Faith + Reason = Truth

One of my most important marketing consultants is Jon Spoelstra.  Now, I've never paid him a dime directly, but I have bought a book of his, so technically he's profited from our relationship - though not as much as I have.  He's a tireless champion of outrageous marketing techniques/ploys, as exemplified by his book Marketing Outrageously (the one I bought back in 2001 or so) and its cover shot of a Sumo wrestler in full uniform (i.e., wearing nothing more than what looks to be a diaper) soaring like MJ with basketball in hand towards a basket.  He also liked sending people FedEx tubes and rubber chickens to get their attention (and - this is critical - getting them to take some action once you DO have their attention) while in his position with an NBA team as one of the most successful sports marketing executives ever, and reportedly has a plan for selling ice to eskimos, or at least a book with that title.

Though his Sumo-covered book is a few years old now, I'm reminded of its principles whenever my attention is effectively captured by something different; allow me to give an example.  WAY back in 2006, I received a direct mail piece that was oddly-shaped for a direct mail piece, more of a square than a rectangle; was obviously a very large single page, but folded many times over just to be small enough to be of reasonable size; was a brilliant shade of red on every surface; and had nothing printed on it other than my name and address.  Of course I had to unfold it to see what it was.  Amazingly, when unfolded it was indeed a very large page, brilliant red front and back, and still nothing on either side of it other than my address - and, right in the middle of the other side of the page, less than ten words printed in white letting me know that it was The Economist and that they'd like me to subscribe again.  I believe it may have had a reply card booger-glued to it as well.  The point is, whether I subscribed or not, their piece fulfilled its mission in life, which was nothing more than to avoid being thrown straight away without even having a chance of being opened or otherwise delivering its message to me and my undivided attention.  Well done, Economist - and if you're not reading it, you should be, even if only grabbing a copy from the newsstand once every now and then or visiting their site for lots of great free content.

A couple of articles openly spell out how to game 2 of the most high-profile communities today, Youtube and Digg.  One on Wired News is a confession, actually more of a declaration, of a successful "pay for Diggs" campaign, naming names, costs, and results, all in an effort to spur more effort to plug holes like this.  The other post was by Cuban over at blogmaverick (again - I'm going to have to stop reading this guy because I find myself coming around to his "'b'uck authority" mentality more and more often) and his advice to the Oscars on how he would game Youtube by overwhelming users with frustrating tease clips (you'll have to read his post to see what this is), along with what the logical outcome of that exercise would be - quite the opposite of the Academy Awards's typical old-school authoritarian response to users posting actual Oscar snippets from the broadcast.
So the question is, is it all just a game?  There really are no laws governing unruly or misbehaving users who would game such systems, as long as you're not stealing/violating I.P. laws; there's only individual sense of fair play and common decency.  Yes, it's possible to "cheat", and it's possible to profit from it.  And if it is all just a game with "winning" defined as beating the system and/or making money, is there anything wrong with trying to do just that?  Maybe it's like sex - all based on one's point of view:  if sex is viewed as "hey, this is great!  Let's do it!", then it can be exactly that; however, when viewed as "this is wrong, we shouldn't be doing it, I feel guilty", then once again, it is exactly that.  In the end, I would say it's "player's choice" in any of these games, until heavy-handed, over-bearing, liberty-infringing laws are enacted to make it officially not ok.

On Feb.19, I created a new AdWords campaign for people searching for blogs so I could check the various bids for keywords.  What a difference 10 days makes for certain keyword prices!  On that day, almost every keyword I entered had a minimum bid of around $.15 per click.  Keep in mind that you would actually pay less than that, usually by several cents; that's merely your bid, your "not to exceed" price per click.  And you would obviously bid higher than the minimum for higher placement in the ads.  Out of 10-15 keywords, the ones along the lines of "tech blogs", "best tech blog", "business blogs", etc. were the cheapest, while "political blogs", "conservative blogs", "best political blog", etc. went for minimums of $.20-.25 per click, so quite a bit more (.25 is 67% more than .15).  Earlier this week, I checked again and noticed that several of the political keywords had gone up to $.50, and later the same day to $1.00!  Apparently the Presidential campaigns are discovering AdWords right this very week:  yesterday and today, "conservative blogs", "best liberal blog", and "political blog" are going for $1 (there are differences if you use "blog" or "blogs", so cover your bases - "best liberal blogs" with the "s" at the end is only .50 instead of 1.00 without the "s"), and SHOCKINGLY, "best political blogs" has a minimum bid of $5 PER CLICK.  It was $.25 8-9 days earlier, giving it a 20-fold increase in 8 days.  Wow - Google's going to get a HUGE boost this campaign season, which, amazingly, is already in full swing as of Feb. '07, making it a 21-month campaign.  Just think what the prices of keywords will be as the campaigns REALLY crank up.  Think it can't get much higher?  I saw bids for "residential moving companies", city-specific, for a friend's company increase from $2-3/click to over $14/click from around Dec '04 to Oct '05.  For 1 lousy click on a website.  Why didn't I go to Stanford and start a company?  Oh, I remember - I knew they wouldn't let me in, so I didn't bother trying.  Go Cardinal!

The WSJ reports that Oracle is purchasing Santa Clara-based Hyperion Solutions, a Business Intelligence company, for $3.3B.  BI software, as it's called, fills in the gap between the data contained in a company's GL, or "transaction" system (which Oracle dominates), and a company's internal analysts, allowing them to make sense of the accounting data.  Yes, to non-financial/accounting people, finance and accounting all looks the same, but it's really not.  The accountants need to follow the rules and book the entries properly, while the financial analysts whiz around in Excel looking at variances, charts, growth rates, b.u performance, etc.  Hyperion is GREAT at this (I know, because I've made it my business to be an expert in Hyperion products), and Oracle has been the 800-pound gorilla lurking around the corner - a role it's all-too familiar with!  The eternal battle has been between company I.T. departments, typically in Oracle's back pocket and pushing to be end-to-end Oracle shops for ease of administration, and end-users, pushing for Hyperion products (particularly what's called Essbase, an Excel add-in) because they allow them to do what they do best, which is live in Excel and access multi-relational databases (as opposed to 2-d datatbases, with the 2 dimensions being Fields and Records, or Columns and Rows) on an Oracle-sized scale without having to figure out Microsoft Access and it's table-linking hell and limited specs.  I for one am thrilled with this news, because 1) it makes me look smart to my colleagues since I've been calling for this for the past year and a half or so when Hyperion leaped even further ahead with their latest offering, and 2) because now that I.T./Finance-Accounting depertmental battle can be laid to rest.  Today is a good day.