Bansky Exits Through Gift Shop

Street artist Bansky's Exit Through The Gift Shop is a magical, funny film. Featuring major street artists including Shepard Fairey and Space Invader Exit Through The Gift Shop never quite let's you know how much is tongue in cheek art expose and what is real. Is there a major French / American artist named Mr. Brainwash? I doubt it, but his lessons in Warholian nihilism are something anyone of a certain age understands. If you love art and like to laugh, Exit Through The Gift Shop is a MUST SEE!

Martin

Web Design From Outside In

Designing a website is hard. There is nothing more intimidating than a blank web page. Simple, if you aren't Google, is almost impossible. One creation story explains Google's simplicity with lack of HTML expertise by founders. Even if that story is correct you have to admire the mother bear precision used to keep such a crisp, clean, simple interface. Clean and simple is almost impossible. Mission creep is inevitable and mission creep kills clean and simple.

Today's ScentTrail post explains how objective measures should influence website design. The web is a huge calculator. Everything done by everyone goes into this calculator. Numbers, objective measurement, take guess work out of web design. Check that, numbers about search patterns take SOME guess work out of web design. Good web designers know when gut intuition should trump confusing search pattern information. There is no "paint by the numbers" manual for web design. Each website presents specific opportunities and a million possible solutions.

WebMD's Cancer Health Center
I used WebMD's Cancer Health Center to demonstrate key design elements such as:

• Use of "High Count" Keywords
• Effective Use of the Golden Triangle
• Use of Hot Spots and Line Of Sight
  

Use of High Count Keywords
WordTracker is one of the best web meta-search tracking tools. A "meta-search tracking tool" provides summaries of searches by keywords. The relative values are not as important as the relationship those values have to each other. In any modeled system it is easy to get lost in the "accuracy" of the numbers instead of understanding trends they represent. WordTracker's counts provide a sense of how many searches are being done by keyword. In the example below there were 9,579 searches for "lung cancer" almost 7x greater than calcium's 1,375. This is the important "relationship to each other".

WordTracker provides statistics on how many links include the keyword in anchor text and two Keyword Efficiency Indexes or KEI's. Anchor text pegs a link to a keyword so understanding how many uses are out there is a competitive measurement. Any KEI over 100 is good. KEI's calculate the chance for positive return when buying a keyword via Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising. Low KEI's indicate a low number of searches or many competitive pages or both. Sometimes it doesn't matter if a term has a low KEI. The keyword "cancer" has a low KEI but any site hoping to receive traffic from cancer or cancer related keywords has to include it. It will be hard to impossible to show up on the first page for "cancer" in the short term because the term is too competitive. There are strategies to gain first page search results eventually, but such strategies are complex and deserve another post.

The final WordTracker stat is a Google page count showing documents returned on keywords being searched. Documents returned are another competitive measure. More documents mean more competitors making it harder for your page and content to break through.

Review the counts below (this table got smashed, send an email to MartinSellingZoe(at)aol if you would like an Excel version of the complete table ) and then look at the WebMD Cancer Health Center.

WebMD WordTracker Counts By Keyword
Keyword	Searches	Anchor	KEI	KEI3	Google Count
lung cancer	9,579	68,524	202.38	0.14	14,000,000
leukemia	9,480	74,745	203.27	0.13	13,400,000
breast cancer	8,240	299,832	25.38	0.03	45,400,000
coffee	7,072	918,217	3.73	0.01	198,000,000
prostate cancer	6,341	94,516	63.22	0.07	11,300,000
melanoma	3,806	29,769	67.09	0.13	6,400,000
quit smoking	2,455	82,208	7.53	0.03	6,960,000
pancreatic cancer	2,404	20,308	44.92	0.12
ovarian cancer	2,089	26,845	21.90	0.08	4,650,000
cervical cancer	1,764	22,248	20.48	0.08	4,720,000
calcium	1,375	133,447	1.37	0.01	55,200,000
bladder cancer	962	18,613	6.34	0.05	2,900,000
chemo	838	50,763	2.06	0.02
kidney cancer	666	6,647	11.39	0.10
bone marrow transplant	417	2,579	7.45	0.16	1,450,000
colorectal cancer	407	16,946	1.60	0.02	4,160,000
black tea	314	8,031	1.03	0.04	37,000,000
adriamycin	142	1,280	1.52	0.11	777,000
non-hodgkin's lymphoma	129	3,051	0.80	0.04	1,430,000
coping with cancer	105	880	2.94	0.12	982,000
cancer clinical trials	70	1,094	0.73	0.06	9,000,000
cancer quiz	1	116	0.00	0.01	12,800,000
cancer overview	1	650	0.00	0.00	23,900,000
crisis assistance	1	184	0.00	0.01	3,870,000

WebMD's Cancer Center has many high count terms. There are many different kinds of cancer. WebMD could have sorted by count, but sorting by search count would confuse users. WebMD's orders their list alphabetically. Alphabetic is a solid compromise between user experience and search engine spiders. Web designers serve two masters: people and search engine "spiders". Spiders are code sent out to index the web. Note how WebMD serves both masters. Every cancer type is represented along with some high count topics only tangentially related. Black tea, coffee and calcium are present for their counts more than their importance to cancer.






Web Design Trick 1: Line of Sight
WebMD's model is traffic arbitrage, so more is always better. WebMD's designers are astute. . They do two other web design tricks well. Note the line of site of the two images of men on the page. The first man is looking straight out. This creates a hot spot directly below and to the right. We follow line of sight from anyone on the page. We look at what they are looking at. When a person looks out at us we look below him (and in this design to his right). This is why CANCER OVERVIEW is located directly below the staring man.

Look at the line of site for the second image below Cancer Overview. He is looking to his left directing our eyes to the "Latest Headline". He is not related to the article. His presence is pure line of sight. We follow his eyes to where the WebMD designers want our eyes to go. Pink blocks below are WebMD hot spots based on eye movement studies and line of sight.















Web Design Trick 2: Golden Triangle
In western cultures eyes spend more time on the left of a web page than anywhere else. This is why many sites including WebMD locate vertical navigation on the left. They know your eyes will spend quality time looking at their navigation. The triangle is drawn with the base on the left and extending into the page. Note how well WebMD uses this critical area:















WebMD's web design team knows how to design from the outside in. They serve people and search engine spiders. Like all content portals, the site is crowded. Traffic arbitrage requires a crowded page. More content = more opportunities to sell ads. Hard to be Google-clean if you are WebMD. Despite the crowded page, there are clear navigation, read and play blocks. The page is crowded but not overwhelmingly so.

Learning to use quantitative measurements can design websites from the outside in. Designing from the outside in protects against hidden or not so hidden marketing prejudice. Best to align your site with how your customers speak and search. Can you teach customers to search new terms? Yes, but it is more work. How do you know your new keywords are working? When you competitors steal your low count keywords you've won the first round. Once people start performing your searches you've really won. Competitors may mark you just to make sure your site is not alone. My team misspelled a popular brand once. For a time we owned the term, but all too soon our competitors moved in and copied our faux paux. Customers only follow when you've found something they care about. Nirvana is finding something people care about first. Uncover four or five of under served keywords and you get an instant upgrade to the head of the class. Find more than ten and you get invited into the Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Hall of Fame.

Good luck designing your website from the outside in.

Martin

.

Selling In A Digital World

It is impossible to “sell” something today. Consumers are too skeptical, over marketed and tired of too familiar BS. Sales and selling have a bad name in a “Do-It-Yourself” and Wisdom of Crowds world. Trust may be at an all time low. It is impossible to sell anything without trust, yet things are being sold. This post is about selling in a digital world. I've been selling one thing or another for thirty years. One truth I know beyond any doubt is selling is different and becoming more so. Why can Oprah sell anything while GM can't sell an umbrella on a rainy day? Selling In A Digital World examines what it means to sell stuff today. Here is the first of what may turn out to be several posts on Selling In A Digital World.

Willy Loman Is Dead
Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman helped shape modern sales skeptics. Buying cars was another major negative “sales” experience. Used car salesmen become synonymous with sales manipulation and trickery. Used car salesmen are just this side of grifters according to Hollywood and popular press. Somehow selling became manipulation and trickery.

Selling is a balanced equation. There are at least two parties – a buyer and a seller. When I worked at M&M/Mars one of Mars' five principles was mutual benefit. Mutual benefits endure and grow. Unilateral benefits are short term and short sighted. Despite our modern reluctance products are sold every day.

Willy Loman and the self-serving system that employed him is dead. Such a unilateral system only existed in media fairy tales. New sophisticated online tools are changing what it means to sell anything to anyone.

Bad News, Good News
Bad news is we live in a time of abundance. Good news is we live in a time of abundance. Abundance creates a paradox of choice, too much choice. Barry Schwartz’s book The Paradox of Choice: Why more is less explains time we use to make buying decisions is often wasted on meaningless difference. Choice creates a brutal paradox. We use our most valuable nonrenewable resource, time, to make distinctions that don’t matter. Sometimes the net result is we shut down. We refuse to make any decision.

Add The Paradox of Choice with Davenport’s and Beck’s The Attention Economy: The new currency of business and you see the problem. Time is the only commodity where we can’t create more, and time is under attack. Something has to give. I vote for eliminating time dedicated to making decision between identical things.

Sounds bad for big brand advertisers right? Maybe. As production capacity increased true brand distinction lessened. The same food company that makes a branded cereal or maple syrup may make your grocer's house brand with a very similar (if not exact) formula. The same factory in China that makes your Nike shoes probably makes Adidas and Reebok’s too. Here is how Philip Knight, Nike’s Founder, explained the evolution of Nike’s business:

For Years, we thought of ourselves as a production-oriented company, meaning we put all our emphasis on designing and manufacturing the product. But now we understand that the most important thing we do is market the product.
Nike Founder Phil Knight quoted in The Story of Stuff by Annie Leonard

Distribution
Distribution used to be a kingmaker. Rule distribution logistics to rule the world. Wal-Mart’s big box retail dominance is due to gun slinging with suppliers forcing prices down and brilliant distribution logistics. Wal-Mart retail dominance is a foreshadow built on the back of increasingly powerful transistors and brilliant computer programming. I was watching a news magazine show once with a reporter was inside Wal-Mart’s massive computer operation. The IT manager explained that bad weather in Florida meant Pop Tarts would be shipped in truckloads to stores in the path of any potential hurricane. “Why,” the reporter asked. “I have no idea and it doesn’t matter,” came the simple elegant reply. Wal-Mart’s sophisticated algorithms know hurricanes in Florida mean Pop Tart sales increase and don't worry about why.

Wal-Mart’s computer logistics genius created efficiencies and efficiencies could be shared as lower prices. This cycle creates a positive "virtual cycle". Think of a snow ball rolling down hill become bigger and more powerful with each rotation. Wal-Mart played the web scale game before there was a World Wide Web. They understood first place wins a new car, second place wins a pair of steak knives and third place is ruin to quote Mamet’s Glengarry Glen Ross.

I sold candy for M&M/Mars in the Buffalo, New York market from 1983 to 1985. Half of my sales territory was made up of hundreds of small candy and tobacco distributors. M&M/Mars’ wholesale prices to small customers for a pound of M&M’s was $2.05 a bag. Wal-Mart’s retail price for the same product was $1.99. “What do you want me to do,” one ticked off distributor asked me, “go buy 12 bags from Wal-Mart?” In my two years in Buffalo the number of distributors shrank 20%. If Wal-Mart started the wound Sam’s finished it. Once convenience store owners could load up at Sam’s Wholesale Club need for a candy and tobacco distributor was eliminated. Sam's is just a natural extension of Wal-Mart's logistics power.

It is important to be clear. Wal-Mart didn’t put candy and tobacco distributors out of business. Distribution logistics and scale killed Zutes, Calderon and hundreds of similar small candy and tobacco distributors in my old sales territory. Information processing, speed and scale killed these friendly dinosaurs. One more candy and tobacco story before I continue. Every Friday I met with Dean Zutes, owner of Zutes Candy and Tobacco in Rochester. Grocery stores, even Wegmans, don’t want salesmen and saleswomen in stores on weekends when they make most of their money, so Friday was a great day to visit my favorite distributors.

Every Friday I sat in a tiny office with a large screaming Greek man. Dean’s blood pressure increased 50 points as he yelled about poor margins and the death of his business. “Wax teeth, why can’t Snickers give me the same margin as Wax Teeth?” “Dean,” I would say as calmly as I could, “how many wax teeth did you sell last week?” Snickers’ poor margin paid Dean’s rent while the magical mythical wax teeth margin sat mostly in his warehouse. After a year of these debates I learned to like Dean Zutes. Dean received the only invitation to my wedding of anyone in my sales territory.

I will never forget the Friday after Dean received our wedding invitation. Tears behind his eyes Dean reached into his pocket for a fat wad of bills. Dean said, “Kid I can’t come to your wedding but I want you to get something special for you and Janet.” There were two one hundred dollar bills in Dean’s big meaty hand. M&M/Mars has rules about accepting such a gift. We needed the money and I wasn’t going to insult my friend Dean Zutes. “Thanks Dean,” I said standing and shaking his big Greek hand. After I moved to M&M’s national office in New Jersey I heard Dean became sick and passed. More was leaving the building than Dean Zutes I remember thinking. Candy and Tobacco distributors were passing away too.

Hearts and Minds
It is funny to think of something like distribution logistics advantages as time stamped. It would seem such advantages would last until the end of time. Nothing lasts until the end of time. Buying and selling is an ever-changing dance, an organic life form. Wal-Mart’s brick and mortar (stores) advantage assumes a lot. It assume we continue to get in cars and go to stores. Five dollar a gallon gasoline and tight cost cutting times means we go to stores less. What value does Wal-Mart’s store logistics bring to electronic commerce? It isn't zero, but store logistics don't help as much as you might think.

Creating and managing a 2,000 square foot warehouse killed Found Objects, the company I co-founded. Logistics are hard and costly. Wal-Mart’s logistics advantages don’t get wiped out if most of their retailing future is filled from online orders, but using store logistics is akin to a nuclear weapon when a pop gun would do just fine. Because Wal-Mart (or Target or Sears or Nordstrom’s) is good at stores doesn’t mean they will be good at online retailing or distribution logistics that go along with electronic commerce.

Stores exist in three-dimensional space. Their bulk brings legitimacy and a sense of safety. If I have a problem I can go to the store and they will fix it. Such immediate assurances don’t exist online. Online everyone starts with a blank screen and blank screens are the great equalizers (been there, done that). Does it help to have a brand people know and trust? Yes is the easy answer, but trust must always be earned. Moving from a physical world to the web shifts the paradigm. The physical world is about distribution logistics and having a Wal-Mart on every corner. Online retailing is about walking your talk and winning hearts and minds.

Switching costs online are so low loyalty is hard to create. One click, two clicks, three clicks, blue clicks and customers have a hundred options. Online retailers have to simultaneously address Key Decision Points (KDP):

• Market Pricing on Lost Leaders = cost of poker
• Elimination of online purchasing barriers such as shipping costs
• Reputation backed guarantees that WOW customers
• “Like Me Values”
• Wisdom of Crowds Selling
  

These e-commerce Key Decision Points (KDPs) along with a discussion of Guns, Germs and Steel and implications of the battle for our hearths and minds will be addressed in Selling In A Digital World II (should be up in the next few days).

Marty

.

Postmodern Marketing And Quests

I was born on the first day of January 1958, featured in the Aiken, South Carolina paper as the first baby of the New Year, and born on my father’s birthday. My Warholian fifteen minutes of fame happened early (lol). My birthday places me in the middle of the “baby boom” 1946 – 1964 post World War II, Levittown generation. Boomers are the most “marketed to” generation in history until Generation X and then Y came along behind us. Boomers grew up with television, became the "Woodstock Generation" and helped create our digital present.

Modern marketing ended about 1968 or 1969. The sixties didn’t go quietly into any good night. Marketing began to lose its innocence and trust. Modern marketing as a craft was honed on boomers in the fifties and sixties. Modern marketing was new, innovative and unspoiled. Rising tides easily lifted all boats with only four television stations, a daily newspaper and Life magazine. In the fast, furious and flat postmodern marketing world attention becomes our most valuable commodity with our connected friends as active gatekeepers. The Attention Economy is a great book on this subject. Movie critic Roger Ebert said something true for film and postmodern marketing; “it is hard to be ironic when everything is ironic.” He said this in an interview for the excellent documentary Midnight Movies: From the margin to the mainstream.

Irony results from an inability to trust or believe any message even as the number of messages explode. We see and hear thousands of marketing messages daily trusting none. Marketing, once so able to describe human aspiration and desire, seems hollow and disconnected. A previous boss described postmodern marketing as the sin of “talking to ourselves about ourselves.”

The answer, as some able marketers such as Hertz and AT&T (of all companies) illustrate, is lower advertising volume and create connection to meaningful Quests. Humans live for quests. Other animals are preoccupied with survival. Secure basic needs and human minds search for meaningful quests. Maslow named this search “actualization”. Human history is replete with examples of heroic or villainous quests:

• Alexander’s desire to conquer the known world.
• Hitler’s desire to enslave the world.
• Churchill and Roosevelt’s quest to keep our world free
• Kennedy’s desire to put a man on the moon in ten years
• Individual searches for meaning and connection
  

Internet age marketing seems to have lost its center. The web seems to distill magical heroic quests into searches for cheaper stuff. I agree with Steven Johnson, author of Everything Bad Is Good For You. Johnson believes our modern minds expand. We are capable of processing more information faster, and so capable of connecting with quest, heroes and myths. Johnson’s examples come from video games, but Google is another form of digital homework. Google teaches complex information mapping, heuristics and algorithmic control. To use Google is to learn Google. To play a video game is to learn a new logic, language and connection.

Irony of Postmodern Marketing
Success in postmodern marketing depends on lowering volume. Push volume up to destroy connection to quest. You talk to yourself about yourself. Models may say pump up marketing volume. These are modern models and they are wrong. Turning up ad volume in a postmodern time does the opposite. Effective postmodern marketing messages connected to quest BECOME REPEATED BY CUSTOMERS VIA SOCIAL NETWORKS. Try forcing your way up the attention mountain and failure is assured. Better to seed ideas and see what happens.

See how postmodern marketing is different? Postmodern marketers must accept their part in a larger marketing ecosystem. A company’s or brand’s marketing team’s efforts are NOT most important. What happens after ideas are published, living and breathing in the world becomes dividing line between postmodern marketing's success and failure. If you create ideas with legs, sometimes called memes, you win. If you talk to yourself about yourself you lose. Losing isn’t the worst thing. In a fast, furious, flat and connected world marketing solipsism may be the worst crime your brand, product or company can commit. Disconnected and self-serving appeals to no one and will be condemned and destroyed. Want to see an Oprah Effect in reverse? Isolate your company’s products and proudly beat your chest.

A better idea is to open up and share everything. I wrote Process Is Product explaining anything you or your company is doing can become shared content. Shared content creates tribes of supporters; supporters provide real world feedback, block any marketing person’s tendency to talk to themselves about themselves and creates a ready market. Few companies understand it is impossible to be TOO OPEN in postmodern marketing. Share early and often and on every dimension. Sharing is the best protection any new idea / product can have. Transparency also helps a company stay on the right side of major trends such as planet impact (green) and social responsibility (social marketing).

Sharing doesn’t guarantee success, listening does. I’m a marketing guy. I come complete with 30 years of marketing experience with P&G, M&M/Mars and companies I started. The value of those thirty years pales next to feedback from the Magic 1%. Citizen Marketer, an important book, explains 1% of your customers will actively engage. This 1% is the “Magical 1%”. They will help you for the privilege of inclusion and because they care (Altruism). Wikipedia is built by the magical 1%. What is your company doing to harness the power of your magical 1%?

Thinking Like A Postmodern Marketing Person
If you and your company are new to postmodern marketing start with these steps:

• Facebook page (your wall is a great place to get “wisdom of crowds” feedback
• Create a Tribe – invite customers to become part of a special group where the rewards are largely social and inclusive (this avoids mercenaries)
• Email – Tie your Magical 1% tribe together so they can share with each other and you. Allow forum-like open discussion you can contribute to but don’t control.
• Invitation Only Forum – forums can become hijacked by devils intent on self-glorification, eliminate that problem by clearly stating rules and making your support forum invitation only.
  
• Get T-Shirts printed or create some other tribal identification device.
  

Still stumped? I will be glad to help and can be reached at MartinSellingZoe(at)aol. Good luck with your company’s postmodern marketing.

Martin Marty Smith
MartinSellingZoe(at)aol

Examples of excellent postmodern advertising connected to Quest:

Hertz Journey Ads

AT&T Christo Ads (Rethink the Possible)
* these ads shamelessly rip artist Christo, but they are beautiful and I bet Christo doesn't mind.