Like everything else, the Twelve Days of Christmas just got more expensive….And just how many of you put on your Christmas shopping list the 364 items that make up “The Twelve Days of Christmas”"  From partridges and pear trees to seven swans-a-swimming, you’ve already discovered that these 364 items have gone up.

We don’t know how many of you actually ventured out to duplicate these 364 items on your Christmas shopping list this year, but if you did — you quickly discovered, like everything else, prices for these 12 Days has gone up:  2011′s list will cost you $101,119.84, the most expensive total ever according to PNC Wealth Management, which for some strange reason (publicity) tracks this every year for us.

Compiled on this 364-item list in this classic carol, the Twelve Days of Christmas Index is up 4.4%.  Birds this year were a pricy proposition — cost of those seven swans-a-swimming soared $700 or 12.5% to $6,300, which is the largest dollar increase out of the song’s collection of gifts.  A partridge is now 14.2% more expensive at $15….two turtle doves cost $125, a 25% increase because of the rising cost of feed and availability.  Five gold rings were actually cheaper this season as high prices for the metal drove down retail demand by 0.8%.  And if you’re wondering about your Thanksgiving Day dinner — it was 13% more expensive in 2011 than last year.

We are not recommending you get a head start on Christmas’ 2012 list — the costs would skyrocket because you’d provide room and board for: 12 drummers, 11 pipers, 10 lords, 9 ladies, 8 maids, 7 swans, 6 geese, 4 colly birds, 3 French hens, 2 turtle doves, and a partridge in a pear tree.  Your only benefit, perhaps, if you bought 5 gold rings and the price of gold went up, instead of down (like this year!).  In any event, hope you had a great holiday!    — RJL

[Illustration courtesy of Dream Designs / freedigitalphotos.net ]

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by Jeff Sandgren, Technology Editor

Mobile is top digital channel in Africa

Here in North America, mobile devices are in the process of overtaking traditional PCs – Gartner predicts that combined sales of smartphones and tablets will exceed desktops and laptops for the first time this year.  In other markets the mobile devices have already established their dominance.  So it makes perfect sense that leadership in mobile marketing solutions reveals a top player who leveraged a true reverse market strategy.

That company is InMobi, a global mobile advertising network launched in 2007 who mastered their boot camp skills in Asia, Africa and the Middle East, all markets where mobile is the number one digital channel, before market timing and marketing savvy set the stage for their big beachhead assault on the North American market.

At this summer’s Mobile Marketing Association Forum one of the best presentations was delivered by Anne Frisbie, InMobi’s VP & Managing Director for North America, backed up with some very solid market intelligence developed by James Lamberti, InMobi’s VP of Global Research & Marketing.  Anne and James were the first two strategic hires for InMobi’s North American market entry, and we had the opportunity to spend time with both of them.

We asked Anne what surprised her most about the recent studies presented at the forum.

“Two thirds of mobile shoppers make direct purchases on mobile,” Anne revealed.  “People used to think it would all be digital, games and ringtones.  But we’ve found that a third of the users are buying physical goods and services on mobile.”

InMobi now serves over 50 billion impressions per month, according to the company’s website.  Their US push includes two recent catalysts: a $200M investment from Japan’s SoftBank, and their opening this month of their new Manhattan offices. Although the office is new, Anne and James have actually been busy in the US for a few years, since most of the advertising inventory comes from the US.

“We’ve been working with lots of publishers here in the US for the past three years,” Anne explained.  “There’s been a big leap here over the past year.  Marketers have really woken up.  The immersive, rich media ad experience that became possible on the smartphones was really eye-opening.”

Anne’s a straight talker.  “It’s pretty schizophrenic out there,” she told us, “about half of the top 200 brands don’t have a mobile optimized website.”

Analytics point the way

Marketers now are trying to measure all the way through to the point of sale, Anne contends.  InMobi has seen a big increase in their customers’ usage of the available analytics.  This seems to be indicative of a real turning point, as advertisers and agencies are driven more and more by the need to demonstrate return on marketing investment.  Test, Learn & Evolve is a common mantra of advertisers these days.  Numbers rule: it’s been demonstrated that ad budgets are growing faster in channels that have more metrics.

InMobi is big on analytics.  “We offer real-time analytics,” Anne continued “and can track over two dozen variables, back to whatever event people want to monitor: engagement actions like videos views, or right down to conversion and sales.  More importantly, this real-time analysis drives the ad-serving logic, so the ad serving can truly be optimized.  At the publisher level we’ve seen a huge difference.”

This big difference in Marketer perception complements the growing usage by consumers.  The research reported at the MMA event showed that the demographics of smartphone shoppers who say they prefer mobile to PC shopping now includes all age groups except those over 65.  “Every six months, you bring another decade of consumer demographics into the market,” said James Lamberti.  According to this study, even non smartphone users prefer mobile to PC shopping.

James, who previously pioneered some of the top tools on comScore, including qSearch™ and Video Metrix™, now widely used by hundreds of clients around the world, has played a key role not only in driving the focus on analytics at InMobi, but also in helping see where the market was going at an early stage.  According to James, “we recognized earlier than many that Android and IOS would be game-changers, delivering compelling consumer experiences at scale, globally.  And we recognized that it would be a ‘developer economy’ with application developers becoming publishers, and doing so in a new way that was truly global.  We saw them focusing on global monetization, without a lot of ‘country bias’, so that’s been key in helping us architect the right platform.”

In fact, over half of the developer/publisher revenue comes from outside the US.  Let’s recap that important distinction: over half the ad inventory comes from inside the US, but the majority of revenue comes from outside.  So InMobi has built itself to be “a one-stop shop for global monetization”, according to James.

The Privacy elephant in the boardroom

The privacy issues commonly come up in conversations about mobile marketing.  They technically center around the UDID (Unique Device ID), which, as the name suggests, is an identifier unique to each individual device.  The UDIDs are pretty critical to Application functionality, so they’re necessarily accessed.  Will they be classified as personally identifiable information, from a personal privacy standpoint?  How will they be allowed to be used by marketers?  The Mobile Marketing Association is developing a Point Of View and recommendations on dealing with privacy in mobile marketing, as one of its top initiatives.

According to James, the Tier 1 players are all aggressively managing privacy issues, as a group.  They’re leveraging the learning from privacy concerns on PC-based web marketing, so the hope is that they will solve these issues fast and better than their desktop/laptop predecessors.  But not everyone is on board.  James cautions, “If some Tier 2 providers are promising a high degree of targeting, marketers should be sure to ask the tough questions.”

The investment by SoftBank might be a significant validation of InMobi’s leadership.  SoftBank is a big, big player in digital media, the dominant Japanese Digital Media company.  Case in point: they have a 40% stake in Alibaba, the Asian counterpart to eBay.  They’re clearly staking a big bet on InMobi as a key investment in mobile.

Looking ahead

InMobi offers advice to those who haven’t yet optimized.  Looking ahead, Anne expresses a consumer-driven vision.  “We expect over 100 million Americans every month will enjoy a better mobile ad experience by the end of this year.  I would love to see every ‘top 2’ brand optimize on the mobile platform BECAUSE it matters to consumers.  Not all CMOs fundamentally believe yet that people are buying on mobile.  But it’s changing fast.”  Brand Marketers have good reason to heed the trend.  InMobi shared a case study from ten Memorial Day campaigns that showed clients realizing a 74% reduction in cost of conversion.  Marketing, Shmarketing, now you’re getting Finance’s attention.

For those ‘sub-optimized’ brands, Lamberti counsels that you start safely and solidly.  “There’s a lot of distracting shiny objects in mobile right now, that don’t all scale well and may have high opportunity costs.  You don’t want to start off with a bad first impression on mobile.  Start with the common elements, aspects of Mobile that are working now, not just all-in on rich media.  Build a holistic plan.  And don’t just take what worked on a PC and stick it on the mobile phone.  There are five main calls to action for mobile – you need to make sure you use them all.”

James sees the evolution in phases.  “Deployment at scale was Phase 1.  Achieving real consumer engagement, at scale, was Phase 2.  We’ve done both. Phase 3 comes when you solve the problems of privacy and tracking, and when you solve the equally important challenges of bridging the analytics and message delivery between mobile and other channels.”

InMobi, we guess, is working hard on both these challenges.  We think bigger things in mobile marketing are yet to come.  -JTS

Related articles

• Worldwide Global Subscriptions Reach 5 Billion (mycricket.com)
• Samsung overtakes Apple smartphone sales (telegraph.co.uk)
• The global state of the mobile industry (rossdawsonblog.com)
• Local transactions by Kenya’s mobile money service, M-Pesa exceeds Western Union’s global transactions (textually.org)
• Android Overtakes Apple with 44% Worldwide Share of Mobile App Downloads (abiresearch.com)
• InMobi Now Reaches 83 Million U.S. Consumers, Steals Millennial Media Exec (techcrunch.com)
• SoftBank invests $200m in InMobi (mobile-ent.biz)
• InMobi’s Sprout Purchase Turns Rivals into Customers (clickz.com)

When it comes to high tech innovations, we often assume that it has to start here in the USA and then move into global adoption.  So we were surprised when we attended the Mobile Marketing Association Forum last summer to learn that InMobi, the world’s largest independent mobile ad network, realized its early success in Asia and Africa before timing its push into the North American market.  They now serve over 50 billion impressions per month, according to the company’s website.

The US push includes two recent catalysts: a $200M investment from SoftBank and their opening this month of their new Manhattan offices.  But InMobi isn’t forgetting their global roots, as demonstrated by their fundraiser Monday night (October24) at their NY launch party at the Cooper Square Hotel, with tickets and donations benefitting Mobilize4Good, a charity foundation which “… seeks to leverage the power of mobile technology to affect positive change in the world.” 

Funds raised for Mobilize4Good will help disadvantaged women globally through mobile technology, starting with a special project in Africa that uses community-based entertainment/education to foster and empower women within their communities.  In addition to serving a very worthwhile cause, the fundraiser also offered excellent entertainment, with music by Angelique Kidjo (her album Black Ivory Soul is awesome) and guest speakers including Anne Shongwe, Founder / CEO of Afroes, a group that creates uniquely African mobile applications and tools for social development agencies and corporate enterprises keen to spread educational and branded messages across the African continent.

So why was the North American market uncharacteristically late to the mobile advertising party?  We asked Anne Frisbie, InMobi’s VP & Managing Director for North America.

“InMobi launched in 2007,” Anne told us.  “First in Asia (their headquarters are in India), then in Africa and the Middle East, then Europe, then America.  Mobile in Africa is the number one digital channel – it’s way more important there.  Back in 2008 Brands weren’t spending on mobile here, but in the African market it’s all about the mobile channel.”

“We really secured a lead in entering the North American market from our prior experience abroad, but a majority of our ad inventory has always come from North American publishers, whose content is extremely popular in other markets,” Anne explained.  This apparently was key in coming out of the gates rapidly in this market.  According to Anne, InMobi has seen “… a tremendous growth in this  market.  We’ ve managed to grow our network to reach over 83 million mobile consumers in North America in just a little over a year.”

We learned a lot more about the mobile advertising market from Anne, and we’ll be sharing more of those insights – plus others from the execs we collared at Monday night’s event – in our deeper dive into mobile advertising in the next issue of BrandTech News.  Check back then for more on this fascinating intersection of branding and technology.

Related articles

• InMobi gets $200 million from Japan’s SoftBank (intomobile.com)

Some brands have it tough right from the start.  Branded solutions that focus on situations we innately dislike, for example.  Take waiting in line.  We hate to wait. In today’s society we’re each of us much too busy (and far too important) to have to endure anything short of immediate service and gratification.  So waiting is a big negative.  By association, so are all the accoutrements of waiting.

Queue Management solutions seek to tame that beast.  The most familiar component to most of us is the systems of belts and stanchions that line everyone up into an orderly queue, like at airport security points.   It’s a love/hate affair, really.  You may not like the feeling of being “herded” by the retractable tension belts, but the alternative is much worse, with a pushing and shoving crowd in which the rudest and pushiest are rewarded with the shortest wait.  Let’s face it: the tension belts of queue management keep things civilized.

More recently, however, innovative companies have begun to look at this space as an opportunity not just for orderliness, but for engagement.  They’re going beyond tension barriers and take-a-number systems, and employing digital signage, and even holographic projections.

We spoke with Keith Carpentier, Senior Business Development Manager at Lawrence, a Tensator Group Company.    At this year’s GlobalShop, the leading industry trade event for marketing-at-retail solutions, Lawrence showed some bold solutions to change the user experience while waiting into something more informative, entertaining, and social.  Apparently, some innovative retailers took note.

“Our position in the industry historically was retractable tension belts,” Keith explained, “but at our show this year, there were very few tension barriers as part of our booth.  We made a very powerful technology statement around queuing, and around impulse purchase buying.”

“The main goal has always been to guide the customer.  But in today’s competitive world, the guidance part is just the foundation of the pyramid.  Layered on top of that – and what the retailers today are most interested in – is impulse purchase generation, reduction of ‘walk-away’ shoppers, and efficiency.”

Lawrence claims to have led retailers to success in treating the checkout and service queues as a ‘micro-environments’ within the store.  It’s not the Point of Sale, and it’s not the broad shop.  It’s unique, with its own dynamics.  “It’s now taking on a more digital persona,” suggests Keith.  “The newest generation of solutions improves the efficiency AND become a profit center.”

Tensator has studied the difference between Actual Wait versus Perceived Wait.  A big factor is whether the waiting guests have their attention occupied with something they find interesting.  An occupied wait always feels shorter than an unoccupied wait.  Witness the prayerful posture of the smartphone crowd in such situations.

The checkout queue is the moment when a shopper has made the decision to buy something and invested the time to make the purchase, so it seems to be an ideal moment to engage them.  Initially, in-queue signage has offered URLs of brand sites or brand social sites as suggestions for guests to browse and “Like”.  QR codes are part of the next iteration, to make it easier for guests to ‘leapfrog’ to their sites with a simple click of the phone’s camera.

“Right now Brands are testing, learning how to best utilize the space.  Retailers are working hard at staying relevant, especially with younger shoppers.  They are looking to leverage this space as part of the experience, creating custom content to drive the consumer to social media sites.  It’s a great way to gain additional consumer insights.”

The ‘Holy Grail of queuing’, according the Keith, has always been grocery. Within the past year, there has been a big uptick in the grocery category, which pundits used to feel was ‘off limits’.  This includes interest and pilot studies by big players like Safeway, Kroger, Giant Eagle, and H.E. Butt in Texas.

Chain Drug retailers are even further along.  “Six out of the top ten chain drug are working with us to adopt these innovations,” claimed Keith.  “And we’re especially proud of our latest, state-of-the-art installation at Duane Reade.”

This past July, Duane Reade, New York City’s largest drug store chain, held a grand opening of its Wall Street megastore in the Trump Building.  Prominently displayed is “the industry’s first Virtual Assistant”, a next-generation digital signage solution by Tensator that creates the illusion of a real person acting as a ‘Greeter’ to provide Duane Reade customers with a friendly hello, useful information, and brand and promotional messaging.

“Our Virtual Greeter is an essential part of the ‘wow factor’ we have built into our newest store, and serves as ambassador of the new Duane Reade customer experience,” said Paul Tiberio, Senior Vice President of Merchandising & Chief Marketing Officer for Duane Reade. “The virtual aspect captures shoppers’ attention from the moment they enter the store – engaging their visual and auditory senses. And because the Virtual Assistant is so compelling, shoppers are receptive to the wealth of information she provides.”

There’s a bit of a Wizard Of Oz parallel to the presentation in the visual impact of the image – along with the requisite “pay no attention …” implied relative to the rather large projection platform, but it’s a nice neutral grey that quickly disappears from the visual perception with only the brand imagery sticking to the memory (hopefully).  Besides, the Virtual Assistant is just so charming, who cares what’s behind the curtain?  See for yourself at http://bit.ly/Virtual-Greeter

The size of the projection device also triggers in our price-sensitive minds the question of what this thing costs – or, more importantly, how the payback measures up.  Tensator is no stranger to these issues with their traditional product line, having done extensive studies of the reduced cost of “walk-aways”, consumers who were intending to purchase but abandoned their merchandise when dismayed by the perception of a checkout queue that was too daunting.  Tensator studies have allegedly found an 80-90% reduction of this costly phenomenon when queues are properly designed, managed, and equipped with engaging information for the shoppers.

In this case, the Return On Investment seems pretty clear: replacing the cost of a human greeter with one whom, as the website demo informs us, is “available 24 hours a day, seven days a week, never needs a break or vacation” and can say whatever messages you want in whatever language is required with total compliance and consistency.   Human resources like that don’t come free … certainly not on Wall Street.            -JTS

Related articles

• A Miracle Makeover at Duane Reade (businessweek.com)
• Check Out The Amazing Duane Reade Drugstore Specifically Catering To Wall Street (businessinsider.com)

Quiz: What innovative 2-D tag image solution was used in these advertising campaigns this summer?

• Ocean Spray, in their cross-country mobile sampling tour
• Toyota Motors’ ToyoTag, to “move the consumer closer to the transaction”
• Gap, in Glamour Magazine (right on the cover, next to Rihanna’s … personality)
• Office Depot’s nationwide back-to-school promotion offering $500,000 in mobile gift cards
• Wrigley’s Orbit gum back-to-school in 100 million packages of gum
• Bud Light’s “Ultimate Fan Experience” promotion
• Casa Noble Tequila and Bar Louie restaurants offer chances at tickets to a Santana concert
• Chivas Regal’s “Brotherhood” campaign

If you answered Quick Response (“QR”) Codes, or the more colorful Microsoft Tags, you’re wrong.  The correct answer is SnapTags, a solution offered by SpyderLynk, a mobile activation and marketing platform company.

This could be mobile marketing’s worst kept secret.  While Quick Response codes seem to dominate the news, and Microsoft Tags fight for a share of media attention, SpyderLynk continues to build up an ever-growing stable of successful campaigns.  And there are two good reasons why.

The first, from a brand point of view, is looks.  QR codes are functionally nifty, but they’re ugly … by design.  They were developed by the Denso Wave Company as a better way to track car parts, with more information than traditional ‘striped’ 1D barcodes.  Nicole Skogg, SpyderLynk’s Founder and CEO, is also the inventor of the SnapTag, which feat she performed before she’d even heard of a QR code, so the whole angle of approach is different, coming from a visual, brand-friendly starting point.  Where the visual appeal matters (e.g. Rihanna on Glamour), the choice of a simple, attractive logo with a surrounding circle, rather than the black and white QR checkerboard, has better brand appeal.

The second reason for SnapTag’s success, from an advertising effectiveness standpoint, is reach.  At issue is the question of how many cell phones are “feature phones” (cell phones with cameras) versus how many are “smart phones” (iPhones, Androids, etc.), which matters because SpyderLynk’s SnapTags work with both, so they simply cast a wider marketing net.  Two equally credible reports came up with different answers this summer.  Nielsen finds that 40% are smartphones vs. 60% feature phones.  The report from comScore found an even smaller slice for smartphones, at around 35%.  SnapTags can potentially be “read” by virtually all of these devices.

Smartphone adoption is growing, but the numbers for now still give feature phones the majority.  On top of that, comScore also found only 6.2% of mobile phone users actually scanned a QR code in the most recent test period.  Here in the US, camera phone users can use a service from another company, Scanlife, to send a photo of a QR code via MMS to a special number, where a server decodes it and sends back an SMS message with the web link or other info that the user can then input to get more content.  Did that sound too involved to you?  Precisely the point.

We spoke on two separate occasions with Nicole Skogg, SpyderLynk’s Founder/CEO and Jane McPherson, SpyderLynk’s CMO, who have had a great view of the development of this new solution over the past few years.  We wondered, would the trend in QR adoption make it easier or harder for SpyderLynk?

Jane prioritizes brand strategy over technology:  “The bigger questions should be, are brands really giving consumers a reason to use them?”

“There’s a bit of risk,” Jane explained.  “If everyone throws QR codes on everything without offering consumers value beyond a web connection, will it turn consumers off?  Right now there’s still a novelty factor, but marketers are going to have think more carefully about the best times, places, and ways to use mobile activation codes.  We try to focus our clients on really meeting a market need.”

According to Nicole, “We’re moving into a Marketing 3.0 landscape.  Consumer-driven conversations are the next phase, an ongoing, on-demand dialogue with the brand.  It’s about brands getting close to consumers, and to their decision-making process.”

Adoption by brand marketers has come in waves, according to Jane.  “Traditional advertising was the first big wave, then event marketing, now retailers.  We’re finding that shopper marketers are focusing more on purchase consideration, rather than just dropping brand and awareness.  Their focus is on helping consumers in making a purchasing decision.  HP is doing a good job of serving short videos to help them answer questions about products.  For Coors, sweepstakes still work, because that’s a high engagement brand.  It varies by product.”

An interesting example of on-package marketing with SnapTags is the recent work of Colorado Native, a brand of AC Golden (MillerCoors) that’s marketed locally in the Rocky Mountain state.  According to Jane, they put SnapTags on their bottles.  Participating consumers are first “age-gated”, then drawn into a back and forth dialogue with trivia, polling questions, and social networking.

“They are doing a great job of crafting campaigns that drive loyalty in the marketplace.  Colorado Native contributes a portion of all sales to a charity. Right now, if you snap and send (with your cell phone camera) the SnapTag engagement lets the consumer decide which charity.  Now the consumer feels connected.  Colorado Native has also become arbiters of event news.  So they ask via SnapTag conversations: what events do you care about?  Consumers choose the event, and they send out messages about the appropriate events.  Their SnapTag community is as big as or bigger than their Facebook community.”

SnapTags were also used to clever effect in DVD launches, like Warner Brothers’ “Inception” and Sony Pictures’ “This Is It”.  Ah, but show business has a way of drawing the unwary into its web.  Nicole’s innovations were recently honored by The Producers Guild of America, in association with Variety, who chose her as one of the 2011 “Digital 25” Leaders in Emerging Entertainment.  That puts her in the heady company of Lady Gaga.  We’ll be looking for her first SnapTag tattoo soon.  -JTS

Related articles

• Ocean Spray Taps SpyderLynk for Cross Country Mobile Tour Using SnapTags (prweb.com)
• Q&A: Nicole Skogg, CEO of SpyderLynk: The Rise of Social Barcodes (mathieson.typepad.com)
• Could Social Snap Tags ever take on the ugly QR code? (thenextweb.com)
• SpyderLynk CEO Nicole Skogg Named to Mobile Marketer “2011 Mobile Women to Watch” List (prweb.com)
• Office Depot Engages Customers with First-of-its-Kind Mobile Back-to-School Promotion Created by Momentum Worldwide and Using SpyderLynk SnapTags (prweb.com)
• Social SnapTags Direct Magazine Readers To Facebook (allfacebook.com)
• Snap And Send For More Infomation From Toyota (And Many Others) (adpulp.com)

Lemonade Award goes to Odds on Promotion for donating $20,000 to Minnesota Youth Hockey in lieu of awarding $50,000 to a young boy who shot a hockey puck 89 feet through a small hole just barely larger than a puck……The young man who made the winning shot was the identical twin brother of the one who was actually eligible for the opportunity — but he was outside the arena when his name was called.  The father grabbed his twin brother — and told him to take his place.

When he made this incredible shot, everyone cheered….but after realizing that his son really wasn’t eligible for the prize, he ‘fessed up.  The honest thing to do, or course.  But the public clamored for the prize to be awarded anyway — but Odds on Promotion, the Reno-based promotion company who put up the $50,000, said it violated the rules of the promotion — hence, they could not award the $50,000.

However — and here is where the Lemonade comes in — Odds on Promotion President Mark Gilmartin decided to donate $20,000 to Minnesota Youth Hockey.  We think this is a sterling solution — by any legal measure, Odds on Promotion wasn’t obligated to do anything.  The $20,000 donation will be surely appreciated, and the kids and family are all in agreement with the final solution.  Congratulations to Odds on Promotion.  (www.oddsonpromotion.com)

[Image: Suat Eman / FreeDigitalPhotos.net]

by Robert Liljenwall

BrandTech’s Lemon Award goes this month to HP for its failed attempt to get in (and stay in) the tablet market.  Obviously, HP should have understood the competition, but they felt their distribution channels and product features would enable them to get a fair shot at a decent market share that would enable them to stay in the tablet market.  They were wrong.

They were right, however, about deciding to exit early.  With nearly 100 different tablet products on the market, HP and others knew they had to compete with Apple’s iPad, which quickly earned 80% market share … and has remained near that dominating presence ever since it launched iPad in 2010.  Even after the post iPad2 launch, there have been others wiling to get up to bat against Apple.  They have done little to crack Apple’s now 78% market share (global), although the Chinese are buying competitor tablets.  But China is a market where ‘brand power’ is everything, too – they love to have what is popular, and we suspect that Apple’s market share will rise with iPad3, reportedly to come out either just before New Year’s Eve or shortly thereafter (thinner, lighter, etc.).

So what was so bad about HP’s decision?  Thinking they could compete with Apple’s OS with Palm’s WebOS – that’s what!

The Lemon Award probably should have an asterisk next to it, because HP had the guts to pull the plug early.  But what is so embarrassing is that the world’s largest computer producer miscalculated so badly to think it really had a chance with Palm’s WebOS application.

Did they not understand why Apple is so strong in this market?  Did they honestly believe they had the guns (and ammo) to overcome Apple’s bigger-than-life brand advantage?  Obviously they didn’t figure it until it was too late, too costly, and well, too embarrassing.  Along with HP’s debacle with their WebOS-based smartphone, HP is not looking like the smarter person in the room anymore.  They have announced they are still selling the TouchPads (from those already in the  pipeline) but are not making any promises on future deliveries.  Would you?

Consumers love their downfall, however.  Target, Best Buy, Walmart all quickly sold out the $499 tablets that were on sale for $99 – all buyers knew there would be NO support, NO future products, and very little in terms of Apps that would be designed just for the HP TouchPad.  One consumer mumbled as he walked out of Best Buy … “it’s a fun toy to have around.  For $99, why not?”

That’s our opinion – ones person’s lemon is another’s lemonade!    –   RJL

Related articles

• Are buyers of the now defunct HP TouchPad a little “touched”? (mississippigeek.wordpress.com)
• HP’s $99 fire sale on discontinued TouchPad sells out (usatoday.com)
• What TouchPad’s Fate Says About the Tablet Market (businessweek.com)
• HP TouchPad: What owners need to know (news.consumerreports.org)
• HP single-handedly destroys non-iPad tablet market (zdnet.com)

They aren’t cheap per board – some running over $45,000 per site, per month – but the CPM is relatively cheap – in the pennies/M – compared to television.  And you can get complete coverage within a short time frame (like 30 days) of practically 100% of the market.

Everyone knows that you never walk in California – you drive, whether it’s for lunch 60 miles away or to go to the corner super market just steps from your home.  Californians are so lazy and auto-dependent; they love to soak up the latest billboards just to keep their minds awake while in hour-long traffic jams on the not-so-efficient freeways.  Of course, you know that you cannot put more than seven words on a billboard and have it understood, right?  But there are more agencies than not  and dim-witted clients who just love to jam just about everything including the kitchen sink into the 18×48 billboards – Look at all that empty space? Of course, at 80 miles an hour, you can probably just read three or four words.

Notable brand marketers who know their outdoor stuff – Apple (who else?), Anheuser Busch,  Toyota, Audi, Coca Cola, Heineken, Hollywood studios….they are pros at putting up eye-catching ads with not a lot of copy – they just want to sell the brand.  Outdoor advertising is a brand-building medium that remains hugely popular with advertisers.  It’s cheap, efficient, and proven to be remembered with consumers.

The latest technology, of course, is four-color process, large vinyl printed sheets that stretch across the outdoor boards.  Long gone are the famous billboard artists who use to hand paint all the artwork – including the photo-like artwork that was an “art” by itself.  I remember when we did the Disney characters on our billboards in the 1960s and 1970s….it was all original art from our style-guides given to these very talented artists.  They loved working on the Disney characters because they admired the art and creativity.

Today, this art has all been replaced by Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign.  It’s mechanical but efficient and spot-on accurate.  I love the simplicity of the Apple billboards – no copy, just the outline of a dancer with the iPod in their ears.  Clean and simple.

This brings me up to the attached artwork (below) – I was speaking in Mexico City this week (August 15) for Diffusion Paramerica – who is one of Mexico’s largest billboard companies – and they surprised me with place five billboards around Mexico City with my photo and subject matter on it – and also had five taxi cabs with my mug on it, too.  Surprised?  I think so.  It’s a first for me.  -  RJL

Related articles

• 10 Brilliant Interactive Billboards [VIDEOS] (mashable.com)
• Visually arresting Newcastle billboard (marshallstanton.com)
• Coca-Cola / WWF: Plant Billboard (ibelieveinadv.com)
• Living in a Billboard (neatorama.com)
• Sponsored Post: The Occasionally Perfect Billboard (laist.com)

Awarded to the most deserving brand

By Robert Liljenwall
With this piece we start a new regular feature for BrandTech News, in which our Brand Editor puts the squeeze on Brands that have recently soured. News Corp. is BrandTech News’ first recipient of the Lemon Award for the company that has most tarnished its brand through missteps, bad behavior, or just plain stupidity.
Revelations of alleged mass hacking of just about everybody’s email and voicemails plus bribery of police officials by News Corp’s News of the World tabloid can best be described as a massive tsunami of brand destruction that is still sweeping across the UK. Who knows where this will end? Second only to Disney as the world’s largest media company, the entire Rupert Murdoch empire is on the brink of tumbling off its global pedestal—just like Humpty Dumpty. Except Humpty Dumpty was never threatened with jail, let alone arrested. But already, News Corp has trashed its venerable 168-year old News of the World — shut down, gone. Its powerful chief, Rebekah Brooks, has been arrested, with more to follow.
Started long before you were born in 1843, the News of the World (NotW) was the biggest English language newspaper in the world. It was purchased by Murdoch in 1969, but the immense and quick execution of the entire NotW staff of 200 goes down as one of the greatest brand implosions of all time. But, wait there’s more. Also, the Police Commissioner of London has now resigned, although he admits to no wrong doing.
Is this News Corp’s BrandGate? Obviously, there is smoke from News Corp’s chimney…..News Corp has already withdrawn its bid for control of British Sky Broadcasting’s (BSkyB) massive satellite network …and while observers mused if the new Hacking Plague would spread to the company’s prime US properties….it already has with the resignation of Les Hinton, who resigned as the publisher of The Wall Street Journal (he had previously served as publisher for NotW). Does the glove fit here, too?
All in all, News Corp’s total market value has lost over $6 billion in value since July 1 when the scandal first broke (more than 13%)…..and last week, the company published a letter signed personally by Rupert Murdoch….”We are sorry.” He is making the rounds to get anyone to listen to his version of why he is so sorry.
Will it work? The essence of any brand is its commitment to core values and how it is perceived by its customers. Do they trust you? Obviously, there are chinks in Rupert’s armor. But it’s too early to tell what the long-term effects will be on Murdoch’s News Corp brand. He has managed to build strong brands in the newspaper business with The London Times and Wall Street Journal. And for his US holdings of Fox News, Fox Television, and 20th Century Fox Studios – he has significant brand equity despite dumping the UK newspaper that was a moneymaker and a huge public opinion influencer for 168 years. You have to be pretty desperate to do that.
This 80-year old Murdoch is not going quietly into the night … he is slashing, firing, and plunging into his brands with ever-quickening speed to stop the bleeding. His ace in the hole: Strong media he still owns. There is an old saying in the newspaper business: “You never argue with a man who buys ink by the barrel.” But in these days of electronic media, he may not have enough ink. More to follow. RJL
[image courtesy of Ambro, FreeDigitalPhotos.com]

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• The Murdochs must stop spinning and resign over the phone-hacking scandal | Robert Greenwald (guardian.co.uk)
• News Corp to emerge ‘a stronger company’: Murdoch – AFP (news.google.com)
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