Ashland. 11:02am
Mile 3. 11:13am
Natick! 12:01pm
Mile 14. 1:15pm.
Mile 23. 3:20pm.
When Danielle Gilardi, (Digital Producer), ran the 112th Boston marathon last month, she was able to give us live race updates by microblogging from her mobile phone. Her short posts allowed us to virtually run with her while we sent her messages of encouragement and support. It was a surreal virtual experience that only a few years ago, would not have been possible.
Angus MacGuyver – the mightiest problem solver of the 20th Century – is helping me solve the age-old problem of explaining to my friends exactly what an ‘experiential marketing creative guy’ does every day. How’s the legendary Mac assisting?
I just whip out the above picture and say, “Hey, see the paper clip . . . well think of it as any product or brand. Most are the same, yeah? Competitors looking and behaving just like their competition in a world full of me-too stuff.” (They nod.)
Continue reading "I carry this to tell people what it is I do for a living"
For those of us who are North America based marketeers who strategize, design and develop components of communications campaigns that will be delivered via hand held mobile devices worldwide, (mobile phones in US terminology), it is important that we be sensitive to the fact that what is true in the US is not necessarily (and often not) true outside our borders.
Take Apple and the iPhone for example. In North America their impact has been significant given the convergence of iPhone capabilities with their coveted target market segment (Generation Y and Millenials). However, outside of US, things are very different.
As early as I can remember, I was told that sharing is good. Not only did it get us gold stars in kindergarten but it connects us to other people--whether we're sharing a story, advice, a pitcher of beer (yes please!) or an experience. It makes us warm and fuzzy and I think, by nature, we as humans are eager to share things that make us feel good. We want others to experience the same great feeling that we did.
Everybody knows (don't they) that air travel dumps lots of CO2 into the atmosphere -- an LA to NY flight has a bigger carbon impact per person than if you drove that distance by yourself in a Hummer. Many of us are trying to reduce discretionary travel, but in business you usually don't have a choice. Reduce what you can and mitigate the rest with carbon offsets. Some of the airlines now have programs where you can purchase that offset when you buy your ticket. Virgin actually sells the offsets in the aisle alongside cocktails and snacks.
The problem with that approach is that our clients are often reimbursing (or purchasing) the air travel and they won't pay the extra amount. Nor will many companies adopt the policy of paying for offsets for their employees travel. And the airlines are certainly in no financial shape to absorb those costs. So what about you? Would you routinely pay $10 extra for each flight?
What if you could get the offsets, automatically for every flight, with no cash out of pocket? Here's what I'm thinking...
I have miles accumulated in AAdvantage and Mileage Plus and whatever the mileage programs are called for Southwest, Alaska, and Continental. Sometimes I manage to actually cash them in for a personal flight, but often they either expire or get spent on a car rental, or even magazine subscriptions I don't really need. I'd love to be able to "spend" them on carbon offsets. I'd even sign up to have all my travel offset with miles.
I know... you like your miles, but don't you like the environment more? But to spend them on business travel? Well, you probably earned most of them on business travel, and they're essentially a rebate on your money spent by either your boss or your client. Isn't that fair? And it wouldn't take all of your miles to do it. Depending on the length of the flight, it would be something like 1,000 miles to buy the offset.
Let me know what you think. And if you're interested, join my grassroots campaign here.
NBC Universal's innovative CES "booth" (scare quotes signal how much it transcended what you'd expect in a CES booth) won the 2008 Cable Faxie Award for Trade Show Marketing and PR. Since working with NBCU at CES, Jack Morton's most recent experience for this great media company was its "upfront" earlier this week (again with the scare quotes... but again, the experience completely transcended what you'd expect!). 
We all see it, feel it or sense it....the economy is at best in flux and we have yet to fully understand it's potential impact on our industry. However, I say that when the economy hands you a bushel of lemons all anyone can do is add sugar and make lemonade!
So what's the "sugar" in our industry?
Obviously clients will look to revise, cut-back, reduce, delay or (gasp) cancel certain events in order to prepare for or weather the economic uncertainty.
However, just as when the stock market takes a dip, there are great opportunities out there from a production procurement point of view. 3rd party suppliers are looking to secure themselves for this impending economic storm. This is powerful knowledge and clients would be well served to utilize this opportunity to reduce their overall event marketing costs by leveraging their agencies procurement capabilities.
Clients will most likely still look to reduce their budgets, but in my opinion there is no reason they should have to completely eliminate their budgets. Optimizing their and their agencies spend and relationships with 3rd party suppliers should be the sugar needed to make lemonade out of these economic lemons!
My colleague Matt Jones wrote another opinion piece published in B & T Magazine. In it he discusses whether a brand-based discipline should focus on driving sales.
“It’s all about the Benjamins” (money for those not fluent in hip hop speak), according to the artist formally known as Puff Daddy but now known as Diddy (or P. Diddy as he remains in some markets for legal reasons). That could also have served as the theme of Jack Morton’s global leadership meeting in Boston last month. Because money featured a lot. Specifically, how we can help our clients make more of it.
Surprising many (including me), Amazon's Kindle may turn out to be a big success. Even with a big price tag -- reduced today to $359 -- analysts are predicting sales of $750 Million by 2010.
Full disclosure: Jack Morton helped launch the Kindle last November, so I'm certainly happy for Amazon's success. I'm just generally skeptical about any product that attempts to change people's habits so dramatically. People like books, like to touch them, dog-ear the pages, pass them on to friends. So even for a tech geek like me, I'm slow to adopt an eBook.
With sales hitting critical mass (enough to achieve production economies and bring the price down), I think I might have to pick one up and try it for a while.
Have you tried it? What did you think?
While many people are tired of talking about Web 2.0 and social networking, companies still seem to be ill-informed on how to develop an online voice that is differentiated from all of their other marketing communications. In the world of Web 2.0, the question is not whether to open a dialogue – because people are certainly already talking about you. The question is, “Do YOU want in on the action?”
Jack Morton has undertaken a major advancement in our efforts to go green - we've named our initiative: Olive
I'm kidding, of course, we have been up to a lot and have plenty more to do. But what's in a name? Well, it's a nice word, it reflects our unique culture and perspective on the world and it just makes things sound more official. Plus Olive contains the word "live" - which can be understood two ways...live as in live experiences, what we are all about, and live as in helping the planet live a bit longer.
This company and our industry have a long way to go. My colleague Eric Samuelson recently forwarded an alarming statistic...
