Adless in São Paulo

Well, somebody in Brazil gets it.

In 2006 Gilberto Kassab, mayor of São Paulo, Brazil passed the Clean City Law which banned “every billboard, poster, and bus ad in São Paulo.”

Anna Freitag, the marketing manager for Hewlett-Packard Brazil, said her company had never considered how inefficient billboards and the like were until they were illegal. “A billboard is media on the road,” she told the FT. “In rational purchases it means less effectiveness… as people are involved in so many things that it makes it difficult to execute the call to action.”

It’s like everyone is competing to see who can scream the loudest, or find the most clever way to say Click Here. I went to a business meeting a few years ago in Aspen and, in addition to the natural beauty of the place, one of the first things I noticed: no billboards, and very little outdoor advertising at all.

Estimates say some Americans now look at upwards of 4,000 ads per day. When is enough enough?

This is the main reason we don’t watch much TV at our house, and when we do everyone in the house knows to hit the mute button when a commercial comes on because most of it is vacuous or obnoxious. I don’t know how anyone tolerates it.

I wonder if any major US cities might ever try Mayor Kassab’s model. Wouldn’t it be nice if all the visual pollution just disappeared one day.

This Is Why Your Website Is Slow

Technology Review posted an article about tracking and advertising scripts on the web and Ghostery’s report of the worst offenders. I wrote about Ghostery recently and have been using it in my browsers for several months now.

Website tracking scripts are bits of software code embedded into a web page that run when you visit the site. These scripts communicate with third-party sites to gather information about your visits and track your activity so they can serve ads to you and collect information to sell to advertisers. (Even the referenced article had 12 such scripts that were blocked by Ghostery, see screen shot below.)

But in addition to being invasive these scripts also make websites take longer to load. Some sites have dozens of these things running, causing the website you’re visiting to hang up until all of the scripts have communicated with their respective advertising networks. This makes the web seem slower and worsens the user’s experience.

These tracking tools and the advertisers who run them are a blight on the internet. Ghostery will let you selectively block the common offenders and improve your web browsing experience. Check it out.

Innovation: Kenneth Cole Shoes

This is genius.

Dan Lewis posted a story about how Kenneth Cole got his shoe company going in spite of some financial and logistical challenges. Summary:

• Cole wanted to rent some exhibit space to show his shoes at a big event in New York City
• The space was too expensive for the budget of his small company
• He asked the city for a permit to park a big truck nearby and display his shoes from the truck
• The city said no — permits like that are only for utility companies and film production
• So he decided to shoot a film: The Birth of a Shoe Company
• He got a film permit from the city
• He hired cameramen and actors (models) to display his shoes from the truck
• They sold 40,000 pairs in two and a half days

Website Launch Checklist

Last month I published a post—Website Planning Guide—about steps to consider when planning your website (objectives, content, design, maintenance, etc).

Breccan McLeod-Lundy had a good post Sunday with a Website Launch Checklist that’s focused a bit more on the technical aspects like server setup (DNS, backup, monitoring, deployment) and developer tasks (analytics, sitemap, testing, performance).

Good preparation takes a lot of the uncertainty out of the process and helps ensure a successful launch.

Ghostery: block web tracking

Ghostery is a free browser plugin that lets you block various scripts embedded in web sites. Many of these scripts attempt to track our browsing habits and report this info back to advertising networks and others that are interested in our personal activity on the web.

There are versions available at the Ghostery download page for Internet Explorer, Safari, Firefox, Chrome and Opera browsers. Their FAQ page provides some background on their efforts to “create the web’s most capable and comprehensive user privacy tool.” I have installed it in my browsers and I’m amazed at how much tracking activity is going on at most web sites.

Below is a screen shot from my visit today to the Gigaom tech news site showing the Ghostery popup list of network scripts that attempted to run but were blocked. You can configure the tool and selectively exclude things that you want to allow to run—I don’t block Google Analytics, for example, because I use it myself to get traffic info for my site, but this is not for advertising purposes, it’s only to see how many visits I receive and where they originate from (no personal identifying data of any kind).

Dropbox updates Terms of Service

Dropbox announced on their blog today an update to their Terms of Service (TOS) in response to some unhappy customer feedback. Previously the TOS wording gave the impression that Dropbox was claiming ownership rights over customer data. This didn’t go over well, so they have revised the language to be more clear about their intentions.

I’m glad because I really like Dropbox. There are other cloud storage and sync services out there but Dropbox has really executed well with ease of use and reliable sync across multiple devices.

We’ve never been interested in rights broader than what we need to run Dropbox. We want to get this language right so that you’re comfortable using Dropbox with no reservations: what’s yours is yours.

If you’re interested in getting a Dropbox account use this link to join and we’ll both get extra storage as a referral bonus. You can sign up for a free 2 GB account and then upgrade to a paid account, or just stay at the free level.

Google+

Google’s ‘social’ platform/Facebook competitor: plus.google.com

Pronounced Google Plus but not to be confused I suppose with their +1 button recommendations system they recently introduced.

Google has a detailed blog post describing the service. Interactive (Flash) Tour of Google+ is here.

Website Planning Guide

A helpful post over on Smashing Magazine about planning a web site. There are some good principles to think through, including:

• Needs & objectives assessment
• Alignment with marketing
• Roles & responsibilities
• Content
• Site design & structure
• CMS (Content Management Systems)
• Ongoing maintenance & updates

I’ve had people ask me “how much will it cost to build a web site?” That’s like asking a home builder “how much for a house?” — there are so many variables involved, and it all depends on what it is you want to accomplish with your site. It could be anything from a simple one page ‘brochure’ site to a complex database-driven e-commerce machine.

Some content options to think about when considering what your site might need:

• Articles
• Blog posts
• Advertising
• Discussion forum
• Images
• Documents (usually PDFs)
• Audio
• Video (embedded from YouTube or Vimeo, or self-hosted)
• Flash animation (I don’t recommend it)
• Content feeds/integrations from other sites
• Photo gallery
• Twitter stream
• Facebook ‘friends’ list
• RSS feeds
• E-commerce
• Forms for contact, quotes or something else
• Physical products (how many?)
• Digital content (what kind and how many?)
• Email newsletter
• Event calendar
• Event registration
• Search
• Social media sharing links (Twitter, Facebook, etc)
• Personnel directory

Planning and building a web site is much easier when you’re clear about what it is you want from the site.

Remote-Controlled Marketing

I recently received a box from BMC Software, an enterprise software provider focused mostly on Business Service Management, whatever that is.

The box was a marketing effort, presumably targeted at professionals who would likely be interested in BMC’s offerings, or at least willing to have them in for a dog-n-pony and introductions to other ‘players’ within the organization.

In the box was a 1/10 scale remote-controlled Ferrari Enzo. A cool little toy, I guess, if you’re into that. Even had a sticker with my name on each door. I assume they’ve done their homework and determined that their market is at least partially populated by people who like remote-controlled cars.

So what’s the clever marketing trick employed by BMC?

They didn’t include the remote control with the car—the thing that makes it go. If you want the remote you have to call BMC and agree to a meeting.

So the marketing here is interesting. I don’t know what these cars sell for, but it’s not trivial like a postcard or some other routine mailing that these companies do. They actually spent some money here, which makes me think they needed to be pretty targeted in their approach, right? Know your market, spend those dollars wisely. But this marketing campaign assumes a few things about the recipient:

• He/she is likely to be in the market for BMC products and services
• He/she is in a position within the organization to influence high-dollar software projects
• He/she might be encouraged to contact BMC and maybe even buy something simply because BMC so generously provided him/her with a non-functioning plastic toy car

I’d be interested to see the ROI on this campaign. Is someone really going to be influenced to do business with a vendor because they got this thing in the mail? It doesn’t even work. Maybe this pays off for BMC, I don’t know. Strange bit of marketing though, in my opinion. I gave the car away.