Robi Ganguly’s Big Ideas

Some great humor, some snarky Jay Leno comments and some fantastic insights from a man who’s built a massive personal brand and now understands his ability to continue growing it online

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I do a lot of thinking about the economy, the stock market and how to build great businesses. Like Howard Lindzon says, Twitter’s killed my blog too, but I need to remedy that. Let’s combine some humor (not mine) and insights (hopefully mine ). Here are some interrelated observations in my head right now:

• As I work on building ideas & companies of my own while watching politicians, media pundits and anal-ysts (they charge people for predictions they don’t follow or stand behind, WTF is going on here??) futilely attempt to make sense of what’s going on in the midst of our globe’s financial tornado I think to myself: these guys are talking too damned much.
• Credit was built on trust. When credit was invented it was highly controversial for a lot of reasons, but one was because of something we seem to have forgotten: money is based on trust as well.
• I don’t think any of us should trust a single bank until they can prove to us that they’re trustworthy again, individually and in aggregate. The Government’s actions aren’t fucking helping make us trust them any more, so their involvement is mostly absurd. The trust we’re talking about isn’t trust that they’ll lose all our money, it’s that they don’t know what the hell they’re doing it and are COSTING US ALL MONEY. I don’t trust them to not gamble all of our aggregate profits away.
• Profitable companies that have massive amounts of cash, no debt and high margins should be getting reamed for hoarding their cash unintelligently, as many of them are doing. Profits are to re-invest in your business, your ideas and your future.
• Assets and people are on a fire sale right now, why aren’t winner companies investing? Microsoft, Google, eBay, Yahoo, et al are announcing layoffs and basically indicating that they’re either: a) afraid of using the word “fire” and lying about layoffs or b) making decisions in reaction to the stock market, as opposed to making decisions based on plans and opportunity. To which I say: you all need to step up to the plate and be leaders right now.
• If you’re pissed off, bummed out, frustrated or just plain confused, remember one thing: you can work harder. Step up and be a leader in your own life.
  

Last night’s South Park episode was funny and unrelenting in pointing out the stupid pyramid of lies we see around us. I recommend watching it and thinking about it in the context of our ongoing credit crisis.

South Park – “The Pinewood Derby”

A few choice quotes:

Dedicated to Iceland’s defunct economy: “Hey guys, Finland’s dead…. Hey guys, somebody better break the news to Norway, they were pretty close.”

To all of the politicians and bankers who think they should talk about transparency but not actually provide it: “And if I’m not honest now, I’ll have to keep this lie going on forever and it’ll just grow and grow.”

To anyone who thinks that “solving” the credit problems facing our globe isn’t within our power: “There is no space jail and space cash is only worth what YOU decide it’s worth. I mean, come on, how stupid is your species?”

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Been meaning to share this for a while. This sums up a lot of what I think about the world:

Hat tip to Brad Feld, who said the same thing a while back and introduced me to the video

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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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Check out this Indian PSA promoting safe sex…. not only is it bizarre and hilarious at the same time for us Americans, it’s also highly demonstrative that media and really, communication, is much more culture-specific than most give thought to on a regular basis. This is, given the Indian media that I’ve seen, pretty normal in some important ways. Feel free to go rent a Hindi movie if you don’t believe me  

(Hat tip to my media guru sister, who passed this on to me).

But wait a second… are you sure that I’m not just doing the ignorant thing and taking some piece of media that’s meant mockingly (say, like the Colbert Report) and ascribing serious attributes to it? What if this was an ad from a popular comedy show (SNL India perhaps?) and now I’m telling you all that this is a real ad? The credits at the end make it a little odd, don’t they?

So let’s see.. what else is out there in the way of condom ads from India?

It turns out, according to this news item that another condom ad won an award from the UN this year. Much shorter, more serious but the point of the ad is that condom is an ok word to say – now that might be kind of different from what we’d see in America, but not as shocking as the above video. Check it out:

But wait, there’s more…

You should then remember that this is an ad that was judged to be good by the UN. While the story does mention quite a bit of activity done in order to promote the campaign, it doesn’t mean that this campaign was particularly effective. What it might actually speak to is the subjective judgements of largely Westernized citizens on the UN panel of judges. Oh, that and the fact that according to that article, it sounds like the campaign was only competing against 2 other campaigns for this award… Minor detail, no?

So, what’s my point here, now that I’ve tied your head in knots?

Won’t it be a great world when advertising and marketing messages are much better translated to the cultures that they’re targeting?

Which of the above campaigns really gets people in India to use condoms and practice safe sex?

Remember, that’s the goal here – to get the message across and impact people’s behavior.. that’s what this stuff is all about. It’s not about winning awards or having something that is so funny and odd that people on the other side of the world are looking at it and passing it around to one another as a joke. This campaign is about promoting safe sex and hopefully slowing the growth of AIDS in India, the country with the most reported AIDS cases of any country in the world.

*Wow, that’s a very serious goal, isn’t it?*

Yes, advertising and marketing messages can be unwanted and annoying. They can be offensive or deceitful. They can even be culturally damaging.

So can any type of communication.

But when it has such a high ceiling, we should really be focusing on making it better, not arguing about exactly what is and isn’t ok. And when I see media like this, I think to myself, “Damn it, we need to be making ads that communicate better to the cultures they’re hoping to connect with!”

What U.S. company can effectively advertise in India? It’s damn hard, isn’t it?

We need people to take much more seriously the fact that in order to communicate our ideas globally, we have to be able to tailor those messages: not just language, not just images, but real cultural tailoring. Understanding, experimenting and continuing to revise those messages so that they hit home with the target audience most effectively. 

It’s happening now in small ways (think about McDonald’s “I’m lovin’ it” or the massive growth in Spanish language media), but it’s very very slow for society as a whole and this should really be changing dramatically with the Internet.

Anyone want to help speed that change up? I bet there’d be some money in there for ya

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Valeria Maltoni, over on her Conversation Agent blog, conducts an awesome interview with the Editor-in-Chief of BusinessWeek.com over here:

“Meet the (New Media) Editor — John Byrne, BusinessWeek”

Excellent questions, as usual, from Valeria, but I was really impressed by John’s answers. The guy is thoughtful and he gets it – he understands the importance of the conversation that goes on around journalism. He also really understands the importance of the permanence that the digital medium provides and says:

The aha for me is that the most permanent and influential of all journalism today is, in fact, digital. Unlike the journalism in a magazine or newspaper that gets thrown away, digital journalism is a permanent searchable record. You can access it anywhere around the globe at anytime, whether you are at home or work, in an airport lounge in Warsaw or a cafe in Bangalore. Unlike print, it doesn’t disappear with the garbage. You can’t line a bird cage with it. Instead, digital journalism lives on forever.

Wow. Sometimes I take this progress for granted. But it wasn’t that long ago that I was hearing that the online medium cheapened journalism and content. I LOVE how much people’s perceptions are changing.

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While surfing around the Yahoo! Music website, I came across this video, from the soundtrack of the movie “Into the Wild”. It turns out that Eddie Vedder did most of the music for the movie (for his pal Sean Penn, who directed it) and this is the video. Being a Pearl Jam fan, I clicked play and 5 minutes later, I’m searching around the ‘Net to find out more about the movie, the story behind it and when/where it’s playing.

Now, while you could argue that this video is meant to be marketing for the movie, I would suggest that this is much more compelling and useful than some 30-second snippet that’s edited for TV. It’s also interesting to note that despite being a song done by a famous musician, he doesn’t really appear in the video at all.

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Well, the good news is that I’m making more decisions these days and pushing forward several important things. The bad news is, I’m not having as much time to sit, think and write as I would like. But, between 16 hours of travel time this upcoming weekend (heading to a conference in Miami), and some newfound mobility in my computing life, that should change soon.

In the meantime, check this out. It’s freaking cool, of course, but, the fact that my friend Sarah could send this on to me in email and then I can go find it on YouTube to share with all of you is the really cool part.

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By way of my friend Damon’s blog comes this amazing video of a home crowd at a basketball game. It’s incredible to watch how into the game they are and the lack of social fear.

That’s right, social fear. Maybe you should think about that for a moment. Do you have social fear? Are you afraid of being yourself in public?

The digitization of our lives is happening. Whether it’s Flickr, YouTube, your blog or whatever’s coming next, we’re becoming more digitally entwined. That scares people. A ton. But it’s also good, because you can share these experiences. Watch this video and then think about it like this:

- Imagine that you go to school here and you’re trying to tell a friend who doesn’t go there about your freshman year. You’re telling them how cohesive the student body is, how tied together everyone feels and how much they love basketball. Your friend listens intently, but they don’t “get” it. Not just with your words.

- You send them this video.

Then what happens? Maybe your friend picks up the phone and calls you with 5 questions about your school. Maybe they want to transfer there. Or think you should leave.

But, all of a sudden, they’ve gotten to experience your life more intimately than ever before.

Isn’t that what we’re really seeking with this stuff? The ability to more fully share who we are, what we think, what we do? Aren’t we really try to share the experiences of our lives?

I think so.

You tell me. Tell me what you want out of blogs, flickr, youtube, twitter etc. I’m dying to know.

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Over the past few months, I’ve had this demo (below) emailed to me several times with comments to the effect of, “Holy crap, this is so amazing. I guess Microsoft can still do cool stuff every once in a while.”

I usually laugh when I get those notes.

Ridiculously Cool Technology – Watch more free videos

I’ve been aware of the Photosynth technology out of MSFT labs for a while now and I’d seen a demo of Sea Dragon as well. So, I laugh because I’ve already seen it and my friends assume that they’re going to shock me. But, I also laugh because of the implicit commentary about Microsoft. I think it’s really funny how many people assume that Microsoft is an old, boring, closed-minded company that’s not doing anything exciting at all. On a semi-regular basis, I try to peek into their research labs site and see what’s going on over there. In short, it’s pretty amazing.

As I touched on in this post on perceptions and the media, Google’s currently the hot company that everyone’s paying attention to in the Internet space (with Facebook starting to give it a run for its money..). Whether it’s Microsoft Surface, Yahoo! Answers, AOL Video or any number of other very cool developments from companies not named Google, the crowd seems to be overlooking a lot of it at the moment.

So here’s an idea: go find out about something new and cool today that you’re not aware of and then come back and tell me about it in my comments. I’d love to see what you find and share it back out with the rest of my readers in a subsequent blog post or two.

Go, now. Do it

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