Facebook or Macy's Parade

Saw a little item on NYT today. The topic: How virtual our lives have become, yet how face-to-face interaction remains a natural wonder. No logging in with user name and password required. Smile. Talk. Enjoy. Online social networks help us enhance and expand human networks. We benefit from access to information, cultures, interests and knowledge that each of us is willing to share. So now that the parade has passed, flickr has lots of colorful photos posted and available for you to see, some of them from Thursday. A search of Macy's Parade yields 7,246 results as of tonight.

Simplicity as Brand

One of my favorite brands is Moots. The company builds bicycle frames and components available in one color: bead-blasted titanium. Think no frills, functionality and simplicity like the iPod. New Moots titanium frames fetch about $2,500, give or take a few hundred dollars. The Steamboat Springs, Colorado company is small, competing in a global marketplace where Taiwanese factories stamp out frames for huge U.S. brands. Moots spends roughly zero on advertising (not even Google ad words) yet has managed to sell in the U.S. and abroad for more than 25 years. That's brand equity. Customers (like me) carry the Moots message without hesitation. It doesn't hurt that the products are beautifully designed and handbuilt. But Moots doesn't just make bike products. It creates relationships. From the first interaction to post-sale communications, a bonding between company and consumer occurs over time. And consumers remember. What other new product today comes out of the box affixed with a tag hand-initialed and dated by the people who had a hand along the way in making it? Two years ago, Moots invited owners to submit essays on what they loved about their two-wheeled machines. The company personalized its annual product catalog through these stories and the faces of storytellers. This week, Moots launched its newly designed website, complete with a riders' forum section. Simple. Like its product. As word spreads, the loyalists will post. The curious will read. And converts will be won. Small can compete with big.

Kindling? Are They Kidding?

At first glance, the Amazon Kindle looks like a modern Etch A Sketch in eggshell white with keyboard and wireless features. Kinda ugly yet neat. But the product's name, value proposition and target audience elude me.

First, the name: Kindle? As in to ignite? Imagine a Kindle product launch after the holiday shopping season. Any spark? We probably keep reading our trusty printed tomes, unworried about fumbling with them in the airport security checkpoint (after removing our shoes, belt, jacket, laptop from briefcase, cellphone from pocket).

Second, the value proposition: 90,000 titles and up to 200-book capacity. Not terribly exciting on its face -- who is going to read 200 books in the next year? Next 5 years? Most of us like to consume books one at a time. Then display them on our shelves. No such thing as novel shuffle or party mix. However, what may bode well for the product is the ability for a user to purchase a book wirelessly now -- bingo, the impulse buy after reading a great review or getting a recommedation from a friend. That's consumer magic. No waiting for the FedEx truck.

Third and most puzzling to me is the target audience: Who is Amazon going after? They've got great market data so I can't doubt them. Clearly the under 30 market is wireless. But are they book buyers and newspaper consumers? Why read blogs on Kindle when you can read them on your mobile. Feels like a 35-49 demographic play. I read the NYT on my Blackberry Pearl while out and about. A single news column fits on the screen perfectly, and I carry it around in my pocket. My eye scrolls down news columns just like it would on a newspaper page. But I don't spend hours. Just enough time to scratch the information itch. No, I don't want to read the newspaper on a tablet. I'll buy one, thank you. Fifty cents to a buck, if out of town.

So, what are books? An escape. A chance to get away for an hour or so. Sometimes a vacation. Sometimes brain food before sleep. The intimacy of reading and savoring the page are part of the experience. Making dogears. Scratching notes in the margins. Going back to revisit a key passage. Seeing how close you are to the end and wishing for more -- or sensing relief about finishing.

Kindle? I'm not feeling the fire.

But an Etch A Sketch may end up under the tree this year. I'm a sucker for red.

Email : Losing out to TXT and IM?

Slate this week included a catchy piece that asks if those of us who remember how cutting-edge and cute Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan were in 1998's "You've Got Mail," will abandon email for more popular texting and IM of our children's generation. The rise of Facebook and Myspace, combined with texting (wildly popular in Asia while the U.S. was still spell-checking Yahoo outbox missives) has a few techies wondering if email will die. For social interaction, the answer is yes -- at least as we know email today. For business, hell no. Here's why. Staying current with the ebb and flow of your buddies' movements and their free time requires 24/7 connectivity. Voice, text, IM. It's an A.D.D. sort of world - quick exchanges with little or no punctuation: what up? r u going? ttyl. For 9-5 office mates, it's email and structure. The line between "knowing now" and "checking email" is a firewall that divides our personal lives from our professional lives. The line blurs when your google email forwards to your mobile, but I've been in offices where 90% of employees under 30 juggle IM dialog boxes, emoticons and trusty but dry Microsoft Outlook. It's second nature. They move back and forth between fun and duty. Email outside of work? Only when they have to send resumes if the employer won't accept video resumes posted on You Tube.

Internet Radio Meets Digital Player

It took longer than predicted, but availability for portable digital music devices from Slacker was announced this week in advance of Black Friday, the largest U.S. consumer spending day of the year. Slacker said it's taking online pre-orders for players that will ship in mid-December. But no retail sales yet where a hands-on experience is how Apple has done marvelously with the iPod and iPhone. Instead, Slacker will market directly to their 1 million desktop radio subscribers first. One executive said the company hopes to sell 100,000 units. First thing, they should start posting more product photgraphy ASAP. The image above is making the rounds this week. Deeper in the Slacker website are photographs of users and recording artists holding the players, but you have to hunt to find them. Competing for mindshare in a space with Apple and Microsoft's Zune requires loyal consumers or a product too hot to ignore. We need to see more of it.

Really?

In the world of advertising agencies, awards are now bestowed for the act of creative planning. This from an organization of creative agency planners. Its mission statement below. I am not making this up.

"The Account Planning Group exists to promote and celebrate excellence in creative thinking. We believe that creativity is the key to differentiated, successful brands. The emphasis is on creative, rather than merely disciplined, buttoned down thinking. We argue that if exciting ideas govern a brand and its communication, that brand or business will enjoy greater success. We believe that the planning discipline can be applied to any and all marketing and communication issues and channels. The APG champions new thinking by enabling new publications on the subject of planning, and celebrates the practice of excellent planning in its biennual Creative Planning Awards. The APG is a not-for-profit organisation run for and by its membership."

Disciplined, buttoned down thinking? I usually do mine in a mock turtle neck...

Dick Pound and WADA

Dick Pound draws blood, ripping professional baseball on its drug testing program. Top section from tomorrow's NYT from a story out of Madrid, where doping experts are meeting: After years of criticizing Major League Baseball for what he called useless, toothless drug-testing policies, Dick Pound, chairman of the World Anti-Doping Agency, chastised the sport again Friday, saying that Barry Bonds’s indictment on perjury charges confirmed that the league’s doping problems were “out of control. The professional leagues have consistently denied they are cheating their public and putting their athletes at risk by saying there is no problem, there is no drug use,” Pound said. “When forced to acknowledge that there is, and these investigations are starting to show that it is really widespread, they are turning the other way. We’ve seen this before, in cycling, and we all know what happened to that sport — it nearly destroyed itself.” Here is story in L.A. Times on Pound's comments

MLB : Messy Little Business

Bud Selig must want to spit. Once he opens his eyes, that is. After beaming at the World Series about how Major League Baseball had its best year at the gate, he now must go silent on the Barry Bonds matter. Asterisks, denials, hypocrisy. Professional baseball knows it needs steroids to go away, with Barry as the black hat. Professional cycling is years ahead of American sports in its fight against doping and its reconciliation with fans and sponsors. An ugly chapter, but the right thing to do. MLB needs to adopt a real doping / testing program so real athletic talent is rewarded.

Take a Mulligan

Post-Thanksgiving, the marketing bean website goes live. The site was unveiled on Labor Day this year before the corporate world came calling. After a quick retooling, the site goes back up and I begin doing work in my free time for selected clients.