Ugg Boots for the 32-year-old woman?

It’s bad enough that I know I’m 32, but now you know too and are just throwing it in my face! All in the name of some sort of commerce?! Tacky.

I’m wondering if you can explain how my being 32 connects me to your product? I would think the fact that I’m 32 would automatically remove me from your horribly built list. I’m soooo over you. I thought you were kind of cool 8 years ago, but times have changed. I’ve moved on. My daughter likes you now; somehow, you don’t make her feet feel claustrophobic and sweaty like you do mine. Also, I’m a strong believer that moms’ and daughters’ fashion should not overlap, which means you’re now going against the grain of my good upbringing.

And let’s not forget your terrible use of a call to action. I saw this exact same offer yesterday and the day before that. Perhaps you live in an alternate universe where time means completely different things, but here on earth, within the hallowed halls of Facebook, 3 minutes means exactly 180 seconds. Otherwise, I’d still be 19 years old, and we wouldn’t be having this conversation!

I won’t belabor this, but simply put, your advertising has elicited the opposite reaction of what it intends. Targeting done right is great. This, done poorly to the point of pathetic, is counterproductive at best and offensive at worst.

Whatever the reason, I’m not a fan. Perhaps I should don Pee-wee Herman sized sunglasses and change my attitude. Is this one of the key items they discussed at the investor webcast?

http://www.reuters.com/article/technologyNews/idUSTRE58873U20090910

1. comScore has now decided to charge for its State of the Union findings. If you’re not familiar with these, they are webinars hosted by co-founder Gian Fulgoni which walk you through the previous quarter. You glean such things as, ‘people are scared’ or ‘rich people aren’t spending as much’ or ‘people really like coupons now’ or ‘lower income brackets are concerned about their jobs’. You also get some really great insights into how eCommerce is tracking against the rest of the economy. Really the gist is people are poor and scared. So good call comScore! Twist the knife a little will with a $199 ticket for an hour of your smooth jazz.
2. My cell phone provider AT&T just called me and asked if they could lower my bill. Um, yeah, sure. Wait. WHAT? Turns out the texting tween got a little carried away and $90 dollars later I have a new best friend who moonlights as a customer service rep. Good job AT&T! Consider me a loyal customer until I forget about the kind gesture in approximately two months.
3. Speaking of AT&T my office mate suggested they start offering a ‘Buy Back Blackberry’ program so that us late adopters could get on this dang app bandwagon. Then they could garner additional goodwill by creating a secondary program to give away the unloved BlackBerry’s and entitle this one, punnily enough, as ‘Handouts for the Phoneless.

This Wednesday I hereby declare AT&T the winner of my own personal thoughts.

I personally have been forced to spend quite a bit more time within this particular analytics tool and to be honest, most of the time I narrowly focus on the bare essentials I need to complete the task. I realize, however, that there is a hidden treasure trove of data for me to uncover. I just can’t seem to find my way through the labyrinth of choices and meanings and links to helpful tips. Never mind that when I finally do get to the meaning of one particular report, when I try and replicate it for another client the meanings and associations might be completely different. I understand that personalization and customization is essential to businesses. But what is an agency to do when there’s no place to turn for help?

Years ago, when I first started managing accounts, I would try to think like a client in order to traverse a particularly twisted and question-riddled road. More often than not, though, the person responsible for the system setup was unavailable or even unsure themselves of how the underlying structure had been built. Or even better, the setup had been put in place 3 years ago and no one can remember where that guy went, but he’s long gone. Being forced into proactivity, I would reach out to the respective Analytics Company’s reps for help.

I’m not pointing fingers, but let’s just say that if my friendly neighborhood analytics provider was a 1-800 suicide prevention hotline, I’d be a long-gone and mourned-for angst-y teen with too much eyeliner.

It’s tantamount to just learning to read and being locked outside the library door. I want to read and be better at it, but I need someone to help me get in first. Maybe even walk me over to the card catalogue. After I have a few proverbial books under my belt, I’ll probably settle in for a nice long stretch. Maybe dig into Beverly Cleary’s oeuvre and then move on to the unpleasant surprises of Judy Blume. Eventually, though, I’ll have to get to the proverbial Dostoevsky, at which point I’ll need some help from an Analytics “professor.” Hopefully there’s one around who has actually read the relevant book.

So, what’s the point of my rant? My clients are paying top dollar for mounds of data, and that data might as well be John Nash’s mad scribbling on the wall. And, as a customer service focused agency, I just have to ask the Omnitures of the world – What’s the point of all this data if there is no filtering, no context and… well… no human being to walk a marketer through it?

Apparently, the idea behind Bing is that it should convey to the user the sound that is made when a light bulb goes off in one’s head, like what happens when Wile E. Coyote gets a great idea or when you solve a Rubik’s cube. My colleagues and I chatted about this at length, and we determined that Bing is not the sound that at all goes off in our heads at the point of enlightenment.

For me the sound is an obvious ‘ting’ with some vibrato to it. For my good friend Brian, who tends to be more left brained, the sound is much more course and sharp. We did our best to find it but the closest we could find was ‘e-spark2’. Ding also seemed to be a very popular reponse. Eureka, gasp, AH!….on and on and on. This other guy thought it sounded like the bell on the counter of a cheap motel.

Later, I brought the discussion to the car. Since my daughter and spend a lot of time in the vehicle, and there is usually a lot of empty air to fill, I asked her what she thought about Bing. She’s never been much for short and sweet so her answer didn’t surprise me in the least. A very animated, “wait, wait, I got it, I know this one.” To be honest we both concurred that might be a little long and cumbersome to remember at the keyboard.

Whatever the sound, we’ll see if MSN’s new search is worth me switching from Googling to Binging anytime soon.

Online celebrity culture and I have a real love/hate relationship. I love that it is quickly updated and always there to provide a brief reprieve from more important tasks, but I loathe its vapidity and the shame I feel for looking Reminiscently like I felt after my older brother and sister let me watch Porky’s in a hotel room at the tender age of 5.

Love it or hate it, online celebrity culture isn’t going anywhere, and in fact, its assimilation of your eyeballs, time and brain is even more ingrained. Consider MSN’s latest venture, Celebrifeed. Celebrifeed is a central repository for your favorite icon’s tweets and blog entries—if you want to know exactly how boring celebrities actually are, you can find out when they tell you about what they ate for lunch. Of course, running alongside will be supplemental material from reputable titles such as Us Weekly and Parade Magazine.

I’m going to do my best to stay far away from the likes of this. I already feel dumber and this might just push me over some sort of brink. Hats off though to you MSN for granting yet another destination, slightly rearranged, which will allow a few seconds shaved off a life.

I’d like to point out that my foray into luxury retail was only made possible by ridiculous markdowns, and this got me thinking. I had turned into the type of consumer luxury marketers work to avoid: the ultra price-sensitive shopper who wanders and browses, never really associating with any particular brand. They’re sort of like Dory, the absent-minded fish from Finding Nemo, if Dory shopped for discounted Burberry handbags. Luxury retailers don’t really target these people, because while certain price-conscious shoppers want to purchase from designer labels, they don’t care about which one they’re buying—only that they are getting something fancy for 40% off.

Luxury brands might not be interested in bargain-hunters, but they are VERY interested in so-called Aspirationals, or those who aspire to luxury. Luxury retail is essentially a lifestyle choice, and just as regular people who want to be associated with rock music wear AC/DC shirts, people who desire association with luxury wear shirts from A/X. These people might only have a couple high-end items they wear over and over again (if you know what a $30k-a-year-millionaire is, we’re on the same page), but they are very brand conscious and spend what they can. You’d think that a luxury brand wouldn’t want this segment so much either, but it turns out that there are way more people who want to live a life of Prada than people who can actually afford to. These people still spend a lot of money, even if owning a pair of Versace jeans means they have to pick up an extra shift to pay the phone bill.

So what happens with Aspirationals’ spending habits when their income takes a hit, say for example, during a global recession? Curiously, none of the presentations I attended at Luxury Interactive really defined the luxury customer or the element of aspiration involved. I didn’t walk away with a solid sense of how we were going to work to address the chasm that now exists between the spending levels of yesterday and today. How do you measure the aspiration shift and better yet, how do you shift the crowd? If you can no longer aspire to buy a new coat and handbag once a quarter, maybe you’ll aspire to “timeless” luxury and buy a single higher-priced purse that will get you through the whole year. This is obviously the tip of the iceberg; there’s merchandising, inventories, margins and on and on and on to consider. As for me, I’m just ready to at least hear some honest talk around it. I’m ready to learn how to not run into me again.

Apparently, out of the roughly 250MM cell phones in the US, 10%-12% of those are smartphones. Of those on a smartphone, 36% use this to access the web over a traditional PC.

Pretty impressive stats, by themselves, but I’m more interested in putting them in a different context. If you hopped into the Delorean (the flying one that runs on garbage, not the plutonium-fueled one that gets you chased by Libyans) and go back a decade or so, you’d probably read headlines about traditional media losing a chunk of its audience to digital. You can probably see where I’m going with this. Digital stands to lose a chunk of its audience to mobile. The monarch of Media Mountain is starting to lose some of its serfs.

Of course, it’s not like digital is dead (far from it),but if you’re one those brands who has a pretty big stake, say in something like search, you might want to start thinking about this – like right now. Mobile adoption by brands is still pretty low, which means you can actually get in and work out the channel’s intrinsic kinks at unbelievably low prices. Get in while the tickets are still cheap.

The frustration felt when you see a client throw hundreds of thousands of dollars at short-lived, easily forgotten campaigns while allowing their brand positioning in something as basic as paid search to be ignored is maddening. You go home after days like that and just beat your head into a wall. Then you wake up and go at it again.

That is until now.

Because now, in the ad world, while the news is bleak all around, the light at the tunnel is finally shining in our direction. It sort of feels like you’ve been in a one sided relationship and all the sudden the other one decides you’re the partner of his/her dreams. You’re expected to just accept this, but the history lingers in the back of your mind. See, I completely understand the decision process here – now we make sense to CMOs. We didn’t make a lot of sense when we asked you about branding or share of voice but dollars on spreadsheets? That feels real now. That feels painfully real.

I’m not ungrateful – Quite the opposite. It’s our moment to shine, but a couple of things stick out at me. First and foremost – we want your programs to not only work, but be wildly successful. I’ve gotta tell you, though, you sure picked a tough time. You can’t steal from Peter to pay Paul. People are scared, conservative and downright unsure, but that doesn’t mean they don’t watch TV or flip through the glossies or give the billboard 10 seconds of a loving gaze. I fear brands will dial down spend in one media channel hoping to make it back in the one that they’re currently fixated on. But then that’s our job and I suppose it always has been: to be honest and set expectations. Sure, I think we can do more, but all of the channels working together to support one another? It’s beginning to sound like science fiction to me.