Gripes and Grins

Dock Ellis goes to Sundance Film Festival

Last month I shared an animated short in a blog about Chris Isenberg and the No Mas NYC clothing line. The Sundance Film Festival thought highly of the short Doc Ellis & the LSD No-No. It's been selected for the Sundance short film program. See the selections here: http://www.indiewire.com/…m_program/.

To see the film one more time, go here: http://aaronburcell.typepad.com/…-nono.html

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Protect the sanctity if marriage. Outlaw divorce

I can't remember where I first heard about this movement.  Wasn't Ohlberman.  I can't wait to see Stewart or Colbert interview John Marcotte, the clever man behind this California voter petition to put an amendment outlawing divorce on the California ballot.  If you like this idea, buy a tshirt.  PSA below

This is one of the best videos I've seen in awhile.

http://www.webguild.org/2009/11/how-not-to-be-the-social-media-guru.php

Doc Ellis and the LSD No-No

NoMas-nyc was created by Chris Isenberg, aka "Ise" (pronounced IZ). Like many of our classmates at Stanford, Chris went the startup route -- media, fashion, art.  His creativity is on display at nomas-nyc.com.  Chris and I were friendly in college, but no friends.  We had one very good friend in common -- a roommate that pitched on the baseball team, and later pitched several years in the Baltimore and Arizona organizations. 

From time to time I hear about No Mas.  On business in New York, I'll see the hipsters wearing No Mas gear on the streets.  I'll hear about the amazing bags and apparel from friends, or read reviews of No Mas gear in mens fashion rags in executive lounges in airports and hotels. Chris has done well, and he is still into the things that he always loved.

Isenberg is a true baseball fan.  Really, he is a sports junky.  You have to know this to understand the No Mas line and the art he produces.  The following animated short was produced by Chris -- you'll love it.  It's got a feel that matched the innocence of the 1970s, when American was experimenting in all directions and the fashion, art was 'far out'.  The short is about one of the most astounding events in baseball -- the day Doc Ellis through a no-hitter after a two-day acid bender. 

Nice work, Chris. 

Too soon?

Send your own ElfYourself eCards

New Twitter profile: Useless data

Check out #uselessdata for pointless data points: twitter.com/uselessdata.

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Awesome example of bad email marketing

I typically use this blog to share and highlight instances where big brands fail to meet their brand promises. Sometimes I applaud bigger brands that are doing a good job -- Microsoft and Starbucks are recent examples.  Sometimes, I post about startups that are trying to do something new or better.  On a rare occasion, I dump on a small outfit doing something cuddy.  This is one of those situations.

I get a lot of email.  My email addresses are bought, sold, rented to all kinds of business consultants and solution providers.  I get 300-400 emails per day, maybe 1-in-5 is from a fellow employee, partner or vendor. As the math indicates, I receive a lot of marketing emails.  In addition, I send out a lot of  marketing email messages to parents registered with SmartyCard.  Establishing my cred here, I've been handling outbound email marketing for consumer Internet companies for more than a decade. 

Basic marketing tip for you: When you're trying to get someone's business via email marketing, don't insult them or antagonize them.  I know this seems intuitive, but you'd be surprised what kind of stuff rolls into my inbox.  Take the email below for example.  

 

Comcast: Were you trying to scare my wife?

Readers of my blog have seen me post mysterious charges on my Comcast bill, charges that were later disappeared.  I've documented outages and summarized Comcast explanations of outages as well.  It's no secret that I have a love-hate relationship with Comcast.  Generally, I love their marketing, hate their service, feel sorry for their support and I'm annoyed by their "social media" monkeys that respond to any tweet or post mentioning Comcast. 

In my most recent post about Comcast, I confessed that I didn't even care about the minor service fee increases because my services have been relatively stable this year. 

But, I'm back to hating Comcast this morning.  I live in suburban Mountain View CA.  I arrived home last night and my wife was clearly spooked.  My wife was home with our children yesterday when a creepy cable guy knocked on the door.  My wife opened the door, and a guy wearing a Comcast shirt with a clip board explained that he was there to check on our Comcast services. 

Now, having started my marketing career in "field research" for Nabisco, I can tell you that there is a right way and wrong way to find out how your customers are feeling about your products and services.  

Here are some non-threatening methods:

1. Approach people in a public marketplace, ask if they're a customer, inquire about customer satisfaction and take notes.

2. Use a phone.  Presumably, as a Triple Play customer, Comcast has my phone number.  Comcast didn't call me.  No one calls that number -- I pick it up once a month to see if there is a dial-tone. 

3. Send survey in the mail.

4. Send a survey in email. 

5. Using one of the channels above, contact and arrange for an in-person interview.

6. Offer an honorarium. Note: this is a good way to get more profiling info.

Instead of using one of these methods, this guy with no ID except a shirt, a dangling badge and clipboard shows up and starts asking about our services.  Now, even using this method, there's still a way to execute the door-to-door customer inquiry without scaring the crap out of people. 

1. Be polite, ask if you can have a few moments of someone's time and explain the customer research objective.

2. Provide some sort of indication that you are familiar with the services being provides to each customer -- a list of customers providing names and service class (Triple Play vs. basic) is a good start.

3. Provide reassurances that you're asking questions to improve service and understand customer concerns.

Sadly, Comcast didn't execute very well.  In fact, they scared my wife, because they new nothing about our service package, our family name, how long we'd been with Comcast, nor did they explain their research objective.  Basically, Comcast sent a surly guy in a tshirt to my house to audit our services, and, in the process, scare the crap out of my wife.  I'm sure that my divorced and widowed neighbors didn't even answer their doors.  Instead, they probably looked out their windows and saw a creepy guy in a Comcast tshirt --> that's a net-negative brand impression. 

Comcast: I'm so very close to putting $1K into AppleTV and PS3 with Netflix so that I never have to deal with your sloppy business practices again. Someone in corporate please grow a brain and stop scaring the crap out of people with these customer audits.  

 

Why TV Elsewhere is so much more interesting

The point of this post and the clip is not to say that Americans are dumb.  I mean, that would be a little cliche right?  Well, this over-priveleged-asshole is drooling over English TV again after finding this clip on smirking chimp. Why? Because the content is so rich and focused.  Seriously, when I was traveling to the UK a lot in 06 and 07, this is the kind of TV that I would watch in the middle of the night because I couldn't sleep. 

Forget the super-stimulating business and political content in the clip. I recognize that not everyone graduated PoliSci and went to work in high-tech or business for that matter. Forget the awesomeness of a clip where UK bankers are referring to Goldman Sachs as "scum". Think about TV as a medium for creativity, entertainment and innovation. Think of Endemol -- the Dutch/British lab that creates reality TV franchises frequently imported by dim-witted Hollywood execs. Think of the amazing UK television series creating commercial successes (the office) and influencing whole generations of American productions (The Young Ones). TV in the UK reminds me of what could be here in the US, but is not, because TV (the business of TV) is racing to the bottom rung of intelligence (along with the brand marketers supporting bad programming).

So, last night, as I watched a bit of the biggest loser, I wretched a little bit at Jillian's tired act and the awkward product placements. And, honestly, this show deserves my support for the good that it might do in inspiring obese Americans to get healthy...but the execution is just so poor that it is getting really hard to watch. How bad is American TV if I have 800 Comcast digital channels, including 50 HD channels, and TV can only hold my attention for an hour on Thursday night (NBC) and Sunday Night (A&E)? Literally, TV was so bad last night that I couldn't stay awake.

As I crawled into bed and reached for a book, my wife looked up at Jay Leno and said, "really, Jay has Ewen McGregor on and he is asking about accents and fried Mars bars?". Yeah, really. TV is that bad. I'm going out tonight.

Diggerslist: Cause Marketing at Work

Diggerslist "launched" earlier this week. Disclosure: the founders are my brothers-in-law. In truth, if you look at the site (think eBay for construction), you'll see that DiggersList has been around for awhile.  Most people are savvy enough to know that you don't get regional listings from contractors overnight... I know my contractor isn't exactly an earlier adopter.  But I digress. 

You may look a the video below and scratch your head and think -- wow, corny vids and a DIY knock-off are so 2006.  These guys have a sense of humor about themselves.  What you're seeing in the video is reinforcing two key DiggersList customer beneifts, albeit the latter benefit is a very subtle reference. And, the cause marketing tactic is very engaging - holds my attention enough to communicate two key user benefits.  Here they are the meta-points:

1. The really interesting thing about DiggersList is that it works for both professional contractors and DIY'ers like yours truly.  In my garage, I've got random piles of tiles, un-opened buckets of paint, and more outdoor irrigation PVC than most Mexican drug lords.  I'm going to use DiggersList to clean out the garage, and buy a secret kegerator to fill the new space in my garage. I find this beneficial.

2. DiggersList is a green business.  The tshirts were the subtle indicator in the video.  But, if you're walking around Santa Monica or Los Angeles right now, you'll see posters on dozens of construction sites noting that the scrap materials are going to be recycled through DiggersList.  And, I love any business that is making money out of a byproduct.  That's good value for the buyer, great margin for the seller, good for the environment.

When you think about all of the marketing drek out there, this low-budget "help a neighbor" web video promotional effort is genuine and engaging.  I know from all of my years of marketing that whatever the format, your marketing has to genuine and engaging. 

Now, I'm not saying DiggersList is going to be huge.  And, I know for sure that venture capitalists aren't going to bet on DiggersList this quarter.  But, that's not DiggersList fault.  Most VCs are having trouble keeping their existing investments afloat and nobody wants to make a capital call to their limited partners this Holiday season.  And, because TechCrunch50 Winner Red Beacon (Angie's List for DIY) is tangential to DiggersList, most VCs will shy away from DiggersList because they won't see the obvious business differences.  But I don't think having VC dollars is as important as it once was.

I view DiggersList as another great idea that is going to make a lot of money outside of the traditional venture startup model.  There's a lot of these startups happening right now.  Entrepreneurs are choosing to take money from high-net-worth individual investors with domain expertise in lieu of venture funding right now.  DiggersList is one of them. And, in some ways, I'm green with envy.