Crayon, join the conversation

Who is Tim Coyne and what is he doing sponsoring an episode of my marketing podcast, Across the Sound?

Tim is an actor; a podcaster – check out: The Hollywood Podcast; a listener of Across the Sound.

Tim – not you, your company or your clients – responded to my original barter/sponsorship offer and I’m now the proud owner of 2 (two) iPhones.

It’s always terrific to meet a listener of the show; it’s even better when they are not necessarily in the marketing field (people like Matthew Ebel for example) Diversity of audience allows for a richer conversation and in most cases, these “non-marketing” people are in reality, better marketers than you or I. The reason is simple: marketing is not something you learn or study or buy…it’s something you either have or you don’t.

Take Tim for example. He’s using the Web and new marketing to differentiate himself. Amidst a sea of sameness, Tim is hoping that this sponsorship helps elevate himself.

Tim has a specific goal: leverage this sponsorship to achieve a very specific outcome: to secure an audition on either CSI, Criminal Minds, Shark or House. All four are terrific shows…I watch them all. I absolutely love Criminal Minds (probably one of the most underrated shows) and am a big James Woods fan.

You can hear it all right here

To help him narrow his search and focus, he’d like both his and my community to decide for him. You can leave your vote/choice as a comment on this thread or vote on his site.

As Tim explained to me on ATS #86, this is more “Fatblogging” than it is “One Red Paperclip” conceptually. By putting a stake in the ground and coming out with a goal, Tim is hoping that this will be “audition by community”.

Tim plans on documenting and sharing his journey with you as well. He’ll be podcasting about it, sending in audio updates to ATS. He’ll be twittering throughout: http://twitter.com/timcoyne. Tim really is Actor 2.0

…but it doesn’t stop there.

This sponsorship is going to involve you. In this new and wonderful world of social media and social networking; where book titles like “Wisdom of Crowds”, “Tipping Point”, “World is Flat”, “Long Tail”, “Life after the 30-second spot” and “Join the Conversation” are not cliches, but calls-to-action, each and every one of us can make incredible things happen.

You can help in one of the following ways:

* The direct way: social/networking. The ability to make the kind of introduction which helps secure Tim an audition. He’ll take it from there i.e. let his talent do the talking
* The indirect way: spread the word! Internalize this. Make it your own. We have the power to uplift a burgeoning brand. We can get Tim on The Today Show or Good Morning America. A combination of social media and mainstream media would do the trick
* The social way: help create an audio promo for Tim…or better yet, interview him on your podcast. His e-mail address is: thehollywoodpodcast [at] mac [dot] com
* The internal way: All you PR junkies out there…help Tim with his press strategy (social media releases etc) or marketing

NOTE: Do not approach any of these shows – or their personnel – directly. Hollywood is a relationship game and it’s really important not to burn bridges.

…but it doesn’t stop there!

Mack Collier, are you listening? I’m going to pay it forward and give the iPhone right back to the person that is ultimately *most* responsible for helping Tim realize his dream. You see…maybe I do know what I’m doing after all

This sponsorship is not about an iPhone (although there is tangential thread about the iPhone becoming a sort of creative currency if you think about it), it’s about Tim; it’s about the incredible community that is Across the Sound; it’s about the power of using new marketing to prove new marketing.

So do it for an iPhone if you must, but more importantly, do it for Tim. It’s a great opportunity for us to use new marketing to prove new marketing.

On your marks. Get set. GO!

Transcript for crayonCast #31
Originally Posted July 26, 2007

C.C. Chapman: Hey everybody and welcome to crayonCast #31 for Thursday, July 26, 2007. This is the official podcast of Crayon, a new marketing company. If you want to find out more about the company and this is your first time listening to it, go over to crayonville.com or go to crayonville.com/blog and read what we’re all talking about. Every week we give anybody in the company who wants 60 seconds to say what’s on their mind. Sometimes we go over, sometimes some doesn’t catch your attention that week, and that’s okay. The key is that everybody gets a voice. That’s what we’re about here. So, let’s jump right in to the week.

Gary Cohen: Hi, this is Gary Cohen. So, this week, I’d actually like to give props to HP and its agencies, comparing what was done last year to what was being done this year in the Back to School campaign, you know, kudos. A year ago, HP’s plan was predominantly 70% not online and was target primarily at parents, what a difference a year makes. This year, 70% is targeted at the teens themselves, focused on social networking sites and other places where teens congregate. They’ve really targeted the kids to influence the parents to buy in some creative ways. Part of the campaign is looking to go borrow with some videos that they hope their kids would pass along to others. This is a campaign which goes direct to the source, the consumer, and it allows them to choose where and what they want and to go to the parents who are ultimately the buyers. It is a nuance on the influencer strategy, but one that also is not only influencer-based, but consumer based. Great approach and it would be interesting to see the success of the program. We’ll follow this closely and have a great week. Cheers.

Seni Thomas: Seni Thomas here, New Marketing Strategist here at Crayon. This week, I wanted to talk about maximizing the amplification of your message, basically how to get people say a lot of good things about you to a lot of people. It’s all about maximizing the expectation gap, which is a difference good or bad between the experience you expect and what you get or what’s delivered. For example, if I expect something to be mediocre and it turns out to be amazing, you have a very large positive expectation gap and the larger this gap, the more I want to talk about it. You’re supposed to be more likely to spread the word about something that surprises you versus an overly hyped product with sky high expectations for even if this product ends up delivering, the expectation gap is small and you’re less likely to spread the word. You figured everyone already knows how good this thing is. This of course is also true for negative examples. If I’m expecting something to be really good turns out to be really bad, has a very large negative expectation gap, I’m going to make damn sure that everyone knows how much this product sucks. So, as a marketer, you basically need to find the right balance between the consumer’s expectations to maximize the experience and by doing so, you increase the volume and the quality of the buzz around your product. Anyways, send your comments my way at seni@crayonville.com, that’s S-E-N-I, or directly insert an audio text or video comment into the stream through CrowdAbout. Thank you very much. Take care.

Aaron Greenberger: Hey everybody. This is Aaron. So, I’d really like to say that I’m more interested in politics than I really am. I want to be more knowledgeable about what goes on in Congress and what’s happening in our nation’s capital. I find that people from the Metro DC area really have it in their DNA, just part of their everyday lives and for me it’s a bit more of an effort to stay informed and to stay current. Whenever there are political party debates, I say I’m going to do my best to watch, not only watch but really stay focused and concentrate and often it doesn’t happen and I’d have to say shame on me, but I have been watching Monday’s democratic CNN YouTube debate that took place in Charleston, South Carolina on YouTube. I’ve been watching it today and I have to say that the eight democratic presidential candidates were more interesting to watch in this format than I have ever seen. Now, maybe it’s because of the actual candidates, but I definitely think it was the format that had something to do with it. I’m very impressed by the overall experience. This was made for people like me. I can click on specific questions that pertain to my interest or stay away from topics quite frankly I may not have time to listen to at that moment. So, on-demand debate, I love the idea. Anderson Cooper keeps it fresh with follow-up questions to real submissions by YouTubers and their fellow US citizens. I enjoy watching [unintelligible] field of questions coming from all walks of life with different accents, dialects, and colors. It truly kept my attention and what most surprised me is I actually looked for a little additional literature about the candidates. So, thank you CNN and YouTube. Usually, I feel a little dumber after spending time on YouTube, but today I feel a little smarter and a little more empowered. So, thanks and if you want to check it out, go to youtube.com/debates. Take care, everyone.

C.C. Chapman: Okay, I admit. I’m a movie junkie. I love movies. It’s C.C. I read this great article that I’ll link to in the show notes today. It was covering the entire campaign of The Simpsons movie. Now, I’m not a Simpsons fanatic, but you can’t escape The Simpsons movie. You can’t. It’s everywhere and I just think that’s the way everything has to be these days. It has to be as many touch points as possible. Yeah, they did the traditional print and radio and television, yay! Big deal. Forget that stuff. But they did other things. They’ve got cross promotions with JetBlue and Burger King and the 7-11 stores that they converted. People were in line to get into a 7-11 just because there were Simpsons stuffs in there. People were taking pictures. They were Flickring it. They were tagging it, blogging it, video podcasting it. One thing I didn’t know about, did you know Microsoft made a custom yellow Simpsons Xbox 360 that came preloaded with Simpsons content? I had no idea. There are all kinds of tie-ins and I think it’s very cool and I think it’s something that people need to think about. Any campaign that you’re going to be launching whether it’s a movie, a CD, a new website, you’ve got to touch people as many places as possible because your audience is not going simply be where you think they are. Yeah, you might go out and do a blog or influencer outreach and those types of things and those are great, but you’ve got to reach beyond that as well. You’ve got to get out there in people’s faces. 7-11 is a perfect example. They were going to hit people that may not even — they probably walked into 7-11 to get their morning coffee and thought they’ve awoken up from a dream when there’s a huge Homer standing next to the doughnuts. I would have love to have seen that. So, when you’re thinking about a campaign, you’re thinking about taking the next step. Think bigger. Think outreach. Think as big as it can be as many touch points as possible and then figure out how to implement it. I’ll link to the post that got me going on it because it just was really a nice overview. I’ll talk to you next week.

Joseph Jaffe: Hey, this is Joseph Jaffe, President and Chief Interrupter of Crayon and I’m actually here with two other crayonistas today, Scott Monty and Greg Verdino, in Mexico City. We’re here on a business trip and we thought we’d take a really unique opportunity to join forces this week and talk to you about a subject worthy and that I think is on everyone’s mind, the YouTube CNN political debate.

Scott Monty: Well, I was able to catch some of it just in recap after I got off the plane on Monday night and I was absolutely astounded at how this younger generation and many times I think we’re looking at clips of young people who this is their first presidential election that they’ve had a chance to vote in and they’re very outspoken. They want answers. They have seen a lot of things going on just over the last four or five years with the Iraq war and they really want answers and they’re using YouTube as a way to specifically drill and question the presidential candidates that I think journalists for most part give them a pass on and these are kids that are using new technology to really connect with the presidential candidates and try to get some answers.

Greg Verdino: Yeah, I agree with that, Scott, and actually from what I’ve seen and again I also caught it mostly in recap since I was flying the night of the debate, but from what I’ve seen, I’ve also been impressed with the quality of the questions and I don’t mean necessarily that they were great questions, but they were good authentic questions. Scott, I know you told the story of a snowman who submitted a question and there were some pretty gutsy questions. One I know was submitted by a preacher who asked a very pointed question about same sex relationships and whether the candidates’ religious preferences or beliefs were going to color the way they address issues like that if they were to become president. On the other hand, I guess the thing that I’m not hearing a lot of analysis on and I don’t know if either of you guys are whether in the aftermath, are these new especially younger voters feeling like they have been getting straight answers. I did see some very basic analysis on CNN where one of the analysts went through some of the responses and while the responses may have sounded like they were much more straightforward responses than you typically get in a debate, as a matter of fact, many of the candidates were quite frankly making stats up in order to address the questions. So, I wonder how much of that is becoming evident to the voting population and how that’s impacting the way people are thinking about the debate now.

Scott Monty: What might be really interesting is if these individuals who were selected off of YouTube, I don’t know if there’s a tagging system that they all identify themselves with this debate, if they can go back and actually post video responses to the debate responses that they got to their questions to kind of close the loop on this or quite frankly continue the conversation with the presidential candidates.

Joseph Jaffe: Yeah, that actually has been one of the community consensus feedback, something that was missing, but talking about made up stats, I think 100% of us agree that this was definitely a success. You know, I’m taking a step back for a second and I’ll push back on only one point and then I’ll make another point and we’ll wrap up. The first point in terms of pushing back is even if you look at the people asking the questions, if there is a perception that YouTube is just 14-year-old, pimple-faced, or whatever the case, that’s not YouTube. The people asking questions were adults. YouTube is mainstreamed big time and I think it’s probably a fallacy to think about YouTube just as being the younger audience, but there is no question that if this does anything to be able to get a younger disenfranchised, political-based, more involved, and more engaged in the process, that would be a good thing. The other thing and the final point I want to make is what I think is so unprecedented is here is CNN, the world — can you do James Earl Jones, Scott?

Scott Monty: This is CNN.

Joseph Jaffe: I mean this is CNN, the world news leader in news internationally and they could not have pulled this off by themselves. They needed the new network, not broadcast network, but social network. They needed YouTube and that is a first and certainly not the last and nor is the fact that these kind of open-sourced in a way or partnership type of conversational activities are just going to be on the increase.

Greg Verdino: Well, I think that’s all we have here from sunny Mexico, adios, vaya con dios fellow crayonistas.

Scott Monty: Take care.

Joseph Jaffe: Ciao.

No one is safe as the business world’s whipping boy, ROI, looks to extend his reach.

What was the difference between the Quadra-era and the iMac-era at Apple? Simple. It was design. The iMac revolutionized people’s perception of computers. People realized that computers could be personable, they could have emotions (No one likes a sad Mac), and they were born instead of produced. This was the beginning of a revolution as design began to permeate everything. Today it is expected that products perform superbly and look damn cool while doing whatever it is that they do. Personally, I’m a huge sucker for well designed product and will pay the premium or even pass-on better functionality for a higher slick-ness factor.

Design is an intangible. So is advertising.

But, let me tell you more people bought iMacs because they looked cool than because their ads were cool.

Here’s a slap in the face to advertisers from a great Fast Company article.

FC: Then what makes you think that design drives profitability?

Here’s one example: On average, based on two dozen case studies with Fortune 500 companies, for every dollar invested in advertising, packaging and promotion, and visual communication at the point of sale, companies realized a $7.21 ROI. But when the advertising didn’t change (or there was no advertising)—and packaging design was the only thing that did change—there was a $15.17 average ROI on every dollar invested.

I’m confident that if the ROI on design was truly measured, design would come out quite well, and it would be treated by the finance side as the adult it now wants to be. The ROI on design is not only a tool for showing design’s true value, it can also show how and when design can be most critically used as a tool to continually generate the highest profits.

Full article here.

A good point to make here is that ROI is of course a ratio so the difference between $7.21 in ROI and $15.17 in ROI shows that much of the advertising is wasted. If the budgets were trimmed and used more effectively we would see a very different picture.

Food for thought.

Last night I turned on my TV at 10PM sharp to tune into Mad Men – Yes, I admit to actually watching some live TV – and it got me thinking about how ridiculous the ad world was in the “Old Days” and how in some ways very little has changed in the past 40 years. There was a scene in last night’s episode (for the 4 of you who missed it) where they were discussing how to position Gillette’s new spray deodorant as a space-age innovation, being flogged by zero G men with stubble; made me chuckle. In those days ad men truly were kings of their domain and enjoyed the luxury of ZERO oversight; the term ROI was still absent from the Madison Ave. lexicon. However, fast-forwarding to today ROI seems to be the new industry mantra, yet we still see companies wasting 100s of millions of their clients $$$ to boost intangibles like awareness, mind share, goodwill, etc, etc.

This is an argument we have all heard a million times, and I’m not calling for a 100% shift away from traditional media; however, watching a show that depicts this industry so many years ago puts into perspective how little has changed and how much we need to change. I mean just look at how much the world has changed since the 60s and how much Account Manager – Creative relationship hasn’t.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vm9L1yiGUwo&eurl=[/youtube]

We hope you enjoy the CrowdAbout version of the podcast, but you can listen to the MP3 right here as well.

This week we talked about a lot of things including the CNN YouTube Debate and the integrated Simpsons Movie marketing.

As one of the project leads I’m VERY excited to announce that we have a winner in the Virtual Thirst contest and her name is Ann Marie Mathis aka Emerie May in Second Life.

Not only did she submit the winning idea, but she also went and took several photos of herself for bloggers to use in their posts. The one above is one that I found on her Flickr stream and got a big kick out of it. The fact that she took the time to take photos gave me a big smile! I was going to ask if I could take some of her and she beat me to it!

In the very near future she will travel to California to work with Millions of Us on making her idea a reality. We can’t wait to share some of that with you in the future!

Thank you again to everyone who submitted ideas. The range and creativity was astounding and I can assure you that the Advisory Panel did not have an easy time making a decision.

The essence of conversational marketing is of course to get people talking. To ignite conversation around a given service or product. To seed the conversation and amplify it, you need the right people to say right things about your product. For example you want the camera buff to evangelize your new digital camera to his friends for he is a trusted source of information regarding cameras. At least within his network. However, how do you get the camera buff to crank up the volume of your message, to amplify it.

The key is in managing the expectation gap. To explain this concept I will use 4 scenarios at a local pizza shop.

1. You are hungry so you walk into a pizza shop you’ve never been to before. You are expecting a decent slice of pizza, but you’re primarily just trying to get a quick fix. The expectations are relatively low, but the pizza isn’t bad in fact it is slightly better than anticipated. You go back to the office and might mention it. The expectation gap was too small to register.

2. Now this time you walk into the same pizza place and are BLOWN away by the flavor. When you get to the office this time you tell everybody about this transcendental pizza experience. The expectation gap was huge, therefore the quality and volume of amplification is equally exaggerated.

3. Now if you get a slightly subpar pizza it’s also not a talking point as the expectation gap was insignificant.

4. The final scenario is if your best friend, whose pizza taste you agree with, raves about a particular pizza joint and you decide to give it a shot. However, the pizza was so bad you ended up throwing it away. Due to the hype, the expectations were astronomical and subsequently the negative expectation gap was equally as large. You now go back to your friend and curse him out for making you endure such a terrible gastronomic experience, and vow to never heed another recommendation from him. In addition, you tell everyone else you know how bad it was. Finally, your friend, the evangelist, loses confidence in his recommendation and stops promoting the shop. The repercussions are severe.

The greater the expectation gap the more conversation, good or bad, is catalyzed around the product.

The key to conversational marketing is optimizing the expectation gap, not simply hyping a product to unrealistic levels. In today’s world if the product under delivers word travels fast. As marketers we need to find the balance between building positive buzz around our products and not over-hyping.

Create as great a gap as possible between expectations and delivery.

Rewind back a few months and everyone was happy with the ever flowing river of new web applications. The latest and greatest pretty and shiny thing that we’d flock to and try it out. But, those days are pass and now people are cynical, buried and full of questions. Oh no!

In the past week I’ve read handfuls of articles slamming Second Life. I’ve seen blog posts complaining about the sudden attention Facebook has gotten. The death match between Twitter and Pownce continues (or was there ever really one?).

What I think is important for people to realize is that the honeymoon is over. If you are going to launch a new application, widget, campaign or anything else that you hope to get people’s attention with, it damn well better be unique, well constructed and thought out in every detail. Flying by the seats of your pants is no longer going to cut it because everyone has gotten past the glow of pillow talk and is not focusing on the day to day living with these things and the warts are starting to show.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not bashing any of the technology that I’m using. I’m figuring out what works for me and what doesn’t. Trying to figure out how to cross pollinate while not making the water undrinkable and determining what I cut off and what I keep. The point I’m trying to make though is that EVERYONE is now doing this. From the newest of newbies to the oldest-timers out there. We are all stopping and taking a closer look at all the toys we are playing with.

What are you doing right now to dig through the ever growing pile of social media invites? Have you made any reductions in the number of feeds or duplicated services you use? I’d love to hear how this is all effecting you the reader of this post because let’s face it, we all approach this differently.

Transcript of crayonCast #30
Originally posted on July 20, 2007

C.C. Chapman: Hey everybody and welcome to crayonCast #30. We’ve reached a little milestone here and I’m very excited to have everyone here. I am C.C. Chapman, VP of New Marketing for Crayon, the new marketing company, and you know the rules. If you’re new to crayonCast this week, I have we have some new listeners this week, it’s always great to have them, it’s 60 seconds from anybody in our company who has something that inspired them this week. We’ve got kind of a theme this week, not really. I just happen to notice some people talk about the same things. We have one calling in from vacation. It’s all good, so let’s kick it right off this week and remember, tell your friends, if you go to crayoncast.com, they can subscribe in iTunes right away and get this every week automatically delivered to their iPod, their computer, their iPhone, whatever it is they want to listen to it on. Without further ado, here we go.

Scott Monty: Hi, this is Scott, Crayon’s resident Consigliere and evidently voice-over artist for hire according to Across the Sound #83. Take a listen if you haven’t had a chance yet. This week has seen a remarkable development in the marketing world. The Age of Conversation launched on Monday. You can find it at ageofconversation.com. Basically, this is a project that was spearheaded by Drew McLellan and Gavin Heaton who back in March decided that they thought a collective book, a community-driven book would be interesting and the topic they chose was the conversation, how citizen marketers are going about creating conversations about brands, about companies everyday whether it’s the blogosphere, the podosphere or face to face. Now, this is a topic that is near and dear to the hearts of crayonistas and I’m proud to say that fellow crayonista Greg Verdino is actually one of the authors as well. In addition to the two of us, Drew and Gavin were able to put together a list of 101 other bloggers who each wrote a 400-word essay about the conversation, could be any take on it whatsoever. You can actually check out what Greg and I have written by going to the ageofconversation.com and select whether you want to purchase the book as a downloadable e-book, in hardcover or paperback format. Either way, you will not be disappointed. This is some amazing thinking from people from all over the world with many different perspectives on the conversation and this is exactly what new media is all about, people from different backgrounds sharing their perspective, coming together to give a collective knowledge base of a wonderful topic. All proceeds from the book will be donated to Variety, the Children’s Charity, and from what I understand, in just the first three days alone, we’ve raised nearly $5000 for the charity. It’s a great cause. It’s great content. Get out there. Buy yourself a copy of Age of Conversation and drop by crayonville.com here to continue the conversation and let us know what you thought of it.

Seni Thomas: Seni Thomas here, New Marketing Strategist here at Crayon. Social networking overload has been a popular topic over the past few weeks in the blog space. However, I just really want to kind of zoom in and focus on what I call is Facebook overload, although Facebook is now only getting really mainstream coverage to many, especially the kids that were in college from about 2003, Facebook was their first and only social networking site. They’re saying how it appear to be exclusively Asian and there’s MySpace, which was so cluttered with gaudy tasteless pages and equally garish music. Many, including myself, we just flock to the cleanliness of Facebook and sad to say, that day is over. Every single day I get three or four or five of these anonymous spam friend requests and I’m constantly [unintelligible] friends who are adding new useless features like pets you can take care of or a dry humping buddy. This is just getting ridiculous. Although there seems to be some kind of an inherent human trait to that, we have to try every single little feature that comes along. Frankly, I’m overloaded. I use Facebook less and less because it’s less and less appealing and to tell the truth, be completely honest, if there was a better platform that I came along and convince my friends to jump ship, I certainly would. I don’t know. Everyone’s just going apeshit over this F8 platform and I love the idea around it, but the execution is really, really lacking. I’d love to hear your comments into all this, so please join us in our blog and please directly insert your comments into the audio stream through our new CrowdAbout platform. Thank you. Take care.

Greg Verdino: Hey, this is Greg Verdino. I know Scott Monty is already talking this week about a book called the Age of Conversation, so I’d like to speak a bit more broadly about the topic of conversational marketing. I know a lot of marketers are now getting excited about the opportunity of harnessing the power of communities, of influencing influencers in those communities and of joining in conversations that consumers are already having about their products and services and that’s great. It’s great to see that finally happening, but I would like to issue a word of warning. I think sometimes we get hung up on the act of conversation as an end when in fact it’s really just a means and here’s what I mean by that. At the end of the day, we can count the blog posts that we get mentioned in and we can count up the number of viral video views we have on YouTube or the number of friends we’ve made on MySpace, but if we aren’t able to tie those back to tangible business results whether that’s awareness or sales or traffic to a website, whatever the case may be for your particular business, then chances are we really haven’t done our job as marketers at all. So, at the end of the day, when you’re embarking on a program of conversational marketing tactics, make sure you always have the end results in mind. This is Greg Verdino and I am at greg@crayonville.com.

Aaron Greenberger: Hello everybody. This is Aaron. So, this past week, there were some cancellations on magazines, Jane and Cocktail along with some others this year and I thought I’d talk about a new client of Crayon. It is a magazine actually and I’m pretty excited about it and what makes this magazine different is that it’s a magazine with a purpose. The heart of the publication is that it’s for Latin teenagers and its sole purpose is to talk about things that are truly on the minds of today’s Latin youth. Its goal is to get the Latin community reading and writing more and the magazine is called La Teen and its founder is an ex-schoolteacher from Denver, Colorado. When the teacher realized there was nothing that kids in his class could relate to and few publications that they wanted to read, he took it upon himself to create a grassroots magazine as a class project along with his kids and the kids were also authoring some of these articles, which I thought was pretty unique. So, it started locally and has since gone on to some increased publications and it is being released in some smaller markets this month in Arizona and parts of the west coast. Crayon’s pretty excited about it because the project is really built from the heart and we’re excited to be working with the founder, Ayal Korczak. Really, to create an experience that empowers and entertains and inspires Hispanic male and female teenagers to read, write and communicate on multiple platforms. So, I’ll definitely keep you posted of our progress and the launch of the online magazine. Thanks for listening everyone. Talk to you soon.

C.C. Chapman: 01/18/08, January 18, 2008, what does it mean to you? This is C.C. and to me, that’s the new name or teaser or I don’t know what it is for a new movie from J.J. Abrams. Now, it’s got the world abuzz. In front of Transformers, there was a trailer. I looked like home video. It was a party, whatnot, next thing you know things are blowing up, people were freaking out, and it ends, and it just has the date. It says J.J. Abrams. First of all, I’ve never seen a movie trailer without a title and I got home and I’m like, “That’s kind of cool.” I wonder what I can find out about it. I go to IMDb, I popped it in, and then I find out there’s this whole world happening right now. There’s websites, maybe an ARG, an alternative reality game. No one’s quite sure. There’s rumors. There are sites that J.J. Abrams had said are fake, but everyone thinks are part of the game. It’s got the codename Cloverfield. There’s a slushy website that I guess has something to do with alias. What is amazing is everybody’s talking about this movie that doesn’t come out until next year and no one’s quite sure what it is. They didn’t show a monster. I mean the plotline… there’s just something blowing up in New York including the Statue of Liberty head rolling down the street. There’s a website. I just think the campaign’s very exciting and it’s very neat and it’s a big risk for a — it’s going to be a big movie. I mean J.J. Abrams’ name attached to it instantly makes it big, but what is it? None of us know and yet the whole web is abuzz and everybody is talking about it. Sometimes you don’t have to give away the farm to get people excited. If it’s good, they will. Just ponder that. I figured I’d give you guys — suck you into the frenzy that I am stuck in right now. Talk to you next week.

Transcript for crayonCast #27
Originally posted on June 25, 2007

C.C. Chapman: Hey, welcome to crayonCast for Monday, June 25, 2007, episode #27. How is it going everybody? C.C. Chapman, VP of New Marketing here at Crayon, welcoming you to another week of crayonCast. New voices, new perspectives, new everything, so let us just jump right into it. You do not want to hear me talk. You want to hear people like Seni talk.

Seni Thomas: Hello. Seni Thomas here, New Marketing Strategist here at Crayon. Today’s rant is on the ridiculous amount of hype surrounding the launch of a device that some say Steve Jobs will change the world, the device that an overzealous fan made the focus of the short flick, Jesus phone. Of course, I am talking about the iPhone. However, what I want to focus on is the importance of partnerships and branding. I am a huge techie, but I will tell you right now I will never buy an iPhone until another carrier picks it up. I have had so many terrible experiences with AT&T that I will never sign another contract with them regardless of how cool their phones are. You see branding partnerships everywhere. The fact of the matter is that you cannot make your brand suck any less by partnering with a better perceived one. Do you really want to buy a terrible, terrible can of beans just because they now come in Taco Bell flavor? Hell no. Anyways, just some food for thought. For those of you who are actually going to be camping out of any Apple store, Godspeed. Take care. For any comments, please hit me at seni@crayonville.com. That is S-E-N-I. Take care.

Aaron Greenberger: Hey everybody, this is Aaron, podcasting today from sunny New York City. I have been paying attention to what has been going on at [CAN] this week, not really to see the winners and losers, but really just read about and listen to what has been happening there, the blogs, the podcasts, video blogs, checking out a couple of interviews. Yes, I do admit I have checked out a few highlights from the occasional party there, I am guilty, but an interview with Marian Salzman, Chief Marketing Officer at JWT, made me pick up my head from a PowerPoint and really take notice. She was talking about a few things that were of interest to me. One was about change. The interviewer was saying that change is a scary thing and Marian immediately disagreed and jumped in and said that change is an awesome thing. This is a business that is about originating change, engineering change, profiting from change, and it is about being at the center, being in the center of change, and changing before you really have to. I think that is really an interesting point. I have to agree that the industry should be about this, but how many agencies truly, truly live up to this and clients and companies as well. This is not really about Marian. It is really about proving that the industry is actually doing just that, that it is changing proactively and not reactively. In order to change, you really have to take some risks and be willing to experiment. I just hope more agencies and companies follow her and what I think is her call to action. She also had some insight into or was curious about how agencies are going to be narrowcasting. She was interested to see how the industry will tackle this. Well, it is not really a shock to me, narrowcasting, with on-demand viewership and multimedia platforms. I can think of three words, Marian, of how the industry should delve into these niche markets and that is community, dialogue, and partnership. Thanks for listening everyone. Hope to see you at Coffee with Crayon and I look forward to any emails at aaron@crayonville.com. Take care.

C.C. Chapman: Hey, it is C.C. Unless you have been living under a rock, you know that this week, the iPhone drops. The iPhone is finally coming out, Steve Jobs’ greatest, latest little creation that everybody wants and everyone is lusting after. Now, I am not getting one. I am just not because, plain and simple, I am not switching to AT&T at the moment. I am not going to sign a two-year contract and shell out $500 for a phone. I do not care how cool the phone is. Do not get me wrong. I want an iPhone. I want to play with one. I think it opens up all kinds of new channels for new marketing to get right to the handheld. I love it. I cannot wait for that interface to be on an iPod. I do not need the phone capability. I really, really do not. Cell phones are for making calls, not playing around with things, but to have that interface on an iPod and my hand held, I cannot wait. I am sure lots of you are getting the iPhone and I really hope that this week, if you get one and you play with it, I would kill for an audio comment from you talking about it. Email me at cc@crayonville.com. Let me know what you think of the iPhone. Let us face it. It is going to change things. Love or hate Apple, they keep pushing things forward, they keep changing the world around them and making us all kind of stop and go, “Ooh, we got to catch up.” Lots of companies are going to be coming out with similar interfaces. It is a step closer to the universal media device that so many people have been talking about that I first read about in the Future of Music. Trust me. It is going to be an interesting week and I would love to hear your thoughts on the iPhone. Please, please, please share them. No, I am not going to be having one, but, hey Apple, Steve Jobs, you want to give me one to play with? That, I will gladly take. Take care, guys. See you next week.

Gary Cohen: Hi, this is Gary Cohen. This week, some interesting open source projects have come my way. I really like aswarmofangels.com, which is angel investors putting out £25, all or none, towards a digital age, open source Creative Commons movie. The community will determine what script changes are going to happen. They are going to produce the movie. They are going to market it. It will be distributed online for free. The viewers will be able to share and remix the movie as they go forward. They have got some interesting heavy hitters behind it contributing, Cory Doctorow, the authors, some musicians such as The Kleptones and others. This power of [crowd] has been used successfully by musicians who have sold investment stakes in their yet to be released album and there is a [crowd] on the west coast I believe who have created an online way for people to manage a phantom portfolio. The power of that [crowd] is translating now to a fund, which investors in the real world can invest in. So, stay tuned. More of this will happen as companies tap into the power of [your crowd]. Take care.

Joseph Jaffe: Hey, everybody. This is Joseph Jaffe.

Greg Verdino: And this is Greg Verdino.

Joseph Jaffe: We are actually together this week working from the Jaffe Manor in Westport, Connecticut, so we thought we would take I guess our allocation of 120 seconds and talk to you this week about politicians, political marketing, and really the extent to which they are embracing new marketing. I guess we are going to start with our friend, Barack Obama, who now has free mobile ringtones on his site and I am going to play you just a couple.

Greg Verdino: All right. There are three things that I think are good about this. I am going to come to some bad I think as well, but the three things that I like about this, number one, is clearly the candidates need to be experimenting with new media forms and this is certainly an attempt to do so. The second thing is that if you actually read the copy on the site, it makes it clear that these ringtones were submitted by supporters. Barack and his campaign team did not create these themselves, thankfully. It is an interesting way to incorporate creativity from his actual supporter base. The third thing, and we can argue about this I suppose, is I think the execution is pretty bad. To me, it blatantly panders to the urban youth market. On the other hand, this is potentially an attempt to get young urban voters into the fold, into the voting booths and support the presidential election, maybe.

Joseph Jaffe: Yeah. All I want to add to that is if the words from our supporters were not mentioned on the site this would be downright laughable and pathetic, but it is really just another indication of the power of partnership and conversation ultimately in terms of being able to reposition, in this case, an up and coming political candidate in a new light with a younger, let us face it, less engaged audience. Overall, you guys can make up your minds for yourselves. Just go to barackobama.com/mobile and check it out and download the ringtone. Cheers, guys.

Scott Monty: Hi, this is Scott, Relationship Director and Consigliere for Crayon. I would like to introduce a new segment this week that I am calling Crayon Toolbox. I would like to start with something that is in response to crayonCast #23 in which Gary commented about not being able to effectively print blog pages to show to a client or a perspective client. At first, the idea kind of struck me as odd. Why would you actually want to print out a blog page? It seemed a little backwards thinking, but to Gary’s point, I think, we are getting to a point where bloggers are more mainstream and they are producing some great ideas that just need to be shared in a variety of ways, so some kind of print function as bloggers become more like journalists may be something that is in the works. It is certainly maybe something that the likes of Vox and WordPress and TypePad and Blogger should consider. In the meantime, I wanted to introduce a tool that could effectively help clients or prospects or colleagues understand particular points of a website that you think are appropriate. The tool I would like to introduce is called Trailfire. It can be found at trailfire.com. Actually what it is, is an application both online and downloadable that allows you to take a series of webpages and put them in context for someone. You start out with the first page, you drop a Trailfire button on there, and a little window pops up, a little balloon pops up that allows you to explain why the page is important. You give context to each page, each successive page that they scroll through. The Trailfire application actually allows them to arrow through from one page to the next. You are leading them down a path or a trail, as it were, and explaining why each is relevant. It is kind of like a high tech PowerPoint or an online PowerPoint for your target. I think it is an incredibly useful application. It is a way to actually put yourself in the chair next to a client or next to a colleague without actually being there and explain relevance. So, this week’s tool is Trailfire. Continue to listen to see what else I come up with. I would be happy to hear if you have any suggestions or comments, if you email me at scott@crayonville.com.