Marketers Studio - David Berkowitz's Marketing Blog

Kazakhstan Mobile Banking - Nice!

Like my mama used to tell me, "If you don't have something nice to say about Kazakhstan, don't say it at all."

Granted, Borat never had such a mama. But in light of all the unflattering press coverage Borat has bestowed upon the country he deems so misogynous, anti-Semitic, and incestuous, here's some real news about what's going on there, via Moconews.net: National Bank of Kazakhstan: 100 thousand mobile clients.

What?

Read the article. It's really impressive, especially compared to what we're used to in the US.

Maybe this will give the president of Kazakhstan something else to talk about with President Bush other than Sacha Baron Cohen. 

(After seeing both of those articles back to back, it's hard to think which one's more incredible.)

Schwag Watch - Advertising Week

Of all the subjects to tackle relating to Advertising Week currently underway in New York, this blog needs to focus on the most important: the schwag.

At OMMA East, where I spent the entire day, the winner among my colleagues and I were the ContextWeb mini Rubik's Cubes.

Then, thanks to Scott Delea's invite, I made it to DigitalGrit's soiree on W46th with live piano music, where I saw quite a few familiar faces and met a bunch of their friends. The giveaway: flasks. That could come in handy for Tuesday night... or perhaps at 4:30, when I have my OMMA session on local search (Scott and I can clink flasks beforehand, as he's on the panel).

The final stop was China Club for Batanga's Latin music party. I got there on the early side before the crowd really showed up, but it was a very hospitable bunch, and I had the pleasure of catching up with Accuquote's Sean Cheyney and his colleague Teresa. I left there with a goodie bag that included a CD, two pens, earphones, and two t-shirts.

Click the pictures for the full size. And if you're in town this week for the myriad events, send a line.  

Engaged in the Blogosphere

At the 360i Summit, Max Kalehoff of AttentionMax and Nielsen BuzzMetrics fame, interviewed me for a video blog (vlog) on engagement BuzzMetrics is hosting in conjunction with the Advertising Research Foundation (ARF) and the American Association of Advertising Agencies (the 4 As), all as a thought piece for Advertising Week here in New York (send a note if you're in town for the hallowed occasion).

My own clip might drive traffic away from the blog, so I'm not sure why he put it up there, but some of the other interviewees are a little more coherent (perhaps they hadn't been sleep deprived planning a client event for the previous few weeks).

That being said, peruse at your leisure, and thanks Max for what I believe is my first-ever vlog interview.

Wal-Mart's MySpace Hub

Wal-Mart didn't win much positive press with The Hub (Ad Age called it "sanitized, controlled, and rather unhip" -- perhaps the three worst things you can call a social networking or user-generated content site), so can it do better winning friends on MySpace?

I found its "back to college" page on MySpace, and it seemed to be off to a good start (not sure how long it has been up), with over 7,000 friends so far.

Then I read the profiles. A good number of them - perhaps an overwhelming number - are from kids who work at the store, writing lines, like, "Giving a shout out to my crew at store number 754.....What What!!!" and "whats up from store #1375...Marianna, Fl...top 5 biggest Walmarts in the country".

They get funnier - you need to read these. Two of my favorites are back to back. First Joel writes, "WALMART IS MY HERO - I GO TO YOU EVERY NIGHT WHEN I AM LONELY," and then Bradley writes, "hey were [sic] are all my cart pushers at?"

When I was in college, someone giving a shout-out to his pushers meant something else entirely.

Are You Down with ODS? - The Column

This week's column is being posted here so late, there's already a response to it in another column. Mine was a response to a post by Jeremiah Owyang, so there's a whole lotta conversing going on.

I wonder how Jeremiah's 40 observations about online data storage will impact marketers in the column:

The hypothetical model is essentially a “Bizarro World” version of an affiliate network. In the traditional affiliate model, a merchant site (e.g., Amazon) serves as the producer, which teams up with a publisher (often a low-traffic site run by a publisher-consumer), and the publisher earns a small commission on anything it helps consumers purchase. In the Bizarro affiliate model, a producer (or, a producer-consumer) provides content through a publisher (e.g., Google) and earns a small commission on ad revenue the producer helps the publisher earn.

Jeremiah commented both on my blog, the MediaPost blog, and his own blog (he does a lot of commenting). Gord Hotchkiss, meanwhile, commented in a column of his own: What Happens When The Whole World Becomes Searchable? He writes:

As the barriers disappear between our hard drive and the Net (the subject of David’s column) all this content theoretically can enter the public domain and be searchable. Increasingly, the question we ask ourselves is “where do I draw the line between my private and my online world?” File sharing becomes a substantially bigger deal.

Now your turn. Comment away.

 

Coming Soon: The $100 Hot Dog

Okay, the $100 dog's not here yet, but the salmon dog is, and the $25 dog, according to a USA Today article (thanks for the link, Dr. Adelglass). Give it time - someone will make a $100 hot dog as a great PR stunt, like the $1,000 omelette. A few will eat it, but many more will flock to whoever serves it just to say to their friends, "You know this places sells hot dogs for $100?" (At least Norma's, which sells the $1,000 omelette, backs up the rest of the menu by serving the best breakfast anywhere in Manhattan - you get what you pay for there).

An aside: the article also mentions Mandler's, which was featured in a Search Insider article in March. 360i moved a bit further from Mandler's, but I still try to make it back every so often. Ronnie & Gil, keep the grill hot for me.

360i Summit - Full Recap

Here's the full rundown of posts from the 360i Summit in NYC on September 19:

• Preview of Summit Blog
  
• Welcome
• Innovating by Fast Following (Intro Remarks)
• Search Informed Marketing overview
• Search Informed Marketing Panel
• Multichannel E-Commerce Roundtable
• Lunch Review
• Jordan Rohan - Lunch Keynote (shorter than the lunch review - though the keynote really was even better than the meal)
• Engine Roundtable - Google
• Engine Roundtable - Yahoo!
• Engine Roundtable - MSN
• Engine Roundtable - Q&A
• 2007 SEO and Paid Search Strategies
• Cheesecake Watch
• What's Next: Emerging Media
• Dinner Cruise

Thanks again to all who took part.

Dinner Cruise - 360i Summit

At 6:30, scores of attendees and a few other guests boarded the Royal Princess yacht for a three hour tour (sing it, “three hour tour”) of Manhattan and those other landmasses – I think one was Brooklyn, Jersey was somewhere out there…

The weather did start getting rough, but the not-so-tiny ship never got lost, and we made it within spitting distance of the Statue of Liberty under clear skies amid a crispness in the air that signals fall is really upon us. Fortunately, the event went nothing like this.

It was a perfect setting for digesting the packed day, unwinding, and trying not to fall over from exhaustion while talking to clients and members of the press.

Thanks to Sarah Hofstetter for putting it all together, Jeffrey Melton for making sure the day ran smoothly, NYU for hosting it, and all the others who made the day one of the better conferences I’ve attended. (I’d be wary of singing the event’s praises here if I didn’t hear and overhear that sentiment, in even more exuberant form, repeated by countless attendees throughout the day.)

Now, back to work.

Emerging Media - 360i Summit

What's Next: Emerging Media
Dana VanDen Heuvel, Director of Business Development Pheedo
Max Kalehoff, Vice President, Nielsen BuzzMetrics
David Berkowitz, Director of Strategic Planning, 360i (moderator)

Lastly, this David Berkowitz guy went on and on about emerging trends in the final session of the day, rattling of 12 trends that can impact the future of search: The Long Tail of Search, Mashups, Microformats, Mobile Search, Q&A, Social Search, Personalization, RSS, Tagging, User-Generated Content, Social Media, and Virtual Worlds.

Following the standing ovation, Dana VanDen Heuvel from Pheedo offered penetrating insight into how marketers can best make use of RSS, and Max Kalehoff from Nielsen BuzzMetrics explored the explosive world of consumer-generated media.

Its hard blogging about the questions asked during this session, since I wrote the post before it occurred, but it’s safe to say that the Berkowitz guy couldn’t answer a single one of em. We’ll see if he’s invited back to next year’s event.

You can view the PDF of his presentation here: Download 360i_summit_12_search_trends_dberkowitz.pdf

Cheesecake Watch - 360i Summit

After that last session, I went back for another strawberry cheesecake. SO good.