Marketers Studio - David Berkowitz's Marketing Blog

What Gary from Veep Can Teach You about the Future of Marketing

Are you a Veep fan? If not, you should be, as this is the show that will teach you everything you need to know about the next trillion-dollar idea in marketing and technology. Or something like that.

The polished, edited version is in Ad Age. My draft is below for your reading pleasure.

Why Garyoke is Marketing's Holy Grail

If you’re an HBO subscriber or pirate, then you may enjoy watching one show because of how it depicts one awkward nerd’s attempt to change the world with a billion-dollar idea. That show, of course, is “Veep,” and the nerd is Gary, played by Tony Hale. What, you thought it’s “Silicon Valley”?

“Veep” shows the real vision, and Gary embodies the dream of so many entrepreneurs and venture capitalists right now. Gary is the title character’s body man, the one who has everything for the Vice President the moment she needs it. What’s most impressive about him, though, is his memory. He knows at least some salient information about everyone his boss has ever met or could meet. Just as she makes eye contact with another person and needs to greet them, Gary literally whispers their name and their most important personal or professional details into the Vice President’s ear. It’s a game affectionately or mockingly dubbed “Garyoke.”

Don’t mock Garyoke. The most literal embodiment of Gary-oke today is Google. Most importantly, it’s where Google is going, not what Google has been. If Google continues to be one of the world’s successful companies into the 2020s, it’s because it will have mastered Garyoke.

For Google, search may keep bringing in revenue, but it’s a dated model. Every time someone enters a search query, it’s a technological failure. If Google and other tech and media companies were that impressive, they would deliver information before anyone has to ask for it. If I’m searching for Mother’s Day gifts, it’s because I didn’t receive any gift recommendations via email, ads, app alerts, or my friends on Snapchat. If I’m searching for information stroller-friendly museums in New York City, it’s because no one picked up on my shifts in digital behavior that give away that I’m a father on paternity leave. Most searches can be prevented.

Google gets this. That’s why Google Now proactively offers traffic conditions, sports scores, package tracking, and other relevant updates. This is also the promise of wearable displays such as Google Glass, although the technology falls short today. People already search less on mobile devices than on PCs, and Google is so open to disrupting itself that it is trying to obviate searching further.

This isn’t just about Google though. Practically every tech and media company is trying to master Garyoke. Whether the company’s buzzwords involve social, mobile, real-time, native, programmatic, or wearable, some version of Garyoke is the goal.

What determines who wins Garyoke? Here are the three areas where Gary shines, and where his corporate disciples must excel too:

• Timing: Information received late is useless, but deliver information too soon and there’s the risk of irrelevance or creepiness. Gary knows that his boss can’t focus on anything until the moment when she is forced to deal with it, so he dishes out the Garyoke just before she’d get that deer in the headlights look.
  
  
• Context: What kind of information matters? That’s the pitfall of big data; usually, just a few data points matter at any given moment, but it’s hard to know which ones matter unless one has access to a massive amount of data to begin with. Gary is masterful here too. If there’s a Congressman approaching who’s unhappy with proposed legislation, Gary lets her know which bill the Congressman will argue about. If it’s a dignitary approaching her on a receiving line, Gary lets her know about the dignitary’s family or hobbies. Context also shifts based on who needs information. If Gary, heaven forbid, ever quit his job and worked for the minority whip, the new boss would prioritize different kinds of data.
  
  
• Accuracy: The quality of the information is essential. Gary has to be perfect, or his boss won’t trust him. Consumers may be more tolerant of error than the fictional Vice President, but technological Garyoke will only be ready when it’s precise. If I am at the same Internet Week event as you, and an app gives you intelligence on people there with whom you share mutual connections, then the app better be telling you about an agency executive and not a serial killer, or it will make for an awkward conversation (more awkward for you than me; I hear it all the time).

Which companies will master Gary-oke? Beyond Google, many are trying to harness enough social, geographical, personal, commercial, behavioral, and contextual data to make it possible. Foursquare wants to predict which nearby destination you’ll visit or want to visit. Buzzfeed wants to clue you in on what everyone else will soon be talking about. The most successful ad networks will need to more effectively predict your intent. Some apps take a more literal approach, such as Refresh and Tempo syncing with your phone’s calendar to deliver details about people you will soon meet with.

On “Veep,” Gary isn’t always appreciated, and it’s easy to make fun of him. But he’s the only irreplaceable member of the vice president’s staff. That dependability is invaluable, and it’s why any company that masters Garyoke will have staying power.

 

 

 

If Not Nike, Who Will Win the Wearable Marathon?

Here's another byline that I've been delayed in posting. Like other bylines, I've included my original version below; the edition in Ad Age undoubtedly reads better, so you may want to skip ahead to that one instead.

 

FuelBand Won the Sprint, But Here’s How to Win the Wearable Marathon
By David Berkowitz

April 18 wasn’t just Good Friday this year. For many people working on the brand side, it will go down as one of the best Fridays ever. Nike just invented a new Hallmark holiday for marketers, and all they had to do was lay off some their wearable hardware team. While Nike later said it would keep supporting its FuelBand SE model and release new colors, Nike’s longterm commitment to tech hardware seems to be in doubt.

Marketers, how many times have you been in a meeting getting pitched from some agency creative or strategist trying to sell you on some outlandish idea, where the crux of the idea was, “Here’s how your brand can be more like Nike”? Sometimes it’s slide 3, and sometimes it’s slide 93, but it’s always there: that picture of the FuelBand all lit up daring your brand to be as forward-thinking as Nike.

You know what happened to those cutting edge Nike folks? The ones who were always making your brand look bad, assuming your brand isn’t Nike? Many are looking for their next gig.

This must be a come to Jesus moments for Nike. It invented the first household brand name in wearable technology before practically any layman knew what a wearable device was. Having a hot tech product these days for a company that earned $25 billion in revenue in 2013 doesn’t sound like such a bad idea when Facebook is willing to spend nearly $20 billion on a mobile app. Yet Nike couldn’t continue this indefinitely. FuelBand was designed to win the 400-meter dash, not the marathon.

To understand Nike’s challenge, check the Google Trends graph for FuelBand versus Fitbit. Especially interesting is what happened in January the past three years, during the Consumer Electronics Show. Around CES 2012, FuelBand interest spiked, almost keeping pace with the buzz starting to build around Fitbit. Come CES 2013, FuelBand searches were stagnating, while Fitbit was surging and had more than 3.5 times the FuelBand interest. Come CES 2014, Fuelband was cresting from the 2013 holiday season, yet FitBit now had 8 times as much interest. And Fitbit is just one of FuelBand’s competitors.

CES 2014 was a landmark event for another reason. One of the most important announcements there came from Tory Burch, which teased a new accessory collection for Fitbit Flex. Tory Burch is making the Fitbit more fashionable. Nike’s options are limited here, as it must support FuelBand over any other technology. If FuelBand can’t iterate and innovate as fast as other products, then Nike must attach its iconic swoosh to a losing player. Yet Nike is a brand that wants to find the next Tiger Woods or Michael Jordan, not the next Tim Tebow.

What may have tripped up Nike is its own mission statement, which says Nike is here “to bring inspiration and innovation to every athlete* in the world (*if you have a body, you are an athlete).” If Nike’s in the innovation business, and its target market is everyone, the FuelBand makes sense. The only way it seems that they could justify shuttering FuelBand is by saying it’s no longer innovative, but I’d argue some aspects of the FuelBand – especially in its design – are far more innovative than Fitbit Flex and other competitors.

What Nike ultimately had to accept is that while it says it’s in the innovation business, it’s mostly in the footwear and apparel business. Every brand grapples with this, where many have these lofty ideals, but consumers are more practical. People can get inspiration and innovation from a lot of brands, from Pope Francis to Google. People can only get those comfortable, well-engineered, swoosh-sporting sneakers from one source.

I’ve dealt with this internally too. During a brand positioning discussion for my agency, one colleague said how we should be in the business of changing the world. And I had to be the jerk who said, “That’s not what we do. We help corporations sell mouthwash, booze, and credit cards.” We have to be honest with ourselves about what business we’re in if we’re going to earn the trust of our customers.

And that, ultimately, is what brands can say to agencies who have been trying to come up with the next FuelBand. It’s the brand manager or CMO who needs to say, “Sorry, we’re not in the innovation business.” Stand up for the business you’re in. There’s no time to humor another agency creative who wishes they were in the business of changing the world.

 

Should You Get Your Baby a Twitter Handle? A Look Ahead to 2026

I've been slow to post a few of my own bylines here, in part due to the reason referenced below -- the newest addition to my family. As I take a bit of time for paternity leave, I'll also be catching up and sharing some things I've meant to post. This post was originally published in Ad Age in April, and undoubtedly reads better there thnks to their editing. My slightly rougher version is below.

How to Digitally Prepare a New Brand for 2026
By David Berkowitz

Which types of digital media will matter in 2026?

I wound up in some spirited conversations about this topic with my wife after we welcomed our firstborn in February. It was only once our daughter was born, and we were fully committed to her name, that we started to discuss which digital identities we would reserve for her.

The focus of our conversations quickly shifted to 2026. That’s when our daughter will turn 12. She will be legally able to sign up for a lot of media properties and digital services herself. By then, she’ll also be well past the age where she’ll have strong opinions on which media properties matter to her.

To illustrate one family’s attempt at forecasting what will matter more than a decade from now, here’s how the conversation netted out:

Email: The only email service we considered for our daughter was Gmail, based on our own personal preferences. My wife started to register a new address for our baby, as we tried several combinations of our daughter’s first, middle, and last names. After we decided on one, my wife entered our daughter’s birthday in the registration form. Google advised that the service was only meant for people over age 12, and we paused.

It wasn’t that we cared about the age limit. Just last year, I helped my niece add a couple years to her age to get a Skype account. Rather, it made wonder why we were doing it at all. We weren’t going to send emails from our daughter to us or others; it felt odd creating some persona for this little person who was already developing her own personality. While I’d wager that Google will still be around for more than a decade, and email will exist in some form, I trust that my daughter will be okay with coming up with an address that suits her.

Social networks: Twitter seemed like the most logical social network when considering reserving a handle for a dozen years from now. Perhaps its most important asset is its deep integration with live television – another form of media that should soldier on. Twitter is also relatively unusual in that handles still matter. On Facebook, LinkedIn, and elsewhere, people are known by their real names, but on Twitter, you are your username (at least for now).

For my daughter, it’s possible to squat on a handle and do little with it until she decides to own it. Yet even if Twitter is still around in a decade, will she use it? Maybe by 2026, teens will think Twitter has some retro cachet. Or maybe Twitter will just be a boring news aggregator that some of their parents and grandparents use. If Twitter does have that kind of longevity, my daughter may not need her handle for 20 or 30 years, and by then, she can pick her own name. For a different approach, there are some parents who tweet on behalf of their children, but I can’t imagine putting in the effort that my former colleague Matt Wurst does for @LilWurst.

Websites: Even people who have never registered a URL have been asking me if I’ve reserved domain names for my daughter. This one seemed like a no brainer at first. A domain is an open book. She can ultimately do what she wants with it, and there may always be a little extra cachet to a memorable .com domain.

Unlike email addresses or social handles, however, domain names cost money, and so many domain names sit idle. My daughter won’t need her own domain if she wants to blog, run a Tumblr, contribute to Medium, post an about.me bio, or participate in whatever such services are popular in the years to come. And I’m not convinced that domains will be the default taxonomy of the web going forward. Ultimately, my wife and I settled on a compromise: we’d reserve one .com with her full name and a .me with just her first name, and hold it for three years. In 2017, we can revisit the decision.

That’s how rattled I am about how fast media is changing. Nothing should be taken for granted. Some form of email will prevail indefinitely, and that may look more like Gmail, Facebook messaging, WeChat, or something we haven’t encountered yet. Facebook has lasted one decade, but that doesn’t mean it will last two. For many brands and people, domain names are far less important than their social identities.

Let’s revisit this in 2026 and see how prescient these decisions were. I have no doubt my daughter will have opinions on this long before her twelfth birthday, and she’ll tell me exactly what she thinks of my decisions.

See you at Vineathon IV?

One of my favorite things I've been a part of at MRY - or anywhere else - is the Vineathon series, an event where people come together to create content for no reason other than to learn by doing. You can also meet top and avant garde Viners, and get some creative inspiration.

Vineathon IV is coming. See details below on how to RSVP. And catch more info on MRY's blog.

Note: this is an event open to anyone in the marketing/tech/creative industries, but it wound up on some freeloader lists last time, so we've had to password protect it, but if you're reading this blog, you're absolutely welcome.

PS: MRY is hiring, so if you're looking for something, it's not a bad time to meet some of the team. You can also join us during Internet Week at the Contently launch party 5/21.