Bruxelles-Brussel-Brussels-Brüssel

It's not in a name, it's in an attitude. Brussels is a really laid back city, possibly too laid back for my taste, but in a good way. I know that I'm here in august and tens of thousands of EU representatives, officials and lobbyist are not, but I believe that the lack of them is actually bringing out the true spirit of the city.

And in the spirit of that laid-backness, not sure if that is a word in any language, I witnessed today an example of how businesses that could compete against each other can co-exist and co-operate in a perfect harmony.

Not far from the Square Marechal Montgomery where I'm staying, thanks to my good friend who was kind enough to offer his place for my accommodation, is Place Jourdan. An oddly shaped city plaza that has parked cars in a middle and is circled with cafes and bars on the outside.

Except for the parked cars there's something else in the middle. Maison Antoine is basically a kiosk that serves the best tasting french fries in Brussels. It doesn't matter what you call them - frites, chips or fries - one thing is for sure, everybody loves them. No surprise there.

What is different and maybe even special is the fact that not only do all the cafes and bars allow you to eat their fries sitting at their tables, but they encourage it with posted signs. It clearly states in French and Flemish that you are welcome to enjoy Antoine's frites at their establishments.

At some point they figured out that instead of taking on an impossible task of trying to compete with Antoine's fries they are better off supplying drinks to every thirsty Frites lover. You got to admit that this is somewhat unusual. Situation where everybody wins.

Maison Antoine is probably selling more fries because people know that they can enjoy them sitting down at the surrounding cafes and socialize with their friends while stuffing their faces with little sticks of heaven. Cafes and bars are probably selling more beer, coke and coffee because people who wouldn't visit them for no reason are there for the fries. Plus people are probably buying more fries and beer and coke and coffee than they would if they'd known that they would have to take the fries home. That's something that would rob the whole social aspect of dinner from them.

So here it is - everybody wins and everybody's happy. Perfect harmony. It's not that hard. It didn't take thinking outside the box or creating a Tipping Point for a Purple Cow swimming in a Blue Ocean. All it took was simple logic - if I let them do what they are good at and I keep on doing what I'm good at, everybody flourishes. Simple.

Now try to imagine an attitude like that with Mobile and Internet Tech businesses of Estonia. Impossible? Why not supply the users with free Wi-Fi wherever they go because of the potential traffic that will happen just because of the availability of free Wi-Fi? It's not that hard. Let's not forget that everybody loves fries. We do.

Planet Green Video ads - good for mother earth and funny

Here are couple of links. I personally love the second one with Tommy Lee and Ludacris. Sure, we all assume that he doesn't shower, but it's still funny and just check out the look on Ludacris's face - priceless.

THE MAN WITH A SOLAR POWERED SWIMSUIT

LUDACRIS AND TOMMY LEE IN A DINER

New Dark Overlords of Dark Marketing

McDonald's - can you believe this, yes McDonald's is doing Dark Marketing. Company that usually limits their marketing efforts to cheap plastic action figure type toys produced for 2 cents a piece somewhere in the South Pacific, is now doing Dark Marketing.

What's even better is the fact that they are doing it quite well. Maybe not real well, but well enough. Unlike the pathetic efforts by Sony (fake tourist: they paid people on the street to pretend that they are tourists and asked bypassing strangers to take their picture with a Sony camera) and Skype (fake enthusiast: they paid people in London Tube to pretend to love the Skype voip service and to participate in loud dialogs witnessed by other travelers). Pathetic and borderline unethical efforts.

No, McDonald's has taken a refreshingly honest and laid-back approach - a branded ARG. I love ARG's. They are creative, mysterious and often combine all possible ways of communication. The Lost Ring has been going on for quite a while now and is counting down to the Olympics. McDonald's has demonstrated restraint and has not plastered the whole experience with their Golden Arches Logo. Sure you will see them, but it's kinda like a post-roll. Not in your face at all and hiring Jane McGonigal as the designer is working out great. The game is great and the Corporation with big money is not ruining everything. How unusual, how unbelievable.

In my opinion the most surprising thing about The Lost Ring is the person with enormous cojones. The person who came up with the idea in the first place and then made the pitch to one of the most conservative and easily startled corporations in the whole wide world. I love you.


P.S. Then again I just recently fell in love with Julia Allison, so don't take it too seriously.

AS Starman - Can you hear me ground control?

Excuse me for such a frivolous comparison to a classic. I'm not even sure what made me think of it. My situation with cable and Internet service is probably the exact opposite of what Major Tom was experiencing in the song. In my case Starman would be the ground control that couldn't care less that "I'm floating in a most peculiar way".

See, for three weeks now, instead of the 77 channels I got only 6. Yes, I wasn't really watching most of them to begin with, but still. I'm paying for them. Plus losing the international news channels does annoy me.

I do take full responsibility for my failure to stay on the phone line for longer than 10 minutes and because of that I have not been able to talk to a actual physical person customer service rep. That is - if they do exist.

So here I am with six channels and Internet connection that's iffy at best. Since I do like to vent and like most people enjoy complaining about bad consumer experiences, I told my story to a good friend. Do you think he was shocked or surprised? No. I may add that he's also a Starman customer, if only for few weeks.

To my great disappointment he managed to top my bitching story with one of his own.
And it's a good one. He decided to get Starman Digi-TV service at the end of May. One of the deciding factors was that they were offering two months service for free. As it happened, he became a Starman Customer on May 31 at around 16:00. Just recently he was attentive enough to notice, and this is a riot, that they counted these 8 hours in the month of May as A MONTH.

I know and you know that this is not a coincidence. Long conference table with at least eight people sitting behind it was involved and a conscious decision was made. I just can't believe that they didn't discuss what should happen in case some one calls. See, my friend was told that his situation will be investigated.

Unfortunately "your situation will be investigated" is the corporate equivalent of giving a finger. What is there to investigate? You tried to trick your new customer and you were called on it. So apologize and fix it right then and there. Done.

But no, AS Starman considers us all idiots with bank accounts. I will spread the word and tell this story on every possible occasion. This is our last chance. They don't realize that this is not 20th century. All they have is the service they offer and we have the power to reject it.

If you do the math solution taken from a pretty good book by Mark Hughes - for every 23 unhappy customers who take time to complain to you, your company will have ten thousand enemies who didn't bother to write or call. Starman are you getting this? Right now it's 2 down 21 to go and 10 000 is a freaking ARMY.

Wasn't expecting this

Rimigratsioon

Dear Rimi,

I respectfully ask you to cease all advertising efforts present and future. See, I still haven't recovered from " tudish piip ". Your explanation that these are sounds - "tudish" being the thump that merchandise makes when it hits the moving belt at the cashiers and "piip" when it gets UPC scanned... I just couldn't wrap my mind around that. Every time I tried, I was getting a feeling like I'm having an embolism, so eventually I stopped. And now this.

Rimigratsioon. What the hell do you mean by that? Yes, yes I get it - play on words. The first one is obvious- RIMI and then what? Migration? Immigration? Something else?
And if it's migration, then migration of what? Are you talking about money migrating out of my pockets into yours? I can't even guess what's the deal if it's immigration.

So please do us all a favor and stop. If for no other reason then think about public safety, people are driving past your billboards doing 50-60 km/h and we all know that
laughing, rolling around and driving don't mix.

Please stop, no more.

Respectfully Yours,

Ron






OK, guys I really could use your input on this, in any of the world's languages.
I know I'm not laughing alone.

vidSENSE

No doubt vidSENSE is an original and ambitious online video advertising solution, that differentiates it-self from all the wannabes by taking the video content from publishers environment to the advertisers domain. Great...except a tiny issue that doesn't sit well with me and maybe others. See the very first step in their advertising process is basically deception.

This is how vidSENSE describes the process in their DEMO, they call them content units - small pictures or thumbnails taken from vidSENSE video content, that are invitations for viewers to click on them. And now it gets little creepy, at least in my opinion and I'm quoting vidSENSE: "Content unit appears to be part of the website, it does not look like advertisement and because of that gets much higher CTR ".

Let's see - appears to be part of the website, meaning that they are not. So you guys figured out a way to trick me into watching advertising and you are actually proud of your-self.

No, it's not all bad. The fact that all the viewing takes place surrounded by the advertisers brand, since it takes place on advertisers website is a brilliant idea.
It's just that I can't get over the very first step, you deceived me and tricked me.

Sure it generates traffic to advertisers website, but what kind of traffic? Disappointed, pissed off traffic who in the next step are googleing products that similar to pop-up blockers will block involuntary traffic direction generators.

Maybe, maybe not.

And what about the brands? Do they want consumers with funny tastes in their mouths viewing content in this branded entertainment type of environment?

Again, maybe, maybe not.

Here's an good counter-view to mine by Seana Mulcahy who always makes an excellent point, as she did in her last post for OnlineSPIN. I just happen to disagree with her on this subject.

nrme

Possibilities, possibilities. A new app for the I-Phone nrme is coming out soon and this one looks promising. Twitter-like by style, but if you take a closer look, it'll be all about location by substance. The transmitting of messages will be controlled by a pretty narrow geographical area surrounding the sender.

Now if the marketers get involved the use of this app can be promising. Sure it's gonna be fun to find out in which bar or club your friends are getting wasted at, but think about this - last minute price-drop for perishables, it doesn't have to be fish. Fruits, flowers even wedding cakes, that are not picked up.

On demand pricing for opera tickets or for over-purchased wagyu beef at the elite restaurant. Did I mention coupons? That's right location and time-line aware coupons.
This could be fun. It could be turned into a social marketing game.

Here's a link to TechCrunch post that describes nrme quite well
http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/06/26/exclusive-peek-at-nrme-location-based-twitter-without-the-noise/

Best Crowd-sourcing effort up to date

Brazilian best-selling author Paul Coelho declared a competition on MySpace for making a collaborative movie of the book "The Witch of Portobello". You can pick a character and film the segment of the book in which that character is the narrator (there are fifteen). Then the best entries for each character will be combined to complete the storyline.The entire movie will be submitted to film festivals.

Holy Crap! I think this is incredible. Considering that he's known to have passionate fans, he's executing this perfectly. He's narrowing the creative by dividing the project into segments, well actually his book did that, but it works out great. Meanwhile loosening the reins on trying to control the creative.Plus there will be more than one winner. Like I said - best crowd-sourcing up to this point.


Except...MySpace...Well you can't have it all.


In any case I will go and see it.

And don't take the "best" in the title literally, of course I'm aware of importance of Wikipedia, InnoCentive, Threadless and many others.

Overfriending

Just today I noticed somebody new following me on Twitter. Somebody with the user-name OOzzl, he(since there's a picture) is also following 144869 others. Yep, that's right one hundred forty four thousand eight hundred and sixty nine others. WTF.

I do get it. He's a collector. He thinks that by following me there's a good chance I will be following him. But NO. I don't need another so-called friend. I truly believe, that my online friends should be at least somewhat similar to my off-line friends. I can't believe I just called REAL LIFE - off-line.

So here it is - Facebook's Beacon failed and there are a lot of reasons, but one that nobody's talking about is - that Word of Mouth only works if you care about the person's opinion in the first place. Oozzl's opinion on the other hand means absolutely nothing to me.

There's a definite connection between me, my every-day decisions (where to eat, what movie to see, which department store to shop at) and the source of the recommendation. If I don't know you, don't respect you - it means ... you guessed it.

Oh yeah, couple of weeks ago I met an old friend on the street and later tried to contact him on Orkut, but unfortunately he's over his friends limit. In case you didn't know, I'm pretty sure it's at 1000. I'm happy for him - that is a lot of friends.

Too bad, there's just very little value from marketer's point of view with these online super-connectors. The connections are too weak. That's putting it mildly, quite often the connections are non-existent.

So I will keep my real life friends and connect with them in real life, using all possible communication methods. Online and off-line.

APML

I guess the future is now. Finally. Attention Profiling Mark-up Language is taking care of all of my on-line needs.Is there other kind? In a little while I-myself will cease to be necessary.

No more surfing the net,
Facebook-Orkut-Amazon-Ebay-Twitter-Google-Last.Fm mash-up will know exactly what to do.

Except, I kinda like the discovery part of online experience. It's the same with a lot of people and shopping, they don't want to find that perfect accessory in the very first store. They enjoy the process way too much.

Still, lately I have been fooling around with Engagd and I've been using Particls for quite some time. I also use Piggy Bank browser add-on and Last.Fm and Jango for my background music needs while using my laptop.

What I'm unhappy with is the quality of the recommendation engines. Maybe it's just me since even I consider my taste in music odd. It ranges from old hardcore punk like Black Flag to mellow crooner k.d.lang. My likings of movies are no better.

Even if it is me, there's still no question these engines don't work. Netflix is working hard on improving theirs, but hey - after entering around 200 movies I like, it still showed "Dude Where's My Car?" as one of the recommendations.

Personally I still like Amazon's - "buyers who bought this, also bought these".
It's not really an engine and there's no algorithms involved, but quite often it works for me. Maybe it's the human factor.

I don't know what I don't know and too often I don't know what I want. It also doesn't look like truly semantic web is happening any day soon. It could be a good thing.

I dread the day my browser will know exactly where to take me.

Online Marketing Buzzwords Du Jour

What would I do without the ability to hypothesize about the tools of engagement that can monetize my platform for customer synchronization? Without that, how could I possibly automate the optimization of my behavioral targeting methodology or expand the customization engine with which it meets my ROI?

WOW...

P.S. Does that ROI stand for Return On Investment or Return On Influence?

I want to play

Yes I do, I want to play and I'm sure there are others. Not everybody is willing to admit to that. Well I'm ready and brave enough. I admit it. That's what I want. I want to play.

Life is not easy and we are way too serious most of the time. So this is my resolution, I know it's not New Year's, but who said you can't have June or July resolutions. Now I just have to figure out a way that will seem at least somewhat acceptable for the rest of society.


See I think that we could use play in almost all of the everyday situations. The workplace - it just screams for it. The daily commute - let's see, if I let every car that's not yellow to cut in front of me in traffic, how long would it take to get the finger from the driver behind me? OK, maybe it'll add few minutes, but I could feel better about the whole trip. Then there's relationships, it's already all play, not all fun play though. We need to work on that. Sex - need I say more, without play and being fun it's just a release, then again with fun play - it's the best thing possible.

Distinguished psychologist, ethologist, affective neuroscientist, and one of the greatest intellectual troublemakers of 20th century Jaak Panksepp discovered that play offers another arena for social epigenetics. His work identified a specific compound generated during play that drives genetic transcription. His findings add new significance to every child's universal yearning and to mine and I have a feeling to your's as well.

I want to play just means that everything that's going on gets suspended in "as if" reality. That can only happen in relatively safe environment. Well ... where could that be in the beginning of 21st century? Too many family environments are dysfunctional. TV? Not really an environment, still more like moving pictures invented in the beginning of the previous century. Facebook or Orkut? Basically schoolyard bullies who are spying on us just to tell on us, all the while taking our lunch money. I personally think it does not exist.

So here I am with my brand new resolution, but no good outlet. Guess what? This whole thing requires a simple action. Letting go. Saying ... fuck it. I want to play.

All you marketing people out there are you getting this? I' m not alone and we are not afraid. If anything we are bored. So what are you scared of? We are ready and you can make money off us. Let's play.

Free beer

Euronics stores that sell home electronics and household appliances are giving away free beer as a mid-summer promotional campaign. Just imagine, you shell out 36 000 EEK's for a plasma or LCD TV with diagonal size somewhere in a range of 40 inches and you will receive 24 cans of A.LeCoq beer.

Whoaa, beer for nothing. Who cares that it amounts just around 1% of the purchase price. It's FREE and it's BEER. Again - it's BEER.

Alright, in case you did not detect my well hidden slight case of sarcasm, I confess - I am being facetious. I think this is an absolutely idiotic use of marketing man hours and an idiotic use of beer for that matter. Think about it, it's a store that sells refrigerators, but the beer is displayed on top of them, not inside. That even takes away the surprise factor. It doesn't stay cold that way either.

Well if you disagree, be my guest and help your-self to a 24 pack at your neighborhood Euronics. Cheers