Uniformity

By Jay Jarmon, CEO, Lux Worldwide

Everyone has a uniform of some kind, I suspect, but software people have eschewed the formality of business fashion since the days of short-sleeved white shirts, clip-on ties, Buddy Holly glasses and IBM.


During my formative years at Microsoft, the only people caught dead in suits and/or ties, were interviewees who were unfamiliar with the lax dress code. On the second day of interviewing, they would always return in what has come to be known as “business casual,” in an attempt to persuade the interviewers that they weren’t too stiff and formal for the company.


At my first company, Saltmine, things were even less formal. As a web development agency, we weren’t restrictive at all about appearance. The business casual of Microsoft looked positively glamorous in the early Internet culture… a patois of punk rock, gamer nerd, glue-sniffing geek, and how shall we say, things nebbish-ista.


I mean, take a look at this guy:


He’s my business partner, for cryin’ out loud!!

So now days, the Internet business is reaching a kind of maturity (although I agree it’s iffy to use “Internet” and “Maturity” in the same sentence). With this, ahem, maturity, there has come a ubiquity of clothing unseen since the days of IBM. I’m talking about the omnipresent BLUE SHIRT. As I cast my eyes down 1st Avenue here in Seattle, I can see blue shirts on every block, at every Starbucks, and in the lobby of every building I pass. Why blue? Why now?


So in the beginning was the end, the software fashion cycle has come full circle from conventional to unconventional and back again. As for me, I have a blue shirt and a Rat City Roller Girls T-shirt so I feel prepared for just about anything.

Fear Not the Metal Ones

By Loren Skaggs, Vice President, Marketing and Business Development, Lux Worldwide

A hot topic around our office water cooler the past week as been the recent New York Times article that puts forward the idea by Oxford University philosopher Nick Bostrom that we might all be living in a computer simulation. What’s fascinating about the concept is not that it just might be possible, but that – if Bostrom’s calculations are correct – it is actually probable that we’re living in some sort of a simulation.

The logic goes like this: you calculate the likelihood that we will eventually develop a computer simulation that is sufficiently complex as to develop self-awareness. If the likelihood is high, as Bostrom estimates that it is, then the likelihood increases that such a simulation has already been created by someone else, and that we are living within that simulation.

My ramblings can’t do this concept justice. Just read the article.

Now, some people might find this disturbing, but I’m not going to start worrying about it. After all, if we ARE in some elaborate computer simulation, there’s no way we’d be able to find out for sure, and nothing practical we could do with the information if we had it. So, relax.

Besides, from long experience in working with start-ups who have had as their goal creating simulated environments, there’s one thing I’ve learned with great certainty: creating simulated environments is hard. It’s one thing to create a computer that can beat you at chess; it’s quite another to create one that will decide on its own that it prefers to play Madden 08.

This unease about the immediate future of technology is nothing new. Science and technology reporting, as well as science fiction, is rife with stories of technological nightmares that lie just around the corner. In the earlier parts of the 20^th century, there were dire warnings about the robots, the mechanical men who would rise up and destroy us all.

Westinghouse's H. J. Wensley and his mechanical man, "Mr. Televox" in 1928

In the latter parts of the century it was fear of the run amok computer, in films such as 2001: A Space Odyssey and Colossus: The Forbin Project. By the 1980s, the robots and computers had joined forces to rid the world of humanity in films like The Terminator. We always seem
to be one step away from having our tools take over for us altogether.

But it never happens.

Why? It’s because the nightmare we can imagine is a nightmare that’s already under our technological control. If we can build a killer robot, we can build an appropriate fail-safe. This doesn’t mean that things can’t go horribly wrong – they can and they do. It just means that, for now, the likelihood of our machines becoming more sophisticated than us is very, very
unlikely.

Until The Singularity comes, that is. Then all bets are off.

Run for your lives!!!

Loren

A Piece of the Action

By Loren Skaggs, Vice President, Marketing and Business Development, Lux Worldwide

I get asked by clients, more often than you’d think, “Would you like to have a piece of our company rather than payment in cash?”

This was a lot more common back in the heady days before the burst of the dot-com bubble, but my answer now remains the same as it was then: thanks, but no thanks.

It’s not a reflection on the quality of the companies we’re dealing with – it’s just a question of the nature of the relationship. A good website design and development agency should be a trusted partner to help you create and maintain a high quality presence online. It should not be in the position of banker or backer or silent partner. An agency committed in this fashion can quickly lose focus. A good agency should be paid in cash – and should be worth every penny you pay.

I can’t say, however, that I haven’t been tempted to take a cut instead of money. And herein lies the value of experience. For example:

Back in 1998, we were approached by a company called “Ioptics,” which had developed a revolutionary storage product called “OROM,” or Optical Read-Only Memory. This company had everything going for it, or so it seemed. The technology had been developed by the inventor of the Compact Disc. The company had funding from Microsoft. And they had a smooth marketing department, with a well respected and likeable marketing director, who walked around with a very cool mock-up of an OROM device in his pants pocket. The press was ga-ga for the thing. People were predicting the death of everything from the Zip Drive to the CD at the hands of OROM devices.

Original Ioptics imagining of the OROM device.

It will sound stupid nowadays, living as we do with 2GB Flash memory drives available for $39.99 at any drug store, but back then, a pocket sized device with no moving parts and capable of storing a whopping 128MB (!) was nothing short of science fiction. It seemed like a can’t-lose proposition. We had many hushed conversations in our offices about whether or not this was a company we should consider taking a piece of in lieu of payment. However, we went against what we thought was our better judgment, and decided to stick to policy, and do our design and development work for a strictly cash arrangement.

Lucky us.

Within a year, the OROM product had been rendered obsolete by new advances in storage technology. And with OROM the only arrow in their quiver, Ioptics quietly shut its doors. Now, there is nary a trace of its existence online – even the ioptics.com website was sold off. It could easily have taken us down with it.

OROM was supposed to have worked kind of like this, sort of.

Ioptics was not a bad company, and the people who ran it weren’t stupid. The market just got away from them before they were able to strike. And that was nothing that could have been predicted, certainly not by us, anyway.

So, lesson learned: if your work has value, your clients will be willing to pay for it. It’s a formula as old as business itself, and it’s a model that is worth following.

Do the work you do, the best you can do it. This will free up your clients to do whatever it is that they do, the best that they can do it.

What’s so crazy ‘bout that?

Loren

The Art of Hyperbole: RIP, Weekly World News

By Loren Skaggs, Vice President, Marketing and Business Development, Lux Worldwide

When it comes to news, I’m generally a pretty serious individual. I read the top stories from most of the major newspapers on a fairly regular basis, a habit that goes back to my days as a journalist (although now, of course, I’m reading them online). However, I have long harbored a dark secret: I love – LOVE – the Weekly World News. In fact, if there was one dream job that I could have had (other than this one, of course!), it would have been to be a writer for the WWN. Heck, I’d have been happy just to write those headlines!

Alas, it appears this dream is not to come true. American Media, the parent company of the WWN, has recently announced that it’s shutting down publication of the tabloid at the end of this month.

This is sad news indeed. While other tabloids, such as the Star and the National Enquirer, give lip service to oddball stories, the WWN pulled out all the stops. Not only did they never let the truth get in the way of a good story, they never even considered doing so. Whether it was an Elvis sighting, an alien presidential endorsement, or a romance with Bigfoot, the WWN shamelessly invented stories that struck a universal chord and tugged at our psyches.

They were the professional wrestling of the publishing world.

So, what does this have to do with online marketing?

Well, I’m tempted to say “nothing,” and just claim that I wanted to use the pending closure as an excuse to wax nostalgic about my favorite supermarket publication, but that simply wouldn’t be true. Here’s the takeaway from this:

Hyperbole sells. The WWN knew it, but they didn’t invent it. Any kid who ever bought a comic book off the shelf knows that the cover is always a little more scintillating than the actual contents. And this is something you can use in your marketing materials.

For instance, maybe all your company did last month was install a single set of accounting software licenses for a chain of grocery stores. You can write up a press release that says, “Our Company Sold Some More Accounting Software Licences.”

Or, you can say, “Our Company Helps Our Client Bring in the Cabbage!!!” It’s more direct, it’s more engaging, and it’ll encourage visitors to your site to read a little more.

I keep the WWN approach to headline writing in mind whenever I’m preparing marketing materials, so it’s truly sad to see this paragon on BS disappear from store shelves.

And yet, on August 27, the Weekly World News will be no more.

Or, will it?

I’ve heard from a reliable source the Weekly World News has been spotted at a Burger King just outside of Lexington, Kentucky, enjoying a Double Whopper and Fries. It’s totally true!!!

‘Til next time,

Loren

The 12 Kinds of Ads: Can You Make Them Work for You?

By Loren Skaggs, Vice President, Marketing and Business Development, Lux Worldwide

There are a few features online that I make a point to read regularly. One of these is Seth Stevenson's regular column in Slate Magazine called "Ad Report Card." Stevenson uses this column to assess the quality and effectiveness of current television ads. This is one of the few places outside of the trade press where you can get this kind of analysis, which I find a little puzzling, given the ubiquity of television advertising in our lives.

The most recent Ad Report Card column is very interesting, and warrants a read (or, rather, a look -- it's in the format of an online slide show). In the column, Stevenson explores ad-man Donald Gunn's 12 categories of advertising, or "12 Master Formats," as Gunn calls them. As Stevenson explains, Gunn developed the notion that there are really only 12 basic formats for television ads, and if you are familiar with the formats, it will make it easier for an ad creator to develop a new campaign.

Stevenson swallows the concept whole, which is fine, because it really is a useful way to analyze ads. However, it's arguable that Gunn's model may be missing a few types, or that some of them are difficult to distinguish. So be it; that topic may be fodder for future blog entries and for endless debate among us marketing types.

The question is: Do these categories apply to your online marketing efforts? Has the new media rendered Gunn’s ad types model to be moot? Probably not. I’ve tried to wrap my head around all 12 categories, and when I look at marketing-centric sites, I still see echoes of the 12 basic types.

So, if you’re looking to redesign your website and you’re a little stumped on where to begin with a messaging approach, you might want to consider the 12 types and try to figure out if employing one of them as a format will help you conceptualize the direction of your site.

More in future posts … stay tuned.

Cheers,
Loren