The Tangible Cost of Bad Trade Show Schwag
Tradeshows and The Schwag they effuse; we’ve got to get real here.
Bad schwag gets thrown away immediately. Not only does it NOT make it onto desktops, it causes harm to the environment. And all of you who don’t believe the environment is an important issue can go flip a duck.
Schwag has weight. When consumers are trying to decide what to take back home in the already heavy suitcase, your schwag will lose unless it has value, real or emotional. Perhaps they do need a new pen or want to give a bag to the cleaning crew. However there is a large probability that your chosen schwag may not do anything except take up space in the garbage of local hotels.
I’ve been to hundreds of tradeshows and seen a lot of schwag in my life. During a 4 year stint I actually produced shows for a living, so the schwag I’ve seen has run the gamut.
I’d currently wager that AdTech has a definite lack of schwag innovation considering the industry which it serves. Where are the call to actions and so forth? I expected to see more companies tying their live tradeshow participation and schwag giveaways to their websites, for example.
I can’t affect company tradeshow participation plans, but I can comment on the schwag, so here we go. There are a few simple rules to make your schwag memorable and worth keeping. Kind of like Internet advertising in a way.
Is it cute?
Does it do anything?
Does it add value? (perceived quality)
At every AdTech in recent memory for example, I’ve seen hats, pens and notepads given away by Casale Media. Their golf hats are BRIGHT red and I mean BRIGHT. You would not get lost on the links in this hat. The notepads are a slightly strange design that are too big to slip into a pocket, yet too small to use for regular note keeping. Their pens however, the pens they give out are by far the best at the show, in my humble opinion. These pens are worth keeping a deep supply of. When I return from AdTech shows in fact I usually find that my red Casale pen has mysteriously gone missing from my office desk within days. Hmm…
I thought it might be interesting to solicit your feedback, dear reader, about the “best in class” of schwag which you saw and/or collected at the recent AdTech in San Francisco. That schwag which is worth keeping… Comment away about your own finds at the show…. like maybe you really loved the Doubleclick iPod mini speakers set for example…. hmm that might make a nice bedside music player…..
Here are some examples to get you going:
Best Pens
Best Flashy Thing
Best Notepads
Best Bags
Best Mints
T-shirts with the best design
Best “Other”
New(?) Phone Scam
This story is relayed to me directly from the daughter involved. But no facts were double checked for this post….
Part 1
Mom calls daughter on the daughters cell phone, from Mom’s land-line.
Signal is intercepted and voices are recorded by the interceptor.
Repeat often, until enough of the voices are recorded in order to go to part 2.
Part 2
Daughter receives call, looks at the ID, see’s “Mom” and answers the phone.
A strange conversation occurs. Daughter is convinced Mom has had a little stroke and having problem with memories.
Daughter calls Mom the next day. Mom denies having the conversation.
Next day, Daughter get’s a call from “Mom” again, but due to cell phone coverage, the call cannot completely connect.
When Daughter arrives into area with better coverage she calls Mom back. Time elapsed, 2 minutes. Mom denies having called Daughter 2 minutes ago. Both parties think either Mom or Daughter is having some mental issues.
Daughter, being a very smart lady, tells Mom to retrieve phone call records from phone company.
Part 3
Phone company tells Mom, and I’m paraphrasing, “Oh we’ve been having trouble with scammers who break into calls, record voices, pump the voices into computers, then use the synthetic voices to call relatives of the person who’s voice is being imitated.”
It appears that scam artists can now use voice software and computer systems to try and scam people out of money. Wow. Have we entered the second age of the Nigerian scam?
So the next time “Mom” calls you and asks to wire her some money………tell her you’ll call her back.
Filed under Scams | Comment (0)AdTech:day1: Comments on Startups, Bubbles and Buyouts
The Title of the session: Internet Economy: Startups, Bubbles and Buyouts
Moderator:
Roger McNamee: Managing Director Co-Founder - Elevation Partners
Panel:
Alex Gove, Principal Walden Venture Capital
William C. Park, Entrepreneur - transitioning to new role…
Safa Rashtchy, Managing Director, Sr Internet Analyst, Piper Jaffray & Company
Neil Garfinkel, Partner, Francisco Partners
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Directions from the Mod to the audience:
Small company looking for capital go to Alex
Large companies looking for buyout go to Neil
Looking to sell for stock, go to William
Safa just published a new book. check it out. the cartoons are great.
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Safa starts:
Why am I leaving? More than just healthy growth emerging after “all the activities” are done. More than a phoenix rising from the ashes” of relatively recent (2001) firestorm. “New resurgence in consumerism”.
We have a new economy, call it web 2.0 if you must, but that term is old now. Hot is Search and Social networking. Next wave “help users get done what they need to get done, not just capture eyeballs”
Mod: What is the one thing this audience of people who want to get rich should be paying attention to?
Safa: Spending is done by older people and I think we are ignoring the older generation. Increase Global consumerism.
Mod: Alex, what does the audience need to do to get money from you?
Alex: Online marketing, Lead gen markets are hot - but VC’s are looking for true partnerships, they don’t want to simply be an ATM for entrepreneurs. “…Perhaps the entrepreneur is investing their own money, what we really want is…”
Mod: “Stop, we’re getting into a commercial pitch here”
Alex: Ok, let me try this “…if you have one competitor then you have 3. If you have 3 competitors then you really have 9. If you are very early with a unique new idea, we will listen.
William: We are looking for long term trends. Something that can power a wave of consumerism. Companies that can ride a long wave and not just a short break will attract our attention.
Neil: “… a meshing of cultures and long term goals iss extremely important. People are what differentiate the potential value of combined companies.”
Mod: We’re going to jump into a hole here…reluctance on the part of Advertisers to commit themselves to the web (as opposed to “traditional” media) especially because of the numbers.
Neil: Relevancy and Reach is a part of the primary pitch from Behavioral targeting firms. One limit for BT is how many targets are available. Data volume being collected is larger than the companies have ability to parse in a useful way. (challenges that demographics do outperform BT, until granularity of BT data let’s effective targeting succeed). Granted, BT does outperform Run-of-site.
Safa: “Right now internet usage is still very much like a utility. When I chat in IM, is that the most effective time to target me? It’s like I’m talking on the phone. Would you target me while I’m on the phone?”
Mod: As an entrepreneur, the traditional paths to success are:
1) Create an incredibly valuable product functionality
2) Build a real company framework and make it work, growing through the small and medium sized stages, exit at the end.
Do you have a benchmark that gets you excited about a company?
Alex: Importance of team cannot be under-stressed, but it’s also impossible to predict which features of a company will appeal to a company (like Google). Companies must have UNIQUE assets in order to become one of the chosen few. [anecdotal: Each Google M&A screener looks at 10 companies per day]
William: Companies in the Lead Gen markets are making money hand over fist. Some make 40-50% margins. But the thing that makes us hesitate about investing in this market is the constant risk of Google making changes to their algorithm which impacts the revenue stream of these firms. We can’t take the risk.
Safa: “Defining Lead Gen is difficult” as many companies simply create as large a net as possible to try and capture “leads”. Not all Lead Gen is created equal.
Mod: What are the most effective Lead Gen techniques you see today?
Safa: Actually Search is the best way to qualify Leads because you know more about what the user is trying to achieve.
William: Saw a nice lead gen company focused on the higher education vertical, but they focused only in one vertical.
Mod: there are a lot of lead gen business but they are not all equal in quality of their own processes as well as the leads” they generate.
Neil: “comScore is no more accurate for measuring audience than Nielsen.” I look forward to more accurate targeting in the near future.
Mod: Are “things” coming in your door which are too expensive for the investment market to consider?
Neil: “I’m not sure how you can say things are too expensive? Our returns are still double digit, so things are not yet too expensive, but look backwards. Things are underpriced!
William: On the private equity side, Doubleclick did a very good job of resolving their troubles and rebuilding their value. I’d do all Doubleclick deals if I could. If business is very profitable and growing, hold out for the Doubleclick exit (referring to the $3 Billion buyout.)
Mod: Different types of capital are appropriate for different stages of a company depending on the stage and status the company is in.
General responses to that last aphorism, then question time for the audience….
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
I asked the panel: What are the most valuable upcoming categories for Lead Generation, that are not super high value/per lead or super-saturated already. They answered “Education”. I said that was a well known market already. Others in the audience chimed in with ringtones and other “known” markets, nothing new out there…at least no new ideas were forthcoming from the VC’s.
Mod: Great tips. “Start with the big number, work back to the little numbers” in order to hook in an investment bank. “Get your capital in the country where you have the most users.”
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
The takeaway:
- Start-ups with bright ideas and very large companies that are well established attract the most attention from people who can offer them money. For VC’s, the middle market, say forty to several hundred million dollars in valuation, is very hard to work with.
- There is no bubble, the current environment is rational, at least where is comes to investment money being handed out.
- Buyouts are rare. To be attractive, be as unique as possible.
When Good Content Goes Bad - News as Fiction
I was researching some information related to what happens to passwords when you die (that’s another story) and stumbled across an interesting bit of post-factum editorial revisionism by Wired. It seems that a particular author may have some problems based on the inability of Wired to track down some of the sources in the article. Perhaps the content, while well written, is only a work of fiction? Is this a really old story that I missed or forgot was already addressed by Wired?
Read the disclaimer next to the author.
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So this got me thinking about the state of our web content. I mean, who really polices the quality of content on the net? No one, impossible, right? What happens to the news integrity of an article after it’s immediacy has worn off? Does it matter if an Internet news article turns out to be a fake after the fact? Tree falls in the forest…
The Importance of Words in Web Navigation
Open API’s ROCK
I’ve written a few posts about Twitter already, fascinated with the simplicity of their pure concept. What a wonderful service, open to new ideas by exposing their API. In my eyes this is very forward looking because the Twitter team is expecting to see not just one community build up around the core service, but many communities. Twitter micro-crowds if you will, where all participants are engaged with the core service and valuable mash-ups. Already there are Twitter geo-location visualizers & user search (which exposes user post time-lines), continuously evolving Twitter books (140 characters at a time), Twitter stand up-comedians etc,. Every micro-crowd is using Twitter in different ways that meet the personal needs of each micro-crowd member.
Growing Pains
The use of Twitter and twitter-like functionality is expanding quickly, so I believe that the Twitter team is receiving a tremendous cacophony of Tweets about ways in which to improve the service. Instead of adding to the noise, I thought I’d add my $0.02 by pointing to a navigation issue that the Twitter team will probably fix shortly. In fact they are probably already planning to make the change, so perhaps I’m being a bit previous.
Why Word Usage Matters
Note the way that I used the last word in that last paragraph above, as “previous” can be defined as “too soon or too hasty”. While I am not an English Major, I was confused about how the Twitter.com service uses “previous” and “next” in navigation on the site. Today when I want to see Tweets that have been posted within the past, I scroll to the bottom of the “now” page, click “Next”, and I land on the page that represents data from my most recent past (page=2) in my “friends” time-line of posts. When I scroll to the bottom of this page I see “previous | next.”
I’m confused by what “previous” and “next” might mean in this context, because where Temporal considerations exist for me as a user I need additional clues in order to know what to do immediately. If I want to see older posts I know that I can probably click “next” and get to older posts, however I need to interpret this. I might also think that “next” will take me back to the next post in Time, the one that was most recently posted on the “now” page.
Words for Temporal Application
Previous and Next are usually a series of predefined linear steps where Time is not involved. Where Time is an important aspect of the user experience we need to add Temporal indicators into our navigation language.
For example, where data is representing “now” or “now-minus-a-few-minutes-hours”, textual navigation might work like this:
“Now and Recent || Older”
or just “Older” because we are probably already viewing data from “now”
And for data representing recent past, textual navigation might work like this:
“Now and Recent || Newer || Older”
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We almost need to invent a new word that means the time-span of “Now and Recent” in order to take into consideration all of the web services which involve a temporal flow of information. Users constantly try to stay abreast of information within a confined but loosely defined time-space prior to moving the information to “archive”, “delete” or “out-of-immediate-awareness” (like the messages that are deep in the past of your recorded chat-stream).
Let’s call it the “now-span” unless someone has a better idea.
It’s fun to make up words 
“X” = ” Now-span ”
Definition: The time-span of “Now including Recent”. “Within a limited recent history, including the present.”
“Y” = ” Now-spanning ”
Definition: To pay attention to geo-temporal events within (X). (i.e. To read a chat post sent to me in San Francisco from Stephanie in New York at 9:16 PST, while simultaneously performing other interactive tasks that are also geo-temporally tagged. Some tasks are completed immediately, others sit for awhile before being addressed)
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Twitter Emergency Alert System
Has a Twitter emergency alert system been built yet?
Filed under Mashups | Comment (1)
