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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Hyundai is pushing their new Assurance Guarantee in a big way. Buy a new Hyundai and if you lose your source of income in the next year, you can return the car. This loosely translates to: we care enough that we don’t want you to stress about making car payments if you lose your job, and by the way, our company is going to be around in a year unlike some others you might have heard about. This makes for a much less self serving, one-sided message than Nissan’s cold attempt. Although the url for this assurance is a little shitty: www.walkawayusa.com. That’s nice.

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“You don’t just need a car, you need a car company.”

Wow! That’s cold. It’s obvious they’re poking at the American car companies facing potential bankruptcy – sorry, Organized Bankruptcy.

The concern whether people will buy a car from a company in bankruptcy is well reported. The media was already doing a good job of that. There was no need for Nissan to get down in the gutter and address it, too.

Especially when one of those troubled companies (Hint: Chrysler) was good enough for a non-partnership partnership just this last April. What does that say about Nissan the company?

This kind of negative advertising is a bad idea. Nissan is a respected company producing quality cars. But promoting yourself by tearing someone else down leaves a bad taste in the consumer’s mouth. Sure you want attention, and the timing of the ad is about right. The public is ready for smaller, more fuel-efficient cars, and that is Nissan’s niche. A snappy one-liner is a disappointment.

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My case today? Starbucks. I admit it. I have made fun of being able to see three different Starbucks within 20 yards. I have wondered how many stores could possibly be supported. But also, I have gone to Starbucks in England, Frankfurt and virtually every other city I have visited in the last 10 years, if available.

Sure, people complain that it’s too corporate. That local coffee shops are way better, and that Starbucks is to coffee what Disney is to the real world. Whatever. They make good coffee and I like it.

Starbucks is recognized as having ridiculous growth for years. Like, way too much ridiculous growth for too many years. Metro corners, grocery stores, airports, shopping malls, drive thrus… anywhere people moving or sitting may want coffee. More locations than McDonalds?

Speaking of McDonalds (smooth segway…), the home of the Big Mac wants to take on Starbucks by selling “designer” coffee. So, McDonalds sees an opportunity. It has a launched a full radio and billboard campaign going right at Starbucks.

“Four Bucks is Dumb”

“Espresso Served Cold, Not Snobby”

And radio commercials that have some kind of message about coffee and intelligence not going together or something. Not sure.

And earlier this year, when the financial woes, employee training and store closure plans were reported, one would expect that people would be hooting and hollering that it’s about time Starbucks falls.

But, No. People are vying for their Starbucks! The day after I heard about the campaigns to save the neighborhood Starbucks scheduled for closure, my wife casually mentions she is going to avoid McDonald’s coffee because of the bad ad campaign (shouldn’t be too hard, since we don’t hit McDonald’s too much, but she said it none the less).

So I think Starbucks is turning the cultural trait on its head. People like their coffee, and appreciate their Starbucks. And besides: McDonald’s, the epitome of American fast food, thinks the public will rebel against Starbucks, the biggest coffee chain in the world. If anything, Coffee drinkers are rebelling to neighborhood coffee shops. They’re not going to trade one mass-market venue for another.

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Well, that was, like, 20 years ago. And the more things change the more they stay the same. Last year there was Miller Chill: Miller beer’s answer to people buying Corona and dropping in a slice of lime and a couple of shakes of salt. Miller Chill has a hint of lime & salt. I’ve tried it, and it reminds me of something like Taos: chick beer. It took me and my friend Simon the better part of a six-pack to decide we didn’t care for it.

Anyway, new this year is Bud Light Lime (Bud Light with a splash of lime): another competitive copycat product to try and retain a tiny sliver of the beer mass market.

So, I still get “me, too” products when you are Coke vs. Pepsi or Miller vs. Bud. But what if we were talking about Coke vs. Fresca?

What about other competitive relationships?

Does it make sense for a market leader to compete on a “me, too” level? No. Chances are you didn’t get to be the market leader by merely maintaining the status quo. And if a competitor has caught you off guard with a new product, now is not the time for you to act like the underdog. If you’ve been scooped, step back. Take stock. Look beyond. What is it that made you the market leader in the first place? It was capturing lightning in a bottle. Put yourself in the position to do it again. That’s not going to happen by letting your competition do your product development.

Does it make sense for a guerilla in the market to compete on a “me, too” level? No. The market leader got there for a reason, and a duplicate product with a different brand on it is rarely worth a switch. You need to pull off that next generation product the market leader has been trying to get at for a couple of years. You get to do the scooping, because you’re smaller and faster and can shake up the status quo. Plus you don’t have to worry about introducing something new and instantly obsolescing everything you built your market leadership on. Heavy is the head that wears the crown.

And besides, copying a product is no fun, because it is obvious you are copying what you believe to be a good idea. And that idea is someone else’s.

UPDATE: We went to Lake Chelan last weekend, and Simon had some of the Bud Light Lime. I didn’t want it, and I didn’t want to like it, but I tried it. It was Delicious! You should try it.

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So, to some degree, my brain shuts off when I hear these terms thrown about. But then, every now and again I discover that something I’ve been doing has a sadly jargonistic name. And “integrated marketing campaign” is one of those terms.

Here’s the funny thing I’ve discovered about creating an integrated marketing campaign. It is way easier than creating what I guess could be called a disintegrated campaign.

Basically, each of your marketing components is inspired by all of the others. Advertisements and press releases are coordinated and then timed with trade shows or product events. Web sites look like, and are organized like, advertisements and catalogs. Catalogs refer to web sites, ads refer to web sites, pretty much everything refers back to a web site that is up to date and completes the story that is started by the catalog, ad or press release.

And all of this is done to get the product in front of the customer, when they are in the mood to buy.

In an integrated campaign, you get to create the whole thing once, rather than reinventing the wheel every time you need an ad or a press release or a web graphic. You get everybody on board once, rather than sending graphics, slogans or pictures around for approval every time something comes up.

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