The Depressing News About Spam

There are some some interesting statistics in this Forbes article. The most stunning is the percentage of people who purchase stuff that's advertised via spam.

Americans waste an average of nearly three minutes each day deleting spam--a loss of productivity calculated at more than $21 billion annually. That said, you might think that fewer and fewer people would actually purchase products peddled by spammers. But you'd be wrong.

According to a recent study by custom market-researcher Rockbridge Associates, 4% of online adults purchased a product or service advertised via spam. Based on the number of American adults who are online, that's a marketplace five million strong, which is more than enough to encourage spammers to continue peddling their junk.

Clearly, email is not dead as a marketing tool. It's alive and well. Because of this, it is dying as a source for non-commercial information.

The Age of Luxury

Ageless Marketing has some interesting observations about why high-end stuff did so well last holiday season. If luxury goods prospered partially due to shifting demographics, then this spells more trouble for the discounters. The effect of rising energy costs on their less-affluent customers may be masking another key factor.

Best quote:

"No one gets up in one morning and exclaims, “I’m tired of being middle class.” Buying luxury doesn’t elevate a person from middle class to upper class placement. But growing older does turn many a person into more of a luxury-buying consumer.

With most adults now in the second half of life (130 million 40 and older adults to 86 million 18-39-year-olds) buying behavior has become less anchored to quantitative foundations and more deeply rooted in qualitative foundations. The “New customer Majority” has replaced the buying ethos of “more” with the more discrimination buying ethos of “better or best”."

I've been so focused on why the low end did poorly that I failed to look at why the high end did so well. It will be interesting to see how Wal-Mart and others react to this. No one can afford to lose the Boomers.

Amazon the Wholesale Club

Lots of comments on this today in the press. One I haven't seen: Perhaps Amazon is starting to emulate the wholesale club model. That is, maybe they are trying to see if they can clear a profit on membership fees and simply break even on merchandise sales. It has certainly worked for Costco.

Bezos believes strongly in driving sales growth and cash flow through low prices, mainly by offering free shipping on most transactions.

Bezos reinforced that belief on Wednesday by announcing yet another shipping promotion, Amazon Prime. For $79, customers can get express two-day shipping on all purchases for 12 months at no further cost.

Go Daddy Ad Not Super

My domain names are all registered with Go Daddy. I'm very happy with their customer service, their site, and their overall business philosophy. The CEO even has a blog and posts regularly and intelligently.

Over the past few weeks there has been quite the furor over Go Daddy's decision to buy a Super Bowl TV ad. Is it money well spent? Probably not from an ROI standpoint, but Go Daddy founder Bob Parsons makes a strong case and has reasonable expectations. Given his company's brand awareness "crisis," I understand why he feels a Super Bowl ad is a plus. The Super Bowl is a unique product, which is why it commands such huge ad prices. It also sounds like Parsons is keeping his employees' interests and fiscal responsibility in mind, which the dead dot coms miserably failed to do.

The Super Bowl PR-machine is now in full gear. The media is studying the ads, interviewing the advertisers and analyzing all of the people and companies behind them. Oh, yeah, and there's going to be a football game too. (What other event generates such media coverage about its advertisements?!) Go Daddy is enjoying the lion's share of the attention, which just serves to add value to the decision.

Riding the run-up for all its worth, Go Daddy has released a sneak preview of a version of their ad that Fox rejected. (It's a long story and pretty good reading.) I viewed the ad this morning, and I was unpleasantly surprised. Assuming the ad that they are running is in the same vein as the rejected spot, then what we can expect is a beer commercial minus the beer. The product and the brand are hardly the most memorable things about the ad. Yes, it's somewhat amusing, but the point of advertising is not to amuse. Ultimately, it is to persuade and improve brand awareness. This version does more for breast awareness than brand awareness.

No, the Go Daddy ad is not any worse than much of the other material that will grace the air waves Sunday night. Will it cause the company to crash and burn? Not at all. I just hoped the ad would be as smart as the company. I hoped they would talk about the product or tell a little of the Go Daddy story. Perhaps something that poked fun at Network Solutions or touted the Go Daddy difference. Or even better, stood out compared to the funny but futile efforts of the extinct dot coms. In the end the ad agencies, Fox and the lawyers will all make their money from this ad. Go Daddy will do fine, but they could have done better.

Comb-Overs OK'd in North Korea

As reported in January 21 issue of The Week, comb-overs are legal in North Korea. Other than that, if you're a man with a full head of hair, then you'd better watch out:

North Korean state television has begun a propaganda campaign urging men to get their hair cut frequently, the BBC reported this week. The campaign, called “Let Us Trim Our Hair in Accordance With Socialist Lifestyle,” shows five approved hairstyles for men, all of them crew cuts. Men over 50 are allowed to grow their top hair slightly longer, but only to comb over a bald spot. One TV program has been doing a “name and shame” feature, sending cameras out into the streets to capture long-haired men on video, and forcing them to explain why they’ve been avoiding the barber.

Fear Factor Family Viewing

A blurb in the January 2 issue of TV Guide talks about who's watching NBC's Fear Factor on Monday nights. Turns out that this pathetic show is the fourth most popular prime-time show for children between 2 and 11 years old. I can't believe that parents are letting their pre-schoolers watch such junk. Perhaps even worse, Fear Factor is #3 on the list of prime-time shows that children watch with adults. Now that's something to fear.

Seinfeld Business

Another neat thing about the extras on the Seinfeld DVD's is that they share many details of the business of producing and writing a TV show. It's an amazingly efficient process because it has to be -- it's not a choice when you have seven days to complete such a huge project. One particularly useful nugget is Jerry's philosophy about naming the episodes.

Every episode except for the second one (Male Un-Bonding) is simply tilted, "The ___________." For example, The Contest, The Busboy, The Pony Remark and so on. Jerry explains that he didn't want the writers to sit around wasting creative energy developing catchy names for the shows, especially since most viewers wouldn't even care or remember the name once the show started. They chose names that were merely descriptive, and in so doing they managed to give them a brand flavor all their own since they were consistent with the protocol.

That's pretty good advice. How much time and energy do we waste working on details that are of little consequence? Developing product names is a great example. We sit in meetings for hours each year and then spend even more time  checking to make sure we aren't violating anyone else's trademarks. How often do customers really care what the product is called anyway?

Seinfeld Wisdom

I've really been enjoying the Seinfeld DVD's that Lisa bought me for Christmas. The bonus features are excellent, and it's nice to watch the episodes without commercial interruption. The neatest feature is called "Notes about Nothing," which are subtitles throughout each show that provide insight into the minds of the show's creators and how they developed the material. One in particular cracked me up last night.

According to Jerry, the two major favors of male friendship are:

1. The airport run
2. Helping someone move

True indeed! Perhaps he missed one: taking someone to/from a colonoscopy.

Google's NIH Attitude

On their blog, Google just publicly asked for help developing management tools for the AdWords program. It's a bold and brilliant idea and not unheard of in today's "open source" world.

What strikes me, though, is that they go right at the heart of the matter by addressing the whole "Not Invented Here" attitude that tarnishes product development efforts at so many companies. Any product development group that thinks they have all the good ideas doesn't. Rejecting external creativity is a narrow path that leads nowhere. As Google puts it:

In our experience, it's better to wear "Not Invented Here" as a badge of honor than as a chip on your shoulder.

Lisa's Blog

Well, Lisa launched her very own knitting blog this evening. The first post is a virtual novel, and she's off to a great start.