Marketing Type

Obama is Good, Too: Knowing Who To Flatter

By way of an addendum to a post from a couple of months back-- "John Edwards is good, and so is his marketing"--I should note that Barack Obama is also good, as the following snippet from Google News demonstrates:

NBC5.comObama Requests Creative Commons for Presidential Debates
Slashdot - 4 hours ago
Presidential hopeful Barack Obama recently submitted a letter to the DNC asking for the Presidential debates to be licensed under the Creative Commons. ...
Obama gets web-savvy and takes a hit along the way African Path
Obama Hijacks MySpace Page, Mails Howard Dean WebProNews
all 432 news articles »

Apart from representing a genuinely good idea -- albeit a superfluous one since excerpts of the debates will be all over the Internet regardless -- this shows that the Obama camp knows who to flatter in these, the campaign's crucial early days. Creative Commons fans represent the constituency known as early adopters. These folks, a passioante few, hang out on the Internet and are, by and large, publishers--bloggers, forum posters, webmasters and the like. Flattering them is an outstanding idea, but it also reinforces my suspicion that we are entering the smartest, most sophisticated political campaign period in history. This election will reveal some truly brilliant marketing. I'm looking forward to it all. Most of it, anyway.

The NEW New Yorker

Thanks to a sidebar link on mistersugar, I now know that The New Yorker -- up until now possibly the most technologically backward major magazine in circulation --  has finally launched web site worthy of the label.

I should explain that I am a longtime New Yorker reader -- fanatic, even. For the last few years the magazine has been virtually the only offline media I've touched. Its lack of sophistication on the web has bothered me, as much from a disgruntled marketing sense as for any other reason.

Even before now there have been signs something was afoot. First they made available incredible DVDs containing the magazine's first 75 years with scanned page by page archives complete with the original advertisements. Then they updated the offering and bundled it all on a portable harddrive. That proved to me someone at the magazine was thinking about the big picture. Now, finally, a web site with an RSS Feed (look for it soon in the Salutor sidebar) and the promise of an upcoming inclusion of searchable archive. I am floored.

I have always suspected that the real problem lay with CondeNast, the half-witted corporate parent of The New Yorker. Small signs of their vast incompetence remain:

1) I am not only a New Yorker subscriber of fifteen years, but have volunteered my email address to them on more than one occasion. In the past, providing my email address to The New Yorker website has led, not to receiving stimulating New Yorker related material and advertisements, but to spam for other CondeNast  publications like Glamour. Why on earth would they not, by mail or email, find some way to announce to me that they have a new website?

2) In my haste to test their new marketing smarts, I attempted to (re-)give the new New Yorker site my email address. In the screenshot below, note that on the first page (left) of the site they offer a single form-field newsletter sign-up (note that this is an email marketing 'best practice'), but that when I fill it out and click enter I am taken to a second page (right) with a number of required fields -- one of which is MY BLANK EMAIL ADDRESS.

My guess is that the smart web team designed the first page, and the imbeciles at CondeNast got the hand-off on the second page.

Custom Kleenex

Here's a nifty idea from Kleenex, a brand I would not expect to find on the cutting edge: Create your own Kleenex tissue.

The MyKleenex idea is similar to, but a lot fuzzier than, a stunt we pulled a couple of years back (while working for Lulu): a line of Print-on-demand toilet paper for which authors were invited to have rejection letters from publishers custom-printed onto rolls of TP.

Should Kleenex have wished to go after a bit of PR for their site, I might have suggested marketing boxes of tissue to jilted lovers boasting the most unflattering possible images of their exes. The TP idea for Lulu may have been a bit contrived (the sales guys went ballistic) but it certainly generated buzz, as I am reminded by this archive post from Grumpy Old Bookman, a popular book blog.

[If you really want custom TP,  by the way, don't go to Lulu. Try JustToiletPaper.com. Or get your RSS subscriptions printed for convenient bathroom reading with the RSStroom Reader.]