Ex Boyfriend Sweater (From @Meggerisim on Instagram)

…Or his sweater anyway.

It’s just a regular sweater. Nothing more, nothing less. But think of all the imagery a simple sign like this “Ex-Boyfriend Sweater” conjures up.

You might remember the songs he liked, the way he smelled, the sound of his voice or maybe you recall the road trip you took together.

Maybe, the ‘Ex-Boyfriend Sweater’ isn’t just a sweater, it’s a vessel for all the ex-boyfriends you’ve ever had.

What sign conjures up emotions that connect with your consumers and differentiate your products?

What’s your Ex-Boyfriend Sweater sign?

Jim Henson Company

What follows is the text from a presentation I gave at Content Marketing World last week during the 42-Minute Shotgun Session. I was honored to share the stage with luminaries like Jim Kukral, Jay Baer, Barbra Gago, and Ahava Leibtag. Unfortunately, no matter how much I’d rehearsed I didn’t finish my presentation in the seven minutes allotted. After tons of requests, I’ve posted the four lessons here for all to enjoy.

My Dream Job

In 1998, I landed my dream job at The Jim Henson Company in New York. I had the pleasure of working on films like Muppets from Space and Elmo in Grouchland. I worked on Sesame Street and a show on the Disney Channel called Bear in the Big Blue House.

Now, as you can imagine, the Jim Henson Company is a magical place. As a product of the first Sesame Street generation I grinned ear to ear for the first few months on the job.

I didn’t have to work at The Jim Henson Company long to realize that content can drive sales. The Jim Henson Company is more a licensing engine than content creator and for me this was a revelation. They inherently understand that amazing content will drive phenomenal sales.

The Dalmatian Effect

Children’s programming has a long history of driving demand for product sales. In fact, it’s often referred to as the Dalmatian Effect, inspired by hundreds of thousands of dalmatian dogs that were brought into homes after the release of Disney’s film 101 Dalmatians in 1961. Wanna test it? Buy a copy of Finding Nemo, show it to a five year old and after it ends ask them if they want a clown fish. As a point of fact, the release of Finding Nemo decimated the global population of Clown Fish… It’s the Nemo Effect.

As I look back on my time at The Jim Henson Company as a marketer, I’d like to share with you some of the lessons I learned working with Kermit The Frog, BoBo The Bear, Pepe The Prawn, Miss Piggy and my all time favorite… Grover.

Lesson #1: Focus Builds Character

Muppets are NOT Puppets. This is a cardinal rule at The Jim Henson workshop. And there’s only one distinguishing trait that makes a Muppet different than a puppet… it’s the eyes. Don Sahlin, the first Muppet artist obsessed over the placement of the eyeballs. The truth is Muppet eyeballs aren’t straight… they’re cross-eyed and placed perfectly in what’s called the magic triangle with the nose and mouth. This unique eyeball design gives the perception that the character is actually looking at you – it’s a phenomenal engineering feat that brings life to every muppet. Jim Henson told every designer that if your muppet has no point of focus – you actually had no character.

Your content, your marketing strategy, like a muppet needs focus. Even if it needs to be a little cross-eyed. Without it your brand has no character.

Lesson #2: See what they see

Now, if a Muppet’s eyes have a keenly honed point of focus, how can you ensure that your hand (in the Muppet) is actually looking where they are supposed to be looking? Remember, you’re shooting a television show and a lot of the content is delivered directly into the camera, so the Muppeteer needs to be able to see the camera, in order to know if he’s looking at it. Jim and his team came up with an ingenious idea. Every puppeteer would have their own video monitor so they could see what the camera sees… Even Muppets like Big Bird have a video monitor strapped to their chest to make sure those eyes hit their mark. Basically, the muppeteer acted as an audience member and a content creator at the same time, so they knew when it wasn’t working immediately.

As marketers we need to spend more time seeing the world from our consumer’s perspective. We need our own monitors strapped to our chest so we’re constantly looking at the world the way our consumers see it, not the way we perceive it.

So remember to take the time to see what they see.

Click here to view the embedded video.

In this video (a behind the scenes of the Muppets on 30 Rock) you can see Joey looking at his monitor to see what they see.

Lesson #3: A Hook Comes First

In 1972, a Sesame Street writer came to Muppeteer, Jerry Nelson with a new character idea. The character was a Vampire, not a real vampire, but a vampire obsessed with counting. Now Frank Oz, the man behind Miss Piggy, Fozzie the Bear, Grover, Sam The Eagle and Cookie Monster developed a fool-proof process to bringing life to a new character and it all started with a vocal hook. The secret was in the laugh. If you could create a laugh for your character that was distinct, you had a hook that you could build around. Think about a few characters – Fozzie’s Wocka, Wocka Wocka, Kermit’s giggle, Elmo’s infectious laugh, Bert’s start and stop style or Ernie’s typewriter return. Jerry Nelson turned to Jim and started counting… 1 ah ah ah, 2 ah ah ah 3 ah ah ah – and Count Von Count was born.

Good content doesn’t happen on a hook magically, it starts with one. Spend less time creating commodity content and develop a content hook that’s unique. A great hook is easy to build around and it’s what people identify with.

Lesson #4 – Finding Value in the Inner Workings of Your Organization

You don’t have to spend more than half an hour on a set with the Muppets to realize that some of the funniest stuff happens below the characters – with the Muppeteers. They react to what happens on camera or adlib adult-oriented jokes when a take goes awry. The funny thing is that a Muppet can get away with things a human could never say or do. Long after I left The Jim Henson Company, Brian Henson debuted an improv comedy show called Puppet Up. Billed as two shows in one, the live comedy act featured two big screens where you could watch the Muppet comedy as if it was a television show. Or you could watch the muppeteers in action as the comedy unfolded. Puppet Up is hilarious, R-rated, adult comedy and it works. By revealing the inner workings of a puppet production, Brian Henson attracted a new audience, won comedy festivals around the world and is on tour today with Puppet Up.

As content creators in a new media world, it’s time we looked for the content buried deep within the inner workings of our organizations… it’s there, and if you look hard enough you may just find that you have two shows in one.

Click here to view the embedded video.

By the way, Puppet Up is now called Stuffed and Unstrung and is on tour today.

Some of the greatest creative minds

I only spent two years at The Jim Henson company, but I learned a lot about brand building, marketing and content creation from some of the greatest creative minds in the world. Don SaLeen taught me to remain focused (even if it meant being cross-eyed) if I wanted to build a brand. Jim Henson taught me to constantly monitor what the customer consumes. Frank Oz taught me to create a hook first and build content around it. And Jim’s son, Brian Henson taught me that if you look hard enough you’ll always find two shows in one.

I’m Drew Davis and this is just some of what I learned about Marketing at the Jim Henson Company.

A Participation Creation Primer

Content Marketing World Underway Today

The new media landscape has forever changed the way company’s create and distribute content. Today, every brand has a valuable digital audience, whether it’s fans on Facebook, followers on Twitter or subscribers on YouTube marketers need to begin working together to distribute content across brands to reach new consumers wherever they are. You need to remember that in today’s digital world, no brand is an island.

An Evolution in Distribution

Decades ago most companies created relatively little content. It wasn’t because creating content was hard or too expensive. In fact, creating content might have been just as easy as it is today. Anyone could write a novel, take amazing photos, even shoot a film on old-fashioned videotape but accessing your audience was impossible. There were only two ways to get your content in the hands of consumers: advertising or traditional media channels. Unless you had a large enough budget to buy time on television or radio, or the cash required to purchase space on a billboard, in a magazine or even to print and distribute posters, generating an audience for your content was reserved for companies with the largest advertising budgets.

If your content was good enough, or your talent high-profile enough (like a celebrity CEO,) you might have been able to get your book published, your photography printed, your film distributed or your television show aired. But this happened rarely, if ever, when it came to brand marketers. Twenty years ago, traditional marketing consisted of a solid public relations strategy, an advertising and media buying budget and the occasional hiring of a spokesperson to raise awareness of your products or services.

Leveling The Playing Field

Content creation capabilities have certainly advanced since the early 1990s, but more important than lowering the barriers to content creation, is the extremely low content distribution barrier. Whether you’re a one person consultant or a multi-billion dollar consulting firm you both can harness the very same distribution channels to grow and maintain an audience for the content you create. This is a complete paradigm shift.

Every Brand Has An Audience

Today, brands create more and more of their own media from podcasts to presentations and videos to blog posts big brands are garnering big audiences. You need to start thinking about every brand as if they are a media company with a valuable audience. Think of every brand’s YouTube page as a television network, every company blog as a digital magazine, every corporate podcast as radio program.

Adidas Vs. The NBA Finals

Adidas Logo

Adidas, the German shoe and sportswear manufacturer, for example, has 11 million consumers on Facebook who’ve subscribed to their content. Adidas publishes a constant stream of videos, imagery and insight designed to reach their most loyal customers using Facebook. They use Facebook just like they used to use mass media. For example, Adidas’ audience is about 3 million viewers larger than the audience that tuned into the most popular 2011 NBA Semi-conference Playoff Game on the ESPN television network. That qualifies Adidas as a media company in my book.

But You’re Not Adidas

I know what you’re thinking. “Yeah, but we’re not Adidas.” You’re right. You may only have one hundred or one thousand fans on Facebook or a hundred blog subscribers, or maybe five hundred e-mail addresses in your distribution list but imagine if you partnered with ten other brands who also target your customers. Let’s assume that those brands only have one hundred, one thousand or even ten thousand subscribers, fans, or followers. What if you developed a coordinated content programming schedule between these brands? Now, you and your partners can reach 1,000, 10,000 or a million consumers a day. That’s a powerful media brand, and you don’t have to bare the burden of creating and distributing all the content alone.

Share YOUR Audience

Every company, consultant, employee and customer has an audience. This, most basic principle, lies beneath the successful execution of a participation creation strategy. Every partner you create content with already has a valuable audience. It’s your goal to build a long term relationship with that audience by associating your branded content with your partner’s audience in the most authentic way possible.

Start thinking about the companies that target the same consumers you do, but don’t think of them as competitors for mind share, think of them as valuable partnership opportunities. This is the beginning of your journey into uncovering the potential of participation creation. Embrace the notion that no brand is an island and every company has an audience.

The Clownfish

Scientists have concluded that Disney’s affect on the Clownfish population was catastrophic. In unprotected waters, Clownfish populations dropped by 25-times. Waters previously teaming with the species were completely void of the funny fish.

But this isn’t the first time Disney’s increased the demand for a pet. In fact, in 1961, when 101 Dalmatians debuted there was a run on the dogs featured in the film. The massive increase in demand for the dogs led to a troubling over-population problem and a huge increase in abandoned Dalmatian dogs.

What if Disney embraced the effect they have on the pet industry and worked with pet-store owners to develop a deeper understanding of the market impact their films and the resulting merchandise has on the market? What if, Disney actually solicited the World Pet Association to raise financing for their creature-friendly flicks by working with the World Pet Association.

If Disney had chosen a more tank-friendly fish as the star of their film and aquarium store owners had ramped up the  inventory (in an environmentally friendly way,) wouldn’t everyone have been more successful?

Great content drives sales, no matter what the content is, or who it’s targeted towards. Maybe you should identify who else your content could affect and join forces with them to increase your audience, build a deeper revenue stream and even save the environment. This is what I call Participation Creation.

I envision a world in which you focus on building long-term, authentic relationships – with your media partners, loyal customers, bloggers, podcasters, videographers, talented content creators, other brands and even your competitors – that make your products relevant more often in a deeper way. The future of your marketing efforts will look more like a first date that blossoms into a marriage, than a one-night stand.

The CMO's Purse

It’s time that marketers took back control of their marketing budgets. For too long we have shoveled money into media buys with the assumption that brand impressions associated with the content our customers consume will help sell more products. In a digital world our display advertising is being ignored far more often than it’s being consumed. With the billions of new webpages published everyday, those numbers aren’t going to go back up, they’re going down. We can’t continue buying what media companies are selling unless we start investing in content that consumers are actually interested in engaging with. That means we need to take a more active role in defining the kind of content we know makes an impact in the purchasing decisions of our audience.

The CMO Doomsday clock

The average Chief Marketing Officer’s (CMO) tenure is twenty-eight months. Chief Information Officers last thirty-eight months. CEOs sit in their lofty offices for an average of ninety-five months (almost eight years.) CFOs crunch numbers for fifty-two months. So, why is it that CMOs don’t last? One simple reason. The rest of the executive team doesn’t think CMOs know what they’re doing. CFOs don’t trust your metrics or forecasts. CEOs don’t understand your tactics or your strategies. Why? The new CMO is not doing anything different than the last CMO.

Marketing isn’t about the number of friends and followers you garner. It’s about identifying and measuring what moves your market and translating that into a language that your CEO, CFO and even CIO can understand. It’s about developing a concrete marketing philosophy that is executed tactically but communicated strategically. It’s about proving that the rest of the executive team can trust you to make a long-term impact. You need to regain your ability to deliver measurable results that increase your tenure, focus your marketing efforts and ultimately drive you to outlast your CEO. Think about getting to the 29th month and beyond.

Stand out in a crowd

As a marketer you must stop blindly following the herd. Don’t buy advertising just because your competitor is buying advertising. Don’t buy Facebook ads just because you went to a social media seminar and they told you that you have to be on Facebook. Stop wasting money on search engine marketing just because everyone else is.

If you’re going to survive in the new consumer reality you’re going to have to ask the right questions of your team, your partners and your agencies so you can focus and simplify your marketing efforts on those that make the biggest impact.

If you’re going to be a standout CMO you’ve got to stop the ‘Me-Too Marketing.’

Postagram - printing instagram photos.

Yesterday, I sent my first real, printed postcard from my iphone. That’s right, a printed, physical, postcard that needs to be stamped and sent in the mail.

Here’s a quick overview of how it works.

Essentially, Postagram takes any photo and turns it into a printed postcard. However, if you use Instagram (a really great iPhone app) to take your pictures, you can seamlessly integrate your Instagram photos into your postcard.

A couple of things make this work, and if you’re a printer, you need to start looking at this model of content generation that leads to print.

First, Instagram turns even the worst photographer into a decent photographer armed with nothing but a really bad iPhone camera. (The key to this is their tilt-shift feature, in my opinion.) So, now that I feel like I’m taking artsy photos, I’d often thought it would be great to share these. I travel a lot and thought it would be nice to send my wife a picture from each city I visit.

Coinanach.org's Postagram already arrived and she took a picture of it with instagram.

Enter Postagram. Essentially, Postagram is focused on a specific and loyal user-base of Instagram addicts like me. This means, that their free iPhone app immediately appealed to me. The workflow is great. Take a picture with Instagram, open Postagram, choose the photo I’d like to feature, write my postcard note, enter the address, pay $.99 and it’s off.

With the huge amount of digital content being created with mobile devices, finding a way to turn them into offline, printed products isn’t hard, it’s elegantly simple. I’ll let you know when I get my postcard.

Remember, the Future of Digital is Print.

If you’d like to see my Instagram photos, check out Instagrid.

P.S. There are lots of other Instagram photo printing ideas. Check out some of these…

The 2011 Escalate Ecometry Summit was held in Fort Lauderdale, here's my plane.

Last week I had the pleasure of speaking at Escalate’s Ecometry Conference in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. The theme for the event focused around “thriving in the new consumer reality,” which provided the attendees with three days of informative, interesting and extremely high-caliber insight into the future of e-commerce.

While I focused much of my presentation on the new realities of the confusing consumer journey, I was asked by a number of attendees to not only post my presentation but elaborate on the ‘return to linear’ trend I discussed.

No Differentiation in eCommerce Today

As I survey the eCommerce landscape looking for the proverbial ‘what’s next,’ I’m struck by how genuinely standardized eCommerce has become. Online catalogs all look the same, and there’s a good reason for that – it works. Providing consumers with an online shopping experience based on a set of best practices ensures they know what to do, where to do it and how to make a purchase on any platform on the web. I get that, but as a brand-marketer it makes me question whether an eCommerce experience is a branded experience any longer.

Looking at Retail & Print Catalogs for Answers

Whenever I find myself questioning a common practice that works, I look for offline analogies that might point the way to a new kind of digital experience. In this case, let’s look at an offline retail experience. LL Bean is famous for their in-store experience. It’s inviting, expansive and it certainly embodies the brand, with their recycled wood walls and green construction. It exudes their brand and it’s completely opposite of their online experience.

If their offline experience defines a high-quality brand experience, then let’s take a look at their catalog. For starters, ever y LL Bean cover is a work of art (and they even display them in their retail stores.) The catalog itself exudes the brand and delivers a thirty-minute (if you’re my wife) deeply branded experience.

The Online Analogy

Ubuntu on Projeqt

Both the catalog and the in-store experience have three things the online experience is lacking.

1. They are linear experiences – I walk in the door of the store, wander around and then leave. The catalog has a front, a back and a bunch of stuff in the middle. (Unlike the click-anywhere, on anything online e-commerce experience.)
2. They’re completely bounded experiences, meaning I know the catalog has a last page and the store has an exit. (The opposite of an infinite online experience.)
3. They’re completely deep brand experiences (unlike the standardized online e-commerce experience.

The Online Catalog Re-Born

So, is there a place for a deeply branded, linear, bounded digital experience in the online marketplace? I think there is. Just look at the Net-A-Porter app on the iPad or new experiments in linear storytelling like Projeqt.

What do you think, can we differentiate the e-commerce experience with a return to linear?