New Design Cool: The Tea Bag Coffin Lets You Bury That Bag.

The best design ideas are so elegant in their simplicity most of us feel like dunderheads for not thinking of them.

Here from Jonas Trampedach comes one of those ideas: The Tea Bag Coffin.

With the ‘Tea bag Coffin’, the drinker can tidily bury the bag under the cup and out of the way.”

Well, duh.

(Thanks to Likecool.com)

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MotrinGate: Twitter Moms Abuzz Over Motrin Video.

At times like this, I am resoundingly thrilled with my decision to leave traditional advertising oh-so-many-moons ago at the dawn of the digital age.

Apparently, they still don’t ‘get it.’ At least whoever created Motrin’s ‘Wearing Your Baby’ video doesn’t get it. And this corporate cluelessness has now exploded into MotrinGate, thanks to legions of Twitter Moms who have been tweeting upthewazoo all weekend. Pity the poor Motrin exec who shows up to Monday morning’s firestorm. Of course, if they had they had the customer service smarts of Zappos, JetBlue, ComcastCares, etc. they would already know about this Mom-fueled fury and they would have apologized, explained or waved a white eco- diaper.

The video “Wearing Your Baby” is still up and running on the official Motrin website. The video claims that this supposed ‘fashion trend’ of carrying baby in a sling causes ‘extreme pain’ — and thus merits Motrin. Not only is the voice-over whiny, annoying and inauthentic but their ‘facts’ are dicey.

Considering how many zillions of Mom marketing firms there out clamoring to help corporate America, (I spent a chunk of this week’s hugely useful WOMMA conference with Mom-savvy Stacy DeBroff of MomCentral) it seems pretty clear that as one tweeter said: “There’s no way a Mom was involved, or if she was, she was ignored.”

Part of the copy: “If I look tired and crazy people will understand.”

If you’d like to follow MotrinGate on Twitter, simply use #MotrinMoms. Currently MotrinMoms is trending #1 on Twitter — and social media mavens are splashing across all media from new to traditional.

As a Springspotter, I’m pinging Liesbeth in Amsterdam with this trend that shows off the incredible power of mobilized Don’t-Mess-With-Me-Moms.

And here’s one of the videos created in response to Motrin’s original video.

Guru’s Take: The lesson here for corporate America? This didn’t have to happen. All you have to do is ask and Moms will help — with your creative, your research, your buzz. We’ve been having Twitter Product Parties – a nifty way to do Social Media Research — and this 21st century style focus group could easily have prevented this corporate boo-boo. Motrin apparently didn’t ask — and now they’re getting stung bigtime.

Guru’s Take #2: Okay, have been researching and from what I can tell, McNeil (maker of Motrin) is a division of Johnson and Johnson . . . and J&J owns the #1 parenting site on the web: Babycenter. So I am wondering why they couldn’t have tapped into that multi-million strong BabyCenter Mom-community?

Guru’s Take #3: Okay, finally a response from the VP at McNeil.  (Thank you, Katja, for the post and all your hard work.)  Amazing that this semi mea culpa took this long. Amazing that no one from McNeil or the Johnson & Johnson Family of Companies appears to be tweeting on the weekend. Even for a complete Twitter newbie, it would have taken all of about a minute for the outraged Motrin tweets to have bubbled up; it was that fast and furious. This whole thing could have been prevented if:

• Someone, anyone, at McNeil (or its agencies) had a clue about social media
• Someone, anyone, at McNeil had a clue about the importance of respecting the VOM (Voice-of-Moms). I’m a veteran market researcher and I cannot imagine letting my clients go without either exploratory pre-production research or post-production eval — hopefully both. I always tell them that research is essentially insurance — it would have prevented McNeil’s 4-Motrin-Migraine.

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The First Musical Instrument Created for the Apple iPhone: Ocarina.

Just in time to head off a boring wait in Black Friday’s check-out lines — the iPhone Ocarina. Now you can amuse yourself and other frenzied shoppers by turning your iPhone into a musical instrument — the ocarina. Simply blow into the microphone and and play the four holes on the iPhone screen. Guru suggests a hearty rendition of the Burl Ives classic: “Have A Holly Jolly Christmas.” Or perhaps the sacred “Feliz Navidad.” Both undoubtedly do justice the ancient heritage of this traditional instrument.

Thanks to LikeCool and Smule Ocarina.

More cool from Smule: Ocarina is a social application. (I knew it — everything has to be a social app these days. Where are the anti-social apps? I want one.) Tap on the globe icon and you will see and hear other Ocarina players throughout the world. (Also likely standing in line at Target) The globe view will highlight the source of the music. Rate your favorite performances so that others may benefit from your judgment. Name your Ocarina if you want listeners around the world to identify your performances. With this robust application beautiful music is created, appreciated and shared. (I am so wanting to hear Inna-Ga-Da-Davida Baby)

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From the Bears to Britney, Sarah to Shoes, What’s New This Week.

The week after Labor Day 2008 brings us a bonanza of newbees from the droolworthy to the dreadful:

New Jet Brett Favre, now sporting #4 for his new team, and fresh off his first victory as Broadway Brett

Chrome, the Webkit-based Google browser that’s already being called a Windows killer

New Comeback Kid, Britney Spears, thanking God and her ‘two beautiful boys’ while sparkling her revamped bod through last night’s MTV Video Awards

The new Seinfeld-Bill Gates commercial that’s reportedly part of a $300 million media buy aimed at  ‘engaging consumers, sparking conversation’.  Has Ad Disruptor Alex Bogusky succeeded in making Microsoft cool?  Are you conversing, folks?

The newly ranked Cal Bears, surfacing at #23 after the 66-3 rout of Washington State over the weekend

New VP Candidate, Moose Murdering Mom Sarah Palin — plus a passle of new polls that gives the ticket a bump bigger than you-know-whose

New starter for the Green Bay Packers, Aaron Rogers, who just won the season opener against rival Minnesota Vikings

But of course, all of these pale in comparison to what’s truly earthshakingly (a nod to last Friday’s 4.0)  nouveau: shoes.  That would be the newly launched, newly luxe Hey Lady Shoes, the Anti-Dyeable, Actually Danceable Wedding Shoe. The brainchild of the Bay Area’s style-savvy Leung twins, the shoes’ breakthrough heel constuction is designed to once-and-for-all put an end to The Pain that marrs that Perfect Day.    If you’re about to be a bride and you’re in search of shoes that are both Anti-Polyester and Anti-Prom, check out the elegance from the twin entrepreneurs.  In fact, Hey Lady’s lush look and feel is so fabulously fashionable and functional, I might almost consider getting married again.

 

 

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July 11: More Sinners Than Winners, From The Packers to Silicon Valley to IndyMac to The New iPhone.

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The Week of July 11 is crammed with Sinners and only one (semi) Winner:

• After shoddy treatment from Ted Thompson, Brett asks to be released from Green Bay. 
• Single White Female, the sequel. The Mercury News reports that with the ouster of Dianne Green, CEO of VMWare, none of Silicon Valley’s 150 biggest corporations have a single female CEO.
• The Basin Complex Fire ravages more than 103,000 acres of pure, pristine California and moves closer to Carmel Valley.
• Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae tank. Then mortgage giant IndyMac Bank is seized by the Feds.  This bank deserved to be outed for its sleazy shenanigans.  Who’s next?
• And the obsession with all things Apple grows, with the launch today of the new iPhone3G, released this am at AT&T and Apple stores around the US. It’s faster, cheap, cooler than ever — and also capable of bringing down Apple’s activation system.

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The New York City Waterfalls Public Art Spectacular Opens With A Splash.

Chicago has its cows. San Francisco has its cable cars. Las Vegas has its . . . well, you know.

As of yesterday, New York has its waterfalls.

New York City Waterfalls, the ambitious new $15.5 million project presented by The Public Art Fund and Danish artist Olafur Eliasson, is splashing its way across all five boroughs, bringing new energy and (hopefully) lots of cash into the city. The man-made falls tower 90 to 120 feet high in four sites across the East River’s shores:

Beneath the Brooklyn Bridge,
Manhattan’s Pier 35
Between Brooklyn’s Piers 4 and 5
On the northern end of Governor’s Island.

The Waterfalls, which draw water from the river at 35,000 gallons per minute, run from 9 a.m. to 10 p.m. on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and from 7 a.m. to 10 p.m. every other day through Oct. 13. They will all be visible from South Street Seaport and the Staten Island ferry. Maps, podcasts and more information on viewing these new ‘natural’ wonders are available at NYCWaterfalls.org.

And never fear, Carbon Cops. They will operate on electricity run by renewable resources.

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What Rickrolling Can Teach Marketers About Running Successful UGC Contests.

Way back in the dinosaur days of the web when I was part of AOL’s infamous Greenhouse incubator, we all knew the one surefire way to increase our site traffic: run a contest.

Those early online contests — circa 1995 –were largely bland, boring and limited by lack of bandwidth. An even bigger speed bump to creativity came from Legal. Most corporate lawyers were petrified of the wild wild West of the Internet, with the ever-present possibility of utter chaos and brand destruction, so we were channeled into fairly wimpy, easily definable sweepstakes and mini-giveaways. To counter this, I ran one of the first primitive ventures into Branded Entertainment: a popular chat room game called Play Z Magic Word starring cyber game show host, Chat Pat. We gave away goodies such as free AOL hours (believe it or not, LOL-ing used to cost $2.95 per hour ) Wonderbras, books and Nordic Traks. Given that we never failed to pack them in, AOL’s TOS (Terms of Service) patrol was on 24/7 alert with the attorneys on standby, shaking in their Brionis.

We now realize that this Lawyer Hysteria was not completely unfounded. Their paranoia about rampaging bands of Internet outlaws burst into ear-shattering reality this spring with the Internet phenomenon known as Rickrolling. According to Wikipedia, Rickrolling is a prank and Internet meme involving the music video for the 1987 Rick Astley song “Never Gonna Give You Up.” The meme is a bait and switch: a person provides a Web link they claim is relevant to the topic at hand, but the link actually takes the user to the Astley video.

By late spring of this year, YouTube’s top Rickrolling videos had been viewed some 30 million times, while a national survey reported that at least 18 million American adults confessed to being Rickrolled. A quick search will reveal that such random entities as the New York Mets, Scientologists, Michelle Obama, the Pittsburgh Pirates and a Fox television anchor have been punked as well. Rick Astley’s old record label is reportedly considering producing a new ‘Greatest Hits’ CD.

So what should you do if your company is considering tapping into the high buzz but equally high risk area of User Generated Content-based contests? Other than making sure your attorneys are on speed dial?

First let’s look at why your company might want to create a UGC contest. As noted above, online contests are reliable traffic-generators with the power to dramatically increase your customer database, generate buzz among pivotal psychographics, and even help boost your community. They tap into the growing do-it-yourself trend with its legions of Creative Consumers wanting their 15-minutes of fame (and possibly fortune) via mash-up, photos, videos, songs, ideation and brainpower. All you have to do is tune into American Idol’s yearly coverage of their auditions to see upclose-and-personal the millions who believe they should share their talents with the globe.

User Generated Contests offer prizes that range from major to mini, everything from cash to ’star’ turns on TV commercials, reality shows or music videos to gadgets, gizmos, spa trips and CDs. They work particularly well for launching anything new, from a new benefit or feature, to a new product itself, especially when that product is trying to move into new territory.

Lessons learned from the Rickrollers:

Lesson 1: Plan for the worst case scenario
Assume that your contest is likely to get hijacked by the next new Rickrollers. So carefully build your contest rules with risk in mind. A clause that allows for an out of some type, that puts the ultimate decision-making power back in the hands of the sponsor if a Rickrolling-style prank occurs, should head off a problem. The Mets were savvy enough to have envisioned the possibility that leaving the winning song completely up to the fans could result in an entire season’s worth of Rick Astley.

Lesson 2: Be Transparent
Today’s technology makes it easy for a site to show the contest in action –how many clicks, downloads and entries have been received, who might be winning or lagging behind. We have generations of online users trained in rankings, ratings, polling and page views from everything from gaming to YouTube to iTunes to social networking quiz widgets. So when this is information is fuzzy, confusing or unavailable, it’s not only suspiciously opaque, it can inhibit potential buzz or viral activity. A recent uber-cool contest, smartly conceived and designed by a newly-resourceful Getty Images, directed contest entrants to post their own cause-related advertising using Getty’s encyclopedic collection of everything from classic photography to video. Getty then provided tools that seemingly encouraged viral interaction. However, there was no real explanation as to what the posted numbers meant or how many votes each entry had gotten. From what I could tell, there were many worthy and creative entries yet this lack of clarity certainly deterred me, and likely, others, from viralizing this contest. I needed to see a clear path from submission to polling to refining possible winners to victory.

Lesson 3: Design A Target Specific Contest
Successful contests are seldom one-type-fits-all. The type and format appropriate for a Dove UGC contest might not be the appropriate format for an MTV contest in which the prize is an evening with Tila Tequila. So carefully design your format, your prize, and (of course) your microsite to fit the specific user you want to attract. And while you’re at it, consider how your chosen target feels about the viral aspects of your contest. Some consumers actively enjoy seeding your brand’s message — and in fact, quite a few of them find Rickrolling a hoot — while others are turned off by anything that smacks of ‘Send This To A Friend.’

Lesson 4: Continue The Conversation

Just because the contest has ended, there’s no reason not to keep the conversation going. Make sure the winners’ content is posted and consider creating a gallery of other entries. Nuture this new and thriving community that took the time to share their passions and talents with your company. After all, the primary reason to create a contest in the first place was to boost the level of engagement with your brand and ultimately develop relationships with your best customers.

Lesson #5: Call in the right experts

The world of online contests is about 180 degrees more complicated than when I was playing Chat Pat and giving away AOL hours to chatters who said Z Magic Word.  What with Rickrolling and whatever’s coming next with the old warez gang, the smartest move a marketer can make when it comes to UGC contests may be to call on the pros.  One of these is Votigo,  which uses high-engagement social media technology to come up with creative solutions for their clients, most notably contests based on user generated content. Votigo is run by an ex Yahoo – which makes me decidedly biased due to my long stint as market research vendor for the Purple.  

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Just When You Thought It Was Eco-OK To Run That Online Media Campaign …

We calculated our carbon footprint for all those red-eyes we flew to London, the SUVs we rented, the hotel rooms where we showered for 20-minutes and requested extra Egyptian cotton towels.  We even tossed in the methane from the cheeseburgers we devoured after Brett was intercepted in overtime.

And while our eco-sins are piling up like so many plastic bottles imprinted with 7’s, it didn’t occur to us until this very moment that we marketers need to calculate the environmental impact of our online media campaigns.  We felt so virtuous switching from treeware to those flashing banners and Facebook fan pages.

But now, a company called imc2 has launched Clear Sky Digital Media, a free tool that allows marketers to calculate and then offset the carbon footprint of their online media campaigns. The tool converts an online media buy into a kilowatt hour measure of the energy necessary to support its delivery. This measure is translated into carbon emissions and then used to determine the cost of buying offset credits.

Initially, I tried to calculate the carbon footprint of this blog but was quickly disheartened by the quantity of 0.0’s that appeared. Then I fantasized I was Chief Media Buyer for The Plastic Bags of America account, deep into planning the launch of a major online campaign featuring user-generated videos showing off the many healthy uses of recycled plastic bags. I picked the dimensions, selected high traffic sites like Yahoo, MSN, and AOL, then added the number of expected impressions. In seconds, Clear Sky not only calculated the carbon cost of the proposed campaign but told me how much it would cost me in green credits to offset. In this case, my Healthy Plastics campaign would create about 10 metric tons of carbon — and cost around $127 to offset.

So why do we need this new tool? Isn’t switching from forest to server farm virtuous enough? After all, an average issue of Time magazine is responsible for a quarter-pound of greenhouse gas emissions, while newsprint consumption alone is some 9.2 million tons per year. Electronics have got to be greener, yes?

Apparently Clear Sky’s mission is to simply persuade us to re-think all of our energy consumption and to start an industry-wide conversation about sustainability. Although currently not as devastating as dead trees, electronic media is having a growing impact on the environment. It’s already running neck and neck with air travel, each accounting for an estimated 2% of the world’s carbon emissions.

imc2 has raised some interesting issues — and here’s another one: Should the candidates in this year’s Presidential Election be required to calculate (and offset) the carbon emitted as a result of their campaigns? Imagine what it might cost to offset only the $45 million the money-making machine known as Barack Obama raised in the month of February alone and then spent aggressively on TV ads, particularly in Texas. A Presidential campaign carbon offset could be a significant energy investment windfall.

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“I’m A Focus Group Moderator and I Approved Obama’s New TV Commercial.

As a veteran market researcher and focus group moderator, I usually can spot Projective Exercises like Perceptual Mind Maps or ‘Design Your Ideal Product’ techniques.  Sometimes smart ad agency creatives, if they’re not too engrossed in either the Merlot or the M & Ms in the viewing room, pluck verbatims from the groups and sneak them into television commercials. There are countless anecdotes about this – like the classic McDonald’s theme “You deserve a break today”, which supposedly emerged during a focus group in Chicago.

One of the reasons to conduct focus groups is the off-chance that an expressive respondent in Cleveland will blurt out something so right on and real that it can quickly be transformed into a tagline or campaign that resonates authenticity. Another reason is to further understand what’s polarizing about potential products — in this case, fully figure out how Obama can satisfy the wants, needs and hopes of Hillary supporters who continued to passionately plead the case clear through to the bitter-end of Puerto Rico and South Dakota. And then there’s grokking to the likely toolkit of Karl Rove-style tricks that are already being emailed 24/7.

The minute I saw Barack Obama’s new television commercial “The Country I Love” now slated to appear in some 18 states starting this month, I knew that market researchers everywhere were nodding. The spot is so tightly targeted even a marketing newbie can’t miss the strategic genius in this commercial. Every sentence and shot, from the very visible flag pin to the neighborhoods ‘devastated when steel plants closed’ is perfectly calculated to resoundingly answer those persistent questions. Not only is the ghost of Hillary most decidedly flickering about but so are other symbols of white America — like Barack’s mother and grandparents. Carefully designed to be warmly reassuring with its message of Heartland working class character and values, this spot is a classic example of smoothly going from Me Media to We Media.

Much of this affecting and effective 60 seconds is subliminal.  While it’s all about heading off the negatives, it never feels anything but positive.

I only wish I’d been the Moderator facilitating those Perceptual Mind Maps.

Here’s the full transcript: (video link above)

OBAMA: I’m Barack Obama.

America is a country of strong families and strong values. My life’s been blessed by both.

I was raised by a single mom and my grandparents. We didn’t have much money, but they taught me values straight from the Kansas heartland where they grew up. Accountability and self-reliance. Love of country. Working hard without making excuses. Treating your neighbor as you’d like to be treated. It’s what guided me as I worked my way up – taking jobs and loans to make it through college.

It’s what led me to pass up Wall Street jobs and go to Chicago instead, helping neighborhoods devastated when steel plants closed.

That’s why I passed laws moving people from welfare to work, cut taxes for working families and extended health care for wounded troops who’d been neglected.

I approved this message because I’ll never forget those values, and if I have the honor of taking the oath of office as President, it will be with a deep and abiding faith in the country I love.

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When Name Generation Isn’t About Naming.

Whether it’s the R-word, job loss, midlife crisis or simply some kind of cosmic tipping point, the Guru is getting inundated with Name Generation projects for small businesses.

Normally, name generation centers on coming up with a new brand name, tagline, descriptor and sometimes promise statements, triggers or testworthy concepts for products, services and websites. In the past year, however, probably 60% of my projects have actually been about what my friend Claire calls woo-woo. That is, self-discovery, transformation and ultimately ‘getting’ who you are as a businessperson and your place in the competitive landscape.  The naming process itself, which forces a deeper dive into everything from product to sales to legal to marketing, is provoking more realistic strategies for building businesses. The ones I’ve seen — and helped guide as provocateur — are likely to have a better chance of surviving and thriving.

Planning for the future has always been a significant part of the name generation process:

How scale-able is the name?
Will the name stay relevant? (Hello, dotcom era)
Will the name allow you to migrate into new categories as the marketplace evolves?
And these days, how do you avoid being the plastic bag of the future?

But what’s happening here is more akin to: Does this name fit who I am? Who I want to be 5 years from now? A sizeable portion of these clients are seeing the future via potential names and saying: No way. I don’t want to be perceived in that light. I don’t want to try to squeeze into that slot. Or simply: That’s not me.

This afternoon, one of my all-time favorite client teams called me and rejected all of the names and taglines I presented yesterday.

I was thrilled.

This is because, by wholeheartedly engaging in the process, they learned exactly what they did not want to do or be as a business. They grappled with each of the platforms and names. Some were spot on strategically. Some were spot on creatively. Some were spot on for where they thought they wanted to be when we launched the project.

The good news: The new brand name and strategy they came up with is inspired.  It’s as tongue-in-chic and kicky as they are. Thankfully, they happen to be risk-takers with a history of significant success and the guts to pull this off with panache.

I’m psyched.  I love to watch woo-woo at work.

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