LECHTANSKI.NET

Let’s start with this. I am connected. I have a Blackberry. I blog. I tweet. I’m on Facebook. I’m LinkedIn. I have my own domain. This is all for both work and personal reasons.

I’ve found myself opening my Blackberry RSS reader at red traffic lights. I’ve had my lovely wife pull the Blackberry from my hands during dinner with friends. I’ve found myself watching TV while being logged onto Facebook, clicking through emails on my Blackberry and talking on the phone.

Frankly, I’ve hit a wall. It’s OK to be connected, but I have made the decision to not live my life connected moment to moment. Two things led to this decision.

1. A few years ago I was on a whale watching boat ride. Camera in hand, and hearing the oohs and ahhs of other passengers, I would swing around trying to capture the jumping whale on a memory stick. I was not very successful. And I didn’t get to actually see many of the whales because I was too busy staring at the LCD screen of my camera. Finally, I gave up on the camera and just started watching nature.
2. More recently I went to a marketing automation seminar a couple of weeks ago. Participants were encouraged to tweet the event in real time… during presentations. This seemed like a good idea, but I noticed that in order to tweet I needed to stop paying attention to the speaker. And then to follow the Twitter event feed, I was staring at my Blackberry, not paying much attention to the event itself. And to top that, most of the tweets were simple regurgitations of some of the key points of the person currently speaking.

I’m done. It’s over. I check my email when I have a second. I’ll tweet when something comes up (usually when I’m traveling).

As a marketer, I’ve been curious how these hyper-connected tools will be monetized. There is more to think about here. I’ve had my toe dipped in this water from a business perspective for a couple of years, but still, I’ve got to marinate a bit more on this.

Sure, there are only so many words in the English language. And being concerned with Branding myself, I understand the desire for a memorable and original organization name. But I have recently come upon a few company names that confuse me.

The late 90s brought us wacky, non sequitur company names. Ostensibly this was because of the quest for a unique .com url. So we got Monster.com, instead of jobs.com. Instead of Search.com we get Google.

But in some cases, I think we’ve gone round the bend. A few I’ve been seeing lately include:

• Survey Monkey – I would never send a survey to a customer that had the word Monkey anywhere near it. And I like monkeys as much as the next guy.
• Silverpop – This makes me think of either a metallic candy or being the first loser at the Olympics.
• Meltwater – If water is already melted, doesn’t that imply this company wants to charge me for something that has already been done?
• e{insert word] – To of course signify that your using electricity in your technological innovation.
• i[insert word] – Thank you, iPod.

I work for a rather conservative private company. As well, I get regular cold calls from company wanting to sell us services. To me the best names are ones that capture the essence of the product or service. And from a potential vendor perspective, I’d recommend using words that your potential customers will want to be associated with.

All this being said Survey Monkey is out there and doing fine, but I’ll stick with Constant Contact.

I wrote almost a year ago about McDonald’s attempt to steal coffee customers from Starbucks. The Golden Arches attempt way back in July 2008 was to tell Starbucks customers they were snobs who only read obscure Russian literature (note the Commie undertone). At the same time, you were dumb to be paying $4 for coffee.

Flash forward to today. McDonalds is really pushing their espresso, mochas and iced mochas. How much do they cost? $3.99.

If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em.

Like poop jokes, dogs in commercials are always funny. It is so easy to assign human emotions to the K9, and even make them talk without it being creepy (as opposed to computer-generated talking babies, which should illegal).

DVRs are so great, for many reasons, one of which is skipping commercials of course. But there are two I saw today as I was sipping my coffee this morning that are totally hilarious. Check out this Petco ad.

And this one which you need to fast forward this Sprint one to about 20 seconds for Jaime the talking boxer. Awesome.

So, I haven’t really been paying attention to the struggle between television advertisers and DVR/PVR/TIVO for a while. But essentially, if you are taking advantage skipping commercials with your DVR, you are driving down the value of television advertising.

As I have mentioned before, one of the cleanest ways to get around this is through product placement.

One of my favorite shows right now is Burn Notice, and it is shamelessly positioning products. Michael Westen recently spent a few voice-over seconds talking about how offensive driving is helped by the computer-controlled stability control, and the ability to disable it with the touch of a button, in his ex-girlfriend’s convertible Saab. The show’s website will even help you identify and buy the clothes appearing in the show. This has been relatively well done, except for one scene that had little explanation for Michael wearing sandals, other than they wanted to direct you to Zappos.

Product placement also helps out HBO and Showtime. Subscribers pay the same monthly bill to watch both Weeds and/or a piece of cable turd. There is a zero-sum pool of money from which to produce all of these shows whether they are stinkers or Golden Globe-winning ratings monsters. There is no advertising to supplement superstar salaries and exotic location shoots. Enter product placement. In modern shows, like The Sopranos, there was Coke and Entemann’s. But what about The Tudors? This is a period show about King Henry VIII and the crazy Boelyn clan, back in the 1500’s. How can they put product placement to work to pay for all of those fancy clothes?

I’ve got it. The various associations have a great opportunity:

• Beef – “It’s what for dinner”
• Cotton – “My, that tunic is soft and durable, what is that animal skin?” “Why no, squire, it is cotton!”
• Coffee – Really, you can fit Juan Valdez just about anywhere.

Have you seen any other blatant product placement campaigns? I’ll help with one more: Dodge Ram trucks in The Sarah Conner Chronicles. There had to have been a Dodge marketer on the set for those vehicle montages.