Over at Seth Godin's always-insightful blog, there's this great list of attributes essential to a successful marketer (now, how many of these are applicable to the leaders of N-GEN?):

The marketer's attitude

Traditional job requirements: show up, sober. Listen to the boss, lift heavy objects.

Here's what I'd want if I were hiring a marketer:

• You're relentlessly positive. You can visualize complex projects and imagine alternative possible outcomes. It's one thing to talk about thinking outside the box, it's quite another to have a long history of doing it successfully. You can ride a unicycle, or can read ancient Greek.
• Show me that you've taken on and completed audacious projects, and run them as the lead, not as a hanger on. I'm interested in whether you've become the best in the world at something, and completely unimpressed that you are good at following instructions (playing Little League baseball is worth far less than organizing a non-profit organization).
• You have charisma in that you easily engage with strangers and actually enjoy selling ideas to others. You are comfortable with ambiguity, and rarely ask for detail or permission. Test, measure, repeat and go work just fine for you.
• You like to tell stories and you're good at it. You're good at listening to stories, and using them to change your mind.
• I'd prefer to hire someone who is largely self-motivated, who finds satisfaction in reaching self-imposed goals, and is willing to regularly raise the bar on those goals.
• You're intellectually restless. You care enough about new ideas to read plenty of blogs and books, and you're curious enough about your own ideas that you blog or publish your thoughts for others to react to. You're an engaging writer and speaker and you can demonstrate how the right visuals can change your story.
• And you understand that the system is intertwined, that your actions have side effects and you not only care about them but work to make those side effects good ones.

The cool thing about this list is that it's not dependent on what you were born with or who you know. Or how much you can lift.

Link

MIT Advertising Lab has interesting commentary on Burger King's use of video games. Here's a quote:

Burger King ... made the decision to sell the games at $3.99, an extremely low price for disc-based (as opposed to downloadable) Xbox games but, as it turned out, a potentially much better price than “free.”
By choosing to charge even a small sum, Burger King seems to have sent a message to consumers that its games had real value, unlike other advergames they might have played and been disappointed by in the past. Burger King further supported the games with a strong marketing campaign that included advertisements shown during Saturday Night Live and during NFL games. All this sent a very clear message to consumers: “There is something of value waiting for you at Burger King.”

This is actually one of a series of articles abstracting the book Changing the Game: How Video Games Are Transforming the Future of Business

MIT AdLab article Part 1
Part 2
Part 3

New research into the effects of stimuli on consumer focus reveal a direct link between scents and purchases.

From Canadian Broadcasting Corp:

The mere whiff of a chocolate chip cookie can cause a shopper to stray off-course, abandoning their budget for unplanned, impulse purchases, according to a study on consumer behaviour.

The study, published in the February issue of the Journal of Consumer Research, suggests stimuli that trigger the appetite can cause consumers to opt for immediate pleasures.

"We found that an appetitive stimulus not only affects behaviour in a specific behaviour domain but induces a shared state that propels a consumer to choose smaller-sooner options in unrelated domains," said researcher Xiuping Li, of the National University of Singapore, in the study.

"The findings demonstrated that an appetitive stimulus could induce a general motivational state, called the hot state, which focuses one's attention on the immediate environment."

Two tests involving students at the University of Toronto were conducted. In the first study, participants were asked to select photographs of either food or nature for use in a magazine. Researchers later asked participants if they would prefer playing a lottery that pays out a lower amount sooner or one that pays a higher amount at a later date.

The study found that those who were shown the photos of food were nearly 20 percentage points more likely to select the lottery with the smaller jackpot.

In a second test, researchers found that 67 per cent of women assigned to a room with a hidden cookie-scented candle were more likely to make an impulse sweater purchase, even when told they were on a strict budget. By comparison, only 17 per cent of women in a room without the scented candle decided to make the impulse buy.

The stimulus prompted participants to lose sight of future goals, focusing instead on the present, the study said.

"The scent of the appetitive stimulus led to reduced happiness with remote gains, which implied that participants in a present-oriented state were less sensitive to future values," the study said.

Li noted that retailers might use the findings to create an atmosphere that would entice shoppers to stay longer.

"If retailers want to push their customers to shop more rather than stay longer, they should not only maintain a pleasant environment but also an environment full of temptations and excitement," Li said in a release.

Juice Analytics has a nice (quick-reading) little set of tips on how to avoid inflicting death-by-PowerPoint on your audience. Here's an obvious, but all-too-needed example:

Bad:

Better:

Full article at Juice Analytics

For more on how to use your Power(point)s for good instead of evil, see Presentation Zen.

These people claim to have created an ad banner creation and submission engine.

This looks quite similar to what SpotRunner has done with cheap cable advertising.

AdReady has made creating a sophisticated online advertising campaign incredibly easy.
Select a performance ad template and customize it for your business in minutes.
Target your audience, set your budget, and access the web's largest publishers with only a few clicks.
Watch your website traffic and your sales grow while leveraging AdReady's optimization technology.

Create your custom ads at no cost — all you need is a standard AdReady account (which is free).

Minimum campaign is $100, and there are no set-up fees, no minimum term and no contracts.

You pay only for the media campaigns you run — a major credit card is all you need to get started.

You can also upgrade to a premium account, giving you the power of dedicated account management from the AdReady experts.

It's official - banners are commodities.
Link

Ad Age had this last week:

For "Paranormal State," a ghost-themed series premiering on A&E this week, a billboard using technology manufactured by Holosonic transmits an "audio spotlight" from a rooftop speaker so that the sound is contained within your cranium.

That's generated some privacy-related discussion on Slashdot, as well as the usual mentions of Minority Report.

Advertising Age abstract (subscription required to read full article)



Holosonic press release

Here's a piece from Church of the Customer about a Belgian beer brand.

A cult brand like Westvleteren is created by people religiously devoted to their craft. The monks in Belgium are serious about their business, but they do not obsess over maximizing profit or monetizing eyeballs. They do not do brand extension. They embrace scarcity as a necessary component of quality, thereby ensuring future value. Just as the Wii is a cult hit because it is an excellent product that's not easy to buy, so too with an unlabeled beer that's been religiously produced for 170 years.


After all, cult is the root of culture. It is culture that creates a cult brand.

Link

TracyLocke's Joanna Peña-Bickley is #15 on the Silicon Alley People's Choice list!

Congrats to Joanna, who's been an insightful commentator on our business as long as I've been reading her.

People's Choice Link

Joanna's Blog

Another hat-tip to Mark Van Duinen!

In the tradition of the "Second Life is Over" meme of last summer, here's a post on the current head-scratching around mobile marketing, specifically at the MMA meeting earlier this month.

Quote:

Marketers are balking at shifting money into mobile advertising because they don't understand its potential at a fundamental level, said Renee Borkowski, senior VP of database marketing at Arc Worldwide. Marketers "are still struggling with their own mobile phones," Borkowski said. She said the result is a "true gap" between what the industry sees as the mobile phone's future and the realities of dealing with prospective marketers.

Looks like another case of folks who don't understand the technology using it badly, then moving on to the Next Big Thing.

Link

Wired's Chris Anderson has been ruminating on the economics of Free or Nearly Free on his blog.
Here's one insightful post on the various ways Free has been working - from RyanAir's 5 Pounds airfares to Google's free-to-consumer services.
It's beginning to look like all businesses need to think hard about what happens when their product approaches Free - through automation, commodotization, competition & outsourcing, whatever. The real issue seems to be - what exactly is your product anyway?

In the creative services business, production costs have been tumbling downward for some time - since the desktop publishing revolution at least (one could argue this has been going on since Gutenberg put the monks out of business...)
While costs have gotten stuck temporarily at various points (remember service bureaus?) the market has always found a way around the chokepoints, such that individual operators with minimal equipment could do tasks that were formerly difficult and expensive.
Now I'm looking at at the next stage - systems that can empower the whole production process, at least for print, and remove the barriers between creative and execution.
This will have the side-effect of destroying a revenue stream. Well, it happened to type, and it's only a matter of time before it happens to page makeup too.

What part of your business could be produced and distributed Free? What will happen when you can't charge for that any more?

Link