Robi Ganguly’s Big Ideas

Amazon has come a long way since its early days as “just” an online bookseller. Having been introduced to the company in its infancy (back when it was a plucky Seattle-area Internet business), I’ve followed the company fairly closely over the years and really come to admire it. Whether it was its early forays into personalization or the way it went about executing against its vision regardless of Wall Street’s fickle and unrealistic expectations, the company has convinced me that it has its head on straight and is building for the long run.

Given that I spent several years working on the advertising business of Yahoo!, it’s only natural that I would take some of that experience and apply it to my thoughts about Amazon. In doing so, I’ve developed a point of view on how Amazon could leave their mark on the online advertising space.

First things first, Amazon brings an existing set of strengths built on an understanding of the online customer that should shape any offering that comes from them. As I see it, that implies some core principles for Amazon advertising:

1. Personalization matters: Look across the landscape of online companies and ask yourself this: does any company do it as well as Amazon? If you’re an Amazon customer, you get recommendations from them while surfing the site that are generally quite good. More impressive though, is the fact that the times when they choose to email me a recommendation, they’re often right. This leads to us a second, and related point.
2. Be conservative with your recommendations: Many people see the advertising space as a question of ,“How do we get advertisers to buy against our inventory?” Amazon’s email recommendations come infrequently and, as a result, hold more weight in my inbox. I believe them to be conservative in choosing when to promote a product and if I’m right, it’s one of their great strengths. In approaching the advertising opportunity, they should be thinking about the question, “When are we justified in creating inventory and who gets to advertise against it?”
3. Your customers are your salespeople: Jeff Bezos said in an interview last year with Charlie Rose that, “The Internet is a word-of-mouth accelerator.” EXACTLY.  Amazon Associates is perhaps the web’s most popular and acceptable affiliate marketing program.  Amazon Web Services has grown up around enabling this activity in a very robust way, with a huge variety of endpoints that sell products for Amazon. There is huge power for the future of commercial communications (marketing, advertising, customer service etc.) in this model.

Given those principles and adding in my perspective that just copying existing ad models isn’t that interesting for Amazon, I believe that there are 2 initial areas where the company could focus its time:

1. Open up the recommendations process to paying advertisers, particularly those in the media space
2. Revamp the Amazon Associates program to more easily involve ALL of Amazon’s existing customers AND extend it to appeal to all digital consumers

In short, I believe that Amazon has an opportunity to really change Internet advertising by embracing the idea that personalization is a problem best solved en masse. Creating a marketplace around personalization, such that advertisers can influence it to make recommendations better and consumers can benefit from positive outcomes they’re already driving has the potential to change online commerce.

I’ll add some more detail to these ideas.

The first area of focus:

Open up the recommendations process to paying advertisers, particularly those in the media space.

As I mentioned above, Amazon is already routinely sending out product recommendations, notifications of forthcoming product releases and suggesting products I might like while surfing the site. To my knowledge, these recommendations are currently “pure”, generated algorithmically. I believe that with a very conservative approach to the opportunity, combined with a LOT of testing and the institution of robust feedback mechanisms (a customer should always be able to say NO and tell Amazon when it’s doing a bad job), Amazon could upgrade its accuracy by inviting advertisers to compete to show up in the recommendations.

An example of this: Say that you bought Malcolm Gladwell’s book, Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking a few weeks ago. Imagine that you had previously bought his book The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference as well. Now, normally, the recommendations engine at Amazon would most likely notify you in a few weeks that Gladwell has a new book coming out Outliers: The Story of Success.

This is a pretty good process and does a lot for the consumer, but there’s an opportunity to improve the consumer’s knowledge about an author they probably like a good bit while making some money for Amazon. You see, Malcolm Gladwell isn’t just an author, he’s a writer for the New Yorker as well. The New Yorker, being a for-profit publication, is interested in having more subscribers and readers of its content, so it stands to reason that if they could work with Amazon to reach loyal purchasers of Gladwell’s books, they would take advantage of that opportunity. Again, it would be really important for Amazon, in creating this opportunity, to be conservative in its application and highly focused on soliciting feedback from its customers about the recommendations, but done well, it should add a whole new (and welcome) dimension to the Amazon customer experience.

Remember, this is but one example of how this could be applied. It should be noted that you can think about this with regards to other forms of media rather easily (digital music, video and television make perfect sense). From a process perspective, Amazon could experiment with this concept, refine the technology and the user experience and then reap the eventual rewards that would accumulate as the feedback loop on the recommendations makes Amazon’s database much more intelligent than competing systems.

Moving on…

The second area of focus:

Revamp the Amazon Associates program to more easily involve ALL of Amazon’s existing customers AND then extend it to appeal to all digital consumers

In the last year, Amazon has introduced some enhancements to its Associates program that makes the process of sharing links and recommendations far more easy and powerful. However, the opportunity to expand this program to every single one of Amazon’s customers strikes me as a no-brainer that’s not being fulfilled. Right now, in order to be an Amazon Associate, you have to be aware of the program, navigate to its location on the site and go through a sign-up process that is relatively intimidating for the average customer. The goal should be to make every Amazon customer an Associate at the outset.

Every time a customer shares a product, they should be given a unique link that attributes any sales to their account, at the very least giving them future purchase credit. Instead of focusing massive amounts of attention on just the developers, as Google, Microsoft, Yahoo! and others are doing, Amazon has the opportunity to expand past the developers to the end consumer. Of course the company should be enabling the developers and the Amazon Web Services offerings are exceptional.

BUT, the opportunity to enable others is much more larger than just  the development community:

In our emails, IMs, Twitters, Facebook messages, blog posts, comments and all other forms of digital communications, we are influencing others to take action and make purchases. Amazon’s Associates infrastructure could hold the key to really unlocking the value in these small moments of influence. In so doing, they stand a strong chance of mobilizing the world’s largest distributed sales force: the consumers. Implementing this idea certainly carries a great number of risks around fraud, spam and general abuse, but because Amazon has dealt with many of these issues already in releasing and maintaining their products, they have exceptional opportunity. This idea really deserves much more discussion on its own, but I think that you can ask yourself a few questions here to really think about Amazon’s opportunity here:

• Who else can successfully run the experiments in this arena that connect consumers and commercial action?
• Who else offers the infrastructure and support to developers that could quickly extend the compensation model for consumers to to other sites?
• Who else can work on this area without risking cannibalization of their existing lines of business?

This post has run pretty long already, so I’m going to draw it to a close so you all can digest. What I’d love to hear in the comments is how you react to these ideas and what you think needs to be fleshed out more for discussion. I’ve got a lot more to write about on this topic, so let’s get a discussion going.

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If you’re out there, thinking to yourself that the poll numbers look great and this election is in the bag, STOP.

Stop thinking that you don’t have anything to do in the next 3 weeks. 

I admit, the situation looks rather rosy at the moment, but if you really want to see a President Obama in the White House, I urge you to listen to what the man is saying:

THIS IS OUR TIME 

What do you think that means folks? OUR time.. WE need to be involved. 

"Be the change you want to see in the world."

                         -Mahatma Gandhi

From one of mankind’s greatest philosophers AND one of our most effective leaders comes a reminder for us all: we must make this election go the way we would like.

It’s important to me to see Barack Obama elected. I’ve been doing a number of things to play a part in his candidacy and I have many friends who have been doing the same. Have you?

Some ideas about what you can do to get Barack Obama elected over the next 3 weeks:

1. Familiarize yourself with the "battleground states" of this election: Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia, North Carolina, Florida, Colorado, Nevada, Michigan.
2. Talk to your friends in those swing states about the election: Don’t be pushy, but create conversations, have meaningful, in-depth discussions of the issues that matter to you. Avoid hyperbole and emotional, pithy remarks and engage in behavior that is required of a CITIZEN:
   • Look at your phone’s address book and scroll through it. Do you have any friends in those states? Have you not talked to them in a while? Give them a ring. Talk about the election.
   • Open up your email address book and do the same thing – look to see who among your friends are in these swing states. Email them, start a dialogue. Share digital media that you’ve watched, read, listened to or even created about the election that you find interesting and useful in making your decisions.
   • Are you on MySpace/Facebook/Bebo/iMeem/Friendster/LinkedIn/Plaxo? If so, the tools aren’t great, but you can use these services to identify friends who are in the battleground states – take 30 mins and make a list of 10, 15, 20 friends. Reach out to them.
3. Share your enthusiasm for action with other like-minded friends: It’s always more fun to work as a part of a team. Create your own small team of friends who are taking actions to share, discuss and promote the Obama campaign. Pass this blog post on, recruit people to come up with more ideas than the ones I’ve listed here.
4. Donate to the campaign: Here is the link to my donations page (get me past $0 folks!), but you can just as easily go to the main donation page, located here.
5. Volunteer for the campaign: (sign up at: http://action.barackobama.com/page/s/volunteer)
   • Make calls in the coming weeks with local supporters and contact your neighbors: http://my.barackobama.com/page/votercontact/details
   • Hop in your car and head to a nearby battleground state, if it’s feasible for you (SF friends, there are several trips to Nevada planned).
6. Create your own media for the campaign:
   • If you have a blog, write on it.
   • If you go to a rally, take pictures and video of it and share with your friends.
   • If you have artistic inclinations, create your own Obama logo and put it in your email signatures, on your social network profile, in your IM profiles etc.. If you don’t, go find logos here
7. Wear your support for the campaign: t-shirts, bumper stickers, pins, signs.. all of these will help show your support and remind others.
8. Remind all of your friends to vote on election day!

These are just my ideas, please add your own in the comments.

Also, here are some interesting sites to check out along these lines:

http://www.returntoohio.com/ 

http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2008/09/on-road-grand-junction-colorado.html 

http://thegreatschlep.com/

Finally, for those who are trying to figure out what media to share with their friends, here are some of my favorite speeches/ads/media/articles:

Articles and links:

Attack Tactics backfiring on McCain

Obama’s career timeline, detailing why the experience question is pretty silly

New Yorker on Barack Obama back in 2007

Lengthy piece on "Obamanomics" from August

Ads and Videos:

A recent ad that tells us more about Obama’s background

Obama’s speech on 10/13/08 about the economic crisis.

Inspiring video created for the convention.

Obama’s Speech on Race – "A More Perfect Union": one of the most amazing speeches I’ve ever seen.

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Dear friends and readers of this blog:

If you think to yourself, "I don’t understand why people vote the way they do. I feel like so much of the country is crazy."

Or you think, "Why is everyone up in arms about politics, it’s not like it matters who’s President anyway."

Or maybe you’re just tired of people making snap decisions about candidates based upon the things they hear in the news, through ads and from headlines and feeling a bit hopeless about the state of affairs.

You’re NOT alone.

But you are lying to yourself if you’ve gotten to a point where you think your actions don’t matter. Consider these few things:

• Your vote does get counted in this country (many countries can’t say that).
• Your $$ matter. Give to the candidate or the issue that you care about. It doesn’t matter if it’s $5, $25 or $2,000. Your money DOES help. Look at the Obama campaign, which has stunned EVERYONE in its ability to raise money through the donations of "ordinary" citizens (more than 2 million people have given, do you want to join them?). You’re not ordinary – you live in the U.S.A. and probably have disposable income. You are in a position of global wealthiness.
• You have FRIENDS WHO LISTEN TO YOU.

If you’re out there, talking with people about this election, making sure that your voice is heard; through your vote and your wallet, you are doing something.

MAKE YOUR VOICE MATTER.

Register, today, if you’re not. Put your address in here, right now, to check your local info and make sure you’re registered.

Then, go call/email/text/IM/Facebook/MySpace, whatever, 5 or more of your friends this same thought.

You can do it.

(Or listen to these celebrities tell you the same thing..)

PS. If you happen to live in a "swing state" or have friends in "swing states", your voice matters even more. Think about utilizing that understanding in the coming 30 days.

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I haven’t written since my prediction about who McCain was going to pick as his VP candidate and no, it’s not just because I was horribly wrong . Instead, I’ve been having a lot of private conversations about this selection and come to a conclusion:

I was right.

Specifically, I was right when I wrote in my post about Biden’s selection as Obama’s running mate that:

I still maintain that from a pure #’s analysis, Obama picking Hillary means the election is over. It might not have been super practical, but it would have killed the McCain campaign. I personally never got the sense that they really disliked each other and couldn’t work together, but enough smart people have argued convincingly that I see that it could have presented real issues. That doesn’t diminish a key fact, however: Consuming the media is a successful strategy. The chatter about a Hillary selection after the Democratic National Convention would have continued all the way through the Republican convention and established the Repubs as an afterthought in many voters minds. McCain would have had to select Paris Hilton as a response, if he wanted to get some meaningful media time.

I’ll repeat myself: Consuming the media is a successful strategy.

10 years ago, I was living in Washington, D.C. and working as an intern at C-Span. I learned a number of important things there (like how to talk yourself into a hearing with Ken Starr…awesome), but one of the most important was just how few people actually CARE to watch the entirety of our political process. In fact, most of us don’t even come close to watching enough of the political process that we understand what’s going on, how bills are proposed, debated and voted upon. Nor do we watch the primaries, the speeches of the candidates, their full statements or anything else substantive enough to understand the nuance of a candidate’s platform.

This doesn’t stop us from going into the voting booths and pulling the levers, though.

So, how do we make these decisions, if we’re not devoting much time and energy to the self-education process?

• We read the headlines.
• We skim over short articles.
• We leave the radio on while we’re driving and pick up snippets.
• We turn the TV on when we walk in the door and catch bits and pieces as we do our household chores: changing, making dinner, checking email, surfing the web, making phone calls, taking care of the kids etc..
• We chat with our friends and those in our circle of like-minded folks
• We read the things that our network passes on, usually of a more humorous or fantastical nature – things that get our attention and are entertaining.

This information gathering process is haphazard. It’s rarely open-minded, it’s mostly self-selecting. It’s, objectively speaking, very limited in critical thinking and optimized for time efficiency, rather than being geared towards delivering clear arguments that enable us to come to a decision about our own beliefs and stances on the issues of the day.

The Republican Party has understood this for a LONG LONG time.

Going back to what I wrote about the possibility of a selection of HRC as Obama’s running mate – it scared the Republicans because it meant a total consumption of the news media. The agenda for what would be discussed in the mass media and subsequently, at the water coolers, would have been completely set by the Democrats.

When it didn’t occur, the Republicans saw their opportunity: they didn’t need to select Paris Hilton, they just had to find her political equivalent – Sarah Palin. Pretty, simple, good on camera, quick with the catchphrases (can’t you just see her saying, "That’s hot"??) and most importantly, NEW. After an 18 month election cycle, voters feel like their skimming of the race has told them all they need to know about Obama and McCain. But now.. there’s someone new. And not only that, the news media doesn’t know anything about her, so they need to investigate and dig and tell us everything they find.

Look what happened in the week following her selection. The news was CONSUMED with Palin. Awareness of her name went from nothing to 60, 70, 80% of the country. The conversation was owned by the Republicans. Just as they like it.

Now, of course, the financial crisis is so massive, it’s trumped any strategy the Republicans could put forth, but still, they’re working their best at managing the news cycle to their advantage.

Which brings us to tonight’s debate

According to Nielsen, last week’s Presidential Debate got ~50mm viewers. Putting that in perspective for a moment, we see that in the 2004 election, ~121mm people voted. Very simple math tells me this: less than half of the people voting in the election watch the debates (probably far less than half, if we assume that some of those 50mm people are not eligible to vote and that turnout this year should be higher).

So, if you know that less than half of the voters watch the debates, part of your strategy needs to be focused on the story that comes out of the debates that informs the rest of the voting population.

This is where the expectations game comes in: Just about everyone believes that Palin is going to do a poor job in the debates. The Republicans are very happy to have this happen. Why?

Because the story will almost inevitably be about how the candidates did, in comparison to their expected performances:

Biden is a knowledgeable, experienced, vocal guy. He’s a known entity.

Palin? She’s a total black box at this point. Will we see the Katie Couric performance from her?

Or maybe we’ll see the Convention speech that she gave?

Or, most likely, we’ll see the 2006 Alaskan gubernatorial debates performance. Which is to say, if you’re watching live, you’ll probably be a bit stunned at how she avoids questions and doesn’t address tough issues.

But, if you’re not watching it live.. you’re probably going to hear something like this:

"Palin holds her own, snags Biden on voting history, delivers zingers and was fairly poised. Flustered Biden has a clear mastery of the facts and policy, but seemed out of his elements at times, unsure of how to respond to Palin’s approach."

I’m getting a little specific here with the prediction, so it might not come out sounding like that, but my point to you is this:

Whether or not you watch tonight’s debate, you should pay attention to the wake of the debates.

The headlines and storylines that flow out from tonight’s debate through the mass media and information sources will be interesting and informative.

Your friends who are behind Obama are going to send you clips of outrageous Palin responses and ask how people can vote for Palin. Your McCain friends might keep quiet, but when prodded, reply that "she did all right, she handled herself well and you’ve got to admit, she really zinged Biden a couple times."

As you watch this stuff unfold, what I really urge you to do is to step back and ask yourself if your decision-making is due to the manipulation of the media and the news cycle. Are you letting yourself just skim and feed off of the wake of communications strategies? If the answer is at all yes, I suggest that you dig deeper and think a bit more critically before it comes time to pull that lever.

While you’re at it, tell your friends to do the same .

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