Exclamation blog: Stories, Ideas and loud noises
The Holiday Gift Card Debate
With Thanksgiving coming up this Thursday, it’s safe to say the holidays are upon us and accordingly, gift cards are once again a hot topic in the media and consumer blogosphere.
I have always had mixed feelings about the cards as legitimate, thoughtful holiday gift-fare—they often seem to serve little purpose other than to clog my wallet. They’ve furthermore proved remarkably adept at expiring mere days before I finally attempt to redeem them and I try not to think about the the many cards I’ve been given that have gone unused.
When a college friend very generously gave me a spa certificate for my birthday a couple of years ago, I put it in a drawer and vowed to redeem it upon completion of my final exams. Of course, I forgot about my opportunity for a free facial in the chaos of end-of-the-year festivities and when I finally booked myself in for an appointment the following Christmas, I was unceremoniously informed that the gift card had expired. Guilt-ridden, I resolved never to admit my forgetfulness to my friend– and also began to think twice before purchasing gift cards for others.
Undoubtedly, I am not alone in this frustration and complex gift card fees and expirations have resulted in a windfall for retailers.
According to The New York Times:
“In 2006 alone, $8 billion in gift card sales were never redeemed. That same year, shoppers spent about $80 billion on gift cards. Of that, consumers forfeited 10 percent — about $8 billion — either because the card was lost, stolen, never used, or fees cannibalized what was left on the card.”
Certainly, $8 billion in lost cash is not a number to sniff at — and the recent buzz around gift card management demonstrates that reporters, bloggers and finally consumers are really beginning to pay attention.
On November 13th, Consumer Reports kick-started a public education campaign aimed at creating awareness around the hazards of gift cards with a full-page ad in The New York Times. USA Today, Reuters, The Consumerist, the NPR News Blog and The Motley Fool have all discussed the dirty little secrets of the gift card industry—and that’s just the tip of the iceberg.
With all this coverage, one could say that consumers finally are striking back against an industry that profits — and to a vast degree — from a combination of shopper ennui, ignorance and the post-holiday frenzy, all of which result in deferred or perpetually delayed card redemption.
A new LaunchSquad client is also moving into this space with a free personal web application that helps users better manage gift cards, and loyalty/rewards program memberships. Launching this week, the service is called Leverage and allows users to purchase, track and exchange gift cards and even earn interest on gift card balances for the first time.
What with the proliferation of coverage around the industry and launch of a comprehensive gift card management service like Leverage, I can’t help but wonder if the days of missed expirations and the subsequent exasperation are coming to an end.
$8 billion is a pretty big number. This year, by actually proactively managing my gift cards rather than relegating them to a lonely drawer or the recesses of my already painfully congested wallet, I hope to do my part to put a dent in it.
Let the shopping begin.
Will Comcast’s Unhappy Customers Show Them How To Die?
I was watching John Batelle’s opening remarks at the Conversational Marketing Summit at San Francisco’s Presidio last Tuesday afternoon; the entire event surrounds trends in marketing that involve the consumer, presumably as a co-creator of marketing content.
I was introduced to the people sitting on both sides of me, and, two people to my right was a guy from Comcast. I turned to the guy to my right and said, “Man, has that guy been on the blogs this week? They’ve been getting slaughtered.” The guy shrugged his shoulders and said, “Uh, I don’t know,” which made me wonder what the hell he was doing at a conversational marketing event if he wasn’t aware of the Comcast situation, but I digress..
Ad Age’s Bob Garfield, among others, has been going ballistic about Comcast, and Jeff Jarvis (Dell Hell) took his tragicomic account of waiting for the cable guy and kicked it to the next level: stating that “every company — every industry — that makes its money by screwing its customers is doomed.” Well, he’s got a point here.
The kids today aren’t really just into being spoon-fed professionally made content. In fact, according to a Deloitte study referenced on David Weinberger’s blog last week, stated that Millenials (yes, I’m officially old because I called people aged 13-24 the kids) are adopting new forms of content consumption faster than ever, but all generations are demanding UGC faster than ever. Essentially, 51% of the Internet is watching user-generated content. That is, one half is watching what the other half if saying.
When Garfield challenges Comcast’s unhappy customers to start an anti-advertising campaign, customercials, to make a video explaining why the cable behemoth sucks so bad, he’s already a week or two late. Jeremy told me about the infamous sleeping Comcast technician video posted on YouTube a year ago.
This video is so popular (over 1 million views) that it actually comes up on the first page of Google and Yahoo for search-rankings, so it goes without saying that customercials can have enormous effect, especially when they’re highly viewed on video portals like YouTube. Will videos like this have a long-term pervasive effect on conversations about brands? Absolutely.
But until the other day it wasn’t empirically clear that a majority of the customer marketplace was listening to the content-creators among them. To quote one of my favorite consumer advocates, Garth Algar: “Game On.”
Comcast Customercial Link Love:
What’s Your Brand Mantra: I Hate Comcast
Squeezing Life Out of Organic Boxed Chicken Stock
On Saturday night, I realized how rarely I go to the theater. And I don’t mean Theater, with a capital T. I mean low-key, do-it-yourself, break-down-the-set-afterwards-and-be-outta-here-in-15-minutes theater.
Aside from a community-theater version of Same Time Next Year and a birthday trip to Avenue Q (South Park meets Sesame Street Live!, essentially), I haven’t seen a real play in years. So, when I saw Amy Tobin’s show, Organic Boxed Chicken Stock at the San Francisco Fringe Festival Saturday night, it made me realize that independent actor/writers have every bit of as much of a challenge as many of LaunchSquad’s clients do.
Indie actors and directors have to write, direct and act (and in Tobin’s case, play and sing) the entire production. Our clients have to conceive, execute and sell their entire product or service to a marketplace that, while familiar with new ideas, is immensely skeptical about adopting any one of them unless they’re seen as a whole product. But, that too, is something that actor/directors also have to face: if the audience can’t contextualize the show in terms of their own experience, they can only appreciate it on a limited level. Both situations leave “the artist” exhausted, at the end of the day, when it comes time to do the media relations, and attract attention to your art (or product, as the case may be).
Tobin’s spoken-word-meets-cabaret performance (which crammed four songs and eight monologues into fifty minutes) is a really coherent piece about consumerism, identity and, in her words, “being stuck in between two worlds.” I couldn’t help but laugh at the part where she admits a secret joy at occasionally throwing away plastic bottles. I could only imagine how it would have gone over in a completely packed room, rather than the half-full one that it played in.
Post-show, chowing on Indian food with Tobin and her partner and A Little Friction bandmate (ex-Beatnig) Kevin Carnes, it became all too clear to me that the only way to for an independent artist to dedicate the requisite amount of time to “the art” and “selling the story” requires a trying 50/50 time investment - which few artists believe they have, with day jobs, tech rehearsals and, well, sleeping getting in the way. Moments like these make me realize why so many innovative brands are out there looking for someone to tell their story: they simply lack the human capital to do so, because they’re so busy working on their “production.”
A painter friend of mine, Aliza Cohen, is about to debut her first full-scale San Francisco art show in mid-October, and she’s grappling with the same problem as Tobin; so much art “work” to do, and not nearly enough time to talk to bloggers and local media to tell the story. While I think she’s becoming much more media-savvy, I can tell that it’s a slow, blocky transition for someone who’s obviously much more comfortable behind her easel. When I told that I thought she should spend 50% of the time between now and her mid-October show publicizing the event, she looked at me like she thought I was a little nuts. But, like Tobin’s work, Cohen’s paintings are too good not to talk about. They just don’t tell you in art school that part of the “art” includes being willing to spend three or four hours a day doing email and making phone calls.
After my recent experiences with Tobin’s show and Cohen’s connundrum, the next time I meet with a perspective client who has awesome story to tell (but looks a little exhausted), I think I’ll have a bit more insight as to where they’re coming from.
Organic Boxed Chicken Stock plays on Friday, September 14 through Sunday, September 16 at the Exit Theater, at 156 Eddy in San Francisco. Cohen’s show opens at 1890 Bryant Studios in San Francisco on Friday, October 19.
Science Fiction’s Influence on Web 2.0 (podcast)
In this podcast, LaunchSquad’s Adam Metz and Stanford doctoral candidate Noam Cohen, author of the forthcoming thesis, “Speculative Nostalgias: Metafiction, Science Fiction and the Putative Death of the Novel,” discuss the influence of science-fiction on business, and especially, Web 2.0.
The podcast also features an in-depth discussion of the ramifications of Neal Stephenson’s 1993 novel Snow Crash, and its influence on virtual worlds like Second Life and There.
How A Small Press Author Stormed Amazon’s Charts (and beat Black Lab)
Scott Sigler works in downtown San Francisco, and hasn’t taken a day off from his day job in the last month to promote his new science fiction book Ancestor. So, how he got to #7 on Amazon was a wake-up call to many in the publishing industry. Turns out that podcasting your novels - and giving them away for free as PDFs - builds a large and loyal following.
Ancestor, is Sigler’s second novel, both of which have been podcast. I’ve been running into Sigler at San Francisco podcast Meetup events for the last year, and although I wasn’t amazed by his efforts at podcasting his sci-fi/mashup genre novels (so-so audio), I was impressed by the rabid and rapidly growing following that he was cultivating, as well as the fact that he was mounting an effort to coordinate his follow-up to “Kill Amazon” - yes, that’s seriously what it was called: Ancestor Kills Amazon.
In March, alt rock band Black Lab tried to do the same thing, and managed to sell 14,000 copies of their 2006 song “Mine Again” on iTunes, sending the song to #11 on the iTunes U.S. rock charts, according to Mike Musgrove at the Washington Post. While Sigler may not have sold as many copies as Black Lab, his gross is far higher; by the end of the first week, Sigler had sold 3,800 copies at Amazon’s price of $13.53. Which means his gross (about $51,000) is about four times higher than that of Black Lab’s (about $13,000).
And that’s what rocketed Ancestor to the #7 spot on Amazon for a day (and the #1 spot in Amazon’s Horror category and #4 in Amazon’s sci-fi category), and got Sigler’s other novel Infection (now retitled Infested) signed to Random House’s Crown imprint, where it will be reissued in hardcover next summer. Sigler’s next book, The Rookie, comes out in November.
