The Spirit of the Times

So while I was at work today, I found out that Barack Obama will be announcing his choice for running mate soon. The weird thing was that I found out first via Twitter. Then about an hour later I saw it on Digg. I had even been to nytimes.com twice already this morning, and saw nothing there.

I just signed up for Twitter while at ad:tech last week (because I'm determined to figure out what the appeal is - still tbd), so I'm not an avid twitterer. Yet that was how I found out about the VP annoucement, so I guess you can score one for the latest shiny object.

This "Be the First to Know" thing seems pretty cheesy to me. Kind of like admiring a home run while you're still in the batter's box, or doing a ridiculous touchdown dance. Act like you've been there before.

Postel's Law

While I have to admit that I now have an odd curiosity about what's being written on the /b/ message board discussed in this NYT article, I'm also completely disturbed by the people profiled in it.

I also found this passage especially interesting:

In 1981, he formulated what’s known as Postel’s Law: “Be conservative in what you do; be liberal in what you accept from others.” Originally intended to foster “interoperability,” the ability of multiple computer systems to understand one another, Postel’s Law is now recognized as having wider applications. To build a robust global network with no central authority, engineers were encouraged to write code that could “speak” as clearly as possible yet “listen” to the widest possible range of other speakers, including those who do not conform perfectly to the rules of the road. The human equivalent of this robustness is a combination of eloquence and tolerance — the spirit of good conversation.

Not bad advice for a planner. What other applications of this could there be?

ad:Tech Chicago notes

In between sessions I almost bumped into a man walking with a cane who looked lost. His name tag said Ron May, as in The May Report. That brought me back several years. If you don’t know Ron May, his May Report is kind of like The Delaney Report (which, sadly, is nothing like the Colbert Report). If you don’t know The Delaney Report, it’s kind of like the advertising version of Jackie Harvey’s “The Outside Scoop.” And if you do know Jackie Harvey, you're my kind of peoples.

My only other name drop from Day One was Steve Hall from Adrants. Keep up the good work, Steve.

My quick rant about attending conferences: 95% of the questions asked in the Q&A are awful. It’s always, “My situation is that we got a 7.5% increase in clickthrough when we expected only 3%. How were we so successful?" Or, "Here's an obnoxious question that is ultimately unanswerable. Please squirm through an answer." Or, "I don’t have a clue what I’m doing, where do I start?”

By far the most interesting company/business model that I heard about today is Lemonade. They allow you to create a widget that shows what products you like and recommend, and then embed that widget in your social networking site or blog. If/when people click through your lemonade stand to buy the products, you get a cut of the sale (details). I’m sure the cut is small, and how many people will really click through to purchase, but it’s a cool concept. People get an easy way to show others what good taste they have, retailers get yet another affiliate program (and we’ve seen many successful affiliate programs), and the Lemonade folks do nothing but provide the webservice that sucks up products and spits them out on Facebook. Kudos Lemonade.

So the CEO from Lemonade told a story about how the leader of Nepal decided he wasn’t going to measure his country’s success by GDP, he wanted to measure GDH (“happiness”). Moral of the story – really think about what you’re measuring. What really matters? Maybe Americans do care about productivity more than happiness, but if you have an awareness campaign, does ROI matter?

I was floored that at the end of the “The Banner is Dead: Digital Advertising Strategies in the Age of Earned Media” session, the moderator asked the panel if the banner was dead. OK, her actual question was, “What % of online advertising will be banner ads in 2010?” The woman from Nokia said, “What % is it now?” and when the moderator said for you (at Nokia) it is probably 85%. She said that it would probably not change significantly by 2010. The Lemonade guy said that a banner is nothing more than a container for an idea, so it doesn’t really matter. He doesn’t really care what the containers are; the ideas will always take precedence.

Biggest joke of the day: the agency guy says that Diet Coke Plus program was a success because it had 12,000 downloads, across 5 different free music podcasts. If that's a success - what's a failure?
I’m going to find numbers as examples of stupid groups/apps to use as comparison for “successful” campaigns. My hypothesis: There will be more fans of REALLY stupid things on Facebook than the most popular brands. To be continued...