Cam Balzer's Web-Cite

Xmas goodness

Celebrated Christmas this year by unplugging and before that December got hectic. Getting back in gear now and intend to get some fresh thoughts flowing here.

A few observations / thoughts to get the observational flow going again:

• Radiohead's "name your price" strategy yielded more fruit for the band when I demanded the boxed set of their studio albums for xmas. Working my way backwards to trace the path to In Rainbows, by far my favorite album of the year. Now, just to see them live. Milan in June sounds like fun!
  
• Finally reading Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials. Taking me back to the thrill and mythic majesty of reading Tolkien as a teen, though as Pullman says in this interview, the thrust and spirit of the two series could not be more different! And while the film of The Golden Compass had some beautifully realized characters (Kidman's Mrs. Coulter and Lyra) and a few gripping scenes, the story just never really got any momentum. I found myself wishing that Peter Jackson had directed it... Perhaps if he'd settled his feud with New Line sooner, it would have been another blockbuster series?!
• For others who didn't get a wii under the trii, check out another electronic game that gets kids and adults off the sofa: HyperDash. Brought to you with the magic of RFID! Good wholesome family fun, as they say...
• See Juno. And not just because Ellen Page and Jason Reitman are both Canadian or because they somehow made Vancouver stand in for Minneapolis! It doesn't fall in the wholesome family fun category, necessarily... But see it because we should collectively reward the movie industry for such a sympathetic and optimistic rendering of ordinary, decent, self-aware people triumphing in a sticky situation. Dammit: it IS because it feels really Canadian that you should see it!

Might actually have a thing or two to say about web marketing once I soak in it for a while...

C2C banner buys?

Fun new alpha from Yahoo: Me2U, which is basically person to person marketing, for fun. You create a nice flash ad unit, the squarish size that shows up all over the place on content pages on Yahoo, too frequently with inhuman, badly drawn dancing automaton's trying to sell you a refi. Then you enter your target's emails and they see a personalized ad among the other ads they are (probably) tuning out...

Send personalized messages to your friends and family as banner ads on the Yahoo! network.

Very cool: ads become "hackable" and useful for the little guy. Aside from classifieds, which Craig and his list have done in, who would have previously perceived a need for this kind of functionality. Nice idea Y!.

Open question: you've got so much great web 2 stuff under your umbrella, can you just make another big play here, blow through some of the internal barriers you seem to face in product dev / management and tie all Y! things social into a big awesome bundle.

Remember, you're being watched

In London on Remembrance Day (at least, that's what we Canadians call it). Striking to see bemedaled Veteran's in uniform around the city. Also saw a very timely exhibition at StolenSpace Gallery in Brick Lane: Shephard Fairey's NINETEENEIGHTYFOURIA. Very large scale works to smaller prints staring back at big brother. With it's palette of poppy reds and its subtext of the costs and trade-offs for freedom. Struck me as strangely appropriate to photograph people viewing and photographing the work.

The space is spectacular too, above the Old Truman Brewery Sunday Market. Additional work from Fairey's Obey series "deface" the area around the gallery. Brilliant work and entirely sold out, including the massive canvases. Maybe I can go back and steam one of the posters off the wall outside!

My photos on Flickr. More info at stolenspace.com and a great review from the London Times: Poster boy with a difference.

Promoting art online - Saatchi

London's Saatchi gallery is taking a crowd-sourcing approach to promoting art online, letting artists promote and sell their work for free from a custom site. Seems to be phenomenally successful from a traffic POV, ringing up tens of millions of daily "hits" (seems like a long time since I've heard that metric!).

Having just added Heather's work to the site, I have to say that the user interface for artists and browsers is remarkably bad. I kept getting weird errors trying to log-in to the account and got landed on blank pages when I added images. And the page elements dance all over the screen more garishly than a LowerMyBills ad as the page loads. You'd think that Saatchi would be able to find/fund resources to build him a world-class site. The art gathered there deserves a more professional environment. He'd never settle for this type of shoddy experience in his galleries!

Here's Heather's new page on Saatchi: Heather Hancock Mosaics. Judge for yourself.

Wasted Advertising, take 2

I've expanded a bit on my Corollary to Wanamaker in my latest Chief Marketer column: Untracked Conversions Mean Wasted Advertising.

Around the Coyote 2007

Around the Coyote, originally uploaded by cambalzer.

A few pictures to capture the vibe at the annual Around the Coyote Fall Arts Festival in Chicago's Bucktown neighborhood.

UPDATE: we were lucky enough to find some new artists to add to our collection at ATC. Check out some really great work from these deserving artists and genuinely good people:

• Damien James likes you. He likes everyone... well, not everyone. Just "you." It really shows in the exquisite miniature marker drawings of people he sees around
  
• Russ White has a business jones, or at least a jones for aged pallet wood which he sculpts into variegated mosaics and semaphores
• Christina Mann is your fotomann, with realist mystical pin-hole photos of the gradually disappearing bouldered views along Chicago's lakefront
• Darren Oberto pits formal beauty against the vulgar excess of midwestern refinery-scapes
• Karen Gagich has a singular vision of form and a wry wit to boot
• And keep an eye on Gabe Mejia, whose life-sized portraits, formerly in ballpoint ink, now in charcoal or paint, continue to find so much humanity in the stern warmth of his subjects' gaze.

And at risk of driving up prices on artists we're still just watching, check out Eric Mecum's photo realistic paintings, which took an interesting spare turn year, and Robert Burnier's taut duels with chaos.

Yo La Tengo in Chicago

Yo La Tengo in Chicago, originally uploaded by cambalzer.

The quietest, beautifulest rock show you'll ever see. Yo La Tengo played an intimate acoustic set tonight in Chicago for diehard fans and newer devotees, me in the latter category. In their "The Freewheelin' Yo La Tengo" mode, they chatted with the fans, alternately answered and dodged questions (like how Ira proposed to Georgia), and covered everything from the b-side of Ira's first ever 45 (Let's Spend the Night Together has never sounded so innocent) to Brian Wilson's Farmer's Daughter (the closer).

Great versions of three or four songs from "I Am Not Afraid of You and I Will Beat Your Ass," including Weakest Part and a quietly blistering Pass The Hatchet. Plus a lot of stuff that all their real fans knew well but we got to enjoy for the first time!

Ira claimed that none of them are great players, but they clearly know who they are and play who they are. They could not look less rock and roll but they "totally delivered the goods" (as James said Van Halen did when they were the second band he ever saw).

Google Streetview Launches in Chicago

Streetview has been around for a while now, but it is so much more amusing when you can navigate around your hometown. For instance, here's where you can find many Performics employees starting their morning, at the Starbucks on the corner of Lake and LaSalle in Chicago:

Now all they need are clickable hotspots overlaid on the street view for ads, offers, click-to-call buttons and inventory look-up functionality!

A corollary to Wanamaker

Search marketing is one of the most accountable advertising mediums ever created. Advertisers pay only for clicks from users who are explicitly looking for specific products, services or information. Those clicks can all be tracked to the exact keyword that the user entered. And the users can be tracked to conversion. Seems like a closed loop, right?

Wrong. Eighty to ninety percent of the conversions, in some verticals, that are generated by search cannot be tracked. They happen offline, where the user goes after researching online or looking up a store address. Or they happen after a tracking cookie expires or is cleared by the user.

So, yes: search addresses Wanamaker's axiom: "Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don't know which half." But it introduces another vexing challenge for search marketers, and thus my Corollary to Wanamaker's First Law of Advertising Accountability:

I know half the value I'm driving from advertising (even in search) is untracked, there's just no easy way to track it!

Some additional thoughts on this topic as they pertain to local and mobile advertising, in my presentation from SMX Local in Denver. (Christine's reference to Wanamaker in her presentation triggered this thought for me. Thanks Christine!)

Curiosity vs noticing the curious

Outside the Times Square Starbucks (Broadway & 51st), there's a guy working at his desk... in his Chevy Cavalier [correction: Chrysler Sebring] convertible. In place of his passenger seat, he's got a computer, full sized monitor, printer, desk lamp, even a fake flower arrangement. He's getting a huge amount of attention from passers-by, gawking, standing around, taking pictures on camera phones and speculating to each other at great length amongst themselves about what he's doing... that guy that is three feet away from them in his open convertible. Of the hundreds of people who have gawked, exactly six have asked him what he's doing. Conclusion: homo sapiens isn't characterized by actual curiosity so much as by a vague capacity to notice curious things before jumping to unexamined, uninformed conclusions.

Curious.

And furthermore... it doesn't actually take much to make us shake our heads. A slight decontextualization and suddenly everyone is documenting the moment for posterity. I'm sitting 20 feet away from him in the Starbucks working on my computer, using the same wireless network as him, with two other dudes beside me doing the same thing. But put one of those computers in a car and man people will go nuts!

Curious.