Jolie O’Dell Archive

Saturday’s session at SXSW 2009 on Emerging Trends in Mobile gave audience members food for thought and panelists a run for their money.

The heavily international crowd (which included an estimated 25 percent non-American attendants) seemed to be, from a show of hands, a well-informed group with a good number of mobile developers in attendance.

Topics ranged from better device-charging solutions to developing for devices that come closer to standard Internet browsing every year. All in all, it was given that WAP technology is dead, fully Flash-enabled devices are the next step, image recognition capabilities and more detailed location-based information are crucial, and the idea that you’d have to actually plug a device into an outlet for any reason is becoming increasingly laughable.

What does this mean for marketers?

Read the rest of my article on Adrants.

Jolie O’Dell is a designer, writer, and consultant based in Richmond, Virginia.

Multiplatform marketing is about saturating the consumer’s world with the brand’s message.

As noted by GM’s Jaime de Valle, the old advertising adage “Fish where the fish are” has been flipped 180 degrees. Consumers are now the fishers, casting hooks to find the products, services, and brands they need, when and where they need them.

It is the marketer’s prerogative to swim where consumers are fishing, to be present and relevant at every touch point and tipping point in the decision-making process.

This is where the multiplatform approach becomes necessary.

In a world replete with marketing messages, the most competitive brands must use traditional media to place themselves before consumers before the decision becomes a priority. They must be present and relevant when research begins online. They must provide channels for response, interaction, and dialogue through nascent but omnipresent platforms such as mobile and social media. And they must send a consistent, persuasive message all the way to the point of sale.

Ok, I really only chose to cover the multiplatform sessions because I knew there’d be some talk of mobile, my one true love.

And talk there was. Carnival’s Jordan Corredera (with Susan Kidwell of Avenue A | Razorfish) and GM opened up the conversation Wednesday afternoon, echoing the industry-wide sentiment that mobile testing (WAP sites, search, etc.) is important but that the U.S. is too far behind other territories and right now is not the time for venturing beyond SMS text marketing. The good thing is, they’re testing.

Carnival’s case study on their Avenue A | Razorfish-created Funship Island campaign highlighted the mobile downloads they offered, including wallpaper and ringtones. GM’s mobile concentration seemed to revolve more around search.

Mobile, because of its everywhere-all-the-time nature, is the best medium for achieving the goal of any multiplatform campaign, as stated by de Valle: Being everywhere, all the time, at every tipping point for consumers in the decision-making process. Increasingly, he said, that process is being conducted almost entirely online, particularly for the automotive vertical.

Mobile aside, Carnival’s highly (read: insanely, borderline overwhelmingly) interactive microsite allowed users to virtually romp around an SL-like cruise ship. Their goal was to dispel common myths held to be true by cruise skeptics. Highly lauded by the digital ad community and cruise enthusiast community alike, the site was a hit.

Not only did they achieve critical success; by tracking user behavior on the site, they were able to optimize their other marketing channels. For example, they found that the section at which users spent the greatest amount of time was the stateroom page. As a result, they beefed up their coverage of stateroom features/benefits on the main Carnival page.

Most impressively, Carnival displayed a deep understanding of their brand ambassadors and partners using existing online communities. They used their advocates on cruise-related social nets to promote the new microsite, and they created a special subsection for travel agents to make sharing the Carnival Fun Ship experience easier.

They clearly understood that these days, consumers begin and end their buying decision on the Internet.

GM’s Andreas Huettner made that statement very clearly when he said that consumers are buying cars online.

He clarified that by the time consumers walk into a dealership, they, inmost cases, already know the exact make and model of the car they want, the price they want to pay, the kind of financing they expect and probably even the kind of warranty and insurance coverage they want. All the decisions have been preordained through hours of intense online work; they truly come to dealers to sign the papers and pick up the keys.

And although Internet is topping every other purchase-influencing medium, including word-of-mouth, the growth of mobile usage outstrips the growth of Internet usage. Hence, multiplatform advertisers need to very quickly figure out how to increase their presence and relevance in that medium.

A couple hours after the Carnival/GM awesomeness, Latin American portal Terra took the stage to talk about their approach to online marketing of music. Their presentation left me tweeting, “Where is the English-language version of Terra Musica?!?”

With artist sites constructed with building blocks of videos, blog feeds, UCG, photos, and every imaginable kind of social-media-friendly content acting as portals to more content and interactivity than was previously imaginable, one pities the technologically impoverished musicians stuck with MySpace Music.

Realizing that the best distribution is wide distribution, the folks at Terra have made most of the widgets portable across most social networks. They’ve also allowed for a great deal of user interaction and even submission to artists’ content.

And they understand that the best part of a content-rich site is incredible SEO, which is very likely where the user experience and direct artist-consumer interaction begin.

All these factors are what forward-thinking U.S. musicians have been struggling to define and realize. All in all, if there’s one thing I wanted to take away from ad:tech Miami and the world of Hispanic and Latin American marketing, it was to find one standout use of technology that marketers were getting right and from which the rest of us could learn and benefit.

Terra Musica may or may not get it entirely right, but it gives us some amazing clues as to the direction we should take for using rich, social media to market music directly to consumers.

Jolie O’Dell blogs, vlogs, tweets, and runs RAMPAGE, a new media ad agency.  Jolie covered ad:tech Miami and you can read all of her conference posts on the ad:tech blog.

Dudes. Not only can you follow and reply to groups of people; you can harness the getting-you-laid power of Chatterous on-the-go, anytime, anywhere. And no one has to @you or DM you if you don’t have their updates on mobile. It’s perfect for staying connected to groups/topics while out of home.

In a word, you can’t really turn on mobile updates for 50 different people on Twitter. It’d be messy, difficult to start and stop, and you’d still never know what you were really missing out on.

With Chatterous, I can blow up the Web, decide to head out, click a single button, and stay in touch with the whole group while I’m out and about. And I can reply to the whole group at the same time. I never have to leave my social network at home!

Right now, I’m in touch with the Cali Peeps group (for SV/SF tech types) and the Random Entity group (that’d be one of my tech-geek Web designers on the East Coast). And I’m about to head into the Rainbow on Sunset, just to make sure there are still 40-year-olds who think KISS makeup is hot. Thank god for Chatterous; it feeds my chat addiction when Twitter is being difficult or is offline or just won’t travel with me the way I want it to.

And Chatterous will get me laid.

Jolie O’Dell blogs, vlogs, tweets, and runs RAMPAGE, a new media ad agency.

Ok, so after posting my bitchy rant about people stealing my videos and watching the fallout, I’ve decided a few things about how Internet friends should use and share content.

First of all, any blogger has to be grateful that her content is compelling enough that others want to share it. It’s awesome to be part of the big conversation known as the Internet, and having a share of that voice is an intensely powerful experience. Life-changing, for many.

Traditionally speaking, any content I create belongs to me, and I am the only one who has the right to publish it. That’s from freshman year media law back in, like, 2000. And although it still applies online, it doesn’t really work, does it?

Copyright exists for a lot of reasons, most of them involving or related to money. However, ways of measuring money online are vastly different from ways of measuring money in traditional media. Site traffic, diggs, retweets, and dofollow backlinks are all part of the new currency. So, suppose a video of mine pops up elsewhere; how am I getting paid? The views alone count for something, I rather think. A link back to my site? That’s awesome, too. Drop my name in the tag and surrounding copy, and we’re gold. If none of those things happen, however, somebody’s got to fix the sitch. A bitchy video and a cease and desist letter are not how I prefer to handle my Web issues, but what else is a blogger to do?

Another important aspect of traditional media copyright law is permission. With permission, even if no one’s getting paid, you can do just about anything with content. ‘Member the Woody Allen/American Apparel debacle? Dudes, if they’d simply gotten permission, they could’ve Photoshopped a dildo to his forehead and run the ad at a porn convention in Cuba. Seriously. Sans permission, it’s lawsuit time.

However, the shareability of online content makes ganking text, pics, and videos so fluid and simple that permission is a total afterthought most of the time. I’ve ganked, you’ve ganked… Anyone who’s written a college paper has ganked content from someone who’s either smarter, cooler, or less lazy. Most of the time, no one gets caught, so no one gets hurt.

Asking for permission is scary. “It’s better to ask forgiveness than permission” is a popular glibism for a reason. No one likes risking rejection; and if rejection means you have to create your own content with your own time, money, mental effort, etc., ganking seems much simpler.

So, here we have a big, contradictory mess: Traditional copyright law requiring permission and (usually) payment for use of content is a nightmare when applied to the Internet. The Creative Commons folks make the excellent point that sharing and reusing content should be fairly simple and usually free, considering that the creative economy is often more about share-of-voice than U.S. dollars. They ask content creators to state expectations at the outset with a set of icons symbolizing whether or not the creator wants the content to be used commercially, whether he requires to be credited, whether the content can be altered or remixed, etc. That’s awesome. But I, personally, am scared to release all my traditional copyright for my online content, as are many others.

Here’s a thought: Why not have a page or section on your site stating exactly what you expect when people want to share your content? Me, I’m cool with any kind of sharing as long as you contact me first and link back to me. There we have both permission and payment in Internet currency, satisfying me as a creator and copyright law, as well.

I’m going to go make that page right now. You should, too. Let’s keep it simple and friendly, dudes! After all, the Internet was created so that people could watch free pr0n, not sue one another over ganked content.

Jolie O’Dell blogs, vlogs, tweets, and runs RAMPAGE, a new media ad agency.