To celebrate Israel’s 60th Birthday, The American Jewish Committee has put out what may be the worst web advertising campaign ever.  Just now I clicked on a flash-ad on Slate.com that described different American cities and their characteristics.   Thinking it was an ad for a ranking of American cities (I love to critique their methodologies), I clicked through, only to come across this page from the AJC pointing out how Israel is Diverse, Innovative, Friendly, and Free.  In fact, that’s all it does.  The entire content of the website is a picture of a black couple at a strip-mall with the text:

Diverse. Innovative. Friendly. Free. These are just a few of the countless ways to describe Israel @ 60. A modern democracy with an enduring history, Israel’s unique mix of culture and ingenuity makes it a lot like home and yet like nowhere else on Earth.

I clicked through the ad to get what could very easily be a print ad hastily stuck at a URL.  There’s no content for me to explore, no call to action, no history of Israel, tourism info, testimonials or interviews with Israelis, anything.  Just a paragraph of text and a stock-photo.  I haven’t researched around yet to figure out the impetus behind this campaign, but to consider it a terrible waste of donor funds would be an understatement. If you’re going to advertise on the web, at least advertise something.

To break it down for the AJC, Indecipherable/Misleading Ad + Contentless Page = Worst Web Campaign Ever.

Categories: Israel, Marketing
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A Missouri Farmer has carved the St. Louis Cardinals logo into his corn field:

You can even see it on Google Maps by calling it up yourself - go south on Hwy 61 from Troy. Call me when your customers, employees or Red Sox fans (Hi Deb!) do a tribute to your brand that is visible from space

You can’t buy marketing like that, but if your customers are engaged, they’ll give it to you for free. Of course, it’s probably only a matter of time before the Cardinals or MLB sues away their only visible-from-space billboard.

Categories: Business and Economics, Customer Engagement, Marketing
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After an experience at a restaurant, the Evil HR Lady says:

We don’t train our managers correctly. We don’t teach them what they, as the manager, should fix and what their employees should fix. Managers are scared to let employees have any power–for fear they’ll make the wrong decision. If your employees are poor decision makers, you should not have hired them in the first place. Hire good employees and let them do their work.

Customers want the person they’re dealing with to be able to fix their problems, not have to pawn it off on someone else. If your employees need to get management approval to improve customer experience, they’re wasting everyone’s time. Better to hire talented people, focus them on the customer, and trust them to make the right choices. Let managers manage, and trust the employees who handle your most precious asset, your customers, to make the right decisions, because if you don’t, your customers will leave for a company that does.

Categories: Business and Economics, Careers, Customer Engagement, Employee Engagement, Governance, Managing, Marketing
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Wow, talk about feeling good about helping rather than actually helping. Some data on Bono’s Red Campaign:

• Total spent on making Bono more famous = $100million.
• Total spent on drugs for Africans = $18million.

How self serving is it that celebrities would rather spend millions of dollars promoting how much they than make the large scale donations or encourage the structural reforms that can make an impact?

Categories: Marketing, Philanthropy
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From the Donor Power Blog:

You can’t go wrong if you think of your donors as your owners. They’ve invested in you, and demand some kind of return for their investment. Not money, but a better world. It’s something you need to deliver — and clearly let them know you’ve delivered.

I’d go one further - think of your donors as shareholders. They have lots of choices about where they can invest their donations, and they’ve chosen to invest it with you. That means you have to treat them like you would shareholders by delivering results, measuring them, and communicating information about your organization. At the same time, your service recipients are your customers, and you need to treat them as such by providing value for them, because that’s what your shareholders demand of you.

If you’re going to be responsive to your donors as shareholders, you need to run like a business, by determining what your objectives are, measuring performance and outcomes, and then communicating that information to your donors so they’re motivated to invest in you again.

Update: Duh! If I had read further in the post, I would have noticed he already advocated Donors as Shareholders. Donor Power Blog, you are so empowering!

Categories: Business and Economics, Marketing, Metrics, Philanthropy, Strategy
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Even after JetBlue screwed up big time, people are still going back:

Because JetBlue worked hard to acknowledge the importance of customer satisfaction early, the carrier has, in effect, built in a forgiveness contingency in it’s implied agreements with its customers.

Categories: Business and Economics, Incentive Centered Design, Marketing, Strategy, Travel
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Turner Broadcasting and their ad agency are paying the city of Boston $2 million after law enforcement there confused a glowing Mooninite advertising the new AquaTeen Hunger Force movie with a terrorist threat.  Half will be “goodwill” funds given to the agencies for training and equipment.  Does this mean they just got a million dollars for their screw up?  Will they use this to prevent a similar embarrassment?  Doesn’t this provide an incentive for police departments to overreact, forcing a settlement with corporations who will then pay up to prevent a PR disaster?  After all, none of the departments in 9 other cities, who figured out that a glowing Moon Man isn’t a bomb, got any free money.
The companies can’t say what I’m going to: Boston law enforcement overreacted and behaved in a bumbling and incompetent manner.  The more we are willing to kowtow to our fears of terrorism, the more effective it becomes as a tactic.

Categories: America, Entertainment Media, Governance, Incentive Centered Design, Law, Marketing, Television
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Chris Anderson’s Long Tail Blog takes a look at how Anheuser-Busch is expanding into niche brands:

Earlier this month I got in touch with Anheuser-Busch to hear from the Clydesdale’s mouth why the shift from hits to niches was coming to suds, too. I mean, I get how the Internet lowers the costs of distribution in many markets to allow for more choice (the “infinite shelf space” effect), but how does that apply to real bottles on real shelves?

Categories: Business and Economics, Distribution, Information Economics, Marketing, Strategy
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Chris Anderson’s Long Tail Blog asks do artists who give their music away for free want to make money?

Many do, but they’re just smarter than most music industry execs. They understand the difference between abundance and scarcity economics. Music as a digital product enjoys near-zero costs of production and distribution–classic abundance economics. When costs are near zero, you might as well make the price zero, too, something thousands of bands have figured out.

Meanwhile, the one thing that you can’t digitize and distribute with full fidelity is a live show. That’s scarcity economics. No wonder the average price for a ticket was $61 last year, up 8%–in an era when digital products are commodities, there’s a premium on experience. No surprise that bands are increasingly giving away their recorded music as marketing for their concerts, which offer something no MP3 can match.

Categories: Business and Economics, Distribution, Entertainment Media, Incentive Centered Design, Information Economics, Marketing, Strategy
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In the WaPo, a librarian laments that books are a hard sell, and futility tries to save them:

But as I moved along in my library science program, I found that books weren’t really our focus. Information management, database networking and research tools claimed the largest share of the curriculum. In other words, literacy today is defined less by how English departments or a librarian might teach Wordsworth or Faulkner than by how we find our way through the digital forest of information overload.

As I mentioned in my earlier post about libraries, information searches are usually for more specific information than a book offers.  Finding that specific information is tough, and a book surrounds it with hundreds of pages of noise that are difficult to search through.  Successful librarians, or information specialists, are the ones who are recognizing this and adapting.  They see their profession holistically.  Unfortunately, too many nostalgic Luddites are still wandering around library science programs trying to prolong and accentuate their love affair with the physical book.

Categories: Books, Education, Information Economics, Libraries, Marketing
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According to Slate, an attempt to get a nobody elected to the NHL All Star Game has exposed gross incompetence on the part of the site administrators and league officials:

How did the Rory Vote-O-Matic work? According to Touesnard, online security at NHL.com was pathetic. The league tried to counter automated scripts by making voters decipher words embedded in distorted images—a system known as CAPTCHA. But the NHL used only 51 different picture files and each one had a predictable name, like “1.gif.” All the Rory hackers had to do was create a table that linked up each file name with the appropriate pass phrase. Touesnard coded up the Vote-O-Matic in just a few hours.

Incentive centered design problem for online voting, anyone?

My favorite tidbit:

Some have even gone so far as to suggest the whole thing was orchestrated by the league’s viral marketers, who have been pushing a fan-centered brand under the slogan “My NHL.” But it’s hard to imagine how anything positive could come from such a parade of scandalous incompetence.

Having viral marketers is stupid enough on its own.  Then giving them positive credit for something they didn’t start and subsequently blatantly mismanaged?

Categories: Business and Economics, Community, Governance, Incentive Centered Design, Information Economics, Information Markets, Marketing, Social Software, Users as Partners
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From BusinessWeek:

Now that the merger with BellSouth merger is complete, the new AT&T may be trying to change the basis of rivalry in telecom. Providers have long competed on which can offer the biggest bundle of services such as wireless, landline, and TV. Now the competition may shift to who can offer free access to the largest community of users. “Before, it was about, ‘My bundle of services is bigger than yours,’ ” says Winther. “Now, they will say, ‘My community is bigger than yours.’ “

To move beyond bundling their low marginal cost services together, AT&T is trying to attract users by increasing the network effects of AT&T service.  It’s like an Information Rules case example.  Info-Econ students pay attention.

Categories: Business and Economics, Distribution, Information Economics, Marketing, Strategy, Technology
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The cool kids in the Jewblogosphere , which I’m just starting to navigate into (thanks mom for the advance recon!), are debating whether social justice is central to Judaism. It starts here, they’re going all week, and Canonist has already chimed in a bit. They raise different points that I might take on later this week, but I’m going to tackle something else today.

The entire debate makes the same mistake that the Jewish community always does by confusing social justice with Tikkun Olam (repairing the world). Tikkun Olam is making the world a better place, very broadly defined. It influences everyday interactions like how you perform at work, how you treat your neighbors, what you do with your empty beer can, and whether or not it’s OK to cheat on your taxes, just to name a few.

In contrast, social justice is still very narrow, and usually means leftist/progressive/liberal/socialist political leanings. Income redistribution is seen as social justice, but it doesn’t usually make the world a better place (see, Zimbabwe). If you count equal rights in the picture, you get another amorphous concept. Should we treat everyone equal, or make everyone equal? Because social justice is so narrowly defined, and because there’s real philosophical differences that usually emerge from the popular definitions, it’s really tough to make it a viable central theme for the Jewish community.

Making the world a better place, in contrast, is simple to understand and gives powerful meaning to peoples lives. Contrary to what you may think, nobody else in the marketplace of religions is selling it, and it has wide appeal.

Here’s an anecdote to illustrate the difference. An recent college graduate becomes an engineer and figures out how to make a manufacturing process 7% more efficient. He has just made the world a better place, because now you can make 7% more product for the same amount of money, but he probably hasn’t made society any more just (and he may have even made it less just). For his efforts, he is rightfully compensated by the company he works for, and he takes $5000 of that money and donates it to a charity which uses local labor, and therefore can build and stock an entire library for his contribution.

Another graduate strongly believes in social justice, and decides that education in the developing world is important to them. Because of this, they forsake the salary and benefits of a first job, and instead travel to the developing world to build a school. They want to get their hands dirty. Though they’ve never worked in construction, jointly with a group of 20 other recent graduates, they spend 8 months in Ethopia helping a Western project manager to construct a rudimentary building that a village can then use as a schoolhouse. Of course, they couldn’t get paid to do this - they’re making the world more just, so they borrow money from their parents to pay the organization supporting them about $4000 to cover food and lodging, as well as another $1000 for transportation to get to Ethiopia. Remember it took 20 kids to do this.

I don’t mean to criticize the graduate who spent time volunteering abroad (OK, I do). More than that, I mean to criticize the communal values that define Tikkun Olam in such a way that the volunteer is somehow seen as helping the world more than the engineer. Whether or not Tikkun Olam was central to ancient Judaism doesn’t matter, it’s certainly central to modern Judaism, and it’s what Judaism brings to the table better than any other religion (or non-religion) competing for people’s attentions.

Judaism offers a lot. It is a culture rooted in laws for every day life, a revolution at its time, that are based around values that are still relevant today. What Judaism offers that gives meaning to peoples lives is an end state not of another world, but of this one. I don’t mean to get too theological in this (maybe another day), but I see Judaism as a partnership with God to make the world a better place. Does campaigning for equal rights do this? Absolutely, but it’s not the only way. Does buying only fair trade coffee? I’d argue not so much. But that argument - about how we’re going to make the world a better place - is another example of the richness of Jewish culture. It’s just one for another post.

Categories: America, Jewishness, Marketing, Philanthropy, Strategy
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Suppose that two retailers, East Side Tires and West Side Tires, are advertising the same tire for $50.

If East Side Tires cuts its advertised price to $45 while the West Side price stays at $50, we would expect that some of those customers on the west side of town would be willing to travel a few extra minutes to save the $5.

East Side Tires would then sell more tires at a lower price. If the increase in sales was large enough, its profits would rise.

Hal Varian discusses whether price-matching or price beating guarantees help reduce prices.

Over the summer, I used a similar argument in a discussion about why gas stations accross the street from each other can charge different prices and still be competitive.

(Via Greg Mankiw)

Categories: Business and Economics, Incentive Centered Design, Marketing, Strategy
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The Donor Power Blog has a list of the 3 best times to ask donors for money:

#1 3 to 6 weeks after they’ve given
Hands down, without question, this is the best time to ask a donor to give. The #1 predictor of likelihood to give is recency of the last gift. A lot of nonprofits operate on the opposite assumption — that recency predicts unwillingness to give again. If you’re avoiding contact with recent donors, you’re losing significant opportunities to bond with happy, involved donors

Categories: Business and Economics, Information Economics, Marketing, Philanthropy, Strategy
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