You've Got Mail Part 2

I’m a broadcast journalist, so I live and die by my teases and the lead line of every story I write, just like my friends in print live and die by their headlines and lead paragraph. Capture the viewer’s/reader’s attention and you get them to watch/read the rest of the story. Fail to engage them and they change the channel or toss the paper in the trash.

E-mail marketing is no different. Craft a great subject line and the recipient will open the e-mail to find out more – and if your opening is just as enticing as the headline, they may read to the end and maybe even take you up on your offer. Write a bad subject line and they’ll never even get to your opening: you’ll quickly become the victim of the delete button, or worse, be automatically consigned to the spam file.

This got me thinking again about those 43 e-mails I received June 17-25. Which ones had headlines that grabbed my attention? Which ones would the experts say were effective? And which ones were clunkers?

I judged them against advice from two sources: an organization called MailChimp, which actually analyzed the open rates of 40 million e-mails it sent on behalf of customers, and web marketer Michael Bloch of tamingthebeast.com. Bloch says there are two different types of e-mail marketing communications: those that require a hard sell (a traditional marketing campaign) and those that require a soft sell (informational e-mails, e-newsletters, etc.). Looking back through my e-mails I could see exactly what he means. For example:

From Pottery Barn (hard sell): Outdoor sale! Save Up to 50%
From the Red Cross (soft sell): Flood relief relies on all of us

Interestingly the folks at MailChimp found that the top 20 e-mail subject lines in terms of open rate (60%-87% opened) were more straightforward and less pushy than the ones with the lowest open rates (1%-14%). They say it’s all in the recipient’s expectations: if you’re a soft-sell organization that builds customer relationships slowly, an out of the blue e-mail screaming "10% Discount! Open Now!" would be jarring. But if subscribers have opted-in to receive special notices and promotions, then they fully expect a hard sell.

Bloch goes on to describe some general rules for subject lines:

*Should be no longer than 51 characters to take into account varying subject line display lengths of different software. I received at least three e-mails during my test time period that violated that rule:

From Allstate: Reminder -- Online Survey from Allstate not fo…
From Home Decorators Collection: Choose From Hundreds of Our Most Popular Pr…
From e-rewards: Get Rewarded for Your Time – A Study About En…

See what he means? I need to know what “Pr” and “En” are in order to know whether I’m interested in opening the e-mails from Home Decorators and e-rewards! Those two e-mails would have been an automatic delete for me.

*Avoid words that trigger spam filters, like free and discount, or punctuation like “!” and “$”. Bloch says that doesn’t mean you can't use them, just don't go overboard. The organizations that market to me must have taken this advice to heart: I encountered only one mention of “free,” one “discount,” and three exclamation points during my test period. However, I can find no explanation in Bloch’s writings for the fact that every e-mail I receive from Prevention Magazine is consigned to the spam file!

*Don't SHOUT (caps lock). It can trigger spam filters and is bad “netiquette.”

*Bloch and MailChimp agree: the use of [COMPANYNAME] as the first word in a subject line seems to help achieve high open rates. If you don't want to take up subject line space, put the company name in the “from” line, along with a human name. That’s what the on-line marketing education organization Marketing Profs did when they sent me this e-mail:

From: Penny at Marketing Profs Subject: Welcome to Marketing Profs!

*Use the person's first name in a subject line if you have that information, followed by a question. I got no personalized subject lines during my test.

*Create a sense of urgency without going overboard, like this one from Borders:

Coupon Inside – Through Sunday

*Describe what the email contains, the reason it should be opened and the reward the reader will receive for doing so. That covers the majority of the e-mails I received, like:

Get Tickets First for Styx with The Outlaws (Ticketmaster)
Chilled Soups & Summer Salads (Weightwatchers.com)
Weekly Specials and More at Giant Eagle (Giant Eagle supermarket)
Best Books of June (Amazon)

*Try to stir up curiosity. Here is where the subject lines in my e-mails from Marketing Profs hit a home run – you would hope so, since they’re in the business of dispensing marketing advice! My favorites included:

It’s Time to Socialize, People! (about how everyone – even people you wouldn’t expect – are using social media)

Just Say No! (about saying no to pushy e-mail campaigns designed to drive short term sales)

Shameless Marketing Stunt (about a viral marketing campaign called “Walk of No Shame” for AMP energy drink)

You Tried Hard. I Like You (about how companies – like Avis - that are perceived as putting in more effort are rewarded with more business)

Block also recommends testing subject lines before doing a mass e-mailing. This idea is two fold: you can test your spam scoring by sending to different e-mail services like Yahoo, Gmail and Hotmail. And you can test different subject lines to see which get the best response. One of my classmates laid out the following scenario: you need to send out an e-mail to 200 people advertising a festival where two distinctly different activities will be going on. Before the mass mailing you send out 25 test e-mails with a subject line describing one activity and 25 promoting the other. Which ever subject line generates the most response is sent to the other 150 recipients.

I couldn’t finish this blog post without sharing the two worst subject lines I received during my test – yes, they’re even worse than the ones that were too long to fit:

Plan A Summer Vacation (Pottery Barn). Last time I checked, Pottery Barn did not offer travel agency services!

New England July Connected Living (Comcast). Might work if I lived in Boston, but I’m from Pittsburgh!

Happy e-mailing!

You've Got Mail

I love direct mail e-mail.

Why? Because I signed up to receive it and it tells me about things that I’m interested in, versus direct snail mail, much of which attempts to sell me stuff I couldn’t care less about, with the very same message it uses to target my elderly neighbors. Because it’s immediate I don’t have to wait for a message that might be urgent – a sale I want to get in on, the weekly availability of concert tickets, air fares or specials at my local grocery store. And because it’s free, I can get regular communications from companies and organizations I care about, communications that would be too expensive for them to send any other way.

I hate direct mail e-mail.

Why? Because I get too much of it too often. Because it’s clogging up my e-mail in-box so that I can barely find my personal e-mail messages. Because I spend the first 5-10 minutes with my e-mail account every night reading a few of these messages and deleting most of them. Because some organizations feel it necessary to send me a message nearly every day – sometimes more than one message in a day.

I conducted a little experiment to see just how helpful – or bothersome – my direct marketing e-mail has become. I saved all of my DM e-mail offers over the nine day period from June 17-25 to see what I could learn about how and why I’m being marketed to. My findings? I received a total of:

*43 e-mail direct marketing offerings in my regular e-mail box
*11 e-mail direct marketing offerings that were labeled as Spam

Doing the math, that’s an average of 6 direct mail e-messages per day!

Of these, the volume winner is an organization called Marketing Profs, a really cool website I just signed up for because it has great tips for marketing professionals. They sent me a whopping 13 e-mail messages over the 9 day period. At first blush it didn’t seem like so many, since they send out e-mails labeled as from Marketing Profs, some labeled as being from “Get to the Point” (an informative newsletter), and others labeled by the “name” of the sender, like the one from “Sharon Hudson at Marketing Profs” These were the hard sells to sign up for the organization’s “pay” services, like the on-line seminars Sharon was pushing.

Coming in second for "official" volume was Pottery Barn which sent me 5 e-mails in 9 days from their regular website and the one for kids. Prevention Magazine (and its parent company Rodale Publications) would have ranked right up there with 6 e-mails, except all of theirs were sent to my Spam box.

OK, so what’s the point of all this? When companies send out too many e-mail messages – even when the consumer has signed up to receive them – they risk drifting into the realm of spammer. Mark Kline of AWeber Communications observes in a post to the company's website that many web-based e-mail services (Yahoo, Google, etc.) allow their subscribers to report messages they don’t want in their in-boxes, and there are ways of monitoring the number of complaints about an organization or a particular e-mail campaign. I won’t get into all of the details about that – you can read more at his post. I was more interested in Kline’s advice for keeping your complaint rate low:

*Don't Take Permission For Granted
When adding subscribers to your campaign, take a moment to think about what kind of permission was given to receive email messages from you. Has each and every person specifically requested to receive email messages from you? Was it clear to them that they were doing this when you got their permission? If not, simply don't add them to your list.

*Use Confirmed Opt-In
Sometimes it takes only one incorrect email address on a list to cause issues. If someone repeatedly receives messages from you they did not request, they very well could mark each message they see as SPAM.

*Send Only Valuable, Relevant Information

It was this last piece of advice that really got my attention. Clicking through on Kline’s thread I found an informative piece from his colleague Justin Premick that took the idea a step further. Premick says obtaining permission isn’t enough, and unwanted e-mail isn't just mail that's labeled as Spam. He states very bluntly: if you’re not relevant you’re irrelevant. He writes:

Relevancy has to do with whether what someone wants and expects to receive from you is actually what they do get from you. Start off by setting subscriber expectations. You have a number of opportunities to do this, but none more important than when someone first signs up. Here, you must answer two key questions:
*What are you going to email me?
*How often are you going to email me?
Once you do that, reinforce those expectations (and stay relevant) by meeting them — by emailing them as often as you told them you would, and by consistently providing value in your messages.

I went back to my informal survey to measure the stuff in my e-mail in-box against Kline’s and Premick’s list of do’s and don’ts.

In my case, I signed up to receive messages from everyone who has sent me one in the past week and a half. But I’m not surprised that Prevention/Rodale were labeled as spam in my network. If you’ve ever purchased a book or a video from them, you know that they have one of those insidious “opt out” check boxes on their order forms where you must remove the check to avoid getting their marketing materials (if you don't believe me check out their subscription form). That goes against Premick’s “confirmed opt-in” advice. While the opt-out might seem like a great sales strategy in the short run, if your company gets a reputation as a spammer you've blown your brand reputation, and pretty soon you can send out as many e-mails as you want and no one will receive them. Where’s the return on that?

My volume-of-email winner, Marketing Profs, sent me information on an almost daily basis. I don’t remember exactly how often they said they would e-mail me or what they would be e-mailing me, but by gosh, it was relevant, informative and interesting. So I'm actually thinking about signing up for their service (I'm on my free trial) – and I might even read most of their e-mails too!

By the way, they also win my award for best e-mail subject line, which you’ll read more about (with some great advice from experts on writing subject lines) in my next post.

Now Playing: Short Films as Marketing

I remember reading awhile back about the incredible success that BMW had with a series of eight short films called The Hire. These shorts (this one's called The Ambush) were created in 2001 as marketing tools, but they looked anything but, and no wonder. Among the directors chosen to work on the projects were Ang Lee and Guy Ritchie. The shorts starred star Clive Owen and featured well-known celebrities including Madonna (her's was called Star) and James Brown, and award winning actors like Don Cheadle, Forest Whittaker, and F. Murray Abraham.

Before reading about The Hire, I hadn't thought much about the short film genre as a marketing vehicle, but it seems lots of people are doing it these days.

One of the most stunning examples I was able to find is one created by Mercedes Benz in 2007 to promote the launch of its luxury SLR McLaren Roadster, which can be yours for about $500,000! For a car like that, this short, entitled Die Erlkoenigin (The Illusive) had better be good! And it is.

George Zabrinski (Robert Seeliger) is a crack photographer attempting to get pictures of the new Roadster as the car goes through secret pre-launch road tests in the north of France. Along the way he meets up with a mysterious and sexy hotel mate Laura Ziegler (Franziska Schlattner - who turns out to be the Mercedes security chief on the road test), an inexplicably bitter waiter and a dowdy older couple on holiday, all of whom eventually figure into the plot. After several dramatic - and sometimes amusing (one involves a goat) - twists and turns, the film comes to an ending that caught me by surprise. It runs on what Mercedes calls an innovative new platform called FLOADED, with an interactive feature that enables users to stop the film at certain points and go to brand profile sites via a "brand layer."

The cinematography, editing and acting in this short is better than you'd find in most feature films. You'll rarely see a stick shift or a bumper lit and photographed this artfully! Seeliger and Schlattner develop full blown characters with a subtle sexual tension -- all in the space of 10 minutes. The film even has its own soundtrack by the up and coming band "The Kilians."

OK, cool movie. But is it really effective marketing? I guess that all depends on how you define marketing. If it's selling me the car, then the film failed. There's no way I can afford a $500,000 car -- or any Mercedes for that matter. But if marketing means building a brand, then I think the film is a success. It's, fast, it's sexy, it's good looking and well made -- all qualities Mercedes wants us to think about when we think about their cars. The campaign also invites viewers to spread the movie virally -- there's an "e-mail to a friend" icon right on the opening page. I enjoyed this movie enough that I definitely will share it.

And isn't creating "buzz" what it's all about? My colleague Elicia cited another great example that took a different tack to create buzz with a short film. In 2003, Volvo created a mockumentary about the small Swedish town of Dalaro, where 32 people all bought a Volvo S40 on the same day. The film "interviews" these people about their "motivations," and even talks to "scholars" about the psychological and sociological implications of the phenomenon. What's more, Volvo later created another mockumentary "exposing" the first as a fake! Elicia says over a million people visited Volvo's website and half watched the original film.

I do wonder, though, whether the short film is already old news as a marketing device. Over a million people watched The Hire series of films, and they've become a textbook example of innovative and creative thinking. Fast forward six years to The Illusive, and while I could find some talk about the movie in the trades and on blogs, it's nowhere near the level of buzz that The Hire recieved.

P.S. another great marketing short you should check out is The Call, a short film by Pirelli tires, starring John Malkovich. Think "The Exorcist" meets a posessed car! Thanks Dan for the heads up on that one!

School's Out For Summer...

With all due respect to Alice Cooper, summer isn't just about "no more pencils, no more books" any more. For a lot of families summer is a time when kids spend more hours than ever with interactive media like the internet. Looking at it from a parent’s perspective, at the beginning of summer vacation, the days stretch out in what seems like a never ending string of hours to fill and entertain. It's easy for frazzled moms and dads to let kids veg out in front of the TV -- or to let them get on line and surf the day away. (Photo Left: my son and his *fabulous* 2nd grade teacher on the last day of school).

I won't discuss the physical perils of letting kids explore the internet unsupervised; there's already been plenty said about the fact that child molesters are out there trolling for our kids on line (our state’s Attorney General Tom Corbett recently said that, sadly, perverts look forward to summer vacation as much as our kids do!). I'm interested in the much more insidious psychological threat: the marketing messages that our kids may be exposed to when they’re on the internet.

It’s really scary when you consider how marketers have thought of ways to manipulate the littlest consumers – oh, and they are consumers! Many parents don’t know it, but marketers are using psychologists to research our children to find out everything about what motivates them as consumers, from why 3 to 7 year olds love toys that transform themselves, and 8 to 12 year olds can become obsessive about collecting things. Some in the world of psychology were so upset by this so-called “abuse of psychological knowledge” that they asked the American Psychological Association to denounce the use of psychological principals in marketing to children (read more).

This knowledge has helped explain a lot about my own son’s behavior. We were among the families that got into the WebKinz craze last year. If you’re a parent or grandparent, chances are you know about these cute little bean-filled stuffed animals with the web component that allows children to go on-line and care for their pets in a virtual WebKinz World. We stopped at four WebKinz, but left to his own devices my son would have wanted many more. The WebKinz World website doesn’t help. It plays upon an 8-year old’s innate desire to collect. Here, the banner “collect them all” is a call to action to hoard as many WebKinz as you can (there are more than 80 animals in active circulation) – a call that has now branched out into collectable WebKinz cards (think Pokemon).

So, while there are lots of valuable things to learn on the WebKinz website (children learn how to responsibly earn and spend virtual KinzCash to aid in the care of their animals), there are also blatantly commercial elements that, the Canada-based Media Awareness Network says, my son and other children are too young to discern. Even the most ostensibly educational websites have commercial messages – National Geographic’s kids’ site has ads for the new Indiana Jones movie (rated PG-13, by the way) and contest connected to the film. If our kids are being pitched to among lessons about environmental responsibility and endangered species, what do you supposed they’re “learning” on the thinly veiled educational websites for Lucky Charms and McDonalds?

In my mind this really comes down to parental control and using every situation as a learning opportunity. My husband and I are the ones who control the computer in our house, not our son. Could I shut down the computer and never allow my son to visit the website for a favorite brand or product. Sure. Would I be better to let him experience these things and then educate him about what it means to be a responsible consumer? Absolutely. The Media Awareness Network has some great resources to help. If you’re a parent they’re definitely worth a little bit of your time.

Making It "Official": Why Don't More Companies Have Official Blogs?

Why don't more companies have official blogs? It seems like a great way to interact with consumers. You get to put out messages and initiatives you want them to know about, and they get to give you feedback, good and bad. People are probably blogging about you any way at an unofficial blog. Why not get into the game?

Rich Julius a partner at the marketing strategy company Crimson Consulting Group brings up one reason why: your company's lawyers won't let you have an official blog. It's certainly a consideration. I can think of a lot of situations where blogging with customers could get a company into legal trouble. What if the blogger lets slip something that's proprietary? Or makes promises on the blog that the company later fails to keep? Here at the TV station our lawyers always counsel us to be cautious what we say in e-mail or on the phone when we're talking to angry viewers -- certainly this would be true of interactions with viewers on a blog as well. Sure, legal could review every post, but Julius says if you're going to sanitize the blog, then why bother. It's not really a blog.

On his company's blog (yeah, this company's definitely got one--check out their blog roll for some really useful links), Julius' colleague Karen O'Brien talks about another reason possible reason why companies don't have blogs: they don't have the kinds of experts on their staffs to make it happen. On her post O'Brien lists a dizzying array of 13 different areas of expertise for which a company might need a "strategist" to support their social media activities. She links to another informative blog by Jeremiah Owyang, a Senior Manager at Forrester Research, in which he asserts that to do social media right, companies will need an actual social media manager who focuses full time on the subject. Yikes!

Which leads me to another reason why companies probably don't blog: it's really time and labor intensive! Blogger Yaro Staraks says that a good blog should have at least one new post a day to keep it fresh and keep people coming back, so someone needs to be constantly researching and writing blog posts -- or recruiting others to write. Then someone needs to monitor the blog on a daily (if not more often) basis to see what's being said in the responses -- and respond to those if necessary. I can see how the task could balloon into a full time job.

I talked with our web manager Jennifer Pollard about whether the TV station has ever considered an "official" blog. We do already have 10 personal blogs written by our staff on everything from The Young and the Restless to the city's three sports teams. Jen said no, we've never talked about an official blog, and we started brainstorming about what it might contain. In a minute or two we came up with a whole list of potential ideas. For example, we get lots of complaints from viewers about why we tease so much. So I could blog about how television ratings work and why they necessitate the need for promotion and teases. Our awesome Creative Services producer Greg Loscar could blog about the effort that went into directing, shooting and editing the station's latest "Your Home" image promotion spot. Some of the station's individual blogs could be incorporated into the main blog, kind of like Dell computer's blog posts to their main page, and then to the various blog categories represented on the page.

Then Jen and I got curious. Do other television station's have "official" blogs like the one we were talking about? My first stop was the website for WRAL, the ABC affiliate in Raleigh, North Carolina. Jen says their website is one that's often mentioned as one of the best TV sites because they've been at it for so long and tend to be more creative and cutting edge than most. WRAL has no fewer than 27 staff blogs, but no "official" blog. None of the stations in New York, the biggest media market in the country, has an official blog either. In fact I checked out a number of large markets and no one has an "official" blog.

If any of you have found an official blog for a TV station, I'd love to hear about it.

When Will the FCC Get Sirius About Satellite Radio?

As a graduate student in marketing, a fan of satellite radio, and a broadcast professional who started her career in local radio, I've been recently watching what's going on with the FCC's foot dragging over whether or not to approve the merger between Sirius and XM radio. I've found the blog Siriusbuzz is a good place to keep up with the latest developments, which today include FCC Chairman Kevin Martin telling CNBC that a decision is coming "soon." Blogger Tyler Savery makes a great analogy between that lame answer and what your parents told you as a kid when you asked "are we there yet" on a long road trip -- without satellite radio, of course!

There was recently an interesting op-ed piece about the merger issue in the Tennessean, written by Whit Adamson, the president of the Tennessee Association of Broadcasters. It got good back and forth discussion about the pros and cons of the satellite radio merger that helped me crystallize my own opinions. While I'm all for competition because it results in more choices (and usually lower prices) for the consumer, it appears that neither Sirius or XM will survive without a merger, leaving consumers with fewer choices, not more.

Adamson claims he's worried that the merger will give satellite radio an unfair monopoly. I suspect he's really more interested in eliminating competition for the over the air radio stations owned by his members. The radio section of the 2008 State of the News Media report by the Project for Excellence in Media says there's really no reason for him -- or other radio broadcasters for that matter -- to be afraid of satellite radio wiping out their audience any time soon. Some highlights (in case you don't want to read it for yourself):

*While Sirius ended 2007 with 8.3 million subscribers (up 38% from 2006), and XM grew to more than 9 million subs (up 18%), audience growth may be leveling off. Arbitron says awareness of both services was flat compared to 2006.
*93% of car radio users still favor AM/FM stations, compared to MP3 players (19%) and satellite radio (4%).
*233 million people over the age of 12 tuned into the AM/FM dial at least once during an average week in 2007. That's a 1.6% drop since 2000, a relatively small decline compared with other media that also face competition from new technologies, especially newspapers.
*7 out of 10 satellite radio subscribers anticipate maintaining their current levels of traditional radio listening.

Why? Because as great as satellite radio can be for listening to music, talk, and sports, it will not soon replace local radio. Local radio has local news, local traffic and local weather -- and, like it or not, advertisements for local businesses we like to patronize. And it's free!

Plus let's face it: even if the FCC doesn't approve the merger and satellite radio goes away, local radio will still face competition from iPods, MP3s, cellphones, and listening mediums we haven't even thought of yet. So instead of lobbying against the satellite radio merger, maybe Mr. Adamson would be better off spending his time thinking of ways to help make his members' products more relevant to the digital generation.

If you're one of my friends in the news media and you haven't read the 2008 State of the News Media Report, here you (or "yinz" if you live in Pittsburgh!) go. Read it and rejoice -- or weep -- depending on which medium you're in. Better yet, let it get you thinking and talking about what we need to be doing to make sure our media continues to exist in the digital age.

Iced Coffee, Blogs and a Scarf

Has anyone read about the big dust up with Rachel Ray and a recent ad for Dunkin' Donuts? Seems said celebrity chef was wearing a scarf in the ad that shows her enjoying a DD iced coffee against the backdrop of some pink flowering trees. So, what's the problem? Believe it or not, the problem is the scarf! Conservative commentator Michelle Malkin claimed on TV that it looked suspiciously like a kaffiyeh, a traditional Arab scarf. Once the story hit the media, including multiple political blogs, Dunkin Donuts decided to pull the ad.

The marketing implications of this go beyond the initial story. While the blogs I've read have generally panned the Malkin's criticism of the scarf -- "Is this idiocy or what?" writes Jacob Hornberger in his Media with Conscience blog -- they're reserving even more ire for Dunkin Donuts. "Dunkin Donuts should never have caved" says blogger Charles Cronn. "Even more disquieting (than the controversy) is the fact that Dunkin' Donuts quickly yanked the ad," writes the LA Times' Monica Corcoran (156 responses so far) -- BTW, love the title of her blog post: Rachel Ray is a fashion terrorist. And MarketWatch blogger Jon Friedman (82 responses so far) says it "underscores the potential perils of employing celebrity endorsers. Dunkin' Donuts was eager to capitalize on the legitimacy of Ray, a celebrity chef, in its ads. But in a way, her fame worked against the interests of the food company. Celebrities can make consumers pay closer attention to products because ordinary people want to identify with them. But when the celebrities run into criticism, the company that hired them can pay a price by getting unwanted publicity."

It seems like Dunkin Donuts can't win the PR war here, even though their only offense is a poor wardrobe choice. Don't pull the ad, have Michelle Malkin and her supporters continue to rail. Pull the ad and have people criticize you for "caving to the right's fear of clothing accessories." So far I haven't found any response from the company beyond their initial statement that they didn't want a "misperception" to detract from their promotion of the product.

Here's what people in our business are saying. What does anyone else think?

You Still Gotta Tell A Story

I had the pleasure of meeting Bruce Nelson, the Vice Chairman of the Omnicom Group and all around marketing icon at the IMC weekend at West Virginia University last Friday. He was the keynote speaker at the Friday night reception and dinner. Since I'm an a new/emerging media class this semester, I was anxious to hear what Nelson has to say about new media. He didn't disappoint.

You might expect a guy who has come up with some of the most brilliant marketing ideas of all time to have it all figured out, but he's the first to admit he doesn't. "I'm a tremendous believer in ditigal," Nelson told the group. But "we are just beginning to figure out how to talk to people in a digital environment."

Nelson observed that everytime there's been a sea change in communication it took a generation for people to really get it. "TV -- it took us 10 years to realize that (advertisements) shouldn't be radio on TV. This is the best time to be in our business because we know the least. How do we connect the (IMC) disciplines? How do they work together? How much should we spend? What's the mix? That's your generation's job to figure out," Nelson charged. Hmmm I thought. Does that sound exciting -- or scary?

Nelson's address did have one comfort -- and caveat. It's his opinion that some things about what we do won't change. The biggest thing is story telling. While the way we tell the client's story and how we deliver it will change "without a story we are lost," says Nelson. So if we're good at figuring out what the story should be, and good at telling it, then we will still be successful no matter what the landscape.

Anne

P.S. Given his background and success you might think that Nelson would only want to talk about himself and his achievements. In reality he is full of surprises (he wears light blue socks with his dark business suit), self-deprecating in a very funny way (he makes lots of original jokes about his baldness), and he is a GREAT listener. Before dinner, he made the rounds of the room, stopping to talk to each student, asking what we were learning. Friend and former classmate Dave Michaels chatted with him about a project we collaborated on in Creative Strategies last summer, and he focused on what we had to say with great interest. He didn't say it in his speech, but I have to think that's another reason why he's been so successful: he listens. That's another good lesson learned. You can be an expert at all the technology involved in new media, but you still have to be able to listen.