Carman Pirie's Blog

Marketing Halo 3 - "Don't suck"

Darren Zenko wrote a review of Halo 3 in the Edmonton Journal here.

A lot of marketers could learn from his explanation of the Halo 3's hype:
"So, what’s the big deal with Halo 3? Why the doorcrashing lineups and midnight madness and insane first-day numbers? Hype’s a part of it, but that hype is built on a foundation of trust and respect. Every step of the way, the Halo games have provided experiences so perfectly tuned and enjoyable that their countless little innovations only really get noticed when other games don’t have them — and gamers can’t wait to see what Halo has in store for this powerhouse generation of consoles. Halo earned its blockbusterdom the old-fashioned way: by not sucking."

Heh. Rule #1: Don't suck. Rule #2: Refer to rule #1.

Google's Birthday

Wow.

A friend of mine is fond of saying that you can get a lot done in ten years. He's right. But, can any of us imagine the world without Google now? They've certainly done a lot... in 9 years.

Landlord Lou’s big winner

Jeremy Jackson, Killam's VP of Marketing, with Lee Nelson and a car load of plungers.

Lee Nelson and Louise Daoust, a couple of students in Halifax, won a free year’s rent after delivering just over 500 plungers to Killam’s head office a few weeks ago. Very cool. And, if my interaction with Lee and Louise is any indication, they’re wonderfully nice folks. It’s nice when good things happen to good people, etc. Congratulations.

Further, it seems students weren’t the only ones picking up on the Landlord Lou buzz. During a recent Bay Street visit, a number of Investor Analysts spoke very highly of Landlord Lou. I wish I could say I saw that coming. Very cool.

Canadian Sponsorship Forum talk

Just catching up a bit. All went well at the Canadian Sponsorship Forum talk a week or so ago. (Although, we Canadians tend to be a tad polite. So, any critical commentary from those in attendance would be fantastic… just drop me a line or leave a comment here.)

The talk covered Colour’s partnership with the United Way detailing 3 main points:

1. How Closer to the Customer led us to the insights and ideas that got the campaign going.

2. The United Way campaign as a demonstration of the Appreciative Approach to social marketing.

3. How the campaign is spreading naturally across the country through our letting go of the concept and the work done to date, enabling co-creation of the campaign via the Internet, and how chaordic theory has guided us along this path.

I’d post the slide deck, but it wouldn’t make any sense without the talk going along with it. Which brings me to a final point: I witnessed a presentation at this conference where the average number of words on a slide was 68. YES, 68!!! Don’t ever do this. Please. Not for your next departmental team meeting, not for your AGM, not for your next big conference gig. Please.

Stormhoek Blue Monster Reserve

Just to be clear... this is very, very smart. If you care at all about marketing, and you have at least a passing interest in being relevant, Hugh really is a must read.

What defines a customer?

Simple question maybe.... but: What defines a customer?

When I couldn’t figure out today how to make a permanent change to my Facebook email address security preferences (it keeps reverting back even though it seemingly accepts my changes), I clicked help on the bottom of the Facebook homepage. When the FAQ’s didn’t help, I clicked through to send a message to their customer support desk. I just got an email back from Facebook Customer Support thanking me for the note and saying that they’ll be back to me soon with an answer.

We generally only think of customers as those people that have extended some form of consideration in exchange for a product or service…. most often cash. This helps tell us how they should be treated (hopefully) and establishes some expectations along the way.

But I’ve never paid Facebook a cent. Not one. And I suspect you haven’t either. Now, I suppose one could make the argument that I am giving them my attention (with corresponding ad revenue) in exchange for the use of a social networking service… but, we give our attention to TV, outdoor ads, radio, print, etc. all the time, and I don’t think they treat us as customers. Viewers / listeners / readers maybe, but never customers.

Part of understanding what’s going on with the Internet is recognizing that the old rules just don’t apply. Now Facebook has an opportunity deliver a brand-building, favourable experience to a customer via a positive two-way interaction. When was the last time you had a customer conversation with a TV network?

(Update: Less than 24hrs later, Jamie at Facebook has fixed the problem! Fantastic 'customer' service.)

Facebook and the obscene

First off, I'm writing this via blackberry... so I apologize for the lack of links, etc. to the original story.

The good folks at Facebook are facing a bit of a backlash after closing the account of at least one Canadian mother whose snaps of her nursing her child were deemed obscene.

The Facebook group "Hey Facebook, breastfeeding is not obscene!" is gaining members as fast as Angelina Jolie's fan club.... all of them rather put off by all of this.

The way I see it, the rules have changed. Just because you've built (and could sell for an incredible amount of cash) a social network like Facebook, doesn't mean you own it. The users own it. Facebook can learn this now, or learn it later - but learn it they will.

My advice: take the same ingenuity used to create Facebook and build a self-governance framework for users. Human beings have a remarkable capacity for self-governance when the conditions are right.

This is pretty basic chaordic theory really.... determine the minimum amount of order required, then get out of the way. Control is not the answer.

The Culture Definition Market

Charlene Croft commented on my earlier posting predicting TV’s demise, suggesting that “TV may not be dead yet considering most of the blogsphere is driven by commentary and editorialization of stuff that occurs on television”. That got me thinking… is it perhaps too early to stick a fork in TV?

Blogs are wonderfully useful for a variety of things, not the least of which is publishing half-baked ideas in a global forum... so, let's give that a shot and see what collective clarity emerges from the conversation.

Right now, I’m thinking that what we’re seeing is a rather typical pattern of when monopolies (or even strong oligopolies for that matter) are challenged. This time, we’re seeing it in the Culture Definition Market.

It’s pretty common for challengers to intensely focus – almost obsess about – the leading player in many markets. And, it is also plenty common for the incumbent to adopt the strategy of indifference… appearing not to care or notice lest they lend some credibility to the up-and-comers. Challengers gain credibility (or at least notoriety) by talking about the incumbent – they’ve got nothing to lose, and everything to gain.

If we follow the evolution of such a market, we generally see that eventually the incumbent is forced to acknowledge the competitive threat – and often far too late in the game.

And so it goes with blogs versus TV…. of course blogs mention TV more than TV mentions blogs…. of course TV still drives blog content, blogs play in the pop culture space and TV = pop culture. They’ve defined the space for over 50 years.

But it’s evolving.

Recently, various traditional media outlets have acknowledged blogging and other social media… some have even embraced it. This is different from their recognition of Web 1.0…. Web 1.0 as it was didn’t threaten what Seth Godin refers to as the TV Industrial Complex. Web 2.0 does, however. And Web 3.0 will finally be the straw that breaks the camel’s back.

TV vs Social Media / the Internet is really a battle between two competitors in the Culture Definition Market. TV is the fat, lazy incumbent – the Internet the young upstart challenger with nothing to lose.

Landlord Lou in Fredericton

Photo Credit: The Daily Gleaner / Stephen MacGillivray

LandLord Lou gets some ink in Fredericton here.

We're learning a lot with this campaign I think. I like how people are responding to the utter randomness of the plunger placement... trust me, there really is no rhyme or reason to it. i.e. The best way for things to appear random is for them to truly be random. Go figure. So, we're learning that you can indeed turn plungers into currency for apartments. And, perhaps most importantly, we're learning the discipline to not over think this.