Interesting new ad campaign from Wal-marts new agency. Wal-mart itself is a very polarizing brand and I will leave it up to others to debate whether their business practices are contributing to the downfall of middle America. But I do find the ad campaign they have created to be pretty interesting. Not sure I'd go so far as to say brilliant but definitely interesting.

In the commercial Wal-mart clearly calls out the customer benefits; shop with us  and you will have more money to do the important things in your life. That is a much more powerful message than a smiley face guy popping around the store slashing prices. Cutting prices doesn't appeal to my emotional side, it doesn't show me any customer benefit. But saving money to spend on what is really important to me does. Forget about the fact that saving money at Wal-mart doesn't mean you go home and drop your savings into a piggy bank to save for a family vacation. The dream doesn't ever have to be actualized to still be very powerful.

Nike ads do a great job of this. They appeal to our aspirations. It's not so exciting to just show running shoes when the majority of American don't even exercise. That doesn't appeal to them. But the images of strong men and women with chizzled abs climbing high mountains appeals to the aspirations of someone buying those shoes. It's the perception that you could be empowered to do that if you so chose to. That's the appealing part of the ad.

Oh yah. Looks like someone besides Microsoft has made a faux pas. Seems Yahoo accidentally leaked news this week of an upcoming social networking site . It's possibly called Mash. Who knows if it's true but in most cases where you smell smoke, there's fire. But really does anybody find this at all earth shattering? No. They closed down Yahoo photos now that they have Flickr. So maybe this is the end of Yahoo 360. I'm not sure what type of differntiator Yahoo could possibly offer to compete against the multitude of current SN sites in the market, not to mention that little site Facebook. I say Go for it! But then again I'm not a shareholder.

Yesterday was September 11th, another year gone by. Each year I think it will be a little less sad and it never is. Each year I think to myself this will be the year that I can remember that horrible day and not cry. But it never happens. Yesterday I cried.

I remember where I was, how I found out. I'm sure we all do. My phone rang at 5:30am which is never a good sign. I live on the west coast so that was 8:30am in NYC. I have family and friends that were living in NYC and one of my friends called to see if my family was okay. I didn't answer the first or second time the phone rang. By the third time I was up and out of bed. This time it was my dad calling to say he had spoken to my brother and he was okay. My brother had an office in Soho. He walked home over the Brooklyn bridge. He and sister-in-law had a condo in Brooklyn with a view of lower Manhattan. She was standing at the window watching when the 2nd plane hit.

I used to work in the east village and was lucky enough to have an office with a windows and a view of the towers. I spent many afternoons daydreaming out that big picture window wondering what kind of important business was being done down there. Wall Street.

We all have our memories of that time. That day. I think what strikes me as most profound about the day was that 3,000 got up that morning and went about the daily rituals of their lives. What we do to assemble ourselves for the day ahead. Mother's went to work, father's dropped off kids at daycare, son's grabbed coffee on the way in, daughters overslept, or maybe went in early for the first time. They did nothing but what was expected of them. One can truly say "there but for the grace of God go I."

This was my favorite retrospective from yesterday.

I just came across an interesting manifesto that is worth a read. It's a short e-book put out by Pragmatic Marketing. You can read the whole thing yourself, I just wanted to highlight and interesting list at the end of the article. Answer these questions to see if your company is a market-driven one:

• Do you meet your product delivery schedules?
• Are your product requirements defined by needs of the market?
• Is the focus of your research and innovation on addressing an understood
  and well-defined market need?
• Do you first look outside for new technologies before building them yourself?
• Are product positioning and messages based on the specific quantified problems of a well-defined market and buyer?
• Is the positioning statement done before development begins?
• Can a customer or prospect understand the “value to them” of a product or feature by reading the first few lines of any of your marketing deliverables (data sheets, brochures, fact sheets, etc.)?
• Does your web site focus more on market problems, market segments, buyer personas, and solutions than on your products, technology, and company?
• Do you have a marketing programs strategy?
• When you have a meeting with a customer, do you spend the largest percentage of the time listening versus talking?
• Does someone other than sales routinely visit non-customers?
• Do you have someone who is your chief prospect advocate?
• Can an average salesperson quickly locate the right tools to present your product strategy or to close a deal?
• Are your channels selling all of your products?
• Is part of your marketing programs budget and sales goals allocated to customer satisfaction and customer retention?
• Do you measure product profitability including estimating fixed costs on a pro-rated basis?
• Do you retire non-performing products?

My product got about 50/50 yes/no. Not too great.

I got a private message that informed me I've been featured on BlogBuzz. Thanks guys for the heads up! I think this will be my new favorite site. Check it out.

I joined the social networking site AdGabber a week ago. It's a site for advertising and marketing people. To date I haven't seen anything worth mentioning or passing along. I'll admit I've been a lurker so far. The same few people are mostly doing the contributing right now. And I've seen more than a little self-promotion. Lot's of job postings too but little content. Telling me to go create a viral video and be transparent doesn't cut it. I already knew that. :)