Kid Rock

I don’t like precocious children. But what kind of joyless cynic would deny these two their props.

From the boldaslove blog:

The Bots are two brothers, Mikaiah Lei, 16, and Anaiah Lei, 12, sons of a Chinese father and an Afro-Caribbean mother.

Shout out to ’68’s Brian Tate, who sent me the link to this video.  It was forwarded to him by his guitarist, Eddie Alsina, who said in a note, “. . .they rock tha fuck out.”  Actually, The Bots performance is quite impressive, given their ages.

Their site says their sound is a combination of Punk, Ska, Rock and Reggae, and that they cite The Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Rancid, Bad Brains, Led Zeppelin, The Artic Monkeys and Vampire Weekend (to name a few) as their influences.

Filed under: Cool Hunting, Music, Trend Spotting, supergenius llc

Welcome to the Paradise, “New Media” Slumdogs

Child Corn Picker

Lost in all the hype about New Media! And The Democratization of the News! And Newspapers are Dying! Is the fact that the information phase of the information revolution we’re in right now kind of blows.

We are working harder than ever before to find cool and interesting stuff. Between Digg and StumbleUpon and Reddit and MetaFilter and Facebook and Twitter, we are the ones who vote on the news, send it to the top, and retweet the hell out of it to make sure it gets massive and unprecedented exposure. It’s a simple system, inarguable for anyone who has faith in democracy.

I no longer have faith in democracy.

Here’s the problem. I don’t want to do this much work to find stuff I want to read. For every interesting take on Google vs. Facebook, or a solid analysis of the Iranian nuclear question, there are about fifty useless posts, either lists or lols or scraped content. My Twitter feed has become a series of Burma-Shave signs, haikus leading down a road to nowhere. I may be able to read anything I want, but I’m doing all this work to find it, and by the time I get it, I’m no longer interested.

Information is out there. But we’re doing all the work.

It’s not enough to have people act as information filters: people like you have to act as filters, or else it’s just not going to satisfy. You need trusted sources with a wide range of access to information. If you just choose your friends, you’re going to end up in an echo chamber, retweeting lol posts. You need independent sources of interesting stories, told in a way that’s compelling, challenging, and informative. We used to have something like this: they were called magazines and newspapers.

That’s why this spasm of eulogizing Ye Olde Media feels a little premature. We’re not going to wake up to find a dead tree on our front doorstep anymore. But if you want trusted, analytical, valued information, you’re not going to hook into the Tehran Twitter feed and watch people misspell words. You’re going to click on the New York Times, or the Economist, or Time. For the time being, media brands still matter. They help us stop digging through veins of information, and gain perspective on what’s true.

Filed under: advertising, consumer choice, facebook, social media, supergenius llc, twitter

Planes, trains & advertising: The John Hughes School of Craft

John Hughes means a lot to everyone who grew up on his films. But if you’re from Chicago, he means a little bit more.

John Hughes reinvented Chicago. The suburbs around Chicago are fine, safe places to grow up, but they lack anything in the way of personality. When Hughes introduced us to the good people of Shermer, Illinois, teenagers of the greater Chicagoland area took a collective gasp. Here was someone who understood the mind-numbing sameness, the bland days that rolled into each other, the long flat streets that never went anywhere no matter how long you walked. No one saw cinema in this but him.

What Hughes did was to take Chicago and make it universal. For a stretch of the 1980’s, Shermer stood in for everything that was right and wrong about growing up in America. The trapped claustrophobia of The Breakfast Club. The giddy feeling of freedom from tedium in Ferris Beuller’s Day Off. The geeky, insular, Dungeons-and-Dragons-in-the-basement world of Weird Science. These were more than iconic moments in film. These were our lives. No matter how universal the themes of his films, there was still something in them that was uniquely, relentlessly Chicago.

Hughes did all of this, of course, after putting in his time working at Leo Burnett and busting out of there to do great things. As former Burnetters ourselves, we know the talent that flows through that place, and the heights to which our former colleagues have and will soar. Hughes was special. And if we can create a small echo of his work here at Super-Genius by overturning old stories and making them feel relevant, fresh, and universal — by making our own Shermer, so to speak — then we have accomplished a great, true thing.

Hughes made a generation of Chicagoans proud of who we were. For that and a million other reasons, we are grateful. Because life moves pretty fast. You don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.

Filed under: advertising , chicago advertising, john hughes, leo burnett

Super Genius launches Facebook brand page and application for client lia sophia.

Our agency has just “given birth” to an official Facebook brand presence for lia sophia. Their business is largely driven by referrals and relationships, and social media tools align perfectly with how their Advisors work.  We’ve also created a photo sharing app that brings the lia sophia brand to life – by literally allowing fans to share jewelry on photos of their friends.  The photo sharing app was designed to tap into the sharing functionality Facebook provides.  With a simple call to action of “add lia sophia jewelry to your friends’ photos”, a user can select a photo from their own albums or their friends’ available albums they want to decorate with lia sophia jewelry.   Complete with cropping and rotation features, users can get their touches of jewelry just right before sharing.  Users can save the photos and post their friends’ walls which generate powerful news feeds for awareness.  The app also allows a user save an unlimited amount of images that they have created and sent to friends and any that they have received from friends.

Filed under: facebook, social media, supergenius llc, viral , soc, social networking

Kids on the Future of TV

Filed under: advertising , advertising, internet, kids, the sky is falling, TV FAIL

Black Dynamite: In Your Face Advertising

Check out a piece we wrote for EbonyJet.com that debuted today.

RETHINK is an occasional series featuring contemporary thought on classic Ebony And Jet photos and articles.

We asked ad agency executive Mat Burnett, of Super Genius LLC in Chicago to give some modern perspective on a series of revolutionary ads done by Johnson Publishing in the late 1960s and how far (or not) ethnic advertising has come since then.

Filed under: ad agency, advertising, supergenius llc , 50s advertising, advertising, black advertising, ethnic advertising, super genius

Five Questions for Zappos CEO: Tony Hsieh

Tony Hsieh, CEO of online retailer Zappos.com was kind enough to debut a new feature on Black Match. Five questions for a CEO. For those under rocks, they sell shoes.

1)   What advantages for the Zappos brand come from being so accessible and  transparent across social/digital platforms?

At Zappos, our #1 priority is our company culture. Our belief is that if
we get the culture right, most of the other stuff, like delivering great
customer service or building a long term enduring brand, will happen
naturally on its own. We’ve formalized the definition of our culture into
10 core values:

Being transparent isn’t really something that’s specific to social/digital
platforms. Core value #6 is “Build Open and Honest Relationships With
Communication”… It’s just part of who we are.

2)   As a company that has famously avoided broadcast advertising in favor
of “actions” that advertise (i.e. free shipping) what was the trigger point for your recent ad campaign? How are you/will you measure success (i.e. sales only)?

We take most of the money we would have spent on paid advertising and
invest it into the customer experience instead.  However, we do spend as
much money on direct marketing as possible when it pays for itself.
Using hypothetical numbers, this means that if we spend $1 on paid
advertising, if we get back $10 in sales, then we will spend as much money
as possible as long as we continue to hit that ratio. The problem is that
there isn’t enough advertising inventory out there that meets that ratio.
What we found was that if we invest some money in offline brand
advertising such as magazine ads or TV ads, then that improves the ROI of
our online campaigns, so that altogether we are still hitting the ratio
that makes sense for us.

3)   Is there an overall strategy for your participation in digital/social media or has it come about organically?

It’s really been organic. We aren’t really about “digital/social media” (a
term which I personally dislike). We’re really just about figuring out
ways where we can best express our core values (our culture) and our
commitment to great customer service. We’ve found that Twitter has been
great for that, but so has the telephone, which is why we put our 1-800
number at the top of every page of our web site. The telephone isn’t very
newsworthy, but it’s one of our best branding devices.

4)   Has/How has the Zappos brand been challenged over the past 12 months?

I think the biggest challenge with building our brand is that Zappos is an
experiential brand. Anyone can start another web site tomorrow and make
the same claims that we do about delivering great customer service, but
it’s not until you actually purchase something from us, or call our 1-800
number, or visit our offices, that you can start to tell the difference
between another company and the Zappos brand and culture.

5)   There are obviously tricks that traditional retailers are stealing from you (I’m looking at you piperlime.com); are there dance moves you’re borrowing from traditional/brick and mortar retailers?

We really don’t focus very much on what other retailers are doing. We just
focus on what our customers and employees tell us and then try to deliver
the best customer experience possible while still meeting our financial
goals.

There are a number of interesting widgets that Zappos has in play, including this great Google/Zappos sales mash-up.

Filed under: brands, ceo, consumer choice, online advertising, recession, social media, supergenius llc, twitter, zappos , brand, ceo questions, consumer choice, digital, engagement, social media, strategy, tony hsieh, twitter, zappos

Twitter is Dead, Long Live Twitter.

We are slowly dying in 140-character bursts.

Twitter has gone from a precious little idea to a respectable mini-blogging service to a massive cultural phenomenon in a little more than a year. And I think a lot of us are looking around at each other, nodding, saying, yes, this is awesome, I get it, tweet tweet birdhouse tweetdeck rt @imsohip.

I think some people have a legitimate use for Twitter: comedians, technical support, and Barack Obama. I think the rest of us are fumbling around for a way to stay relevant on it. Because Twitter suffers from the same problem blogs, podcasts, and user-generated content does: most people either have something interesting to say but can’t figure out how to tell it, or don’t have something interesting to say and disguise that fact with wry observational humor that went out of style with Seinfeld.

Here’s the great thing about Twitter: you can only communicate in 140-character bursts, so if it sucks, it’s over. Here’s the crappy thing about Twitter: we haven’t learned how to create stories on it yet. What we’re getting is fragments, little tic-tacs of information that hit us like pellets and we pretend are refreshing and informative and clever, but what we’re leaving off is: for a tweet. As in, that’s cute. For a tweet. We’re grading on a 140-character curve.

That’s why most people who sign up for Twitter don’t stick with it: there’s nothing yet there to stick to. There’s no flow there. Say what you want about Facebook, but people have learned how to tell stories with beginnings, middles, and ends. There’s a continuity. Not so on Twitter. Each tweet lives and dies like a fruit fly, leaving us not necessarily wanting more.

I’m not saying there aren’t uses for this sort of communication, but that they’re more limited than we think they are. If I am wrong — and I am never wrong — then maybe it works as a meta-communicator and tastemaker, directing your attention to bit.ly links. The Japanese are writing novels this way, but they’re not necessarily the sanest of nations, pop-culturally speaking. Pogue has decided to let others write a book for him, which is stupid, lazy and just like him. It’s nice when you have a question to pop it into the ether and get responses. And it helps to have a brand, a mission, and something worthwhile to say. Three times a day. Every day.

We’re tweeting, we follow other tweeters, so we’re biting the hand that feeds us. But it feels like the Twitter phenomenon, like billions of “Margaritas! WOO HOO!” tweets themselves, has a shelf life, until something better comes along.

Filed under: social media, supergenius llc, twitter , content, creative, facebook, social media, story, storytelling, super genius, twitter

5 Minute Futurama: Hosted Micro-Blogging

This is post one of a new feature on Black Match, where, like Nicholas Cage in Next, we peer just a few minutes into the future.

Hosted (even branded!) micro-blogging. Think Twitter w/a purpose – cooler, faster, stronger.  How about a private “tweetspace” where volunteers or contributors speak up about or around a particular event.  Or how about a public tweestpace that’s branded/customized to a particular company or cause, where tweets from anyone who cares or contributes shows up.  Imagine if ESPN created a private micro-blogging platform for their fantasy leagues: 140 characters + trash talk = gold, jerry! gold! What a powerful way to track cause engagement (and btw brand engagement.)  Yes, Twitter has already been engaged to drive charity, but social technology that helps brands and their causes both benefit is still virgin territory. There are a couple of horses entering this race: twitteronia and status.net.  Of course, this has worlds of possibilities for regular users, just like those who have made wordpress and ning successful; but as a marketer I’m really excited about the possibility for brands.  And the really cool thing is that could integrate your regular tweetstream into your private tweets (so you’re not running back and forth between two places.) Those brands or groups that seem to inspire or form natural communities are a no brainer for this kind of functionality. Think moms! for instance or Big Ten fans or skiers or, hell, even WOW players. You add some kind mobile accessibility of top of this and *shazam* you got yourself some of that nitroglycerine kids. For more future-peering, reading of entrails and general brand astrology we can be reached @ www.supergeniusllc.com.

Filed under: social media, twitter , digital, micro-blogging, social media, the future, twitter

You Are Not a Brand

“I am not an elephant! I am not an animal! I am a human being! I am a man!”

This is a pet peeve.  In fact, peeve may be too soft a description for my feelings on this issue. What “issue” you ask?   Oh well, that would be this whole notion which has taken root over the past seven or ten years that perfectly normal people should act as if they are boxes of detergent.  This whole idea of, “what’s your brand?” and “what’s your positioning?” as if the divine combination of soul and intellect is now the moral equivalent of Cheerios.  I had some hope that the New Depression would kill this off but no such luck.  Hey, if you’re Lebron James it’s fine. I get it. $150 million. You’re a corporation. You’re a mensch. You have people.  You’re Oprah? Understood.  Multi-platform proposition.  You help elect presidents. Enough said.  Even Donny Deutsch.  I guess…so.  Well, you had a television show. Fair enough.

But.

2nd Vice President of Sales at Avirtex? Not so fast.  Not with that haircut.

I could continue ranting like this for the rest of the post but there is a (slightly) larger point to be made.  As the web becomes more social and as brands cede more control to people; and, really, as brands start to act more like people what with the twittering and the facebookery and so forth. In that kind of landscape it doesn’t make any sense for the real people to continue acting like brands.  Because plainly that’s not what we want from our brands these days. What we want is a sense of social responsibility. What we want is a sense of foible. What we want, dear Brutus, is a sense of HUMANITY from our brands. And if that’s what we want from Clorox Green then we certainly prefer humanity in the actual humans.

You take that all the way to its philosophical endpoint. All the way to its QED. And what it means is that we are approaching an online social geography where brands are secondary to the people or “friends’ who use and recommend them to us and, beyond that, the value of a “brand” is only as good as its ability to live up to its WOM.  Or it’s only as good as the people who have the name on their business cards.  I’m looking at you, Washington Mutual.  This has always been true. We’re not shaking the cosmos here; but the facts got obscured back when we still had banks and U.S. made cars.  People used to actually talk to you (vodka soda in hand) about their “brand.” And not in a funny “Sex and the City” way either, but in a deadly serious I think I’m Martha Stewart way. And the terrifying bit? This self-delusion among white-collar professionals continues to this day.

I’m looking at you, Linkedin.

Self-branding is a silent killer.  Seems right in the moment. “Oh, I have to be a ‘go getter’ brand to get that job.”  Really?  What a mercenary and cynical approach to life that seems to be.  I’m speaking as someone who embraces the Great Game of advertising and marketing in all its tiny glory.  Honestly, I like my brands just as they are and I prefer people to simply be people.  For those of you not offended by this rant and who would like help with you actual, inanimate “brands” please contact one of the super geniuses (info@supergeniusllc.om)

Filed under: Self Help , advertising overload, bad brand behavior, social media