I originally wrote this as a blog entry a few years ago, and I thought it might be interesting to update it for 2012.

A snowstorm of white vows. I once read that phrase describing how most people begin the New Year. For some reason, we’ve come to accept New Year’s as new beginnings; more so than our own birthdays, anniversaries, or any other more personally signficant date.

What is it about the New Year that makes us stay up till 5AM, kiss strangers on the mouth, drink like alcoholic fish, make tons and tons of resolutions, and feel like we hve a new lease on life? A survey conducted by the Reader’s Digest in 2001 showed that 73% of American’s felt most “hopeful” on January 1. The same survey also showed that nothing significant ever happened in December to truly warrant that hope.

This is all, of course, rhetorical. We humans live for signs. Faith in symbolism is prevelant in even the least conforming of us. And “January 1” is about as large as a symbol or sign that one can put up anywhere—it is universal in its forgiveness, and unfailing in its approach. So much so that I know a gentleman in New York named Ken Walker who trademarked the date 01-01-00, and sued anyone who used it in the context of the millenium for royalties. Even hope, therefore, is marketable.

82% of Americans have some form of a “New Year’s resolutions” list. In their heads, on a napkin, in their diaries, on their hands, or in their hearts. Less than 2% of them will see all the resolutions through. Why? Life happens. Interestingly, though, it is us, as marketers, who cause most of the resolution drop-offs. That’s because the majority of resolutions Americans make have to do with restricting consumption of something (or someone.)

“I will stop smoking by March.”

“I will lose 30 pounds this year.”

“I will spend less on Internet porn.”

“I will pay off my credit cards.”

“I will stop making up with my deadbeat ex-boyfriend. “

I will… I will…

And then along comes temptation in the form of a credit plan with no monthly payments for eighteen months; in the guise of a buxom virtual blonde with “click me” streaked across her airbrushed torso; in the sweetness of fat-free yogurt (which, impossibly convinces most eaters that they will gain no fat by consuming it); and in the sight of two dozen roses on your doorstep from a man who fucked someone else just last week.

I’ve always maintained that marketers are born. That’s not because I believe there’s a specific, innate talent that some of us emerge without. It’s because we’ve been marketing to each other and ourselves all our lives. Every half-truth, every justification, every lie, and every blind eye we turn is part of our personal marketing plan. And New Years, my friend—note the capitalization—are our biggest personal campaigns yet.

Still, there is something romantic about the notion of creating resolutions that will probably never be carried out in their entirety. It feels good. It feels like you’re in the driver’s seat. It’s empowering. New Year’s bring about a sense of security and forgiveness. Not that you’ve forgiven anyone. It’s more like you tend to feel like you can contact that friend again, with whom you’ve had this horrible tiff, because she’s forgotten what a jerk you were last year. Or a perfect time to send one of those “sorry I dissappeared with your money” emails. This is us marketing to ourselves. We’re experts at it because, face it, no knows this customer better than we do.

 And so this year, I’ll make some resolutions of my own. I’ll lull myself into a mad dash of optimism about all mistakes being forgiven, and that anything is possible this year. So, in 2012, I resolve to:

1. Lose 45 pounds, and get a six-pack.
2. Take two vacations.
3. Apologise to and make up with an old friend.

That feels good. That feels right. That feels like part of the battle is won. It feels “new”. So this year, here’s hoping that life is a panoply of pleasant surprises for you, me, and all the others we know and care for.

Dare I say it? Why not? I am, after all, feeling optimistic.

Happy New Year.

And Interscope records, sensing blood in the water, is releasing chum in the form of a new Pia Toscano album, to the simple-minded consumer sharks that will undoubtedly feed in a frenzy, at least for a little while.

Pia’s elimination shouldn’t be a mystery. While tastemakers may have lauded Pia’s pipes (there’s a porn movie title, if there ever was one,) who are we kidding? The majority of voters on AI are young, teenage girls. And Pia represents everything they hate. She’s a beautiful girl, but am I the only one who found her completely robotic and lacking in any true warmth? Even her interviews seemed scripted, and there was nothing truly likeable about her persona.

And American Idol has long been a popularity contest, not a singing one. Sometimes, stars show up, and the entire context changes. Adults are compelled to come forward to vote. Young girls find an idol, and they vote. Sometimes, popularity meets talent, and a true star is born. It’s really only happened twice: Kelly Clarkson; and Carrie Underwood. Both of them transcended the usual popularity contest into one where they stood in a class of their own…which is what stars tend to do.

Pia Toscana may be the nicest girl in the world. And her pipes are amazing. But, she has no personality, and she has absolutely no star-power. Most importantly, she has no charisma. Which is defined as the ability to make someone else feel better about themselves. People with charisma make the experience of interacting with them (even through a television screen) a joyful exercise. Pia absolutely doesn’t have that quality.

Yes, she’ll release an album. Yes, she’ll sell records. Yes, she’ll make enough money and be seen enough to ocassionally make the pages of US Weekly. But let’s be honest.

She didn’t survive because the wisdom of crowds prevailed. 

So, after a few hours and what seemed like ten thousand new addition to the tax code, I was finally done. I was quite amused when I saw this on the final confirmation screen — the software wanted to know if I cared to “share” socially that I was done with my taxes.

I’m not sure what to make of that yet. I mean — taxes are a very personal, private affair. Is the fact that you’re done with them a shareable thought? I suppose it could be…I just don’t know. I would love to see the click-through stats on that baby.

I want my dry-cleaner’s to barcode all the clothes I send them, and scan it in every time it comes in. Eventually, I’ll have an online repository of all my suits and shirts, and information on when I bought them, and how often they’ve been cleaned. I can add notes on special care for individual garments on the secure page provided by the dry cleaner, and as a result, will not go anywhere else, ever again, for my cleaning. If I move, a consortium of cleaners could have access to my data, and I’d only want to move within that network, because I don’t want to lose the information on all my clothes and their care.

Sadly, the dry cleaning industry had done nothing to consolidate, or create this incredibly useful service on a national level. As I think about this again, I think in fact the service itself could be a data subscription system that multiple dry-cleaners could tap into. That way, when I move and have to change dry cleaners, I can still carry over my profile, preferences and other useful information to the new shop. All the system would need to do is tap into (or create APIs or) the few standardized dry-cleaning software packages that exist, and I suspect that over 60% of good establishments woud end up being covered.

I want Starbucks to mine its cash card transactional data and create a premier-customer line between 8:00am and 10:00am for high value customers, in select stores, reducing the wait time for these customers to get their coffee. Value could be determined by a combination of frequency, longevity and margin (some drinks make more money than others.) This will increase sales of the cash cards, where they’ll get better margins because of breakage, and it’ll push morning traffic to stores that can handle them better. Of course, all of this has to be done under some kind of new Starbucks loyalty program umbrella, and have other benefits as well. I’d recommend creating a program construct with only a few national benefits, like the coffee premier-customer lane. The rest of the benefits should be administered at the local store level, with benefits coming from neighborhood vendors who want to share in Starbucks’ traffic.

Well, it’s called MyStarubucks Rewards. And while they didn’t implement the “Fast Lane” concept, it’s a pretty healthy loyalty program, and it looks like the heavy local personlization I was asking for is available at their “Gold” level.

I want my local home improvement retailer to start a replenishment program so that I don’t have to go buy lightbulbs or filters anymore. I want a subscription to my every-week home necessities. Come to think of it, they could also send things like garbage bags, disinfectants, laundry detergent and toilet cleaner. I want to be able to manage my subscriptions online, and turn them off when I go on vacation. And when I move, I want to be able to go to my local home improvement retailer, punch in my new address into a kiosk, and have it spit out data on how often the house needed replacement bulbs, filters and other essentials.

I tried to get this implemented at The Home Depot for a whole year, but it never took — in all fairness, there were bigger fish to fry. I still think this could be a huge “auto-commerce” idea for trusted companies that deal with homeowners.

I want my wireless carrier to have a push-button option that allows me to upload all my phone numbers to some secure network location that they host. That way, if I ever lose my phone, (and I don’t backup my phone numbers to my computer,) I can use a simple push button with the same provider to download my numbers again. I’d pay for this service, but if I were my phone company, I’d give it to me for free—because with all my 600+ numbers stored securely on their network, I’m not going anywhere.

I have two words for you: Mobile Me. I pay for this service, too.

So, looking back — not a lot of progress on my things for the future. In reality, we’re not that far ahead from a commerce standpoint than we were in 2005. The past five years have all been about the growth of the social engine. The use of the cloud. Micro content. e-Commerce has taken a back seat, but I think that’s because companies stopped focusing on it. We’ve hired 200,000 new “social media managers” and haven’t paid enough attention to the basics — commerce.

Hey, at least I got one thing that I wanted. And look who gave it to me — Apple.

This is what came up. You can click on the image to make it bigger.

Notice that Revlon’s ad buy is not only positioned beautifully on this obviously out-of-context page, but YouTube’s new system of doing video snipes has taken over the bottom fourth of the viewing window and positioned the ad on top of some very different content.

This is why I have been fighting for a few months now about appropriate “context” filters for ads and ad-snipes. Generally, I don’t know a single brand that would be interested in positoning themselves on a snipe on this content, unless it had to do with security, or perhaps even a PSA. This is obviously a “run of site” placement — where the brand’s ads are placed in whatever page that YouTube’s serving engine deems appropriate in order to fulfill a specific numeric quota of impressions.

Don’t get me wrong — I am aware that several ad serving engines work to place ads in the context of the content that surrounds it. But those algorithms are inclusive, not exclusive. And, then when it comes to UGC (user generated content) that is uploaded on a daily basis which cannot be meta-tagged using text parsing engines, can you imagine the man-power that will be necessary to manually tag each and every one? Who will be the arbiter of that decision?

In my opinion, brands that decide to do run-of-site placements with UGC video sites have marketing departments that are smoking dope. In this case, someone at Revlon actually thought it would be a good idea to not just run ads on specific content, but allow YouTube’s community and the company to pick the context for their messaging.

We’ll have to see if Revlon’s agency will catch this, and if there will be a backlash from advertisers in general as more of these arbitrary content-ad pairings will obviously be made.

Finally, I reloaded the page a few times, and soon several other run-of-site ads starting popping into place. Here are a couple more. At least the Vegas one is somewhat in context :-).

Click to enlarge.Click to enlarge

So — what’s the solution to this? Well, let’s start with the obvious. Let’s start acknowledging that online advertising is not the “do anything” step-child of the media business. There would be lawsuits being filed right now, had a Revlon ad been placed within, for example, “Pimps and Hos” on the Spike network. Of course, the issue is, media planning would never let such a placement take place. The reality is, most agencies are good about media buying, but there needs to be a very steep and fast change in the way online media is allocated as we get into user generated content as being the primary mechanism by which people get their online entertainment. We need to assemble some sort of systemic body that creates a standard, and a meta-tagging infrastructure. We need for advertisers and their media agencies to adpot this standard.

Of course, some will argue that none of this matters, and that consumers understand how to view online ads differently from the context in which they are presented.

To those who make this argument, I’d just like to say: “you twits!”

“Happiness” (working title): One hour dramedy, a Willy Wonka meets Dallas in the tone of Thank You For Smoking. The unstoppable Bruce Eric Kaplan is writing, and Peter Horton is my fellow non-writing EP. Corporate drama/comedy that explores all we do to pursue happiness, and how that’s almost always at the cost of someone else’s misery.

“Hip Hop Nation” (working title): One hour cable-focused drama. Sopranos in the world of Hip-Hop. Tells the story of the birth of the art form through the stories of three fictional “families” from across the US. Set simultaneously in three time frames. Joy Kecken is writing.

“Generation Gap”: Reality competition series that expolores the lighter side of parent-child generational issues in a fun, and frothy ongoing competition. PB&J TV is producing. We’ve pitched NBC, CBS and CW in the past week.  Waiting to hear from all of them.

“What a Girl Wants”: My friend Sudhir gave me this idea all the way from India. It’s a branded-entertainment version of the movie “What Women Want”, except in a reality dating show format. (Don’t ask.) Still interviewing production houses to see where it best fits.

I’ll keep you posted on pitch developments.

Interestingly, all the same principles that we use to integrate brands into entertainment hold true, especially for properties that are based on specific conceptual ideas — thinking about the right brand fit becomes not just a competitive advantage, but a potential business driver.

I’ll keep you posted on these developments.

Here’s a snippet from the press release that’s particularly interesting:

For past four weeks, since American Idol has picked its final 12 contestants this season, TiVo has been using its second-by-second audience measurement to determine which performers had the highest and lowest viewership. It turns out, this information, especially among viewers who are watching on a timeshifted basis, is predictive of which contestant will be voted off. Viewers tend to rewind and watch their favorite performances multiple times, while fast-forwarding through the ones they don’t like.

Almost two years ago, I wrote an article on my Brutal Clarity blog, titled “TiVo and American Idol Predictions”. Here’s a snippet from my own ramble:

In the heat of the continuing American Idol juggernaut, I had another idea. I caught myself doing something interesting during the performance last night. I wanted to skip the commercials, so I watch the show an hour after it has aired. I noticed that I would skip the performances I didn’t like, and I would re-watch the ones I loved. Often, my distaste for a particular performance was so instant, I would start skipping within the first 10 seconds.

Looking at my TiVo privacy policy, I saw that they allow for the aggregation of anonymous content to help enhance the service. If that’s so, why couldn’t they track the skipping and rewatching habits of 5,000 users who watch American Idol post airing, and use the aggregate data around each contestant to predict their potential position in the voting lineup?

Well, at the very least, I’m glad to know that my late night rambling a couple of years ago ended up being statistically accurate. I have no idea if anyone at TiVo actually read the blog article and then decided to run the test, but if they did, (and you’re reading this,) drop me an email, wouldja?

I promise I won’t tell. 

• Ivanka and Kim both started off modeling on runways.
• They both are the daughters of extremely well-established real estate moguls.
• They are both highly visible socialites in their respective towns.

Fascinating, n’est-ce pas?