Category Archives: Rants

Every so often I have to blow off steam. These are the results

Google: Bad Behavior?

It seems that every time I’m getting ready to go on a family holiday, Google decides to up the game with personalization. Two years ago on the cusp of a spring getaway they announced default opt ins for search and web history. This time, they’re siddling up to behavioral targeting, courtesy of that same personal information. In the process, they’ve recanted much of what they’ve said about behavioral targeting over the past 2 years. I have always said that of course Google was going to go down the behavioral targeting road. Why else would they be collecting the data? The official line of making your search experience better didn’t hold much water.

I’m torn on the whole question of behavioral targeting. As a marketer, I appreciate the potential. BT was the tactic that marketers were most interested in according to the latest SEMPO Search Market Survey. But as a user, I’m profoundly disappointed in Google’s tip toeing around the issue. I think it shows a more fundamental issue at the heart of Google’s culture, which has been rearing it’s head more often as of late.

The disastrous economy has created a split personality within Google.It seems that Google, once the brash, idealistic young university student out to change the world is now being severely schooled in the more pragmatic ways of that world. Google is growing up, and I’m not sure we’ll like what it turns into. It’s double talking, pulling the bait and switch, sacrificing ideals for cash and sometimes outright lying. In short, it’s becoming just like every other company in the world. The company John Battelle wrote about in The Search is rapidly disappearing. In it’s place is an online juggernaut that seems intent on keeping advertisers happy. The one thing that always set Google apart was it’s respect for the user. If you read the official Google press release on this, the carrot for the user is more relevant ads. Okay,that’s a stretch of epic proportions. You’re tracking everything I do, based on a promise to make my search experience more useful. You know what? My search experience hasn’t changed too much in the last 2 years. I haven’t noticed a huge increase in relevancy. But now you’re using the information I volunteered, giving it to marketers so they can serve me more ads? That wasn’t part of the original bargain Google. You violated my trust. And you did it to keep more revenue rolling in.

Behavioral targeting of ads was inevitable. Everyone knew Google was going there. So why were they so righteous (and so dismissive of other BT providers) in saying that it just wasn’t a targeting approach they were going to take? Not cool, Google, not cool.

Belief in Evolution still 50/50 in the US

It’s amazed me how slow the US has been to accept Evolution. It’s been 150 years since the publication of Darwin’s theory and as I said in a previous post, more people in the US believe in angels than Evolution. I ran across an interesting chart in The Economist that showed the acceptance of Evolution in different countries around the world. Guess what? Of the countries shown, only Turkey comes in below the US.

acceptance

The Importance of Touchpoints – every Touchpoint

I got an iPhone on Thursday.

This post has nothing to do with the iPhone..everything to do with where I got it. Being in Canada, Roger’s is the only carrier that has the iPhone. Roger’s is particularly clueless when it comes to brand integrity (perhaps rivaled only by Air Canada in my home and native land). And this was made abundantly clear to me.

I went to a local mobile store. While the store is run by a licensee, the branding is all Roger’s. For all intents and purposes, it’s a Roger’s store. I walked up to the counter and what appeared to be a 13 year old with a five o’clock shadow who managed the store siddled over to wait on me. His assistant, a petulant female, rolled her eyes and went in the back.

I currently have a Roger’s plan, put in place almost 4 years ago. At the time, I put a plan in place that would cover my somewhat limited data needs. To be honest, I don’t really monitor the bills and my assistant finally showed me one. I hit the roof. Because my device now syncs with our mail server while I’m in Canada (I’m on another plan when I’m in the US) my data traffic has increased substantially. Here’s the details of the plan I was on..get this..25 Megs per month for $25 bucks..and 5 cents a kilobyte for overages! 5 cents a kilobyte! My relatively modest data needs were racking up hundreds of dollars in charges. Was I stupid for letting it go? Absolutely. But obviously Roger’s was perfectly happy to leave me on the stupidest plan in the world and rake in the money. That’s their bad.

So, after hitting the roof, I decided to change the plan. Roger’s plans are still highway robbery, but at least Apple forced them to ease the data plan usury in order to get exclusives on the iPhone. Now..I could get 1 GB of data monthly, plus a limited voice plan, for about $70 a month..all in. I could get an iPhone (which I’ve been salivating over for some time) and still save hundreds a month. I still had to deal with Roger’s, but to be honest, their competition is no better (Twitter recently had to discontinue SMS notifications in Canada because our mobile carriers are uniformly stupid). So, hence my visit to the local store.

I informed Skippy, the wonder manager, of all this and he said, “Well, I can get you set up with the iPhone dude, but I can’t change your plan. You need to call Roger’s to do that”.

“Why?”

The answer was painfully incoherent, but it came down to Roger’s not trusting their licensees (remember, this is Skippy’s take on the situation) and trying to lock me into a package that maximized profit for them and minimized usability for me. Skippy walked me through the routine (with many interjections of “Sorry dude, Roger’s makes us do this”) and, as we were wrapping up, pulled out the check lists to make sure he had done all the things he was supposed to. By this time, I was looking for the nearest exit to escape. Yes..you had shown me how the iPhone works. Yes, you explained all the nickle and dime charges imposed on me. Yes, you explained how Roger’s repossesses my home if I cancel early. Yes, you explained why the writing on the contract might not be what I actually get. Just let me go home.

And then, the final straw.

“Okay..you’re probably going to get a call from Roger’s to make sure I did my job right. I only get my points if you answer that you were ‘definitely satisfied'”

“Sure”

“No..I mean it. That’s the only answer that will give me the score I need. Will you answer that.” At this point, I swear to God, he gives me a photocopied sheet of paper with the right answer printed on it, circled with a check mark beside, just to jog my memory for the call. “You will say ‘Definitely Satisfied’, right?”

At this point, I was either ready to beat my self to death with my shiny new iPhone, or burst out laughing. Skippy was on the verge of tears. I could have launched into an explanation of how this was not the way to ensure customer satisfaction (but the irony is, he does this with every customer and it probably works most of the time. Whoever thought up this approach had done their psychological homework) but that would have cost me more precious hours of my life. I smiled my best paternal, sympathetic older dude to younger dude smile and said, “Sure man.”

Obviously, Roger’s is trying to police the quality of these licensee touchpoints through these ridiculous QA checklists and follow up phone calls, but it made the entire experience bizarre. I think a better approach would be to create reasonable plans, be proactive with existing customers in moving them into the right plans, be more transparent and fair with promotional deals, insist on better hiring practices and provide more value to customers. If they did all these things, their brand integrity could survive the odd fumble in the hands of a Skippy.

Chasing Digital Fluff – Who Cares about What’s Hot?

Marketers are falling over themselves in their rush to the digital landscape. Social media is SO hot! But not as hot as behavioral targeting. And if you think that’s hot, wait till you see what you can do with mobile!

The Digital Dogpile

blow-dandelionMarketers desperately scramble over each other, grasping for a tenuous handhold on some emerging tactic that gives them, however briefly, a fraction of an inch advantage over the competition. New digital marketing directors prove their worth through their savvy of online technology. They cut their teeth on Facebook advertising and put Powerpoints (or, because they’re uber-cool – Keynote presentations) together on the immense potential of the social graph.

Churn is the norm in digital marketing. And marketers are the worst, whipping the industry into a froth because they get all breathless about the latest thing. My inbox gets a hundred emails every single day talking about how freaking cool everything is and how we’re stumbling to figure out the importance of everything. If you’re not an early adopter…scratch that…if you’re not a bleeding edge pioneer, you’re a hopeless loser. The pace of marketing testing and adoptions just keeps spinning faster and faster.

Step Away from the iPhone

Stop! Take a breath. Relax for a few minutes. Get outside and breath some honest to God fresh air. And don’t take your iPhone with you. Because here’s the scoop Kemosabe, all the technology in the world is useless until your audience figures out how to use it. And here’s the nasty little secret. Humans love bright shiny objects but we’re pretty slow when it comes to figuring out how to jam it into our already busy lives. Until that happens, your nifty online strategies will never be anymore than a pointless treadmill jammed on overdrive. You can run as fast as you want, but you’ll never get anywhere.

I do financial analyst calls every quarter and the last question on the call is always the same: anything else we should be looking at? Apparently, technologiosis (or technitis, or technophilia, take your pick) is contagious. My answer is usually the same..wait till people figure out how to use it.

Think about the buzz that’s been devoted to social networks and, more recently, real time search, in the last 2 years. That’s 2 years of foaming-at-the-mouth marketing buzz about how this channel is:

A) the savior of marketing
B) most effective connection with consumers
C) coolest technology without an identifiable purpose
D) biggest waste of time on God’s green earth
E) all of the above

The Geekiest Guy on my Block

Now, I’ll be the first to admit I don’t have a clue how to use social media in a meaningful way in my life. I have a Facebook page, I tweet, I have a Linked In profile, a Trip-It network, just to name a few, making me the geekiest guy I know. Maybe not at an online marketing show, but if you ever visit Kelowna, take a walk with me down my block and I’ll prove my techno-geek status is several Trekkie parsecs ahead of anyone else. I suspect the same is true for you. And you know what? I have no frigging idea why Facebook is important or why I should log into my profile today. It’s cool, but it’s not useful in an every day kind of way. And if I, who spend over 10 hours a day online and have a network of friends and colleagues that span the globe, can’t jam Facebook into my life in a useful way, how is the average techno-pleb going to?

As far as I can see, most of things marketers salivate over fall into the same category..digital candy that tweaks our dopamine supplying pleasure centre but serves no real, sustainable purpose in our lives. This puts it in the same category as 95% of my iPhone apps, 99% of the computer games on my laptop and the Wii my nephew got last Christmas – an obsession for approximately 27 hours, an occasional pastime for another 36 hours, then something we ignore for the rest of our lives.

The one difference, at least in my experience, seems to be teenagers. Most of things that seem to be passing fancies to us do seem to become useful in the lives of the average 15 – 23 year old. But, as I said in a previous post, when you look at what the live of a high school or university student looks like and what they want to do, a Facebook suddenly makes sense. For me, not so much.

An Eyeball is an Eyeball, Right?

So, even given this notorious degree of fickleness, why should marketer’s care? Eyeballs are still eyeballs, right? Even if the eyeballs we’re capturing this week will be completely different than the eyeballs we capture next week. This approach only works if you consider your market a faceless blob of unleashed consumer potential. If you actually want to get relevant messages to real people with real needs, the logic starts to break down immediately.

Effective marketing depends on reliable targeting. And reliable targeting depends on established patterns. And established patterns depend on sustained behaviors. And sustained behaviors depend on things we find useful. Otherwise, we’re marketing via fad, condemning ourselves to spending our professional lives and our client’s ad dollars chasing fluff in a hurricane. Our audience will always be “just passing through” on the way to the next thing.

I Miss Frank Cannon, PI

movies_070708_cannonMarkets have to stabilize in order for us to understand the individuals that make up that market. Also, brand relationships need a stable environment, allowing them to germinate and flourish.

When I was a kid, Kraft always sponsored Cannon. When you tuned in to see William Conrad somehow roll his fat old carcass out of his Lincoln Continental and pick off a sniper 3 miles away on a mountain top with his trusty .38 revolver, you could depend on Kraft telling you how to cook Mac & Cheese in every commercial break. Much as the entertainment value may have sucked (beggars with 2 channels in the Canadian prairies can’t be choosers) you knew Kraft would be there and Kraft knew who they were talking to. The audience had stabilized.

Until things pass through the temporary obsession phase to something that adds real value to our lives, we can’t consider advertising on these channels as anything more than an experiment. The trick in picking the right digital channels is not to look at the eyeballs they’re attracting today, but in how these things might be used in real, practical ways. That will give you an idea of how real people might be using these things next week or next month, when the technoratti have moved on to the latest bright shiny object.

To Google’s Competitors: Please, This Year, Do Something Amazing!

First published January 8, 2009 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

A month ago yesterday, I was on stage in Park City, Utah at the Search Insider Summit with Danny Sullivan, Jeff Pruitt (SEMPO President/iCrossing) and John Tawadros (iProspect) talking about Google’s domination of the search space. Both Danny and I took Microsoft and Yahoo to task for not mounting a more significant challenge to Google’s dominance. It could be my imagination, but it seemed that for the rest of the Summit, I felt a bit of a chill in the air between myself and the Yahoo and Microsoft reps that ventured to Park City. I suspect the feeling was that as the emcee and moderator, I should have been less opinionated and more neutral. Fair enough, I guess, considering the root of the word moderator. But, with my first column of the new year, I felt I should clear the air a little bit.

I Like You, I Really Like You…

Really, Microsoft and Yahoo, I don’t hate you. You frustrate the hell out of me, but I certainly don’t hate you. I root for you constantly. I’ve always been an “underdog” kind of guy. Anything I mentioned on stage in Park City I’ve said directly to your respective development teams in Sunnyvale (Yahoo) and Redmond (Microsoft). I’ll tell anyone that listens. Ad nauseam, so I’ve been told. In a recent post, Danny Sullivan called it tough love. Danny and I have talked about this and we both really, really want you to succeed. But as much as I’ve tried to give helpful advice, the right people don’t seem to be listening.

Here’s the thing. I love search. I love its potential. I love the way it makes me more functional and sound smarter and better informed. Yet I know we’ve barely scratched the surface. There is so much more to come, but we need to get there as fast as possible. The only way to do that is to have a more competitive market. Google needs to have someone constantly breathing down its neck. The current market domination isn’t good for anyone, especially not the user. I suspect the engineers (not the bean counters) at Google even feel the same way. We need an arms race in search. Right now, it’s like the U.S. taking on Canada and Iceland (as a Canadian, I can say that). So when I say pull up your socks and take search seriously, I mean it with love.

Bottom Up is the Way to Go

In Danny’s post, he nicely outlines the symptoms of malaise at Microsoft. And lord knows everyone and their dog has been piling on the bash-Yahoo bandwagon in the last few months, so I won’t go there. The problem, as I see it, is that there’s a gap a mile wide between the top and bottom in both organizations. The result is a dysfunctional culture. The front lines at both organizations desperately want to do something significant in search, but they’re hamstrung by a lack of clear strategic focus from the top. Microsoft is locked in a product development mindset that squeezes anything amazing out before it can even make it to beta. Yahoo is trying to walk an impossible tight rope, tweaking the user experience while at the same time squeezing as much money as possible out of the search page.

To do something amazing in search, both organizations have to start at the foundation, the user, and rebuild from the ground up. What I would like to see is an approach taken by Intel and Apple in the past, leapfrog development. Let one team work on tweaking the existing product, and lock another team away somewhere to reinvent the future. Throw the rule book away and start over. Take your brightest rebels, remove them from the distractions of mind-numbing bureaucracy and panicked financial analyst reports, and let them do what they long to do: beat Google. Let them do something amazing.

Let People Be Amazing, Then Keep Your Hands Off

But please, if someone at Microsoft or Yahoo is listening, don’t make the same mistake GM did with Saturn. The launch of Saturn in 1983 redefined how a North American car company could be. Many of the legacy issues that plagued GM (confrontational union relationships, overly complacent dealer networks, quality control issues) were left behind with Saturn, creating an exceptional degree of loyalty and pride of ownership. In fact, Saturn became so successful that GM just couldn’t keep its hands off it, gradually bringing Saturn more and more into the GM corporate fold and, in the process, squeezing much of the life out of the brand.

Amazing things wither and die in an atmosphere of corporate bureaucracy, visionless management and political infighting. Search is too important and too vibrant to leave it to this fate. Let 2009 be the year to do something remarkable.

Al Ries Slight Off on GM’s Brand Woes

Who am I to disagree with Al Ries on branding? No matter, I’ll take a swing at it anyway.

In AdAge, Ries takes GM to task (may need a subscription) for not creating strong brands, which in turn was triggered by an article in the Wall Street Journal titled “How Detroit Drove Into a Ditch“. The WSJ article places the blame on Detroit’s failure to understand the nature of the Japanese competition:

“Just as America didn’t understand the depth of ethnic and religious divisions in Iraq, Detroit failed to grasp — or at least to address — the fundamental nature of its Japanese competition. Japan’s car companies, and more recently the Germans and Koreans, gained a competitive advantage largely by forging an alliance with American workers.”

Ries disagrees:

“Nowhere in this entire article is a mention of Detroit’s failure to build powerful brands. Rather the blame is placed almost totally on problems in the factories.”

I have to say, I side much more with the WSJ on this one. Just where, I wonder, does Ries think brand comes from? He seems to think it’s somehow seperated from what happens on the factory floor…that brand is somehow magically concocted in a Madison Avenue boardroom and lives and thrives independent of the crap that comes off the assembly line. It’s a troubling throwback to the arrogant assumption of marketing control that I believe is at least partly responsible for the situation we currently find ourselves in: you don’t have to worry about being good, as long as your advertising is. Consider the examples of successful brands that Ries uses as examples:

“It seems to me that the fundamental nature of Detroit’s Japanese competition is its ability to build brands. Toyota stands for reliability, Scion for youth, Prius for hybrid, Lexus for luxury. “

It’s not a marketing ploy that has determined that Toyota stands for reliability. It’s superior quality control. I question Lexus’s exclusive claim to luxury, or Scion’s claim to youth, but their success in both markets comes directly from the appeal of their products and an acceptance of this by the target market, not by any particular marketing genius. And the success of the Prius as the definition of hybrid comes from engineering excellence and the ability of Toyoto to make it into a practical vehicle. This isn’t marketing, this is just being better than the competition.

Ries seems to suffer from the delusion that brands can be unilaterally built. In the hyper connected reality of today, brands can, at best, be mutually agreed upon. Brand is a label that is connected in the cortex. All the advertising in the world can plant some mental seeds, but if the reality doesn’t connect, those seeds wither and die. It wasn’t Detroit’s ineptness in advertising that killed them, it was their ineptness in every single aspect of their business.

The hole that GM (and Detroit) has dug for themselves has been built over the last 40 years. And contrary to Ries’s opinion, Detroit has been extraordinarily successful in creating brands. Consider the cultural legacy of the Mustang, the Corvette, the Cadillac, the Jeep. These are brands that were once rich with meaning..with mental connections that resonated and rang true with enthusiasts. But the meaning has been eroded away because the products didn’t live up to the promise. And the reasons had nothing to do with advertising, it’s was squarely rooted in what came off of the factory floor, and everything that contributed to it: shoddy workmanship, antagonist relationships with workers, squeezing vendors for every last cent, arrogant management, lack of respect for customers and poor service in the dealer network.

What is true is if the product doesn’t deliver on the promise, word spreads much quicker now. And perhaps that was the final nail in Detroit’s collective coffin. The new connected marketplace allowed us to call bullshit in a way that is heard much further and much louder.

It’s not that Detroit can’t build a brand. It’s that they just can’t build a very good vehicle.

Bring Me the Head of Jerry Yang

In 1974, Sam Peckinpah directed the film Bring Me the head of Alfredo Garcia, the story of a bounty hunter who set out to avenge family dishonor (through rape and abandonment) by bringing back the aforementioned anatomical appendage.

If I were part of the Yahoo! family of shareholders, I’d be having similar thoughts about Jerry Yang. This just in..Yang wants to go back to the table with Steve Ballmer to open up the deal. Of course this time, the price will be a fraction of what was originally offered.

Yang isn’t stupid. This is hubris disguised as stupidity, which is worse. Hubris deludes the holder into thinking they know more than they do. It’s pride that overcomes rationality, clouds judgement and obscures reality. Effective leaders should know better, they should be able to see through hubris, especially when acting on behalf of shareholders. Yang failed miserably. He has, through hubris, crushed Yahoo! beyond repair. Semel started the decline through his arrogance, Yang simply took it in a new direction. When humble self evaluation was desperately needed, Yahoo! got bravado and blind delusion.

This isn’t new for Yahoo! Those goes back to the very cultural foundations of the company. In their glory days, they had a cockiness that makes Google seem positively Uriah Heep-ish (the Copperfield character that was “ever so humble”). But at some point during the past decade, you would have thought that Yang and company would have realized that they were a rapidly fading second place player and would have made the necessary adjustments. Not so. Yahoo! has been suffereing from a massive and chronic case of denial.

Here’s the thing. If Microhoo happens (can’t see how it won’t at this point) it’s still going to be a disaster for search. I’ll reserve judgement on the Display side of things, but I tend to agree with some opinions saying that Microsoft should get out of the media business. Yahoo deal or not, Microsoft doesn’t have the culture to build a successful media business. But let’s just talk about search. If Yahoo! is cocky, Microsoft is ten times so. Microsoft just doesn’t know how to play catch up. This, as I said when people started talking about the original Microhoo deal, is two dysfunctional families joining together. It will distract Microsoft from what they need to do, which is become truly innovative and disruptive in redefining search. They’ll think they bought breathing room. They’re wrong. Yahoo’s search business is obsolete and bleeding market share quickly. And the enormous task of integrating two cultures under the given circumstances will sink both ships. There can be no good that comes from this.

Which is sad. At this point, the only hope for search is Google and some amazing start up somewhere. The mighty haven’t fallen yet, but their shoelaces are tied together in what is essentially a sprint, so it’s only a matter of time.

Note to Cuil: Read My Columns!

Cuil was introduced when I had other things on my mind, namely trying to jam 2 months of work into 2 weeks so I could take my family on a long vacation to Europe. So I didn’t get a chance to caste my jaundiced eye on the much touted Google killer that has so resoundingly flopped since it’s introduction. That’s too bad, because I could have saved everyone a lot of time. I don’t care how “cuil” the technology is in the background, from a search user perspective, Cuil is a disaster!

For the past several months, I’ve been writing on MediaPost and Search Engine Land about inherent human behaviors and how they play out on search. I’ve talked about the limits of working memory, information foraging theory, how we pick up scent, how we navigate the results page, how we respond to images versus text, how we’ve been conditioned to search by habit and how what we read on the results page connects with our unexpressed intent in our minds. Cuil fails miserably on all counts. It frustrates the hell out of me that people don’t pay attention to the basic rules of human behavior. If the founders of Cuil had read our eye tracking reports, read Pirolli and Card’s information foraging theory, read any of my posts or blogs or read any post by Bryan or Jeffrey Eisenberg or Jakob Nielsen, millions of dollars of VC funding, thousands of hours of development time and a lot of actual and virtual ink could have been saved. Unless Cuil completely revamps their interface, they’re doomed to failure.

Cuil completely disregards the conditioned patterns we use to navigate results pages. This is a risk, but an acceptable one. You can change things up, but you better damn well deliver when you do. All Cuil delivers is confusion. It’s almost impossible to pick up scent. The eye is dragged all over the page because there’s no logical presentation. Functionality is ambiguous, not intuitive. The mix of images and text does nothing to establish relevance. Perceived relevance of the SERP is nil. If I would have looked at this a few months ago, I would have predicted that users would try it once because of the hype, been mildly intrigued by the look but found it almost unusable, quickly beating a path back to Google. I didn’t need to do eye tracking. A quick glance at the results page was all I needed. Unfortunately, because my mind was on the French Alps rather than the latest Google killer, my first glance was 3 months delayed and my would-be brilliant prediction just sounds like “me-too” hindsight.

Ah well..

For others that have Google in their sights, a word of advice. Mix up the search business..shake the hell out of it. It’s time. Come up with a better algorithm, blow up the results page and see where it lands, jolt the user out of their conditioned behavior. By all means, take millions in eager VC capital and reinvent the game. It’s way past time. But please, don’t ignore the fact that humans are humans and there will always be certain rules of thumb and strategies we operate by. You can destroy the paradigm, but you can’t change generations of inherent behavior. Cuil never bothered to learn the rules. That’s going to cost them.

Oops – I Did It Again. Sorry Andrew.

One year ago, I may have mentioned that my fellow countrymen (or at least a select group of Canadian marketers) had their heads up a part of their anatomy at SES Toronto. Andrew Goodman afterwards promised to force feed me Canadian politeness serum before he put me in front of another Toronto crowd. And Andrew, I want you to know I tried. I really tried. But then Rogers missed the boat in an incredibly stupid way, and, well..I may have said something similar again. I’m sorry, I really am.

Last year, I tore up the Ontario Tourism Board for not using search effectively, prompting a multipart debate with them in my Search Insider Column. First, I said they weren’t doing search. They said they were and I didn’t know what I was talking about. I looked at what they were doing and amended my stance: they were doing search, just not doing it very well. I offered free advice. They declined my offer. We went home in seperate cars. I didn’t get a card on Valentine’s Day. I think this time, it’s really over between us.

This year, having a hard time believing that Andrew was daring to put me in front of a Toronto crowd again, I decided to stay on safer ground and give a rather non controversial tour of why the Golden Triangle is the way it is, using results from several recent studies. But the main theme of the study was that relevance and the presentation of recognized brands are both critical elements in the Golden Triangle for commercial searches. I was finishing my slide deck on the day of the announcement that the iPhone was finally coming to Canada. Rogers would be the exclusive carrier. I just knew there would be a corresponding search spike and I thought this would be a great example of how to utilize search effectively. The following Google Trends Graph shows just how big this spike was:

google-trends-iphonesm

I searched for “iPhone” and what did I find? Nary a mention of Rogers. No ad, no organic listing.

google-iphonesm

I went to their site and other than a mysterious and unusable link off their home page that went to a 3 line media release, there was no information. Surely, Rogers couldn’t be this stupid, could they? But alas, they were.

So, I amended my slide deck to include the examples. And yes, I may have got a little hot under the collar at SES again, and I’m pretty sure I said something not so polite. But you know what? I’m getting sick and tired of going to the business capital of Canada year after year and seeing that the major Canadian brands are still miles behind the rest of the world in search. Do a search for any major consumer product in Canada and almost all the big brands are completely absent. They don’t get it. Or in many cases, their agencies don’t get it. Look, accept the reality. People search. People search because they’re looking to buy things. On June 10, thousands of Canadians searched for information on the new 3G iPhone. I’m suspecting more than a few of them are intending to snap one up July 11. And not one advertiser had the foresight to buy a search ad on what was probably the biggest search day of the year for iPhone, including the exclusive carrier. Correction, one advertiser did…Research in Motion, the maker of the Blackberry.

Maybe being big and stupid worked in Canadian advertising up to now, but it won’t work in the future. You have to understand that Canadian’s aren’t stupid when it comes to the internet. We’re amongst the world’s biggest Internet users. Our early lead in terms of high bandwidth penetration is slipping (another sign of sheer stupidity) but we still go online more than almost anyone in the world. Yet Canadian advertisers are avoiding search, turning the Golden Triangle into an advertising slum. Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft’s Canadian offices are slamming their heads into brick walls, wondering when Canadians will finally get it. They’ve all asked me. And frankly, I’m tired of apologizing for Canadian marketers. Yes, we’re a cautious country. Yes, we’re deliberate. But it’s gone beyond that. Now, there are no more excuses. Roger’s absense from the search page on June 10 was inexcusable. It was either stupid or incredibly arrogant. It was one of Canada’s best known brands telling thousands of Canadian’s looking for information on buying an iPhone one of two things:

  1. We’re huge and we have a monopoly so why do we have to spend a handful of our advertising dollars actually giving you useful information? We know you’re going to buy from us because you have no where else to go. And oh, by the way, we’re going to charge you whatever we want, or;
  2. Sorry, we just don’t get this whole internet thing. You mean people actually search for information online? Huh..imagine that.

I’m passionate about being a Canadian. I am tremendously proud of my country. But I’m also passionate about search. And in this one area, Canadians are ridiculously behind the curve.

Thank God for Product-Centric Leaders

First published May 1, 2008 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

All you who have Google stock, take a moment to thank Larry and Sergey. You who have fallen in lust with your iPhone, stop and say a silent prayer for Steve Jobs. And you parents who spent many a peaceful hour thanks to your kids being glued to a Disney movie, face towards Disneyland and bow to Walt himself, may he rest in peace (or a freezer, as rumor has it). Thank God for product-centric leaders, because they are few and far between.

Customer-Centricity: More Than Just Words

I have spent many an hour in conference rooms listening to the new “religion” of customer-centricity that has suddenly taken hold of the mega-corporation X, Y or Z. The scripted lines are typically “We are here to serve our customer. We will find optimal strategies to maximize customer experience and revenue opportunities. We embrace good design.”

It may sound good in the annual report, but it’s not that easy. When you talk about balance, I hear compromise. Somebody is losing, and it’s almost always your customer. Because as Sergey, Larry, Steve and Walt will tell you, there can only be one person driving this bus. Either it’s your sales manager, or it’s your customer. Come to any intersection and one will tell you to turn right and one will tell you to turn left. Who are you going to listen to?

Now, obviously, Apple, Google and Disney have been known to make a buck or two, so customer-centricity can be profitable. It depends on which route you want to take to get there. If you take the customer’s route, it means having the courage to say no to a lot of people inside your company (and out) along the way. And really, the only person who can say no and get away with it is the leader of the company.

The Product-Centric Leader

Here’s a shocker, coming from me. The more I think about it, the more I don’t believe customer-centricity is the key. It’s not a goal, it’s a by-product. It comes as part of the package (often unconsciously) with another principle that is a little more concrete: product-centricity. Product-centric leaders, the ones that are obsessive about what gets shipped out the door, are customer-centric by nature. They understand the importance of that magical intersection between product and person, the sheer power of amazing experiences. The iPhone is amazing. Disney classics are amazing. My first search on Google was amazing. Steve, Walt, Larry and Sergey wouldn’t have it any other way. They focus attention on the importance of that experience, and know, somewhere deep down inside, that if they get it right, the revenue will take care of itself.

The other thing about product-centric leaders is that they don’t have to do extensive customer research. They may, and many do, but they already have a gut instinct for what their customers want, because they are their own customer. Larry and Sergey invented a new search engine because the old ones were fundamentally broken and they were fed up with them. Walt built Disneyland because he was tired of sleazy, grimy amusement parks. And Steve knew that some people need a lot more than a beige, generic box because he’s one of them. They have user-centricity baked into their core, because they’re building products they want to use. They don’t compromise in the drive to create a product that’s good enough for them. It’s a happy coincidence that there are lots of other people who also love the product. It’s an intuitive connection that 99.9% of corporate leaders can’t imagine, let alone do.

Managers Are Almost Never Product-Centric

The typical corporate manager has no special bond to the product. Along the line, too, many compromises have been made in the name of profitability. Whatever amazement the product may have once had has been sold off, bit by bit, along the way. The sales manager and the bean counters have taken over the steering wheel. They turn out bland, uninspiring products they wouldn’t use themselves. They are not product centric, they’re profit-centric, and profit really doesn’t inspire anyone.

I’ve spent a lot of time wondering how so many companies can preach customer-centricity, yet continually miss the mark by so much so often. Look at the ones who hit the bull’s eye regularly. It turns out that it’s not so much customer-centricity they’re aiming for, it’s delivering products the leaders are obsessed with because they can’t wait to use them themselves. That’s a key element “Good to Great” and “Built to Last” author Jim Collins missed in his Level 5 leadership. Steve Jobs would never be mistaken for Collin’s or Stephen Covey’s ideal leader, but if I were looking for someone who’s going to turn out a product that blows me away, Steve would be my guy.