The Duke Hartman Center

Click Here To Listen.

I had the most amazing experience earlier today. Helen Klein Ross (more famously known at @adbroad or @bettydraper) was at Duke University to deliver a lecture on social media and advertising. So I, not one to pass up the opportunity to meet past guests of The BeanCast, drove over to the campus early this morning to meet her. Helen is an amazing person. If you've not had an opportunity to meet her, make the time. She is witty, engaging, smart and truly delightful. 

Well, to make a long story longer, we had a wonderful breakfast and then she asked if I wanted to see the Hartman Center with her.

Jacqueline Reid, Director at the center, had arranged private access to what may be the world's biggest collection of advertising history. The archive at Duke contains nearly the entire archive of J. Walter Thompson's storied history, as well as briefs, research and work from other agencies. And they continue to grow, soon adding another one of the big and storied agency players as a contributor to the archive. 

The collection is rich and amazing. I saw ads for dozens of brands throughout the 20th century and that only scratched the surface of what they have. I saw brands at their best and brands at their absolute racist and sexist worst. But unlike many Internet scans, these were actual proof, many times attached to original documentation and strategy discussions.

To say the center blew my mind is an understatement. Just a few minutes there and you realize how much advertising has been a reflection of culture around the world. 

I write so much here, because the ad industry needs to know about what's going on at Duke. If you are an agency, you need to be seriously considering donating your archive to the center for preservation. They charge no more than your internal archival costs and provide a chance to preserve the history that our work represents. And if you are a researcher, movie producer or just an agency looking for historical perspective, the Hartman Center represents the first place you should look for information.

As Jacqueline points out in the interview, a little study can show that woman have historically played more of a role in shaping advertising than many have realized. And in terms of historical data, only they knew what colors were used for the light of the Great White Way's many advertising signs when the producers of King Kong came looking for answers. 

So make an appointment the next time you're in Durham, NC. You'll love every minute of the experience.

What Makes A Good Agency Website

I had a wonderful lunch yesterday with a very interesting lady. She's been part of a team that built several iterations of an agency. She's bought in, sold out, restarted and built the current agency into a multi-city operation, so she knows a few things about the agency world. But one thing she wasn't sure about was her agency's website.

I could see why. It wasn't that it wasn't well produced. (It was.) Nor was it that it didn't impress. (It did.) The reason it failed was as simple as my jaw hitting the ground when I walked into her shop. Nothing and I mean nothing on her website had prepared me for the scale of her operation. From office to scope of work, I had no idea. It was truly impressive. Her website had conveyed none of this effectively.

In hindsight, their online effort clearly stated what they did. Trouble is I'm jaded. I've seen one too many lies or fluffery on an agency website to believe anything I read on them anymore. So I was shocked by how grand it all was. 

So she asked me to tell her who is doing it right. She wanted to see examples. Who was clearly presenting their capabilities and work in a manner that made it genuine and believable. And for my part, I added in the need to find sites that were proving through their thinking that the portfolio was truly a testimonial to their capabilities and not a memorial to folks who have long since departed. 

Some interesting side note before I go to my list. Nearly every agency I visited started with "About Us." For a business that preaches it's about the customer, this struck me as odd. Also, while I reluctantly agree that a portfolio is important, I found portfolio examples much more interesting if they were married with content pieces like blog posts or research papers. (Case studies counted, but were not nearly as impressive as tying the work to thought leadership pieces as examples.) The work attracted me, but the thinking made me stop and consider what the work meant. And finally, only one site (R/GA's) had a mobile optimized page and it really wasn't that good. That speaks volumes about the mobile expertise we all crow about.

That aside, here's a list of 3 agency websites that I personally like, along with a couple honorable mentions. This is not a "top 3" or definitive list in any way. These are just some examples I have found so far and I'm still willing to accept more for the list. Thanks to to Rupal Parekh, Chris Houchens, David Horne, Shawn Hartley and Scott Crawford for their help on this.

Best of The Best

Mullen.com - Clearly they get it. They have the usual portfolio and capabilities, but the most prominent emphasis on the site is an ongoing stream of thinking. You see clearly that the work being show is not just memorial, but testimonial. Examples of work flash up at the top and then below are recent news, blog posts, thought leadership pieces and more to back it up. It's not flashy. It's just clean, informational, interesting and engaging. It looks easy to update and the content always appears fresh every time I go.

BigSpaceship.com -- Big Spaceship's site is very similar to Mullen's in function and yet you can't say they are the same. People read, engage and are comfortable with these WordPress style layouts that automatically update and sort news. I like how they took this knowledge and made it their own. Clearly this homepage is being fed stories actively and sorting them based on if they are news or a blog post. This clear demarcation allows the site to function both as a destination for agency information and as an interesting content source to repeatedly visit. The rest of the site then clearly communicates what they are about without fluff. Very effective and engaging.

RGA.com -- There was some debate about this site. I personally like it. In one page they offer everything you need to make a decision. There's no need to navigate through the site. You get all your questions answered here. I also like the wall of video presentations about capabilities. It's an interesting and fun approach to meet people expressing ideas rather than just reading about those ideas. But some felt it hyped the agency too much without impressing. Debatable.

Honorable Mentions

CPBgroup.com - This is a great idea that is being poorly executed. They presented a site that is constantly changing content and revealing the conversation going on around the agency. Rather than them telling clients what they are about, they allowed the online chatter (good and bad) to be displayed on their site. It's bold and risky, but effective. Trouble is the content is not pushing thinking as much as fluff PR. But I like the concept very much.

Hookusa.com This one is very cool and interesting without losing sight of the information. I have trouble recommending such a Flash-intensive approach since it dies on most mobile devices, but I have to admit that it delivers on the eye candy in terms of navigation. I would want to see more abilities to refresh the homepage every time you see it so that it isn't such a one-and-done experience. I also don't want to have to dig so hard to get to what is essentially some good content.

An Open Letter To Apple: Why Selling Podcast Stats Makes Sense

Dear Apple/iTunes Executives:

I know that podcasts make you no money. I know it was an act of good will to even give us podcasters access to your iTunes store in the first place. However, I have a business case to make about why you should consider offering podcasters access to the statistics you gather about their listings in your store.

The premise is simple: You already collect the data. (You have to be collecting the data.) So why not sell us access to this data on a subscription basis? Consider these facts:

• Unlike data from other portions of the store where it is to your advantage to, shall we say, "control" access, there is no such reason with our data. You make no money from us now, so there is no benefit to obscuring our stats.

• There have to be 250,000 shows listed by now, if not more. But even by some old stats of 125,000 shows, there is definitely an active community of participants which can be pursued.
  

• If even a fraction of this audience wants stats (let's say 10,000 shows), at $5 a month that's $600,000 a year — just for putting an accessible front end on the data you're already collecting!

• With minimal marketing (say including an offer of stats with the listing of a show or via email blasts to existing listers) it is easily conceivable that you could quickly capture five or ten times that number — which I feel compelled to remind you is $3 million to $6 million dollars for just opening a front end web page tied to the data you already have.

I seriously hope you will consider this proposal. The direct access to your subscribe/unsubscribe stats as well as page view data would be enormously beneficial to those of us making a business of podcasting. It would help us tailor content to the desires of our audiences, it would help us justify media buys to advertisers and it would solidify your position as a singular destination for podcasting. 

Thank you for your time. Please feel free to contact me at bob[at]coolbeansgroup[dot]com if you would like to comment in any way.

Bob Knorpp, Host of The BeanCast Marketing Podcast

Frequency By Relationship

Frequency is a question that plagues all levels of marketing. How often do we send a message to a prospect before effectiveness begins to diminish? How often does a customer have to buy before they become loyal? How often do we reach out to an existing customer before customer service becomes good old fashioned stalking?

Frequency is supposed to be determined by the math. Through controlled testing we're supposed to arrive at an optimal number of connections that deliver a peak in the bell curve of desired response. Albeit, most of the time marketers just sit around in a room and guess using the "focus-group-of-one" principal of, "What would I like?" But still, there are formulas out there and they work.

Trouble is, does determining frequency based purely on the math leave a lot of opportunity on the table?

The Intangible of Relationship

Once again marketers would do well to pay attention to something that sale executives have always known instinctively: Relationship lengthens the bell curve.

A sales person knows that the frequency you can communicate with someone goes up the deeper the relationship you have with them. If you know their kids names and they are sharing what their summer vacation plans are, you might be able to drop a line every couple days. You're friends. The relationship is genuine. So there's no reason not to have higher frequency of contact.

However, if the prospect or customer is stony or saying, "I'll think about it," you have to carefully space out communications. In this case, more frequent communications can get quickly annoying and you'll lose the ability to build that deeper relationship.

Now there are certainly mathematical indicators that could help us understand frequency in these situations, but in the end math can't tell the full story. There is an intangible at play here. There is unquantifiable intuition at work when it comes to relationships and relationship building.

So my question is, are we short-changing our potential ROI and marketing to too small of an audience when we don't invest in relationship-building first?

More Than Social Marketing

This is the part where most people trot out their social marketing evangelism. I'm not going to do that. Because if you read my blog recently you know I'm beginning to believe there isn't any such thing. Social is a media, not a tactic. So saying "social marketing" is like saying "TV marketing" without specifying whether we're launching a brand campaign, an infomercial or going for a product placement on The Today Show. What I'm saying instead is that by any means necessary, including through the use of social media, we need to be cultivating better lead strategies.

Let's take the example of Kmart. Long before the Rain Man uttered the iconic words "Kmart sucks," I despised this store. It represented a childhood of being forced to go there with my parents to endure flickering fluorescent lighting and endless racks of junk. Even today when I know that they hold some of the best deals on video games, I still won't shop there. 

Then along comes their KmartGamer Twitter account. It's not there to convince me Kmart doesn't suck. (Well, it probably is, but they don't say that.) Nor is it just there to spew an RSS feed of sale information. It's there to engage gamers in conversation about games. They are running chat sessions, they are talking about PAX (don't worry, it's a gamer thing) and they generally show interest and commonality with gamers. 

No amount of marketing before this would have ever convinced me to step foot in a Kmart. That's how damaged their reputation was with me. Now, however, I might consider it. Maybe. I'm not committing to anything here. But you get my point. Purely by the numbers I was out of the demo. In a blanket, untargeted mailing I would have thrown out every piece of mail. But now, Kmart's audience just widened a tiny bit. That mailer wouldn't be thrown out. I might actually look at what they have to offer.

Now imagine further, if Kmart invested in a mailing that didn't try to sell me anything right away. Imagine if they reached out for a local gaming tournament. Or maybe they just sent me an email inviting me to write a post about my favorite game on a gamer blog. What if they made me a founding member of a Gamer Klub? What they would really be doing is making me even more ready to read their solicitations.

My point is that relationship building, built into every aspect of a marketer's strategy, opens up the audience for greater possibilities. It may cost more and deliver less results upfront, but over time it creates greater ROI than simply going by modeling and targeting existing buyer or simply competing on price. 

Building Both Sales And Potential Sales

I openly admit that you can succeed just from going by the numbers. If you know that "x" audience will see an ad and "y" will be impressed and "z" will respond to an offer you send, then you know how much to spend and what results you will get from your marketing campaign. And while most marketers would love to raise that "x" number (Who wouldn't love a bigger budget?) and spend most of their time worrying about that "z" number, the "y" number is where real magic can happen. That's because "y" indicates what people think about you and how willing they are to even listen to your offer in the first place.

We covered an interesting story on this week's BeanCast about how PR shops are winning against digital shops for digital work. The article we were referring to for our discussion credited social expertise as the reason for this shift. After all, clients are looking for digital plans that embrace the social spectrum. But the panel saw it slightly different. 

Ultimately the focus of digital is moving from campaigns to ongoing communication strategies. It's my belief the reason for this comes down to everything I've said here in this post. A campaign gets you a sale. A communication plan buys you a sale and a relationship. And a relationship can buy you even more future sales by creating a customer who is more receptive to messaging. Just like the salesperson who knows her customer's kids by name, you have their trust and their ear.

This long term view of marketing makes a lot of sense to me. How about you?

The Story Of McDonalds.com

Want to know how far we've come in Internet branding? Consider this story from Wired Magazine, circa 1994.

I may be dating myself, but this article is what convinced me of the importance of online branding. It defined everything I thought about marketing for the next decade and half. I wish it had also convinced me to snap up some domain names, but it certainly got me in hot water with superiors for pushing ideas that they later stole and used for their own gain 3 years down the line.

But I digress.

This article by Josh Quittner chronicles his attempts to contact someone — anyone — at McDonald's corporate who may have heard of the Internet. He tells them point blank that their domain is in jeopardy and that even a competitor could register it. From the beginning of the article:

I'm waiting for a call back from McDonald's, the hamburger people. They're trying to find me someone - anyone - within corporate headquarters who knows what the Internet is and can tell me why there are no Golden Arches on the information highway.

It's true: there is no mcdonalds.com on the Internet. No burger_king.com either.

Yet. 

"Are you finding that the Internet is a big thing?" asked Jane Hulbert, a helpful McDonald's media-relations person, with whom I spoke a short while ago.

Yes, I told her. In some quarters, the Internet is a very big thing.

I explained a little bit about what the Big Thing is, and how it works, and about the Net Name Gold Rush that's going on. I told her how important domain names are on the Internet ("Kind of like a phone number. It's where you get your e-mail. It's part of your address."), and I explained that savvy business folks are racing out and registering any domain name they can think of: their own company names, obviously, and generic names like drugs.com and sex.com, and
silly names that might have some kind of speculative value one day, like roadkill.com.

"Some companies," I told Jane Hulbert, "are even registering the names of their competitors."

"You're kidding," she said. 

I am not, I told her...

Yet instead of registering it, they let it go. So he registered it. I believe the expletive I remember from the piece have been edited out since the original publication, but I distinctly remember the line of jubilation: "I'm am now Ronald @ F***ing McDonalds.com!"

He even ends the pieces with a call for comments about what he should do with his new prize: 

Got a suggestion? Send it to ronald@mcdonalds.com.

A classic Wired piece, to be sure. But it's also a great warning. The next big thing is always with us. You just can't see it yet. So if you get a crazy call from an oddball journalist, please pay attention.

Preroll Gone Horribly Wrong

I've been watching a lot of streaming online video over the last week. I've probably watched more in the past week than I have in the past year. So this is the first time I've had to deal extensively with the automated ad serving that is part and parcel of the online video model.

Here's my problem: I understand that ads are necessary to support these video sites, but why have we thrown out all sensibility in regard to ad placement?

I was watching a rather gruesome anime series about a serial killer and the doctor who is trying to stop him. There's blood. There's child abuse. There's alcoholism. There's racist clashes. And the first day I was watching it I saw the same Kraft Macaroni and Cheese ad every 3 minutes like clockwork. 10 episodes. That 60 times. The same interminably long 30-second ad.

I know ever line of that commercial. I know every cut. I know what's happening in the background. And I know that when she raises her right eyebrow we go to the camera card. And invariably I would go from cute, sassy kid back to a murder victim lying in a pool of blood.

My choice of entertainment aside, if this was traditional TV I doubt that Kraft or it's media buying agency would ever willingly buy time in such a series. I also know that they certainly wouldn't have thrown out all the rules about frequency and run the same ad over and over again until I would sooner gouge my eyes out than buy their new Baked Macaroni and Cheese. Yet, there I was watching the same 30 second ad, over and over and over again.

To be fair, on subsequent days the ad mix was a little better. I might actually get three different commercials within a given half hour. But I started to see a pattern and it became clear to me who was getting it and who was not. Online video is not a cable buy. You can't just buy an ad-serving network, specify a few sites and expect good results. You have to anticipate certain things. So I compiled a few rules of thumb from my own observations:

• Know Where The Ad Is Running - On the surface a buy for Jell-o or Kraft that will include an anime site may sound good. But the juxtaposition of kids and kids dying was extremely disturbing and it did not reflect well on the brand. Be hyper aware of how your content will run.
  

• 15 Seconds - These are not broadcast commercials. I was incredibly engaged with each and every ad, but my patience was thinner. I had a much higher opinion of the ads that got me back to the content quickly and I can still name every ad and their brand proposition.

• Creativity Matters More Than Ever - Engagement is being forced with this model. So understand that if the spot is not intensely interesting it's worse than bad. The worst of the ads always came with a sigh from me and a gritting of my teeth as I had to endure them. 
  

• Mix It Up - You have to assume that your ad may run repeatedly if the ad volume is low on the service. This means that your ad may be shown up to 12 times an hour. So alternate ads. Snickers did an excellent job of alternating two 15s during their buy.
  

• Be Smart About Response - Ultimately I would never have clicked on any of these ads. There was always the choice to click (and Pensacola tourism even asked me to click), but no one was making me an offer that deserved me losing my place in the video. So if you're not making an offer, don't measure success by clicks. You won't get any. But don't be afraid to experiment with targeted offers. I might just have clicked if you enticed me just right.

• I Blamed The Ads - My final point is really just a hazard of the territory. The ads would not auto-serve on the site I was viewing. I had to click play for every ad to begin. And then when the show would freeze, I just KNEW that the ad serving was to blame as I had to reload and find my place in the video again. Technically there's not much we can do until the sites and the ad servers get their act together. But be aware that you may be causing your audience stress. This is where I found a surprise. Despite the data showing preroll as best, in this context the preroll ads were most annoying. Having to reload the page and see that 30 second HP ad, obviously bought as the preroll placement, made me irritated at HP, not the site.

All in all I'm still a fan of the model. The potential good of running ad during online videos far outweighs the bad. But clearly we have to rethink both the creation and the delivery of these ads if we want to get the full benefit of the platforms.

What are your thoughts?

They Want To Get Married In Your Store

T.J. Maxx had an interesting proposal recently. (See what I did there?) 

A loyal T.J. Maxx customer, Lisa Satayut, decided that she wanted to have her wedding in the shoe aisle of one of their Michigan stores. So she wrote to the corporate office asking permission. I image there was a bit of head-scratching at first, but obviously the PR possibilities were immediately evident. After all, 

Bass Pro Shops

 is always in the news for their redneck weddings. Why the hell not?

So ultimately permission was granted. Wedding on. PR cranked up. Interviews galore.

Here's the problem. Miss Satayut came off as bat-sh*t crazy. I mean either she was a badly cast plant by T.J. Maxx, thought she needed to help promote the hell out of the store or really was the demon of all consumerism she came off as, but any way you look at it this woman was not playing with a full deck. In every interview she was practically salivating with giddy glee as she looked at the shoes surrounding her. Frankly, if she is a representative sample of the average T.J. Maxx customer, I can think of no reason why I would ever want to set foot in one of their stores again.

Further, in all the national press I saw about the event they never mentioned that the wedding was between two reporters. The newlyweds were Michigan Morning Sun sport reporter Drew Ellis and former reporter Lisa Satayut. I don't know about you, but their stature as media representatives seems relevant to me, mainly because it calls into question whether any of this was genuine. Was this a stunt the local paper cobbled together with the local T.J. Maxx to secure more ad dollars? I'd like to know.

But that aside, I do want to say if the event was indeed genuine I can't blame T.J. Maxx for jumping on the opportunity. But I think the way this whole thing went down is a warning to brands who get involved with things like this. Essentially you are handing the keys to your brand to a person who we know from the beginning has to be a little off-kilter (she wants her wedding day in a shoe department, folks) or may have ulterior motives that have nothing to do with you. Giving them too much voice could be disastrous.

So if you are tempted to allow a similar event in one of your stores, all I'm saying is ask lots of questions and keep control of the message. I now pronounce you brand and brand manager. You may kiss the slingbacks.

The Personal Branding Debate

I was impressed that Forrester had the audacity and guts to tackle the Personal Branding question on their blog today, especially given their own recent troubles on that front. Although Augie Ray's post didn't immediately address their own troubles in regard to analysts leveraging Forrester fame to jump ship, he obviously anticipated the question. You can read both my question and his response in the comments section of the post.

But all this led me to offer a follow-up thought on the personal branding debate. Here's where I stand, complete with A/V clip:

I find this fascinating. It's so interesting to look at the Forrester case as a self-contained experiment on the problem as a whole, because both the benefits and liabilities are so obviously exposed within your organization.

So much of the Forrester model is built on having rock star analysts. Sure, there's the reputation of the company to uphold, but it's the personalities and specific research of the individual analysts' that drive the calls and dollars. You're a bit like a professional sports team -- everyone is out to win as a team, but the reputation of specific players drive ticket sales. And just like with sports teams, ultimately those players know their value and leverage the team as a launching pad for their own endorsement deals, contract negotiations and even team moves.

The question is, is such a model a double edged sword that is dangerous but necessary in today's business, or is encouraging such activity always beneficial to the company despite the risk of investing in talent who may ultimately leave for a competitor?

David Byrne of Talking Heads fame, had a film called True Stories in the early 90's [I was wrong...it was 1986] that contains a fairly prophetic stance on this topic. In the scene, Earl Culver, played by Spaulding Gray, delivers this speech:

"Most middle-class people have worked for large corporations like Vericorp or for the government itself. But now, all that's started to change. Scientists and engineers are moving off from those larger corporations, like Vericorp. And they're beginning to start their own businesses, marketing new inventions...But It all spins back to the middle...that's why we have to keep these guys in Virgil. Even though they do leave Vericorp.

"For the time being it's create confusion and chaos. They don't work for money anymore, but to earn a place in heaven, which was a big motivating factor once upon a time, believe you and me. They are working and inventing because they like it! Economics has become a spiritual thing. I must admit it frightens me a little bit. They don't seem to see the difference between working and not working. It has all become a part of one's life. Linda! Larry! There's no concept of weekends anymore!"

Obviously this is over the top, but the core of the speech completely and accurately predicted the entire dot-com boom. And more importantly, it predicted how the big companies just needed to let the innovation happen, then either learn from the innovations or buy the best of those start-ups and absorb them back into the fold. (Not withstanding a few notable companies like Google that became giants themselves.)

I think this model is just as relevant today when applied to the personal branding question. There are obviously risks to giving employees public, social platforms of expression. After all, in these instances we are no longer just investing in what an employee can do for the organization, but investing in their own stature as an individual. We also must be concerned that they may indeed use such platforms for self-advancement or transfer this fame to their personal efforts. But we also have to accept that by not allowing individuals to shine within an organization, we lose the benefit of their inventiveness. And by burning bridges with them when they open a personal blog or decide to leave, we lose the opportunity to possibly re-absorb them into the organization later as an even more valuable asset.

I fully believe that most of the concerns over employees advancing their personal brand in tandem with the corporate brand they are tasked to promote is simply a product of short-sighted thinking. If we're truly afraid of our own brilliant employees jumping ship, then we should be doing more to either hire more loyal people or create additional reasons for them to stay. Ultimately that would be a better use of resources than trying to suppress the flood of personal expression our workers are dying to give us.

What are your thoughts on personal branding and corporate response?

The Social Game Dilemma

In the gung-ho world of social engagement, it's hard not to get excited whenDisney invests over half a billion dollars in a social gaming company. Instantly one's brain starts to click with the marketing potential. As any marketer (or economist, for that matter) knows, commerce is essentially a game. And the more we introduce interesting and relevant mechanics to inspire game-like behavior, the more engaged a targeted customer will become. It would seem a given that blending the worlds of marketing and social gaming would be a winning formula — no pun intended.

Yet, as my guests on this past week's episode of The BeanCast

 so skillfully pointed out, that blending may be harder to achieve than would seem immediately evident. Just as product placement in films is subject to the inconsistent whims of producers and writers who may or may not be on board with the effort, so too game developer buy-in (or even skill) may greatly affect outcomes. Then add in the newness of the platforms and the lack of proven case studies and you quickly uncover the risks of involving a brand in the space.

As was mentioned on the show, some tie-ins are born winners. The example of Miracle Grow being introduced to Farmville as a beneficial fertilizer was particularly notable. But such tie-ins are few and far between and as Mike Monello noted, it would be better for a brand to build a social game from the ground up than to inhabit a space with so much uncertainty.

Which brings up the case of location-based social games like Foursquare and Gowalla and the topic that started the show.Forrester says wait, when it comes to most brands involving themselves in such platforms. The panel agreed for the most part, though offered the insight that even Twitter and Facebook were insignificant 4 years ago. 

So what do we do?

There was an interesting point made during the show that may have been overlooked. Jeffrey Hayzlett quoted Sheldon Adelson (the man behind COMDEX) who said to him once, "Attendees beget exhibitors and exhibitors beget attendees."

Clearly if we want a social gaming experience to be a powerful platform for marketing, we have to be willing to invest in the platform itself. That means advertising and promoting our commitment and involvement on the platform to our customers at the same time we're marketing to users already on the platform. It also means moderating our expectations in anticipation for future returns. And it means doing all this carefully with a clear exit strategy.

But ignoring the opportunities of the platform completely until it's fleshed out would be like Microsoft saying that COMDEX was too risky to participate in during the 80s. Such a move in hindsight would have been foolish. So too, we have to at least recognize that there is a natural synergy between marketing, social networking and games. That synergy is worth some cautious exploration at the very least.

Ideas Drive True Growth

Ever notice how financial brands are starting to view themselves as more important than the products or services they represent? I hate to get all "in-my-day" here, but some recent statistics I saw have highlighted for me what the true impact of this shifting focus really means.

Did you know that the single greatest input to the Gross National Product (GNP) for the US last year was the business of making money? 

At 21.4% of the GNP, financial services is far and away our biggest contribution, almost doubling the nearest measurable sector. And if we
look at the assets they own, financial institutions really account for about 60% of the GNP. While I have no complaints about banks making money (they have been clients and I am a strident proponent of open markets), this news showcases for me how the entrepreneurial spirit in this country has lost its way.

Why did you get into advertising or marketing? If you're like me, you did it to sell ideas — not just creative ideas, but the new ideas of your clients. I became a marketer to position the exciting new inventions and reformulations and service offerings of my clients. And I did it to get an audience thrilled about buying into these ideas. That's where marketing gets exciting and fun. It's the real foundation of the American business spirit.

Yet if the numbers can be believed, our biggest sellable focus in this country has shifted away from ideas to formulas. We don't make money and drive success by innovation anymore. We make money by having our existing money make more money.

Again, no complaint from me on the value of investing. However, this changing focus from ideas being the driving force of profit generation to ideas being the disposable fodder of investing I find troubling. 

I could wax poetic on the failings of this mindset — how it's destroying the pysche of America, much as turn-of-the-century factories and mills virtually enslaved workers to the system and crushed innovation in favor of profit. But more often than not the underlying problem all comes down to the company viewing its own well-being as more important than the customer's. 

No company is perfect and profits are always of primary concern for any corporation, but when a brand becomes more about it's own profit than about solving customer problems we start down a dangerous road. When products and services become the after-thought of the equation of profitability, we negate the substance of ideas. We are selling air. And as any hustler will tell you, there's only so long you can sell air before someone figures it out and comes after you with a shotgun.

There is a place for pure and simple money making through investment to be sure. The financial institutions out there play a vital part in the growth of the economic picture. But when the GNP of a country is weighted this far in favor of money-making, we are clearly stifling the risk-taking necessary to promote new and innovative ideas. 

What are your thoughts on this? Am I over-reacting here? Should the banks be holding on to their cash to weather the storm or freeing up loans for innovation? I admit freely that I am not a numbers guy, so I'd appreciate the insights.

And for the record, I have good credit with my banks, so thanks for investing in me.