A little more than a week ago I purchased an iPad. Typically I am an early adopter for tech toys such as this for a few reasons: First, in my job as strategy leader of a digital agency, my team and clients are eager to hear our take. Second, I am always looking for tools that will help me be more effective and/or efficient in what I do for a living. In this case I have been increasingly feeling the limitations of my laptop, especially when I want to, say, show a few slides or websites to a client over breakfast or lunch; the last thing you want to do in those situations is haul a heavy bag around and wait 10 minutes for the thing to power up and down. But I was really most interested in purchasing an iPad to understand for myself whether this promising/hyped new category of devices would be dominated by the old, interruptive model of advertising or start with a platform for Marketing with Meaning. And after a few days of use I can safely include that the latter is the case.

So far, the interruptive model for iPad advertising seems to be moving quickly up the hype cycle. Some people actually believe that this will—finally!—be the year of mobile advertising, even before Apple got into the game. Apple is preparing to launch its own advertising network for iPhone and iPad apps with special creative formats, dubbed iAd. It has raked in $60 million in commitments already from some of the biggest brands in the world who want to test it first, including Unilever, AT&T, Sears, State Farm, and Disney. The hope is that millions of app developers will earn a living out of turning a percentage of their mobile pixel space over to new ad networks and wait for the money to roll in—and marketers can reach people closer to where and when they actually pull out their wallets to buy stuff.

But a few of us are warning that mobile advertising is not necessarily the next big thing. Along with many others elsewhere, I wrote in this blog back in May about the limitations of iAd as an advertising option. The Wall Street Journal blog recently featured an interesting quote from Kevin Ryan, former CEO of online-ad company DoubleClick: “The answer that people want to hear is that mobile is going to be huge.” “The People” obviously means investors who hope to sell their mobile-ad companies to the highest bidder. But it also includes the largest advertisers in the world—who are watching TV commercial ratings and print subscriptions sink and know that they need to figure out a mobile solution quickly.

The central challenge, however, is the lack of “scale” in mobile marketing. At the end of the day, traditional advertisers such as the big names above depend on an interruptive model in which many millions of eyeballs are exposed to a short message in hopes that some small percentage leads to a sale. Just because they long for this scale does not mean it will actually arrive. There are already too many ad impressions to compete with, too many media options for consumers, and too many mobile-phone platforms to allow for such scale.

The alternative choice for mobile—and advertising overall—is Marketing with Meaning. In mobile devices this looks like creating value-added apps that a smaller percentage of people download (as compared to mass interruptions), but because the brand engagement is so much superior, this small group buys products and services at a much higher rate, over a much longer time period. This is the bet being placed by brands as diverse as Charmin (public restroom finder), Nationwide (car accident guide), Starwood (loyalty points tracker), and REI (ski report). The Gilt Groupe, a high-end online retailer, is now seeing 10% of its sales come from the iPhone and iPad. The reason? A killer interface made specifically for these platforms, and a business that has great deals for a limited-time only—i.e., if you wait to log on at your desk to check out the specials they might already be sold out.

Now to my handful of impressions after using an iPad for a few weeks:

• First, the device is exceeding my expectations. I do love it! I expected to have a tool that would allow for easy reading of email, books, and websites, as well as something simple for presenting slides. It does that more than adequately, and so much more. The keys to greatness lie in a brilliant piece of hardware. The device is thin, lightweight, features an incredible screen quality, responds well to the touch, and you cannot beat the easy on/off button. This is really what computing should be about in 2010, rather than the endless boot-up of bloatware operating systems and unknown creatures in the taskbar bin. With this platform and basic OS, the possibilities for developing apps that make best use of it are limitless. So far I’m loving Netflix, Kindle, The Weather Channel, TweetDeck, and GoodReader. And I’m now reading the paper newspaper again thanks to USAToday and WSJ apps. So many great apps and we’re only in the first couple of months of this thing, folks!
• The “magazine” model of advertising is weak. I have downloaded a few magazines such as Wired and Esquire to test what this experience is like. Chris Anderson, editor of Wired, talked at an Ad:Tech speech a few months ago about how his company was betting heavily on the iPad and promised to have many cool bells and whistles in its digital version. I also checked out Esquire on an app called Zinio that lets you subscribe to digital editions of many popular magazines. At Ad:Tech, Anderson was excited about the fact that people would be “forced” to flip past each full-page ad in his virtual magazine. (See more on his speech here.) In my experience, the iPad magazine reading is fine, but I hated having to swipe past each ad. This is a worse experience than a physical magazine, which you can simply shuffle past quickly. In this case you’re likely to get a finger cramp with the number of ads crammed in! Again, maybe people notice such ads in the short term because this is a novel experience, but after a while we will all just tune out another piece of unwanted clutter.
• Improved websites might eliminate the need for apps. What I mean here is that the Web-surfing experience with the iPad is so strong (despite the lack of Flash) that you might not need to develop apps to provide similar value to users. For example, I considered buying the ESPN app for iPad, but then I just pulled up ESPN.com on my iPad’s Safari browser. The latter experience was outstanding because the network has built a site optimized for iPads. So there’s no need for the $4.99 app. Remarkably, this is something I have not heard in relation to the launch of the iPad. It could be a threat to Apple’s desire to “control” the user experience for its own profit, as there is no need to purchase or download a special app. For consumers, it means you skip finding/downloading/updating apps. We are already working on making iPad-ready adjustments for some of our clients.

Despite marketers’ desire to make the mass/interruptive model work in mobile, and Steve Jobs’s record of overturning and improving business models, my advice to brands is to create an app (or an optimized website), not an ad buy, as a way to connect with consumers on the iPad. There are simply too many challenges of making an interruption pay out—and too many opportunities to delight people by creating added value on the iPad platform.

Late Sunday night I got back from my first-ever trip to the much-discussed South by Southwest (SXSW) conference for Film, Music, and Interactive in Austin, Texas. After seeing many friends and other folks in the business rave and tweet about this event for a few years, I felt compelled to add yet another conference badge to my collection. Overall I found it to be one of the best conferences for digital marketing that I have attended in some time. That means something, because I think I’ve been to more than a dozen different digital shows in the past 24 months alone. Over the course of the next few blog posts I plan to share some of my biggest takeaways and examples of Marketing with Meaning.

First up is an example of a start-up digital service that used meaningful marketing to make the conference better for nearly everyone involved: Foursquare. For those who haven’t heard, Foursquare is a mobile tool that allows you to “check in” at locations where you physically appear—essentially a way of broadcasting to friends that you are, say, having a coffee at Starbucks, or waiting in line at the DMV. This is the leading brand in a new category of “geo-location” services. You might call it “Geo-Twitter”—in fact, you can update your Twitter and Facebook accounts with Foursquare when you check in around town.

SXSW is a very big event for the folks at Foursquare for many reasons. It is the place where partners and customers gather to see what’s new. Investors are lurking everywhere to spy the next hot winner. And some of the earliest early adopters and trendsetters (including a few celebrities) share their latest findings with their friends at SXSW.

So it is a clear business objective to own this event in every way possible. For most companies, this means paying sponsorship dollars to put your name everywhere, employing booth babes to walk around with branded snacks, and maybe hosting a giant beer-for-all for everyone at the event. But not Foursquare. Instead, Foursquare stuck with what makes its service special, and spent most of its time and money making it more so.

Foursquare is already a killer app for conferences. It is most effective when a large group of people who know each other and want to get together are located in a pretty close environment. This is exactly what conferences are all about. So instead of calling or texting to find out where your friends and contacts are, you simply see where they have recently checked in and walk over to the conference room, bar, or restaurant where they happen to be. This even makes it easy to “run into” people who you might unable to reach via email or telephone.

This is why Foursquare became so popular at SXSW in 2009. So the business decided to do more with this hyper-engaged, ultra-important audience in 2010. When we got off the plane in Austin and checked into the airport, we noticed that Foursquare had created special new features for SXSW participants. The main add was a set of special “badges” that you could unlock by performing various check-ins during the six-day event. Badges are a key element of the basic Foursquare service—providing you a fun way to show that you have, say, checked in at 50 different total places or from five airports or from a boat. They are fun for the user, and cleverly (and cheaply) train people to make Foursquare check-ins a habit. Some of the special SXSW badges include the “Austin Explorer” for hitting five locations in the city, and the “Hookup” for checking in at two different hotels. For me and our team, we found that these badges turned Foursquare into a living game that made some of the boring moments between sessions and meetings much more tolerable.

Foursquare did more than virtual badges, though. The firm partnered with specific locations such as the Pepsi Refresh Cafe and SXSW Web Awards to give people temporary tattoos to match their unlocked badges. And it partnered with PayPal to donate $.25 for every check-in to Haitian relief efforts. Foursquare even reported a running total of how much you had earned for Haiti. (I believe I hit more than $8.)

Only the folks at Foursquare know how much this modest expense in programming time delivered for its business at this big event. One key data point reported on its site shows that there were more than 15,000 badges awarded, including 6,025 versions of the Austin Explorer. That means that roughly 50% of the 12,000 people who went to the Interactive conference tried Foursquare.  According to this article, there were 300,000 check-ins in Austin during the event, and Foursquare added 100,000 users overall – “likely as a result of check-ins being broadcast to Twitter and Facebook.” This might have even helped the nascent company establish a business model; TechCrunch made the case that Foursquare could create a business around building similar special apps for other conferences.

So many thanks to Foursquare for helping me get a more out of my company’s significant time and money investment in sending me to SXSW. I will certainly repay the favor by giving this new service major attention in the months ahead.

One of my favorite things to do in presentations about mobile and the future of marketing is to replay the scene above from the movie Minority Report (play above), in which Tom Cruise walks through a subway station and is bombarded with personalized 3-D ad units that scan his pupils and attempt to entice him to buy one of many products. Director Steven Spielberg actually got help from the MIT Media Lab to come up with the advertising concepts used in the movie. The movie was set in 2054, but here, today, aggressive companies want to make it a reality now. They dream of a world where our mobile devices are alerted to coupons, deals, and promotions as we walk by store fronts. Last week AT&T showed off such a mobile couponing concept at its Tech Showcase. But here’s the reality for today and tomorrow: These ideas will fail completely.

At the link below you can see a very short video of the AT&T concept, which is consistent with an idea that dozens of futurists, entrepreneurs, and big marketers hope will come true one day:

Next time you hear someone claim that this is the future of advertising, kindly beg to differ. The big problem with this concept is that people don’t like to be interrupted by advertising! I know, I know; it’s hard for us lifelong marketers to deal with, but it is absolutely true. To put this in perspective, let’s imagine that you could give out your home phone number to any number of marketers, and when these marketers have a “great deal” for you, they could call your home phone and speak to you when you answer, or leave you a voice mail message. Sounds great, right? Not really. In fact, more than 76% of Americans have registered their home phone numbers on the National Do Not Call Registry, which shows two problems with this future scenario.

First, the telephone is a very personal tool that people are extremely protective of. We look at the phone as our window to the world, our way of communicating with the people who we want to talk to. We own our phones and our numbers; we even pay to keep these numbers by moving them from phone to phone and address to address. It is literally a lifeline in some cases. When Congress overwhelmingly passed the Do Not Call Registry legislation, they established the fact that a telephone line is something that the homeowner “owns,” rather than a public space such as the street in front of your house. And this and other laws have ingrained the “right to phone control” in people’s lives.

The second major issue is the fact that when we let marketers start sending “valuable” messages, it’s highly likely to be completely irrelevant and annoying. Let’s use email as the analogy in this case. Soon after marketers gained the ability to send email to customers and prospects, they discovered that they could reach many, many people at the push of a button and at near zero cost. When you have freedom to advertise at no cost, the result is unbridled junk. And despite great data about the value of personalization, most marketers are lazy and would rather just spam millions and hope that some small percentage opens the email and buys a product. And I’m talking about big, reputable marketers here, not just the common spammers.

Doubt me? Well, take a read of my post on how Banana Republic is sending me emails about women’s boots. In this Minority Report world, why would Banana Republic do anything differently? In this AT&T future, when I walk by its store in the mall they will send me the same irrelevant offers that they’re sending me now. And it will take only a handful of these lazy, valueless messages before I unsubscribe to this entire mobile marketing app or end my contract with whatever mobile service is pushing it on me. And even if they do something personalized (say for men’s shirts), the chances that I will be in the mood to stop in the store when I am going about my life and trying to get things done is extremely small. Sure, one walk by out of 100 might find me in the buying mood, but that means 99 messages will simply annoy me.

This brings me to some of the special reasons that mobile is the last place such a service could succeed. The mobile phone is even more personal and private, and people are scared to death that it will be taken over by marketers. A few data points from recent studies by ACNielsen:

• Mobile marketing was judged to be the “least trusted” form of advertising by consumers in 47 countries.
• Only 10% of people responded to ads in a test.
• 67% of people found it unacceptable to have ads on their mobile device.

We consumers really shouldn’t worry about the interruptive mobile future, because it faces two giant barriers. First, the mobile-service providers know that it would be suicide to force such an advertising medium on their customers. Thankfully, we have several choices in which company we go with for service. If any one of them starts spamming, then the move to alternatives would be swift. And there’s just not a ton of money for the AT&Ts of the world to reap from advertising, either. They make $50 to $100 per month on service. But at even a CPM rate of $100 for this “high quality impression,” you would have to hit people with many, many ads for this to earn a few bucks per month.

The second barrier to this future is the highly likely legislation that governments would pass to prevent this from happening. The Do Not Call Registry was the biggest slam-dunk bill passed during George Bush’s eight years. Congress loves to pick on advertisers because their constituents are sick of 3,000 ad interruptions per day, and very few people are going to defend the rights of a group that is respected at about the level of used-car salesmen.

Finally, let’s remember the barrier to all of the greatest ideas in the present and future of marketing: It takes forever for businesses to try something new. People envision a service like this to be a boon to small businesses, but here’s the reality: Small businesses don’t have a lot of marketing dollars, and they are the last to try new marketing. I love how one sandwich place near our office started using Facebook to spread the news of its daily specials. But these are few and far between. Not to mention the fact that they have been using a very, very low-tech way to share offers and promotions with people as they walk by: the sign!

So as much as we marketing geeks think it would be cool to intercept potential customers as they stroll by our stores, this idea is DOA. I think the only possibility for it to work is for services that are completely opt-in. Foursquare is one company that hopes people who have time to kill and want to see some offers will open its app. This is going in the much more meaningful direction, as it means the consumer is choosing to engage. That said, this is an idea on the small side. A store might get one person a week who has the app, logs into the app, sees a special he likes, walks in, and decides to buy.

I’m an enormous believer in the potential for mobile to connect customers and marketers in meaningful ways. But let’s file the Minority Report future somewhere along flying cars and remember to put ourselves in the customers’ mindset first.

One of the last great hopes of believers in the interruptive marketing model is that consumers will willingly opt into advertising if there is enough of an incentive to do so. This idea is inspiring a few new business models; perhaps the most-watched has been Blyk, a mobile service in the UK that since 2007 has been offering free calls and texts to 16- to 24-year-olds in return for mandatory advertising. Alas, Blyk failed to hit its growth numbers and was recently absorbed into telecom giant Orange with little fanfare or investor payday. I believe it proves my point that when the price of interruption is too high, the only way forward is Marketing with Meaning.

The business model of Blyk was fairly simple: Offer free mobile service to teens and young adults who are heavy users but have small bank accounts, and use mandatory advertising to lure big marketers eager to engage with an audience that is notoriously difficult to reach. According to Advertising Age, the company expected to reach 4.5 million members and roll out across Europe in its first year. There was even talk of an eventual U.S. entry. Alas, the service hit only 200,000 members in its first year and was unable to attract more users.

There were some good signs from the Blyk experiment. The company launched more than 2,000 campaigns, which included top brands such as Coca-Cola, Colgate, L’Oreal, and the BBC. Clearly the company was reaching an audience that these marketers desire. And the response rates to the forced ads were actually very good. The average response was “at least 25%” and one quiz for L’Oreal got a 70% response rate.

So, WTF? Simple: Most people, even teenagers with more time than money, find the true cost of advertising interruption so high that they will not accept it. In 2005 there were 6.9 million people aged 16 to 24 in the UK, so 200,000 Blyk users represent only 2.9% penetration (assuming 100% of Blyk subscribers fell into this narrow range and the company didn’t kick out users at age 25). Consider the fact that this is a very social crowd, and likely each of the 200,000 users told dozens of friends about the service. The lack of growth shows that the proposition of free mobile service could not overcome the advertising overload.

I think this experiment also shows how personally important the mobile device is in our lives. While we might be OK with zoning out in front of ad-supported passive media such as television (even on Hulu.com), our mobile devices are our active, lean-forward links to the world. As we’ve seen with the tens of millions of people who have signed up for the Federal Do-Not-Call List, we want our phones to be immune to marketing interruption.

Some might wonder why the response rates to ads were so high. I believe it is just a logical function of the type of people who were attracted to Blyk in the first place; in other words, the (small) audience that bought into Blyk doesn’t find advertising to be that much of a negative. Some of them even enjoyed the advertising. It reminds me of a study AOL did a few years ago on the .2% of people who click on banner ads more than once per month. These rare few are “the same people that tend to open direct mail and love to talk to telemarketers.”

So another ad-supported business model bites the dust. My hope is that marketers and the investment community see this specifically as an example of how interruption and annoyance will fail in new media. As I wrote about earlier this week in my review of Chris Anderson’s book, Free, the price of consumer attention continues to increase. Forcing people to accept a drain on their time and attention (forced ads) in exchange for something of value (free cell service) is likely the wrong way to go. But if the marketing itself can be enjoyable and add immediate value in return for people’s attention, we might just be able to win them over.

Last week I had the chance to lead a workshop on mobile marketing at the 3rd Annual Mobile Commerce Summit in Las Vegas, a conference focused on the financial services industry and designed to help companies figure out how to crack the code on this powerful new medium. My presentation kicked off the conference Wednesday afternoon, and I was able to share the stage with Paul Moore from Fifth Third Bank, a client of ours who we helped on the launch of the bank’s mobile banking platform. While we were nervous about filling up a three-hour workshop window and not losing people to the many distractions of Vegas, we had a nice, attentive crowd and the time flew by.

Embedded below you can see an edited version of the presentation that we gave. Alas, you had to be there to get to see the Fifth Third case and some other goodies that are not appropriate for broad sharing. Overall, the goal of the presentation was to help financial services marketers get an understanding of the way that best-in-class marketers are using mobile, and then provide a framework and industry-specific direction that they could bring to bear on their own businesses. Of course, my overall theme was that mobile marketing must be meaningful in order to earn customer attention and drive sales.

Let me know what you think, and if you find this useful, please share it with your friends.

The most intriguing story I heard last week was that Apple has made somewhere between $20 million and $45 million in revenue from the 1 billion iPhone apps that have been downloaded from its store to date. In blog posts and Tweets about this estimate, the most common reaction was “That’s all they’ve made?” Since most apps are free, and Apple gets only a 30 percent cut of any revenue from paid-for apps, this seems like relative nickels in the grand scheme of things.

But one @reply from my Twitter feed, Rob Saker, had a great point that’s been sticking with me:

“I’d love [$20 million] with no inventory, spoilage, and few promotional costs… They may have found the Holy Grail of marketing, promotion that in itself generates revenue.”

To paraphrase Rob, Apple’s true take from the app store is much higher considering that these apps are the best marketing possible for the pricey iPhones and revenue cut from AT&T service (30 million of which are now in the market). The ulitmate test of Marketing with Meaning is when people actually pay for your marketing. And I believe marketers must set this as a new goal and revenue source for the work they do.

iPhone apps offer the perfect way for companies to create marketing that in some ways pays for itself.  Kraft’s very successful and slick iFood app is probably the best-known example. At the iMedia conference in March, the brand owner of the program, Ed Kaczmarek, said that Kraft chose to charge $.99 for the tool because they felt it was valuable, and putting a price on it actually helped communicate that value to consumers. That’s right-charging for the marketing made it even more valuable and meaningful. The result: iFood hit its three-year download goal in a matter of weeks.

At Bridge Worldwide, we’re developing a few iPhone app ideas, and my strong guidance to clients is to charge at least $.99 for them. Not only do I believe this adds to the value impression, but business managers start to get excited when new revenue comes in. Even if it doesn’t add a lot to the bottom line, the money that comes from selling apps can be directed toward further development and marketing of the app, which, in turn, can drive greater app quality and total downloads.

Another related and exciting piece of news last week was that Amazon has opened up a beta program to allow bloggers to get paid for people who subscribe to their blogs via the Kindle. Subscriptions are priced up to $1.99 per month, and the blogger gets 30 percent of the revenue. Of course, this is small beans right now, as there are likely not even 1 million Kindles on the market yet. But, again, we’re starting to see a model in which people are willing and able to spend a little for blog content. And blog content is almost always considered “marketing.”

In a recent post on his blog, John Gerzema makes a great point about consumer mentality of micropayments:

“The luxury of micropayment pricing is that a consumer can instantly make a low-risk value judgment. Limiting risk allows for product experimentation leading to little failures or successes and the consequent expansion of brand loyalty.”

It’s still too early to make this claim across the board, but I believe most iPhone and Kindle owners do not blink at being asked to spend less than a buck on impulse for a useful service. Frankly, I find it hard to believe that killer apps such as Facebook and Pandora for iPhone do not even charge a penny for their services. Both lack a viable business model today, and it’s so easy and cheap to make a buck through the app store. But I was also disappointed to see that Nationwide doesn’t charge for its very cool Car Accident Toolkit app, and Bloomberg—a company that charges thousands of dollars for its proprietary information and terminals—is giving its milk away for free as well. The industry actually needs these big players to start charging for apps in order to set the bar. Let’s not lose this opportunity to convince people that free is not the standard!

I’m very excited to see where brands play in the world of charging for their content. I’m so excited that I just signed up for the Kindle blog program, and invite those of you who are Kindle owners to subscribe to Marketing with Meaning now. I promise that every dollar that comes will be put right back into making this blog bigger and better. In fact, I will send a free Tide Loads of Hope T-shirt to the first person who subscribes and emails me the receipt!

After learning a lot at the Economist Marketing Forum in San Francisco last week, I had a chance to head in the complete opposite direction for the iMedia Breakthrough Summit in Fort Myers, Florida. As usual, the iMedia folks hosted a great event that brought together people from the brand, agency, and media sides of digital marketing. Once again my notebook was full of some great insights and ideas that only seem to result from being there. Of course, my goal is to provide you, dear readers, with as many of those insights and ideas as possible in this blog—with a meaningful marketing spin, of course.

Overall, the two main focus area of the event were Twitter and mobile. It seems that the consensus from all was that mobile is close to going mainstream, while Twitter was the exciting new tool that promises to explode. Here are some of the specific takeaways that I collected from the guest speakers:

Christi Day, Emerging Media Manager, Southwest Airlines

I don’t think I have seen anyone who has a brand personality that better matches the brand she works on than Christi Day. Her goal was to make us smile as well as learn as she described how she got Southwest into the world of Twitter. She and her team in media relations first tried out Twitter on a lark in July 2007 and quickly gained a following. Eventually it became so successful and followed that Christi brought in people from both media relations and customer service. Instead of outsourcing Twitter responses to an agency or team, Christi takes the responsibility for herself, 24-7. Her tips for other brands joining the Twitterati: (1) Be Fun—connect to events, stories from real flights, and viral videos; (2) Be Real—show your personality and what’s going on in your real life; and (3) Be Relevant—provide information and notices, and promote fare sales. I was a little surprised to hear that Southwest is not tracking how the Twitter account leads to actual sales, but that is in the works. You can follow Christi at twitter.com/southwestair.

Ed Kaczmarek, Director of Innovation, Kraft

Ed is the newest marketing rock star in my mind after hearing his story of the launch of the Kraft iFood app for the iPhone. It is already a huge success according to Kraft’s expectations, with downloads in a few weeks that met its three-year objective, and PR coverage valued in the millions of dollars. Ed talked about how the iFood app “brings us closer to becoming an indispensable food resource for consumers’ meal planning, preparation, and shopping needs.” This is a perfect example of how a great brand purpose leads to marketing with meaning.

I loved hearing some inside lessons about how Ed’s team got this remarkable innovation through the company by “keeping it under the radar,” and that a big key to success was leveraging Kraft’s database of 15 million consumers to drive initial awareness (another benefit of a decade of meaningful relationship marketing). Another huge help was Apple’s decision to feature the app on its App Store front page, which drove traffic “better than any paid marketing.” The tool is catching hold with new consumer targets including Gen-Y and Men (35 percent of users, “far above” the percentage in the Kraft database).

This is just the beginning for iFood. Ed alluded to upgrades on the way and said that it was built to be a platform for retail customers and even external marketers. Even working with competitors is possible, as Ed said that, “If we really want to fulfill our goal, we have to allow others in.”

Lara Green, Digital Marketing Manager, CoverGirl and Max Factor (P&G)

Perhaps the quote of the event was Lara’s claim that “mobile is no longer innovation” for her brands at P&G. In other words, it’s just the best way to reach the young girls and women that her brands target—and they have done enough experimentation to feel comfortable with this space. Another key to success is the fact that mobile has gotten a strong read in marketing mix modeling, which is the single best way to compare ROI across media alternatives. As evidence of the mainstream nature of mobile for CoverGirl, the brand actually has four mobile focus areas: (1) a strong WAP site; (2) a text-to-sample program; (3) a mobile CRM program; and (4) integration with other marketing activities. I was a little surprised to hear that a beauty product can “look good” in the small space of mobile screens, but its banners are getting 1 percent to 2 percent click rates, and when text-to-sample offers appear in print magazines, the supplies are exhausted in days. Another great example of meaningful marketing from CoverGirl in mobile is a ColorMatch tool that helps people make the right choice on the go and at the retail point-of-purchase.

Dr. Spencer Wells, Genographic Project Director, National Geographic

iMedia consistently mixes in pure digital marketing presentations with diverse speakers such as Nolan Bushnell, the father of video games. I specifically enjoyed the presentation by Dr. Wells, who is in the middle of a long-term project to categorize and glean human migration insights by sampling the DNA of thousands of men and women around the world. The Genographic Project is a long-term investment by National Geographic and partner brands such as IBM. It began way back in 2005 and is now starting to spin off insights. I loved the fact that National Geographic is funding the project and building personal connections by selling a $100 kit that allows anyone to submit his or her DNA and receive insights into family history. According to Dr. Wells, his management worried that no one would buy the kits, and hoped to sell 10,000; but more than 297,000 have been ordered so far.

So, another great collection of insights, some of which will make their way to my upcoming book. For more, check out the Twitter stream here. I hope to see you there next year.

It’s Friday – the day of the week when many of us like to surf the Web or the email inbox for a small distraction before the weekend starts. So I figure it’s as good a day as any to share another example of Marketing WITHOUT Meaning…

This week I didn’t have to look hard to find something provocative to write about. Despite multiple layers of spam protection that often leaves clients’ messages sitting in “mailMAX” purgatory alongside come-ons for male enhancement products, a sales message with multiple attachments made it through unscathed from an individual at Xipto.com. Here’s the unedited pitch:

Hi, Bob-

We have just completed our launch for Cincinnati Bell wireless subscribers.  Xipto allows cell phone users to choose messages to play out when they receive incoming calls.  The format is a 25 second mp3 clip that is introduced by a two-second ‘Your friend supports the following message.’ The messages are about brands, causes, events, or passions — messages that are relevant to reflective [huh?] of the individual cell phone subscribers.

We just started marketing Xipto last week, and already hundreds of CBW subscribers have signed up to endorse messages and those messages are playing out to their incoming callers.

Here are a few links and tools that you can explore, along with our press release below.  We would like to present Xipto to you next week — might you be free on Wednesday, September 18 at 9:30 a.m. I promise you’ll see the potential of Xipto as an innovative marketing tool.

Thanks very much.

Jill (not the real name)”

The gist, I figured, was that I could enable my phone to spam incoming callers with ad-supported messages of my choosing. Great! As a meaningful marketing practioner, I felt it was my duty to check out Xipto.com and the MP3 samples of what kinds of messages are “relevant to reflective” (per the email above) to people I might be calling. Here’s an example of what your friends could be hearing when they dial you up this weekend:

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The bonus: you can get paid every time a friend hears the relevant to reflective message you choose! Xipto doesn’t give specifics, but the website states that there is either a cash-back or donation option for the brands you market to your callers. Which makes one jump to quickly calculate the CPM on a year of phone calls – especially if incoming solicitor calls count!

Despite the Xipto sales rep’s emails and phone calls, I decided not to take the meeting. I cannot see how anyone would agree to sign up for or listen into such a service. One might note that more than 150 million numbers have been registered on the federal do-not-call list. More Americans have registered for this list than have registered to vote! The bottom line is that ad models that depend on a few seconds of interruption are increasingly driving people away entirely. Tests of pre-roll video ads show a 75% abandon rate. How many calls friends are you willing to lose in order to spread your “message” and make a nickel?

Once again, marketers of all types need to accept that unwanted advertising is a failed business model. In a separate iMedia article I read this week, Ted McConnell, interactive innovation director at Procter & Gamble, probably said it best: “I don’t think we will ever buy into a model that relies on personalized, unsolicited messages in a private addressable channel such as a telephone – and neither will consumers.” Amen.

Much has been written about how mobile marketing is going to be the next great way for marketers to connect with customers. The latest hype fuel is the success of the iPhone and thousands of applications.  But another trend is gaining pace in the mobile world: QR codes.

QR codes are a kind of two-dimensional bar code. In marketing to date, they have been used mainly to make it easy for a mobile phone to communicate via the Web. They can send your phone to a mobile webpage, or direct it to download information such as songs, videos, or photos. QR codes are increasingly appearing in magazines as part of print ads. One might dismiss this idea immediately as a second-coming of the ill-fated Cue Cat, but let’s give it the benefit of the doubt and look further.

For a look at QR codes in action, let’s take the example above of a Polo clothing print ad that appeared in The Week magazine. Here, a QR code and directions in the lower right corner allow readers to whip out their mobile phones and shop online, read Ralph Lauren magazine stories, and watch Ralph Lauren videos. It’s an interesting concept – and I could see some ways in which people would be willing to engage with the brand in this way.  If you’re on a train on the way to work, or at home reading on the weekend, it could be interesting to pull out your phone and check out the latest tennis fashions from Ralph Lauren.

I followed the instructions to give it a try myself. I texted RLQR4 to 23000. In a few minutes I was instructed to visit m.ralphlauren.com on my Treo 700’s browser. From there I had to navigate to download a QR reader. After a few clicks the site asked for my cell carrier and confirmation that I had a Treo 700. Then disaster struck: Either the Treo or Sprint was not covered by the QR software. Alas, my search for meaning was over and I ended up wasting my time with this ad.

Despite the hype and gee-whiz factor of new technology, I’m not sure QR code marketing is here to stay. First, there’s a huge education factor. Geeks like me who bother to download the software are less than 5% of the general population. Second, the range of browsers, phones, and service providers make mobile marketing a mess at this point.

Finally, there’s the issue of whether or not QR codes are meaningful for consumers. If these codes don’t excite people in their early use, adoption is likely to lag. In the example above, I really question Polo’s strategy in using QR codes to simply open up a mobile store link with a few articles and videos. Magazine readers are not necessarily in shopping mode, and we can always open up our laptop for a much better shopping experience when we get home or to the office. I was able to get to the site on my laptop and the content is extremely basic. For example, a Style Guide section on “insights, tips and essential information on Ralph Lauren style” had only three basic FAQ.

It’s pretty obvious that Ralph Lauren wanted to experiment and learn with little cost and effort. I can see the rationale clearly, but I would bet that low risk will result in low reward in terms of learning. What if the brand spent more thought on how it could uniquely use the mobile space to ad value in the world of athletic fashion. One idea: Let users send a photo of themselves, and a real fashion expert at RL send back personalized wardrobe suggestions. It’s more complicated, sure, but I think you can see it as much more meaningful.

As I wrote a few weeks ago, for new technology to be effective in marketing, we must work hard to make meaning from Day 1. Advertising is not needed for mobile and other new devices to be successful. We’ve got to earn consumers’ attention with tools and content that truly add value.

(This is part three of a three-part series on beer companies that are building meaningful connections with their target consumers.)

In the past two posts I focused on challenger brands Sam Adams and Speight’s, both of which were built on creating close connections with a focused niche of consumers. But can big mega-brands with millions of diverse beer drinkers get in on the meaningful marketing game as well? I think a recent Coors Light campaign shows it is possible – but they have work left to do.

Coors Light recently launched a pretty interesting beer innovation – a “cold activated label” in which the mountains on the label turn from white to blue when the beer gets cold enough to drink. It’s a neat idea in a category that doesn’t get much innovation, and I think the focus on “cold” fits with the Coors Light equity in an ownable way (compared to, say, wide-mouth cans). The brand is supporting the new label with – you guessed it – a giant TV campaign. If you’re a sports fan you’ve likely been exposed to this copy dozens of times already, but if not take a gander here:

At first blush, it’s another amusing beer ad that is not especially meaningful. However, a deeper look shows some progress. A recent article in the New York Times announced that Coors Light is leveraging this ad idea to create a Facebook application that friends can use to send a “Code Blue” alert to friends and coordinate a place and time to escape from work. Coors Light has created other interesting applications on its website and MySpace page. There is a Happy Hour Locater, links to local city events, and an “Excuse-o-ator” widget that will provide you with rationale for leaving work early. All are tools that pass the Marketing with Meaning test: (1) consumers must choose to engage with them; and (2) there is a benefit even without buying the product.

Despite its progress, Coors Light is missing on a few levels. I think the biggest problem is that the 30-second ad is not truly integrated into the meaningful marketing. The TV ad does not tie into or drive viewers to the meaningful tools. C’mon, guys – there’s not even a URL at the end of the ad! We’ve seen this dozens of times with interactive work; the lead agency creates a commercial, and the client asks us to “build a digital link” after the fact. Tellingly, in the NYT article, the creative director at Draft FCB, Bill Lindsey, says that, “In this new world we live in, it’s something we’re learning to live with.” He doesn’t exactly sound thrilled to be in this new world, does he? Frankly, it is a pain in the ass to coordinate with outside agencies, and it’s much more work than AORs are used to. But the new world is here. Get used to it, and create better work. Going forward, brands must ensure that all advertising works together in a connected ecosystem – despite the lead agency insisting that it will kill the creative or take too much time.

Another big problem comes in the execution of the meaningful pieces of the program. Coors Light really should have figured out a way to use mobile (SMS) – as it is the communication tool of choice for coordinating party-goers. The article says it was not technically feasible, but we beg to differ. The Facebook application, which got such powerful buzz in this article, is nowhere to be found. Coors has purchased no Google AdWords to support consumers who are looking for its tools. And the user experience of tools such as the Happy Hour Locater is pretty poor; it feels slapped together (see Adrants‘ review of a banner ad).

Unfortunately, it’s hard to find data on the program in order to measure meaning or marketing results. But I did see that Coors Light share was up over the Memorial Day weekend. Despite a mixed execution, I’m excited to see this mass beer brand recognize the need to do something more than amuse its consumers with witty 30-second ads – and it is forcing its agencies to work together to improve. I believe the people who choose to engage with these Coors Light tools will build stronger loyalty to the brand. And the social element of the tools helps drive word-of-mouth at a minimal cost.