We had an ethics case today primarily oriented around the attempts by Shell to sink the Brent Spar, an oil rig off the shore of the UK.  Shell had done a lot of investigation of the most environmentally friendly and economic way to sink the oil rig.  They found, through scientific analysis, that sinking it was actually the best option.  Sounds contrary to belief, but it was the case.

Greenpeace decided it was a bad idea.  They boated out to it and had a PR campaign that showed them occupying the rig with ads saying to stop Shell.   They got a campaign to raise awareness and attempt to influence Shell into bringing the rig on land and dismantling it there.  They won.  It was not the best decision, but it was the one that took hold.

The reason?  They got the public on their side by a simple and pointed message:  ”Don’t Litter!”

Though this wasn’t the best option, it took hold with people.  The reason is that marketing and communication are often tied to lowest common denominators.  In math, that refers to a divisible numbers.  In marketing, this refers to the communication that can resonate with the most people.   This is the same reason that political campaign slogans are short, often rhyme and are also associated with imagery.  Same reason brands exists as logos.  Humans can remember these things very easily.

Of course, this situation also had a play on human perception of large entities and former thoughts on the parties.  It was a David and Goliath situation, at least in the eyes of consumers.  People tend to give a nonprofit the benefit of the doubt and are especially wary of larger corporations.  Those aren’t bad things either.

Not all marketing uses lowest common denominators.  Political campaigns thrive on them because they are often mass marketing, or trying to affect the largest group of people with the least amount of resources.  A politician could probably win a lot of votes if they walked up to every house in their area and asked for their votes.  But the resources are not supple for such activities.  The same goes for large corporations trying to sell cereal; they are better off buying advertisements and touting their virtues than giving away a free sample to everyone.  It’s cost prohibitive to do the latter.  Hence the large cost for Superbowl ads.

Lowest common denominators rule marketing in certain kinds of marketing.  The opposite is true for large, one time purchases.  Someone selling a contract for large industrial engines or military supply will likely use a different approach to win over that one person who makes the purchase decision.

So marketers are faced with that choice.  Do I build my brand through lowest common denominators and lots of ads…or do I go to lunch with my buyer and learn about their business before presenting them with the reason that my company’s offering is a perfect fit?  Or, even better, do I meet with them first and tailor my offering to their needs?

I’ve toyed with the idea of buying cable for quite a while, but haven’t pulled the trigger because it’s too expensive for the tiny amount I watch television.  Sports and the History channel are about all that get me going, so the investment never seemed worth it.  I get movies from Netflix and stream them a lot.  I don’t watch Hulu all that much anymore, but used to.

Just yesterday I signed up for the half season of NBA League Pass, with seven teams to pick from.  One issue that I’m already seeing is that black out rules apply.  That’s pretty weak when the only good game to watch isn’t available despite having signed up for it.  Overall though, it’s a nice interface and the streams are really good.  We’ll see if it’s enough to keep me on for next season.

My optimal situation would be to be able to stream Twins, Vikes and T-Wolves (favorite team) games and not have to pay for normal cable.  Problem with that arises in that the cost for streaming the games adds up if you buy the season packages.  I’ll be investigating this when the Twins season starts soon.  Honestly, if any of the cable and content companies could work a deal to let people pick and choose at a decent price, I’d be all over it.  It may take quite a long time, but I feel like this is the way content is slowly moving.

Read this article today denoting how Chrome is the way of the future.  I’d been waiting to try out Chrome for some time and now I have it.  There doesn’t seem to be much in terms of increased functionality, though searching in the URL bar is kind of a nice feature, still Firefox allows you to type in a word and go directly to that site.

I’ll give it a spin for a few days and see if it’s worth a switch.  My guess is not.

My end table in the living room is getting lost.  Slowly but surely over the last month since getting back from a trip, I’ve been buying books.  Most of them are business books.  One on cash flow, one on game theory, a seminal Tom Peters book, an investment and personal finance book and an organization theory piece.  Looking back at my book reviews from this site, there are only four for all of 2009!  That’s a pretty sad state of affairs.  Granted, I read more than that if you include text books, but still.  I’m going to set a goal of reading at least a book a month this year.  That pace is currently being met.  I’d actually like to up that number to eighteen, but walk before you run.

Previously, I noted how a book should be condensed into one or two core themes.  I think I’ll start distilling non fiction into a more common thematic, where the core principle(s) is stated as an introduction and a more opinion based interpretation is stated afterward.  There are three months left of school.  After that it’s off to work.  There are many things I’d like to learn about outside of the normal curriculum before starting.  Yet the normal curriculum is what makes that difficult to do!

I’m always really impressed with people who find the time to read a lot of books despite being extremely productive otherwise.  Anyone have any tips on how to find time for reading while still getting in 10 hours of normal work and maintaining their online activities such as a blog or social networking?

My semester is pretty light this semester.  I have three night classes and my earliest class is once a week at 10am.  Next in line is a 3:45 class.  That is all over in two months when I’m down to three classes.  Compared to my first three semesters of biz school, that’s easy street.

So why am I writing at 7:30am?  Inaction.  I have come to absolutely loathe inaction on my part.  The idea of sleeping past 8am is not a good one.  I have a job lined up after this semester and I don’t plan on getting in any later than 8am any day, so it’s a good idea to get into a rhythm now.  As a callow youth, none of this seemed to matter.  Sleeping in and not really accomplishing anything didn’t seem to bother me.  Everything changed in college; the realization that your time is limited and thus your ability for accomplishment is limited hit me like a slow breeze and I followed it.

Two years into undergrad, I hadn’t done much except partied and made a lot of new friends.  It dawned on me that I had to get a job in a few years and that most of my time had been wasted (though not completely.)  All of a sudden, I got very active.  I joined the American Marketing Association and took on several different roles, improved my grade point average drastically and began an in depth search for employment, all while working 25 hours a week at a group home to pay for food and lodging (by the by, it was $360 per month for an efficiency!)  Things really changed then.  My GPA raised to a respectable 3.3 level, I learned a lot about running organizations and building groundswell with groups of people and I made best friends to this day.  Just as importantly, I got an internship that turned into a job in marketing when that kind of experience was akin to frankincense and myrrh.  Still is, in many circles.

Fighting inaction is a constant practice.  Human nature is to be lazy, to graze, intellectually and physically.  That’s not how we got here though.

So today, I was reading this NYT piece and agreeing with most of it.  It asserts that congress hasn’t dealt with a real American issue in four decades.  That point can be disputed with multiple citations, but the validity of their importance can too.  Our big problems such as social security, the future cost of healthcare (Medicare and Medicaid), the obesity epidemic and our deficit have been pontificated upon endlessly and in practicality ignored.

Americans are tired of it…and they should be.  Normal, average Americans have a job to do and they do it.  They get up every day and go into work and do what they are supposed to.  Our government has not.  I will not point fingers as to the perpetrators of it as I only have two hands.  But the inaction and polarization of parties supposed to solve our problems and progressively manage issues as they arise is disgusting.  Politicians seem to only care about being politicians.  It makes me think that there should be caps on the amount of time anyone can spend in office.  Politics should not be a career.

So when I see people complain about spending on a stimulus or a party deny the plausibility of a joint commission to lower the deficit, and holy of holy’s, complain about it, I’m put off.  Politics are standing directly in the way of governance.  People are not.  They are hungry and without work (about 30 million), they are uninsured (roughly 45 million) and there isn’t any guarantee that there will be legislation to fix these problems.

Just as there are no atheists in foxholes, there are no men or women wanting in the government.  None without jobs, none without healthcare.

This is the 500th post of Redmarketer.  That’s not bad in my opinion.  It took a little under 20 months to get here and I’ve learned a lot about the web and marketing since then.  But there is still so much more to learn about.  I think about SEO and how to improve my ranking for different search terms and how to effectively connect with other marketers.  The great part about this is that I have a top level domain with longevity and a great base to learn from.  There are no plans to make money on it, it’s just fun to learn about.  The web is the way of the future and learning about it will be valuable. I hope to reach 5,000 posts; I have no plans to stop writing, ever.

It dawned on me today about how much repetition is in my writing.  It’s in everyone’s writing who does this much.  It doesn’t matter how good you are or what you write about, even if it’s something changing all the time.  I read music reviews on Pitchfork quite a bit, but even though they are new albums, you see recurring themes.  It’s especially prevalent on this site.  Themes are repeated and so are ideas.  And that’s OK.  I don’t have a problem with ideas and thoughts being repeated.  There is value in repeating them.  I have a problem with ideas being forgotten.

To round out my 500th post, I’ll finish with this thought that occurred to me in the morning:  nothing is really a failure until you give up.

I’ve really been getting into the Girls album, Album, that made so many top ten lists last year.  It’s a two piece, and the opening track really hooks you into listening off the bat.  Most of the CD isn’t comprised of fast sounding tunes, unlike the opener, but there’s something about it that is easy to listen to.

It seems like more of a summer album.  It’s kind of odd how certain types of music lend themselves more so to certain seasons.  Summer is usually lighter and poppy.  Fall is retrospective and mellow.  Winter is introspective and embattled, which for me means hip hop.  Spring is the least demonstrable, but is always good for new sounds as it seems like a new time, every time.

If you’re looking for some new tunage, you might give this a shot.  Here’s a decent review of the story behind the band and album though.

It’s not something I’d buy today.  Granted, I just purchased a very nice and functional ASUS EEE which has thoroughly enamored me.  There just isn’t enough email functionality there.  Browsing seems much more advanced than the iPhone, but what is it really giving beyond that?  I have iTunes on my netbook and don’t really use applications beyond reading the news and Twitter, but those are better done on actual sites.

A really solid keyboard virtual interface could turn the tide here, so it’s something I’d look at in person.  Still, it’s only 10″ and that means the netbooks have better browsing.  I just don’t know until it get some better applications.  The iWork and iLife software is nice.

This above all seems like a business person’s device and I like what they did with the no contract 3G network.  In the long term, this could be a product that finds a good market, but it needs something compelling to draw in the non-douche who don’t want it because it’s novel and rocks a deep bezel.  I don’t dig the bezel, for the record.  Still, it’s not all doomsday, the browsing looks great, but if you’re making a bigger iPhone/iTouch, why not put a phone and forward/backward cameras in it for conferencing?  Why not give it handwriting recognition software?  Why not give the damn thing flash and multiple application usage?

I’m a late adopter anyway.  I wait for the improved functionality and apps to be developed before putting in.  Tablets could very well change the game in the long run though, so Apple has done OK by getting this thing out and hearing the critics.  That’s important.  It may give them an leg up on tablet wars to come.  It is a long term time line though.

Just did a quick search on “iPad” to look at some reviews and thoughts and found Google’s news feature, a scroll down of new publications updated constantly.  It incorporates a lot of stuff that I saw such as tweets, blogs, site reviews and whatnot.

I just found it interesting and a nice, functional real time piece.  Funny, though, how Apple doesn’t show up till after the newsworthy stuff, and even an Amazon sponsored link on the right side.  Fight fire with fire, I guess.

Check it out, it’s the “Latest Results for ipad” with the scroll bar:

I’ve been very busy with school as the semester starts.  I have three night classes (that’s a lot) and they are all centered on the medical industry, which has been interesting as of yet, but will assuredly be a lot of work.  My day classes are ethics and anthropology; the latter is already proving a great choice.  It’s going to be a very good semester.

Adding to the work is a case competition that I’m assembling for five weeks from now with Medtronic.  This is part of the MILIsa group that I serve on the board for.  Last year we did the same case competition and it was the best event I was involved in and I’m planning on it being even better this year.

These things are keeping me busy, but there are a lot of other cool things going on outside of school.

Apple’s likely tablet release tomorrow is a very big deal.  I’ve written many posts on the alteration and evolution of media and this event is yet another sign of change.  Amazon’s Kindle will now certainly face the largest and best competitor (apologies to Nook, but it is what it is.)  They should be very worried.  Apple revolutionized so called smart phones a few years ago; they just sold 8 million iPhones last quarter and have somewhere around 20% share of that market.  What may be the biggest accomplishment was getting people to pay for songs different media on their phones through iTunes.  As pointed out by this article, that wasn’t a common practice until Apple got consumers on board.

I have to say that Apple really does great things.  There are many people out there who hate on Apple for their prices and a few other things, but no other company on the planet knows design and user experience like them.  They are also completely masterful in the way they go to market with a roll out.  And what’s more, their products set the tone for entire industries.  iPods, iPhones, Macbook Pros, iMacs and now maybe this tablet; they are an incredible company.

The proposed health reform bill is in jeopardy due to the GOP gaining MA last week.  Just last night I had a class detailing how many times national healthcare has been proposed and denied in the states.  It’s a colossal act to accomplish and it will be interesting to see what Obama says in the State of the Union address on Wednesday to spur action.  He’s had a rough time of it lately and garnering public support (which has eroded a great deal in the last few months) is important now.  It’s an interesting time.

There are many other things worth note, but I have to get to work.  Updates to come.