Requiem for a taste-maker

If there’s been much reaction to the short story “Raj, Bohemiam,” by Hari Kunzru, on the various taste-maker, buzz-creator, cool-ness blogs, I’ve missed it. And that’s a surprise: Given that William Gibson’s Pattern Recognition is such a touchstone in the world, you’d figure a fresh piece of fiction published in The New Yorker and set at the crossroads of cultural capital and commercial persuasion would get some attention.

If you’re interested in that sort of thing, you should read it. The narrator/protagonist is a certified Cool Guy plunged into existential crisis by an encounter with a fellow party-goer with some excellent vodka and a camera phone.

What was a personality if it wasn’t a drop-down menu, a collection of likes and dislikes? And now that my possessions were gone, what would I put in their place? Who was I without my private pressings, my limited editions, my vintage one-offs? How could I signal to potential allies across the vast black reaches of interpersonal space?

Upbeat? Well, no. Good read, though. Here’s the link.

(Big thanks to Brian K. for the tip!)

Annals of weird fandom: Erin Esurance? Really?

Through a series of clicks that started I’m not sure where, I ended up encountering this post, and this one, about what Esurance (which is an online insurance outfit of some kind) should do about the fans of its ad icon, a cartoon hottie named Erin.

The questions are the usual stuff about how Esurance should leverage the fandom. (“Find someone who can assume the persona of Erin Esurance and engage your clients with experiential marketing.”) But really, isn’t the more interesting question: What are these people thinking?

Are they really, truly fans of Erin Esurance? If so, what is the nature of that fandom, precisely? Is it just kind of kitschy? Or is this page of fan art from DeviantArt — I don’t have it in me to go through the process of seeing the blocked “mature” examples — an indicator? I’m not criticizing anybody here: If you want to draw pictures of an animated advertising mascot in her underwear, you know, that’s really your business.

But I admit I’m more curious about what motivates these fans than I am about what, if anything, Esurance ought to do about it.

Express yourself … or whoever

One of my favorite topics is the flipside of the supposed confessional, privacy-indifferent nature of Web expression: The amount of Web expression that is not only un-confessional, it’s somewhere between self-marketing and flat-out lying. So this story in today’s WSJ about people who crib from the profiles of others on social networking or dating sites made my day:

Online daters feel pressure to stand out and believe they must sell themselves like a product, say researchers at Georgetown, Rutgers and Michigan State universities who are conducting a joint study of them. “You are not making money off of somebody else’s work; you’re just trying to market yourself,” says self-confessed copier Jeff Picazio, a 40-year-old computer-systems manager in Boynton Beach, Fla.

Businesses have even cropped up to sell people elemements of a marketable personality. One, the WSJ says, “offers 12 ‘proven’ profiles for $4. Sample: ‘There is a shallowness, a fakeness to much of the “‘singles scene.”‘”

Worth reading.  

Human rights icons in the form of LEGO minifigs

Martin Luther King, Jr., originally uploaded by Dunechaser.

As the title makes clear, that’s Martin Luther King, Jr. Or rather, it is a Lego “minifig” representation of Martin Luther King Jr.

I encountered this on Flickr yesterday, and I was surprised, and interested. Particularly because Flickr photographer Dunechaser’s photostream, and related blog The Brothers Brick, contain images of other minifig representations of human-rights icons: Steve Biko, Aung San Suu Kyi, and Gandhi. Go ahead and click, it’s worth it.

Please put aside the issue of whether or not the above image actually resembles Martin Luther King, Jr. I knew that Lego made lots of minifigures — but were these manufactured and sold as MLK (and Ghandi, etc.)? I asked Dunechaser, whose real name is Andrew Becraft.

“The short answer is no,” he replied. “That said, aside from the occasional accessory created by a third-party vendor, I only use official parts manufactured by LEGO. It’s all about putting together the little plastic bricks in an interesting way — sort of like working in a medium with a limited palette, which is more challenging. Nearly all the LEGO creations you see on Flickr are original designs as well.”

So these are customized creations, as it were. Relevant Flickr pools include The Minifig Stars Pool, and the LEGO Pool.

Mr. Becraft adds: “There are certainly very rare LEGO minifigs, and since I’ve been collecting for more than 30 years, I have LEGO elements that are no longer available. LEGO occasionally produces very small runs of elements to test designs or new colors, and these can show up on the secondary market (eBay and a site called BrickLink). Naturally, elements that were never released in LEGO sets are very, very rare”

He also tells me he’s part of LEGO Ambassadors, which is described on the Lego.com site as “a community based program made up of adult LEGO hobbyists who share their product and building expertise with the world-wide LEGO community (kids and adults actively participating in a LEGO community) and the public (kids, parents, grandparents).” Details on that here. The upshot is that it’s a sort of brand-evangelism/co-promotion/people’s-marketing situation. So I suppose on some level, by posting this entry, I’m playing into the hands of LEGO’s murketing! Ah, well.

Okay, if you didn’t click above, you simply must see Gandhi. Here he is:

Mohandas K. Gandhi, originally uploaded by Dunechaser.

FYI: Guy living in Ikea for a week

According to aptly named website Mark Lives In Ikea:

Comediean/Filmmaker Mark Malkoff’s New York City apartment had to be fumigated. All of his friends have tiny studio apartments. Hotels in New York are insanely expensive. Left with few living options, Mark thought it would be fun and make an interesting video to move into an IKEA store where he’d live and sleep for a week. Never in a million years did he think IKEA would go for it, but miraculously they have a agreed.

I don’t think it’s all that surprising. Perfect example of co-promotion.

Site says he “moved in” today and will be there through Saturday. Posting videos, etc.

Via Coudal.

Dept. of: Is It Just Me, Or Is This Pretty Depressing?

NYT describes new 1-800-Flowers.Com ad campaign with consumer involvement component:

The company is holding a “Will You Marry Me?” contest to find the season’s most intriguing marriage proposal. Love-smitten users can log on to a special 1-800-Flowers.com YouTube channel starting on Monday and submit a video of themselves proposing.

The winning video will be on YouTube’s front page on Feb. 11.

Fan creativity image of the day

I’m ambivalent about Battlestar Galactica, but I do like these posters, via ffffound.

And with that, I wish you a happy holiday. See you later.

Leveraging Apple fandom — for Friendly’s

So I happened upon this glowing account of yet another consumer-generated ad stunt, this one for Friendly’s.

For the iScream campaign, consumers were encouraged to “show their love for Friendly’s ice cream or life itself” by posting original photos and videos to the www.iscreamfriendlys.com microsite.

Right, right, the usual thing. Of course it’s rare that there’s enough raw brand fandom around to make these things work, so as usual this consumer revolution is incentivized: The best photos and videos would get prizes. And those were? Apple “sprees” of $10,000, $5,000, and $2,500, plus a bunch of secondary prizes like iPods and Macs. (And a few Canon products.)

I guess $10,000 worth of Friendly’s ice cream wasn’t going to cut it.

The democratization of product placement

You know what all those amateur-hour grassroots-creative videos on YouTube are missing? Paid product placement!

Luckily, an outfit called Brandfame now exists, to broker deals between people making homebrew mini-films, and corporations. They are “the premier product placement agency for video-sharing web sites.” Maybe if those Billiam guys get their product line off the ground, they can be clients.

Here’s the Brandfame site. Via Influx. I’m definitely going to keep an eye on it.

Meanwhile, maybe I should disintermediate and offer a cash prize to the first person who mentions Murketing.com in a YouTube video. Hmm…

Not enough Murketing in your life? Fast Company can help

Lately I’ve done some back-page columns for Fast Company, which is now edited by Robert Safian, who I’ve worked with in the past at American Lawyer, SmartMoney, Fortune, and Money. I guess I like working with him! And also with my editor on these columns, Denise Martin, with whom I’ve crossed paths at almost as many magazines.

If all that weren’t exciting enough (for me, I mean), they’re now giving my columns the rubric, “Murketing.” And the theme of the new one will be familiar to readers of this site, though perhaps expressed a little better than usual, thanks to being, you know, actually edited.

Nothing thrills advertising experts more these days than advertising made by…nonexperts. Clunky buzz phrases jostle for pole position to describe the trend — “user-generated content,” “citizen marketing,” “co-creation”–but the gist is always the same: The future of advertising belongs to consumers. Advertising Age even made “the consumer” its latest pick for ad agency of the year, arguing that “the most compelling content” is being made not by creative directors, but by “amateurs working with digital video cameras and Macs, and uploading onto YouTube.” …

Read the rest here, or in the October issue of Fast Company.

Branding Billiam

As you probably know, one of the questions posed via YouTube video in the recent Democratic debate, came from a snowman figure, with a Mr. Bill-like voice, who asked about global warming. What is the significance of this? Is it the end of decorum? The dawn of a new era of interactive accountability?

Don’t be absurd. It’s a branding event!

The snowman has a name, which is Billiam. According to the WSJ, the two “unemployed” brothers who created Billiam:

have done interviews with local television, snagged a spot on the Wisconsin Public Radio game show “Whad’Ya Know?” and are working on a line of “Billiam the Snowman” T-shirts. They’ve also launched a “Billiam the Snowman” presidential exploratory committee — online….

The Hamel brothers couldn’t be happier about the attention. At last count, the question has been watched 130,000 times on YouTube. “It means our 15 minutes of fame may stretch to 30,” says Nathan, 26 years old, who created the snowman with his 23-year-old brother, Greg, who does the voice.

Once again, an example of co-promotion: Citizen-whateverism that’s not about participating in a brand or an event or a process. (After all, global warming questions are hardly a breakthrough or novelty in presidential debates.) It’s about latching onto a brand or an event or a process that seems likely to draw attention, and stealing some of that attention for yourself, and your own idea or cultural offering … however threadbare that may be.

Hello Kitschy

In Consumed: Domo: How Internet jokes helped a Japanese ad mascot make its way into American malls.

This fall, the cable channel Nicktoons Network will begin showing a series of two-minute stop-motion animation shorts featuring a brown, squarish creature with arms and legs and a mouth permanently thrown wide open to reveal sharp white teeth. Like any other cute character on a kid-friendly TV show, this little fellow, whose name is Domo, is perfect for the crossover into licensed merchandise. What’s unusual about Domo, however, is that he arrived in the U.S. retail marketplace well ahead of his debut on American television. He’s on T-shirts and accessories at Hot Topic, greeting cards at many Barnes & Noble locations and grocery stores and is expected to be sold as a plush doll at F.Y.E. stores. Then again, Domo is a merchandisable star not so much because he has a TV show in the works but because of his track record in what is arguably the most potent entertainment form of our time: clowning around on the Internet….

Continue reading at the NYT site, or at the Boston Globe site.
Additional links: Domo Nation site, includes the original Domo films; Domo on Flickr; Domo on DeviantArt; Domo at Hot Topic; Domo/kitten image referenced in column.

iSelfPromote

Business Week’s marketing blog says there is already a “variety of user-generated ads” on YouTube for the iPhone. The lesson extracted from this is that: “the power of YouTube is amazing” and “every brand must wake up to this.” Given how many times I’ve read that exact same epiphany, I’m surprised there are brands that haven’t, but anything is possible.

Anyway, I’d like to point out what’s actually interesting about user-generated ads for a product that isn’t on the market yet. This is the issue of motivation. Is this brand evangelism, or some other expression of product fandom? If so, that’s pretty weird, given that the grass-roots ad makers haven’t tried the iPhone, and know nothing more about its quality than what Steve Jobs has asserted. The idea that people would not only scramble to buy the new new thing without hearing any unbiased opinions from trusted friends (isn’t that what’s driving the big word of mouth revolution? that we trust our friends, not companies or traditional authority figures?), but actually create promotional content on behalf of that thing, would seem to be evidence that consumer manipulation has reached a new level — gullibility 2.0, perhaps.

The more likely explanation, I suspect, is co-promotion. A year ago, in Consumed, I wrote about Firefox’s user-generated ad contest, in the context of the popular marketing concept of “co-creation,” which refers to ways that companies and brands “allow” consumers to collaborate with them. As noted there, the winners of Firefox’s contest both happened to be people eyeing a career in the making of ads and films, and who pretty obviously saw enterting the contest as a way to promote themselves by skillfully promoting Firefox. Thus: co-promotion.

Indeed, it looks some, and maybe a lot, of the “user-generated” ads for the iPhone are connected to a similar contest from a company called ViralMedium — “your chance to show the world you’ve got the vision to write a script, cast your actors, and throw in some mind-blowing effects for the most revolutionary product to come along in decades, the Apple iPhone.”

It’s not clear whether ViralMedium was hired by Apple to do this, or is simply jumping onto the iPhone bandwagon to promote itself. In any case, I suspect that anybody taking the time to make a home-brew iPhone ad basically recognizes that the product is going to be a big deal, swathed in hype and attention — and they want in on that. It’s a way to participate in what will probably qualify as at least a low-grade cultural phenomenon, so that when people get around to searching for all things related to the iPhone, these grass-roots ads will be among those things. If one of them is good, it’ll get forwarded around, and the creator will become Internet-famous at the very least. My guess, in other words, is that this is not about evangelizing for Apple’s brand. It’s about leeching off of Apple’s brand.

Which is both more interesting than the mere fact of yet more unsanctioned ads on YouTube, and also (I can only assume) more important for brand managers to understand.

Notes on a transparent apology

I’m still snickering over the recent comments of Fake Steve Jobs at about famous PR guy Steve Rubel. Rubel is one of these people who’s turned himself into a guru by touting the mighty Web and how it’s, you know, changing everything.

For example, it’s a great opportunity to “empower customer evangelists.” Actually, I first became aware of Rubel when he was talking up some project he’d come up with for Vespa, which basically involved “empowering” some Vespa fans to blog about Vespas, under the auspices of the company that makes Vespas. “What better way to evangelize the benefits of scootering than empowering existing customers to tell prospective scooterati why Vespa rocks?” he summarized. The two synthetic blogs that resulted were called Vespaway.com and Vespaquest.com. I kept an eye on them for a while, but then I forgot about them — and it’s not clear how that experiment panned out, since both those URLs lead to 404 Not Found error pages.

Still, Rubel ended up with a column in Ad Age, and a more prestigious job at Edelman. Probably he had some other success stories that I happen not to be aware of.

Anyway, one of his other big themes is transparency. Fake Steve Jobs finds something a little, uh, unconvincing about this. And then goes on the following rampage:

Apparently Rubel blabbered on Twitter that he doesn’t read PC Mag and in fact tosses his copy into the trash when it arrives. Smooth move for a PR guy right? [PC Magazine editor in chief Jim] Louderback blasted back here saying that since Mr. Bigshot PR man and blogger Steve Rubel of Edelman PR has so little respect for PC Mag, then he would start ignoring pitches from Edelman clients.

That in turn prompted this hilarious groveling open letter from Rubel to “Mr. Louderback” and everyone at Ziff Davis, which owns PC Mag. It’s really a must-read, if only because Rubel is one of these guys who’s been going around saying how the mainstream media doesn’t matter anymore, and how blogs are displacing all the big newspapers and magazines, blah blah blah … but here he is taking one deep down the windpipe on behalf of his clients, who no doubt carved him a new one for pissing off PC Mag.

From there it gets a little crude for the family-friendly environment of Murketing.com, so proceed at your own risk. And needless to say, I don’t necessarily endorse the views of Fake Steve.

But in this instance, I did find them amusing. I just thought I’d be transparent about that.

“Easy” answers? Got one?

I remember when I saw these things popping up in Staples stores: The “Easy Button” from the chain’s ad campaign. You could buy yourself a piece of Staples’ branding efforts. Who would do that? I remember thinking: If these sell, it would be a great Consumed.

But then I never heard anything else about it, never knew anybody who bought one, never saw or heard references to anybody buying one. And of course I never bothered to look into it, since I had plenty of other things to write about.

Well, now comes a piece in Brandweek saying that Staples has sold 1.5 million of them! They cost $5 apiece.

The piece also mentions people buying gnomes that Travelocity is selling. But really that’s just something with a life of its own that Travelocity appropriated for its branding, so I think it’s different. You can buy a gnome without having a handle on Travelocity or its marketing, but the Easy Button is a product that exists only as an extension of advertising. (So far as I know, anyway.)

Brandweek compares the Easy Buttons to Hess trucks, and quotes an ad guy involved in the campaign that spawned the buttons saying: “It’s a testament to very successful advertising … an elegant metaphor for the fact that everyone is frustrated as hell about how hard it is to get things done today.”

Is he right about that? Why do people buy these? If you’ve bought one or know somebody who has, please explain: murketing AT robwalker DOT net. (Or in the comments.)

Regarding the picture above: I was looking for an image to swipe for this post and found this guy’s Flickr set about hacking the “Easy Button” into a garage-door opener. (That’s step 15 pictured.) Clever!