn’t really extend the supply it only appears to create infinity. My question is what is the difference? Fiction becomes real when they get you to fork over money for a flight. I found a flight going through Minneapolis, seemed strange to go to Atlanta or Charlotte to fly west, and I pulled out the CC. The perception of infinite supply wins again.

When Infinite Inventory Hurts
Want to really tick off your customers? Build infinite inventory into a poorly architected site with poor internal search and no recommendation engine. You can’t build to infinity on nothing. You need three things: solid site content management system (cms), great internal search tool and robust recommendation engine. Your CMS has to be SEO friendly or you are talking to yourself in the dark. Internal search has to be easy to pivot around customers. You tag your data and your data flows like water into easy to see and manipulate channels. Customer reviews mean if you have five products on your site you can reach out to infinity. Why does someone write the 1,000 review? Because they want to be part of your club. You can never be too rich, thin or have too many reviews.

“But I only have 100 products,” I can hear an innocent marketing director complain. In a search engine-marketing world you have as many products as your keywords can support and that tail always stretches to infinity. The point my new friends in Baltimore were making is the long tail of any vertical stretches to infinity. “To the moon Alice,” Jackie Gleason’s character used to yell. Soon that will be a short trip for web marketing managers and content developers.

Scale is the problem. As the table above shows we are all in the race to 1,000,000 URLs (content pages). URL stands for Universal Resource Locator. Relate to the abbreviation that way and you can see why moving my 1,000,000 words will become 1,000,000 pages. Traffic arbitrageurs get many things right including the need for SCALE and SPEED. Q: How do you get to 1,000,000 pages? A: One page at a time.

Nasher Museum of Art: Picasso and the Allure of Language

Little Red Man, 1985
Created this collage thinking of PP back in the day.

Picasso Dissonance
It was 1976. I was a freshman at Vassar. Art was all around me. Somehow I saw my first Pollack. I was hooked. Vassar is a short train ride to New York, so within weeks of something going PING in my brain after seeing Blue Poles I was on a train. Autumn Rhythm at MoMA buried the hook for life. I was dripping paint on canvas in the hall outside my dorm room not an hour after getting off the train in Poughkeepsie.

Artists learn about art from other artist. My first instinct, encouraged by artist friends, was to move from Pollack, De Kooning, Kline and Rothko forward. I read about the Cedar Tavern in New York where it was possible to get falling down drunk with a painter / hero / artist. My imagination could easily put aside problems such as I wasn’t born when the New York School painters were drinking at the Cedar and I don’t drink (lol).

POP hit me like a truck on the highway. Warhol, Lichtenstein and Johns saw art everywhere in everything. I had to know who created such an incredible idea. I found a quiet Frenchman who preferred playing chess to painting - Marcel Duchamp. Picasso, in the midst of so much contemporary flux, seemed remote, stodgy and French (not necessarily in that order).

Picasso Recovered
Edmund Besh set me straight about Picasso. “No, No, No,” I remember my painter friend Edmund yelling at me, “you have it all wrong.” My heroes owed an unpayable debt to the Spaniard Edmund explained. Ed got my attention. I started looking at Picasso without prejudice. Everyone I loved was there including my most recent discoveries (Schnabel, Fischl and Clemente).

Picasso And The Allure of Language at Nasher
It is easy to be intimidated and/or overwhelmed - So much talent so little time - when you start looking at Picasso. Understanding Picasso requires seeing him as human. If you’ve ever held a paintbrush with intent you view Picasso’s output as signs of alien life. Area 51 + Picasso = we are not alone.

The Nasher Museum at Duke's current stellar show Picasso and the Allure of Language helps see this GIANT as a man with limitations. Picasso really wanted to be a writer. It took writer Gertrude Stein grabbing him by the collar and insisting he return to his painting to remind Picasso as a writer he made an unbelievably great painter. The interior room dedicated to Picasso and Stein is curatorial genius. Nasher’s curators were able to include samples of Stein’s writing. This couldn’t have been easy, but it reinforces how painterly Stein writing was. Stein’s writing reminded me of Agnes Martin’s paintings or Ed Rushca’s word paintings.

The show includes several great Picasso paintings including the cubist masterpiece Dog and Cock, 1921 on loan from Yale and First Steps, 1943 (also from Yale). Another curatorial great idea was including a huge photo enlargement of Picasso in his studio sitting next to almost every painting in the show.

Another Nasher exhibit highlight is pages from Pierre Reverdy’s Le chant des morts (The Song of the Dead). Here we see Picasso’s Calder-like drawings illustrating Reverdy’s book. Pages from a book on the wall are hard to see as “book”. Nasher includes a masterful flash-like monitor to flip through the book. The monitor’s easy iPod-like interface made page flipping easy and exciting. Seeing these paintings in original written context makes Picasso’s simple red lines jump off the page. The experience was moving even though I can’t read French (long painful story there lol).

I recommend the $3.00 audio tour as it provides important inside scoop and background. The audio tour goes quickly following well laid out symbols and is a fun podcast-like approach to audio learning.

Picasso and the Allure of Language helps “see” Pablo from a new angle. If Picasso could write as well as Stein we would know, beyond any reasonable question, the man was from another planet. As it is, the dude could paint.

Steve Hobbs Vibes Man

Walking out of Julie & Julia tonight I caught the last tune of what must have been an amazing set from the Steve Hobbs quartet. Incongruous to say the least. There is something about vibes, some indescribable connection to the medulla oblongata that Mr. Hobbs knows well. Dancing behind his vibes on a mild September Durham night Steve Hobbs was poetic, rambunctious and righteous.

You just don't expect to hear Gary Burton-esque quality vibes outside of Urban Outfitters at Southpoint Mall on Friday night September 11th. Whoever booked Mr. Hobbs to fill a slot normally plagued by too loud juniors I thank you. Serendipity can be a marvelously fun thing. Finding The Steve Hobbs band tonight was a special gift.

A quick trip to iTunes and Mr. Hobbs albums now reside on my iPod next to Gary Burton in all of his manifestations (Quartet, with Metheny, with Corea). This is as it should be. Why it took chance to discover such a massive home grown jazz talent I have no idea. Playing vibes is hard. The dexterity of a of a major league pitcher, Miles Davis-like timing and a dancer's ability to move, contort and shift body around golden bars are just beginning traits of great jazz vibraphonists such as Mr. Hobbs.

I've seen Gary Burton in concert several times. Tonight, Steve Hobbs rivaled any Burton concert including the one in Chicago at Orchestra Hall with Chic Corea. I don't diminish Burton but praise Hobbs. Vibes players live a difficult lot. Most Jazz musicians don't receive fame and fortune like their rock brothers ans sisters. Jazz fans make up for lack of numbers with fever and ardor. Seeing Miles Davis was one of my most commented on ScentTrail posts. He who has receives such a jazz communion is forever touched. Read Seeing Miles Davis 2 to see what I mean. Vibes men like Hobbs are strange third cousins to trumpet, piano and bass.

Great vibes music is obscure because VIBES ARE HARD. There can't be a hundred players on the planet who could make vibes sing as well (don't forget the great jazz vibraphonist Tito Puente). A search on Wikipedia turns up 25 vibraphonists confirming vibe playing greatness's rarity. Playing the vibes could easily become a lost art except for love, skill and dedication from players such as Steve Hobbs. Mr. Hobbs is a teacher and that too is as it should be so we don't lose a special art.

Steve Hobbs and his band floated a unique combination of staccato and smooth, loud and soft, energy and pause, love an hate through an inky black September 11th Durham sky tonight. There are many meanings in such clear passion and love for something so special and obscure. Tonight of all nights, Mr. Hobbs taught me something I already knew - serendipity is a magical thing.

Thanks Steve.

Martin (Marty) Smith
Durham, North Carolina
September 11th, 2009

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Top 5 Web Site Design Questions

Every web site springs from the answers to five questions:

• Site's Strategic Goal
• Intended Audience
• What is Unique
• How will the site's messages spread?
• Save The World: How will things be better because the site exits?

This list is designed to be reversed. If you are more comfortable working from your goals out to the world start with the list in the sequence above. I like to work web sites from the outside in. After reading Seth Godin excellent book The Purple Cow doing some normal boring thing has no appeal or need to exist. Someone else is already there and figuring out how to do that boring thing for less as I write this.

Save The World: How will we be better because of this site?
There are only two kinds of human activity: things that save or enslave us. No web designer sets out to enslave but slaves we can become. We are living in a time of new altruism and social marketing. The web fuels this trend. Selfish, greedy, liars have a limited shelf life these days. The word goes out and no web site can save them.

There is a great story in Jim Collins magical book Good To Great about the beginning of Hewlett- Packard. HP's founders first product, a bowling ball foul line, wasn't going to become a billion dollar industry. It didn't matter because Bill and Dave understood a critical Good to Great point - get the culture right and make whatever. Ground your business in intelligence, support and altruism and the big thing will arrive. The innovator's dilemma is not what to make but who are we and what do we stand for. Once you can answer those questions the same way over and over again your culture is forming, you are on our way.

Once you know who you are and what you stand for every decision can be derived from those values. When I worked at M&M/Mars we refined the 5 principles of Mars:

• Quality
• Responsibility
• Mutuality
• Efficiency
• Freedom

The link above will take you to the Mars corporate site where you can read each guiding principle. Mars understood the HP, "Define your culture," directive and so should you before writing one line of HTML code.

Spreading The Word
If a tree falls in the web forest someone must hear it. Silence is deadly and a web site killer. Thinking about how to use the web's natural desire to move, share and change your message is important. You won't be able to plan all of how your message will move. The web doesn't work that way, but you can make it easier with tools such as Real Simple Syndication (RSS), bookmarks, links and other natural web tools. The reason you think about spreading the word early is to build in paths out to the world. Remember, you can't carry your message up the hill. Good news. There is an army of sherpas waiting to help. Just be sure to build ways for your new friends to help from jump (always easier that way).

What is unique?
When I was at P&G we called this concept a "unique selling proposition". That sounds a tad mercenary for these times, but it conveys a key idea. If you don't have something unique stay home. If your widget doesn't save the world in some way then don't make it. Make a difference or go home. Be sure to check your assumptions with real people. Creating things is a drug. It is easy to get addicted to your own juice. You can't think straight about your children or things you create. Push whatever it is out there and say, "We think this is what is unique about our widget, are we right?" If you don't find out 30% new information you aren't asking the right questions or listening very well. Real people, customers, always change and inform your vision. You can get this kind of feedback so easily now why wouldn't you? If the script gets played back to you close to how you understood it go all in.

Intended Audience
Your audience may shift over time. HP didn't become a household name from bowlers. When HP was selling bowler foul devices you bet they spoke with bowlers and alley owners. You don't just set down and understand how to make the best bowling foul line detector, you learn how from people telling you why the one they are using now doesn't make it.

Some innovations are disruptive some are incremental. We live in a time of disruptive innovations that scale seemingly in days and weeks instead of years and decades. Remember you are creating something for someone. Enlist them, get to know them so well you can finish their sentences and then make your incremental or disruptive technology. BTW, I think all innovation is incremental. It just seems like something pops fully formed out of a hat. The more common reality is there is a daisy chain of innovators leading to a slightly too incremental change, say of more than 10%, that appears revolutionary. Innovation is more Darwin than surprise 99% of the time.

Site's Strategic Goals
Every web site is part of a larger organization (or human). Web sites are not sealed ecospheres. They reach out, up, sideways and over. Planners, and I've known great ones and have had to do strategic planning in different jobs along the way, believe in their ability to see the future. Sorry, you can't see the future. It is hard enough to understand the now. Any plan beyond 3 years is fantasy now. Any web plan beyond six months is a similar fantasy. I like to paraphrase an old P&G boss: plan early, plan often and don't talk when you should be listening.

Answer these five questions in whatever order works for you and your site will be off to a good start. Creating great web sites is like painting great paintings. You don't start out to create great. You start with passion, vision and a little experience and you wet a paint brush with paint and jump in. Your first site will be a bowling lane line detector. When the inevitable happens remember Jim Collins' HP story.

Good luck.


Martin

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Woodstock - The First Freemium

Watching Ang Lee's Taking Woodstock this weekend close on finishing Chris Anderson's Free: The future of a radical price made me realize Woodstock was the first "Freemium" of our modern marketing era. I can hear the snorts of some. Yes "modern marketing era" is a stretch for me too, but King Gillette owns the poll position on free. King, yes he of razor fame, is said to have given away his razor in order to sell the blades. Give me a $2.00 handle and I will pay you thousands over my shaving live. I've been shaving since I was twelve, so tens of thousands for me (lol).

Taking Woodstock may work better as a lesson in Freemium history than movie. Woodstock is the movie's conceptual core but we don't see any acts. My guess is Lee couldn't pay for footage. Once promoter Michael Lang, well played by Jonathan Groff, understands Woodstock is happening faster than the promoters can figure out how to make money a beautiful Zen quality takes effect. I loved one of Groff's last lines as Lang, "Guess we are all going to sue each other now," said just before hoping on a horse and riding up the garbage strewn hill into the upstate New York sunset.

On examination Woodstock is very "web-like". The New York Thruway becomes so congested it stops functioning. Acts have to be helicoptered in. Another great movie scene is when a State Trooper also adopts a, "What the F***K" attitude and gives the movie's protagonist Jake Teichberg, also well acted by Henry Goodman, a ride on his Harley to get to the concert. Instead of seeing the concert we spend an over long acid trip in a van.

Scale changed Woodstock forcing its promoters to, as John Irving insisted in an early book, "Set free the bears." Woodstock's scale changed its economics just as Facebook's, Twitter's and My Space's scale changed theirs. Once Woodstock achieved scale how they thought money would be made changed. From the ashes of such creative destruction came an also ran idea - the movie. Woodstock's promoters weren't idiots, but the movie was not the main idea. They would make money from traditional concert ticket sales.

Not so much as it turns out. When you don't get a ticket booth and fence built before a few hundred thousand people show up your concert is free. Another great scene from the movies is when the townspeople, upset by the invasion of "hippies", protest. Faces red and carrying angry placards Jake asks what they plan to do about an army of people. Guess what, there is NOTHING they can do as the police chief has already told them. All they can do is look marginal and goofystupid.

In VH1's excellent Woodstock Then And Now we learn the young money men who put up the capital to make Woodstock possible sold their movie rights for about enough money to break even on the event. Now $1.5 million 1969 dollars is nothing to sneeze at, but the movie goes on to gross over $200,000,000. Once Woodstock reached scale magic was in the can. Joplin, The Who, Hendrix, CSN's FIRST performance, Richie Havens and Country Joe looked out on a rippling sea of people giving the career making performances of their lives.

When I worked at M&M/Mars the company hired Richie Havens to sing about a new granola candy bar. Havens performed at the M&M national meeting. Few listened. I was riveted flashing back to his gold sweat stained tunic. "Freedom, FREEDOM," I could hear in my ear. I was eleven when Woodstock happened, but seeing the film with friends we felt like we were there. Woodstock thus became one of the first examples of The Experience Economy, a great book by a couple of smart Harvard profs. When I saw Richie Havens he wasn't singing about granola bars. "Freedom, FREEDOM...." is what I heard.

Freemiums are different now. Woodstock became free, but now we set out to give away the basics charging a few elite users for premium versions. LinkedIn, AOL and any application that pitches an "upgrade" uses payments few supporting the many. This law of large numbers is a web reality. When you reach millions 1% paid is a BIG number. No need to explain the economics of large numbers to Woodstock's promoters. They created the first Freemium in the modern marketing era (lol). Thanks to Michael and the money boys for creating magic. Maybe you didn't make money, but Woodstock will live forever and Ang Lee directs movies about you all these years later. What is that worth? K, you can ride off into the sunset now and I will too :).


Interesting Reading....for FREE (mostly)

3 Kinds of Free by Chris Anderson

The Long Tail by Chris Anderson

Martin's Long Tail on Slideshare

Free Marketing In A Long Tail World on Slideshare


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