Brandwidth Blog

I’m a football fan in general. A Steelers fan in particular (much to the chagrin of neighbors and friends here in Indianapolis). I played the game a little so I know the sport. I know my team. As an avid Fantasy Football participant, I also know a great deal about everyone else’s team. What’s more, I’m not alone - heck our account manager Danielle knows more about football than Dave Calabro, a local sports “personality.” Okay, so he is by far the single worst sports person I’ve ever seen in my life (though being from a real sports town like Pittsburgh, I’m probably pretty spoiled). It doesn’t change the fact that Danielle knows more about football than Dave Calabro does.

Bottom line…I enjoy watching a good game and I know my s%!t. So…

…why do FoxSports and CBS and NBC and ESPN treat me like a freakin’ idiot? Do I really need an anthropomorphic gladiator bot to reveal the damn Prilosec play clock? Do I need a CG explosion to usher in the Kwell Instant Replay? Do I need those damn blue and yellow lines to show me where the ball is and where it needs to go? Do I need Industrial Light And Magic to inform me that it’s time for the Progressive Insurance Crunch Time two-minute warning? Do I need the combined forces of the London Symphony and the Moron Tabernacle Choir to cue me that Mike Tomlin has thrown the red challenge flag? And do I really need that annoyingly condescending and stupid on-field graphic to remind me it’s 3rd and 9? I KNOW IT’S 3rd AND 9 – I’M WATCHING THE f*%$ng GAME!

Why oh why has a football broadcast become the gridiron equivalent of FOXNews - playing to the lowest common denominator; the most stupid among us; the 21% who support GW? Won’t anyone give at least some of us a little credit?

The answer to that question, it seems, is going to be no until more of us speak out. Because a football broadcast is no different from a movie (Will Farrell, check; tits, check; explosions, check; surprise ending, check). No different from an ad for Captain Morgan (I don’t know about you, but I always stand like a dog peeing on a fire hydrant when I drink my Capt’n and Coke). No different from an interview response on O’Reilly (”sending our army into harm’s way to a country that is no threat to us, having WMD that don’t exist and are no threat to you actually protects your FREEEEEEEEDOM and makes you SAAAAAAAAAFER”). Everything these days seems to be designed to not lose the stupid ones. And that’s the point of this whole blog this week. Whether you’re talking football or FOXNews or a Gecko from Oxfordshire or another formulaic hollywood slopfest, no one anywhere has the courage or cojones (balls, in case any of them are reading, too) to play to anyone BUT the lowest common denominator. Because it’s easier to sell to stupid. Costs less to sell to stupid. Requires too much thinking and effort to sell to smart. Particularly if you’re selling beer or a war of convenience. Stupid is dealt with by the media and the corporate machine and by America as the demographic majority. And that really sucks.

That doesn’t mean, however, that any of us have to actually believe it. Or acquiesce to it. And that doesn’t mean we can’t buck the trend with friends, colleagues and client partners who we’re fortunate to know and work with and who are clearly cut from a different cloth (you know who you are). I believe that the true majority of smart, practical, sentient beings is out there - potential friends, colleagues, client partners, sports announcers (still holding out hope for Mike Greenburg and Mike Golic taking over Monday Night Football) - and all wondering the same thing. Why doesn’t anyone cater to us for a change?

This is where I cue the annoying NASCAR-type pointer that shows you the car number in case you can’t read numbers upside down or sideways - or more than likely read at all. This is where I tell Joe Theisman to shut the f*%k up. This is where I scream at the top of my lungs - WE’RE RIGHT HERE! IT’S FOURTH AND ONE, STUPID. AND WE’RE GOING FOR IT!

This is where I continue to believe in - and hope for - the best.

I have to admit that all the way to Cleveland I was thinking “Oh, great, what a dump of a city. This trip surely will be all about meeting with a potential new client - we’ll fly out of there as quickly as we arrived.” Boy, what a surprise!

A few of the Brandwidth team (Tony and I) headed up to Cleveland to meet with an up and coming International Entertainment company specializing in live online events – a PPV model nonetheless (that’s Pay-Per-View for all you acronym haters). I’ll spare you the details of a great meeting with said company with a great idea and the toolset to make it happen. They need a story and distribution – the rest is there. More on that later.

We arrived the night before our meeting and were looking for something to entertain ourselves, to keep our minds off our families at home. So off to downtown we went. Soon we’re lost, driving aimlessly, although successfully, in circles. And the city is looking pretty good. In fact, it’s clean and it’s active and on a Wednesday night, there were actually people walking the streets, going in and out of stores and bars and other local establishments. It was looking promising. Once we realized we weren’t going to be the victims of some senseless crime in the dirty old streets of Cleveland, we snap out of it…Oh yea, what was it we were hoping to find…

The House of Blues. We pull over and ask a gentlemen for directions. Turns out we made a wrong turn or didn’t pay attention to the street signs. Whatever happened, we did another successful circle. Again, we pull over and ask another guy for directions. Same story from this guy, except this time as we’re paying attention to the street signs a car weaves in front of us and cuts us off – beeping their horn and hanging out the window. Suddenly we realize that it’s the guy that just gave us the directions and he’s leading us right to the spot. He either borrowed somebody’s car really quick or hijacked one. Either way, he went out of his to get us to The House of Blues. Cleveland experience one, a sign of things to come.

We valet park and hike to the venue. From the street, we can see the place is dead. We’re hoping at this point that the party’s in the back. We’re greeted at the door by the bartender who informs us the show for the night is canceled. As quick as he told us there’s no point in hanging around, he offers up the best spot in town and suggests a cab down to the flats. As we’re walking back to the valet, the guy reaches in his pocket and offers us our money back. We tell him to keep it but ask a favor, driving directions to the bartenders recommended venue for the evening. A few turns later and we’re in the money. Cleveland experience two, wow.

What’s in the flats? You’ll have to discover all the entertainment for yourself. Sorry, but it’s my pitch for Cleveland. It’s the least I can do in return for the hospitality. Suffice it to say, we had a blast and that bartender knows where the pulse of the city is on a Wednesday night. Cleveland experience three, fun and a nice distraction.

Surely you’re wondering how this could possibly be about marketing. It’s a beautiful display of something that can’t be bought and is infinitely invaluable. You could call it viral marketing if you want to, I’ll call it hospitality for the sake of proving a point. The point is that even if Cleveland put out a huge campaign across the Midwest touting how nice and earnest their citizens were, no one would believe it and no one would visit on that basis. It’s just something you have to experience. So was it marketing or just people? Who cares, it works. If we weren’t on a tight timeline, we surely would have stayed the weekend.

Although we didn’t get to rock out in Cleveland, suffice it to say that Cleveland Rocks! And thanks to all of the hospitable folks who guided us! We’ll see you again soon.

Breaking down the walls to creating a well known and respected brand name is difficult. There are a million things to consider when creating a new brand or trying to increase awareness of an existing brand. Branding generally takes a lot of time and can be very expensive. Many clients look at branding as a necessity while others consider it optional.

Most of the largest companies in the world understand the concept of branding and brand response. You as a consumer understand because you know the Corporate Identities of those who focus on branding. You know their products and what their products do. Most of the time anyway. So why will a large global company spend so much money and time trying to create a brand identity-awareness? Why will a local or regional corporation spend very little or no money trying to create a brand identity-awareness?

Sales is the reason why “for profit” companies exist. There is a product or service that can be sold for a profit to a market large enough to justify a corporate existence. Making it easy for the consumer to buy your product over the competition is what will make or break a great sales organization. A successful local, regional, or international branding campaign can give your company the upper hand in the sales fight. Understanding your customers needs and getting your value proposition in front of as many of your potential customers as possible is critical. Most clients that do not have a focus on branding and are missing an opportunity to increase sales. Branding can be accomplished in many ways. Some can be a little expensive (TV-Radio) and others are free (Community Relations). Finding a good marketing agency that understands the value of branding and how to accomplish it can help you increase sales. Believe it, brand it, sell it.

Being in the hosting business, we have to buy domain names. Everyone needs a domain name….Even your aunt selling widgets. Ideally, it would be nice to register auntieswidgets.com (as opposed to auntieswidgets1.com), but we have started noticing a disturbing trend.

Normally, when you go to look up a domain name, almost inevitably the one you want isn’t available due to domain parking or prospecting. This practice isn’t all that bad, mainly because some industrious individual had the forethought to register something that was going to be the next big name or brand. Take www.ie7.com for example. Anyone who watched the trend of IE5 and IE6 could safely bet that IE7 was on the horizon. However, since Microsoft took their sweet time developing IE7, there was considerable lag time between IE6 and IE7. In the mean time, someone who saw this trend went ahead and registered IE7.com. Go check it out…it’s a prime example of what could happen if you miss your brand :).

What we have been noticing lately is that one day we will search for the availability of a domain name, go back the next to register it and it is suddenly gone. One or two I can leave to coincidence, but after about five I started getting suspicious. We checked the WHOIS information, and sure enough they were registered to the same people. This leaves me to one conclusion – someone at the site we were searching was either selling the searches or sniping domains in the effort to up sell them.

This interesting article in the Washington Post outlines what we have been seeing as well. ICANN is looking in to it, but finding “proof” seems to be the problem. I think the whois records and timing that we were noticing are proof enough, but we’re not a large international organization now, are we??

The best definition of branding I’ve heard is “A Promise Made Is A Promise Kept”. With so many brand promises touting “quality, service, and value,” it’s a wonder why the words even exists. They’re old and tired and it surely doesn’t say much and can’t be trusted any longer. With megalithic communication, energy companies, and big box stores who seeming have a monopoly on consumer choice, could customer service be at an all time low? I hope it’s just not my lens on reality. You’ve probably heard this fact: “It can cost up to five times as much to attract a new customer than to retain an existing one.” I did say monopoly didn’t I…too bad for the rest of us. So, why is it that so many companies promise to deliver customer service but it’s only their lips that do the talking? I’ve come up with a small list of possible answers. That being said…I’d like to hear yours as well. Chime in.

#1 - They Don’t Care
Good God, I can’t fathom. Actually and unfortunately I can. In the case of a monopoly, I can understand how this happens, outside of that, it makes me worried for the portions of the human race that participate.

#2 - They Don’t Know How To Fix It
Yes, some companies are so out of touch with their customers and the problems that exists with their products and services that they are at a complete loss in knowing how to fix their own problems. Or yours, for that matter.

#3 - They Don’t Know What Customer Service Is
“I’m sorry that our installer didn’t show up while you took a day off work and sat on your thumbs waiting. We can be there tomorrow between 1PM and 5PM.” Enough said.

If you work for an organization that has one or more of the above traits as a corporate culture…do yourself (your conscience that is) and their customers a favor and do something about it! There’s right and there’s wrong and you’re smart enough to know the difference. So do it.

Customer service is not just warm and fuzzies, it’s part of building a relationship with your customers. In every business, it’s people that make it; that being said, mistakes will happen. It’s the resolution of those mistakes that makes all the difference. That’s building a relationship built on trust - that’s customer service and that’s branding. Or is it?

“Einstein always appeared to have a clear view of the problems of physics and the determination to solve them. He had a strategy of his own and was able to visualize the main stages on the way to his goal. He regarded his major achievements as mere stepping-stones for the next advance,” states The Noble Foundation from nobelprize.org.

Concepts such as this, a clear view of the problems, a determination to solve them, and having a strategy will help you to visualize the goal. Now altogether now, let’s pretend we are listening to our favorite teacher, Mr. Einstein, and say out loud what this is called…our “Formula for Success”. Now since we know what types of steps that are necessary in order to achieve our goal or success, let’s consider his actual equation for energy. Energy is the result of mass times the square of the speed of light. And since energy and mass are different forms of the same thing, they are interchangeable.

Ponder this thought in deciding what to do next with your marketing plan, if you are wanting a specific result, then you must develop a clear view of your problem first. Jumping into a problem head first will not only overwhelm you but it will cost you more time and energy to get out of the new problems that could have been avoided. Thinking pro-actively can eliminate further stress.

Our “Formula for Success” now has a clear understanding of what problems we are trying to solve, we need to remember that different forms of our well thought out solutions can be achieved by testing. For example, if you are trying to decide what topic for your promotional videos is the most popular, testing a few out and analyzing the data can help you decide what the best topic is for you to promote. If you are wanting more exposure to your website, then by testing different distributional ideas out can enable you to have a much more clear idea of what works and what does not.

Keep in mind that we are using our testing for our main goal which is to find your “Formula for Success”. Once you find out what works for you, you now have the strategy to achieve your goals. Roll with it and change your formula as you grow.

I always look forward to my daily IBJ updates and our subsequent subscription, but in last week’s edition, there was an article about the Heartland Film Festival and the featured film Home Of The Giants that I simply have to comment on.

What I didn’t see alluded to anywhere in this story – or in any of the press this week about the festival – is how very little support (beyond Heartland), the film industry (or the broader production community/communications industry) get from the state of Indiana. In fact, the producers of Home Of The Giants wanted to shoot the film entirely in Indiana, but North Carolina offered the production millions in incentives while Indiana offered them $10,000. As a result, the film, with the exception of a couple of days of shooting exterior key locations, was shot in North Carolina. This, and the Governor’s recent veto of a film incentives bill that would have meant hundreds of millions in revenue a year (a YEAR - versus the $250 million one-time Super Bowl revenues the state fell all over itself to secure - and spent more than $1 million on in the process) is the real story behind Home Of The Giants. A story that really needs to be told since so much of the current efforts to bring production to Indiana centers around an industry that means more than $650 annually to the state (when you include commercial production, radio production, music production and corporate communications).

Indiana has one of the most respected film festivals in the nation, yet the industry as a whole gets absolutely no respect or real support from the state. That a one-time event like the Super Bowl is more important to the state than an entire industry - an industry to which we are all connected in some way shape or form – is a real shame.

For what it’s worth, Home Of The Giants is just the tip of the iceberg with regard to how myopic this state is on this particular issue – a clean industry that (no kidding) means $650 million annually in taxable revenues. Indiana has lost an additional $55 million in film business the last couple of years with films that had looked at Indiana and then went to more progressive states like New Mexico, North Carolina or Illinois. Included among the films lost is American Crime - a story about a high-profile murder in Indianapolis. The film stars Catherine Keener, it’s getting the kind of early Oscar buzz that could have lent some luster to Indiana’s production reputation and it is a uniquely Indiana story that is being told in California because the state wouldn’t support it with production incentives.

Add to this other uniquely Indiana stories that are slated to be told elsewhere, the veto of a bill that would have supported an industry whose annual contribution to the state would be 3 times that of a one-time Super Bowl windfall and a general dismissal of and disregard for an industry important to all of us, and you see how much more the IBJ could have said.

It appears the IBJ will be following up on the issue further, if the state allows. So stay tuned. And support your local film community. Visit www.imindiana.org for more details.

In January, I took the plunge using Linux on the desktop. I had tried a couple different distributions of Linux before I finally settled with Ubuntu. The ease of installation shocked me. It, in some respects, was much faster and easier than Windows XP. It even came with almost everything I needed to be productive at work – Firefox, Open Office (Microsoft office equivalent), Gimp (a Photoshop like graphics tool). The only thing I really had to download was Eclipse for my development IDE.

When Gutsy Gibbon (Ubuntu 7.10) was released on October 18th, I was running KUbuntu 7.04 (a version of Ubuntu that used the KDE desktop). I had a straight upgrade path to 7.10, and could do it over the net, so on Friday I sat down and started the upgrade process. After about 490MB later, my new distribution was downloaded and ready to install. The installation process didn’t take long at all, and I was up and running with the new operating system in no time.

The biggest problem I had was my video drivers. I had been running the propietary driver from Nvidia, (which needs to be built for your kernel), and wanted to switch to the version that came in the Ubuntu packages. My reasoning was that I could then use their software update feature to upgrade my kernel and drivers all at the same time without having to rebuild the video drivers EVERY time. After some time messing with this, I was able to get in and see all the wonders of Ubuntu 7.10.

Probably the biggest upgrades they’ve made are Compiz-fusion, a new version of KDE, and the Dolphin file manager . Compiz-fusion is a lot like the eye-candy effects of Vista, only a ton better :). Dolphin is by far my favorite. It replaced the KDE file manager with a much more intuitive interface and probably the best thing to cater to people who are used to Windows.

All in all, I’m very happy with the new distribution. Now, all I need to do is find open source alternatives to software I use at home so I can make the jump there as well!

Over the years I have heard so many people say that some things will never change. He or she will never change. This or that will never change etc. etc. Some things can and do change (when you make them change). Sometimes things you did not mean to change do for the negative when you implement a positive change. I find this to be true in business and in my personal life. It’s that old cause and effect phenomenon at work. So here’s an observation.

At the ripe old, young, middle of the road age of 37 I have decided to change my life. In 2007 I decided to change careers from working in an industry that I no longer enjoyed, and for a company that treated me and my family poorly. Now I am for a company I love to work with, and doing a job I enjoy (instead of one I hate). With that in mind a couple of months ago I decided to change my life again. To focus on a better healthier lifestyle. Eating better, taking vitamin supplements, relaxing, meditating, acupuncture, going the Chiropractor, the Dentist. I mean I have been cleaning my life up.

The results have been less than positive to this point. I have never felt worse. I have been sick for almost a month now. First with the stomach flu, then a broken tooth, now bronchitis for two weeks solid. I am about to start round two of antibiotics. What does all this mean. Can it actually be bad to be good. Well, since I am not feeling great at the moment I suppose it can. I will say this though. Overall I have not been feeling well physically but mentally things are improving. These physical problems may just be a symptom of the past several years of unhappiness at work and a terrible diet coming back to haunt me. Now that I am taking the time to fix my issues the machine (my body) has decided it’s ok to break now. It is a painful process now but the future benefits will far surpass the temporary pain I am experiencing now.

I believe the same logic applies in business. Change is hard. It can cause short term issues that can really hurt. Doing the right things for the right reasons is the key to success. Staying diligent and never letting the fear of short term pain hold you back from decisions that will increase you chances of success in the future is critical. Diagnosis: Pain today = less pain tomorrow (I Hope)

There are hundreds of web and search engine optimization (SEO) firms at your disposal. Each claims a “proven track record of marketing excellence.” Each offers to “immerse itself in your business culture;” to “learn your business and partner with you” to “get results.” Every single one claims to offer a “unique marketing and communications process” that is “proven to deliver for all your marketing needs.” Each will be quick to point out that “this is a relationship business” and then roll out a litany of its own relationships and how they are somehow more “solid” and “proven” and downright “fruitful” than everyone else’s solid, proven and fruitful relationships.

Who are we to argue? The plain and simple truth of it is, there are any number of excellent web and search engine marketing consultants who can reasonably do the job for you. Your challenge is to find one with whom you manage to click – with whom you really can develop a relationship on which to build a “winning marketing partnership.”

Size. Talent. Experience. Personality. Vision. Budget. Expectations. Cut through all the platitudes, and it always comes down to a few key precepts. Whether you’re selecting a marketing partner, an accountant, a plumber – or a prospective client relationship.

The real challenge for any company looking for a marketing consultant is finding a “partner” you can “sit down with” – with whom you can “roll up your sleeves;” with whom you can “work elbow to elbow;” with whom you can “get down to business.”

No platitudes. No funky branded processes. No fads. Nothing fancy. Just a good, old-fashioned marketing partnership, done with a good, new-fashioned array of tools and technology.

Here’s to finding ships with partners and relations with clients.