Say what you will about the mindset of Hollywood executives, they do like to reuse and recycle, even if the concept of “reduce” remains beyond their grasp.

We’ve seen the bigscreen reboots of such classics (I use that term loosely) as Charlie’s Angels, Starsky and Hutch, The Dukes of Hazard, Get Smart, The Fugitive, Bewitched and Shaft, with The A-Team on its way in 2009. It’s seen to be a safer bet to hang your hat on a franchise with some pedigree, than try to woo consumers with something entirely fresh and unique. Of course, there’s no shortage of examples where such caution has resulted in a bomb at the box office. Treading the line between attracting older consumers nostalgic for classic television and engaging younger consumers with something updated and current in the same package can be a risky proposition. As is always the case in product marketing, trying to be too many things to too many people can backfire.

All this to introduce the reboot of the mother of all franchises - Star Trek. Yes, I contend, it is bigger than Bond. All that’s left after this is the return of Gunsmoke.  

After six television series (including the animated one) and 10 theatrical releases, the entire franchise is being rebooted with a new movie and new actors in the roles immortalized by the old series, anchored around the characters of Captain James T. Kirk, Dr. Leonard McCoy and Mr. Spock. They have dared to recast these pop culture icons with fresh faces who portray them a few years prior to the time period encompassed by the original TV series. The first trailers have just hit the Internet. This isn’t your daddy’s Star Trek. It’s fast, slick and the starship interior looks like it was designed by Apple engineers. There’s even a clip in the trailer where it looks like Spock loses his temper with Kirk and takes a swing at him. (Where’s the logic in that?)

The studio is obviously hoping to engage a younger audience, after a somewhat feeble response to the last television series and theatrical movie. It remains to be seen if they are beating a dead horse with an offering that will only serve to alienate the core fanbase that has stood by the franchise all these years. With the release date still far off in May 2009, the studio has lots of time to kick the marketing and promotion into high gear (no doubt with the affiliated merchandising to pad any softness in box office revenue).

Whatever the outcome and the general audience reaction to this franchise reboot, I think there will be interesting lessons learned about marketing and managing audience expectations when meddling with such an iconic brand, much like Coca-Cola’s experience with New Coke.

Technorati Tags: marketing, promotion, Hollywood, branding, Star Trek,  Coca-Cola 

Although it had its genesis in a consulting practice that was already several years old, and its first employee had been in place for several months, inmedia Public Relations Inc. was legally incorporated on November 5, 1998, and so today is our tenth birthday.

I would be less than forthright if I said that 10 years after launching a technology focused PR firm that I had accomplished what I thought would be in place a decade out. The tech meltdown damn near put us under and the continued severe contraction of Ottawa’s tech sector means we have slim pickings here at home. And my initial business proposition, that we could create an agency of excellence and extract a premium from the marketplace for that excellence, has proven to be a tough pitch in a market that too often has yet to be weaned off mediocrity.

But we survived the meltdown, the only exclusively B2B technology PR practice in the city to do so. Today, we get very well paid for our excellence from clients who have come to understand the difference. And our deliberate business development strategy over the past three or four years has been to embrace Ottawa clients certainly, but also to aggressively pursue business anywhere and everywhere we see a good opportunity.

My excellent colleague Danny Sullivan’s self-repatriation to his native Scotland a few years back opened a whole new front for us, and our far-reaching Google Adwords campaigns and this blog have brought us amazing opportunities from many other corners. With Ottawa accounting for about 35% of our revenues, we have embraced clients and projects in Calgary, Toronto, Montréal, Fredericton, Moncton and St. John’s; in Boston, Jersey City, San Jose and Chicago; and in Edinburgh, Glasgow, Farnborough and London.

If the business outcome has not been everything I hoped for 10 years ago, the experience has been nonetheless incredible. Most noteworthy has been the extraordinary people who have come to work with me here at inmedia. In an industry where average employee tenure has been pegged at less than a year, inmedianauts tend to hang around for much longer, with the average tenure here topping three years and some having spent five, six and even seven years on board. The consultants who work here are the real product that we sell, and I have had the unmitigated pleasure of consistently being able to bring to market the very best product in the PR industry, period.

Similarly, we have worked on some amazing projects with some of the brightest minds in technology, business and marketing. Our web site lists nearly 90 clients with whom we have worked over the past 10 years, and each and every one of them has represented a unique story, a unique set of market dynamics and a unique set of media and analyst targets to whom that story needed to be told. It is this ever-changing nature of the business that makes PR consulting so fascinating to me.

It has been rewarding, challenging and frustrating, as most any worthwhile venture inevitably is. It has also been a period of considerable personal and professional growth, and I look forward to learning even more as this little PR company continues.

Technorati Tags: inmedia Public Relations, public relations, technology, entrepreneurship, birthday

“I’ve just come to expect that my (public relations) agency can’t write,” was the astonishing admission I heard a few weeks back from a vice president at one of Ottawa’s larger technology companies who called us to see if we’d be interested in participating in an agency review process.

(I’ve promised not to name him (or her) for reasons that will be obvious as you read the rest of this post.)

I could hardly believe my ears. But yes, he said, it had long been his experience that the PR practitioners he had been dealing with from a range of different agencies and across a number of companies just weren’t very good writers, and so it fell to him to write most of the materials used in his campaigns. One of the key reasons he was approaching inmedia, he told me, was our very strong reputation in the marketplace as superb writers, a reputation he said was confirmed when he read our blog and web site.

I chalked this one up to what I assumed was just an unfortunate experience on the part of one technology marketing executive until I relayed the story to a colleague last week, a CEO at another technology company here in Ottawa and an insightful marketer in his own right. I was again utterly gobsmacked when he said he didn’t view writing as a core requirement in the PR function, that the ability to pitch the story was far more important.

“And what do you do,” I asked him, “When the pitch is initially well received and the next words out of the reporter or editor’s mouth are, ‘Sounds good, send me something about it.’?”

Here’s the thing. To work at inmedia and, I believe, to be an effective media relations practitioner anywhere, you must be able to write at an expert level and you must be able to effectively pitch what you’ve written. There is no hierarchy between these two fundamental skills. Lack one, and you’re out of the game.

And here’s why.

To believe, as these two otherwise successful technology marketers clearly do, that writing is either not terribly important or that your PR function, whether internal or an agency, can be permitted to be lousy writers, is to completely beggar the entire communications process.

In the first instance, despite all the wonderful new communications tools at our disposal, most journalists still want to see something in cold, hard black and white, even if it is delivered electronically. And even if they don’t ask for it, it’s just gotta be in your best interests to give them well-written material so they have the complete story, with all the relevant facts and accurate spellings of company, product and people’s names to which they can refer. This is just so basic I’m staggered it needs stating.

Second, how in the heck does a PR practitioner demonstrate her or his understanding of the story without writing about it? Yes, a properly written document proves the communicator can — gasp! — communicate. That is, the words run together in some sort of comprehensible order, everything is spelled correctly and the commas and periods are in the right places. But it still won’t be any good unless the person writing it actually has a thorough grasp of the subject matter.

Effective writing is not a case of cutting and pasting bits and pieces from other documents to make a different document and it needs to be more than a merely technically accurate use of words, grammar and punctuation. Effective writing is the process of distilling what has been learned — from other documents, certainly, but also, and critically, from interviews with a range of subject-matter experts — into a new piece of work. It not only communicates the story to all who read it, it also demonstrates understanding.

Bottom line: If your agency can’t write about it well, they almost certainly can’t pitch it well. And even worse, they probably don’t even understand it well.

So, did we get the business? Well, that’s another story that I cover here: The Ottawa inferiority complex theorem strikes again.

Technorati Tags: writing, pitching, media relations, business development

Most of us in Canada are no doubt familiar with that amusing commercial from Rogers about a fellow bragging to his friend about his new high-definition flatscreen television, despite the fact that the picture quality is horrible because he lacks the HD box for his television to display a true HD signal.

Well, this week my eight-year-old antique gave up the ghost. I had long ago decided that, should the day come, I would go with a Sharp Aquos 1080p LCD television. Within 24 hours of the old TV’s death, I had the new one on the wall.

Now, to set up the new TV, I simply connected my standard cable without any HD box, fully expecting to be confronted by god-awful picture quality that would be unbearable to watch.

But, to my utter amazement, the picture quality was at least as good as it was on my old TV. There was none of the blurry distortion dramatized in that Rogers commercial. Maybe I am not enjoying the full HD experience, but I certainly do not feel a pressing need to rush out and buy the HD box.

Granted, this is my personal experience after having the new TV set up for only an hour. Perhaps I am missing something.

But before I even got the TV home, I was in the electronics store shaking my head at a split screen comparison of the quality difference between a regular DVD picture and a high-definition Blu-ray disc picture. Again, there appeared to be a little exaggeration at work. Later at home, I played a standard DVD movie on my standard DVD player through the new LCD TV. When compared to the split-screen comparison I saw in the store, the picture quality was much closer to that of the Blu-ray than it was to the standard DVD as it was portrayed.

Comparisons can be a very effective means of selling buyers on the merits of your product or service, but in the bid to create that ”wow” factor that allows your product to fly off the shelves, be cautious about massaging the facts. Your product may clearly be better than your competitor’s, or the status quo, but be careful about trying to present those advantages more dramatically than they really are. Sure, you may dupe the unsophisticated buyer, but, guaranteed, there are plenty of savvy people who will see through the gimmick and out you on — oh, I don’t know — a blog, perhaps?

Technorati Tags: high definition, HD, Sharp Aquos, LCD, Blu-ray,  DVD, Rogers, marketing, advertising, product comparison

I already wrote a post at Dangletech.com, where I try to contribute weekly, about the most fascinating highlight the Red Herring Canada 08 conference held earlier this week at Mont Tremblant. For my money, the best entertainment was the riveting behaviour of Red Herring publisher and CEO Alex Vieux who dominated the event with his bewildering mix of brilliant observation, insightful analysis and boorish, insulting and condescending treatment of those who paid big bucks to attend.

But there was, fortunately, more of value beyond Vieux’s theatrics and here, in no particular order other than how they appear in my notebook, are some of the better gems from nearly two days of presentations, round tables and corridor chitchat at an event focused on technology startups and the venture capitalists they pursue for funding.

Miranda Technology Inc. chairman Brian Edwards said there is a “liquidity crisis in Canada,” leading many funds-seeking companies to consider going the capital pool company route on the TSX-Venture Exchange. “That’s pretty scary to me.” And while he applauded that lots of government money is going into research in Canadian universities, he said there is “very little management of that money. … We need to bet on the creation” of new companies.

Jacques Bernier, senior vice-president at Fonds de solidarité FTQ, was equally skeptical of the temptations of an early or inadequate IPO. “We won’t touch” a company that goes public on the venture exchange for its first million dollars or so and then comes to his firm looking for more. Being public “puts the focus entirely on the wrong place,” he said.

Mike Grandinetti, a senior lecturer at MIT Sloan School of Management, said too many companies looking for funding have “an unhealthy focus on not wanting to dilute” the founders’ ownership. If you’re in it to win, he said, retaining less than 50% ownership — sometimes much less — should not be an issue. As for the view that markets are too unsettled or times are too tough, “turbulence creates opportunity,” he said.

RBC Venture Partners managing director Robert Antoniades agreed with Grandinetti on founders accepting lower stakes in their companies, saying, “You can be a very successful entrepreneur with 10% ownership.” He cautioned founders not to try to remake a “VC process (that) is well understood.”

The critical role marketing plays in the early development and revenue growth of a young company was emphasized by Yahoo Canada general manager Kerry Munro. He encouraged companies to boost their marketing spend when the economy turns sour. “Marketing is the first thing you cut in times of trouble,” he said. “It should be the first thing you invest in in times of opportunity.”

The challenge, he added, is to see marketing in a new light. “Most companies in Canada look at it as a cost and not as an investment.”

One Ottawa CEO who successfully found venture backing earlier this year told the conference he did not share any belief that money is not available, so long as the idea being pitched is worthy. “If you want to raise VC money, you’d better come up with an idea that’s VC-fundable,” said OverlayTV’s Rob Lane, something he defined as having the potential of being worth $100 million some day.

Technorati Tags: entrepreneurs, venture capital, Red Herring, Miranda Technology, capital pool companies, TSX Venture Exchange, Fonds de solidarité FTQ, MIT Sloan School of Management, RBC Venture Partners, Yahoo Canada, OverlayTV

I still remember the day on the schoolyard when I picked up a pair of bent twigs to serve as an imaginary pistols and offered one to my classmate for an impromptu game of cops and robbers.

“I’m not allowed to do that,” he told me solemnly.

“Do what?”

“Play with guns.”

“But it’s just a stick,” I said.  “It’s not a real gun.”

I was around eight years old at the time and it came as quite a shock to learn his parent’s religious convictions precluded my classmate from participating in what I considered to be a harmless bit of fun. Cops and robbers, cowboys and Indians and various other activities now tarnished by PC’s broad brush were an integral part of my childhood.

But, thirty years later, with a boy of my own, that perspective has obviously changed. That’s not to say my son won’t enjoy these kinds of activities with his old man (he is the proud owner of a plastic sword complete with light and sound effects, after all), but I’ve become much more sensitive over the years to the insidious influence of the almighty dollar on the marketing agenda of big business, especially when it comes to marketing merchandise to children.

Case in point. My wife is a volunteer tester for the Canadian Toy Testing Council. Every month there’s a new batch of toys that are supposed to be appropriate for children my son’s age (three+), to be tested, reviewed and, well, played with.

A recent item was a pair of over-sized foam Incredible Hulk Smash Hands that kids wear like boxing gloves. The kid is encouraged to smash and bash, with each impact generating some suitable sound effect or a quote from the Hulk’s extensive vocabulary. My son hates the things. One parent for whom my wife provides home daycare services said they wouldn’t even have accepted them for testing.

For the record, the Incredible Hulk was rated a relatively kid-friendly PG-13 (not that I put much faith in the movie ratings system. A rant on that subject you can find here from my days at the Ottawa Business Journal). There are plenty of toys out there too for the latest Batman flick, The Dark Knight, which also gets off easy, despite its dark and violent tone, with a PG-13 rating. The recommended age range for these toys starts at four years old.

Now, I don’t know about you, but I have a problem with toys being marketed to a kid who can’t even see the movie for another nine birthdays.  I’m glad the marketing PR services I provide usually involve technologies and products that would bore a four-year-old to tears.

Technorati Tags: marketing, merchandising, toys, Canadian Toy Testing Council

I originally wrote this post for DangleTech, Canada’s largest community-sponsored website dedicated to the issues surrounding Canada’s technology sector, where I contribute a weekly blog called “In the media: It’s where you need to be.” But my editor here at inmedialog, who’s been itching all week to see a post on this subject, decided we should also post it here.

One of the most frequent and, to tell the truth, most boring and least helpful, themes in the blogosphere is the all-too-common declaration by one blogger or another that PR is dead. With all the authority of his well-read blog, Robert Scoble started the ball rolling again this week with a post Monday that celebrated the fact that he actually heard about a new company – more of a raw beta concept, really – from some source other than a PR or corporate flack.

Leaving aside for the moment the question why this should be so noteworthy – Hey, Robert: It’s a rare day I don’t learn something new or hear about a new company, product or service with no involvement whatsoever from a PR or corporate flack. I call it waking up, opening my eyes and walking down the street! – he went on to extrapolate from this that PR is dead.

I’m not going to weigh in with comments on all the arguments raised both pro and con the silly idea. If you really have nothing better to do, if Canada’s not doing well enough at the Olympics to draw you in to all the TV coverage and you have time to kill, then you can see a good round-up here.

Notwithstanding the tediousness of this apparent fixation on the part of a lot of the blogosphere to bury PR and speak its eulogy, two useful points emerge.

The first is that when it comes to understanding public relations, the full scope of activities that fall under its rubric and the even fuller scope of marketing activities of which PR is merely a subset, Robert Scoble is strictly a blind man touching an elephant. Like many of his blog brethren, all Scoble ever sees (touches) is the story pitch. And since they are on the receiving end of a staggering number of poorly written and badly targeted pitches, it’s no wonder these guys see no value in what most PR people are doing with them.

In fact, the pitch is the very end of a lengthy and intensive process that, if done properly, creates tremendous value, both for the idea being pitched and for the person to whom it is being pitched. It’s merely one arrow in a PR quiver that, in turn, is merely one weapon in a marketing armoury.

The second useful point is that in many ways, Scoble and his colleagues are right. PR is dead. At least, PR – as it has been practiced by too many for far too long – is dead. That old way saw (mal)practitioners source huge lists of so-called contacts from commercial media directories, mail-merge them with their news release or story pitch, and then blast it out to hundreds, if not thousands. It didn’t work in the old days any better than it does now. All that has changed is that the targets of those useless pitches are naming and shaming those who do it. (I did weigh in on the death of the media directory.)

Far from the blogosphere sounding the death knell for PR, it has focused attention on the most egregious practices of the industry. While I still find most of the arguments tendentious and silly, at least they’re serving this one useful public service.

Technorati Tags: Death of PR, public relations, marketing communications, Scoble

One word: Cuil.

This supposed “Google-killer” launched to much ballyhoo earlier this week. Problem is that the product itself is not yet ready for prime time and so it has, as many media have said, “stumbled out of the gate.” In today’s fast paced tech environment, it’s a costly misstep for a company to generate so much publicity when the product itself isn’t up to par, especially when it’s something so high profile as taking on the most successful search engine in history.

I’m sure the Cuil powers that be are questioning both their branding and their launch strategy this week, with influential bloggers being unable to resist the urge to deem the offering “Totally UnCuil.” Ouch.

Technorati Tags: public relations, publicity, PR disaster, Cuil

I was intrigued last week when the Marketing Profs newsletter opened my eyes to the fact that so-called “Generation Y” appears to love direct snail mail. Given how “plugged in” younger people are these days, this seems utterly counterintuitive, but it is indeed the case. One wouldn’t assume that amongst the electronics that are so prevalent in young people’s lives, they’re keeping their coupons clipped, but indeed it sounds as though this can be an effective way to reach this audience. Certainly more relevant information for those marketing a consumer play, but as entrepreneurs get younger and more skilled young people rise through the ranks in the workforce, it’s a good idea for those in the B2B space to be conscious of the habits of this age group as increasingly they are decision makers in the business world.

Marketing to different age groups has indeed been a hot topic in the marketing newsletters of late, as the Daily Dog also pointed to a piece on bridging the generational gaps with PR programs at the end of last week. It’s important, regardless of what you’re marketing, to be conscious of your audience and implement the marketing activities and methods that are most likely to bring about success. Perhaps these articles will provide you with some insight into your market and how best to reach them.

Technorati Tags: demographics, marketing

Is it surrealist to blog about blogging? It’s not my intention, but should this post turn into an Escher-esque experience, I’ll ask you to please bear with me.

There has been considerable media coverage in recent days about corporate blogging and blogging as it pertains to B2B marketing. Forrester, a well respected technology analyst firm, recently released a study analyzing the role of blogs in b2b marketing and survey results that indicate, “The number of business-to-business (B2B) firms that started blogging in 2007 plummeted compared with 2006 as corporate bloggers ran into roadblocks stemming from a misalignment between invested effort and expected returns. Rather than cross blogging off of the marketing communication list, B2B marketers would do better to embrace one of the four strategies prominently used by bloggers to attract readers, build conversations, and engage community members in sharing their experiences with their online peers.

Four Blog Strategies Produce Community Marketing Value

Strategy One: Be A Conversation Starter, Not A Spoiler

Strategy Two: Make Blog Content Entertaining, Easy To Digest And To Use

Strategy Three: Connect The Dots Between Events And Community Involvement

Strategy Four: Invite Thought Leaders, But Coach Them On Community Etiquette”

According to The Leading Edge, a PR technology trends blog, “infrequent and boring content” is what ails the high tech companies that responded to the survey. This blog has some interesting statistics from the study and I would encourage you to visit the link above to find out more.

The bottom line is that blogging, like any other marketing activity, should adhere to best practices. Those companies that are not deriving value from this particular communication channel are probably not meeting all of the challenges inherent with utilizing a new method of communication to reach customers, influencers and prospects. Since blogging was the “hot, new thing,” you would be hard pressed to find a company that hasn’t at least considered hopping on the bandwagon and starting its own blog. Those that are likely to be successful, though, are the ones that carefully considered the reasoning behind the blog, the objectives that the companies were hoping to accomplish by starting their blogs, and how this channel could support their full range of marketing activities.

Coming up with fresh, intelligent, conversation-starting blog posts with regularity can be challenging, to be sure, but whether the effort and potential return on investment are worthwhile is a question that each company must answer for itself before diving headlong into blogging.

Technorati Tags: blogging, public relations