andydidyk.com

“Depression 2.0″ is the catchy term being used to articulate our current fiscal crisis.  I’m not exactly sure where it originated, but it certainly fits the bill in all but one respect.  The “Depression” part is accurate, as there are so many historical indicators that seem to be repeating themselves a la 1929, as this excellent Time article points out.  And I find the “2.0″ aspect of the moniker especially relevant (although very 2006) , because the web makes things so much more interesting for everyone involved.

Also, by most accounts, interactive companies are thriving in this downgrading economy.  Certainly, there are exceptions, but for the most part, marketers are keeping budgets the same for next year or even increasing their spend on interactive projects.  The reason?  I think it has to do with the most important aspect of interactive marketing that has evolved over the past several years.

Interactive marketing is, when executed properly, measurable.  Just look at any Ecommerce site.  With sophisticated (and in the case of Google, free) analytics tools at every agency’s disposal, it’s becoming easier and easier for a marketing executive to plainly articulate the return on their marketing dollar.  It’s something that everyone can understand, “If I spend $10 here, I can on average get $30 back”.  That’s the kind of work that sells itself.  Of course, anyone in the industry knows that it takes the time, energy, and attention of some very talented people working under pressure to pull that off, but when you have the numbers on your side it’s any easy sell.

Finally, unlike the poor folks back in 1929, the access to information is so much greater.  We can get up-to-the-minute reports of exactly how screwed up the economy is at any given time.  We don’t have to wait for our neighbors to knock on our doors to tell us that there’s a run on the local savings and loan.

However, it never ceases to amaze me how, with all of the knowledge of our current world and of our history we have, people still behave quite predictably and ignorantly of the past.  Once again, Americans have overspent, over-borrowed, and lived it up now at the expense of the future, and Americans are hoping the government will bail us out.  I can’t help but wonder if a little more crisis wouldn’t help us all slow down a little and cause us to be thankful for what we have.

Just keep the dollars flowing to responsible interactive companies in the meantime.

Update from Fuse:

“This report just crossed my computer from Marketing Daily.  It indicates that internet ad spends were up 15.2% in the first half of 2008.  No doubt this is a part of a trend toward increased online spending and a steady move away from the more traditional advertising channels. With the economy in its current mode, customers will demand and desire the ROI metrics that their internet marketing spend can provide.”

I’ve been MIA for a while now, because my wife just gave birth to the latest member of our family, Kaela Ruth.  Our new daughter is incredibly beautiful and keeping me very busy.

I started this post a few weeks ago, and decided to finish it today while in the Atlanta airport.  I watched this great Google Tech Talk video in which Merlin Mann of 43 Folders fame talks about how to better manage your email.  The upside of me not blogging for a month is that I’ve had 30+ days to put these habits into practice, and let me tell you, it’s changed my digital lifestyle for the better.

The video is excellent, but it’s 60 minutes long.  If you’d like the highlights and my opinion, then read on.

Here are seven philosophical points about the “whys” of controlling your email, rather than letting your email control you.

1. Knowledge workers make money by turning knowledge and information into value.  You can’t effectively do this if your time is all tied up in pointless emails.
2. Where you decide to put your time and attention says a lot about who you are.
3. “Time and attention are finite, but demands on your time and attention are infinite”.  You have to filter out what gets attention and what gets ignored.
4. Never check your email without “processing to zero” - actually doing something with the email you receive rather than merely “checking it”. In sum, you have to look at every piece of email in your inbox whenever you check your email, and you have to decide what to do with it. Not necessarily respond to every piece, but you have to make a decision about each and every one.
5. Once you’ve gotten the info that you’ve needed to from the email, it’s useless to you. Get rid of it!
6. Make your system as simple as you can stand it.
7. If you’re not in customer service or some other extremely time-sensitive email situation, then turn off your email app and only check your email once an hour, or less if possible. As much as you can, try to reduce the number of times you check it.

Mann then asserts that there are most 5 options that you have for processing a given email:

1. Delete it! (or archive it if it’s really something worth saving).
2. Delegate it. If you tell someone else to do it, set a reminder to yourself to ensure that it in fact took place.
3. Respond to it. This is a tough one for me to follow, because I’m a writer. But email isn’t the place to debut my next philosophical tirade. Mr. Mann suggests placing a line in your footer that states, “I will not write any email longer than 5 sentences”. If nobody reads long blog posts anymore, certainly in a business context no one reads long emails anymore. If it’s that long of a response, then schedule a meeting.
4. Defer it (will need a response, but could take additional time). I don’t know if I like this one. At least in my world, I can respond to most emails fairly quickly.
5. Do it. If something requires action from you, just get it done. If you can’t do it right now, schedule a meeting or reminder for it, and then it’s taken care of.

This has truly helped me to tame my inbox and to stop using it as a reminder system.  I was very guilty of reading the emails when I didn’t have time to respond to them.

Anyways, it’s good to be back.  I still have no idea why Google still refuses to index my blog, so I may go ahead and move it from a Wordpress platform to something else, or redesign it and see what happens.  At any rate, it’s not like I’m selling ads or anything, so I’ll keep writing for now.

In spite of some of my previous criticisms of Facebook, I have finally taken the plunge and signed up for a Facebook page.  At first, it was simply a practical tactic to try and maintain some traffic to site during my difficulties with Google, but I’ve since continued to use it and update it to finally see what exactly my peers had said I was missing out on.  A couple of initial observations:

1.  It’s fun to get friend invitations from both your current cadre of friends and from people you haven’t spoken to in years.

2.  99% of the communication I’ve received thus far has, in fact, confirmed my initial assertions about Facebook: fun, but not much more than interesting entertainment for now.

3.  I can absolutely understand the immense economic value of marketing on a network like Facebook.  The opportunity to use the data contained within posts, status updates, associtions, groups, etc., is like having the largest and most detailed marketing database available.  Oh, and did I mention that the majority of Facebook users fall within the most desirable demographic in terms of discretionary income?

4.  Every interactive agency should have a Facebook and Myspace strategy for their clients if their target audience’s demographics (and attitudes!) fall within the required parameters.

5.  Within a few days of joining, my Facebook page rocketed up to the #1 search result in Google for my name.  In addtion to the day-to-day banter being fun, it’s also another great way for potential clients to find me (although I wish this site would get re-indexed by Google a little faster).

I know these observations are probably pretty obvious to anyone who has already joined, but for professional folks who don’t find a lot of value in it at first, I can say it’s probably worth setting a page up and seeing what happens.

Time to ask for some advice…

Starting last month, I have suddenly gone from about 35%-40% of the traffic to this site coming from search engines to almost zero.  A complete flat-line starting in early May.

I’ve used Webmaster Tools to diagnose things, and everything appears to be running fine.  I’ve submitted my XML sitemap, recently (within the past 3 days) simplified my permalink structure to be more search engine friendly, and disabled the “All in One SEO Pack” for wordpress in case Google thought I was spamming them.  I know that updating my permalink structure after being online for well over a year was a bit silly, but I don’t have a good deal of links that are to specific posts at this point; most of my referrals are right to andydidyk.com, so it shouldn’t affect but a handful of old links.

I’ve also done some basic keyword analysis and my site doesn’t show up in Google search results at all, even when typing in “Andy Didyk”, which some of you readers may recall was on of my reasons for starting this site.

Any help would be greatly appreciated!  And thanks to everyone who keeps accessing the site directly; I’ll get this issue fixed soon and let you know when I figure out a cause.

From:

To:

May 22nd has been a deadline that has been staring me in the face for the last 7 weeks, starting with the signing of a proposal I wrote. Today is the launch of the “reskinned” HunterFan.com. It has been an ambitious journey, reskinning an entire site, plus completely designing and building 3 micro-sites for the same customer, all in less than 2 months! I’m proud of the work our excellent creative team has done, and I truly get fulfilled watching a project go from conception to completion. It was also cool to witness some hardcore legerdemain (YES! I used that word in real life!) by our programming staff to resolve server-side issues I won’t even pretend to comprehend.

The new homepage is much, much cleaner than the old version, and it has a variety of ways that a customer can navigate to the same information. As you can see, our client is really making a move to embrace the new green color, which I think works very well on the live site.

All we had time to do in this phase is redesign the homepage, add a few features, and add a new look and feel to the interior pages - still a huge improvement over the previous site. Of course, now comes the real work: Phase 2. Phase 2 will bring this site up to a new standard. Stay tuned!

Someone on LinkedIn asked the question, “What are the top 5 things you are thinking about in eMarketing? I responded to her, and I thought I’d share with you the top 5 things on my mind:

1. Valuation of Social Media users - how can you determine their worth to an organization?
2. Engagement - how can you ensure online audiences are genuinely engaged with the brand, both on- and offline?
3. Analytics - eMarketing is unique in that with the proper analytics one can easily measure true ROI on a campaign, rather than nebulous “impressions”
4. Permission-based mobile marketing - mobile marketing is great, but without gaining the permission of the users, it’s just expensive spam and an ineffective marketing tool.
5. Convergence - no, not the buzzword of the late 1990’s, but the idea that people’s lives and technology are becoming increasingly inseparable and in some cases, wholly integrated. A marketer can take advantage of this by facilitating conversations and interactions the user is already interested in.

So, have you ever worked on a project that you regretted?   I’ll bet at least someone at the agency responsible for this campaign has.

Fortunately, I’ve been privileged to only work at agencies that had reasonable scruples about promoting clients that are damaging to the environment or to the human populace in general.  While I wouldn’t consider myself super-conservative or anything, there are definitely certain products and/or services that I’m happy to not be promoting.

Advertisers can get such a bad rap in the name of trying to better the world, can’t we? A recent CNN article details some innovative (and presumably cost-effective) new ad placement technologies that Microsoft is developing for online applications. Of course, because it has to do with advertising and with Microsoft, all new technology must be “scary”.

What they are talking about actually sounded really cool to me. Check out this excerpt regarding the new role of advertising in streaming video going forward:

Microsoft — along with Google Inc. and other competitors — is also hard at work on new ways for companies to advertise their brands to Web surfers watching video clips.

One crunched a clip, looking for the most appropriate stretch of time and spot on the screen for an advertiser’s “bug,” or logo. For example, if a car company wanted to show its logo for 10 seconds in the bottom-right-hand corner of the screen, the computer program would find the 10 seconds in which the logo interferes least with the action in the video.

Another used speech recognition to make a transcript of a video, then served up ads — in the demonstration, they were text links — alongside the video. As the topics discussed on screen changed, so did the ads.

The third program scanned a video for surfaces where ads or product images could be inserted later. The demo showed how the same frames could display a Coke ad one moment and a Pepsi ad the next, without having to reshoot the video.

This isn’t scary to me…it’s exciting for a couple of reasons.  First, inserting bugs or other visual content into videos is already highly annoying, so any technology that reduces how obtrusive those elements are is great with me.  Second, we’re all looking for ads to be more relevant to us - both advertisers and consumers.  Most people are at best disinterested in an ad that is irrelevant to them, at worst they are downright offended.  I remember watching an episode of “Dirty Jobs” online at Discovery.com, and every single online ad was for a “regenerating facemask”cream that I had absolutely no use for (this did, however, confirm for me that there must be a lot of middle-aged women watching Dirty Jobs, or there was a totally inept media buyer for the facemask company.).

How much better would your media consumption experience be if it were personalized to you?  Every other aspect of consumerism is heading this direction, and with good reason, because we’re all unique as people.  Ads finally catching up with this isn’t “scary smart” to me, it’s refreshing.

Debuting during the Super Bowl (and what a Super Bowl it was!), Coke’s new ads got my ad-sensibilities as tingly as Mitt Romney in a Utah primary. Gone were the ridiculous, “soft branding” tactics of bubbly music and roller-skating hotties, and in were a couple of ads that really get to the heart of who Coca-Cola undeniably represents worldwide today: America, and her uncanny ability to be the melting pot of the world.The spot with Democrat James Carville and former Senator Bill Frist is definitely my favorite. What other soft drink brand could make the claim to bring disparate people together and not be totally laughed at? Sure, Pepsi tastes better, but globally the world revolves around Coke. Overall, I was disappointed with the rest of the Super Bowl ads. Sure, it’s easy to be critical when my client’s $2.7 Million isn’t on the table, but I was pretty shocked at the overall mediocrity of the ads. Most disappointing to me (besides the horrific salesgenie.com ads) was the fact that several companies tried to bank on the success of a previous idea rather than coming up with something original. During the Bowl, I spotted the following:

• Audi R8 – parody of The Godfather “horse head” scene
• Budweiser – gratuitous use of the Rocky theme song
• Bud Light – “Breathing Fire” spot is a direct rip-off from the DQ and Taco Bell “breathing fire” commercials
• Diet Pepsi Max – ripoff of Saturday Night Live “Night at the Roxbury” sketch
• Life Water - ripoff of Thriller, with a dancing girl

I use the term “ripoff” and “parody” loosely, just to conserve words. What I’m talking about is using an existing, popular idea instead of a new idea in order to sell your product. Sure, it’s great to make your ad buck go the extra mile in today’s congested, information-laden airwaves, but using iconic, if not the classiest, entertainment parodies to promote your brand doesn’t seem that valuable to me. It was also unusual that only a couple of advertisers decided to push a website along with their ad (Tide and Doriotos).

Either way, even though USA Today would disagree with me, I think Coca-Cola won the day. And I’m pretty non-biased because I only drink a soft drink about once a month, and it’s usually a Pepsi product =).

Well. Wow. I’m still in a bit of shock. Philips launched the “Shave Everywhere” campaign last summer, and mercifully it looks like I missed out on it back then. It’s a site that unabashedly describes the benefits of, well, shaving everywhere. They’ve even coined a new phrase, which may be creeping into our everyday language as you read this: “Second Puberty”, or the process by which men begin growing hair in undesirable places as they age. A marketer’s dream.

Tasteful or distasteful? Appropriate or inappropriate? Bravo for broaching a taboo subject in mainstream media, or Shame-on-Philips for assuming men are so base and unintelligent? Everyone may draw their own conclusions, but in the end the site has definitely accomplished its goal: to gain brand awareness by being disruptive.

While I don’t personally find the campaign to be in good taste, I have to tip my hat to Philips for being willing to try something truly creative and potentially dangerous. I think I would echo a lot of creative people in agency jobs in saying, “Wow, I wish the clients I work for would be willing to do something that crazy…looks like fun”.

What could your company do if you weren’t constrained by traditional social mores or accepted advertising tactics? I guess the only way to find out would be to give more marketers and agencies permission to fail while trying out new ideas. Looks like fun.

Thanks to Steve (sort of) =) for the link.