Experience Manifesto

Glimpse.com Women's Fashion, Style Shopping and the Best Stores with the hottest trends online.

Glimpse.com has been getting some decent press since they launched last week. They have some interesting items, lime having a celebrity fashion page, but I'm not really seeing the big point of differentiation yet. But they have some real survivors from the dot-com days involved, so maybe the lessons they learned through eToys will help them. Check it out yourself and see what you think.

When Glimpse.com launched Thursday, the Internet shopping mall set itself apart by providing a window-shopping experience for female online apparel seekers who wanted a mall-like format. "The number of online retailers grows everyday," said Scott Silverman, executive director of Shop.org, a division of the National Retail Federation. "Everyone has competition, and everyone has to be careful in their positioning and how they find critical mass before their competitors do."

Link: Business.

Link: Glimpse.com Women's Fashion, Style Shopping and the Best Stores with the hottest trends online.

American Business Media - Face-To-Face

Good news for people doing trade shows!

According to a report from American Business Media president & CEO, Gordon T. Hughes, the face-to-face events industry is a rapidly growing, critical part of today's integrated business media environment. Face-to-face revenue has surpassed that of its print counterpart for the first time: In 2006, business media trade shows accounted for 36% ($11.3 billion) of industry revenue; magazines accounted for 35%. Events are the third-fastest growing segment of business media, surpassed only by digital and custom media.

Hughes said "As business media companies continue to move into a multiplatform environment, the industry is experiencing growth in three out of four of its major segments: trade shows, custom media and e-Media."

Hughes continued, "E-Media has grown... 22% in revenue over 2005, followed by custom media's 18% growth spurt and trade shows... at a 10% growth variance over 2005. Although ad pages and revenue for January 2007 showed a decline of 3.1% and 2.78% respectively, as predicted, the business media industry now represents $31.1 billion in revenues across all four platforms..."

Link: American Business Media - Face-To-Face.

Advertising Age - Cinema Ads Should Enhance Movie-Theater Experience

As you may have read before, we're getting ready to launch an in-cinema experience next weekend, so this event was pretty interesting for us. Barry attended the event here in NY and I guess if we do a great job next weekend, we might be invited to speak at the one in LA! Like what Cliff Marks had to say (see bold text below), but wish that more companies really tried to deliver on that. If you're out in LA and want to see what we're doing, we launch on May 4th at the Bridge. Please e-mail Barry Grieff to schedule a visit.

Spider-Man, Shrek and Harry Potter aren't the only familiar names movie fans will be reacquainted with on the big screen this summer. An increasing amount of blue-chip brands are making movie theaters a standard part of their overall media plans, having made cinema marketing a $600 million business in 2006. But as Cliff Marks, president-sales and chief marketing officer for National CineMedia, said at the top of the third annual Marquee Marketing at the Movies Conference in New York, it's still not for everyone. "We must remember that nobody comes to the movies to see our preshow. Our most important role is to enhance the movie experience." (Emphasis mine)

Link: Advertising Age - Cinema Ads Should Enhance Movie-Theater Experience.

Gotta' Love It

Story in today's Star Ledger about a company called that sells coffins to bury your wedding ring after the divorce. According to the article, business has been brisk, with orders coming in from all over the world. So, if you're looking for a dignified way to end your marraige, hop on over to www.weddingringcoffin.com and order yours today!

MediaPost Publications - All-In-One: AT&T: Users Can Program DVR From Cell Phone - 04/20/2007

Love this technology! Can't tell you how many times I've forgotten to program something and missed a show!

AT&T, WHOSE TELCO TV SERVICE had a slower-than-promised rollout, is launching a service allowing customers to program DVRs from their cell phones. It gets to the heart of AT&T's goals for the U-verse service, as consumers will have to use an AT&T mobile device for the remote activity. However, the company says it will open it up to other wireless providers in the future.

AT&T is looking to outfox cable operators, which have thrived with so-called triple-play TV-phone-Internet packages, by offering the same bundle -- plus its wireless services -- a fourth option MSOs are deciding how to compete against.

The DVR programming via cell phones allows U-verse TV and Internet customers to schedule shows to be recorded, as well as delete programs. The new service augments an existing option to program U-verse DVRs remotely via computers.

Link: MediaPost Publications - All-In-One: AT&T: Users Can Program DVR From Cell Phone - 04/20/2007.

When does an experience begin and end?

Friend Bob Jacobson is putting together a book on experience and he's looking for some outside input. He's posted five questions at Total Experience and I've included the links below. If you have some time, take a look at them and please head over and give him your thoughts.

I'm asking these questions as part of my research for a book in progress on the design of experience. (It’s coming along quite well, thanks.)

Please visit the blog and leave your answers there as Comments. They’re much appreciated — and should be interesting reading, individually and collectively, as they accumulate. Direct your friends there, too: in this case, the larger the sample, the better the results.

My five questions are:

1. When does an experience begin and end?
2. What are the dimensions of an experience?
3. What role do setting, memories of prior experiences, and the larger environment play in the character of an experience?
4. What metrics can be devised and applied, or already have been, to take the measure of an experience?
5. Can an experience be shared? If so, among whom and how many individuals? Is the experience they share the same?

Thank you for sharing your wisdom.

Link: 1. When does an experience begin and end?

Link: 2. What are the dimensions of an experience?

Link: 3. What role do setting, memories of prior experiences, and the larger environment play in creating the character of an experience?

Link: 4. What metrics can be devised and applied, or have been already, to take the measure of an experience?

Link: 5. Can an experience be shared? If so, in what way, and among whom and how many individuals? Is the experience they share the same?

Micro Persuasion: Open Letter: A Lesson Learned Twittering

Instead of being totally absorbed in Lost, I got caught up in yet another online dust-up in he blogosphere. This time, I guess it started when Steve Rubel from Edelman Twittered PC Mag is another. I have a free sub but it goes in the trash. And that posting lead Jim Louderback, Editor-in-Chief of PC Magazine, to question how seriously he should take pitches from a PR company after one of their top executives admits he just throws out the magazine. As you might have read here before, I don't always agree with Steve (Experience Manifesto: Advertising Age - You Might as Well Be Searching for Bigfoot), but in this case, he said something, someone disagreed and he apologized.

But, you have to read through the comments on Steve Rubel's post to get some really good chuckles. I just love the experts who can't wait to bring Jim Louderback to task for being upset. And while Steve Rubel, in his apology, indicated that he reads PC Mag online and through RSS feeds, he doesn't mention that in his Twitter post. Yet many people attack Jim because he's another big media company upset that people don't want to read the magazine instead of reading it online. But that's not what Rubel said. He didn't say "I don't read the magazine, but I do read it online." He simply said he throws the magazine out.

But people needed to comment on the whole new world bullshit that's probably been around since the beginning of time. Everyone thinks it's a new world. But being rude doesn't change just because you're using a new communications tool. In fact, while reading through the comments, it's clear that folks who like to trumpet the brave new world, carry on just like the middle school kids calling each other names when I was a kid. No brave new world, just a new way to behave childishly.

Hey, gotta’ take a break and re-watch Lost because I think I missed some important items. I might try to get back to this later, but I think you get my point. New communication tools don’t change how we need to behave!

The following is an open letter to Jim Louderback, Editor-in-Chief of PC Magazine, as well as any of the several hundred employees who work for Ziff Davis Media.

Dear Mr. Louderback,

Last Friday, yes Friday the 13th, I put up a post on Twitter that I wish I hadn’t. I said that I don’t read the hard copy of PC Magazine and that my free subscription goes in the trash. In a guest editorial on Strumpette you weighed whether the magazine in response should blacklist all PR pitches from Edelman, my employer, on behalf of our tech clients.

I learned a valuable lesson. Post too fast without providing context and it can elicit an unintended response. While the item is true, it does not reflect my full media consumption habits. I subscribe to PC Mag RSS feeds and have linked to several of your publication's online articles over the three years I have been writing this blog. Further, I have linked to articles from eWeek, your sister site.

Link: Micro Persuasion: Open Letter: A Lesson Learned Twittering.

Link: EXCLUSIVE: PC Magazine Considers Edelman Boycott.

Fast Food: Ads vs. Reality

This is a great example of the difference between advertising and the actual experience of the brand. Thanks to things like the internet, we can not only document things like this, but share them with the whole world in an instant Ad brands don't know how to handle this kind of criticism. And what it most surprising is how quickly companies cut their staff, which is the way to combat this kind of problem. Make sure you check out the pictures and feel free to post your own picture pairs and let’s see if we can get lots more of them going. Thanks to AdPulp for the tip!

Each item was purchased, taken home, and photographed immediately. Nothing was tampered with, run over by a car, or anything of the sort. It is an accurate representation in every case. Shiny, neon-orange, liquefied pump-cheese, and all.

Link: Fast Food: Ads vs. Reality.

Looking for a few Good Blogs

We mentioned the idea of a Blog Book Tour to Rachelle Lacroix, who's handling blogs for Chocolates on the Pillow Aren't Enough: Reinventing The Customer Experience and they're very excited about putting one together.

We're looking for at least four other leading bloggers to take advantage of an opportunity to participate in a week long series of interviews with Jonathan Tisch, the book's author, Chairman of Loew's Hotels and owner of the New York Giants. If you're interested in participating, please e-mail me or Rachelle Lacroix and we can give you additional details. We don't have a schedule right now, so we have some flexibility on starting, but we'd like to get it together in the next couple of weeks.

The books been getting great reviews and Mr. Tisch certainly knows the role of experience. I'm sure that he'd bring a very interesting POV to the experience conversation!

Orange Slices: It's the Insperience

Good to see so many different kind of people writing about the importance of experience! They have a number of good examples in the article and what I think is most interesting about it -- it comes from a blog about library services. Not a group usually known for creating compelling experiences.

Link: Orange Slices: It's the Insperience.