• If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice: the appeal of simplification by choice elimination – At the bottom of the Heaven's Dog cocktail list there's a category called "Freedom from Choice," where you leave it up to the bar staff to decide your drink. Diners choose the spirit they'd like and whether it should be "citrus-driven or spirituous."
• Home + Housewares Show 2009…in Cartoons! – Pithy, brilliant, hilarious. Applies pretty much to every tradeshow I've ever been to.
• Ask Jeremiah: The Comprehensive FAQ Guide to Twitter – It's a great document, but an online FAQ on someone's site is good for the type of user who is going to seek this document out…the mass adoption from Twitter is not going be as well supported by documents like this as it would be through the experience that Twitter itself creates
• Lisa Smith and Caroline Linder at the Home + Housewares Show 2009 – "a maze of the bizarre and the banal, including picture frame air fresheners, pet hair picker-uppers, fingerprintless garbage cans, antibacterial marinaters, high-power vacuum cleaners, automatic hair-cutters, gas-powered blenders, anti-static dusters and instant boot dryers."
  "the spectacle is especially nightmarish; it represents the darker side of our discipline–product design gone wild and unchecked in the marketplace"
  "Who knew that both Miami Vice and the Southwestern pottery craze are preserved within the wide color range of KitchenAid Mixers?"
  "Q: How did you pick these forms? A:Oh, these are historical forms that we made up.""

I wonder how I end up on these mailing lists. I just got a flier for an upcoming event in San Jose called RoboNexus – “North America’s Largest Business and Consumer Robotics Expo!”

(click on any picture to enlarge it)

Today I spent a little bit of time at AD:TECH. To set the frame of reference here – this (interactive technology for advertising) isn’t my field; I went out of curiosity and a chance to meet a friend for lunch. I attended the opening keynote and looked around the exhibit hall. There are several days of presentations and seminars that I didn’t experience.

The opening keynote featured John Costello, Executive Vice President, Merchandising & Marketing, The Home Depot, and Mary Meeker, who watches Internet and advertising for Morgan Stanley (I seem to remember a detailed New Yorker profile of her a few years back; perhaps before the bubble burst).

John Costello (all quotes approximate): “I am often asked how many brand managers do we have? The answer is 325,000 – the number of associates we have.” He went on to stress how all the touchpoints for the customer need to work together. You may see a great ad on TV but if you go to the website and it’s difficult to use, it’s no good. This isn’t so trite because as much as it’s a good idea, it’s just not practiced that way. Home Depot certainly isn’t living up to Costello’s idea. My bad experience with their “clinics” here and see here for their non-response when I tried to resolve it.

Mary gave a really dense presentation, but reassured us that the slides were online. They are, and for now you can read ’em here. I’ll excerpt a few slides that I really liked; I’m not sure what to make out of any of it, just a bunch of factoids that seem provocative and worthy of filing.

Here’s the top five Internet companies (I didn’t know that was the list; interesting) – this slide shows what they were worth before 2000, before they went public, what they were worth at the highest point in the market, what they were worth at the lowest point (and kinda interesting to be reminded of those dates; 3/10/00 and 10/9/02) and here’s what they are worth now – so there is more worth there now than before the crash. It’s one of many angles on ‘recovery’ in the tech sector (hey it feels cool to say “the tech sector”).

These two slides are just some data points to consider when thinking about the various online, mobile, phone, data, wireless, etc. markets around the world. Here’s who the analysts are watching and what they are thinking about…

You’ll need to click on this one to make it bigger in order to see the details; the point here is looking at the number of different services or products (depending on your perspective) that Yahoo has launched in 2003, 2004, and so far in 2005. You can see just by the shape that this year already is as many products as in 2004. This was all under the category of User Experience, but she used that phrase interchangably with other phrases like User Interface, so it wasn’t always clear what exactly she meant. But the slide seemed interesting anyway.

This took a bit of thinking about, looking at different countries, how many PCs do they have and how many mobile phones, and the ratio of the two. The U.S. has the lowest ratio, China has the higest. So the relative prominence of phone vs. PC as platforms for daily info-living, and as opportunities for innovation, etc. are extremely different in these different markets.

Mary, an avid golfer, recounted the recent Tiger Woods dramatic shot at the 16th hole in Augusta, and considered a scenario where someone missed it and wanted to watch it – they’d willingly watch an ad for it, or pay to see it (she suggested $1.00 is what people would pay to see it, but that’s ridiculous). But if you go into Google and Yahoo, you can’t find it. Even if you look in their video search, you can’t find it. You can find it on a blog, where it was turned it into a hypothetical Nike ad. Somehow in this story Mary seemed to imply that it wasn’t really available in that case. She seems to deny blogs (or anything that comes from the consumer side of the equation) as an invalid source of content not to be taken seriously. Yes, there were no rights clearances, but of course, the information gets out anyway. Hello, BitTorrent?! The fact that the only way she could show us this clip was to use the file she found on this blog (and then put into her presentation) seemed to be ignored, since the real problem was that Google and Yahoo didn’t have the clip in their systems. I don’t get that.

In the Q&A there was some emphasis on the future successful companies being those that place the premium on customer service – citing Amazon Prime as an example, but then both speakers seemed to flip between customer service and customer experience. She cited, but couldn’t remember the specifics, a recent book by a professor (Jeff?) in Pennsylvania? who makes the case for the last great competitive advantage being user interface, and she went on to suggest the web is the best user interface, better than an in-store Starbucks experience. Clearly we see why Mary is an online person because her contention, if I understood it, is just silly. I’d be interested in finding out what book she’s referring to, so if you have any ideas, let me know.

The trade show itself was the usual – booths with people in matching t-shirts being extremely extroverted. But it was working – the place was noisy and jam-packed and people were shaking hands and swapping business cards and just being business people in deal-making mode, I guess. There were the usual trinkets – things that flashed, bent, bounced, squeezed, etc. and lots of iPod giveaways. It wasn’t very intersting to me; it was companies with names like AdBrite, AdDrive, AdDynamix, adInterax, Adknowledge, adMarketplace, Adteractive or AdTools; Blowsearch.com and Eyeblaster; Search Engine Optimization, Search For It, SearchAdNetwork, Searchfeed.com, SearchForce.com, SearchIgnite, SearchRev, Findology.com and FindWhat.com; as well as companies that I recognized because they serve the annoying pop-up ads on websites I visit: ZEDO and Undertone.

There were a few of the usual booth babes, and all you really see in this picture is some nice blonde hair, but some women manning booths were obviously models, at least one wore a t-shirt with a slogan across her chest that was something about looking up top. Hmm.

I found this variation quite unusual

A gymnast? Or, a slinky woman in skintight lyrca, twisting her body in interesting ways. Oh, and how’d you like to buy some advertising services?

Looks like she’s in need of some advertising services herself. Cheese!

Attendees engaged in some sort of SMS swordfight.

Google’s booth. Is that a real George Nelson Marshmallow Sofa?

========================================================
FreshMeat #22 from Steve Portigal
=========================================================

               (__)
               (oo) Fresh
                \\/  Meat

Can’t have any pudding if you don’t read FreshMeat!
=========================================================
We make no mention of the huge bottle of Yoo-hoo beverage
=========================================================
Last month I flew to New York to attend the Licensing
International tradeshow. If SpongeBob is going to end up
on a box of cereal in the next two years, this is where
that deal is likely to go down.

I had been interested in attending this tradeshow simply
because I saw it on a morning news program (Today, Good
Morning America, etc.) a few years back. I don’t think I
even caught the name of the show, I just remember being
awestruck by the visual impact of the show itself. It was
a colorful chaotic jungle of familiar brands promoting
themselves, with guys in KISS costumes and Strawberry
Shortcake outfits wandering around. I decided to someday
attend this magical event. Eventually I figured out what
the show (and the business itself) was called – licensing!
Expecting a new and fascinating facet of culture, product
development, business, and marketing, I arranged to attend
as a speaker, organizing and moderating a panel on
consumer trends.

With a bit of ethnographic curiosity, I set out to learn
more of what this community/practice/business is all
about. Typically, my work starts with products, with the
cultural aspects moving to encompass issues of brand. I
was prepared for a shift in focus, with this show starting
with the brand, but I was surprised to discover that in
licensing one doesn’t even deal with “brands,” but rather
“properties.” I’m sure some brand theorist could explain
the difference and we’d be enlightened, but let’s just
marvel for a moment at the lingo. I think culturally we’ve
internalized the distance between the marketing word
“brand” and the cowboy word “brand” because it is a bit of
an uncomfortable connection. But now the entities in
question are actual things that can be exchanged (or
licensed) rather than simply labels that are burned into
flesh to signify ownership. Fair enough.

The tradeshow was interesting, to put it mildly.
Immediately you see that everything imaginable is
available for licensing. I thought I was prepared for
this, I mean if one more person tells me that Martha
Stewart and Ralph Lauren are brands, I’m going to shriek.
Okay, got it. But the licensing business takes it further.
Did you know that John Wayne and Andrew Weil (the bearded
purveyor of wellness) are both brands, er, properties? I’m
not talking about a conceptual sense of property-ness, I
mean they are owned, managed, marketed and ready for
licensing. Other brands/people/products that are also
properties include: Andy Warhol, Antiques Roadshow, Buzz
Aldrin, Chicken Soup for the Soul, CSI: Miami, Dairy
Queen, National Enquirer, NYPD, Siegfried and Roy, Bozo
the Clown, Village People, Terminator 2, Rocky, and
Shrek 3 (yeah, 3).

And so the tradeshow is overflowing with displays that
showcase known and unknown properties. In some cases the
company themselves will be in attendance (i.e., Nickelodeon
with SpongeBob) and in other cases there are holding
companies and agents with boring neutral names (i.e.,
Equity Management Inc. or IMC Licensing) some of whom have
an amusing combination of properties making up their palette
(Zippo, Mr. Clean, Crayola, Andrew Weil, and Pennzoil in
one case; Midway Games, Terminator 2, Village People,
Musicland Band and U.S. Secret Service in another) and
others with quite obvious specialties (IMC had a booth
touting Jello-O, Kool-Aid, Planters, Oscar Mayer, Kraft,
Tabasco, Manischewitz and others – although it appears
they also manage other licenses, such as the science-
fiction show “Red Dwarf”). And in other cases there are
up-and-coming (hopefully) properties that most of us
haven’t heard of.

It gets more complicated. For example, American Greetings
(the card company) hired the consumer products division of
Nickelodeon (the TV channel) to handle Holly Hobbie for
them. Nick is part of Viacom, a huge conglomerate, and
they have enough horsepower that they can take on business
handling other properties for other groups. It seems like
there was business going in every direction. Property
owners looking to sign up a licensor, agents repping their
portfolios, licensees with products looking for
distributors, and every possible permutation.

But it’s hard to see the dealflow – mostly you just see
people in suits and costumes, and a countless number of
booths. Check out my photos from the show (including scans
of some of the artifacts I picked up) here.
I spent several hours walking the floors with my
colleagues, looking at as much as we could, until we
reached total property burnout. Although this was an
industry show, the tactic was to seduce us as consumers. I
posed for pictures with SpongeBob and Patrick, and Mr.
Peanut, and the Care Bears, and more. I sampled the Krispy
Kremes covered in candy fish-shaped sprinkles (for some
to-be-released film). I grabbed free manga, stickers,
postcards, and peered at the current Lassie. After all
that, here are some of my observations.

It seems that many previously dormant properties are back!
Or at least, that’s a common phrase. Holly Hobbie is back!
Trollz are back! Although, in fact, Trollz are an update
of Troll dolls (small toys with long stiff brightly
colored hair), so strictly speaking they may not really be
back. Fido Dido (mostly known for 7-Up ads in the 90s)
appears to be back, and so are Davey and Goliath, those
earnest clay purveyors of biblical insight.

One surprising pattern was a variety of properties or
artifacts that showed a large number of different
feelings, moods, or attitudes. Sesame Street had a single-
sheet magnet featuring 12 different Muppets with
associated moods – Oscar as “crabby”, Elmo as “ticklish”,
Cookie Monster as “hungry”, Guy Smiley as “smiley”, etc.
and a separate magnet, reading “I’m feeling” that can be
used as a frame to be placed on top of the characters to
display your mood to the world. This was very similar to
the “feelings poster” sometimes used in therapy.

Anther example was Mood Frog who appears without labels,
but has a range of facial expressions suggesting anger,
boredom, nausea, confusion, etc. The Fear’s are, as you
might imagine, afraid of very specific things: dirt,
germs, cooking, flat hair, and veggies. Another line of
products featured a grid of baby faces with a variety of
moods: cranky, quiet, sleepy, happy, poopy, and so on. One
property featured cartoon girls with different attitudes
(I don’t have the specifics, but something like “The Shy
Thinker” “The Clever Go-getter” etc.) that presumably
tapped into something that the target audience could
identify with. I guess “The Breakfast Club” (a film that
segmented high school kinds into tidy parcels like The
Jock, The Nerd, The Criminal, The Princess, and The
Basketcase) lives on in one form or another.

Choosing a mood is already a mode in current products and
features, especially online. For example, Moods on
LiveJournal.com (a blogging site popular with the younger
crowd) offers the following default set of choices
(inviting you to add more as needed): accomplished,
aggravated, amused, angry, annoyed, anxious, apathetic,
artistic, awake, bitchy, blah, blank, bored, bouncy, busy,
calm, cheerful, chipper, cold, complacent, confused,
contemplative, content, cranky, crappy, crazy, creative,
crushed, curious, cynical, depressed, determined, devious,
dirty, disappointed, discontent, distressed, ditzy, dorky,
drained, drunk, ecstatic, embarrassed, energetic, enraged,
enthralled, envious, excited, exhausted,
flirty, frustrated, full, geeky, giddy, giggly, gloomy,
good, grateful, groggy, grumpy, guilty, happy, high,
hopeful, horny, hot, hungry, hyper, impressed,
indescribable, indifferent, infuriated, intimidated,
irate, irritated, jealous, jubilant, lazy, lethargic,
listless, lonely, loved, melancholy, mellow, mischievous,
moody, morose, naughty, nauseated, nerdy, nervous,
nostalgic, numb, okay, optimistic, peaceful, pensive,
pessimistic, pissed off, pleased, predatory, productive,
quixotic, recumbent, refreshed, rejected, rejuvenated,
relaxed, relieved, restless, rushed, sad, satisfied,
scared, shocked, sick, silly, sleepy, sore, stressed,
surprised, sympathetic, thankful, thirsty, thoughtful,
tired, touched, uncomfortable, weird, working, and
worried.

Similarly, IM (instant messenger) and web forums both
offer a huge set of smileys (or emoticons) as this
screenshot from the IM program Trillian suggests:

The thrust of this multiple-mood approach seems to be two-
fold: first, just like a line of toothpaste with multiple
flavors and features, we can find the one that suits us
best, and second, the display of so many different
feelings at once appeals to a certain vain sense of our
own emotional complexity.

Elsewhere at the show, girls with attitude were prominent.
This movement got a lot of press earlier this year when
David & Goliath (not the churchgoing boy and dog, but a
clothing company) caused controversy with a clothing
displaying slogans such as “Boys are Stupid – Throw
Rocks At Them” (read more here)

We saw attitude (the very cute Dog of Glee encouraging
you to “have a nice day buttface”) and mean girls galore.
“Angry Little Asian Girl” and “Emily the Strange” were two of
my favorites (probably because I had the opportunity to talk with the
artists and creators of the property, get a sense of who
they were and what their characters were about for them).

A lot of characters involved cats. Some were swanky
princess type cats, skinny, with a Parisian posture,
perhaps with a tiara. Some were emotional (“Sad Kitty
speaks for everyone who has ever experienced heartbreak,
disappointment, and the general hardships of life. Sad
Kitty cries the tears of all mankind!”) while some
companies offered a huge range of cat properties to suit a
variety of moods and attitudes (The Grinning Cat, Blue
Mood Cats, Tribal Cat, Three Hip Kittens, Flower Cat, Rain
Poodle, Art Cat, The Guitar Cat, Tropical Kitty, Dead
Kitty, and Lucky Cat all come from a San Francisco company
called Tokyo Bay).

The aesthetic of Japanese anime is a powerful influence,
with many different animated characters that typically
have flared legs, short bodies, big heads, big eyes, and
sometimes rather adult physical development. Homies and
Mijos come from da ‘hood. Previously infantile Troll dolls
are now sexed-up Trollz. Petz includes Catz and Dogz. And
there’s something called “Rock Hard Fairies” which claims
that “Fairies Just Got Cool!!”

Another tactic was to anthropomorphize whatever hadn’t
previously been given the breath of life (or big cartoony
eyes). We saw an elevator car and Doggy Poo, to name but
two.

And finally, some properties were cool and funny simply
because they were foreign and literally didn’t quite
translate. A whole segment of the floor was operated by
the Korean Culture and Content Agency featuring Big Ear
Rabbit (“The Fundamental Concepts is the adventurous
travel by the boys with complex in their individual
surrounding with Big Ear Rabbit, Roy who is centered with
them and the boys are finding out their good point rather
than their own demerit. This is the story telling method
to be estimated by the boys themselves in the process of
hearing the story clearly, but is different from the
direct story telling method that the esteemed fathers told
their children the instructions.”), Ayap (“Dews in the
cave gathered into the magic bead for a thousand years,
and he was born there…He is good and pure. When he drinks
dews collected in the magic bead, his power rises a lot so
that he can help other people who are at a crisis. He
likes diverse kinds of sports. His is a sport-mania.”) and
JaJa (“She is the girl who always goes on a diet. We’re
trying to develop ‘A diet characters’ mainly for the ages
between 17 to 30, young females who strongly want to be
healthy and beauty. Providing a pleasant infotainment
contents throughout funny diet stories.”).

It’s not clear what lessons there are to be learned here –
no matter how many interesting, creative, and resonant
properties I encountered, I left the tradeshow muttering
about “too much crap.” It was overwhelming. Perhaps the
lessons could be found by looking at patterns over time:
what properties survive, what clever licensing deals get
struck (will there be John Wayne pet food? Or Homies
tampons?), and how do the established brands like Sesame
Street and SpongeBob evolve over time to stay current. In
order to assess those types of things, I may have to go
back next year!

—

My photos (including scans of handouts) from the Licensing
show are here.