BRITE Conference

Muy buenas tardes. Hi, it's Tom Guarriello. Very gloomy day in Manhattan today, very gloomy. But the last couple of days I was invited to be one of several bloggers to cover a conference at Columbia University, a conference called the Bright Conference. I wrote a quick blog about it yesterday. I'll put the link up to yesterday's blog over here in the description. But then, and I wasn't too crazy about Thursday's session. It was sort of, I don't know, just didn't click, you know, just didn't click. There were no great ideas. The people were, it just felt uptight for some reason. But yesterday was terrific. So first of all, François Gasso, thank you very much for inviting me to be one of the bloggers who covered the conference. And the conference, the Bright Conference, Bright B-R-I-T-E. I'll put the link to the conference agenda and so on up here. That stands for Branding, Innovation, and Technology. And yesterday's session was really terrific. There were a lot of great speakers. So what I wanted to do was to just go through some of what were the highlights for me of yesterday's session, because I think they might be of some interest to you guys as well. First of all, there was an award that was given out, the Bright Award for the Big Thinker, and this whole Big Thinker theme was a derivative of a book written by one of the— I guess one of the main organizers of the conference, Bernd Schmidt. From Columbia University who just wrote a book. Wait a minute. Here you go, Berne. I know you'll love this. Here's a plug. Big Think Strategy: How to Leverage Bold Ideas and Leave Small Thinking Behind. Not a big thick book, just a little book, but big ideas. Put out, by the way, by my friends at the Harvard Business School Publishing Company. How you all doing over there? The Big Think Award— this year was given to Marty Homlish. And Marty is the Chief Marketing Officer for SAP. Now SAP is an enterprise software company. They do all this stuff that's kind of behind the scenes in keeping really all the Fortune 1000 companies running. Things like all of their— making sure all of their processes are operating properly, all of their billing and payroll and HR systems and integrating production systems, all the things that big businesses need to have in order to operate. And, you know, when you think about becoming the chief marketing officer for a company like SAP, ho ho ho, you know, it could probably be thought of as pretty boring because, you know, who are you marketing to? What's the story that you're trying to tell? Well, Marty, who had come from Sony and had been involved with the launch of the PlayStation, was pretty, you know, somebody who's pretty cool in terms of his perspective on consumers and brands and markets. And he came to SAP just in time to have seen the company roll out a campaign called mySAP.com. And as he tells the story, it was— to him it was appalling because mySAP.com really had nothing to do with the essence of the company. And the reason that was important— this was in like 2000, 2001— the reason that was important to him and the reason the story is important to me is that he thinks that the crucial thing for marketers to do is— this is a quote— "tell the truth about the company and the brand." Now, there's a, I don't know, refreshing kind of a perspective for a marketer to take, isn't it? Tell the truth about the company and the brand. Now, for somebody who is a founder of a consulting company called TruTalk, those words were music to my ears. And what Marty went on to do was to tell the story about telling the one truth about the company. And the one truth that SAP really found at its core was, "We're the company that helps other companies be successful." Now, you know, that's refreshingly simple. It is definitely true. SAP is a German company, so they really stress their German engineering heritage. A great, great marketing campaign that has really now made SAP a brand that people in business understand and appreciate for what it is. Their big challenge now is to reach out beyond the Fortune 1000 companies because, as Marty put it, there's only a thousand of them. And instead to help smaller companies, they actually have 40,000 customers, so obviously they do help companies beyond the Fortune 1000 to be successful. But their new campaign is using a tagline, "Great companies, not just great big companies." You know, again, SAP being able to help your company be successful. So I thought that was an interesting marketing story about a company that you wouldn't really think of as having a marketing element to it that would be very powerful. And just one more quick thing about Marty's story— I'm already going way too long on this piece, but it's a good story, I think— is that he believes that the, the path for any company is to move from being a product to being a brand to becoming an experience. So if you think about that, that progression, and you say, gee, let's see, a product. What kind of product do you start with? Well, maybe you start with a product like this. It's just a product. It's just a computer, right? Well, then the brand became the crucial element, and so it went from being just a product to being a brand that stood for something and now has become an experience. What does that mean, an experience? It means that whenever a customer comes in contact with your brand, is there a consistent way the way that they feel and think and behave in regard to your product and brand. So here, you know, every element of the experience is consistent, whether it's using the operating system or going into one of the great retail stores or listening to music on an iPod, or every piece of the Apple experience is consistent. It tells the same message. It is something unique and distinctive. So, you know, that— and that's really what the essence of becoming an important element in a customer's life really entails. Having your experience align with their, their lives. So in the case of Apple, everything about their experience feels to me like they understand me and they resonate with the way I want to approach the things that I do. And, you know, so here's, here's SAP. Trying to do that with their software. Now, there were a lot of other great discussions yesterday, and maybe I'll come back and talk about a couple of them because a couple of them were really excellent. But I did want to just get to the last panel of the day because the last panel of the day was really a very cool group of people, and it was made up of Uh, let's see, it was narrated by a guy that I've known now for the last year plus, year and a half, going on a year and a half, uh, Yaron Semid. Yaron is the founder of the Pando Network, so I'll put all these links over here. And also on that panel were Aaron Cohen, who was the founder of Bolt TV. Bolt just sold for, oh, I don't know, I think the number was $50 million, a little Pocket Change that Aaron Cohen got for Bolt TV. Um, uh, Steve Volz from epeebird.com, and you'll know Steve Volz as one of the original, uh, Diet Coke and Mentos guys, the two guys in the lab coats. Um, Steve Rosenbaum, who's the founder of magnify.net, and Jeff Pulver Tom Guarriello, who is— how many companies did he say he's founded? I think 50 in the past 12 years. So these are all very experienced internet entrepreneurs, successful internet entrepreneurs, and the things they had to say were particularly interesting because they spoke on web video and the future of TV. And I'm going to have a lengthy video clip of their panel that I'll put up as soon as I can get it edited and down to some kind of a reasonable size. But let me just say this: their insights about the future of internet video— and by the future they're talking about the next 12 to 18 months. Their insights were quite eye-opening, very much in keeping with things that we've been talking about here in regard to the opportunity that exists for great internet video exploration. So let's just, let's just say this: in the next 12 months we're going to see a tremendous explosion of, um, strongly focused internet video sites begin to appear. Sites that are really tailored for the kind of experience that you want to have. Now, not everybody wants to have the same kind of experience, But we— but some of us want to have different kinds of experiences than others, and that means that we're starting to see the— what I think Yaron called the "nichification of web video." The nichification, meaning of course the differentiation and focus of different kinds of interests within web video. Magnify.net already has thousands of channels that are focused on very specific things. For example, Steve mentioned, if you're interested in fly fishing in Minnesota, you can go to magnify.net and you can see hundreds of videos about fly fishing in Minnesota. Now, Maybe only 2 of you, of all the people who might see this video, would even care about fly fishing or about Minnesota. But if you did, you could find videos that were laser-focused on that thing that you're interested in. And remember, that kind of laser focus is exactly what advertisers are looking for. Now, I know that that makes makes many people uncomfortable. But the fact is, if I'm interested in something, if I'm interested in books about business strategy, and I find that somehow or other I can get advertising that leads me to better content, that leads me to be able to find better business books about strategy, I'm not gonna mind that advertising. What I mind is advertising that feels like spam, advertising for things that I don't care about. Please don't advertise to me about shoes. I'm not interested in shoe ads. Please don't advertise to me about, you know, flowers.com. I'm not interested. Advertise to me about things that would be of interest to me. And that's what these niche sites are going to do. They're going to give me an opportunity to see things that are of interest to me and have relationships with other people who are interested in those things. And they're also going to serve up to me recommendations in the form of advertising that might very well be of interest to me. So this has gone on longer than I anticipated, and I only talked about one and a one and a tenth things. Fact is, a lot of great ideas out of the Bright Conference yesterday, so I will— I'll address some more of those soon. But for now, take care. See you soon. Bye-bye.