Month: February 2007

An interesting item appeared on the Apple website today.

It’s a piece written (supposedly) by Apple CEO Steve Jobs, called simply “Thoughts on Music.”

In it, Jobs responds to recent suggestions, primarily from some European countries, notably Norway, that Apple needs to get rid of the DRM (digital rights management) software that it puts on all the music you buy through Apple’s on-line ITunes store. The DRM means that purchased music can only be played on Apple’s Ipod music players.

This post today is an interesting way for Jobs to get his message out, without any media filters. He doesn’t do a lot of interviews and Apple is notorious for clamping down on any unauthorized messages. And since the company doesn’t have any official blogs, their website is their chosen medium.

What’s especially interesting is that Jobs says that Apple will sell DRM-free music immediately, if the record companies will agree to it.

Imagine a world where every online store sells DRM-free music encoded in open licensable formats. In such a world, any player can play music purchased from any store, and any store can sell music which is playable on all players. This is clearly the best alternative for consumers, and Apple would embrace it in a heartbeat. If the big four music companies would license Apple their music without the requirement that it be protected with a DRM, we would switch to selling only DRM-free music on our iTunes store. Every iPod ever made will play this DRM-free music.

We’ll need to watch this one develop. Somehow I doubt the record companies will accept his offer.

So have you heard about the bride who cut off her hair on her wedding day, freaked out, then posted the whole episode to YouTube?

Or what about the Boston bomb scare that resulted from a failed (?) attempt at guerilla marketing for a TV cartoon? (Some argue that paying a $2 million fine for that kind of publicity is cheap!)

These stories have been all over the media in the past week, so I’m assuming that you know the background. If you don’t, you can follow the links above or do a Google search to find out more.

What’s interesting to me is the way the stories have played out in the mass media.

Journalists seem to be falling over themselves to cast the “perpetrators” as the bad guys and are suggesting that what they are doing is a bad thing, or at least something that we should be wary of.

But are they? And should we be? Wary of them, I mean?

It seems to me that most marketing campaigns (and here I’m using “Marketing” as opposed to “PR”, although I’m not sure that the distinction means much to anyone) are built around the idea of trying to get us to accept some premise which might be doubtful, at best, or an outright lie (at worst) and then adjust our behaviour accordingly.

For example, if I see a bunch of young, dynamic people having fun while drinking beer, I’ll naturally want to buy and drink the same brand of beer to have the same experience.

Or if a well-known actor tells me that her skin stays soft because she’s using a particular face cream, shouldn’t I believe her? After all, why would she lie? Just because she’s paid money to do so? Is she lying?

Last weekend, we went through the annual spectacle of the Super Bowl ads, where people willingly sat down and watched some very creative visions of reality which are trying to influence their buying decisions. Companies spent millions of dollars to get their ads in front of as many people as possible.

But I didn’t hear anyone complaining about a company pretending that apes can talk and plot to ambush a Bud Lite delivery guy. So how come people are so upset at a video that purports to portray a bride that cuts her hair off?

I wonder if people are more offended by the fact that a company pulled off a stunt like that, or by the fact that they were taken in?

Marketing hoaxes are certainly nothing new.

Consider the “Paul is dead” affair from 1969, when Paul McArtney supposedly died, and the album Abbey Road became a roadmap to his death. It’s quite a tale, (here’s a link to a Wikipedia article about it) and some suggest it was an elaborate hoax perpetrated to sell more records.

Or, more recently, there’s the tale of Platinum Weird, a real music group but with a fictional prior existence that’s been documented in print and a television documentary. It’s an interesting story and also involved “taking in” the mass media.

More sinister examples of hoaxes (and the outcry that surrounds them when they’re exposed) include The Bush administration’s claims that Iraq had plenty of WMD’s (Weapons of Mass Destruction) and that Saddam Hussein was planning to buy uranium from Niger.

When I look at the stuff that fills the airwaves and newspapers these days (and is considered legitimate) I can’t get excited when someone manages to sneak something by us. It’s kind of cool, actually.

OK, I admit that the problems in Boston were unfortunate, but isn’t it interesting to consider that in the other nine or 10 cities that the same gag was done, it passed without incident? Perhaps it’s not the marketing people that should be investigated, but the ones who are supposed to be protecting us.

YouTube was created to help liberate messages and ideas. Ordinary people can post their videos and people all over the world can see them instantly – without filters or payment or censors.

If the price of that freedom is the occasional campaign that isn’t actually what it appears to be, that’s OK with me. They’re often the most interesting.

I think we need to get a grip.

The other night I was helping a friend fine tune her slide show. She was going to be giving a presentation to a bunch of students and she was anxious to get across her points with as much detail as possible. You can imagine the result.

I did the usual things to help, given that we didn’t have much time. I showed her how to add some images, pick and choose a theme to apply, clean up the formatting, etc.

But I knew that no matter how much we worked on it, it wasn’t going to have the kind of impact on her students that she was looking for. She had fallen victim to the same kind of PowerPoint trap that so many of us encounter. If one word is good, then two are better, right?

Fortunately, although it’s too late for that particular slide show, marketing guru Seth Godin has ridden to the rescue. He’s just re-posted to his blog a piece called “Really Bad PowerPoint“. He says he first wrote it about four years ago…

I figured the idea might spread and then the problem would go away–we’d no longer see thousands of hours wasted, every single day, by boring PowerPoint presentations filled with bullets.

Not only has it not gone away, it’s gotten a lot worse. Last week I got a template from a conference organizer. It seems they want every single presenter to not only use bullets for their presentations, but for all of us to use the same format! Shudder.

So, for posterity, and in the vain hope it might work, here we go again:

Then he lays out his secrets for creating and delivering a great presentation.

If you have to deliver presentations, or help others to put them together, you should read this piece and think about how you could put it to good use. It’s filled with good ideas and suggestions — things that most of us already know but rarely follow through on. Like these rules:

Here are the five rules you need to remember to create amazing Powerpoint presentations:

1. No more than six words on a slide. EVER. There is no presentation so complex that this rule needs to be broken.

2. No cheesy images. Use professional stock photo images.

3. No dissolves, spins or other transitions.

4. Sound effects can be used a few times per presentation, but never use the sound effects that are built in to the program. Instead, rip sounds and music from CDs and leverage the Proustian effect this can have. If people start bouncing up and down to the Grateful Dead, you’ve kept them from falling asleep, and you’ve reminded them that this isn’t a typical meeting you’re running.

5. Don’t hand out print-outs of your slides. They don’t work without you there.

PowerPoint is a fabulous program but it’s become a crutch for too many of us. We expect the technology to gloss over the fact that we don’t really have that much to say.

But what we really do is fail to take the time to map out our presentation and make sure it’s going to have the impact we want. It’s not something you can just throw together at the last minute.

So what do you say? Let’s all take a pledge to think about our presentations and take the time to follow Seth’s advice. Who’s with me? Hello? Where is everyone?