Seinfeld + Gates + Windows = Seinfeld * 0.5

Well, the first Microsoft ad featuring Jerry Seinfeld has been released. It's featuring Bill Gates and doesn't mention Microsoft or Windows at all. That's fine by me. There's a ton of debate about whether the ad was good or not. Debate is fine by me as well. Here's the ad:



I'll weigh in with this opinion, either Jerry is very rusty in his delivery, or this combination is just too awkward. This doesn't capture the magic of either Seinfeld's standup or the old show (even though it tries to mimic the "much about nothing" style). I'll reserve final judgement until I see the next installments of the campaign, but if this is their answer to Apple's "Mac vs. PC" ads, I don't expect a monumental shift in public opinion.

Chrome Browser from Google: How Shiny Will it Be?

Google is developing its own web browser, called Chrome. I guess it was only a matter of time. Google owns the search industry, and has been developing boatloads of other applications and information services, some of which are hits and some of which sit largely unused. Now we come to the next step in Google's evolution, where it works to tie everything together into a true platform.

Will the Chrome browser be the thing that does it? How heavily will it integrate Google's also-ran services such as Google Finance and Froogle? I have no doubts that compelling and intelligently designed new features will appear in this browser at a ridiculous pace. After all, that has become a key element of Google's brand of innovation with services such as Google Maps and Google Docs.

Will that be enough to overcome the obvious privacy questions that will accompany Chrome? Whether real or imagined, there will be a veritable chorus of concerns voiced (many of them being seeded by Google's frightened competitors) about where your private information could end up. Ironically, that has also become a key element of Google's brand.

Chrome could be a turning point, or just another stone on top of the fortifications. Since nobody actually has their hands on it yet, we'll have to wait and see!

For more, see: Official Google Blog: A fresh take on the browser

Endurance Training - Building a Faster Tomorrow

Endurance sports and branding... what do they have in common? We recently launched FasterTomorrow.com, a site dedicated to the science of endurance training and featuring the innovative muscle recovery product ARX and it gave me the opportunity to contemplate this question.

An endurance race, whether it's running, cycling, swimming or a full triathalon doesn't begin with the starter's pistol. It begins long before that when each athlete makes the decision to enter the race. From the moment the athlete sets that goal, everything they do and every decision they make will take them a step closer or a step further away from reaching that goal.

This is a perfect analogy to branding. To run the strongest race and build the strongest brand, you have to continually reinforce the things that will carry you to victory. The logo, the messaging, the visual branding, compelling ads, diverse channels and a strong, happy customer base that spreads the gospel of your brand. Training and strengthening each of these areas will help create a stronger, faster brand that has real market endurance.

Scrabble vs. Scrabulous = W-A-R

Having a strong and valuable brand is great, but sometimes you are forced to defend the castle of your brand and your intellectual property, and it can get pretty ugly. The unusual brand story of the day is the latest chapter in the Scrabble vs. Scrabulous saga.

Scrabble has a long and detailed history. It is truly one of the great games of all time and, although many challengers have tried to introduce other word games to compete with it, none has come close to toppling this giant. The game has tournaments, passionate devotees and has even been the inspiration for the book Word Freak by author Stefan Fatsis.

It was undoubtedly this passion and addiction to the game that led XXXXX and XX to develop Scrabulous, an online game made popular as a Facebook app that is (in my opinion) a pretty blatant derivation of Scrabble. With Scrabulous pulling attention away from the official Scrabble game and brand, and Hasbro finally launching an official Scrabble game on Facebook, its no surprise that Hasbro sued the makers of Scrabulous and finally, as of yesterday, succeeded in having the game removed from Facebook and the North American Scrabulous site shut down.

So... definitive victory for Scrabble, right? Well, apparently they are still a letter short of V-I-C-T-O-R-Y. It seems that the ravenous fans of scrabulous (or possibly someone even closer to the upstart brand) did not take too kindly to the shuttering of the game, and someone hacked the official online version of Scrabble, knocking it offline for the past 24 hours.

I'm sure the online version will come back online. I'm also sure that, while there may be a few additional skirmishes, this war is mostly over with Hasbro as the winner (at least domestically). So as the generals at Hasbro reflect on this war over a glass of brandy by the fireplace, the brand-related question that I'm still pondering is this:

Was it better for the Scrabble brand for Hasbro to wait until their version of Facebook Scrabble was ready before taking down Scrabulous, or would it have been better to "nip it in the bud" when the game first appeared?

Any thoughts?

2008 Rice in Crisis - Every Grain Counts

OK, bear with me.... this may seem off-topic, and it may seem like I'm just venting, but you're only half right. I'm a fan of Indian food and a very analytical gourmet, and something has been decidedly off about my recent experiences with Indian cuisine. It wasn't the spices or the meat that took these meals down a notch, it was the rice. While the increases in the cost of oil and corn have stolen most of the headlines, the price of basmati rice has surged 200%. This price increase (or possibly the other supply-demand factors fueling it) seem to have forced Indian restaurants to shift to regular old white rice.

Two questions are probably in your mind right now: "Why is this bad?" and "What does this have to do with branding?" It makes sense that you'd ask that.

This is bad because basmati rice has a firm texture and distinctive flavor that is one of the hallmarks of authentic Indian cuisine. It's not just an accompaniment or delivery mechanism for the rest of the food. It's an integral part of the meal and the flavor.

This is relevant to branding because it helps to illustrate that every aspect of the way a consumer experiences your brand plays a vital role in their overall perception and level of satisfaction with it. When I experience bland, mushy rice at my favorite Indian restaurant, I find myself second-guessing my attachment to their brand. I know that its tempting to make adjustments and substitutions when external conditions increase price pressures, but if I stop coming to the restaurant, that could be an especially costly grain of rice.

The Art of Arrival

With so much boring repetition in TV commercials, I love to see a corporation take a bold creative step that still makes a strong, well-directed brand statement. ANA Airlines, from Japan, has done just that in a very refreshing way. In "The Art of Arrival", they have adopted the style of anime, Japan's unique animation genre known for its imaginative, dramatic stories and its cinematic style to convey the feeling of freedom and joy that travel on ANA Airlines can bring.

The Art of Arrival concept itself is wonderful, because of the self-awareness it shows. We all know that unlike other forms of travel, with even the best air travel the journey itself is never the reward. The arrival is the joyous part, and they've captured that joy.

Beyond concept, the execution on this commercial, from start to end, is absolutely fantastic. I had never heard of ANA Airlines before, but I will certainly remember them now. "The Art of Arrival" is a masterpiece of the art of branding!

A Taste of its own Chinese Medicine

China, long known as one of the biggest sources of counterfeit merchandise and piracy of intellectual property is suddenly getting a taste of its own medicine. Chinese authorities have had to scramble to try to rein in a burgeoning cottage industry of fake 2008 Olympics merchandise. According to the Beijing Youth Daily, Chinese authorities have investigated at least 80 websites selling fake Olympics gear.

There are two things about this report that made me stop and think:

1. This may be the first time that China has had a brand strong enough to attract the attention of its own counterfeiters and
2. I'm wondering if this taste of its own medicine will signal an era of stronger protection for international intellectual property.

Thoughts and comments are welcome. Xie Xie in advance.

VitaminWater: Cool, refreshing branding

"Try crossing the antarctic without your wooly underwear. Try Essential. Try it!"
"Try swimming the Atlantic when you just swam the Atlantic. Try Revive. Try it!"
"Try giving an Amazonian howler monkey a Brazilian bikini wax. Try XXX. Try it!"

These imperatives, shouted out in a cocky British accent, accompanied by the same words in bold print and bold colors is just a sample of VitaminWater's new marketing campaign. All I can say is that this new marketing campaign for VitaminWater is an attention-getter.

VitaminWater, from Glaceau (bought out by Coca Cola a few weeks ago) has always worked to build a strong consistent brand through their heavily coordinated and very recognizable packaging, but now they are working to build up their brand on the air and online. Accompanying the TV campaign is a really intense, Flash-based website at www.glaceau.com.

There are a lot of things to appreciate about this website when it comes to branding. First off, it's an intense rush of motion and interactivity, with bottles of VitaminWater front and center and almost larger than life. There is absolutely no ambiguity about the point of the site or the real stars.

Then there's the color. VitaminWater's product line is completely color coded and the site is decked out in that same juicy color scheme. As you move from product to product, the entire interface adjusts to colors that complement the specific product. This blends with typography (thanks to the fact that you can embed fonts in Flash) that is a perfect match to the product labels.

And with that, I offer my own homage:

"Try packing five gallons of branding into a sixteen ounce bottle. Try VitaminWater's website. Try it!"

Microsoft Surface: A touch of cool for the Microsoft Brand?

Microsoft and "cool". Those are two words you don't see together very often. Given that this is the largest software company in the world, with products covering the whole spectrum of our computing lives, that's a bit of a sad statement. I'd say that makes Microsoft Surface blogworthy. Finally, Microsoft has come up with a product that makes people "ooh" and "ahh".

Microsoft Surface, for those who don't know, is a tabletop computing platform that lets users interact with a 30-inch, full-color, fully touch-sensitive work area. Now, when I say "tabletop", don't think about a computer that goes ON a table. Think about a table whose flat top surface IS the computer!

How is this different from a traditional touchscreen that we're all used to? The Microsoft Surface can simultaneously track multiple touchpoints. This means you can use two hands, ten fingers, or even more if you have another person sitting there with you, all at the same time! This technology is definitely something new and has a great, futuristic feel to it.

Don't expect to see one of these in real life all that soon, since they're going to take a while to get to market and they'll be pretty pricey (at least at first). Frankly, I think that the commercial success of the Microsoft Surface will really depend on the appearance of truly innovative, elegant software applications that take advantage of it. This marriage of new technology and exciting software is something that is old news for Microsoft's adversary Apple, but Microsoft itself doesn't have the best record in this area.

Commercial success aside, the biggest benefit from Microsoft Surface could be the injection of coolness that it brings to the stodgy giant from Redmond. Microsoft has been losing serious ground in several key areas to Apple and Google. Both of those companies are fully tuned in to the public's idea of cool. At the same time, one of Microsoft's latest and largest attempts, the launch of the Microsoft Live brand, has been widely acknowledged as a failure.

How has Microsoft leveraged the cool factor of Microsoft Surface in its branding? The Microsoft Surface logo is colorful, modern and elegant. The Microsoft Surface website is bright and energetic, although given the excitement of the product, it is not nearly as interactive as it should be. It remains to be seen if Microsoft will be able to leverage the initial excitement about Microsoft Surface to breathe some life back into its brand image, but at least this proves that the brand still has a pulse.

MySpace: Is the Magic of its Brand Fading?

There's an interesting dynamic that occurs whenever a brand is spawned from concepts such as audience empowerment, personal expression and community. Brands like Digg, LiveJournal, Wikipedia and even Google (now the #1 brand in the world) have all gained much of their power from the consumers perspective that they are working to empower us. Of course, nothing defines this as much as social networking sites like Friendster and, most of all, MySpace.

MySpace's entire brand has grown from providing its users with the power to express themselves, post their info, share with their friends and meet new ones. Of course, along the way MySpace became one of the most heavily visited websites on the Internet, became the most significant alternate channel for bands and musical artists to break out, and it was purchased by Rupert Murdoch's Fox Interactive Media for half a billion dollars (a price that now seems to have been cheap).

Now, here's where things get tricky. Much of the appeal of MySpace is the ability for users to customize their profiles (adding images and media, restyling stylesheets, etc.) and communicate with each other. By making these activities easy and pervasive, and constantly pushing the envelope on profile customization, MySpace has actually started to descend into semi-anarchy.

The site has become flooded with everything from sexual predators, to pornography marketers, to ponzi schemes, to profiles rigged to install malware or divert visitors to dubious external websites. While there are some features to allow a user to block requests or messages from unknown profiles, there are still many threats lurking within this community of over 100 million members. To add insult to injury, Fox Interactive actually wants to recoup their investment, so the site has become more and more crowded with advertising and promotions.

So here lies the conundrum. The MySpace brand was built on freedom of personal expression and a fanciful wonderland of communication. MySpace can't really prune back these features without alienating at least some portion of its user base. As recent history has shown, an alienated user base can make a pretty big stink (witness the recent revolts at Digg and LiveJournal). At the same time, the increasing quantity of parasites and threats (and intrusive ad placements) are turning MySpace into a less-than-desirable neighborhood. The effects are starting to show too. MySpace's growth has leveled off and begun to decline, while that of rival FaceBook (with a cleaner, safer interface) has taken off.

So what is old Rupert Murdoch to do with his troubled brand? Do you make bold moves that cause short-term pain in the name of long-term viability, or do you keep taking baby steps and hope that the brand doesn't rot out completely by the time you get things under control?

I have no idea, I'm just glad I don't have to make that decision.