Paul Isakson

Always In Beta vs. If It Ain't Broke

I can't recall if it was last Thursday night or Friday morning when I ran a search on Google and noticed some new features in the results. Turns out, they've brought back something they've tried before, this time calling it SearchWiki.

The premise is pretty simple. See something you like, but wanted to see higher, move it up. Don't like it? Get rid of it. (And when you do, it makes a little vanishing cloud appear, kind of like removing an app off your Mac Dock.) Want to leave a note about the link for yourself and others? Click the comments icon. (The way I understand it, the moving things up and / or deleting them only effects your personal results, not the results of others.) Ultimately it all is intended to help improve and personalize your search experience.

What I find most interesting is how not everyone is a fan of their testing these new features out. Well, if they don't test it, how can they get feedback on it? Innovation is one of Google's core principles. They ask employees to devote a good deal of time to it. It's what got them to where they are and what will keep them there.

Not only that, but the idea of "If it ain't broke, don't fix it," is past it's time, if it truly ever had a time. That's how Yahoo!, MSN, Lycos and all the others lost out to Google in the first place. If you're not constantly trying to make what you have better, you're going to eventually lose ground and share to a competitor who is. The minute you stop evolving and learning is the day you start becoming irrelevant.

Agency Insights: Coudal's Three Questions

Somewhere along the way, I subscribed to Coudal's Infrequent Mailings*. The email from September 29th listed out three questions they ask before pursuing any new project. Their questions are:

1. Will we be able to make money? We're a business. We have mortgages and tuitions to pay. Plus, if we don't make some cash once in a while, how will we feed our habit of continually screwing around?

2. When we're done, will we be proud of the work we've done? Slaving for months on a project only to not want to show it to anyone when you're finished just plain sucks. No amount of money can make that feel better.

3. Can we learn a little something new along the way? Executing the project has to make us smarter and help satisfy our curiosity, which we think is our greatest asset.

Just like any good brand, an agency's success hinges upon them knowing who they are, what kind of work they want to do and what they stand for. Having some things in place to keep your agency from going after work that will hurt your brand then is a smart busness move given that an agency's brand largely is driven by their work. The smart agencies get this. The rest, well, they just stop at question number one, or maybe don't have any questions at all.

Anyway, nothing new here. Just some random thoughts around Coudal openly sharing the questions they ask before starting any new work.

*For the life of me, I can't find the link to get to this list so if you have it, please leave a note in the comments.

Bike Hero: Droga5 Strikes Again

Droga5 has launched a new video for Guitar Hero World Tour under the guise of it being done by madflux. It's not their first foray into launching a video initially presented as being created by a real person.

Since getting uploaded yesterday, the "Bike Hero" video has over 518,998 views and 2,238 comments. Of the comments I clicked through on YouTube, only one suspected it was an ad so far. (I only clicked five pages deep though.)

Curious how people will react if / when they discover it was done by an agency and not an enthusiastic fan. From various posts with comments so far, it appears the few who suspect it don't really care - they respect the creativity of it.

For me, it shows how the lines are blurring between creating advertising and simply creating content that attracts and engages an audience. If you create something that helps make someone's day just a bit better, it doesn't really matter.

What are your thoughts?

What Expectations Are You Setting?

Image credit: OkayCityNate

I came across a post by Amanda Mooney over the weekend asking brands to stop setting grandiose expectations with their online advertising and then failing to deliver upon them. I can only assume she had recently felt duped by some company trying to "connect" with her, as I'm sure many of us have experienced in one form or another at some point. She says:

"Do something cool where I’m hanging out already unless you really need to redirect me.

Because, unless there really is something amazing there [and not in that "look at the new flavor we have!" kind of amazing], I’ll be really annoyed and make note… to never trust your ads in the future"

Setting expectations pre-experience with your product / marketing / Web site is something Noah has covered a couple times, is something Russell has shared some thoughts on, and I'm sure others have as well. Today it can be even trickier as I've expressed before, thanks to highly-followed, speculative subject matter experts and passionate fans of your brand that use social media heavily who are not at all involved in creating your marketing sharing their over-blown hopes for what is to come.

Now, you can't control what others say about you, but you can control what you place in the market and how you respond to what others are putting out there. When you put an ad, a micro site, a press release, etc. out into the world, you're giving people a piece of information they will use to set or adjust their expectations of your brand.

If they have no previous experience with your product or service, these pieces of information are going to help them create a vision of what they think it must be like. For those who have already experienced your product or service, these communications will either reinforce a positive experience they've had with you or make them recall just how much you underwhelmed, disappointed or frustrated them.

An easy way to think about it is to consider the last time you went to a movie or a concert you had really high expectations for thanks to the previews you had seen on TV or the buzz you heard from others who had seen it / them before, and then walked out of that experience severely disappointed. Or, to the counter, think of a time you went into an experience with no expectations and walked out pleasantly surprised.

Now, I'm not advocating for taking some of the mystery and surprise out of what we do, that would be no fun at all. But this is something we all need to be more cognizant of and make sure we're balancing appropriately. What is really exciting and big news to those of us who work on a product or service every day might not really matter that much at all to the people you're trying to communicate with. In reality, your brand may play a very small role in their everyday life.

As my first mentor in the ad business told me on my first day ...

"It's far better to under-promise and over-deliver than it is to do the opposite."

Confessions Of A (Fake) Mad Man

Between Mark's chapter in Age of Conversation 2, his post on thinking by doing, and the image that is used to show the Ford F-150 commercial in the YouTube video below being stuck on the phrase, "IT'S ABOUT DOING THINGS," I've decided to admit to a "project" I undertook this summer and fall that was started for just that reason ...

So, ummm ... yeeeeeeah. You may have heard about, followed, or seen something regarding fans of Mad Men tweeting as characters from the show. Well, I'm the person responsible for the tweets of @don_draper, and thus kicking off that whole crazy adventure.

It basically started out as a research project of sorts for a thought I had about being able to extend a character from a TV show into social media in a real way and in doing so, having people connect to that character and the show in even more meaningful ways.

The goal was to just get enough evidence either way (to show that it was true or not true) and get out. Regardless of the outcome, I wanted to create a presentation on the experience and offer to turn over the account to AMC when I was done. But then the AMC shutdown happened, I made real connections with some of the people behind other characters, and it got a little too interesting to walk away from so quickly. 

This whole thing turned out to be a lot more than I ever thought it would be (in more ways than one). What ultimately happened was completely unexpected and admittedly fun. I know I didn't do the best job at keeping Don going. To do so would have required far more hours in the day than I had available for it.

I also know I made a handful of people a little unhappy in that I didn't reveal it was me from the start, or at least that it was a fan behind it and not AMC. But that would have ruined what I set out to discover in the first place, so I stayed to having the account point to the show's site and never revealing my true identity until now.

That leads me to my next point ... I wanted to share it publicly since I will be soon handing the @don_draper account over to AMC indirectly. When I admitted to them that it was me behind Don's tweets just after the shutdown, I promised them that I would give it to them when I was done and that in the meantime, I would just continue as I had been – never wanting to harm the character or the show in any way.

Thought it was probably a good time to share this given the upcoming transfer of the account and so that anyone who was curious earlier in the year about it could now see who was behind it. I'm sure some will be glad that it's no longer going to be in my hands. Ha!

Anyway, more to come on this. I will be creating and sharing a recap of what I learned from it when I have a few spare minutes.