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Keynote: “Bringing Sexy Back to Display”

Neal Mohan, VP of Display Product Management for Google

• Challenges to display: macroeconomics, banner blindness, only 6% of display is rich media.
• But display is near a tipping point.
• Americans spend about as much time online as any other media
• Four broad themes to revolution in display:
  • (1) Fragmentation is now an opportunity because of targeting across networks
  • (2) Creativity at scale
  • (3) Measurement has advanced beyond CTR, to brand lift, effectiveness, conversion, etc.
  • (4) Web is social, catching up with life.
• Transformative: multiple data sources in real-time at scale. Now you can reach the right audience at the right time, and control your costs and minimize waste.
• More transactions per day on DoubleClick than all equity and bond transactions in the world.
• For publishers, this also opens a whole world of revenue, since they can provide real-time data on their audience to marketers.
• What display has that TV doesn’t (from a creativity standpoint): Interactivity, knowledge about viewers. Example: Volvo XC60 display ad that allowed user to play with car systems, see tweets from NY Auto Show, etc. Very engaging, great metrics.
• Example: Allowing user to choose their own pre-roll raised unaided awareness 380%.
• Example (spec): Shoot Nike billboard with Google Goggles, get info on nearby stores, promotions, build your own shoe app.
• Moving beyond the bottom of the funnel:
  • (1) Measuring brand lift by web traffic (both to your site and related sites you don’t own) and brand searches (via branded search terms). Data now lets you distinguish display lift vs. other offline efforts.
  • (2) Measuring deep-level conversions. Example: 86% of conversions attributed to a campaign without ad clicks.
  • (3) Measuring reach beyond TV. CPG example: 2.6% incremental reach for a video ad on YouTube. 25% hadn’t seen it on TV.
  • (4) Measuring offline sales. Using geographical modeling to measure offline POS.
• Social web means continuous conversations about our brands. Thus, every display campaign must be social.

Panel: “Online Advertising — Rapid Recovery or Recession 2.0?”

• Matt Freeman, CEO, Mediabrand
• Erin Clift, SVP Global Sales Dev, AOL
• Chang Kim, Omnicom
• Neal Mohan, Google
• Jeetil Patel, Deutsche Bank
• Marita Scarfi, COO, Organic
• Patel: 2010 is a turnaround year. Display and search should be up 10-11% this year.
• Digital media is anything with an IP address.
• Kim: Omnicom’s 4 F’s of future advertising: Fluid (experience, enagement, etc), Fast, Focused, Forecastable (the toughest one)
• Mohan: We can get all the data in the world, but advertising is still a creative medium, and we need to establish that emotional connection. Scaling creativity requires customizing creative to the audience (or the individual).
• AOL is pulling back its ad systems and building them from scratch. AOL is also a content provider now. Divorcing Time Warner will probably help with that transition; no legacy revenue to silo and protect.
• Publisher complains that the vast, vast majority of ads available for his sites are static banners. How do we encourage advertisers to produce better creative? Mohan responds: the technology is there and available.

I’ll be liveblogging the OMMA Global conference today, with nuggets of Online Media, Marketing, & Advertising goodness.

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First up: Keynote by Mark Kvamme of Sequoia.

“Mobile Wars: Will the Mobile Web Be Open or Closed?”
Moderator: Laura Marriott (here at the SF Marriott)
Panel: Tom Bedecarre, CEO, AKQA
Mark Kvamme, Partner, Sequoia Capital
Alexandre Mars, CEO Phonevalley & Head of Mobile Publicis Groupe, Phonevalley & Publicis Groupe
James Min, Managing Partner, Montgomery and Company

• Stats on worldwide smartphone penetration: 45% Nokia, 19% RIM, 13% Apple, 6% HTC
• US: 43% RIM, 25% Apple, 16% MSFT, 7% Google, but almost 50% of mobile web access is via Apple iPhone
• Show of hands, how many used a physical coupon in the last year? About 20%.
• The market for location-based promotions is probably 5x that of physical coupons.
• It’s too early for Apple to run a victory lap. Android is open, and Java devs will build a lot of momentum behind Android.
• Kvamme: iPhone is a terrible telephone — it’s not all AT&T’s fault. RIM is a great PDA.
• James Min: Platform wars are over. You need a closed platform to develop. Apple’s proved it, b/c of fragmentation.
• James Min: But… in the BRIC countries, Nokia/Symbian phones are much cheaper. If Nokia wants to make headway in the US, they have one real asset — mapping.
• Google sees 50x more mobile searches from iPhone than any other device. That’s engagement.
• Mobile marketing hasn’t exploded because the targeting and attribution to get customer to POS isn’t there yet.

Pepsi Refreshes the Brand, with Andrew Katz from Pepsi and Aaron Shapiro from HUGE.

• Pepsi was the most-remembered brand from the Super Bowl this year, but they didn’t advertise!
• Utility-driven marketing: Some of the most effective marketing helps people achieve what the brand stands for.
• What is your brand’s higher value? How do you manifest it on the web? How do you make it viral, social, and CRM’ed?
• “I’m SVP of Refreshing the World.” Groan.
• Why doesn’t Pepsi do pop culture anymore? Pop culture doesn’t exist anymore. Pop culture is whatever you’re into.
• Pepsi Refresh Project: Declare the Refresh Movement, Spark a Conversation, Make a Difference.
• People submit ideas for projects for $20MM pool, voted by users, distributed. Being part of the content, instead of advertising. Partner with media, retail, and celebrities.
• Impressive impressions — it’s a business change, not just a branding campaign.

Marketing track session: New Creative Options for Marketing with Online Video as Web Becomes ‘Lean-Back’

• VuMe demoing interactivity within ads, including a pre-roll that interacts with the adjacent display ad
• GRPs vs. iGRP. GRP (TV) is based on panels. iGRP is based on impressions and engagement.
• Branded entertainment makes sense as an element of the mix. It doesn’t change anything.
• Attribution modeling = Tracking all the ads that a user is exposed to, against eventual user actions and outcomes.
• Is the web going to be long-form “lean back”? More so, but different audiences will want different forms.
• Online industry needs to overcome advertiser objections of online video.

Marketing track session: Social Media Marketing Doesn’t Have to be a Gamble

• Social Media team at MSFT is always-on. Not in campaign mode.
• Walmart.com — Q&A for products, builds an archival asset
• How do you measure the effectiveness? Time spent on an engagement; likelihood to share; how many of those shares convert. MSFT: Measures ROI (based on reach) vs equivalent $$$ display campaign.
• MSFT got 200M free impressions week of W7 launch
• Levi’s — Content management is the great challenge for always-on social media. Solution — UGC (but do you still need to moderate?)
• Marty Collins from MSFT: retailing and augmented reality will help consolidate profiles. Will Whole Foods and the Gap have to ID you with different profiles?
• How do retailers feel about customers shopping on Facebook? Levi’s Brand Marketing VP: You gotta fish where the fish are. Huge potential if you can figure out the purchase component of the FB experience.
• The big Skittles UGC FAIL: What was their business case anyway?
• MSFT: Social media blows away TV or outdoor on cost per impression.

Keynote: People are Expecting Everything, Everywhere, Downloaded, Uploaded, In their Hands, in an Instant – Are Marketers Keeping Pace? by Laura Lang, CEO of Razorfish/Digitas/Denuo Group

• Traditional advertising and mass marketing are dead.
• “How do I join the conversation?” You’re already in it, if you have a brand. 25% of the links associated with major brands are already UGC. Better question is “What do I do now?”
• Case study: Barbie becomes human. She has profiles on all the social nets. Two billion impressions.
• Linear purchase cycle is dead. Now it’s a “purchase web” or “customer journey,” a random walk to the same outcome — purchase. Marketers need to figure out how to get into that walk, to serve the right interaction in real time.
• Campaign flights are dead. People don’t decide to turn on when you’re advertising. You need to always on, which is hard.
• GM trying to get potential customers to change their consideration of GM at purchase. Digitas serving content based on user actions on car sites.
• Hands up: How many people have heard of Chat Roulette? What? Maybe 10%???
• Social ROI is not a sufficient measure. ROI is what you need.
• Social is not a channel. It’s how we live now.

My laptop battery is crying mercy, so I’ll shut down for the day. Going to continue to follow on Twitter via mobile. Cheers.

Last weekend, the wife and I strolled to the Verizon store in the Mission and picked up his-n-hers Motorola Droids, Verizon’s first smart phone with Google’s Android OS.

So far, they’ve been great. Web surfing and Gmail are delightfully fast, and call quality is excellent. (Most importantly, we haven’t resigned ourselves to the black hole that is the AT&T mobile network.) iPhone and BlackBerry owners have known this for years, but it’s a remarkable experience to walk around with a pocket-sized computer far more powerful than the tower case that sat under your desk just a few years ago.

As I was surfing the web this morning, I spotted this ad on the Knowledge@Wharton ad. And I was kind of blown away.

Within a standard 300 x 250 display unit (what we called an “L-REC” at Yahoo!) is a feed of punchy editorial links about the Droid. Scroll down, and you’ll see what looks like dozens if not hundreds of posts from news sites, magazines, and blogs. Topics include:

• Positive reviews of the Droid
• Upbeat news about the Droid launch
• Top apps for Android devices
• Downbeat news about the iPhone, including viruses and developer disaffection with the Apple App Store
• Information about the Droid Eris, HTC’s lighter version

All the links click to the original articles, with a toolbar to Tweet or see more.

The display ad hits on a number of strong points:

• It’s targeted
• It’s interactive
• It gives me a choice of compelling content to click
• It lives on beyond the click
• It encourages me to share
• It includes links to add this Droid feed to Facebook or Twitter

What could be better about it? A few things. If I weren’t already interested in the Droid, I wouldn’t be drawn to it, or bother to scroll. I also suspect this ad wouldn’t test well on a site where people weren’t coming to engage in the act of reading. I can also only see two headlines on the first screen, and the gray-on-black scrollbar could be more obvious.

But in general, it’s great to see such a compelling and innovative ad that so precisely built for an audience and an experience. More, please!

“The web is not TV.”

It sounds obvious enough, and yet how many video ads do you see online that appear to be shoveled directly from cable? The 15-second video spot has become the de facto standard.

Of course, this will change. In their formative years, television ads were basically radio ads with visible narrators. It wasn’t until viewers and marketers became comfortable with the new format that commercials became more like little movies.

Today, some brands with reputations for innovation are exploiting the interactive and creative possibilities of online advertising, especially video advertising. But those still seem to be the exceptions.

My friend Phil O’Neill, director of analytics for VideoEgg, had such a perspective in an essay he scribed for MarketingWeek UK, titled “The Golden Rules of Online Video Advert Design.” His golden rules boil down to three design principles.

1. The web is not the same as TV: Ads should be rich, interactive, and “push-pull.”
2. Clarity is key: If the UI is confusing, users won’t bother.
3. Creative content, creative delivery: If it’s not compelling, users won’t stick around and won’t remember it.

These seem obvious. So why, in these adolescent years of web video, are they so often ignored? Think about that next time you see (or place) a 15-second pre-roll.

Back when I worked on My Yahoo!, one of my projects was to create ad quality standards. Users were generally displeased with seeing an LREC (the standard “large rectangle” ad you see on so many sites) where they used to see their own content, so we had to be sensitive to what users were experiencing in that spot on the screen.

We certainly would not have approved this:

(Click on it to see its gory detail.)

This is the Old Spice campaign currently running on Yahoo! sports. The LREC (which is animated) shows what is supposed to be a very hairy armpit crusted with chunks of antiperspirant residue. (One of the chunks falls and crushes a car, for some reason.) This campaign fails for two very obvious reasons:

1. The LREC: This may say more about me than the ad, but when I saw the LREC, my first thought wasn’t “armpit.”
2. The “takeover” portion: Anyone who enjoys seeing their browser’s vertical borders covered in crusty armpit hair, raise your hands.

I have a pretty strong stomach, but I am repulsed. Is it just me? Or is this an ad standards FAIL?

When I first went to work for Wells Fargo, one of the things that was hard to get used to was what they called their branches: “stores.” In hindsight, it made a lot of sense. Retail banks are called as such for a reason, after all. Most people think of branches as places to transact, but they’re very much retail environments, where brands are established (and refreshed), customers are profiled, and products are sold.

Around the turn of the millennium, the branch looked doom. Online banks with no physical locations were growing fast, and the traditional banks were building out their online capabilities.

Then traditional banks changed tack and doubled-down on meatspace. Major players built thousands of new branches to attract deposits, and some even radically redefined branches entirely. Umpqua’s wi-fi lounges (pictured above) and WaMu’s Occasio were particularly innovative. (Sadly, WaMu’s new Chase overlords are doing away with Occasio.) Commerce Bank grew super-fast with the simple innovation of extending their hours to times that were more convenient for working people.

But now Bank of America is retrenching, shuttering 10% of its branches. Does this mean the end of the store strategy?

Yes and no.

Yes: Retail (consumer and small business) customers are becoming ever more comfortable with online services. As they spend more time interacting with banks online, banks are finding more ways to market and sell through online channels.

No: America is over-retailed in general, and banks are no exception. BofA probably had too many branches to begin with. Other big banks that built out (or acquired) branch networks during the housing boom are probably now looking at their cost structure and finding many unprofitable locations. Shuttering may occur, but people will still want a physical location to transact checks, cash, and the other tangible forms of money that still power our everyday economy.

We can only hope that more of these banks will follow the Umpqua and Commerce models and create a branch experience that its customers don’t hate. Whoever does that will win deposits, and today, that matters more than anything.

Social media is no longer buzzing like a honeybee or a power line. Rather, Social media is roaring, like a chainsaw.

Social media is not just the newest new form of direct marketing. It’s rapidly becoming the primary way that people –- your customers –- seek recommendations and chat with each other about their purchases.
In this environment, every forward-thinking business is already trying to figure out its social media strategy. But the social media ecosystem is so fluid that trial-and-error will only reveal temporary solutions.  And trial-and-error is, by itself, not really a strategy.

So what questions should businesses, especially small, local ones, be asking themselves about social media?

1. Do I need a social media strategy? The answer to this question is a universal “yes,” even if your strategy ends up being “do nothing.” But it’s hard to imagine a small business that couldn’t be served by the fastest emerging method of person-to-person communication on earth.

2. What type of interaction would best serve my current business goals? Social media is about multi-party communication. It connects a business with its customers, but more importantly it can connect a business’s customers with each other. To form an effective social media strategy, a business needs to figure out who needs to be interacting with whom, and how that interaction should be taking place.
Some examples:

• A restaurant that seeks to increase patronage from its regular customers would want a platform to promote its daily specials and perhaps promotions (“free wine Wednesdays”).
• An emergency plumber which gets its main business from immediate problems would want a platform where its current and prospective customers could quickly reach them.
• An auto repair shop which faces lots of competition and customer skepticism would want a platform where past customers could attest to the shop’s honesty and reliability.
• A web-based business would want a platform that could drive traffic to its site and encourage its customers to promote the business to others.

3. Which platforms would best serve those communication needs? Obviously, “Get me on Twitter and Facebook” is not a social media strategy. But once you’ve decided who you’re targeting and what you want to accomplish, you need to pick your platforms: Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, YouTube, Yelp, Ning, Yola, and other sites each serve some purposes better than others.

4. How should I craft my presence on those platforms? The WSJ reported recently on a Twitter campaign by web site builder Moonfruit which increased its homepage traffic 13-fold and paying customers by 20%. The cost? Ten MacBook Pros. Since the contest ended, MoonFruit has lost more than 1/4 of their new followers, but now they’ve built a list of 34,000 followers to engage. It’s never been so easy to build a list that large, but now MoonFruit has the challenge of maintaining these subscribers’ interest, or they’ll tune out. Which leads to…

5. How much time can I commit to maintain my social presence? Unlike building a website, creating a blog, social network page, or Twitter feed takes ongoing effort. To keep your business from being sucked into the social media black hole, you have to maintain the presence with new interaction (or “feed the beast”). Each social platform requires a minimum frequency of interaction to be effective. Figure out who will own your business’s interactions, and how they’ll commit to keeping the brand alive online.

This last point is crucial. Creating and abandoning a social media platform is like letting dust collect on your store shelves.  Thus, if you’re not serious about interacting with your customers online, you should find another method of marketing your business. And good luck finding one that’s more effective.

Is Twitter really for old people? Do most kids really prefer watching pirated DVDs to going to movies, and do they really mostly talk to their friends over their XBox 360s?

My friends who happen to be marketing types have been asking themselves these questions this week, as the Internet went all a-titter about the recent thoughts of Matthew Robson, a 15-year-old boy with a summer internship at Morgan Stanley in London. The venerable investment house for some reason decided to publish Robson’s anecdotal report How Teenagers Consume Media as “research.” (How many of us have relied on the summer intern to tell us what the kids are up to?)

OMG! Everyone is on Facebook, nobody listens to the radio, Twitter is pointless, and banner ads are teh sux. Quick, everyone revise your youth marketing plans!

Oh wait. What about the 99.9% of British teens who aren’t friends with Matthew Robson? (And what about the 65% of Twitter users under 25?)

In this context, it’s worth reading (or revisiting) danah boyd’s remarkable “The Not-So-Hidden Politics of Class Online,” a talk she delivered to the Personal Democracy Forum in New York.

In this talk, Boyd (sorry, the lower-case name drives me bonkers) asserted that Facebook and MySpace drew similar size audiences in America. But when she polled her “primarily American, primarily liberal-leaning, primarily white, and primarily involved professionally in politics” audience, she found that almost all of them used Facebook, but almost none of them used MySpace.

It’s more than obvious that online social networks, like all networks, are class stratified and homophilic. As Facebook opened up beyond college kids, many MySpace users chose to jump ship. But just as many stayed put. So, who bailed? Boyd’s research of young people led to a complicated conclusion:

It wasn’t just anyone who left MySpace to go to Facebook. In fact, if we want to get to the crux of what unfolded, we might as well face an uncomfortable reality… What happened was modern day “white flight.” Whites were more likely to leave or choose Facebook. The educated were more likely to leave or choose Facebook. Those from wealthier backgrounds were more likely to leave or choose Facebook. Those from the suburbs were more likely to leave or choose Facebook. Those who deserted MySpace did so by “choice” but their decision to do so was wrapped up in their connections to others, in their belief that a more peaceful, quiet, less-public space would be more idyllic.

Even within Facebook, the social divisions remain extreme. If Morgan Stanley were to ask me what Facebook users were like, I’d tell them they’re iPhone-using, gourmet-cooking, Democratic-voting, Daily Show-watching, mid-career professionals. What I’d really be reporting are the psychographic profiles of Jewish kids who grew up in Miami in the ‘80s, mid-‘90s Wesleyan alums, and Bay Area MBAs. (My wife, who has lots of friends from her tiny southern hometown, gets a somewhat different picture.) Your experience probably varies. Same deal with Twitter – I’m following 200-odd feeds, and none are of the “My cat is sleeping on my lap” variety. Your experience again probably varies.

The California tech community, which chatters at itself continuously via Facebook, blogs, and Twitter, has an understandably warped view of the pervasiveness of certain tech brands, and the use of technology in general. In our little world, Apple, Twitter, Facebook, Google/GMail/YouTube, Skype, and Firefox dominate. Meanwhile, the hundreds of millions of global citizens on MySpace, Yahoo!, AOL, MSN/Hotmail, and Windows PCs are ignored or disparaged, to say nothing of all those still listening to the radio or reading dead-tree periodicals.

It’s easy to get wrapped up in a world where “teenagers do X,” but some of us still remember high school. If Morgan Stanley came calling, I probably couldn’t find a damn thing that even a solid plurality of my classmates were into. My crowd liked the Dolphins, Led Zeppelin, getting good grades, hating George H.W. Bush, and being scared of girls. They were generally affluent enough to have cable TV, but not enough to have new cars. That’s how my report on the American teen would have read.

Fast forward 20 years. Twitter isn’t for everyone. Nor is anything else. Teenagers’ technology habits will evolve as technology itself does, but also as those teenagers go off to college, or the workforce, or the Army, or all the other places they can go. As marketers and citizens, we should never mistake one boy’s friends or our own experiences for those of the world. Or as Boyd puts it:

If you are trying to connect with the public, where you go online matters. If you choose to make Facebook your platform for civic activity, you are implicitly suggesting that a specific class of people is more worth your time and attention than others. Of course, splitting your attention can also be costly and doesn’t necessarily mean that you’ll be reaching everyone anyhow. You’re damned if you do and damned if you don’t. The key to developing a social media strategy is to understand who you’re reaching and who you’re not and make certain that your perspective is accounting for said choices. Understand your biases and work to counter them.

That last line is great advice for life, too.

Last Friday, I spent part of a sunny afternoon on the patio of Delancey’s Crossroads Café, chatting over coffee and tea with Randy Almond, Yola’s VP of Marketing. Yola, which recently rebranded (from Synthasite) and relaunched at this year’s Web 2.0 Expo, has developed a killer drag-and-drop browser-based platform for small businesses to develop their own websites and blogs. I’ve tried it out, and it’s a superior product.

Yola’s still working on positioning itself as a small business specialist, but its potential seems awesome. They currently operate a “freemium” business model, charging nothing for the product and the hosting (which is also free of ads), but cross-selling custom domains and SEM to their users. More importantly, as Yola ramps up its user base, it’ll have the relationships with customers to further cross-sell online services, especially when they want to bring e-commerce or apps to their sites.

As I learned in my years developing small business products at Wells Fargo, SMB’s needs are wildly different from those of consumers or large enterprises. “No-duh,” you’re thinking. But I’ve come to be unsurprised whenever I meet someone struggling to market services to SMB, simply because they don’t understand how their customers operate and why they buy.

A couple months ago, I met with two sales executives at Network Solutions in Virginia. Like Yola, NetSol also positions itself as a SMB-focused service company, a market niche made necessary by losing its domain registration monopoly in the late ’90s. (The reg business, 90% of their revenues just six years ago, is now just 45%.) NetSol successfully figured out that the vast majority of SMBs are very small indeed, and that domain registration is just the first handshake in what can be a broad service relationship. Broading this relationship, however, requires NetSol to cross-sell and service the customer effectively and respectfully. But it took much of this decade for Network Solutions to get the formula right.

Meanwhile, all types of SMBs are trying to figure out how to leverage online tools and platforms to drive customer acquisition. SEM and SEO are king and queen of this realm, but they’re relatively new and utterly confusing to most SMB managers. If Clickable’s research is accurate, it’s unsurprising that only 50% of Google self-service advertisers return the next year. But think of all the opportunity Google has to turn that around by making their platform and corollary services ever more SMB-oriented.

Yelp is another site that’s potentially awesome (or disastrous) for SMB. Just two weeks ago, I got my hair cut at Spargo in downtown SF, based on Yelp’s wildly positive recommendations. When I told my haircutter that Yelp brought me there, she seemed about as surprised as she did when I admitted I’d never had a manicure. Yelp relies on a community of consumers to build support for a business, but also permits a business like Spargo to augment its presence with pictures and even a “June Caveman Special.” (Yelp has unfortunately also taken heat from business owners who claim that buying advertising will get you special treatment, like deleting disputed reviews.)

So what do small businesses want? While a one-person plumbing operation and a 35-employee web services company may seem to have little in common (and any company wishing to serve both should have a segmentation strategy), small business owners have some broad things in common. They want:

• to be respected. Small business owners have neither time nor money to waste. As a Twitter evangelist learned the hard way in a San Francisco Small Business Week event two weeks ago, SMB managers want to understand, decide, and move on. They do not want to be told to “play around with it.” They’ve don’t have the bandwidth to fiddle; they’ve got to make payroll this week.
• to be served NOW. When they have a problem with you, they need a solution. Now. And on their schedule, which is often not regular business hours. Business owners often spend business hours working in the business, and off-hours working on the business.
• numbers. Small businesses have books to balance, and scarce capital to monitor. If they’re not getting a positive ROI on something, they’ll probably bail and focus elsewhere.
• help. Small businesses are burdened with demands — cash flow, health care costs, red tape, complicated tax laws, hiring and keeping the best people, and finding and keeping their customers. They seek value and simplicity to balance this all. Can you improve the bottom line and make things easier? You win.
• to be a part of something. Business owners are the rock pillars of many communities, physical and virtual. They see themselves as the leaders upon whom this great country depends. They are generally pro-market and pro-freedom, but they believe in collective action to improve conditions for everyone. Are you a part of their communities, too?

SMB is the engine of America’s economy, responsible for more than 90% of private sector employment. Like America’s population, they’re diversifying rapidly, but some things remain the same. Including this: Your business can’t serve SMB as a side project. It requires understanding, focus, the right products, and unequivocable value.

A few weeks ago, I noted Lufthansa’s inexplicable decision to promote its very expensive business class service by handing out gummy, shrink-wrapped “croissants” with intimidating wholesale-style labels.

This a morning, a street team was standing outside the Montgomery BART station handing out foil packets of something called Propel, as well as stacks of coupons to buy some.

What is Propel? Damned if I know. The street team didn’t provide anything to explain what the product is supposed to be. Here’s all I could tell from the package:

• “Propel Powder Packet”: Okay, it’s a packet of powdered… something.
• “Vitamin Enhanced Water Beverage Mix”: I’m supposed to add it to 16.9 ounces (!) of water and “SHAKE GENTLY”
• It’s made by Gatorade, and contains “natural berry flavors.”

OK, I think I get it. I’m supposed to go buy a bottle of water and then dump this in it. It’s going to make the water taste like berries and deliver vitamins. So this is like Vitamin Water mix? Is it a sports drink? Is it sugary, low-cal? Is it meant to get me through my office work day, or replenish me after a workout?

All of this would be nice to know.

There’s also this issue: San Francisco is a green town. Only one product comes in 16.9-ounce servicings, and that product is now as politically incorrect as baby seal bacon. The $0.99-off coupons may be applied to a purchase of the bottled version of Propel, which looks exactly like bottled water.

Here’s probably what happened: The Propel brand manager budgeted for a street team to get samples and coupons out to active, urban populations. They didn’t really think a lot about the details, besides maybe how and where to maximize the distribution.

Here’s how they should have managed it:

• Educate: They handed me something non-obvious, without explaining what it is, why I would want to use it, or when I would want to use it. Instead of a coupon, they should have introduced the brand and especially the product.
• Entice: What’s motivating me to go through the trouble of mixing this with 16.9 ounces of water? Especially since I don’t know what it is, and if I don’t like it, it essentially ruins the $1.50 bottle of water I ostensibly bought.
• Position: Like most San Franciscans, I’m disgusted by our stupid everyday reliance on bottled water. Cleaner water comes through our taps than what’s contained in plastic (an oil product) and trucked in from municipal sources. Instead of positioning itself as an accessory to my bottled water lifestyle, Propel could position itself as a green alternative to products like Glaceau VitaminWater. After all, you can mix Propel with your filtered tap water, instead of buying “enhanced” water that’s trucked in from elsewhere. This would speak to eco-conscious urban dwellers.

Street teams have value. But so do planning and executing the promotions in ways that appeal to your potential customers. That takes forethought.