The Carl Lewis Rules of Marketing

By Leslie LaRue | Aug 27, 2008 3:23:32 PM

Remember Carl Lewis? The Olympic hero of the 80’s and 90’s? He won a lot of medals, set some world records and was in general, the type of athlete you marvel at. He had the potential to endorse multiple household brands and be a sports commenter for as long as Bob Costas. Until Michael Phelps came along, outside of Mary Lou Retton and Bruce Jenner, there were very few other Olympic athletes who were as widely recognized.

But, somewhere along the way, Carl Lewis decided, “I’d like to have a music career.”

Bad idea.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jamJ4-C_TME

This video is quite likely, the most horrible thing I’ve ever seen. My perception of Carl is permanently damaged. It makes me never want to watch him give commentary on a sporting event ever again. Let alone, sing, dance, lift weights or blow bubbles. (?)

Maybe it’s the black unitard, the special effects, or just the song itself. But if there was ever one reason why he never became a household name this video might it. Part of the excitement in the world of marketing is trying new things. But we still have to remember, “Is this a good long-term decision?”

If you’re Carl Lewis, you’re probably asking yourself that very question. Because, whether you like it or not, when you or your company attains a certain level of awareness with the general public, you have to make some decisions on how to market yourself. I'm pretty sure that doesn't nvolve an old lady in yellow sunglasses chasing you around a gym.

So, here are some general rules-of-thumb for anyone trying to make that decision.

(Phelps, are you paying attention here? I don’t want to see anymore of these videos surface.)

1.       Be consistent. – Trying new things is good. But that crazy thing you cooked up late Friday night should support your brand, not define it.

2.       Pick things you’re good at. It’s OK to just be an amazing athlete. You don’t have to sing too. We don’t mind. It’s tempting to constantly widen your services, your product offerings, (your music career) but at what cost? The reason people were inspired by Carl Lewis in the first place was because he is a great athlete. Not a singer/dancer, bubble-blower.  I’m not suggesting we shouldn’t push ourselves to succeed in new ways. But sometimes, use what you’ve got.

3.       Be pro-active, not reactive. It’s very easy to get so busy, that we end up working within the realms of who is contacting us.  To sponsor an event, advertise in their publication, market their product, etc. But does it make sense for your own long-term vision and goal? Spend the extra time doing research on ideas or concepts that fit who you are, not who are filling up your In-Box. Maybe Carl got a great offer from a record company to make this video. But does that mean he should have done it?

4.       Follow through - I recently visited the official Carl Lewis website. He has a blog. He has not posted a blog since January of 2007 and it was a test to see if it was working. If you’re going to do something, do it. Otherwise your audience stops paying attention.

5.       Remember your roots. Success makes us feel good. But it shouldn’t cloud our decision-making. In other words, don’t get cocky and think that now that you’ve established your brand, you can go off the deep-end.  Carl Lewis actually had two endorsement deals, with Coke and Nike. . But he turned Coke down, confident he’d be worth more after the 1984 Olympic Games. Coke cancelled the offer. Nike had Lewis under contract for a few years, despite questions about how it affected his status as an ameteur. He was appearing on Nike television ads, in print and on billboards. After the Games and faced with Lewis’ new negative image, Nike dropped him.

(I think Nike saw the video. Truly, a lesson for all of us.)

All About Eve.

By Barrie Arliss | Aug 26, 2008 4:08:20 PM

When Leslie LaRue mentioned that all the bloggers on this site were male, I was confused. Maybe it’s because every blog I read is by a woman. Or maybe because I’m normally confused. Either way, I wanted to contribute. And since I’m a woman/chick/hey you lady and a writer here at this fine company, I figured we can end this male-only Zaazathon once and for all.

So for my first blog, I’m introducing you to some of the amazing blogs I go to. I can’t promise that everyone will like them, and most likely the men won’t. But as a writer, these blogs are an inspiration. They provide me with different views and ideas. They help me when I’m bored or looking for a recipe. And sometimes they even give me fashion advice. Whatever they do, I’m just glad these women have something to share and are getting noticed for it.

Dooce 
She pretty much started the whole don’t talk about work on your blog phenomenon.

Not Martha
Not only does she live in Seattle, but her site was called Coolest Websites of 2006 by Time magazine.

101 Cookbooks
My all-time favorite cook, Heidi makes me want to be vegetarian. And then I remember I love bacon. Mmmm bacon.

What I Wore
She reminds me that I should throw away my holey t-shirts and try to look halfway girly sometimes.

Freckle Girl
Jess only stopped blogging so she and her coding hubby could start up a knitting/crocheting community that has quickly become a wild success.

Next up: Diaries. What happened to them?

My summer prediction: Microsoft will buy Yahoo by year end

By Nigel Morgan | Aug 19, 2008 2:09:24 PM

So it has been a long summer so far and I hope there are many more days of sunshine to go. It has had its ups, just look at Michael Phelps, and it has had its downs as we bid farewell to Isaac and Bernie. Of course for us online marketers there has been an ongoing story that has had both the ups and the downs. I am talking of course about the on again, off again, on again but now off again saga of the Microsoft takeover of Yahoo.

So while Jerry Yang is in China at the Olympics and the Microsoft upper management is enjoying a fine Pacific Northwest summer, I will throw in my opinions on where this story will end.

To me it is quite clear that this merger will happen; there are a number of reasons why this deal will go through for Microsoft and Yahoo. I list them here and ask you all to join the debate!

Market share of total online ad revenues.

This is the number one reason why this takeover will happen. Online advertising revenues are still growing very fast and will continue to do so according to every survey and expert opinion you read.

Today Google is firmly in the box seat owing to its market position as undisputed search engine leader and ownership of Doubleclick. Once Google fully optimizes it’s ability to understand the vast majority of internet behaviors through its search engine and Doubleclick tags, it will be able to target marketing messaging to daunting effect (read attain massive revenues from online advertisers). Although MSFT owns Atlas, the combination of Atlas and MSN will, most likely, never get MSFT to a market leadership position. If Microsoft doesn’t gain a huge increase in market share and soon, it will be virtually impossible for them to catch Google. How do you suddenly increase market share? Answer, buy a competitor.

“Owning” the vision of the PC is Microsoft’s heritage

Microsoft has continually innovated across the years and while they have some very successful products such as X-Box, Windows and Office to name a few, they have not truly come on from their computer on every desktop vision of 20 years ago.

When a computer was used mostly for work, Microsoft set the vision for the personal computer with its operating systems and productivity software. These products are still by far the biggest driver of the company’s profits. However thanks to internet applications PCs now are equally used for recreation and Microsoft has never managed to dominate the market in this reality. Microsoft’s online presence that gave them early market advantage in the form of Internet Explorer and MSN are becoming more strategically irrelevant every day and their market share continues to follow a long-slow downward trajectory. Efforts such as Silver light, .NET and other initiatives will not change the fortunes of Microsoft in this regards.

The people at Microsoft need to innovate

While Microsoft could happily continue to dominate the OS market, Bill Gates will not want to see his life’s work become a monopolistic commodity. Microsoft also has enormously talented employees and they will not go down this route without kicking and screaming.

It makes good old fashion financial sense.

Although MSN and Yahoo users will not like me saying it, they really are substitute products for each other. Taking best practices from each and merging them together will improve the product and dramatically reduce redundancy. It will also create a broad base of messenger and email users that will dwarf the number of users on gmail. This is one beachhead that a combined Yahoo/MSFT should exploit in their ability to compete with Google.

At the end of the day, it may be the only path ahead for Yahoo too

Unless Yahoo does things very differently, they will continue to lose market share in search queries. This will ultimately result in long-term financial disaster as their editorial teams and messenger and email products will be left to support site visits and therefore online ad revenues. Yahoo’s content is not differentiated enough from other content sources to survive in the long run.

So, a takeover makes a lot of sense, ironically more so for the one that is blocking it. Microsoft can have a future without Yahoo but I struggle to see where Yahoo fits into the online ecosystem long term. Therefore I predict that Yahoo will come to this conclusion, Microsoft will have another attempt at a takeover and this time it will go through.

So there you have my opinions. I’m off to see my stockbroker!

Black Holes Always Put Things in Perspective

By Leslie LaRue | Aug 8, 2008 3:14:21 PM

I’ve been losing sleep lately. I hear the end of the world is coming. Really. September 10^th. Mark your calendars.

Some scientists on the Swiss border will seek to re-create the conditions of The Big Bang Theory in the form of The Large Hadron Collider (LHC); the largest particle accelerator ever built.  27 kilometers of experimentation designed to answer that fundamental question. What happened in the very beginning?

Similar experiments have been conducted in the past, but never on such a massive scale. In previous testing, tiny amounts of anti-matter, or “dark material” were released. The stuff of creation. The stuff that shapes a universe, or can take it down.

Most scientists are elated. It’s their chance to prove hard-core theory, study anti-matter, the possibilities are endless. But there is a slight catch. This experiment could create a series of small black holes, or turn Earth into a vast chasm of grey matter. A former nuclear safety officer actually filed a lawsuit trying to get them to stop the experiment.

I should mention, there is also a chance that dragons and unicorns could fly out of the LHC. It’s about that slim. But scientists being who they are, they won’t discredit that possibility. This makes me a bit nervous.

But it also gets me thinking. When faced with a decision that the world is ending, what do I care about? What really matters? Would I pull up a chair and have a cocktail? Medicate? Meditate? Gather all my friends and family and give them a hug? (Yes)

Surely, you say, she’s not going to make an analogy for digital marketing. Please. Of course I am.

Not that I would focus on performance marketing during the crisis of a black hole. I’m sorry ZAAZ, I love you. But no, I would not. But I do tend to think about the swirling masses of extra “stuff” we create in the world of marketing.

How much of all this is really necessary? Do we do it out of anxiety to prove our worth? Validate we’re consistently churning out results? Now is the time to simplify.

(What better excuse than the end of the world?)

Scale back. For lack of a better term, eliminate the extra crap you’re doing.

Look at what matters to growing your business, to developing it long-term and putting money back into what makes it all worthwhile. Only you can be the judge of that based upon your overall goals for success.

Maybe it’s condensing your KPIs from a list of five to two.  Maybe it’s hosting a panel instead of constructing a booth. Do you REALLY need all that, or is just extra stuff? 

Oh, and don’t forget to wear a sweater. Black holes tend to be chilly.

An Optimization Mix-Tape

By Jason Carmel | Aug 5, 2008 4:53:40 PM

I grew up making mix-tapes (note: for those of you unfamiliar with the concept of a mix-tape, think "playlist," but with far, far crappier technology than you are using right now to listen to far, far crappier music). I am not the first person to wax eloquent on the poetry of the mix-tape, so I will spare you my own musings in deference to those better written. There is no more holistic way to describe a circumstance, event, or task than through a lovingly-crafted compilation of songs. Normally, the songs speak for themselves. I don't need to tell my ex-girlfriend, for example, that the third song on side two of my 8th Grade Summer Mix ("Baby Bitch" by Ween) was pointed directly at her. She knows, man. Used properly, the mix-tape is a perfect medium.

This is a mix-tape for optimization. Ten life lessons about how and why you should be testing your websites, all neatly wrapped in a delicious candy-coating of RAWK:

1. "I Might Be Wrong" - Radiohead (Amnesiac) - This is why we test in the first place, so it's a good one to start off with. You never know whether a new initiative is helping or hurting relative to what was up there before (and by how much) unless you run a test to prove it. As this theme could be our anthem, it deserves pole position. Plus, every mix-tape since Pablo Honey came out had to include a Radiohead song by law, so it's good to get that out of the way (I'd usually cram mine in between "Forever Young" by Alphaville, and whatever Depeche Mode song I was listening to at the time). If those two weren't reason enough, I also have it on good authority that this is one of our Project Manager's (Ariel) favorite songs. First rule of test execution: do whatever it takes to get on your PM's good side.

2. "If I Had $1,000,000" - The Barenaked Ladies (Gordon) - If you had a million dollars (or, as is often the case, far less), where would you apply those resources? Would you test your homepage? The landing page for search results? Your credit card form? Any optimization program worth its salt will dynamically prioritize tests according to return on investment. The song is goofy, but the concept is deadly serious. Live by it.

3. "Minus Two" - Fishboy (Albatross) - Know your math. Love your stats calculators. Revel in Excel. Running a test is a lovely thing, but if you can't determine whether the results are statistically valid, you're in a bad place. In truth, the song doesn't have a lot to do with math (other than the name), but  Fishboy is one of our Web Analytics expert's (Halee) favorite bands, so it's in. Second rule of test execution: do whatever it takes to get on your Analyst's good side.

4. "Invisible Ink" - Aimee Mann (Lost in Space) - Aimee (who has a little crush on me) reminds us to test hiding things in addition to adding things. As everyone fights for real estate on a homepage (for example), customers may get lost with all the choices in front of them. Try hiding a few things (do people really need to sign up for a newsletter on the first visit to a homepage?) and see if that doesn't boost engagement or clickthrough.

5. "Tracks of My Tears" - Billy Bragg (Talking With The Taxman About Poetry) - Covers are wonderful things, as they remind us how a different voice can transform a message. Here we have a smooth, Motown production by Smokey revamped entirely using a single electric guitar and a very bitter-sounding bloke from Essex. What Billy teaches us is that we should consider testing new voices for our messages to see if they strike a chord (proverbially speaking) with our audience as a whole, or various subsets thereof.

6. "Lola" - The Kinks (Lola versus Powerman and the Moneygoround, Part One) - Ah, here we have the classic tune about unexpected results reminding us to watch out for the same when we are testing. You expected conversion rates to go up, and they did, which is great. Did you also expect your churn to skyrocket? A 20% off coupon you tested increased purchases, which is great. But did you expect your average order value to drop through the floor? Much like transvestites in SoHo clubs, unanticipated results aren't necessarily a "bad" thing, but the more work you can do to spot them in advance will save you the occasional awkward moment after launch.

7. "All My Mistakes" - The Avett Brothers (Emotionalism) - Not all of your tests will make things better. Some will have no effect at all, and some (gasp) will demonstrate that the control version is the best one out there at the moment. These are not bad outcomes. As long as you have entered an experiment with a hypothesis, you are proving or disproving something that can lead to a better understanding of how your customers interact with your site, and (just as important) a list of future experiments to consider executing.

8. "Know Your Onion" - The Shins (Oh, Inverted World) - This is my song for segmentation and behavioral targeting. Justin, my colleague from UX, always tells clients that a site should get better at addressing the needs of customers as it acquires more information and adjusts content accordingly. He refers to this as peeling layers of an onion with each customer interaction. So, music fans, I challenge you to know your onion, and to know how to peel those layers off for your customers to target them with relevant content as they demonstrate specific behaviors on your site.

9. "Do What You Want" - Bad Religion (Suffer) - A punk staple, in my humble opinion. Many herald the song as a generalized call to anarchy. While I wasn't in the room when the band wrote the song, I believe that they were referring specifically to the sense of freedom you get by testing your site (some may point to the album's 1988 release date- some five years before the first web browser- as evidence to the contrary. I just think of it as yet another demonstration of how ahead of its time Bad Religion was). "Break all the @$%&ing rules," says singer, Greg Graffin, and I agree. Remove "we've always done it this way" from your vocabulary and challenge your site's most sacred of cows to see if they prove their merit against other alternatives.

10. "Automatic" - Less Than Jake (Losing Streak) - It took a courageous ska-punk band from Gainesville to remind us how we should include optimization automatically in all site releases. Got a new feature going out? Test it. New product offering? Test it. Campaign? Testamundo. You get the idea. Include optimization automatically into your production and release schedule. Your site will be better for it.

Enjoy the music, folks.

[Author's Note: Incidentally, I don't think Chris Kerns could come up with a mix-tape for analytics. I just don't think he has it in him.]

Risky (online) Business

By Chris Kerns | Aug 1, 2008 11:33:31 AM

A few months ago, something very weird happened. Tom Cruise decided that he needed to rebrand himself via a website. In one swoop, he moved from Tom Cruise to TomCruise™ by putting out a self-congratulatory web presence and PR tour. All in order to change our perception of him. Yes, because we’re that stupid.

And, since everyone knows you never launch a new product in August, he went big in May to much fanfair with an appearance on Oprah and the aforementioned website. It was obvious that in the wake of this media blitz, the world’s opinion of TomCruise™ had instantly changed back to “I think he’s just kind of weird in a Hollywood way, I guess.”

As it turns out, TomCruise™ has had a rough time of it the past few decades. Here’s a graph to demonstrate his popularity:

The layman might guess check out this graph that he’s only going up, up, up. Unfortunately, this is a graph demonstrating a ranking of the Top 100 Box Office Stars in each decade based on total receipts, so he’s actually climbing his way out of the money. See the bottom right corner?  TomCruise™ wants to be down there, but it’s already occupied by that good looking Orlando Bloom fellow. So Tom’s watching the trend, and trying to put a stop to it.

So was the site launch a success? Well, that depends on what his goals were. What should his goals have been? If we, the experts at ZAAZ, had met with him in the site planning process, I’m guessing the dialog would have been a little…something…like...this….

ZAAZ: so, TomCruise™, what are the business goals of what you’re trying to achieve online?

TomCruise™ (for some reason I’m picturing him in sunglasses): I’m thinking that people want to hear the truth about me, my loyal fans. And some of the new web 2.0 stuff. Maybe a social network. Did you happen to see the blockbuster “Minority Report”? Steven and I worked tirelessly on that to really capture the visceral essence…

ZAAZ: How about something a little smarter, like getting people to sign up for site updates, news, and other notifications? That way you can continue to tell them how crazy you’re not, and control the conversation. Also, let's talk about targets for demographics. Hispanics have continued to rise as a major force in the moviegoing public (attending 11 movies per year vs. the average 8.5 across all demographics), so how about working to attract a new audience to your films? Or attracting more young moviegoers (12-24 age range), who are making up an increasing piece of the audience wallet (38% of movie admissions in 2007 according to the MPAA)? Or maybe just getting a site out there with great SEO so that “tomcruiseisnuts.com” (currently #3) doesn’t appear before your official site (currently #5) in the Google organic rankings for “Tom Cruise”?

TomCruise™ : did you know I played an uncredited role as “Cowboy” in Young Guns? A lot of people don’t know that.

So, I checked out some data to see how the site is doing with the mock goals I lay out above. The site traffic grew throughout May, seeing the main peak the week of May 24th, and is now on a downhill trajectory. So the word got out – but 95% of the visits are being classified as “passers-by” vs. regulars or addicts. Maybe that’s because there’s not really anything to do on the site. Who can expect people to return when all that’s available is information about 10-year-old films that TomCruise™ has appeared in? Would it kill the guy to write a blog? Give us something to come back for. When it comes to the mock target demographics, we’re not doing so well, either. According to our friends over at QuantCast, almost 50% of the site traffic is from “old people” – over 35. Only 7% of the audience is Hispanic.

So it’s easy to launch a site, get some press, and claim a victory. It's not as easy when you set goals and build a site/campaign around those goals, but it's much more productive. Anyone in Hollywood should appreaciate that when you design a site around goals, your analytics can tell you a story. You set up the situation, you deal with the conflicts that exist, and end up at a resolution. Analytics without goals is like Top Gun without Iceman, Days of Thunder without Rowdy Burns, The Firm without...The Firm. Be honest about what your goals are, follow through with actionable analysis, and you'll be able to tell your own story someday.

* side note: please appreciate the constraint I used in this blog entry, not mentioning any of the following low hanging fruit:

• any reference to "Site traffic: Mission Impossible”
• nothing on “monetization: show me the money!”
• no jokes about conversion.