We are no longer consumers

We are creators.

Have you ever heard of a show called Hawaii Five-O? Well ... there's a small chance that you may have actually played a part in creating an episode of this show.

In what I believe to be a first of it's kind, the producers of Hawaii Five-O are going to give viewers the opportunity to dictate how they want a certain episode to end. Viewers will tweet one of three options and then CBS will air the chosen option in real-time.

This blows my mind.

How far away are we from consumers completely crafting a show of their own? It would take is a group of willing actors to say, "Hey Twitterverse, we're going to come up with a series of entire episodes for a show where YOU get to dictate what happens!" In a marketer's terms, leave the content delivery to us and we'll leave the content ... to you!! 

I think this calls for a new term. It's no longer crowdsourcing ... it's crowdcreating.

Fotobars - The new frontier in utility marketing

I am not sure where I first came across the term 'utility marketing,' but the meaning of it is fairly straightforward. A lot of apps follow this model, when brands produce them to simply enhance or augment a customer's experience rather than actually provide a good or service. For example: An app that provides a catalog or a map of a location has great utility to those who seek that type of information.

This past week, I came across a story about Polaroid and their plans to open up a series of retail locations called 'Fotobars.' These bars let people come in and print photos that have been stored on their phones.

From a utility marketing perspective, here's why this strategy is interesting:

  1. People love taking pictures (as evidenced by Instagram's meteoric rise), so Fotobars are simply providing an outlet for people to take their enjoyment to the next level.
  2. Polaroid doesn't make phones, nor does it necessarily own the photo-taking apps. Fotobars are simply providing a platform on which people can use their existing products. In a way, Polaroid is essentially product agnostic, much like the Amazon Kindle app.

The next time you are considering a marketing plan or perhaps you are even thinking about how to revitalize a current product using a new marketing strategy ... consider utility.

This is a suggested post

Earlier today, I saw this in the heart of my Facebook news feed:

Let me break it down quickly from a marketing perspective:

1. Short, brief copy = good.
2. Social proof (lots of likes, shares, comments) = good.
3. Clear CTA (Like page) = good.
4. Captivating creative = good.

Now let me break it down from a user (far more important) perspective:

1. Relevant = nope.

Therefore, all the marketing points I made earlier ... redundant, useless, void, wasted.

If you're a marketer planning on using any form of non-permission based advertising this year ... please make it relevant. Users ... please revolt against irrelevancy in marketing.

Video ads - will we click now?

I occasionally browse through the ads on the right-hand-side of my Facebook page and most of the time they are not really relevant and so I'm not interested. Today, I noticed what you see below ... 

You will see that I conveniently used Microsoft Paint's spraypaint tool to blur out my friend's personal information, but I left the main part of what caught my attention.

A video ad.

After doing a bit of reading, I've found that Facebook does offer video as an option to potential advertisers:

With the rise in online video and even mobile video could we start to see a rise in video ads? How will this affect the notoriously low click-thru rate on ads in general?

Will supermarkets become extinct?

Or at least be frequented less?

Walmart Labs recently launched a new initiative called Goodies, which is a subscription based food discovery service. It's not the only one of it's kind, in fact there are a whole slew of subscription based discovery services out there, including: Birchbox, Glossybox, ipsy and a whole bunch of other competitors.

I think this model is really neat because it represents an evolution of Seth Godin's permission marketing principle. Many companies have been using a monthly subscription model to offer services for some time now (mostly software companies) and it is interesting to see how packaged goods companies are getting involved.

As usual, I am interested in what the future of this will mean. Right now, if we use Goodies as an example, Walmart is acting as the middle man between packaged goods manufacturers and end-consumers. Will we eventually see a disintermediation in this space?

Will you one day be getting the newest and coolest products directly from giants like Unilever and P&G every month? If so, where will their store fronts be? Where could they possibly reach a massive global audience ... Facebook perhaps?

Walmart is massive and has now set a really neat precedent. I wonder who will follow suit.

How do you recruit the best person for a job?

I came across this video thanks to a brilliant article written by Rob Schwartz on Forbes.

I think recruitment is an industry that is ripe for disruption. These examples are a growing testament to the need for showcasing your ability to do a job ... before you actually do a job.

If you want to hire the best person to replace you in your current job ... how would you test him or her? What would they have to showcase?