I’ve run a monthly reading group at the Boston Athenaeum for the past 13 years or so, and it’s now at the point where if I read 15 books in a year I’m not doing badly. So 150 seems, at all these years of remove from graduate school, like a mountain of data.

Ah, but that’s the academic world. Later in the day yesterday, we were asking a prospect how complex the legal cases his company managed could become. He said, “Well, there’s one pharma client in the middle of a large case, and they have 500,000,000 pages of documents.”

Now that’s a pure BtoB number. Astounding amounts of data, written in multiple languages, and framed in specialty language. Five million pounds of paper, if a single sheet of 8.5 x 11″ weighs .16 ounce. About 62 average harvest-ready pine trees worth of paper. And all of it needs to be organized, potentially in hours in the run-up to a legal event, to find specific  information that will save someone’s tail.

At the other end of the scale, of course, our life science clients are now talking on the atomic and nanoparticle scale, the scale where the actual work of the cell gets done, but for some reason these 500,000,000 pages are sticking with me. As the refrain often goes in our world, “Thank God there’s software for that.”

“Sure,” one of the more cranky executives said, “I’d give a minute of my time to hear more.” (more…)

Clearly, we will be building mass brands and niche brands in the future, but what sort, with what tools and with what kind of partners?

I thought Kevin Maney’s perspective on this question was pretty interesting in his new Portfolio piece, “Free for All.”

When you look at the tectonic shifts in the music industry that have taken place since 1999, those days of paying $9.99 for a new B-52s album and $28 for a ticket to see them live seem like 200 years ago. For example:

* Radiohead lets the user choose the price for In Rainbows

* Nine Inch Nails releases its latest album only to its Web site (though, like Radiohead, you could pay a huge premium for a deluxe edition, both of which have sold out)

* Timbaland has cut an exclusive music deal with Verizon Wireless

* 99% of all downloaded music in China is illegal, and 85% of all CDs sold are pirated

* Concert revenue is surging ($3.9 billion in 2007), CD sales are cratering. If you’ve purchased a concert ticket lately, you know that all too well.

So what may be coming?

* All musical content becomes free, with a mass brand paying seven figures to give the CD away free with its identity and messaging associated with it. (Or to quote Maney, “Any day now, I expect to find a flash drive with a Radiohead song on it inside a specially marked box of Cap’n Crunch.”)

* Groups make money only from sponsorship and touring, using their music as the content play. (Since when did anyone ever pay for a music video, or a CIO for a white paper?)

* Lots more experimentation, “like a teenager’s goth phase.” To this list add Elvis Costello’s Sundance Channel talk show, U2’s 3D movie, and any number of endorsement deals, commercials, and merchandising plays assembled from industry fragments as the music labels begin to crash and burn.
In the end, it’s about giving away the perfect format of the artist’s brand for free (why not? It can be produced and sold for virtually nothing) but exacting a premium for the non-reproducible, thrilling, experience of the artist’s brand.

Does anything here apply to brand building in our world?

If the future of brands is about stepping beyond the perfect print and TV ad proscenium into the human experiential, I’d say just about everything.

“I’d been at MIT for quite a while, but I was a bit tired of technology. I think all of us are. We have so much of it, more of it every day, and we’re not sure why we’re buying so much of it. It’s kind of like a summer movie – except it lasts too long.”

The day after I read this I lost my cell phone (”Lucky you,” quipped a colleague) and decided I wanted to downgrade from a smart phone to something a little less brilliant: a Motorola Razr is what I was hankering after. I expected this swap to be a simple process since I have cell phone insurance, and even to be complimented, at least in a backhanded way, for choosing simplicity.

The mobile phone insurance rep was having none of it. “I’m sorry, sir. You’re not allowed to downgrade. We can only replace the phone that you lost.” He was immediately on to his next activity screen with me, but the whole thing set me to wondering: At what point are we using too much technology in our lives? Will we even know when we’ve passed the overload point?

The Economist had a wonderful special report recently on the rise of technology nomads (if you’re reading this, it’s a fair bet you are one) and how cell phone technology has strengthened our ’strong bonds’ with immediate family but further deteriorated our ‘weak bonds’, the ones we have with strangers, acquaintances, contractors, neighbors and so on. If we’re always attached to a piece of technology, are we really reachable? Are we really living in the moment?

What’s the link to PJA? On a weekly basis we see plenty of marketing programs that use a scattershot approach to technology. One prospect recently showed us a series of YouTube videos he’d posted about his company. Vaguely interesting, but they weren’t attached or tied into anything, and therefore had few hits and almost no impact.

On the other end of the spectrum, I continue to see many case studies on the continuing power of opt-in email marketing. Fast Company recently highlighted the enormous boost Barneys New York has realized with Sheldon Gilbert’s startup Proclivity. The big secret: use predictive algorithms to tune an email program, and realize 10-fold response rate increases.

I wonder if my wireless carrier and their insurance company could have seen the sales opportunity within my service request: give me a simple piece of technology that suits my needs, and I’m likely to use it more.

Maybe next contract.

* Being able to text live to a sports event screen, a la wiffiti

* Being able to send ‘goodbye’ photos from behind security to a digital billboard in an airport’s departures area (the idea of distance is demolished a little more every day, it seems)

* Being able to contact an avatar on your mobile device to get you a cab or a designated driver because you’ve had a few too many.

The more you contribute as part of your sign-up, the more information the company takes away. The longer you look at the screen, the longer your brand impression. Etc.

In the BtoB world, we’ve clearly got deep roots in providing valuable content in exchange for a prospect’s attention. In one case, years ago, we convinced HP to postpone another glossy brochure and go with a buyer’s guide for the technology category that was lightly sponsored by the brand. It was more work-intensive to put together an editorial board of doctors and nurses, but the result was so popular it was reprinted twice and placed on a national regulatory recommended reading list for healthcare information systems.

The same rules apply online, of course: give someone content they couldn’t find elsewhere or that makes them more competitive and they will be more loyal to your brand. Amending that list for the Web 2.0 world is in order, too. You can also connect with:

* content that allows people to connect with their peers and exchange that information

* content that allows people to test their skills in real time

* content that allows for co-creation or near real-time collaboration with a brand

The list could probably go on forever. The point we like to make is, don’t just interrupt someone. Inform them. Educate them. Inspire them. That’s got to be a part of the brand territory now.

What I was pondering today was this: most Web sites in BtoB are silent films. There’s a sort of backdrop quality to them, a lifelessness, and almost no meaningful sound or vision. They are like the 2D sets in silent movies and just about as authentic in feeling. They don’t really talk to or interact with you, so until the next little injection of content, the intertitle card with the language on it, you really have to guess what the characters are saying, what the narrative arc is, and what the key dialogue is. The expressions are somewhat exaggerated or off (bad stock photography is the wooden silent actor of the 21st century). You’re held at a remove from it all because it’s…silent.

Where Web sites want to move is into the Talkie era: the era of full stereo sound synchronized to movement, the era of storytelling that really reaches out and involves the user, the state of a medium starting to realize its full potential. In film that era began in 1927 or so, with The Jazz Singer. There’s only about two minutes of synchronized talking and acting in the film, but movies could never go back afterward.

It might make sense to look at your Web site the same way. Is it really engaging your audiences, or is it mute? Does it deliver a story, or just a series of title cards? Is it experiential, or just a 2D storefront with a few frills attached?

One of our major goals for 2008 is to bring BtoB companies into the era of the talkie Web presence. Once you’ve seen the engagement measures and longer visits to your little marketing theater, you really can’t go back again. And that’s a very good thing.

So is marketing an investment or a line item expense, and what business problems can it solve? Local academic marketing programs often ask someone from PJA to come in and present the BtoB perspective on these eternal questions (see under John Wanamaker, advertising budget, which half is wasted), and though these are basic tenets of marketing, it never hurts to be reminded during an economic period when business common sense is often the first thing to suffer.

Here’s the list our head of interactive plans to present at an upcoming marketing class in a lecture hall near you: (more…)

In some cases these companies have their business strategy set but no story with aspiration or vision that sits above the strategy and unites every business unit. As a result they can’t get the right valuation from analysts or they’re stuck in the wrong competitive set. In other cases the company has chosen a position and is interested in a gut-check, hiring us on a consultative basis first. (These ‘trial-size’ contracts are a classic sign of an economic downturn.)

In other situations the company’s markets are consolidating by the minute, driven by the entrance of a behemoth competitor (on Mondays and Wednesdays insert “Google,” on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Fridays insert “Microsoft”) and they need an irrefutable statement of why choosing best-of-breed still matters over giving in to the inevitable one-stop shop.

In still others, the company is growing too quickly to come up with a new position that works for the next stage of growth, realizing that if they don’t, they’ll put the brakes on that growth because they just don’t pass the smell test of the CXO customer versus the regional VP they’ve sold to successfully in the past. (more…)

Which would be a serious problem if a lot of companies didn’t have those ‘job’ things to do. One antidote to these pronouncements came recently when I was interviewing a CEO about recent job cuts and whether he was worried about retaining his big stars. His response: “Most of them don’t have the option to go, honestly. And of the few that do, half of those are subject to the same inertia that everybody is subject to, so they’re not going anywhere.”

As you probably know, Forrester now creates a lot of reports for “marketing leadership professionals.” Or as I thought to myself on first seeing one of these documents, “Oh, great. They’re not satisfied making my clients feel guilty about falling behind; now they’re doing the same thing with agencies.”

All this throat-clearing aside, I have read and can recommend a recent report called The Connected Agency by Mary Beth Kemp and Peter Kim that’s getting a lot of buzz (and yes, you can check the records: I did pay my $279 for it). (more…)

The report brings back the words of an AT&T executive who is a “friend of the agency,” as the saying goes. In essence, she said that “agencies talk a good game about integrating print and online, but I’ve been hearing it for years and I just don’t see it.” Well, she used more PG-13 language than that, but you hear the same kind of frustration as we’re now hearing about social media.

Although BtoB has traditionally lagged consumer markets in marketing innovation, we find that social media provides a great opportunity to step out and “punch above your weight,” since larger companies tend to arrive at the party later. Of course, there are a few ground rules to be laid down after, to quote Jim Nail from Cymfony, we “put up a good presentation about what social media is.” In no particular order, these are: (more…)