Is that your mom's face on my coffee table?

Pardon my absence, between moving logistics and holidays, I've kept you all waiting far too long. But, alas, beloved blog followers, it is time to get (back) on strategy.

DDB Paris created an app that allows Facebook users to make a hard copy, bound book containing their facebook posts from days, weeks, months past. Take a look:

When Facebook becomes a book from Siavosh Zabeti on Vimeo.

Good idea? Bad idea? Something in between?

I view this as a muddling of two rather distinct, not necessarily related, insights. First, the digital era and the fleeting dynamic it naturally gives rise to. Second, the age old theory that, from time to time, friends and family share meaningful sentiment in the form of kind words, pictures, memories, etc. we want to hold onto.

But, where does Facebook fit in? Is Facebook truly a forum for meaningful sentiment? Or simply a place for casual banter, hellos, birthday wishes, nice to see ya's and other things best left in cyber dust? I vote that later.

Put another way, would you want your Facebook posts from the past month bound in a book sitting atop your own coffee table?

I'm calling this one OFF STRATEGY.

Keep it classy, Apple.

Full disclosure - I hadn't a clue the Beatles weren't previously available on iTunes.

But now I know they are, in all their glory.

A handful of new :30's out from Apple announce to the world that the Beatles have finally come to iTunes. Ready for downloading, uploading, and making the Global iPod listening public a far more gratified bunch. Here's one of five:



One might question whether Apple truly needs five 30-second TV commercials just to tell people there's new music on iTunes. After all, new songs - too many to count- arrive on iTunes daily. And frankly, anyone who really wanted Beatles tracks on their iPod has probably already uploaded via CD or something.

If you count yourself among those wondering "why", just google Steve Jobs. Take a long soak on what's made Apple the cool marketing engine that it is today, then see if you still have questions.

This has very little to do with information delivery and far more to do with branding. Ah, branding, that thing Apple does so damn well. Product launch after product launch, Apple is the consummate brander.

A good friend of mine loves the term "borrowed equity." I'll use that here, partly to see if he's reading, and partly because it's a very appropriate characterization of what's going on here.

Apple and the Beatles are two hugely powerful brands. Together at last. In all their black and white nostalgic splendor, The Beatles have managed to make Apple that much cooler than they were yesterday.

A bit more cool and sure to attract a new wave of young listeners...that's what five :30's will getcha when you're Apple. Here comes the sun.

ON STRATEGY.

Eye on the competitive advantage.

Great new spot from Best Buy with all the appropriate holiday flare any good retailer will have this season.

Santa. Elves. Gadgets. Sounds like a match made in technology heaven.



But none of that is what's worth talking about here. So let's skip to the good part.

The elves' dialogue has some to do with all the fun stuff available for sale at Best Buy. The computers, iPads, smart phones, tvs, etc. are all front and center in the frame, but the more important thing is the emphasis on after-market service which has become Best Buy's competitive advantage.

Because everyone knows you don't just buy a piece of technology, press the On button and start having fun. It's never quite that easy. Inevitably there will be programming questions, set-ups, start-ups, interface and connectivity issues. Inaudibles, buzzers, wires, missing buttons, invisible buttons, and the occasional plug that can't be found simply because over over-egg-nogging.

Best Buy makes sure we know their support staff is always standing by to help with all these annoying problems, big and small, and yes even on Christmas day.

While its name might imply a straight price advantage, Best Buy figured out some time ago how insustainable competiting on price actually is. There's always another retailer carrying the same items, willing to cut their price for a month, day, hour or minute - the real value is in the magic equation of price + experience + service ++

I've got two words for Best Buy...ON STRATEGY.

Now that's a happy meal.

This one is so near to my heart it hurts.

Almost.

In the earliest days of Foursquare - before it tipped, when it was strictly for hipsters and the only "brands" leveraging it as part of a marketing strategy were haute cuisine and artsy boutiques... (oh and then Starbucks). Way back then I had an idea that big chain restaurant companies should steal the platform and leverage the check-in concept to build a simple rewards program that wouldn't require any of the complicated back end POS programming because it would instead run off an existing platform.

As you may have guessed, the client was not ready to dabble in any of that crazy Foursquare nonsense, much less develop their own app. Foursquare was too new. Rewards programs were too complicated. And, what about that fraud risk? Triple yikes.

Kudos to Carl's Jr & Hardees for taking the plunge and building their own app, complete with a "wheel of awesomeness", big prizes and the most compelling reward to fast feeders..........free food!

The punch cards of yesteryear may be old and dated, but appeal of collect-to-get free food is still very much alive.

Here's a look at the app, which has some built-in viral features via Twitter, Facebook and other social networks that will help it gain free exposure too:



You guessed it....ON STRATEGY

Song can be sticky.

Another day, another diet soda.

Make that another diet soda attempting to juggle consumer demand for zero calories whilst escaping the growing stigma of artificial sweeteners.

The latest growth strategy for soda brands involves targeting men, hoping to get them hooked on diet pop the way women have become over the past few decades. This, of course, brings complexity with product naming as men aren't quite so naturally inclined to buy something with the word 'DIET' plastered all over it.

What's a carbonated pop marketer to do? Give it another name. Like "Max".

That could work. Except, much as we detest its connotation, the word "diet" translates quickly to "calorie free" and anything else requires explanation.

Here's a funny, simple new spot from Pepsi to support 0 calorie Pepsi Max that leverages the long running Coke vs. Pepsi guy routine in a fresh and memorable way. What I like about this isn't so much the banter between Coke guy and Pepsi guy, cute as it is, but the lyrics that roll off Snoop's tounge at the end.



Leave it to Snoop to make a few words leave a lasting impression. "I'm up to my knees in zero calories."

Nice work. Snoop helps get this one ON STRATEGY.

Listen. You might learn something.

We won't be looking at any ads today.

Instead, I'd like to share an editorial piece I came across in Ad Age. As with any, this is simply one person's opinion - one with which I happen to whole heartedly agree.

The subject is focus groups.
The position is for.
The rationale is simple.

The pestering trend to force all things digital has virtually rendered old fashioned focus groups a useless waste of money, capable of producing limited insight.

Given a linear sort of audit, the case in favor of digital crowdsourcing, blog scouring, community monitoring and other types of online peeping seems an obvious vote in its favor. What can 24 people in each of 2 or 3 cities possibly reveal that a digitally connected world of thousands can't produce in spades?

The answer to that question has everything to do with what happens when the wheels come off. When the conversation around (a traditional focus group) table takes a left turn. When people start talking and great moderators go with the flow. Therein lies the opportunity to capture tiny nuggets of might-be brilliance.

There's something finite and unforgiving about words typed on a computer screen and saved in cache. That's a very static sort of communication, thus a static sort of insight. Like this post I'm writing right now. Sure, I believe everything I'm typing, but given a forum and room of colleagues willing and able to discuss with me, my mind may wander elsewhere. I might think of other examples, other things that occur in focus groups - I might have more to share, thus more value to add my loyal Get On Strategy reader base.

Below is the text from the Ad Age bit in reference. Follow this advice and you'll be getting ON STRATEGY faster than you can say focus group.

Why You Shouldn't Forsake the Focus Group
In-Person Conversations Can Be Disruptive and Produce Breakthrough Understanding
by Pete Blackshaw

The other day, I spent several captivating hours with about 40 high-school students talking about the role of digital and social technology in their lives.

The experience bordered on transformative. Yes, this from the guy who thinks he knows everything because he's "wired to the conversation."

This exercise in "feet on the street" crowdsourcing was part of my due diligence as new board member of the Cincinnati Youth Collaborative, a youth-mentoring organization.

The conversation from the diverse group of students flew in directions that I didn't expect or plan. Insights flowed like the great Niagara. It was deep, meaningful, and at times outright hilarious. Yes, teens text like crazy (the group I talked to average 50 a day), but the core motivations are more complex.

All of which left me with one screaming thought: I miss focus groups. In an age of almost unstoppable "conversation," this was a real conversation. Deep, authentic, unscripted, meaningful, unpredictable and even -- dare I say -- a bit disruptive. It felt good. It felt right.

Focus groups have become the whipping boy of the digital age. We trash-talk them all the time. They are highly inefficient, overly structured, excessively scripted and easily manipulated. And they're no competition for the seemingly unlimited focus group online.

I owe much to focus groups for igniting my passion for consumer understanding and marketing. Within a week of arriving at P&G for my summer internship in 1994, I was shipped off to Miami and then Los Angeles for a series of intense focus groups to glean key nuance between Hispanics "East of Rockies" (more Puerto Rican and Cuban influenced) and "West of Rockies" (Mexican dominant).

We learned tons. I was humbled. The faces, the body movement, the group interplay, the conversational flows all amounted to a treasure trove of insights. In the non-Hispanic groups that followed over the years, it always boggled my mind how much we could actually learn from engaged moms on something as ostensibly mundane as a paper towel.

I'm not jumping off the digital ship, but I do worry that we sometimes grossly misappropriate social media as a proxy for live interaction or offline conversation. It's not.

Looking ahead, we might be well served by reclaiming or rediscovering some of those "offline" encounters -- not as a replacement for our digital conversations but as a vitamin. As we're learning with TV, and certainly with customer service, social media might just make the core foundations even stronger -- but only if used correctly.

Breakthrough consumer understanding is a delicate (and empathetic) balancing act of what we glean and filter online and what we dig up in real conversations. It's far from an all-or-nothing proposition, and the advent of video digital "sight, sound and motion" blurs the line.

Indeed, the "Research Transformation" initiative led by Joel Rubinson and the Advertising Research Foundation hit the mark by challenging everyone to think carefully about the right balance between "listening and asking."

Both sides contribute.

Unprompted listening to social media, for instance, might sharpen the questions in the "asking" phase. Think about all the surveys or focus groups we've placed without properly identifying the right questions.

Conversely, focus groups can only take you so far without sufficient volume. High velocity of conversation can help us pinpoint "profitable demand pools" that may not be obvious in live conversation, a point implied in a new book, "How Companies Win," by Nielsen CEO Dave Calhoun and Cambridge Group CEO Rick Kash. (Full disclosure: I'm a Nielsen employee.)

But back to the texting teens. They are certainly living the bold new digital conversation, but don't always assume you need to connect with them online to figure out what's going on.

Sometimes we just have to "have a real conversation."