$3000 handbags, marketing and shared ownership...

Hey guys,

I'm sure I'm going to catch some crap for this, but whatever :) I took my girlfriend to the Sex and the City premier in Seattle on Thursday night. I never really watched the show, but I have to admit, it was a good movie :) it got me thinking about a few things actually...

As you might know, I've held a number of roles in the software industry; I'll probably always think of myself as a developer at heart. But, I also did enjoy my stint in technical marketing.

One of the trick questions in a Microsoft product manager interview is to ask the candidate to define 'marketing'. Invariably, the answer revolves around advertising. The definition that we're hoping to hear is really about defining/growing/identifying markets of customers. A friend and mentor of mine told me that in order to be good at marketing, you really have to have a deeply ingrained interest in how companies make money.

Anyways, so all of this leads back to that Sex and the City movie :) as I'm sure you know, placing products in movies has been common since the 1980's. This is a great article on the subject (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/style/movies/features/aolinmail.htm).

When it is done too much, it can be really annoying. But when it is done right, it really isn't that bad. For example, it's hard to complain of the product placement in Rambo IV - if you watch the scene towards the end where they synchronize their watches, you'll see a Panerai and I believe a Breitling featured prominently.

Sex and the City is rampant with product placement of course - one local Seattle company managed to get in there as well. The company is called Bag, borrow or steal and what they do is quite interesting. For a fee, you can rent high-end purses, jewelry and other accessories. Before you scoff :) it maybe something to consider if you have a wife/girlfriend. For the next special occasion, you can purchase a gift card that they can spend with that company. Considering that these bags are in the $1000 - $3000 range, spending $50 bucks or so for an occasion might not be a bad idea.

Renting high-end bags is probably not something that will appeal to everyone of course, but it's good to see a local Seattle startup get featured in a major movie. Good for them :)

Fractional ownership itself is an interesting business. It really spans all different markets. For example, http://www.yachtlease.com/ is a Seattle company that is basically a time share for boats. A lot of similar types of companies can be found in this article (http://www.entrepreneur.com/management/operations/article185396.html).

I wonder if this idea of fractional ownership/renting will catch on more? It's funny, in some sense, this wave of cloud-based services can be thought of as something similar. For example, you could look at Amazon EC2 and think of it as renting computational power and Amazon S3 as renting hard drive space. Why buy these costly, rapidly depreciating items when you can just rent them :) Maybe computers and $3000 Prada bags have something in common after all :)

Anyways, just a random post on a Saturday afternoon. Talk to you later.

Eric.

Sorry, no cashback from me for now...

Hey guys,

As you know, Microsoft Live Search is offering advertisers a new paid search model - CPA (cost per acquisition). Instead of paying Microsoft when a potential customer clicks on your ad, you only pay Microsoft (who in turn pays your customer) if the potential customer makes a purchase.

I was curious to understand how a vendor signs up for this program. All of the details are here http://advertising.microsoft.com/advertising/cashback, but the basic requirements are as follows:

• Headquartered in the United States
• A retail site with e-commerce capabilities
• Able to fulfill the physical shipment of a product
• Able to create and maintain a product data feed
• Able to implement a standard tracking pixel on your website’s order confirmation page

If you meet those criteria, you can get in touch with an account manager from Microsoft who will process your application. I was hoping for more of a self serve model like Google's AdWords, but I suppose that since the models are so drastically different, there has to be some manual process.

I don't meet that criteria because I don't have a physical product, so sorry, no cashback from me for now :)

Thanks!

Eric.

Hey guys,

An email from a colleague of mine reminded me of a really handy presentation tool. It is called ZoomIt and as its name would suggest it lets you zoom in on parts of your screen during a presentation. You can get it from here

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb897434.aspx

You can check out a video of it in action:

Microsoft's LiveSearch cash payback scheme

Hey guys,

I thought this scheme was one big joke - Microsoft bribing customers to use their search. But, I believe it is the merchants that are paying the cash back.

That is a subtle but really important change in how paid search is being done. What I think MS is doing (or is about to do) is not charge on a per click basis. Instead, they are letting the providers determine how much to pay back to the consumer. I would assume that Microsoft will skim a bit of that and rank paid (or I guess potential-paid) search results based on the amount the merchant chooses to pay back.

I wonder if we are starting to see the peak of paying per click?

Anecdotal evidence obviously, but a friend of mine does carpet cleaning in Seattle. I setup his AdWords for him and I was really surprised that I had to bid somewhere around $10/click for the good keywords related to carpet cleaning. Even at that high of a bid, I was only getting onto the 2nd page of search results. $10/click is such a huge risk for just a click.

Flipping this model around really starts to add some value for the providers. It removes a lot of risk from the equation. I'm sure the affiliate marketing folks are really excited about this as well.
Lastly, this conveniently side steps the nearly impossible-to-solve problem of click fraud.

Anyways, I'm going to dig a bit deeper, I'll get back with more information as I find it.

Thanks!

Eric.

Postful API in action

Hey guys,

I posted last week about Postful - the handy service that sends real mail on your behalf. They also have a handy API that enables you to automate their service.

I could imagine products or services that work with receipts or financial data might be interested in integrating Postful. At .99 cents for a domestic letter and $1.49 for a letter to Canada, Postful seems like a great deal.

I put together some videos on how to use their API. I've been doing a lot of Php, Python, etc lately, so I went back to traditional C# and Visual Basic this time.

This first video shows how to do a simple query to see what orders you have with Postful. Each email you send them is processed the next day as real mail, so you have a chance to cancel an order before it is sent out.



This second video shows how to send an email with Postful. I'm using Visual Studio 2008, so this is also an opportunity to show off how the new LINQ for XML features work. We can embed XML directly as a literal in the source code.



And lastly, this third video shows how a very simple example of integrating Postful with Word 2007 using Visual Studio Tools for Office.




Thanks!

Eric.