I really really loved this latest post by Seth Godin. If we could dedicate more time to “wondering,” then more creative ideas would come forth. We spend a lot of time wandering and grasping at ideas and thoughts on the top of mind – especially when we are so slamming busy, we do not have time to stop to breathe. these moments of breath, air, white space – those are the times that brilliant ideas or at least seeds of brilliance come forth. Allow yourself these quiet wondering moments. You will be amazed at what emerges from your mind. Enjoy:

Wondering around

I stumbled on a great typo last night. “Staff in the lobby were wondering around…”

Wandering around is an aimless waste of time.

Wondering around, though, that sounds useful.

Wondering why this product is the way it is, wondering how you can make the lobby more welcoming, wondering if your best customers are happily sharing your ideas with others… So many things worth wondering about, so few people actually taking the time to do it.

Wondering around is the act of inquiring with generous spirit.

http://tiny.cc/dnNon

When was the last time unsubscribing to an email made you chuckle? This was sure a first for me. I meant to click ‘view in browser’, but clicked ‘unsubscribe’ by mistake on today’s Groupon email. I’m glad I fat fingered it because I stumbled upon one of those marketing gems that I wish I’d thought of first.

Click here to see what happens when you click unsubscribe. There’s no audio track, but it’s pretty easy to create your own.

Such a simple idea, yet full of personality. And it sure gets talked about.

Surprising. Clever. Smart. Very smart.

Good ol’ P.T. Barnam. He famously said, “There’s a sucker born every minute.” Oh how often I see that to be true. Then just when I’m getting a little bit of hope – the next thing hits. Love it or hate it, the Internet has been making suckers of more and more people for a good long time now.

The latest incarnation for me has just appeared in a recent “Page Invitation” on Facebook. I was invited by a friend to become a fan of the First 20,000 Fans Get a $1,000 Best Buy Gift Card!!! page. Really? Can reasonable people actually think that something like this would actually be true? You think Best Buy would spend TWENTY MILLION DOLLARS on getting Facebook fans?

Ahhhhhh… classic! Time to party like it’s 1999 – or 1993 – or anytime on the Internet because hoaxes like these have been going around forever. I remember getting my first one via email even before there was a World Wide Web. Snopes even has a nice listing of several of the classic schemes.

So this is nothing new. But it is the first time I’ve seen this type of ploy on Facebook. Turns out it’s going strong, as this particular “fan page” has nearly 10,000 so-called fans. Ten thousand people who either actually thought this offer was real or who decided that the barrier to entry was easy and harmless enough to at least give it a shot.

And that’s the kicker.

Becoming a fan of something on Facebook seems innocuous enough. What harm can it do? Probably not much. But it does get you on a list of profiles at least. It might help people target advertising to you. It might indicate you are gullible. What else do you let people know about you through your Facebook profile? Any of that information becomes easy to get to when you join a group or become a fan of a page.

Then it’s a matter of who set up the page and why. Is it a joke or the prelude to a phishing scheme?

Facebook is just the latest breeding ground for scammers. What I see as the big difference is the inherent trust that people currently have of some communications on Facebook. It’s a community made up primarily of people you know. People you have accepted into your network voluntarily. So information coming from them should be more trustworthy, right?

Not at all.

Most people know that email can’t be trusted anymore. Even if it comes from “someone you know” most people have started to recognize the basic characteristics of strange emails. Uncle Toby usually sends questionable PowerPoint shows, not offers to save money on your mortgage. Facebook is different, though. And people don’t use the same filter on Facebook as they do for email. Not yet, anyway.

A Facebook blog post from last summer recounts that phishing and spam are at an all-time high. Please – always use your best judgement and think about what’s being presented to you as an offer online. The medium makes no difference.

Be careful out there.

Ed. Note: Barnam may not be the originator of the actual quote, but since everyone basically thinks he did, it sounded better in writing. Plus – I did say “famously” and not “actually.” See? Gotta watch what you read online…

… and now Lindsay?

Lindsay Lohan has sued E*Trade for $100 million, saying the “milkaholic” baby girl named Lindsay in one of their recent ads improperly invoked her “likeness, name, characterization and personality” and that Lohan has the same “single name” recognition as celebrities such as Oprah Winfrey.

If you haven’t caught this ad on TV, have a look: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lEXZ2hfD3bU

In 2009 there was a lot of buzz about the potential opportunities offered by location-based applications and functionality for local marketing use. What if a coupon could be delivered via your cell phone as you walked by a Starbucks? Read More

According to MediaDailyNews.com the long-predicted tipping point has arrived, with total U.S. digital advertising and marketing revenues set to surpass print revenues in 2010, according to a new study from Outsell, a consulting and research group serving the information industry.

Altogether, U.S. advertisers and marketers plan to spend $368 billion in 2010, Outsell found — up 1.2% from about $364 billion in 2009. Within the 2010 figure, 32.5% ($119.6 billion) will go to digital, versus 30.3% ($111.5 billion) for print.

While the digital figure includes online advertising mainstays like display and search, it also includes direct marketing, represented by email, as well as investments in company Web sites, which will 53% ($63 billion) of the total digital spending.

As in previous years, print ad revenue declines will fall heaviest on newspapers — with Outsell forecasting total ad revenues of $27 billion in 2010, down about 8% from 2009. Outsell also sees revenue for print directories falling about 8% to $11.6 billion. But it’s not all bad news for print, as Outsell predicts a 2% increase in ad spending for magazines, rising to $9.4 billion.

Not every part of the digital market is buoyant. One surprising prediction in the report has mobile advertising revenues sinking 16% in 2010 compared to 2009. On the television front (combining broadcast and cable), Outsell has total TV ad revenues falling 6.5% to $59.6 billion.

So where do you fall into the picture?  If online advertising is not in your current marketing plan I would strongly suggest that you look into it.  Online advertising allows us to marry consumers with brand involvement.  And in this day and age brand involvement and engagement is key.  

With online advertising you are able to target your market much more efficiently and effectively than with many traditional advertising strategies. Online advertising also offers the benefit of providing detailed and thorough statistics that allow you to tweak and optimize your campaigns to the fullest.

With traditional advertising, there is little you can do to track the success of small changes within campaigns or one campaign as compared to another. However, with online advertising you have a huge array of information at your fingertips.

Over the past few weeks I have been writing about who has actually been watching the Olympics and how viewership has been influenced.  Here are some interesting post-Olympics viewership statistics provided by the Nielsen Company. Read More

Ok, so we all know the results from last nights’ Oscars: Sandra Bullock was awarded best actress, Jeff Bridges was best actor and Kathryn Bigelow was the first woman to win Best Director. But here’s something that may surprise you that I found while doing a quick scan of the news today.

In the 44 films in 2009 that topped the box office for at least one weekend, an Apple logo or device could be seen in at least 18 of them. (That’s almost 41%.) In some, Apple products even eclipsed their human scene partners.

The Awl put together a great piece examining the popularity of Apple products in film. Not editors, effects specialists, composers, or photographers using Apple products, or even celebrities owning iPhones–but the insane frequency with which Apple shows up in movies, without it being official product placement.

Apple’s Greatest Cinematic Achievements from The Awl on Vimeo.

Product placement for Toyota was thought to be a sure thing with more viewers making use of ad-skipping digital video recorders but this was not the case.

Toyota vehicles have been appearing in ABC’s hit show “Modern Family” as part of a product-placement deal struck with ABC that covers the entire 2009-2010 season.  The Toyota pact was struck well before the automaker recalled millions of its cars across several models.

The problem now is that Toyota simply can’t pull out of the deal since they are essentially part of the story line.  Usually when a crisis involving a particular marketer or product arises, common practice is to remove all commercials as soon as possible.  Toyota is now stuck.

Placing products into shows, however often requires months worth of planning.  The goods are made part of a script or storyline and are often captured as part of key scenes in an episode. Pulling a product appearance from a key scene simply is not logistically possible — and can be expensive, when it is.

Toyota’s reasons for keeping its cars in “Modern Family” are simple: After spending a lot of ad money reassuring the public, it wants to get back to selling. Hopefully the show’s strong ratings can help the automaker regain the trust of the American public.

New research indicates that the long-held promise of TV/Internet convergence is gaining traction, albeit slowly. Leichtman Research Group data shows that just over 24% of all U.S. homes have a Web-to-TV connection, while 5% of adults are watching YouTube and Hulu on their TV screens each week.

Leichtman data measured homes with Web-TV connections via video game and Blu-ray systems, as well as compatible TVs. Add in homes that can connect with a TiVo, Roku player or computer, and the amount is estimated to come in just north of 24%.

Leichtman research shows that while 5% of adults watch Web video on the TV weekly, the figure is just 1% on a daily basis. Since game consoles are so widespread, the viewing is largely among young men. Among men ages 18 to 34, 16% are viewing Web video on the big screen weekly via a console, Blu-ray or compatible TV.

The findings come from a survey of 1,250 U.S. homes.

Research from the Yankee Group shows that 23% of homes with an HDTV set have the ability to link the Internet to that screen. Still, only 5% of all homes are watching Internet video on TV.

There have been suggestions that the opportunity to watch video from YouTube, Hulu, ESPN360, CBS Sports and a slew of other sites on a large TV screen could prompt people to cancel a cable or satellite subscription.

But Bruce Leichtman, who conducted the research, said that’s unlikely. The people with the Web-to-TV devices are likely to covet the typical run of TV channels and be willing to pay the price to keep a subscription.

A New York start-up company called Boxee is jumping into the mix.  Boxee bills its software as a simple way to access multiple Internet video and music sites, and to bring them to a large monitor or television that one might be watching from a sofa across the room.

Some of Boxee’s fans also think it is much more: a way to euthanize that costly $100-a-month cable or satellite connection.  

The software, which is free and available for download at www.boxee.tv, works on Mac and Linux computers, and on Apple’s set-top box, Apple TV. A version of Boxee for Windows PCs is being tested among a limited group of users.  Boxee gives users a single interface to access all the photos, video and music on their hard drives, along with a wide range of television shows, movies and songs from sites like Hulu, Netflix, YouTube, CNN.com and CBS.com.

The most ardent Boxee fanatics — almost all of its 200,000 early adopters seem to have turned into online evangelists for the company — then connect their computers to their living room televisions.

The challenge for the cable industry is how they grapple with the fact that this is in some way a substitution for some of the things they do.   So will this replace cable subscriptions?  I doubt it but it will certainly be interesting to see how many homes this influences in years to come.  Services like Boxee will come into the mix but will be used to supplement the entire television viewing experience. 

Face it we are a society now that demands content be accessible whenever and wherever we wish.