Brands usually do everything to not act or talk stupid, in public or anywhere their consumers may see them. You could also say it’s usually not smart to act stupid, to share your inner stupidness in social situations, included social media. But Diesel shows just how compelling, how insightful from a brand positioning, messaging and target demo perspective a “little stupid” can be!

Diesel’s recent campaign “Be Stupid” is a total deep integrated marketing dive -- digitally/socially, store level, traditional media -- into creating a counter cultural POV. A total “We”, not “Them” state of mind. Simply, “Be Stupid” is the ideological twin of Apple’s historic “Think Different” campaign.  It took an Einstein to bring Apple’s effort to life.  The face of a genius was not needed here, just the face of a bold brand to drive real relevance for a consumer looking for the "it" to put down real dough in order to be part of something real…stupid!

The “Be Stupid” campaign featured an extremely engaging, very elegantly simple word based video that told the stupid story on their site, via YouTube, Facebook and other places-http://www.diesel.com/be-stupid/. It tells how easy it is to be smart, how expected it is to do the “smart thing” and how being stupid (aka a “contrarian”) takes the stuff of real stuff…another aka -- “balls”! The video is one great piece of communication, but not the only one. The outdoor posters riff off the same song sheet and the sentiment on the retail windows are real world “social media” looking to literally bring you in.

Eye candy today is everywhere. It’s the reality of our rich graphical playing field. But, Diesel’s “Be Stupid” effort shows why a really well thought out marketing idea that makes people think beyond the brand, will always be the smartest way to elevate a brand.

This stupid post was written by Cliff Medney and designed by Ryan Kitson!

One of the pillars of our digital practice at Flightpath is to integrate the art of technology with the technology of art.  Nowhere is the fluidity of this precept more evident than in our SEO work.  The best search-engine optimization requires a mercury-quick understanding of what is happening in any given market at any given time, what words describe that market snapshot in an informative, creative way, and what technology delivers the information in compelling design (incidentally, another of our tenets).

A major breakthrough for us, then, is Google's increased ability to index Flash.  Flash, when it broke into mainstream consciousness, was the pretty new girl in school.  Everyone was a little bit in love and wanted to take her for a ride, but there was a rumbling contingent that warned about the correlative probability that good looks can mean less substance. 

This turned out to be true--Flash didn't offer much in the way of text that search-engine spiders could index; the crawlers couldn't link back to anything, because the browser didn't reload after interactivity.  Even pages that spiders indexed were useless in search results, because users landed on Flash home pages instead of product pages.   

Flash was . . . well, at least it was pretty. 

But, then, last year, Google dedicated the resources to figure out how to index text in Flash sites:

[We] developed an algorithm that explores Flash files in the same way that a person would, by clicking buttons, entering input, and so on. Our algorithm remembers all of the text that it encounters along the way, and that content is then available to be indexed.

The trick, then, is to put the text that you want indexed "along the way" the algorithm travels.  This might include adding text to Flash applications, including a Robots.txt file or adding alternative HTML code.  Making sure the site's organizational strategy includes lots of deep links helps with long-tail optimization, and page titles have never gone out of style.  

Essentially, as Google becomes more and more ubiquitous, making nearly everything about the digital space more inclusive and included in a more intuitive way, we can expect to allow our artistic strengths to shine in happy equilibirium with our market goals and technological requirements.  

We have a project we're wrapping soon for an amazing, artistic client with big-figure goals that will show this to great effect.   Stay tuned! 

Google announced last week that it is ready to begin its DoubleClick AdExchange.  AdAge reports:

The AdExchange works similarly [to how the search market matches ad buyers and ad impressions in real time], but for display advertising. It also includes integration with Google's search ad-sales system, with the idea that it will let search advertisers move money more easily to display and vice versa. In addition, all of Google's network inventory will be available as part of the exchange . . .

The exchange draws criticism from advertising leaders for failing to offer quality inventory based in genuine relevance because of a focus on moving ads as part of exchanges with other exchange centers that are already part of the display-advertising marketplace, but where Google's offer differs in the combination of its transparency and scalability. 

This combination of offers has always been the advantage of Google's advertising programs--any advertiser who has tested click-based against impression-based programs knows that quality scores and targets require a fine balance and that tinkering with that balance within each program is vital to return on investment. 

The criticism, then, that the DoubleClick exchange's weakness is its inability guarantee quality is no different than any criticism that one could make against any Google advertising program.  Advertisements ranked by quality scores--indeed, advertisements in any channel--have only ever been as good as the creative and marketing teams behind them.  Consumers do not respond to poor-quality ads in any channel.  The fact that Google traditionally rewards advertisements that will generate responses because they are constructed well--and that it continues to do so in new mediums--doesn't change that much from the perspective of a consumer market that benefits from additional creative display and more focused and scalable targeting.  

In that context, the criticism of "But will it be any good?" seems a bit like it's based in the straw-man and red-herring fallacies, whereby those that have an interest in maintaining premium, static pricing on digital-advertising real estate find it a protective necessity to play only with the major players within a narrow range of price points.  

This is where we find the true genius in the new exchange.  Before advertisers even begin to consider the elements of paid-search marketing, the core offers on their websites must be relevant, high-quality offers, and organic search concepts, arguably the foundation of search marketing, allow even the minor players to optimize and sustain competitiveness through the idea of the long tail, a frequency-distribution concept that means businesses sell less quantity of more unique unit types.  When sites communicate relevance for a specific product, that product gains visibility in search-engine results because it is focused to a specific target's need or needs.  

Google's DoubleClick AdExchange allows a similar focused targeting and scalability, only, now, advertisers can marry these benefits with high-impact creative, which has previously been limited to a mostly static, contract marketplace.  What this means for advertisers is that the best of all worlds are now coming together, so that the real opportunity of the DoubleClick AdExchange network is exactly that for which some are criticizing it--everyone now has the ability to compete based on merit, as measured by consumer response, across all playing fields, regardless of scale.     

Organic SEO was once a meritocracy--not that long ago, either. 

Back in February, I talked about "the soulless algorithm" that defines search-engine visibility and how to accomodate its calculations while remaining creative.  My point was that an incisive choice of words that mirrors the common lexicon of a targeted market has the capability to generate visibility in search engines and excite and convince an audience about your offer's value in equal measure.  In simpler terms, I said smart writing delivers results.  

I mentioned, then, that search engines influence what we, as writers and marketers, offer them in concomitance.  I promised to tell you more about the syntactical evolution your offer requires to stay relevant in the market and to the search terms your targets enter. 

As it turns out, online marketing is trending away from that syntactical evolution, but only within the context of what creative marketers offer.  Where you may have been able to lead the majority of your market--and, thus, your searchers--into entering sequences of words you created for them, now search behavior leads the creative mind and the digital marketer more than ever. 

Organic SEO is becoming a democracy--and that means you need a lot of people to prefer your offer in order to generate the results your position-based angle generated in the past.

Steve Rubel, SVP & Director of Insight at Edelman, the world's largest PR firm, writes for AdAge [account required] about how sites earn search visibility more than ever these days:

 . . . the search-engine landscape is shifting. Today consumers are far more likely to seek out and, what's more, trust what they read on other sites rather than anything we put out. The reasons are both technological and sociological. 

He cites two new kinds of search, reputational and social.  Reputational search isn't anything new to most of us, but it recognizes that as online media grants growing credibility to blogs, social-media pages, and aggregators through increased PageRank, writers and marketers need to apply SEO concepts to traditional PR materials that appear online.  His tactical triumvirate of research, content development, and measurement is old hat for SEO copywriters, but offers a new approach for PR professionals.  

Rubel breaks ground when he discusses the importance of social search, though:

As more searches take place inside social networks such as Facebook and Twitter, brands that are early adopters in building out "embassies" will be more visible.

There's no doubt that brand reputation today is incresingly shaped by sites we don't control.  This means that even a nascent field such as search-engine marketing must change in order to survive and thrive.

Rubel ends his thoughts with the mention of requisite change, undoubtedly so that readers engage with Edelman to learn more, but I like the idea of exploring the thought with you further here at Flightpath.  

Essentially, social search means search benchmarks are powered by the people.  SEO copywriters and digital marketers must meet the audience on its turf and on its terms, in all senses of the word.  We have to calibrate our message to keywords the masses use within their own worlds. 

As digital marketers, our traditional website and social-media pages must match the vertical and social engines' expectations.  Our blog posts have to satisfy the topical markers--the words--the audience promulgates.  Our tweets must integrate their hashtags.  Our voice is now the brand voice plus the voice of everyone in the world who already cares about our common interest, that is, our offer to them.  

The fine modicum of control we may have enjoyed as creative market leaders still exists in part--Google will never die, and natural search results will always matter--but, more and more, the future of search is in the hands of the people.