New avenues for marketing

Yes - after a long break, I am back to my favorite hobby :). Since the time I started to think like a marketing person, I have had a keen eye for new avenues that technology is opening up for advertising and today I am going to share one of the avenues that is going to be big pretty soon. This avenue has nothing to do with interactive marketing, but is pretty interesting to think about which is why I am covering it here.

You must be aware of how movies are distributed to various theatres and released. NO ? Ok, let me do a quick round up of the process. Traditionally, the movie producer signs up with a distributor, who then creates multiple prints of the movie ( ranging between 200 to 20,000 depending upon the budget ) and distributes it to cinema halls. Each print costs between 60,000 to 70,000 which explains why costs escalate dramatically if you want to release in multiple cinema halls simultaneously. In addition to this, the high cost of a print forces the distributor to phase out the release in Tier2 and Tier3 cities leading to huge losses in revenue. This has been a big problem for distributors for a number of years and they are desperately looking for a cost effective solution to this problem. Lately, in order to alleviate this problem, distributors have been distributing movies on hard drives, but that doesn't entirely solve the problem because the distributor loses control over the number of times the movie is played. So what is the solution to this problem ?

Many companies have been trying to solve this problem, but the three companies that stand out in the effort are "Valuable Group", "Mukta Adlabs" and "Pyramid Samira". These companies, independently, have come up with solutions to make digital copies of the movies and beam those movies to any theater capable of receiving it. Theaters who sign up for this service would be provided with the necessary equipment that can be used to download the movies and store them for a limited number of replays after which the movie would self-destruct ( doesn't it sound like a clip from a James Bond flick ). The theaters would be charged a nominal amount ( say Rs 200 ) per show as the rental for the equipment that has been provided.

Now you must be wondering how these three companies plan to make profits out of this service if all they charge is a nominal amount to the theater owners. That my friend is what marketing is all about - build up a network that has a large viewership, a network with massive reach across all demographics and you have advertisers lining up outside your door.

Coming back to the service provided by these companies, one of the big positives is the ability to reach the audience in Tier2 and Tier3 cities, and there is no other media that provides this ability today. Every marketer knows that Tier2 and Tier3 cities have huge potential for certain products, but they are afraid to target the audience in these cities because of lack of infrastructure and high costs of marketing involved. With the creation of this new channel, marketers would be able to reach their audience in Tier2 and Tier3 cities in a cost-effective manner and would love to divert some of their spending for slots inside the movie. In addition to the revenue generated from the advertisement, the companies providing these services could also ask for a dedicated area in every subscribing theater that they would use for putting advertisements or promotional campaigns.

This goes on to support my belief that the future lies in services and the one that has the largest number of users in its service net will be the king.

Really Simple Syndication

Really Simple Syndication (RSS) is a lightweight XML format designed for sharing headlines and other Web content. The format has been active in the developer community for a couple of years, and is fast gaining acceptance of the average user.

Recent reports suggest that less than 2% of the adult internet surfers are currently subscribers of RSS. Now that is a very small number, but it is growing rapidly at the rate of more than 40% every month. And why shouldn't that be - afterall, the temptation of being able to dynamically subscribe ( or unsubscribe ) to the content that you are interested in is hard to resist, especially when the facility comes for free.

The rapid growth of RSS as a media for information dissemenation has also captured the imagination of interactive marketers and they are beginning to figure out ways to monetize this channel. But the question everyone is asking is - "How good is 40% growth per month given that the base is a miniscule 2% of adult internet surfers ? How soon is RSS going to be a BIG enough media channel that we can monetize from it ?"

Since RSS started off as a channel for the developer community as the next cool thing, no one ever cared about the usability of this channel. Infact, most of the users don't even know what RSS is even though a majority of news sites prominently display the "RSS", "XML" or "Atom" symbols today. To top that, the user who dares to click on one of these symbols is displayed an obscure XML file and does not know what to do with it.

If RSS is to become a BIG channel for information dissemenation going forward, someone would need to figure out how to market RSS as a service to the users and also make sure that it is really simple for the end users to subscribe and read the RSS feeds. It goes without saying that efforts have already started on both fronts, with companies like "Feedster" taking on the challenge of marketing the RSS service to the end users and companies like "Google" bundling easy to use RSS readers with their popular products like "Desktop Search". With interactive marketing majors putting their weights behind this new media channel, it shouldn't be long before this channel tips.

Optimal dayparts for advertising

Would you believe me if I told you that "there are some parts of a day where online advertising is most effective" ?

A recent survey conducted by Atlas reported that lunch break and evening time ( just before bedtime ) yield as much as 35% higher conversion than other hours in the day. Now, this does not imply that people do not visit websites during the rest of the day or do not click ads at all during rest of the day, but this certainly is concrete statistical evidence to support that a product has as much as 35% higher chance of getting purchased if the advertisement is displayed during these hours.

That leads to an interesting question - "If the information about optimal dayparts is public and well researched, why don't all advertisers display their ads only during these dayparts ?". A look at the laws of demand and supply would easily answer that question ( and is a phenomenon witnessed today on television advertisement ). Lets say that all the advertisers want to advertise only on the prime dayparts ( similar to prime slots on television ) - this would create a very high demand, and given taht the supply of the media on these prime dayparts is limited, would cause the cost of the media during these hours to be raised significantly. In this scenario, advertising on prime dayparts would mean fewer eyeballs and significantly narrow reach to the target audience at the same or higher cost while there is lots of cheap media lying unused on other dayparts. Pushed to the extreme, the market would eventually swing back and breakeven at a point where the media cost during the prime dayparts is 35% higher than the media cost for the remaining dayparts.

So does it really make sense to run after prime dayparts for interactive marketing ? While there is no absolute answer to this question, the key lies in setting up good metrics to measure the progress of the campaign and gathering the statistics from your campaign to build/optimize your media plan. With a good plan, you would certainly be able to find the eyeballs to market your product.

Renaissance Marketing

Marketers are known to pick up catchy phrases to represent what they do, and the latest one in this league is "Renaissance Marketing". If you are thinking that "Renaissance Marketing" falls in the domain of "Interactive Marketing", well, it does not, but it has some interesting implications to interactive marketing which is why we are discussing it here.

Lets review some of the basics before we try to understand this term better. Online retailing has been one of the most profitable and viable business that have been setup since internet came into being. One of the prime reasons for its success has been the fact that most of the retail sites have been championed by companies that have been in the retailing business for years, that have had huge success in doing the retailing business offline and that have looked at online retailing as an additional channel to sell their goods, not as a replacement for their existing channels **. What does this say about the vision these companies had of online retail ?

Well, one of the things that is readily apparent is the fact that anyone who has a history in offline retail would knows the importance of customer interaction. If they are planning to augment the retail channel with an online solution, wouldn't they want their online retail channel to have the same level of interactivity ? Wouldn't they want their online retail channel to act like a salesperson for them ? Wouldn't they want their online retail channel to provide their customers with the same freedom of movement and the same freedom of choice ?

Unfortunately, one of the areas where online retail has been very disappointing is in bringing this vision to reality. Primitive internet technologies have forced online retail to turn into a sequential process, often referred to as the "Retail Funnel". The user is shoved down the funnel where he is forced to select some options along the way in an attempt to take him to the holy grail. One wrong choice and there is no way to go back and fix it. The end result is a lot of frustrated and fuming users who abandon their quest midway in disillusionment.

"Renaissance Marketing" proposes a solution to this problem by providing users choice, control and customization of experience. "Renaisance Marketing" rejects the idea of purchase funnel as a sequential series of steps and proposes a more fluid environment where unconstricted consumers easily float from upper funnel marketing assets to lower funnel assets at their own whim. The basic idea is derived from thinking of online retail as any other marketplace - afterall, if a user is allowed to roam freely in a shopping mall, why not allow him to roam freely in the online marketplace ?

Now that you have understood the concept of "Renaissance Marketing" can you think of where "Interactive Marketing" fits in ? Hey, I'm not going to answer that today - maybe in another post a few days later.

**You might argue that there are/were retail sites built by companies that have had no prior experience in retailing whatsoever. I would argue that most of them have vanished today except for the ones that had a sound business model to back them. Amazon is a great example of the latter.

Another Tipping Advertisement

A lot of people who have read my previous post on advertisements that tip, have been asking me if I happen to have a bagful of interesting advertisements that they can munch on in their spare time. While I don't have a bagful, I certainly have another one that I admire a lot.

This advertisement is very special. Not only do I admire the creativity of the guys who conceived this and the patience of the people who turned it into reality, I truly admire the courage of the marketer who spent a whopping 6 million dollars to shoot this advertisement. I do not know whether the company was able to get more than 6 million dollars worth of value from this advertisement, but without further deliberation on that, ladies and gentlemen, let me present to you, the new Honda Accord.

Tracking Campaign Metrics

Let us start with a small quiz - you will find answers to the questions at the end of this post.

1. Assume that you are the CEO of a F500 automobile company. What would be your purpose behind running a marketing campaign ?
a) Brand Building
b) Increased Car Sales
c) Increased Leads
d) Both a) & b)

2. Assume that you are the VP Marketing of a F500 automobile company. What would be your purpose behind running a marketing campaign ?
a) Brand Building
b) Increased Car Sales
c) Increased Leads
d) Both a) & b)

3. Once you have allocated the marketing spend to various media channels, how would you judge the effectiveness of the media channel ?
a) I will select the media channel only if I am sure it will be effective
b) Effectiveness will be measured by the number of people who see the ad ( or click it if the media is online )
c) Effectiveness will be measured by the number of people who purchase cars through that channel
d) Effectiveness will be measured by the popularity of the ad for offline media and ( search engine ) ranking of the ad for online media

Now that you have selected your answers, I must tell you that the focus of this post will be on question 3 above and I am surprised how few people can actually answer the third question correctly. Think about it for a moment - if you are running an ad campaign, wouldn't you want to track all the time how well the campaign is doing ? More importantly, if your business is to sell cars, wouldn't you want to know how many cars is the campaign helping you sell ? Wouldn't you want to know how much it costs you to sell a car through the media channel ?

It sounds really counter-intuitive, but when it comes to tracking ad campaigns, a lot of marketers make the mistake of using intermediate metrics like web traffic generated or search engine ranking instead of using ROI or sales oriented metrics. A part of the problem is that tracking an ad campaign against ROI metrics is significantly harder, but for the benefits you get, it is a small price to pay.

As an example, how would you attribute credit to an online campaign for conversions that happen offline if you are not tracking your campaign on a sales oriented metric ? Well, the answer is that you would not be able to attribute sales to the online campaign, which eventually means that your metrics portray the channel as less effective than it really is. If you continue to percieve the channel's performance that way, it would not be long before you declare the channel ineffective and stop using it completely - all because you were using the incorrect metric for tracking it in the first place.

So is using a ROI or sales oriented metric the solution to all problem ? Well, as I think more about it, I realize that we haven't even touched the real problem so far. The real problem is the existence of multiple media channels, every channel so diverse that there can be no common platform to track its performance. The usage of incorrect metrics is only a way in which the problem manifests itself today.

The solution to the real problem lies in taking a holistic view of your media channels and understanding how they work in synergy with each other to help you achieve your targets. ROI or sales based metrics are really the first step in understanding that synergy. There is a long long road that lies ahead and we shall never be able to tread on it if we are scared to take the first step.

Answers:
1. Increased Car Sales. A CEO always cares about the core business and if the company is into selling cars, then the motivation behind the campaign should be to sell more cars. Yes, brand building is important, but the end goal of building a brand is again to sell more cars. A CEO would treat brand building as a side effect of achieving his target - afterall, if his cars sell more than his competitors, doesn't that give him a good brand anyway.

2. Increased Car Sales & Brand Building. Since you are VP Marketing, you would be concerned about the brand as well in addition to achieving the target sales. For you as the VP Marketing, brand building is one of the goals, not just a side effect. Infact, a VP Marketing would sometimes go to the extent of considering just brand building as their end goal, considering that a good brand would help them sell more cars then their competitors.

3. Effectiveness will be measured by the number of people who purchase cars through that channel. If you have read through the blog, you would know why.

Crossing the chasm

Let me tell you that I am very new to the domain of "Interactive Marketing". Why, its been only 2 months since I started thinking about it, and one of the things that has always amazed me is the extent to which we can innovate in this domain.

"Money is the most powerful thing that exists in our world" - Is it the fact that there is a lot of money in interactive marketing domain that motivates the best management grads to put their heads together and figure out innovative ways to reach their target audience ? Not really - afterall its interactive marketing, not investment banking at wall street.

Then what is it that motivates an interactive marketer to innovate ? Well, a glance into the history of marketing would tell you that psychology has always played a significant role in the success or failure of a marketer and interactive marketing is no different. Everyday, an interactive marketer faces the challenge of understanding the human psychology, that too of people whom he hasn't met ( or even seen ). It is important to consider here that while the psychology of an individual is not important here, the psychology of the masses holds the key and an attempt to understand the secrets that lie beneath is as interesting as a Jungle Safari in Africa.

An interactive marketer constantly thinks of ways and means to get into the depth of mass psychology ( that the results are stored as statistical data is irrelevant to this discussion ) and to utilize that information to make informed decisions on marketing campaigns. What this really means is that an interactive marketer needs to innovate, to find ways to accumulate the information that gives him/her an understanding of mass psychology, to find ways to process this information to get new insights into mass psychology and to use these insights to find ways to influence the target audience better.

Now that sounds really exciting. But wait a minute - if there is really so much innovation happening in the interactive marketing domain, why is the change in the marketplace so gradual ? Why did it take so many years of struggle for interactive marketing to build a niche for itself in this big bad world ? Why isn't interactive marketing taking the biggest pie of the marketing spend of fortune 500 companies ?

The answer to these ( and other similar ) questions lie in the fact that the time lag between the time an innovation happens and the time it becomes mainstream is very large. If you have read "Crossing the Chasm" by "Geoffrey Moore", you might be familiar with the representation of this gap as a chasm, that every innovation has to cross before it goes mainstream. Unfortunately, every innovation has to face this acid test of survival and interactive marketing innovations are no different. If only this chasm could shrink....

Online Ads First ?

Whoever predicted that online marketing would never take off would find it hard to believe the radical progress that interactive marketing has made in the past four years.

In a twist to the traditional "TV First", "Web Later" sequence of launching new commercials, companies are beginning to launch web commercials first to gauge user reaction and reach their target market as quickly as possible. Recently, Coty Inc launched the commercial of their new perfume Lovely on a lifestyle site and they are planning to target a broader audience through a TV Commercial later this year.

This change in perception certainly marks the growing respect that internet is garnering as a marketing medium. According to Forrester Research, online advertising made up 5 percent of advertising budgets last year and will make up 8 percent by 2010. Someone rightly said "There are only two kinds in this world: Winners and Underdogs" and interactive marketing is moving rapidly out of its underdog shadow.

Folksonomy = Taxonomy - Taxis + Folks

For the uninitiated, "Taxis" means "Classification" and "Nomos" (or "Nomia") means "Management". "Folk" are people. So "Folksonomy" literally means "People's Classification Management".

Some people might argue why "Folksonomy" does not mean "People's Management" and if you are one of those, you might want to join your friends who are debating "Folksonomy" vs "Folks Taxonomy".

Lets forget the etymological nitty-gritties for a while and focus on what this new buzz-word actually means. To completely understand the need of this concept and its significance, you would need a crash course in the history of the famous ( or infamous ) "Search Wars".

Once upon a time, there was a company called "Microsoft" that had the largest share in the retail software space. The ruler of "Microsoft", "Billie Wille Gates" was very happy with his dominance in the retail software space, but he had a bigger ambition - the ambition to dominate the lives of all computer users on this planet called "Earth" ( he never cared about Martians though ). It didn't take him time to figure out that "Internet Search" was an activity he should indulge in to get closer to his ambition. During the same time, a couple of underdogs dropped out of Stanford and built a search engine that would put other search engines out of business. The company called itself "Google" ( after the magical number googol ) and [coincidentally] also called their search engine "Google".

The fairy tale doesn't end here. Having rapped "Microsoft" hard on the back of its head, "Google" went on to become the leaders in the online search space and built a set of businesses around it that would make it very profitable. Meantime, another company called "Amazon", that was into selling books online, got interested in internet search as well and jumped into the fray. "Yahoo!", the undisputed leader of search engines prior to the "Google" onslaught, also set out to take vengeance on those tresspassing into its holy grail. All of these companies had a common motive - to build a better search engine than the other, one that would draw all the people using the internet every single day.

The million dollar question is - what makes a search engine better than the other ? There are several million pages out on the internet that need to be searched and given that there is no definitive "best" answer to this problem, how do you quantify the "goodness" of a search engine ? Is it just the speed at which the search engine crunches through the results that counts or are there other factors that impact its "goodness" ?

As you might have figured out by now, there is no good answer to this question. Umm, yeah, I would like the search results faster, but what if the links that I am looking for are on the 10th page of the search results ? I would much prefer a search engine that takes 5 seconds more to return the results, but gets me the results that I want on the first page. If you were to ask a million internet users of their expectations from a search engine, I bet you would get the same response. Personalization of the results is the top priority and the performance is a close second.

So, the million dollar question changes to "How do you get every search user results that he/she cares about ?" What it really means is that if two people search for the keyword "bull", a finance guy should get links pertaining to wall street whereas a basketball fan should get links pertaining to Chicago Bulls. What it really means is that to be the undisputed market leader, you have to go the last mile and personalize the search results for every single user who performs a search and at the same time personalize it better than all the other search engines.

Ok, so now that you have had a crash course in "Search Wars", what do you think is the answer to this complex problem ? I'm afraid I still have to say - there is no good answer to this problem. But that does not mean there hasn't been progress. Each one of the companies that starred in the "Search Wars" have research teams setup that attempt to crack this problem before the other team does, and the latest solution they are playing with is "Folksonomy".

"Folksonomy" is a neologism for a practice of collaborative categorization using freely chosen keywords. More colloquially, this refers to a group of people cooperating spontaneously to organize information into categories.

Think of it as a circle of friends - if you were to ask your friends to list out the URLs that interest them, there is a high probability that you would find those URLs interesting. Now think about what would happen if everyone in your friends circle shares the URLs that they find interesting - you would easily be sitting on heap of information that interested you but that you did not know about.

Now think about what would happen if everyone on the internet lists out the URLs that interest them. Well, you don't personally know all of them so that is where the extrapolation meets a sudden death. What if, in addition to a list of all the URLs in this world that people care about, you also had the details of how those people are related to each other, you could build communities on the internet that belong to people who share similar interests. Given that you would never know the relationship between all the people on the internet ( nevermind the concept of six degrees of separation ), what if you used a common set of URLs between two people to simulate a relationship and then built communities around these relationships. That is exactly what "Folksonomy" is all about - figuring out common interests and building a community around it. And since it is the users that are organizing this information, advocates of "Folksonomy" believe that it is a better model to store all the information in this world.

How well it would do, only time would tell, but companies like "Yahoo!" and "TagCloud" are already building some interesting pieces to bring this concept to reality. There will soon be a day when the search engines would be able to tell me which of the several billion earthlings should be my friends.

The stickiness factor

The second most important concept in making things tip is what Malcom calls "The stickiness factor". The stickiness factor is a measure of how easily things are able to stick to a person's mind and infact is a hard thing to measure.

What makes an idea or a concept sticky ? If there is something that sticks to my mind, would it stick to your mind as well ? When we think of stickiness, do we think about the masses or just the few people who are gifted to make ideas tip ? When you come up with an idea, how do you know if it is sticky or how sticky it is ? I can bombard you with thousands of questions like this, but how about getting back to the mattresses ( as Godfather would say ) for now and focussing on the areas of immediate impact.

As I think about it, stickiness is not a radically new concept. Marketers have been putting their heads together for years to build a bait that would charm the unsuspecting shopper into doing what the marketer wants him to do. Some have been successful, some haven't, but for most part of it, nobody has thought of coming up with a metric for "stickiness".

It was only with the dawn of direct marketing ( reaching the customers directly through mail, telemarketing etc. ) that the concept of "stickiness" came into the forefront. Direct marketers would shoot mailers to the people on their list and the definition of success was very straightforward - "How many of the people that were mailed responded to the campaign ?". If the percentage of people responding is large, you go Hurrrrray !!!, if not, you get back to the drawing board.

In the realm of interactive marketing, building metrics for success and tracking them over a period of time is relatively easy. But every new media comes with its own advantages and disadvantages and internet is no exception to that rule. For an interactive marketer, the biggest problem lies in the size of the internet community - what is stick for some may not be sticky for others ? If there is an iota of truth in the law of averages, then the metrics recorded across all the users on the internet should cancel out each other and you would never be able to judge the effectiveness of an interactive marketing campaign ever. That is a problem big enough to mark the beginning of the end of interactive marketing.

Don't despair, not yet. The answer to this problem would not only make it insignificant, but would also pave way to one of the fastest growing areas in online advertising called "Creative Optimization". More details in a future blog.

The law of the few

If you have read "The Tipping Point" by Malcom Gladwell, you would have guessed what I am going to talk about now. I finished reading the book last week and was thoroughly impressed with the ideas contained therein.

Since then, I've been thinking about how profound the implications are for interactive marketing. If only there were a way to quantify the tipping point.

Let me document some of my ramblings here and maybe all the intelligent souls who get their eyeballs to this blog can help me build up the idea.

The "Law of the Few" says that there are a few people in this world, that are gifted to make certain ideas tip. You just gotta find those guys, make your offering interesting enough for them and watch it float effortlessly millions across the globe. How do you think "Harry Potter" became such a fad or for that matter the "Carlton Draught Beer Ad" became such a rage across the internet community ? Well, I certainly believe that both of these caught fancy of a few people and those people started a chain making these tip in a short span of time. The question really is - can we find a way to consistently build advertisements ( or for that matter products ) that are designed to tip and make marketing an effortless job ?

My product manager asked me the same question a couple of days back and so far, I haven't found a way to make ideas tip. The day I find a way to do that, I'll be sailing in the crisp-green sea.

Don't be evil unless it is for greater good

Let me ask you a trivia question. Name the company that recently changed its motto from "Don't be evil" to "Don't be evil unless it is for greater good" ?

Don't know the answer - let me help you with another hint. This company holds the largest market share in the online advertising. How about taking a guess now ?

You guessed it right - Google. As if their overwhelming stake in the interactive marketing was not big enough, they recently decided that they are going to enter print marketing as well. Infact, as the rumors have it, they have already started a pilot run of print advertising and will soon start becoming very aggressive about it.

When I heard this news, my first reaction was "Are these guys out of their minds ?". I mean, its good that these guys are leaders in online advertising, but that is because they provide some value to advertisement by targeting it to the right context. What value could they possibly provide in print advertising where the market is already saturated with killer whales ? If there is no additional value out there, is it just a ploy to diversify into a media company and hatch your eggs the way others do ? Nah, I don't believe google would do something that simple.

So I rattled my brains and tried to tune in to the frequency at which the google management was thinking and immediately one part of the puzzle was crystal clear. In order to gain market share at a rate that would be acceptable to google ( which apparently is much higher than what lesser mortals dream of ), they would have to come up with something unique, something differentiated, something that would provide more value to either the publisher or the advertiser.

Analyzing it from the perspective of the value to the publisher, all a publisher cares about is selling off their advertising space as quickly as possible at an acceptable price point. But that happens today as well - where could google possibly innovate ? For starters, google could use its leadership position in online advertising and become one stop shop to get a publisher access to thousands of advertisers. Alternatively, google could buy advertising space in bulk from the publisher and auction it to the advertisers in a manner similar to what it does with online advertising today. To take it a step further, google could purchase a centerfold from the publisher and offer to deliver pre-printed advertisements on the centerfolds that the publisher would simply append to their magazines - that would dramatically reduce the hassle of the publisher and would increase the power of google's offering considerably.

From the perspective of the advertiser, google could do a lot more. For starters, it could offer the advertiser an integrated ad campaign that would offer the convenience of both online and offline advertising in a single package. To top it up, google could offer to target a specific subset of audience based upon the product being advertised. For example, an advertiser for a makeup kit may want to target girls between 18 - 24. Google would tell them that in addition to their expertise in locating this target set online, they also have tie-ups with the right set of publishers to improve the impact of their print campaign. To make things better, based upon the track record of online advertisements, google could also make recommendations to the advertisers on the audience they should be targeting. For example, google could analyze the online advertising data and recommend to our advertiser in the previous example that he should be targeting girls between 18 - 24. Normally, companies spend a lot of money with consultants just running tests to identify their target set, and if google could provide them this information, they would have tremendous cost savings.

Hmm, now things are looking bright, but wait, there is more to come. To give its offering a final killer blow, google might want to make its offering unbelievably easy for small advertisers to use. Afterall, it is the volumes of the advertisements online that makes google the king - why shouldn't it do the same thing with print media. We already talked about the centerfold idea, so lets build upon it. Lets assume that it costs $200,000 ( i'm just making up the numbers here ) to buy a centerfold ( 4 full pages of ads ) on some publisher that circulates 500,000 copies monthly. Lets also assume that a meaningful ad would be at least a quarter the size of a page. This means that the lowest amount anyone could spend advertising on this magazine is $12,500. Whew, that is a lot of money - what if there are lots of small advertisers that have a monthly budget of say $2000 ? Google could come up with an offering for these guys and say "We charge 2.5 cents for a quarter page ad per person. How about paying for 80,000 impressions ?" They would then mix and match their orders with the space available in their centerfolds and deliver the printed centerfolds to the publishers. That makes the world fairer - everyone gets a chance to reach a subset of the audience, if not all of them. Wait a minute - publishers have personal information of the subscribers. Why not use that information for better targeting of the ads in the centerfolds. For example, if you sign up for 80,000 impressions of a shaving kit ad your money would not be wasted by sending these centerfolds to blondes.

Thats a lot of stuff to do and I bet I haven't even explored the tip of the iceberg. People say google is evil, I believe it is as exciting as the early days of wall street. Its a fair game for everyone and there is a lot of money to be made. Someday, you might find google claiming "We will show targeted advertisements in your dreams and make them clickable".

Future of the Nation

Recently, I found an interesting article on the work habits of Indian professionals. I haven't written it, but I thought I must share these words of wisdom with everyone. I can't help but think of the famous Zen koan:

"Two hands clap and there is a sound; what is the sound of one hand?"

Today's generation of high-earning professionals maintain that their personal fulfillment comes from their jobs and the hours they work. They should grow up, says Thomas Barlow.

A friend of mine recently met a young American woman who was studying on a Rhodes Scholarship at Oxford. She already had two degrees from top US universities, had worked as a lawyer and as a social worker in the US, and somewhere along the way had acquired a black belt in kung fu. Now, however, her course at Oxford was coming to an end and she was thoroughly angst-ridden about what to do next.

Her problem was no ordinary one.

She couldn't decide whether she should make a lot of money as a corporate lawyer/management consultant, devote herself to charity work helping battered wives in disadvantaged Communities, or go to Hollywood to work as a stunt double in kung fu films. What most struck my friend was not the disparity of this woman's choices, but the earnestness and bad grace with which she ruminated on them. It was almost as though she begrudged her own talents, Opportunities and freedom - as though the world had treated her unkindly by forcing her to make such a hard choice.

Her case is symptomatic of our times. In recent years, there has grown up a culture of discontent among the highly educated young something that seems to flare up, especially, when people reach their late 20s and early 30s. It arises not from frustration caused by lack of opportunity, as may have been true in the past, but from an excess of possibilities.
Most theories of adult developmental psychology have a special category for those in their late 20s and early 30s.

Whereas the early to mid-20s are seen as a time to establish one's mode of living, the late 20s to early 30s are often considered a period of reappraisal. In a society where people marry and have children young, where financial burdens accumulate early, and where job markets are inflexible, such appraisals may not last long. But when people manage to remain free of financial or family burdens, and where the perceived opportunities for alternative careers are many, the reappraisal is likely to be strong.

Among no social group is this more true than the modern, International, professional elite: that tribe of young bankers, lawyers, consultants and managers for whom financial, familial, personal, corporate and (increasingly) national ties have become irrelevant. Often they grew up in one country, were educated in another, and are now working in a third.

They are independent, well paid, and enriched by experiences that many of their parents could only dream of. Yet, by their late 20s, many carry a sense of disappointment: that for all their opportunities, freedoms and achievements, life has not delivered quite what they had hoped. At the heart of this disillusionment lies a new attitude towards work.

The idea has grown up, in recent years, that work should not be just a means to an end a way to make money, support a family, or gain social prestige but should provide a rich and fulfilling experience in and of itself. Jobs are no longer just jobs; they are lifestyle options. Recruiters at financial companies, consultancies and law firms have promoted this conception of work. Job advertisements promise challenge, wide experiences, opportunities for travel and relentless personal development.

Michael is a 33-year-old management consultant who has bought into this vision of late-20th century work. Intelligent and well-educated - with three degrees, including a doctorate - he works in Munich, and has a "stable, long-distance relationship" with a woman living in California. He takes 140 flights a year and works an average of 80 hours a week. Some weeks he works more than 100 hours.

When asked if he likes his job, he will say: "I enjoy what I'm doing in terms of the intellectual challenges." Although he earns a lot, he doesn't spend much. He rents a small apartment, though he is rarely there, and has accumulated very few possessions. He justifies the long hours not in terms of wealth-acquisition, but solely as part of a "learning experience".

This attitude to work has several interesting implications, mostly to do with the shifting balance between work and non-work, employment and leisure. Because fulfilling and engrossing work - the sort that is thought to provide the most intense learning experience - often requires long hours or captivates the imagination for long periods of time, it is easy to slip into the idea that the converse is also true: that just by working long hours, one is also engaging in fulfilling and engrossing work. This leads to the popular fallacy that you can measure the value of your job (and, therefore, the amount you are learning from it) by the amount of time you spend on it. And, incidentally, when a premium is placed on learning rather than earning, people are particularly susceptible to this form of self-deceit.

Thus, whereas in the past, when people in their 20s or 30s spoke disparagingly about nine-to-five jobs it was invariably because they were seen as too routine, too unimaginative, or too bourgeois. Now, it is simply because they don't contain enough hours.

Young professionals have not suddenly developed a distaste for leisure, but they have solidly bought into the belief that a 45-hour week necessarily signifies an unfulfilling job. Jane, a 29-year-old corporate lawyer who works in the City of London, tells a story about working on a deal with another lawyer, a young man in his early 30s. At about 3am, he leant over the boardroom desk and said: "Isn't this great? This is when I really love my job." What most struck her about the remark was that the work was irrelevant (she says it was actually rather boring); her colleague simply liked the idea of working late. "It's as though he was validated, or making his life important by this," she says.

Unfortunately, when people can convince themselves that all they need do in order to lead fulfilled and happy lives is to work long hours, they can quickly start to lose reasons for their existence. As they start to think of their employment as a lifestyle, fulfilling and rewarding of itself - and in which the reward is proportional to hours worked - people rapidly begin to substitute work for other aspects of their lives.

Michael, the management consultant, is a good example of this phenomenon. He is prepared to trade (his word) not just goods and time for the experience afforded by his work, but also a substantial measure of commitment in his personal relationships. In a few months, he is being transferred to San Francisco, where he will move in with his girlfriend. But he's not sure that living the same house is actually going to change the amount of time he spends on his relationship. "Once I move over, my time involvement on my relationship will not change significantly. My job takes up most of my time and pretty much dominates what I do, when, where and how I do it," he says. Moreover, the reluctance to commit time to a relationship because they are learning so much, and having such an intense and fulfilling time at work is compounded, for some young professionals, by a reluctance to have a long-term relationship at all.

Today, by the time someone reaches 30, they could easily have had three or four jobs in as many different cities - which is not, as it is often portrayed, a function of an insecure global job-market, but of choice. Robert is 30 years old. He has three degrees and has worked on three continents. He is currently working for the United Nations in Geneva. For him, the most significant deterrent when deciding whether to enter into a relationship is the likely transient nature of the rest of his life. "What is the point in investing all this emotional energy and exposing myself in a relationship, if I am leaving in two months, or if I do not know what I am doing next year?" he says.

Such is the character of the modern, international professional, at least throughout his or her 20s. Spare time, goods and relationships, these are all willingly traded for the exigencies of work. Nothing is valued so highly as accumulated experience. Nothing is neglected so much as commitment. With this work ethic - or perhaps one should call it a "professional development ethic" - becoming so powerful, the globally mobile generation now in its late 20s and early 30s has garnered considerable professional success. At what point, though, does the experience-seeking end?

Kathryn is a successful American academic, 29, who bucked the trend of her generation: she recently turned her life round for someone else. She moved to the UK, specifically, to be with a man, a decision that she says few of her contemporaries understood. "We're not meant to say: 'I made this decision for this person. Today, you're meant to do things for yourself. If you're willing to make sacrifices for others - especially if you're a woman - that's seen as a kind of weakness. I wonder, though, is doing things for yourself really empowerment, or is liberty a kind of trap?" she says.

For many, it is a trap that is difficult to break out of, not least because they are so caught up in a culture of professional development. And spoilt for choice, some like the American Rhodes Scholar no doubt become paralysed by their opportunities, unable to do much else in their lives, because they are so determined not to let a single one of their chances slip. If that means minimal personal commitments well into their 30s, so be it. "Loneliness is better than boredom" is Jane's philosophy.

And, although she knows "a lot of professional single women who would give it all up if they met a rich man to marry", she remains far more concerned herself about finding fulfillment at work. "I am constantly questioning whether I am doing the right thing here," she says. "There's an eternal search for a more challenging and satisfying option, a better lifestyle. You always feel you're not doing the right thing always feel as if you should be striving for another goal," she says.

Jane, Michael, Robert and Kathryn grew up as part of a generation with fewer social constraints determining their futures than has been true for probably any other generation in history. They were taught at school that when they grew up they could "do anything", "be anything". It was an idea that was reinforced by popular culture, in films, books and television.
The notion that one can do anything is clearly liberating. But life without constraints has also proved a recipe for endless searching, endless questioning of aspirations. It has made this generation obsessed with self-development and determined, for as long as possible, to minimise personal commitments in order to maximise the options open to them. One might see this as a sign of extended adolescence.

Eventually, they will be forced to realise that living is as much about closing possibilities as it is about creating them.

BIG Marketers

Yesterday, I had the pleasure of listening to interviews of the best interactive marketers in the industry over podcast, courtesy The Bay Area Interactive Group ( they call themselves BIG ). The list of interviewees comprising of the very best in the industry including Glen Sheehan, Joanne Bradford, Mark Stewart, Matt Freeman PJ Perreira, Toby Gabriner and Joseph Jaffe ( the "Life After the 30 Second Spot" author ).

All these marketing guys belong to different walks of life, but I was amazed at the synergy they had when it came to interactive marketing. There was a common theme across all the problems they talked about, the biggest one being the fragmentation of the media. Now that I think of it, it is very much true and it must be a big headache for any marketing guy. In the good old days, when you just had print media, allocating budget for advertisment would be so easy. Then came the radio, but the conditions were not tougher because economic growth surpassed the growth in media by a huge margin. With the advent of TV, marketing took a different dimension and the proverbial 30 second slot came into vogue. Marketers had to be efficient about communicating their message and be creative as well to grab the attention of the user. Creation of creative advertisments became a big business and huge media houses came up whose sole purpose in life would be to create attractive advertisments.

And, then along came internet and seasoned marketers were not going to discount its important. Infact, they were the first ones to jump the bandwagon and sponsor big businesses on the internet ( the businesses sadly did not have a business story to back them up and most of them failed miserably ) and try a variety of way to grab people's attention. Banners could be seen on all the websites and companies started pumping in millions of dollars to get their ads in front of every possible eyeball on the internet. Well, if you are thinking that was the beginning of the problem - it was not. Infact, marketers were pleased with the fact that they had so much to do, so many avenues to seek and the grass was green all around.

The problem really started kicking in when the user community became fragmented. In the good old days, a marketer could show his commercial at a prime slot and expect all his potential customers to watch it. With the proliferation of media, a marketer has too many options, and worse his target audience has too many options. That means marketing is not as easy as choosing the prime time slot anymore - you gotta have a creative mind to make sure that you get your commercial in front of the eyeballs that deserve it. To top it, you also want to make sure that you are passing consistent messages to your audience through all the media and that there is a common recognition for your brand across these diverse media. To make things worse, you don't have a good way to track how many eyeballs you are reaching. Ofcourse, internet provides you thousands of ways to track your audience, but do you have the technology to track the users between the time they spend on the internet and the time they spend with the other media ?

Does this mean it is the end of traditional marketing ? Are the 30 second slots dead ? No sir, the convergence of marketing messages across various media is the prime concern of all the companies and marketers are sweating to figure out a solution to bring them together. What I can say for sure is that Interactive marketing is the sweet spot today and every company is looking to dominate this medium.

Life is Good

Interactive Marketing is the art of marketing products or services on the internet. Laymen are introduced to this concept as Internet Marketing or Online Marketing.

Now you would certainly like to ask me what are the various channels through which this happens. Well, how many times have you seen a banner blinking its way to your attention on the top of a page that you visit ? Yes sir, that is just one of the ways to advertise online and has been in vogue for many years now. There are other ways to market and to put it simply, anywhere you see an advertisment while you are browsing, there is an interactive marketeer, who has his hands crossed hoping for you to click the advertisment.

Some people think of interactive marketing as evil, but that is just a misconception. Who wouldn't want to relax on a patch of green grass while someone, somewhere on this earth is busting his ass to get him whatever he wants ? Well, that is interactive marketing my friend and so far, you have seen only the tip of the iceberg. Isn't life good ?

Interactive Marketing Blog

I am coolpranni and I thought it would be a good idea to start a blog to educate everyone about interactive marketing. Tune in for more posts in the coming days.

PS: I might choose to deviate from the topic of interactive marketing if I find something more interesting to write - why not, I'm the boss.