I'm Steven Verbruggen, Belgian new marketing / cross-media professional currently working at Nascom as an interactive strategy maven.
I bridge the gap between marketing and technology. On this personal blog I talk about trends, implementations, best practices, .. on this subject.
As you can see on the photo the badge is rather big. I don’t mind: it holds a little booklet with the program, so you have that information close.
But that leaves a big area unused below your name. Some people use it for their business card, most people don’t. Adobe nowadays has great looking logos/icons of their products. Little squares with (mostly) the product initials. They’re available as stickers (don’t know where to find them, not really a sway hunter) and people use them all the time to stick them on their laptops, t-shirts, body .. They’re basically tagging themselves. So it would be great that on registrations you’d get a sheet of stickers you could use to tag your badge. Tag yourself with the products your interested in. Or perhaps you can tick them at pre-registration on the website so they can be printed on your badge, might work as well. But stickers is cooler Anyway, I think this would make networking even easier.
An other idea might be to print the badge in a specific colour to identify the country your from. This might help you to establish local connections.
Just learned the nicest thing from Hoss Gifford during his crazy session.
There are 3 parameters everybody wants in any project. The project has to be: - Cheap - Fast - Good
The golden rule is you can only have 2. He’s right. A fast & cheap project is rarely gonna be good. A fast & good project isn’t cheap. And a cheap good project won’t be fast. So please choose whether you want it cheap, or fast. Don’t compromise on the good part.
I’m in Barcelona right now, on the kind invitation of Adobe. I’m attending the Adobe Max conference. Quick status.
It seems the new Adobe strategy includes several services. No real surprise, it’s a market trend. But a trend that will change the major business models.
Saw some really cool stuff already: - Share. A central storage platform that can be integrated in all kind of applications - Scene7: a technology Adobe recently acquired. Making it possible to use a high res images datasource and render the needed images just in time to create all kind of amazing applications (zooming, rotating, integrating, ..) - Thermo: the missing link between designer and developer! Release date not known yet - Pacifica: a VOIP service. This works really well. So you basically can create your own VOIP applications. So who’s up to create the first Skype clone in Flash or AIR - The new flash player, version 10 (codename Astro). I’m especially excited about the new text renderer! - Flash Lite 3. With streaming video towards your mobile amongst others. I can see a cool application evolving using this and Pacifica - I attended a NDA session on AIR as well. Can’t go into the specifics (I signed with my own blood). Just know AIR is here to stay.
Serge was in the keynote this morning. He did really well in front of this room with over 1000 people He in fact presented the VOIP service .. the one with the most risk for failure. Respect man!
This noon I attended a roundtable discussion with the Flash Mobile / Lite team. It was engaging, and fun to know the Adobe people involve the community to make the product better. Really good discussion. It was not only about technology, but also about for example distribution, marketing and awareness. Thank you Kathy Charneco for inviting me.
The greatest thing about these events is the networking, the interaction with the Adobe people and fellow multimedia professionals. And of course the inspiring factor. Really enjoy al these engaging people talk about the technologies they love. Lot’s of new ideas! But the Wifi sucks
Next Saturday, we’re hosting an Adobe Usergroup (previous MMUG) session at These Days, Antwerp. It’s going to be an inspirational session, not very technical.
Feel free to join, we’ll have a Barbeque afterwards. Subscribe on the website.
The usergroup is managed by Koen De Weggheleire nowadays, and he’s doing a very good job so far!
In an era of abundance, self-awareness kicks in. People become sensitive for non-elementary values. Even more: they start living by it. These values become elementary, at least that’s what people think.
I’m talking about health, about environment, about spirituality. For the record, I’m not saying these values aren’t important, but I know you only care about them if you have food on your plate and don’t see your siblings get killed in some dirt war.
Anyway, we start mattering about stuff (mainly ourselves), and this is reflected in our consumption pattern. We pay more because the package states Aloe Vera or Omega 3, we prefer green things and even fair trade becomes an option.
Clever brands noticed this and started offering products that respond to this new demands. They boomed! A billion dollar market! Abundance rocks!
And again, I’m not blaming these brands. And I’m not blaming the consumers either (I’m one of them). Buying these things just makes you feel better. Cheaper than a shrink.
But I’m astonished if a see these new values become absolute and bluntly translated to any brands. Watch this (Belgian) Cola commercial.
It’s about a new product: Coca Cola Light plus. It’s Diet coke with added vitamins and magnesium. I have 2 problems with this approach:
1/ drinking coke isn’t about health. I perfectly understand de light/diet movement: it’s about enjoying good live without damaging yourself (well ..). But the plus movement is telling your consumers: “you know, it’s not only ‘not bad’ for you .. it’s GOOD for you”. As a consumer, I don’t buy this. Drinking coke isn’t about wellness. The message isn’t authentic.
2/ the commercial .. it doesn’t understand the movement. Taking care of yourself is an active decision (passively supported by the adapted products). But if you choose to go to a wellness center for example, you don’t do it because you HAVE to. You do it because you WANT to. Because it makes you feel good. In the spot these values are wiped of the table. Coke light plus .. the lazy way to wellness. Wait, it even is the payoff of the spot: “An easy way to goodness”.
In my mind coke messed up big time. I’m probably proved wrong because I’m sure the product will sell, but they’ll pay in authenticity.
An other local example: McDonalds is sponsoring a Basketball camp. I don’t understand why the organiser of the camp (Pieter Loridon & C°) is accepting the sponsorship, it’s simply the wrong message. McDonals isn’t healthy food, don’t fake it is. Again, not authentic. Not authentic for Micky-D, but most important not authentic for the basket camp.
Writing these things, I feel nagging and getting old
To be honest, I don’t care about the ethics. But I do care about the marketing. And in my mind these examples are bad marketing. And I don’t like bad marketing, I like to do things proper and effective, and now it just feels like wasting money.
Now please bring me a beer with added calcium, I need it!
How do you fight an organisation like the WTO? By pretending you’re them.
That’s exactly the way the yes men figured out.
What’s it about? Some time ago I accidentally bumped on a documentary aired on the Dutch television called The Yes Men. These guys are hosting a website called gatt.org which is more or less a copy of the WTO website. Sometimes (and that’s what they hope for) people mistake them for the real WTO and invite them as speakers and so on.
The yes men jump on these opportunities, call themselves WTO executives, but bring what’s in their mind the real thoughts of the WTO.
Example: the WTO is supposed to be a supporter of 3th world countries, global trade and economics .. but it seems they only care about the Western/rich countries. So in stead of helping people who really need it, they kind of make things worse for them.
The Yes Men is a kind of positive protest to this. A clever form of protest, and a more subtle one. But one that might really change peoples minds and hearts.
I’m not going to describe the actions they did, would lead us too for. In stead I would like to invite you to see the docu yourself. It’s on Google video! (turn of the Spanish subtitles if you wish)
Basically, what the yes men are doing is marketing. If you want to beat your opponents (which is a strong sentence in this context, but after all it’s about winning/selling/gaining .. whether it’s products or minds) there are 2 way: or you position yourself over your opponent, or you position your opponent below you.
The yes men are doing exactly this, except they do it on what one might call ethical grounds. They also do it by not presenting their opponent as inferior, they do it by expressing their opponent’s true thought. Let common sense decide!
But then again, it’s quite scary to see how people living in “the system” swallow almost everything, no questions asked.
BTW: The Yes Men is about much more then the WTO, but the documentary is centered around this topic
I just read the shocking, really shocking, news at Micromiel that David Boschmans passed away last night. David worked as a development evangelist for Microsoft, and I will remember him as a great guy, a passionate developer and evangelist, and overall a clever person.
I know he has a family, so my deepest sympathy to them and his close friends!
My god, he was only 32 or something, I can’t believe this!
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