Alex Churchill

I grew up in a skiing family. And outside of indicating a fair amount of disposable income, growing up in skiing families in the 70s and 80s meant one thing – when the latest Warren Miller flick came to town, we’d all be there. The cavelcade that surrounded these screenings was a veritable alpine shakedown street. There were always entreaties to give money to the national ski team, all the equipment suppliers were there, and the bright young things of the local ski racing scene would be trotted out on stage for a bow – interesting, since Miller’s films rarely if ever had anything to do with racing. But I digress.

The movies themselves were ski bum camp. They were sort of like NFL films if the frozen tundra were elevated to 10,000 feet, and the Purple People Eaters were given a pair of I SKIs and a few bottle tokes. They were the stuff of dream building – Andy Mill and Billy Kidd ripping through Steamboat freshie,  Suzy Chafee and Chris Kent ripping up some steep & deep in Argentina. And so on. Over all of this powder porn, there was Miller himself – adding that touch of cheddar in his FM radio voice. I couldn’t possibly do the prose justice here, but believe me when I tell you it was more florid than the essence of a thousand edelweiss.

There were a few other signatures to the Miller style – the fact that there was an intermission in the middle of the films (all the better to unleash boot warmer salesmen on you in the lobby), the breaks for some on-piste slapstick in the form of silly races or a montage of hackers falling with Miller voicing characters over the top. All in all it was a good night out – it made us all confident that skiing truly was one of the good things in life, that we were shining boys and girls to be a part of it, and above all, that snow was on its way.

It’s this last point that was most interesting. Miller film tours appeared to always roll through town on the wings of falling leaves. I remember it as surely as I remember the end of summer marking the start of school – Miller meant we would be skiing soon. As far as an event marketing relationship, I’m not sure if a Warren Miller screening hadn’t happened in the autumn if winter would come at all.

Then came the Greg Stumps of the world – film makers who took the basic Miller formula and made it something different. Something, wait for it… Extreme. It’s interesting to note that from the 1960s up to the 1990s, it was a film MAKER that defined the mountain lifestyle – but with the arrival of extremities, it was a skier, an entertainer, a performer that did. That man was Glen Plake. Even Warren Miller himself would shoot Plake – and be overshadowed – by a man who knew that in the end, once a marketing channel had been established it is flash (and in Plake’s case, a mohawk) that conquers all.

And up until the dawn of YouTube – with a few other names cranked on the end of the story – that’s where it was. Now of course, all you have to do for some cliff jumping and powder footage is search for same. But the thing is, it is just so… so… so… amateurish.

Is there still room for the anticipation that came with a Miller feature coming to town? Is there a way to make that happen online?

In the final summation, why not liken ski porn to real porn? Look at tired old Vivid – at one time, the ne plus ultra of porn. In fact, in that position at around the same time Glen Plake was the king of skiing. Now, in light of the beautifully produced niche smut that eschews plot and pretense for well-shot action featuring attractive (or specialized) talent Vivid just seems stupid. And kind of greedy.

So, where does that leave ski porn? Can it be revived? Can someone re-open shakedown street? I hope so.

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Over the past few days while hanging out with a decidedly un-marketing professionaly group of people I had heard a number of people refer, completely absent of irony, to “Starbucks Coffee”. As in “We’re going to get Starbuck’s Coffee, would you like something?” In my head of course, I was replying “Yes, a grande bold with milk and sweetener with a side of stop calling it Starbuck’s coffee.” On the flip side, as a marketer, it was a breathtaking moment. What Juan Valdez had failed to do with some of the best branding, marketing and advertising over the better part of a half century, Howard Shultz had accomplished in just a shade over a decade – turned the world’s second most valuable traded commodity into a luxury item owned by one brand.

The question is, of course, how did Starbucks succeed where Colombia failed? The simple answer would be physical retail presence. And that might explain some of it. But I think the larger answer lies in the inherent failings of piggyback branding.

End-users see benefits flowing directly from the brand with whom they have a relationship. In the case of coffee, Starbucks. While a fledgling coffee roastery may gain some benefit from  being alligned with the fair trade movement, or shade-grown advocacies, it will only be to a certain point. Of course, the Starbucks v Colombia coffee showdown goes deeper than that. As illustrated by my use of the fair trade movement above, the lustre has fallen off the Colombian coffee brand considerably in recent years. As the mantle of “premium supplier” has fallen not to a country or bean classification but in the case of shade-grown, a method of growing or, in the case of fair trade an entire market system.

Starbucks uses all of the above to drive marketing and branding efforts or even, somewhat cynically, to nudge up price points and margins. But that still doesn’t explain how the use of “Starbucks Coffee” in my above example came to be – and for that, I’d like to use some good old fashioned speculation. “Starbucks  Coffee” was used not as a designation of quality, but rather as a deliniation of class. If they had said “we’re going to get coffee”, a probable reply would be “where are you going?” The reasons behind such a question could be as varied as the person asking is looking for a espresso-based drink or they know a good place nearby. But saying “Starbucks” eliminates the need for that exchange. In other words, at the very least, we know what we’re getting.

N.B. If, through personal involvement in my birth or via my Facebook profile, you are party to my actual D.O.B. then you will know that this is a post that should rightfully have been scrawled last July. Well, if Lewis Lapham can time shift without being unemployable, then so can I.

I’m walking down the street listening to Diggnation when Kevin Rose mentions that he only has four more years to bloom in the bush that is the 18-34 demographic. He seemed put off by this. I passed through this particular milestone without so much as a nod of the head – but am I missing something? Maybe it is this failure to acknowledge my official passing into my Carlsberg Years is what is missing in my life, my career.

So, like a devotee of re-birthing, I wrapped myself in the carpet of last summer and re-kicked myself wailing and screaming into my thirty sixth year. No longer am I the elusive prey of advertisers and broadcasters. No longer am I thought of being capable of changing brands – unless of course, I choose to purchase a Lexus, and I’ve been kind of thinking my Cadillac has been looking a little fusty lately – no longer do I think of the entirety of my income as disposable, now I watch television shows that aren’t sports, I won’t be online more than any other group, I don’t feel the need to be perpetualy “connected”, nope, now everything is different.

I’ll be honest, I scoffed at each and every one of the demo-types heretofore explained to me. I thought to myself that age is just a state of mind and I’m only as old as I feel. But, here’s the funny thing. I am watching less TV. I don’t feel the need to be constantly informed about “the issues”. On the other hand, I do spend a lot of time on the online – but that has been true of me for as long as it has been possible to be so.

I suppose it is a part of the progression of life that one’s feelings about one’s self and the world change. Marketers work off these changes, positioning ideas and products that they think are going to impact the sub-set of thoughts and feelings they have ascribed to that demographic.

I think the real reason the 18-34 y/o demographic is so vitally important is because those are the people who at all give a shit that they are seen by marketers as important. The rest of us are too busy worrying whether diapers and/or colostomy bags are full.

I liken it to the popular idea that part of the reason professional athletes salaries are so high is in order to 1) grab headlines and 2) further elevate them into the firmament in the public arena. With a working man’s paycheck (or even a hedge fund manager’s paycheck), Kobe Bryant is just another dumb jock – but fill up his universe with zeros and he’s a star! Young? Insecure? Bored? We NEED you to buy a new razor, a swiffer, a honda…

The thing is, here’s the rub – older folks have more money, are harder to reach and care a lot less about you trying to reach them – and the sure firest way to do so is with an old fashioned great product. Marketers have to work their asses off to reach them, but when they do; well, see my Lexus example above.

RIP 18-34

This Saturday – March 24 2007 – is Shutdown Day, an international effort spearheaded by two Canadians – Montrealers Denis Bystrov and Michael Taylor – to get people to spend a single 24-hour period without the aid, or hinderance, of their personal computer. Shutdown Day is, and I’m postulating here, an entirely geek-focused effort. Like digg.com, facebook and YouTube, Shudown Day is aimed at people who spend a lot of time online – most probably in both a professional as well as personal capacity.

In that regard, Shutdown Day is similar to another Canadian-led initiative that defines itself almost more by what it does not do than by what it does – Adbusters. The anti-advertising and marketing publication produced almost exclusively by and for advertising and marketing professionals has recently re-positioned itself as a culture jamming hub, but the “brand” is still best known for publishing the sort of product defiling spec spots that all ad creatives like to come up with when they aren’t being paid to raise the bar on suprilatives for tampons.

While the larger premise for Shutdown Day – get outside and have some fun with your actual friends and families – is far less ambitious than that of Adbusters – marketing is destroying our souls and our planet, we need to take the power back – it is nonetheless interesting that both groups seem, to my mind, encapsulate a tidy piece of the Canadian psyche without actually acknowledging it. That is, Canada’s only true unifying and distinct feature – not being America.

Canadians – and the hard chargers in IT and marketing are the best example of this – tend to be hard working consumers. We work on Sundays, we respond to marketing, we see products as having an important role to play in our lives. Only, when we step back and look at it, that makes us sound REALLY American. Take a few steps further back and the your average CTO or VP Account Director sees the SUV in the driveway and The Sopranos on the tube and says “Jesus Christ, I’m an American. Time to cut that out!” But how? By rejecting American values without it having too much impact on the bottom line.

That having been said, I can’t say I don’t like the work of Adbusters or the idea of Shutdown Day (though I can’t say as I’ll participate – though I keep telling myself it is only because I don’t have cable) – but then again, I’m Canadian aren’t I?

From a New York Times article about using a Russian invention – in this case, a gasoline powered running shoe/pogo stick – as a parable for all that is wrong with Russian innovation. Hint: Innovation was for the military, and in the post-Soviet era, the system isn’t suited to bringing products to market. The last line, wherein a scientist involved in the attempting to commercialize the boots laments the percieved or actual safety and operational shortcomings of the piston-driven pumps, is required reading:

“They should work like a Kalashnikov,” he said. “Reliable in anybody’s hands.”

It could work as a co-brand. Buy media in Soldier of Fortune and we’ve got a program.

This week, productivity across North America experiences its the annual March Madness malaise. The annual celebration of sweat, hustle and collegial pride promises to once again hold vast populations of otherwise productive individuals out at lunch place juuuuust a little bit longer, and chewing up company bandwidth with streaming games.

And while it is, of course, for the love of the game that they’re all tuning in – many of them will have plopped down their $25 and filled out a bracket. Incredibly, the last office I worked in, for last year’s tourny, still ran the brackets the old-fashioned way with pen and photocopier. But outside of Amish Country, most people fill in their picks online – so’s the coputationals can be taken care of and all.
These bracket sites line up into two rough categories which I’ll call the Phi Beta Kappa group and the Delta Tau Chi group – with the PBKs being all about the science of the sport and the DTCs being all crushing beer cans on their heads.

Along with ESPN, the class president of the PBKs is CBSSportsline. As the online presence of the hoast broadcaster, Sportsline has been the bracket source of choice since Pete in accounting realized he didn’t have to complete the brackets himself if he did it online. You can use your Sportsline UN and PW to sign up for the above mentioned NCAA streaming video feed (a big advantage to be sure) and this year, CBS has added a feature that lets you see what percentage of entrants have made certain picks – a nice feature that makes me think it would be incredibly interesting to watch these numbers change in real time.

The only problem with the Sportsline offering? The design – confused, oddly spaced and strangely uninviting – you get all the information you need but I prefer a message board that encourages smack talk – not kills it.
Facebook’s brackets get the smack talk angle down and is a far more attractive option for Otter and the boys over at the DTC house. A simple design, blank save for team names and rankings, the focus here is much more on simply getting the bracket done. You want research? You’re on your own nerd. But if, after your buddy’s picks blow up on day two, you want to remind him of his – ahem – inadiquicies, facebook is the spot to do it.

Of course, there are others, but it’s 12:11 PM and I didn’t get to see any of the games yesterday – so I’ll save a spot in front of the TV for you.

Zoho. Google Docs. 30 Boxes. Twitter. Thinkfree. Web-based apps are proliferating faster than Tom Brady and like Bridget Moynahan, someone is gonna to get hurt. Most people think of the Office Suite as the primary target in this regard, but I contend in the long run (which will be shorter than most people think) the biggest, most high profile loser in the move to web-based apps will be Apple.

Despite the iPod revolution, the company still earns a large proportion of its dough selling computational units. In the third quarter of 2006, Apple shipped 1.61 million desktops and laptops for 2.213BUSD in revenue versus 8.7 million iPods representing 1.559BUSD in revenue.

While both sales figures exceeded analyst expectations for the company, the computer numbers are the largest quarterlies ever – both in unit and dollar figures.

This cursory look at the numbers indicate that iTunes and iPods have had a far lesser role in the Apple renaissance than their visibility would indicate. Without having the sales breakdowns in front of me, I would guess that whileMac nerds have continued to buy through thick and thin – it is product design-driven consumers who have pushed Mac sales to their current levels.

But what happens when online applications start gaining some serious traction? Sure, Apple has the hard-core video editing and music markets locked down, but I think there comes a point when fashionistas simply won’t be willing to pay a premium to have Jonathan Ive-designed thin client on their desk. To say nothing of the fact that if all our work is done via a browser, the vaunted Apple environment will no longer be part of the equation.

This is a problem already faced every day by PC manufacturers the world over. Dell, Gateway and all the already have to sweat what makes them different – thin client or no web-based app. The advent of a truly portable, reliable Office-killer will do more than just free us from Microsoft, it will welcome Apple into the world of the everyday PC builder.

NOTE: iTunes and iPod accesories sales were a speck of $452MUSD in the quarter.

The fascinating, au courant circle jerk that is Facebook led me to another, more timeless circle jerk this morning – Genealogy is back (if it ever went away – but that is not a point for marketing minds to devine, I leave that to the skeptics and people with a brain)! And as evidenced by the preceeding links/semi-sequiturs it is being commercialized online to the max. But none are quite so clever in their feature marketing as myHeritage – sent to me by one of my Facebook friends.

The feature/marketing device in question is a showcase for myHeritage face recognition. You upload a photo, the software isolates your face and then gives you a list of celebrities you look like and then spits it out in a collage that is a pain in the ass to email – but simple to post to your Facebook, MySpace etc… and have it sent to your buddies as default. Instant benefits in the relationship marketing arena and a simple, easy piece of viral that, by definition, drives traffic.

Of course, I tried it out on myself, my wife, my mother-in-law, and then I thought why not try it with slightly better known faces, the results:

Who knew Barbie was so… Sub-Continental?

Edward Norton? American History X Edward Norton? Freaky.

Strangely enough, Brad Pitt looks like Brad Pitt.

• NPR’s Playback makes the most of an earlier (and I contend, lesser) time in the history of the corduroy jacket, pipe-smoking US public broadcaster’s history. The monthly podcast follows NPR’s coverage of stories from exactly 25 years ago. It is interesting to me that NPR in the post-Kroc donation era wouldn’t think, because surely they can afford, to make this a little more ubiquitous – and make a lot more of their extensive archive in the process. Why not (using a story from this month’s edition of Playback) tie the NPR Review of Thank You For Smoking directly to Carl Kassel‘s report from February of 1982 on Big Tobacco? Hell, to be really cynical – you could market retro tobacco schwag in context. Oh yeah, it’s PUBLIC radio.
• Speaking of public broadcasters on the end of the long tail, the BBC YouTube deal makes the Beeb the first major network to sign a deal with the video sharing site. Seems like good news? A glance at the BBC You Tube channel indicates otherwise – the content up there is nothing more than promos for current BBC programming. Why? Simple, if you’d paid 100 pounds for your TV license, you would be pissed if people in the rest of the world got complete programming for free. The solution? Why not make the You Tube channel reflect the (slightly delayed) programming available on the ad-supported BBC America?
• New Mexico is the latest US state to approve the use of Gardasil, the Merck developed vaccine that may help guard against diseases caused by certain types of HPV – including cervical cancer. Last week, Texas Governor Rick Perry faced a fire storm in response to his bypassing the state Legislature when he ordered the vaccine as mandatory for girls entering the sixth grade in Texas starting in 2008. Unfortunately, Perry did so on the very same day that Merck officials met with Perry’s chief of staff to talk about the vaccine and (ahem) provide a small donation to Perry’s PAC. This is a rare situation – one in which the product is contentious in certain circles, but ultimately SO beneficial that even the churchiest marm would decry it at bible study on Sunday and procure it for Brianna on Monday. The agressive Merck campaign backfired to be sure, but even more than that, it was entirely unnecessary. In short, this shit sells itself. Let’s hope New Mexico and other states putting it into their standard immunization schedules were spared being “messaged”.