Saying Apple Won The Mobile Flash War Is Misleading

Remember the headlines in November?  Ones like those in this CNET article saying Apple won the mobile Flash war.  Sources at Adobe were quoted as saying that "We will no longer adapt Flash Player for mobile devices to new browser, OS version or device configurations." (source CNET UK).  So Steve Jobs won.  Flash really is unnecessary on mobile devices.  Actually, it is very necessary.

Adobe made the right move, enabling a successful development platform (Actionscript) to exist in an "app" consumer model within the mobile space via Adobe AIR.  Let's remember what Flash is: a development environment for delivering rich, interactive content to users.  This has traditionally been done via the Flash plugin, allowing web browsers to decode and display this content. However desktop and laptop PC's have more CPU horsepower and screen real estate available for processing Flash content and Actionscript code.  Mobile devices, with their smaller screens, and slower processors, are not ideal vehicles for delivering Flash-based content.

Adobe, FINALLY, recognized this.

So Adobe took a step back, surveyed the situation, and realized what they have: a viable, established development platform.  This development platform not only delivers games and entertainment, but it enables advertisers to create dynamic ads and apps, allowing them to connect with consumers in new ways that traditional advertising does not allow.

That's why the mobile play is so important.  Traditional advertising methods don't work in a mobile environment.  In February of this year, Comscore reported smartphone usage was up 60% year over year (Business Insider).  If you want to get your costumer's attention, it's no longer via a television or a regular PC screen.  In order to win mind share, you have to get consumers in their pockets, so that they will open up their pocketbooks.

Flash/Actionsctipt development via Adobe AIR packaging makes sense. It allows Adobe to continue to sell software.  It allows Adobe to stay relevant with developers. It allows Adobe to be a key player in the mobile advertising realm.  It just makes sense.

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It's about the content, not the algorithm

SEO. Search Engine Optimization.  For the past few years, no other term (other than Social Media) has owned the mindshare of marketers and business owners when it comes to the web.  It's almost a foregone assumption: if I build a website, I must perform SEO.  If I own a website, I must perform SEO.

The next big assumption is that performing SEO means either hiring an expensive "SEO Company", or getting a "SEO For Dummies" book and doing it yourself.  What exactly are you doing when you are "SEO'ing"?  Altering "alt" tags, meta data, headers, tagging images, keyword selection, link-backs...it's almost as mind-boggling as trying to guess how many letters there are in a can of alphabet soup.  Why are we putting ourselves through this insanity?  It's because we desparately want to be at the top of Google's listings.  We want to meet, beat, and even fool Google's algorithm at it's own game. 

It's time to stop the insanity.  Sure, having as much of your content indexable as possible is worthwhile.  Sure, you want to have good keyword selection and contextual page titles.  But lets get one thing clear.  No matter the algorithm, if you don't have relevant content, and others don't think you're content is relevant, Google isn't going to care either.

Google cares the most about relevant content.  If your content is actually about what you claim your website or webpage is addressing, then your content is relevant, or contextual.  If you title your page "Dogs", but you present information about cats, then it is not relevant.  Google and it's genius engineers have figured out how to "crawl" your website, examine your content, and rate it's relevancy.  It grades everything on your page that it can search, or "index.

Not only must your content be relevant, but it must be updated frequently.  Google will index your site on a set schedule once it "finds" you for the first time.  How often you update your content, or create new content, will determine how often Google "decides" to visit your site.  If you create a site, and never update it, then Google will eventually "decide" to visit your site more infrequently, and as a result, it will lower you in relevant search results.  But if you continually update your site, and continue to create relevant content, Google will raise you in it's search results.  Old and stale = forgotten and unimportant.  Fresh and exciting = relevant and important.

Even if you write relevant content, and keep it fresh, unless others also think it is relevant, then Google will not raise you up the search ranking results.  How do others make you relevant?  Link backs.  The more people, in contextual situations, link back to you, then your content is relevant.  What is a contextual situation?  Link farms are NOT contextual situations.  In fact, Google has clamped down on this practice; recently altering its algorithms to remove link farms from the equation.  So many people were "playing" the system with link farms and dummy websites that Google re-worked it's code to severely discount the influence of link farms and dummy websites.

What Google did was increase the relevancy of a website, with content relevant to yours, linking back to you.  For example, a blog post talking about dog sweaters, mentioning your comments about them, and linking back to your site, is relevant.  A series of forum posts on a public community forum site about dog sweaters, with links back to you in those posts, are relevant.  A series of social media posts on Facebook or Twitter, mentioning content about dog sweaters and linking back to your site, are relevant.

Google cares about content that others care about, and if they care about you, then Google cares about you.  So go ahead and optimize those page headers.  Make your site's content match your keywords.  Make as much of your website able to be indexed as possible.  But if your content isn't relevant, and if others don't care about your content, then Google won't either.

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Another Ad Network = More Fragmentation

On Wednesday Yahoo released it's "Living Ad", interactive video ad format for advertisers.  This new ad format works within an ad network, that is centered around Yahoo's Livestand publication app.  Livestand, along with it's ad network, enters an already saturated ad "market" occupied by the likes of Flipboard, Zite, AOL's Editions, and Pulse.  Yahoo is pushing advertisting packages to buyers, some of which are said to run upwards of $500,000.

According to Yahoo, Livestand features a magazine-style layout.  It will launch with some content from third-party publications.  Those publishers will share their ad revenue with Yahoo.  The details of these revenue sharing arrangements are not yet known. These publishers can also re-sell ad packages on the plarform.  I can only deduce that Yahoo get's a cut of that revenue as well. Diane McGarvey at Scientific American, which is offering some content on the Livestand, states Yahoo will keep about 70 percent of revenue on ads sold to appear inline with Scientific American content.
Living Ad, along with Livestand, is one of many initiatives to attempting to make Yahoo a relevant player in mobile advertising.  Mobile advertising is projected to net around $1 billion this year in the U.S. and up to $1.2 billion in 2012, according to eMarketer. Yahoo is positioning itself to receive as large a portion of this pie of revenue as possible.

The mobile ad space is already over-saturated.  Frankly, none of the ad formats and networks bring anything new to the table.  Nothing currently compells a consumer to do anything after viewing these ads compared with any other form of advertising medium.  We don't need another ad network.  We don't need another "method" to get an ad to a consumer.  What we need is a new type of ad, a new way to interact with a product, that might actually compel a consumer to buy.

Advertisers, and content networks, need to bring new ideas to the table.  The internet and mobile phone networks bring whole new possibilities to advertising via interactive ads.  An interactive ad would allow a consumer to configure products, explore them, walk around them, try a focused "demo" of it.  After they have played with it, or configured it to their hearts content, they could be connected with a vendor to purchase that product within a few clicks.  This gives the consumer a quick way to satisfy their emotional desire to buy the product.

However, most online ads don't do anything other than present a picture, an animation, a call to action phrase, and link to a normal website.  There's no point to showing a traditional ad online or on a smart phone if there's nothing new about it's experience.  None.

Yahoo's Living Ad is trying to do this.  However, most advertisers don't seem to know how to create an ad "experience" that really compels consumer interest.  We need to stop telling

If advertisting is going to survive, and make money, the "ad" as we know it needs to evolve along with the technology available to deliver it.  With the growing popularity of mobile devices that are connected to mobile data networks, there is a new opportunity to truly try something new.  Who is going to lead the way?

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Where's The Beef?

I was born in 1980.  I remember lots of things from my childhood.  I remember GI Joe, the Transformers, Mask, the Challenger disaster, Christmas at my grandmother's, and a basic, loud phrase coming from an elderly woman on television: "Where's the beef?"

In 1984, a spot entitled "Fluffy Bun" appeared featuring actress Clara Peller, asking the question, "Where's the beef" upon receiving a massive hamburger bun containing a paltry piece of "beef."  Wendy's used this iconic phrase to poke fun and embarrass competitors such as McDonald's and Burger King, bringing to light the tiny, sliver patties being put into fast food burgers at the time.

Fast forward over twenty years.  The phrase has become part of our American culture, but the origins, and the meaning, have slowly faded away.  Over time, with Wendy's leading the charge, the major fast food restaurants have been offering more items with more natural ingredients.   Now they are upping the ante again, releasing a new line of value hamburgers that aims to one-up category leaders based on quantity and quality of the beef in the sandwich.  In order to do this, Wendy's resurrected "Where's the beef?"  It's a spot-on approach.

In order to bridge the gap between a generation of consumers from the 1980's and the 21st century, Wendy's used today's current retro fashion trends, placing "Modern Family" actor Reid Ewing in a 1980's styled "Where's the beef sandwich" walking down the sidewalks of urban settings.  Along the way, people familiar with "Where's the beef?" give him the proverbial "thumbs up".  The main character doesn't understand the recognition he receives, until he comes up to a sign at a local Wendy's.  Then it all makes sense.  Cut to juicy shot of large hamburger, product sold.

Frankly I think this is brilliant.  We could have seen Clara again.  We could have seen the big bun, small patty.  Instead, what we see is a brilliantly simple connection between two generations.  There's no hard sell, not silly gimmick, just a recognition of pop culture history, and a delicious looking hamburger.

The most powerful messages are sometimes the simplest ones.

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Blogging Effectively

Sage Lewis at the SageRock Digital Marketing Blog wrote that people don't blog as much as they use other social media because, "I think it’s because they see blogging as a big thing." Translation: Blogging is hard.  Blogging is not "hard".  People don't blog, because they are unsure what to do with it.  They don't know how to use it effectively.

Like any use of media, blogging starts with a plan.  Planning helps you set goals, build discipline, and write with purpose.

Goals help you have a purpose.  Without goals, you're blog, or any other type of marketing, is ineffective.  Goals help you focus.  All of your posts should lead towards one common goal, one common claim or idea.  For example, what if you created the most comfortable seat cushion in the world?  What if your goal was to sell one million by the end of the year?  Then all of your posts should be focused on convincing someone of the virtues of properly padded buttocks...which can be achieved with your amazing seat cushion.  Your posts could feature customer stories, or the results of studies about padded versus un-padded seats.  Each post focuses on one reason that someone should buy your seat cushion, which helps you reach one million unit sales.

Regular blogging also helps you develop the discipline you need to reach your goals.  Without discipline, it's impossible to reach a long term goal. Jim Whittaker said, "You can never conquer the mountain.  You can only conquer yourself."  The mountain is the sales goal.  Climbing the mountain means defeating the army of doubt, laziness, and busyness.  Doubt tells you that you will never sell enough of your product, and that no one will read your blog.  Laziness prevents you from spending the time to plan what you are going to write, when you are going to write it, writing it, and editing it.  Busyness lets you make excuses, allowing life's events to constantly get in the way of your online marketing plan.  

Setting goals and practicing discipline with your blogging frees you up to write with a purpose.  If you're not writing with a purpose, your blog becomes a set of random, rambling posts. Start by creating a list of all of the things you want to say that relate to your main goal.  Next, create a short outline for each item on your list.  Spend time each week developing and writing about each item on your list.  Eventually it will become easy, and you will develop a weekly writing routine.  Another benefit to this weekly writing plan is that it will build up content on your blog over time.  That content can be indexed by search engines such as Google.  Eventually you will have a large mass of indexed, searchable content.  Google also grades your blog higher if you're posting relevant content more frequently.  A stale, rarely updated blog will almost never appear on Google search results.  If you're also participating in online forums and other online communities, make sure you are linking back to your blog in your signature.  This helps build a "web" of links going back to your blog, and over time it can improve your search rankings, since Google gives your site a higher ranking when others link to you.

Create a plan, set a goal, practice discipline, and write with a purpose.  You just might find that the skills you develop writing a blog will end up permeating other parts of your life as well.

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