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How do you get drunks to avoid getting behind the wheel? Well…in Germany they came up with The Piss-Screen – a peeing game that involves a video driving simulation that makes its point and encourages drunk urinaters to take a cab. The video game screen above each urinal starts playing as soon as someone begins to pee. Swing your stream right, and the car goes right, swing left….you get the idea. The more blasted you are, the slower your response, reinforcing the effects of alcohol to the gamer. The game ends in a horrific crash-sequence, emphasizing the point.

Great idea.

Created by Saatchi & Saatchi, Germany

Tonight I finished reading a very practical and insightful book titled Beyond Buzz: The Next Generation of Word-of-Mouth Marketing by Lois Kelly. In it, Kelley provides a practical, how-to guide for marketing professionals to navigate the world of conversational marketing.

She outlines and explains the top nine types of stories that people naturally like to talk about.

She arrived at this list by tracking and categorizing business/marketing communications for a ten year period. The practical use of The Nine Block Conversation Planner is to translate conventional marketing messages into conversational points of view and create program ideas worth talking about.

The top nine are (excerpts from the book):

1. Aspirations and beliefs. More than any other topic, people like to hear about aspirations and beliefs. (This may be why religion is the most popular word-of-mouth topic, ever.) Sun Microsystems’ focus on sharing and ending the digital divide is an example of a belief-based point of view as is Patagonia founder Yvon Chouinard’s views about how companies can grow by reducing pollution and creating more sustainable business strategies. Aspirations are helpful because they help us connect emotionally to the speaker, the company, and the issues. They help us see into a person or company’s soul.

2. David vs. Goliath. In the story of David and Goliath, the young Hebrew David took on the Philistine giant Goliath and beat him. Sharing stories about how a small organization is taking on a big company is great business sport. Rooting for the underdog grabs our emotions, creates meaning, and invokes passion. We like to listen to the little guy talk about how he’s going to win and why the world—or the industry—will be a better place for it. Like how Southwest Airlines conquered the big carriers and the way social media is taking on the media giants.

3. Avalanche about to roll. The mountain is rumbling, the sun is getting stronger, but the rocks and snow are yet to fall. You want to tune in and listen to the “avalanche about to roll” topic because you know that there’s a chance that you will be killed if caught unaware. This theme taps into our desire to get the inside story before it’s widely known. It’s not only interesting to hear someone speak about these ideas, they have the ingredients for optimal viral and pass-along effect. Charles Schwab started his company by listening to rumbling market conversations about investing. The avalanche about to roll was that the middle class was growing more interested in buying stocks, especially as companies were cutting out pensions and more people were beginning to control their own retirement savings through IRAs and 401ks.

4. Anxieties. Anxiety is a cousin of the avalanche about to roll, but it is more about uncertainty than an emerging, disruptive trend. We are in all matters more swiftly motivated by fear than appreciation of the good…in other words, if we don’t feel threatened and scared, we tend not to pay attention. Examples of anxiety themes abound: (1) Financial services companies urging baby boomers to hurry up and invest more for retirement: “You’re 55. Will you have your needed $3.2 million to retire comfortably?” (2) Tutoring companies planting seeds of doubt about whether our kids will score well enough on the SATs to get into a good college. Although anxiety themes grab attention, you have to proceed with caution because people are becoming pretty skeptical. Too many politicians, companies have bombarded us with FUD (fear, uncertainty and doubt) with no facts to back up their point.

5. Contrarian/counterintuitive/challenging assumptions. These three themes are like first cousins, similar in many ways but slightly different. Contrarian perspectives defy conventional wisdom; they are positions that often are not in line with—or may even be directly opposite to—the wisdom of the crowd. The boldness of contrarian views grabs attention; the more original and less arrogant they are, the more useful they will be in provoking meaningful conversations.

Counterintuitive ideas fight with what our intuition (as opposed to a majority of the public) says is true. When you introduce counterintuitive ideas, it takes people a minute to reconcile the objective truth with their gut assumption about the topic. Framing views counter to how we intuitively think about topics—going against natural “gut instincts”—pauses and then resets how we think and talk about concepts.

Challenging widely-held assumptions means that when everyone else says the reason for an event is X, you show that it’s actually Y. Challenging assumptions is good for debate and discussion, and especially important in protecting corporate reputation.

6. Personalities and personal stories. There’s nothing more interesting than a personal story with some life lessons to help us understand what makes executives tick and what they value the most. The points of these personal stories are remembered, retold, and instilled into organizational culture. Robert Goizueta, the respected CEO of Coca-Cola, said he hated giving speeches but he was always telling stories—often personal ones about how he and his family had to flee Cuba when Castro took control and had nothing more than his education. When Steve Jobs gave the commencement address to Stanford University in June 2005, he shared his personal story and life lessons. That commencement address, “Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish,” was talked about on thousands of blog and was published verbatim in Fortune magazine. It helped us see Jobs in a new light.

7. How-to stories and advice. Theoretical and thought-provoking ideas are nice, but people love pragmatic how-to advice: how to solve problems, find next practices, and overcome common obstacles. To be interesting, how-to themes need to be fresh and original, providing a new twist to what people already know or tackle thorny issues. For example, in talking with female customers and doing research, Home Depot was surprised to find that women initiate a big percentage of home improvement projects. So the company started how-to clinics and do-it-herself workshops that have been attended by more than 200,000 women.

8. Glitz and glam. Robert Palmer sang about being addicted to love. Our society is more addicted to glamor and celebrity. Finding a way to logically link to something glitzy and glamorous is a surefire conversation starter. For example, Sun Microsystems created a text-messaging program that allows audiences at U2’s rock concerts to get a text message from Bono on their mobile phones after the concert, sending them to the One Campaign Web site. Tagging on to the widespread interest in the Academy Awards, Randall Rothenberg, director of intellectual property at consultancy Booz Allen-Hamilton, crafted a point of view about the similarity between creating new “star” brands and movie stars.

9. Seasonal/event-related. Tying into seasonal or major events has a limited shelf life. But these themes, done right, may appeal to sales reps looking for something interesting to talk to customers about. Seasonal and event-related topics can be used in weekly voice mails to employees, or featured in departmental or company-wide presentations. Talking about industry predictions around the New Year, advertising during SuperBowl season, executive compensation reform when an executive of a well known company “resigns” with an especially bloated compensation package are examples of this type of story.

The desire to be ‘big’ has been an all-consuming focus in the business world. The predominant thinking has been that big leads to better and that big equals more profit. Anyone who questions the validity of this concept is condemned as a heretic. It’s so entrenched as a business mantra that it seems that ‘big’ is the foremost business purpose. THE objective, rather than an outcome of a well-crafted plan and consistent delivery of ‘better’.

In the last week, there have been three specific stories that brought this issue to the forefront and made me think about the effects of the ‘drive to bigness’.

In a February 14 internal memo, Starbucks Chairman Howard Schultz criticized a number of decisions that have led to the watering down of the Starbucks experience.

“Over the past ten years, in order to achieve the growth, development, and scale necessary to go from less than 1,000 stores to 13,000 stores and beyond, we have had to make a series of decisions that, in retrospect, have lead to the watering down of the Starbucks experience, and, what some might call the commoditization of our brand.”

He goes on to list what he sees as the underlying issues they need to solve and to take his share of responsibility for those decisions. Many initially questioned the authenticity of the memo, but according to a story in AdAge the company confirmed it as authentic.

Whole Foods is another example where the quest for big has caused a drift toward the middle, thereby losing some of what made it successful in the first place. In a story in today’s New York Times, it says some people believe the chain is “not living up to its core values — in particular, protecting the environment and supporting organic agriculture and local farmers. In interviews, some of the customers who describe themselves as committed to these values say they have become disillusioned and taken their business elsewhere. “They are at such a level you expect the best from them, and if you don’t live up to it, people notice,” said Todd Hale, a senior vice president of consumer and shopper insights for Nielsen, the market research company.”

Whole Foods has grown from a small business to a mega-chain with 193 stores, and just last week announced a deal to acquire the 110 stores of its largest rival, Wild Oats.

In the Advertising Agency business, an industry already under intense pressure and scrutiny relative to the efficacy of the full-service agency business model, Forrester Research further added to the pain with the release of a rather bleak report entitled “Help Wanted: 21st Century Agency”. The report says clients are dissatisfied, but for no clear reason that data can back up. (Just think of what happened with Cramer-Krasselt late last week.) Instead it’s a vague disenchantment and disappointment that value is not being delivered at a meaningful enough level.

Today’s struggle may be a result of sins of the past — the way in which the agency industry grew. In the quest for ‘bigger’, agency holding companies purchased lots of diversified companies and specialty services groups in the belief they could create an integrated offering by virtue of having these ‘units’ that their full service agencies could call on as needed. The logic was that because it was all under the same holding company banner (keeping the money in the family) it could integrate the offering while still allowing these specialized units to have their own clients/projects thereby avoiding the competitive conflict problem. Seems logical on the surface. The media agnostic pitch to clients worked well for a while because the story made sense. Agency holding companies got real big.

But, the approach didn’t deliver real integration or integrated thinking on a holistic level (in part because of P&L lines that worked against collaboration among agency sister companies and in part because of the infamous above the line/below the line mentality). At best, it delivered a multi-channel marketing capabilities set. Without the thinking, you can’t create an integrated solution or deliver a customer-centric or user-oriented approach that is in sync with today’s media/consumer scape. So now agencies are desperately trying to fold these capabilities and units into the main agency body and reworking their process and operations, as well as changing internal mindsets to get to a more integrated and accountable service deliver. (On top of scrambling to keep up with the quickly changing media landscape.) It’s a difficult predicament, but one that we need to find innovative solutions for in order to thrive and maintain value as a strategic partner. Because as one anonymous CMO was quoted as saying: “Client-side marketers are better at managing integrated campaigns and being media-agnostic.”

There are a lot of people doing some heavy-duty introspection and that bodes well. Personally, I find it refreshing that Schultz is doing some soul searching about Starbucks and like this post in TomPeters.com “I was beginning to wonder whether another great experience was going to surrender to the short-term gains of operational excellence, Howard Schultz gave me faith.”, I too have hope that if someone as revered as Howard Schultz gets it, maybe others will too. The upside of pushing the question to the forefront is that if we truly look at and understand the realities and effects of the all-out quest for ‘big’, perhaps we can create ‘better’. As Howard Schultz is famous for saying, “success is not an entitlement.” It has to be earned over and over and over.

Major yuck! I’ve completely lost my appetite.

This from a Yahoo news story:

“News video showing about a dozen rats running around a KFC-Taco Bell restaurant in Greenwich Village was widely disseminated Friday on TV stations and the Internet.

The footage, taken from the sidewalk through a window, showed the rats running around the floor, between counters and tables and on children’s high chairs. The establishment was not open at the time.

News crews flocked to the scene, and onlookers gave a play-by-play as the rodents moved about. When one rat came close to the window, a person on the sidewalk said: “He’s coming for his close-up.”

Though it’s just one small franchisee shop in New York, the story has spread like crazy. This all started Friday morning and by Friday night, the rat story was seen worldwide. Nothing like this stays isolated. Just type “rats at KFC” in the search field on Technorati and you’ll see over 1400 blog posts. There are thousands of stories on Google.

The only statement I found from YUM was this: “This is completely unacceptable and is an absolute violation of our high standards,” Yum Brands said in a statement.

Maybe they don’t feel they have to do much since it was a franchise and not a company owned location, but they seem to forget that this is their brand that is being affected. They should probably be a bit more stand up about this. It will be interesting to see how badly the brands are damaged by this very gross situation.

JetBlue’s valentine was anything but sweet. As most everyone knows by now, an East-coast storm combined with some operational stumbles stranded thousands of JetBlue passengers on Valentine’s Day. Toilets overflowed when nine planeloads of JetBlue Airways passengers sat on the tarmac for six hours or more at JFK in New York. Tempers overheated as the carrier canceled a quarter of its flights over the President’s Day weekend. Resulting in some very pissed off and frustrated customers and lots of bad press.

But, I’ve been impressed with some of the steps they’ve taken to own up to the mistakes including the “customers’ bill of rights” unveiled Tuesday. I’ve been particularly impressed by the stand up nature of JetBlue CEO David Neeleman. He’s taken all the blame for the Valentine’s Day operational meltdown. No finger pointing or hiding. He has apologized in e-mails, in news reports, on JetBlue’s website, on a YouTube video and even on “Late Night With David Letterman.” And it feels like a genuine, heartfelt apology. Most airline executives (or any executive for that matter) are more inclined to hide beneath their desks and let their minions handle the angry mobs. But Neeleman has been standup enough to be not only the face of the problem, but is earning credibility as the face of the solution as well.

Its clear JetBlue takes its hard-won brand fame seriously, and from the video and triage response it seems like they are making real, fundamental changes on behalf of their customers. That’s encouraging and impressive. That kind of humility and transparency about the problem goes a long way to mitigate customer frustrations. Every company and everyone makes mistakes, but too many try to “spin” their way out of it by trying to offload blame on circumstances or finger pointing at others. Owning up to it and taking this kind of genuine approach will help JetBlue restore confidence and ensure their evangelists remain loyal.

So many dumb moments…so little time. Business 2.0 has their picks for the 101 dumbest of 2006.

Three guesses who’s at number one (and the first two don’t count.) Surprise….it’s Wal-Mart, but this time for hiring Edelman to create their “Candidate Wal-Mart” campaign.

“As a result, candidate Wal-Mart quickly becomes, well, the most popular politician since Spiro Agnew. By year’s end Wal-Mart suffers its first quarterly profit drop in a decade, sees same-store sales decline in November’s run-up to the crucial holiday shopping season, and suffers a series of public relations gaffes so stunning that it lands six spots in this year’s edition of the 101 Dumbest Moments.”

Six spots! Not a good year for Wal-Mart.

At number two: Northwest Airlines begins laying off thousands of ground workers, but not before issuing some of them a handy guide, “101 Ways to Save Money”. That’s cold.

The newly redesigned Wall Street Journal hit newsstands this morning, and nearly 500,000 copies were available free at newsstands across the country.

The new look includes bolder headlines, a brighter look, a reduced page width and even a new font created specifically for the WSJ called “Exchange”.

The Readers’ Guide highlights the whats and whys of the redesign. According to the press release, “A cornerstone of the Journal will be an increased focus on interpretation, insight and ideas—more of what the news means, not just what happened. Other changes include new content features, innovative newspaper navigation, and better print-online alignment.”

The reference to gently pointing folks online underscores the delicate balance between tradition and relevancy. The fact is, our expectations of media have shifted, making this an era when we expect media to embrace that change or we go elsewhere. More synopsis, bolder headlines, a brighter colors and visuals are all techniques that have been used by long-copy web sites and other print publications to help people get through content quickly, but just how far can WSJ go and still be “the” business icon?

I get the feeling the WSJ is engaged in a tough balancing act going forward. They need to stay true to their brand, the cornerstone of which is long-form, text-oriented content. But they also need to accomodate reader “scanning” in order to reflect today’s consumer desire for an easier-to-use newspaper that adds value as readers get news tidbits from multiple sources and channels throughout the day.

It looks like via this redesign they are trying to preserve their brand tradition while acknowledging that the way people absorb content has and is continuing to change rapidly. Supporting readers who “submerge” as well as those who “skim” will be their ongoing challenge.

I just read a great story in the Pitch about the history of the Wal-mart account and the relationship with long-term agency Bernstein Rein.

I admit, I’m totally engrossed in the Wal-mart agency review saga and am reading everything published on the subject. But apparently I’m not alone. Wal-Mart and its travails have reverberated throughout the ad world.
AdAge has 5 stories related to recent events:

In Bentonville, Buyers Abide by Stringent Code

Wal-Mart Ethics Code

1. Follow the law at all times.
2. Be honest and fair.
3. Never manipulate, misrepresent, abuse or conceal information.
4. Avoid conflicts of interest between work and personal life.
5. Never discriminate.
6. Never act unethically — even if someone else tells you to.
7. Never ask someone to act unethically.
8. Seek assistance if you have questions about ethics.
9. Cooperate with any investigation of a possible ethics violation.
10. Report ethics violators.

Draft Dealt Staggering Blow After Strutting Like A Champ

DraftFCB CEO Howard Draft went from triumphant hero to disaster management overnight.

Advertising Age had decided that DraftFCB, thanks to the boldness of its model and the Wal-Mart new-business coup, was going to be this publication’s Agency of the Year, a decision that would have been officially announced in our Jan. 8 issue.

Now, all that has changed.

Sam’s Successors Share Blame For Wal-Mart Shame

Sam Walton must be rolling in his grave.

Almost nothing could be more contrary to Wal-Mart’s culture and heritage than a high-profile marketing executive seen taking rides in high-priced cars with current and potential vendors or accused in the press of accepting expensive entertainment and gratuities from them.

As Wal-Mart Reopens Review, Windy City Ad Community Lets Out A Groan

In the wake of Roehm-gate, Wal-Mart has gone from being the Chicago ad community’s redemption to being a low point in an already-grim 24 months.

Pushing Envelope Julie’s MO–Not Wal-Mart’s

Pushing the envelope of propriety

If there is any practical lesson from this affair, it’s that the client is the company — not the senior VP-marketing — and the client’s values system is not to be taken lightly. DraftFCB evidently bought into Roehm’s self-image as a “change agent.”

Yeah, well, congratulations. Wal-Mart is now changing agencies.

Even the Chicago Tribune is running stories filled with advice for DraftFCB:

DraftFCB needs to act quickly to restore its reputation.

If Draft and his team determine the agency did nothing wrong, they should write a strongly worded letter to Wal-Mart and make it public, sending copies to their clients, prospective clients and employees, advised Robert Dilenschneider, head of the Dilenschneider Group in New York.

“They’ve been fired. They have nothing to lose,” he said in an interview Friday.

If Draft concludes the agency did cross a line somewhere, he should express outrage and remove the people involved, Dilenschneider said. Draft also should ask Wal-Mart to reconsider its stand that DraftFCB won’t be allowed to bid in the new competition for the giant discount chain’s account.

“They shouldn’t wait until Monday. They should do it today,” Dilenschneider said.

I wonder what will happen next.

If you’re a marketer and you still think social networking sites and blogs are the cloistered domain of computer geeks and something you can ignore…think again…or start polishing up your resume.

Fast-forward to today with consumers of all types flocking to social media sites to share brand experiences. Social Media such as blogs, wikis, forums and user-generated content sites like flickr, delicious, MySpace and YouTube have become both a source of information and entertainment. While this new age of digital word of mouth is dramatically shaping the way brands are perceived, many marketers and business managers are still amazingly unaware of the influence of social media on everything from brand reputation to purchase behaviors.

The influence traditional media and marketing have over consumer perception is waning as people use the plethora of digital technologies to circumvent traditional sources to obtain information and entertainment from each other. Simply look at the recent comScore and NetRatings traffic numbers for the likes of sites like YouTube and MySpace, and you quickly get a lesson in the power of user-generated content in endorsing or condemning a product or service.

According to Technorati CEO and founder, David Sifry’s most recent “State of the Blogsphere”; there are now 57 million blogs (about 55% of which are active), about 100,000 new blogs created each day, and 1.3 million posts a day (that’s double the volume of this time last year). At the current growth rate, the blogsphere is doubling every 236 days or so.

The interesting number that really caught my eye is the number of “authoritative” blogs (authority is a ranking assigned by Technorati based on tracking the number of distinct blogs that link to it over the past 6 months). The fact is there are more authoritative blogs than there are traditional outlets in any single medium.

There are 30,488 “high authority” and “very high authority” blogs. (This “authority” level means they each have more than 100 other blogs linking to them in the last 6 months.) For context there are about 13,000 radio stations, 9,000 TV stations, and 17,000 magazines in the US. (source: Forrester Research) That’s a lot of voices, a significant readership and a lot of influence.

Rueters reports that blogs are a more trusted source of information (24 percent) than television advertising (17 percent) and email marketing (14 percent). But blogs still lag behind newspapers (30 percent) in the credibility department. This according to a survey commissioned by Hotwire, a public relations consultancy working in the technology sector.

The evidence relative to the influence of blogs on everything from public opinion to purchase decisions is growing. In this article, on the impact of blogs in the b2b sector, a KnowledgeStorm/McCann survey of purchase behavior found that 53% of respondents said blogs influence their purchase decisions. That influence looms even larger over regular blog users. Of the respondents who said they read blogs daily, nearly 69% said blogs influenced their purchase behavior.

As a marketer, if you don’t have a program in place to monitor your brands in the social media, put one in place. Because detecting influence and understanding its role in how people perceive and adopt your product or service online can give you a powerful tool for marketing programs, advertising approaches and competitive business intelligence.

We’ve had an interesting run of grassroots campaigns and marketing blunders, some of which even managed to shock the media savvy. It all started with the 400 pound Steve Vaught, better known as the “Fat Man Walking,” who set off on a walk across America to shed his excess weight and gain a sense of health and happiness.
About 1/3 into Vaught’s trek, another walker stepped on to the open road – chronic pain sufferer and spokesperson for The National Pain Foundation Dennis Kinch, began a 2,400-mile trek along Route 66 to raise awareness of chronic pain issues, treatment and support. Kinch took his time, meeting with patients, doctors and clinics along the way to educate them on their pain treatment options.

Much like Steve Vaught suffers from being overweight, Dennis Kinch suffers from two degenerative bone diseases that will probably one day inhibit him from walking – AND – although both walkers were stepping out onto the open road for important causes, there was something very different about both campaigns. Vaught was walking for himself, and Kinch was walking for others.

My heart belongs to “Where’s Dennis?” because my PR peers and I headed the media coverage efforts of the campaign. As I began pitching the story of Dennis Kinch to the press, I realized that both of these campaigns were going to be perceived very differently by the media. It seemed that everyone was comparing the chronic pain sufferer to the fat man, and that became slightly damaging. Throughout Vaught’s campaign, there were accusations that he wasn’t walking the entire length of his route, but instead hitching rides to get from one place to another. He was also accused of eating at Waffle Houses and Dunkin’ Donuts. I had a few reporters towards the end of the “Where’s Dennis?” campaign tell me that Kinch was just another walker and since the Fat Man ended up being a scam, it left a bad image of “walkers with a cause” in the eyes of much of the media.

Bottom line – Fat Man Walking wasn’t really trying to educate Americans on obesity, health and a change of lifestyle. He was on a walk for himself, and he was successful – he dropped 100 pounds and gained a ton of media coverage. He became a sensationalistic star because, unlike chronic pain, obesity sells in America. Dennis Kinch, however, gained a very modest amount of national media, inspired hundreds of people he met along the way, and no matter how far he walked, he would never shed or lose his pain. It’s chronic. It will be a part of him forever.

Dennis Kinch had over 125 million media impressions since the start of his campaign, and most of them came from small markets that he walked through along his route. If The National Pain Foundation and Dennis Kinch had as much national press as Steve Vaught, American’s would be more educated on chronic pain, a health issue that affects 75 million people in the United States. Instead, the story of Dennis Kinch was lost in the fame and glory of the Fat Man Walking, and I’m not sure what knowledge Americans gained from that movement.