(click on any picture to enlarge it)

Today I spent a little bit of time at AD:TECH. To set the frame of reference here – this (interactive technology for advertising) isn’t my field; I went out of curiosity and a chance to meet a friend for lunch. I attended the opening keynote and looked around the exhibit hall. There are several days of presentations and seminars that I didn’t experience.

The opening keynote featured John Costello, Executive Vice President, Merchandising & Marketing, The Home Depot, and Mary Meeker, who watches Internet and advertising for Morgan Stanley (I seem to remember a detailed New Yorker profile of her a few years back; perhaps before the bubble burst).

John Costello (all quotes approximate): “I am often asked how many brand managers do we have? The answer is 325,000 – the number of associates we have.” He went on to stress how all the touchpoints for the customer need to work together. You may see a great ad on TV but if you go to the website and it’s difficult to use, it’s no good. This isn’t so trite because as much as it’s a good idea, it’s just not practiced that way. Home Depot certainly isn’t living up to Costello’s idea. My bad experience with their “clinics” here and see here for their non-response when I tried to resolve it.

Mary gave a really dense presentation, but reassured us that the slides were online. They are, and for now you can read ’em here. I’ll excerpt a few slides that I really liked; I’m not sure what to make out of any of it, just a bunch of factoids that seem provocative and worthy of filing.

Here’s the top five Internet companies (I didn’t know that was the list; interesting) – this slide shows what they were worth before 2000, before they went public, what they were worth at the highest point in the market, what they were worth at the lowest point (and kinda interesting to be reminded of those dates; 3/10/00 and 10/9/02) and here’s what they are worth now – so there is more worth there now than before the crash. It’s one of many angles on ‘recovery’ in the tech sector (hey it feels cool to say “the tech sector”).

These two slides are just some data points to consider when thinking about the various online, mobile, phone, data, wireless, etc. markets around the world. Here’s who the analysts are watching and what they are thinking about…

You’ll need to click on this one to make it bigger in order to see the details; the point here is looking at the number of different services or products (depending on your perspective) that Yahoo has launched in 2003, 2004, and so far in 2005. You can see just by the shape that this year already is as many products as in 2004. This was all under the category of User Experience, but she used that phrase interchangably with other phrases like User Interface, so it wasn’t always clear what exactly she meant. But the slide seemed interesting anyway.

This took a bit of thinking about, looking at different countries, how many PCs do they have and how many mobile phones, and the ratio of the two. The U.S. has the lowest ratio, China has the higest. So the relative prominence of phone vs. PC as platforms for daily info-living, and as opportunities for innovation, etc. are extremely different in these different markets.

Mary, an avid golfer, recounted the recent Tiger Woods dramatic shot at the 16th hole in Augusta, and considered a scenario where someone missed it and wanted to watch it – they’d willingly watch an ad for it, or pay to see it (she suggested $1.00 is what people would pay to see it, but that’s ridiculous). But if you go into Google and Yahoo, you can’t find it. Even if you look in their video search, you can’t find it. You can find it on a blog, where it was turned it into a hypothetical Nike ad. Somehow in this story Mary seemed to imply that it wasn’t really available in that case. She seems to deny blogs (or anything that comes from the consumer side of the equation) as an invalid source of content not to be taken seriously. Yes, there were no rights clearances, but of course, the information gets out anyway. Hello, BitTorrent?! The fact that the only way she could show us this clip was to use the file she found on this blog (and then put into her presentation) seemed to be ignored, since the real problem was that Google and Yahoo didn’t have the clip in their systems. I don’t get that.

In the Q&A there was some emphasis on the future successful companies being those that place the premium on customer service – citing Amazon Prime as an example, but then both speakers seemed to flip between customer service and customer experience. She cited, but couldn’t remember the specifics, a recent book by a professor (Jeff?) in Pennsylvania? who makes the case for the last great competitive advantage being user interface, and she went on to suggest the web is the best user interface, better than an in-store Starbucks experience. Clearly we see why Mary is an online person because her contention, if I understood it, is just silly. I’d be interested in finding out what book she’s referring to, so if you have any ideas, let me know.

The trade show itself was the usual – booths with people in matching t-shirts being extremely extroverted. But it was working – the place was noisy and jam-packed and people were shaking hands and swapping business cards and just being business people in deal-making mode, I guess. There were the usual trinkets – things that flashed, bent, bounced, squeezed, etc. and lots of iPod giveaways. It wasn’t very intersting to me; it was companies with names like AdBrite, AdDrive, AdDynamix, adInterax, Adknowledge, adMarketplace, Adteractive or AdTools; Blowsearch.com and Eyeblaster; Search Engine Optimization, Search For It, SearchAdNetwork, Searchfeed.com, SearchForce.com, SearchIgnite, SearchRev, Findology.com and FindWhat.com; as well as companies that I recognized because they serve the annoying pop-up ads on websites I visit: ZEDO and Undertone.

There were a few of the usual booth babes, and all you really see in this picture is some nice blonde hair, but some women manning booths were obviously models, at least one wore a t-shirt with a slogan across her chest that was something about looking up top. Hmm.

I found this variation quite unusual

A gymnast? Or, a slinky woman in skintight lyrca, twisting her body in interesting ways. Oh, and how’d you like to buy some advertising services?

Looks like she’s in need of some advertising services herself. Cheese!

Attendees engaged in some sort of SMS swordfight.

Google’s booth. Is that a real George Nelson Marshmallow Sofa?

Simon Malls shows amazing chutzpah with this Black Friday ad, placing the viewing of the Statue of Liberty in horrific context. “Very inspring. Now, where’s the mall?”

I’m intrigued by this campaign, especially because it has received little buzz. The product itself will let you “tell better stories” because the product is an experience, an experience that can be shared.

It’s been widely reported that Best Buy has created personas for their most profitable customers and taken steps to focus their efforts on attracting and keeping those customers and indeed rejecting other customers. Perhaps an effective strategy, but questionable PR.

Dell goes on the attack today, with a full-page ad that reads, in part

At Dell We Love All Customers. Even the Ones Best Buy Doesn’t.

On November 8, The Wall Street Journal reported that Best Buy is planning to shun up to 20% of its current customer base.

You read that correctly. Shun. As in actively resist. They’ve reportedly decided that as many as 100 million of its 500 million store visits each year are “undesirable.” To quote a Best Buy exectutive as reported in the article: “They can wreak enormous economic havoc.” Well, we would like to officially welcome each and everyone on of those customers to Dell. All of you. Come to Dell.com right now and we’ll give you…[etc.]

Ya know, if they are going to run back-to-back TV commercials for Vanilla Reddi-Whip and Viagra, it’s going to take an awfully mature person to not resort to the sort of comments that…well, I’m sure you understand.

Arby’s Tries a Talking Mitt

Arby’s is turning to a cartoonish kitchen implement to help rescue its sagging brand recognition. The chain’s new animated character is named Oven Mitt. Goofy, assertive and a bit of a ham – much like Tom Arnold, the celebrity who is providing its voice – Mr. Mitt is Arby’s new spokesthing and will appear in an $85 million national advertising campaign, beginning Sunday. Turning over a brand identity to a nonhuman object, however, can be a risky marketing move in the fast-food business. The public may not warm up to Oven Mitt, just as they did not cotton to KFC’s trash-talking cartoon colonel and Domino’s Bad Andy, a puppet that was quickly relieved of his assignment.

At the American Advertising Museum in Portland, OR, they have an exhibit about the best car commercial of all time, currently being created by for Thomason, a Portland-based dealership, by Santo, played by Kevin McDonald. The bits are pretty funny, and remind me of the temperamental architect he played on KitH (“screw you and screw you, I’m outa here!”)

seen in the local paper
CTSI Spring Special!
50% OFF BODY SCAN
for a Loved One or Friend with Your Body Scan *
A body Scan (neck to pelvis) at CTSI can detect health problems at very early stages when cure rates are higest. The procedure is fast, non-invasive and affordable.

[blah blah]
www.ctscreening.com

Of course, the best part of the ad is the smiling woman and competent-looking man on the PC who are helping a blanket-swaddled elderly person slide into a gigantic plastic donut. Yikes!

From: “Hotel Asena Beach”
To: steve
Subject: sales dep.
Date: Fri, 15 Feb 2002 02:33:16 +0200

Dear Sir/Madam,
We are hotelier in Turkey / Fethiye
our hotel is by the Oludeniz which is the best beach choise in Turkey.
We woul like to work with your company for summer 2002.
For more information please contact us.Here are our room rates for your company

PERÔø?YOD DBL.PP.HB SING.SUPP. EXTRA BED CHD 7-12
APRIL 10 EURO FREE %50 FREE
MAY 18 EURO %50 %50 %50
JUNE 25 EURO %50 %50 %50
JULY 37 EURO %50 %50 %50
AUGUST 37 EURO %50 %50 %50
SEPTEM 27 EURO %50 %50 %50
OCTOBER 18 EURO %50 %50 %50

PS:PLEASE REPLY TO FAX:+90 252 617 0487

With Sincere Best Wishes
Suleyman BUYRUK
Reservation Supervisor

HOTEL ASENA BEACH
Belcekiz mevkii
Oludeniz/Fethiye
48340 Mugla/Turkiye

TEL :+90 252 617 0154
FAX :+90 252 617 0487
GSM :+90 533 650 0239
http://www.asenabeach.com
e-mail :[email protected]