The ABC has always been Amateur Hour on grooming. Its station promotions are the other weakness; sickly imitations of the commercial networks’ urgent demands for attention. I’m not suggesting they get better at copying commercial style promotions. Quite the reverse. The problem is an unwillingness to experiment with alternative advertising formats - testimonials, mash-ups, pointers, cross-promotion and snatches. Spare us the insult of needless repetition.
Although their programs treat the audience with great respect, (it’s so nice not to be talked down to) the advertisements they use to promote those programs remain formulaic in scheduling and format. Perhaps there remains some distaste for the notion of advertising, even if it is advertising one’s own excellent content.
ABC Radio National has had tremendous success with Podcasting. But they continue to promote only the forthcoming week’s programs. They could now promote all the content that exists on their web site as well (usually four weeks’ worth of history). Some more creativity in promotion would be welcome. The bad hair we can live with.
Well that’s convenient. My home town Perth has won the right to host the inaugural World Blog Awards, narrowly beating Seville, Manchester and Kansas City (a long fourth). These will be held on Sunday 31st August, 2008 at a venue to be announced. More details as they come to hand.
Gene Weingarten won a Pulitzer Prize for his feature article in the Washington Post, Pearls before Breakfast. It discusses a little social experiment the paper conducted. They convinced Joshua Bell, one of the world’s leading violinists to busk at a Washington Metro station, curious to know if commuters would react to wonderful violin pieces wonderfully played on a Stradivarius. Or would they just keep walking? I think you know the answer.
I couldn’t help thinking that another level of the same experiment played out when the Post published the article; itself a beautiful piece of delicately crafted work. Did people pause and read the article or did they just keep turning the pages on the way to the Business Section and the Sports Section?
Now here we are on a third level; an endorsement of a comment on an experiment. On an obscure marketing blog with a modest readership. But that’s not the point. The point is, here is the article.
There is another irony. If, as the article suggests, beauty is properly acknowledged when it is in an appropriate context, a well regarded writer in a famous newspaper is the contextual equivalent of a virtuoso in a concert hall. But he probably deserved a Pulitzer anyway.
I saw a great use of the Telstra Phone Words product this week. Phone Words is the add-on service that lets you use a 13 or 1300 number in conjunction with a word. Makes it easy to remember a phone number. It’s particularly useful in radio advertising because the listener has a good chance of remembering the number. Er, the number-name.
The one I liked was a Day Spa business called Blush. The Phone Word was sign-written all over their limosine, used as part of their premium packages. Nice touch.
When I read 13DaySpa I imagined a Day Spa that lasted 13 days and I thought, that’s about how long I’d need. It cemented the name; here I am blogging about it.
Blush own the URL also, so clients who type in 13dayspa.com.au will be able to find them (it’s not set up yet though). This is an excellent integration of signwriting, phone and web marketing. Too often people treat their marketing channels as separate. I encourage clients to feature their phone number prominently on a web site. Web sites are a browse that needs to be turned into a sale. That’s much easier to do over the phone.
The price you get for winegrapes is one thing, but the other thing that really matters is what yield you get off that hectare of land. When you multiply the two together you can compare the worth of different varieties and different parts of the country.
So I recently came across a database of West Australian vineyards who are yet to sell their grapes. It includes full data on 33 blocks, including the price the buyer expected to have to pay the vineyard as well as the yield expected.
Sauvignon Blanc and Semillon are the two most lucrative crops, with Chenin Blanc close behind, because of its high yields. Cabernet Sauvignon and Merlot sit at the bottom. “Can’t go wrong planting cabernet or chardonnay they told us; premium varieties…”
Cabernet and merlot also had the widest range of prices; with some vineyards prepared to sell even low yielding grapes for $700 a tonne. This includes Margaret River fruit, one of the best GI’s in Australia and internationally rated. That price is not sustainable; those people will be selling up if it doesn’t change real quick.
Looking at the different regions shows a substantial spread; Margaret River blocks ranged between $9,000 a hectare and $13,000; no better than less prestigous areas like Manjimup and Pemberton. Land cost is of course much higher at Margaret River.
I guess the only other point to make is that operating costs for a vineyard run around $7,000 a hectare. Then there are overheads and capital items… If you’ve borrowed to plant a vineyard, the interest could easily be $6,000 per hectare. You do the maths.
By the way, I know where to get 160 tonnes of quality shiraz grapes in case you’re looking…
The fourth best thing about Japan, after Japanese ladies, Cupie Mayonnaise and the kotatsu is the attitude to customer service. Americans can give good service, but it’s different: it’s good because they want you to tip them. Not so much a service as a transaction. Australian service is better than it used to be, but people still confuse being of service with being subservient. Grudging niceness. Convict heritage.
The Japanese seem to understand better than most cultures that people like to be made to feel special. Attention to detail, extraordinary packaging and an unmatched willingness to correct any defect or problem in their product.
There is a tradition in Japanese retail of greeting the customer when they walk into your shop. The greeting Irrashaimase or its more casual form Irrashai rings out a million times a minute across the land. Such a simple thing to do. Acknowledge the customer the second they walk in your door. It carries more than one message: ‘I know you’re here. Thank you for coming. I’ll be with you as soon as I can’. Part of our unwillingness to do this in Western cultures I think stems from the ‘rude to shout’ value system - the staff are usually not next to the entrance. But if I had any retail clients, I’d be recommending public greetings as Standard Operating Procedure.
Businesses in Australia seem to be under the impression that once you’ve arrived in their store they’ve made a sale. Maybe so, but that doesn’t mean they’ve made you a customer. Every time I go to a coffee shop or restaurant I am re-assessing their worth; will I go back there or not? I think most people work on that principal.
Location is important, of course. But I don’t shop regularly for groceries at the closest supermarket. Nor do I regularly use the closest bottle shop. Because I don’t like those stores and I have a choice. My local coffee shop has my business because I am recognised when I go there. The little Indonesian girl sings out my name in greeting when I arrive and farewells me by name when I leave. And I have a rapport of some sort with the pretty girl that doesn’t smile enough and the shy ethnic ladies who work in food prep.
My third visit to a nearby Dome Coffee House earlier today will be my last. Blank-faced processing by the guy behind the counter. Not a single extra word taking my order or delivering my coffee. I realise there is a skills shortage but I don’t think it’s as serious as the training shortage.
I was interested to learn about the use of Adwords in testing potential names for books. Tim Ferriss found the name “Four Hour Workweek” the stand-out result in his Adwords testing and had a #1 bestseller. I guess he also tested “You Can Be Rich and Lazy If You Buy My Book”.
To be honest though, I was more impressed with the name Cathryn Jakobson Ramin chose for her book. It’s on the subject of memory loss in middle aged people. Come on! Guess what she called it!
Henry Ford is credited with the insight “I know half of my advertising works really well. I just don’t know which half”. The success of Google, the leader in online advertising, is largely due to the impressive accountability that they give advertisers.
Having done the online training course provided by Google, I sat for (and passed) the Google Advertising Professionals exam. The course covered Adwords, cost per click marketing (CPC), cost per impression (CPM), pay per click advertising (PPC), contextual advertising, placement advertising and a slew of other web marketing devices (WMDs; I made that one up).
It all amounts to a fantastic amount of control for the advertiser.
You can start with a tiny budget. Try that on television.
Not only can you select individual web sites that are of interest to your market, you can target based on demographics and/or keywords. In the case of search marketing, you can confine your advertising spend to people in the Perth area who type “model cars” and exclude people who search for “models”, though why you would do that is beyond me.
The system rewards relevance. If you write ads which contain words irrelevant to the web site you send them to, your cost of advertising increases.
You can experiment with different campaign wording and compare the effectiveness of alternatives. Most of this experimentation costs you not a cent.
Having done all that, you can then monitor and adjust at a micro level every aspect of every alternative whenever you want. For example, you can increase your advertising on the weekends or in a particular time-slot. This contrasts sharply with the way NineMSN sells advertising for example. Theirs is a conventional media package: Buy this product, pay this amount, call us if you need a change.
Serious advertisers can also use the Google API to automate keyword changes and daily budgets.
Finally, you can track the conversion rate of every aspect of a web campaign. How effective was each banner ad, Adwords ad, Yahoo ad … in generating an online sale or a page view? Then compare each to your cost of advertising. It’s a system which combines with Google Analytics to give you a comprehensive method of measuring what works and what does not.
Here is one of the sixteen AdWord variations Henry and I are using to launch the Model T:
Ford: Universal Car
Model T; Open Touring & Roadsters
$300 only. 20HP 4 cylinder. Black.
www.ford.com
Call to Action: let me know if you’d like a hand using online advertising. In Australia: 040 990 8133. In the US, 714 656 4001.
There should be only two brands in Western Australian wine marketing. Margaret River and Western Australia. Although it is possible to market your wine as belonging to your local area (appellation/Geographic Indication/GI) this is a marketing blunder and wineries located outside Margaret River should follow a different path.
Margaret River has done a great job establishing a brand. The small number of pioneers who won international awards generated momentum and attracted a larger number of followers. These included well established West Australian companies, behemoths like BRL Hardy, a string of smaller cellar door operators and many entrepreneurs. All up, a great mix of different talents. That’s enough about Margaret River. Now I’m going to talk about ‘West Australia’, by which I mean, non-Margaret River.
West Australian wines are not going to cut it marketing themselves with their GIs. Although they make some extremely good wines, theirs are small and unknown GIs nationally and internationally. They just do not have a critical mass for marketing purposes. A different marketing strategy is needed that lets them market themselves as a coherent entity.
The Wine Industry Association of WA understands this problem and with the help of some state government funding and support from some corporates has established a brand as an export marketing tool. There are two problems with this. One: the positioning is not right. “Dominion of wine” says nothing about West Australia and frankly, is pompous. And don’t get me started on Australia-West.
Two: most of the WA wineries continue to market themselves on an appellation basis, calling themselves for example a ‘Great Southern’ wine, a ‘Swan Valley’ wine or wait for it, ‘Peel’.
These two problems have an overlapping solution. The great advantage Australia has as a wine-making culture is its willingness to innovate. The great advantage WA has as a wine-making region is terrific diversity of styles. It’s partly explained by being really old geologically and really big in area. A tremendous soil diversity exists and this has consequences for wine styles.
The ’story’ of West Australian wines should be diversity and innovation, not life-style, beaches or natural environment. Here’s how this positioning overlaps the appellation issue: if you market yourself as ‘Western Australian’ you are allowed to blend wines from different regions and sub-regions in that wine. You can mix Swan Valley shiraz with cool climate shiraz from the Great Southern. This leads to a complexity you cannot get with a Swan Valley or Great Southern wine alone.
This should be the positioning of West Australian wines: Adventures in winemaking. A willingness to introduce complexity through regional diversity and a willingness to innovate with winemaking. That positioning works as well in domestic marketing as it does in export. It’s an easy-to-understand story and it gives people a reason to buy a West Australian wine.
Like many who spend time in Second Life I have virtual friends, virtual business partners and at least one virtual lover. These people live in Europe and the US and are walled off from my real life friends and business partners. That wall has a new crack in it.
New World Notes reports on a brilliant piece of development that portends one of the most disruptive impacts in the history of human experience. A science-fiction turned reality that will horrify some and delight others. Me, for instance.
A Georgia Tech Masters student, Tobias Lang has integrated Second Life and real video; well big deal I hear you say. Stick with me.
From New World Notes: “They’ve also taken a headset display and mounted it with a video camera and a tracking sensor. The sensor monitors the wearer’s motion and position, while the display feeds Second Life video into the headset. The result? Life-size SL avatars that seem to be standing in front of the headset wearer.”
We’re not talking about cartoon characters here. These are real people who normally communicate with each other using virtual worlds. Worlds which give them youthful avatars, a range of spectacular clothing and animations that let them fly, levitate, blow smoke out of their ears and dance like Fred Astaire.
Let’s assume this technology can be made to work in real time; bandwidth & processing issues.
It means that by wearing a headset, (you’ll feel like a geek but you’ll get over it) you’ll be able to bring your virtual friends into your home, your office and your car. They’ll be able to talk to you in real time of course; they already do that in Second Life.
Did I mention that the average avatar is built like a supermodel and is anatomically correct?
If as I suspect, a visiting avatar turns out to be more effective at selling you a bank loan than a telephone call or a video conference, a very large amount of business is going to be done in your own lounge room. A virtual salesman will sit on your couch, demonstrate the products and answer your questions.
Girlfriend coming round for dinner? Invite over a virtual string quartet to serenade you in 3D.
Family distributed around the world? If you can handle the time differences you can still have a meal together … *wonders about eating with a headset on*
Not an entirely bad thing; travel by avatar instead of dragging a ton of steel, rubber and gas with you.
I was wrong when I wrote two years ago that Second Life would be as influential as the Internet. Its social impact will surpass the Internet and require the development of a new etiquette to manage the real/virtual divide.
And I wouldn’t be writing it off as a business ap just yet. Here’s Tobias doing proof of concept:
Bad Hair Day on Radio National
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