June 20th, 2011, 3 Comments »
Nitobi, the Vancouver-based development shop, is one of our oldest clients. It’s been exciting to watch them grow from their origins as (gulp) eBusiness Applications, and see them take off with the world-class work that is PhoneGap. PhoneGap is an open-source development platform that’s been downloaded hundreds of thousands of times, and has a robust community around it.
It’s finally time for Nitobi to get some day-to-day marketing help in-house. We’re helping them hire for this position–a Marketing and PR Specialist.
If you work in the tech industry, you’re familiar with the unorthodox tactics companies use to attract technical talent. Whether it’s Electronic Arts’ ASCII billboards or Reddit’s solve-for-S-to-get-the-email-address approach, the developers get all the fun job applications.
I thought it’d be fun to set a slightly-higher-than-usual bar to submit your resume for this role. We really want to find the right person for Nitobi, after all. We’d also prefer not to wade through hundreds of unqualified resumes.
In order to apply for this job, applicants need to solve a skill-testing question. In fact, there are four questions they need to answer, but they need to get the first one right before they can access the rest of the application form.
It isn’t rocket science, but it will hopefully filter out some marketers who have never confronted, uh, math. Hopefully it’s also modestly unusual, so the posting might get spread around a bit.
Smart readers: please don’t post the answer in comments.
3 Comments »
November 16th, 2010, 1 Comment »
I was getting off the SkyTrain today, and I noticed this note stuck to the route map above the door. It simply says “Save $$, DealByDay.com“. I gather that it’s one of a bunch of these (slightly parasitical) daily deal site aggregators–another is OneSpout.
That’s pretty much the cheapest advertising I can imagine. The creator was so economic, he didn’t bother to write out the word “money”.
1 Comment »
August 21st, 2010, 2 Comments »
I’m at the tenth (and last, as it happens) Gnomedex down in Seattle. I just watched Larry Wu, a kind of brand research and development guru (his bio is on this page) give a talk about trends. Among other things, he presented a list of current macro trends which I quite liked. I transcribed his slide, and added a few notes from his talk.
Artisan – The return to handcrafted one of a kind objects, services and activities that express personal style.
Cultural fusion – Proactive interest in experiencing multiple cultures and new culture hybrids grounded in popular and consumer culture. The simplest expressions are in music and food. See, for example, Bollywood or the Kogi trucks in Los Angeles.
Fingerprinting – Search for and articulation of one’s unique identity. Fingerprinting is expressed through an individuals’ collection of unique passion points.
Health monitor – The softer side of wellness is elbowed aside as people turn to science and medicine to answer health issues, from life-threatening to life-enhancing. Think self-treatment.
Hyperlife – Life as a multitasking, multi-sensory barrage. If you’re doing on thing at a time, you’re probably bored.
Memory marketing – Using history as an active resource to take a nostalgic trip through time, recoiling the stuff of our collective past. See, for example, the new 2010 Mustang that feels retro.
Merit badges – The shift in values to collect experiences rather than things; the recasting of social status from what one has to what one does.
Ready, set, go – Innovation plus convenience: the seamless combination is the ultimate answer to soothing the roaring demands of stressed-out. The SmartCup XPress lid is an interesting example of confined macro-trends.
Celbri-Me – Look at me, listen to me, but don’t get too close. It really is all about me. Watch this set of consumers create their own 15 minutes of fame.
2 Comments »
February 10th, 2009, 2 Comments »
Lately I’ve been enjoying The Next Stage, a Vancouver blog about the business and marketing of theatre. The other day Simon, the blogger behind The Next Stage, linked to a diverting interview with Jim McCarthy, CEO of Goldstar, which I gather is an American discount ticket seller.
I’m always interested in the business of local, live entertainment, and the interview covers plenty of ground. My favourite bit is McCarthy’s view of advertising:
I’ve literally heard people say they were about to send out 5000 postcards for their show and so they were going to wait to see what happened after those hit before they figured out the rest of their marketing plan. Well, let’s do the math on that: 5000 postcards get delivered, but maybe 20% get read. That’s 1000 postcards. If 10% of the people who read it are interested, that’s 100 postcards, and if 10% of those people actually remember how to buy the tickets and actually go through with a purchase, that’s 10 customers buying a couple tickets each.
The simple fact is that most traditional advertising is overwhelmingly ineffective now. Even “traditional” web advertising has dropped to levels of responsiveness (or unresponsiveness) that we would have been startled by back in ’98 or ’99. If you’re counting on some kind of media buy to solve your marketing problems, you’re going to have a hard time hitting your goals, so you have to do something else.
When I give talks, I do my best to disavow any social media marketing zealotry. I emphasize that, at best, this new webby stuff is just another tool in one’s marketing toolbox.
I am a zealot, however, about measuring. I tell whoever will listen that they need to precisely measure every marketing activity they undertake. If they do that, then they’ve got the answer to the frequently-asked question “how should I spend my time?” is simple. If, for example, their billboards and bus shelter ads prove to be a better spend than time spent on Facebook and Twitter, then get thee away from thy computer.
2 Comments »
January 27th, 2009, 9 Comments »
In the next couple of months, I’m giving three talks to different groups associated with post-secondary education. In preparing these speeches, I was doing research into Facebook’s market penetration among BC’s teens.
As you may know, Facebook’s advertising program lets you thin-slice your target audience in all sorts of interesting ways–gender, age, location even specific interests or workplaces. I created a query that indicated that I could reach 344,860 British Columbians between the age of 15 to 19. I take this to mean that there are 344,860 profiles matching that criteria on Facebook.
Curious to see what percentage of all BC teens this was, I checked the BC government’s stats for the current population of teens aged 15 to 19 in the province. They reported 287,444. I took screenshots of the two sources:
That means that there are 1.2 profiles on Facebook for every BC teen. Is that possible? Probably. After all, I recently read that 99% of the 2012 class at Amherst College had a Facebook profile. I suppose that if 20% of teens created two profiles, they’d generate these results.
And I remember reading some of danah boyd’s (lower case capitalization hers) research that indicates that teens discard unwanted profiles frequently, and often create several on a given social network.
In any case, isn’t this kind of false advertising from Facebook? The most teens an advertiser could possibly reach in BC is all of them: 287,444 in 2008, a few more in 2009.
9 Comments »
January 3rd, 2009, 4 Comments »
James likes to say that advertising is an act of faith. That’s generally true, and it’s a concept that I rail against whenever I speak to marketers. The ad industry of the twentieth century was built on a house of sand: immeasurability. Most of the time, most marketers failed to measure most of their advertising spend.
How effective is that full page ad in that industry magazine? How many people actually see that billboard? How many people actually pick up and read your brochure? These are questions that, too often, assaulted the faith of ad buyers everywhere.
Of course, all of that changed with the web, where we can measure the cost of every click, every conversion, every customer. It makes the newspaper ads and movie posters seem hilariously antiquated. When we talk to ad reps on behalf of our clients, we’ve always got an exact cost-per-conversion in mind. If they can’t offer services below that cost, we don’t advertise with them.
Seth articulates this idea in a recent post:
If the local bank were offering a sale on dollar bills, ninety cents each, how many would you buy?
Most rational people would say, “I’ll take them all please.” Especially if you had thirty days to pay for them.
So, why, precisely, do you have an ad budget?
We always discourage our clients from undertaking any advertising that they can’t measure. If they’re running offline ad campaigns, we urge them to have a unique call to action (such as a specific URL) so that they can track a campaign’s effectiveness.
Otherwise, they’re operating on faith alone.
4 Comments »
January 2nd, 2009, 1 Comment »
We were in the McNally Robinson bookstore in Nolita yesterday. It’s an excellent store, full of great books. As it turns out, it’s Canadian-owned (other stores are in Winnipeg, Saskatoon and Toronto) and shares a space with a tea house owned by Moby.
Inside, I noticed a couple of book-selling ideas that were new to me. Neither was particularly original, I guess, but they struck me as clever ways to repackage the dead tree tome.
The first was a series of tree thematically-linked books, pre-wrapped as a ready-made-gift. Very handy for the lazy gift buyer (and wrapper):
I also spotted these attractively-packaged bundles of a DVD and the book on which it was based:
Neither idea is earth-shattering, but if I were a book seller these seem like to handy ways to sell more product.
This, incidentally, is an ancient but still very useful marketing tactic. I’ve written about it before: visit country X, steal clever ideas and implement them in country Y.
1 Comment »
December 2nd, 2008, 2 Comments »
I enjoyed Paul Graham’s recent essay on corporate bureaucracy, and how there’s such a thing as too many checks and balances:
Checks on purchases will always be expensive, because the harder it is to sell something to you, the more it has to cost. And not merely linearly, either. If you’re hard enough to sell to, the people who are best at making things don’t want to bother. The only people who will sell to you are companies that specialize in selling to you. Then you’ve sunk to a whole new level of inefficiency. Market mechanisms no longer protect you, because the good suppliers are no longer in the market.
In thinking about my day job at Capulet, this article really resonated with me. We’ve been lucky to have no shortage of work over the past few years, and the luxury to be pickier about which clients we take on.
We’ve got sundry criteria for what makes an ideal client. One consideration is the formality of their processes.
When talking with a potential client, I start to worry if they ask for a lengthy, formal proposal. It’s rarely worth our time to write such proposals (and, you know, they’re no fun to do). More importantly, such a request tends to imply that the client may be running a formal and (at least in my experience) inflexible operation. That may work for them, but we like nimble, open minded clients.
Generally our proposed strategies can be summarized in a longish email message. If that, plus referrals to existing clients, isn’t satisfactory, we’ll often take a pass. This is why, for example, we’re not likely to get much work out of the Olympics.
Another sign of this issue is if they want us to talk to a half dozen people in an organization. If they’re not respectful of their own staff’s time, they’re unlikely to be mindful of ours.
UPDATE: On a related note, Jeffrey Zeldman writes about 20 signs you don’t want that web design project.
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