One place though where this seems be to actually, sadly, true is in the rise of bloatware on Android phones. Having worked for a couple different Windows based computer companies, I was always amazed and dismayed at the power partner marketing groups within these companies had to force software and sometimes hardware onto machines.

It’s one of the things that turned to me to Apple.

My guess, and it’s nothing more than that, is that if Google wants to avoid some of the pitfalls that have plagued Microsoft as a brand, they’re going to have to do what Microsoft never did: own the hardware. Obviously the Nexus One was this, but it seems like Google didn’t, or doesn’t, have any long term vision for this product line in the way Apple has had for the iPhone. Without that, it seems like increasingly, the Android experience is going to be what carriers or handset manufacturers want it to be. At this point, I’m not even sure you can differentiate between the OS and the hardware it runs on. To have a coherent experience, I think you’d need to recognize them as intrinsically tied.

In larger sense it points out, for the millionth time, that if you want own your brand experience, you have to own it top to bottom, no matter what you do.

update
Microsoft doing what Microsoft does with these things: After spending a lot of time redesigning Windows Mobile 7 in an “authentically digital” UI, Microsoft had said they would not allow manufacturers to modify it. I thought this was a great move. While still not as good as MS creating it’s own hardware, at least they’d have some sense of what the end user experience would be. Then I read this today.

Oh well.

Actually – this isn’t really about the iPhone antenna, at least not directly. Rather it’s about this page Apple put up today following their press conference.

Every smartphone has a cellular antenna. And nearly every smartphone can lose signal strength if you hold it in a certain way

I’m not sure what the right answer is for Apple in this scenario, but I feel fairly certain it’s not to say “the iPhone 4: just as bad as every other smartphone!” The page is a list of phones from Blackberry, HTC, and Samsung, along with an iPhone 4 and 3GS showing that iPhone performs no worse than those phones.

Apple is making the case that an iPhone whose phone function is similarly bad to every other phone is still the better device, and this is probably true. But it’s a coldly intellectual response that I’m not sure will resonate for an emotional customer base. For a brand like Apple, I’m not sure what is gained from even talking about other phones unless you’re talking about how much better you are.

It’s a small thing, and likely of no consequence to Apple. I’m not convinced that any amount of back and forth on something like antenna design is going to dissuade people from buy what is, if nothing else, an attractive phone. Frankly, at this point, there just isn’t a product on the market that represents a level of competition to the iPhone to render this kind of mistake meaningful.

Still, it seems strategically sloppy to me.

Also, this.

Back in April, when Apple announced iAd as one of it’s “tent poles” of iOS4, I was pretty ready to just hold for Windows Mobile 7 and see how that looked. I’d had some time to mess with my sisters Zune HD and between that experience, and some of the Win 7 demos I’d seen, I was thinking maybe it was time to make a switch.

Not so much.

Of all the ways Microsoft could have gone after the iPhone – the hardware, the ecosystem, any of it – they pick iAd? The new platform is going by the name Toast for now and the goal is, as stated above, to turn their phones into “an ad-serving machine.” Good lord.

Like Apple, Microsoft is trying to spin this as a feature:

“For consumers, what this means is basically seamless experiences, seamless social connectivity”

Uh, what? On what planet is advertising a seamless, social experience? Advertising by its nature is about disrupting the users experience. It’s about taking them out of whatever they’re doing and saying “hey! look over here!”

What really takes this platform over the top for me is that while iAd is limited to applications, Toast runs in the main OS, serving ads right to the home screen of your phone.

I’m a bit a stuck record on this, but since we’re all here I’ll say it again: display advertising is an artifact of the print and broadcast worlds. It ignores all the best aspects of the web in exchange for showcasing its most boring. Worse, its left huge sections of the digital content economy in shambles, resulting stupid pagination schemes, and user hostile page layouts all designed to squeeze in one more ad. It’s bizarre to me that here on the cusp what should be the next wave of connected systems two companies that should be leading the charge are playing last decades game. I was genuinely hoping Microsoft would come into the mobile space with Win 7 and give Apple something to think about. But if this is how they’re going to do it, what’s the point?

If you haven’t seen it, take a watch:

While it has all the affectations of a serious and daring spot – the formal framing, the back & white, the stern narration – I find it devoid of any seriousness at all. It is in fact, possibly the safest, and ultimately most insulting, route Nike could have taken.

What I’m presented with is this sad sack, hunched over Tiger Woods, pleading for my forgiveness like I’m his wife. Only, it’s not him asking for forgiveness, it’s HIS DAD. That’s right, you made his dad do the dirty work, all the while asking literally nothing of Tiger:

- Tiger, tell me about YOUR thoughts?
- Tiger, how are YOU feeling?

Is everything okay big guy? You doin’ alright? You need a soda?

In my mind, there are really only two legitimate tracks here:

1) What ever Tiger did in his personal life is morally reprehensible, but Nike is all about golf, so lets get it on!
2) What ever Tiger did in his personal life is morally reprehensible, this matters to Nike, so lets address it honestly.

Of course I apparently forgot about secret option 3

What ever Tiger did in his personal life is morally reprehensible, we know it, you know it, we know you know it, but instead of addressing it directly or saying nothing, either of which WOULD ACTUALLY BE DARING, we’re going to attempt to LOOK like we’re addressing it, all the while trying to reposition Tiger as a pitiful victim man-child being defended by his DEAD DAD. You can’t be mad at that guy. Right?

Look, I’m not naive, Nike has a golden calf that can’t keep it’s pants on. They can’t toss him overboard. But they also can’t tie themselves too close to him in case this goes further south. So they did what they had to do. I get it. But lets call a spade a spade. All moral outrage aside, looking at this from a purely strategic point of view, this wasn’t daring, edgy or powerful.

It was the safest thing they possibly could have done.

Update
Buzzfeed seems to agree
White and Wong think it’s alright
These guys liked it a lot

A lot of people will point to last night as a triumph of social media, or of Twitter, or Facebook. And they’ll be wrong. Last night was a triumph and a stark reminder of the power of brand. Any one can get on Twitter and pitch their product or give away iPhones, but how many brands could tell a hand full of individuals about an event and have 4000 people show up, at mid-night, and then when you’re an hour late, and no one can ever hear you, still view it as a success?

So next time you’re in a meeting talking about your ‘consumers’ and ‘targets’ and ‘units moved’, consider the power of ‘fans.’ Are you treating your customers like they’re fans? Do you ask yourself “Is this tweet actually interesting?” or “Is this a great experience?” or “Am I making this website to actually benefit my customer?” Being on Twitter or Facebook or anything like that doesn’t mean that you now relate to your customers. Relating to your customers comes from just that: relating to you customers, as humans, not cash machines. There is no short cut. There is no technology solution.

Trevor Warren said on Twitter

“Right now 1000s of social marketers are licking their chops wondering how to recreate the #Chappelle event for some new juice shop.”

I’m sure he’s right, and this is the sad part of all this. The burn this event had through Twitter and Facebook had nothing to with ‘social media marketing’ and everything to do with a passionate core of fans and a brand that has created great experiences for years. There is literally nothing you can do on Twitter to make 4000 people show up at midnight for your event. There is no advertising in the world that will fix a broken experience. What you can do is start today asking “Is this is a great experience for my customer? Will this make them a crazy, ravenous fan?”

It’s NBA playoff time! I know you love sports so I thought this I would share this story with you:

When I was in 8th grade I started playing on my school basketball team. I was 5’9 at the time, which I guess was tall for my league, and I enjoyed a season playing center and averaging about 20 rebounds and 20 points a game. That summer, my dad got it into both our heads that if I could make varsity my freshman year of highschool, I could play in college and then – who knows. My first year of high-school I missed the first two days of try-outs, but squeaked onto the freshman team on the last day. Now at 5′ 11, I spent the season as an undersized 3rd string center, scoring 3 points and grabbing a single rebound. Total. The next season I was cut from the junior varsity team and played city ball instead. By the time I was in college, still 5’11, I found that basketball had become a humiliating mixture consisting of me getting either blocked or dunked on.

It wasn’t that I was getting worse, it’s that the position I had been playing my whole life was changing, the guys were bigger and stronger and I wasn’t. I had to face reality and change my game: at 5’11 I was a point guard I had to learn to handle the ball, learn to pass and to set up others to score and learn to shoot from the outside. But the biggest change was learning to see the court and the game from a totally different angle both physically and philosophically. While I had been coached as a center, whose role is to impose themselves on the game based on size, the role of the point guard is that of a facilitator. But I did something else too: rather than abandon what I had been coached on, I tried to integrate it into this new role. I tried to understand how i could embrace this new role, and make it my own by adding this skill not often associated with point guard position. I took what I had a natural aptitude for and made that the thing that differentiated me: I was a point guard who could play off the block.

The point of my story is this: for brands, the web changes things, and you need to acknowledge this change and if you want to stay part of it, recognize that you’re going to have to change. You don’t have to throw out what you have, but you’re going to have to look at it from a different angle.

What got me on this is a recent, and well covered, rant by Michael Lynton about the apparent perils humanity faces should the web be left unchecked. I don’t I need to address Lyntons concerns directly, nor the profoundly disappointing SXSW keynote by Bruce Sterling, nor the sort of half-hearted attempts by Andrew Keen to raise hackles at the The Next Web conference. There is though a thread running through all these and I think it’s something brands need to think about, and that is this:

I’m sorry this all happened on your watch. I’m sorry that your predecessors had it easier than you and that your industry is getting turned this way and that by people who have no real interest in your industry or your success. But it’s happening, and yelling at it, or deriding it, or praying that someone will swoop in and fix it all back to the way it was isn’t going to save you, it’s going to leave you in the middle of the street wondering how you got left behind.

One thing we need to come to terms with is this: the internet wasn’t made for you, and it really wasn’t made for you to make money on. It was made to enable people to share information. It was made for scientists and researchers, not for movie makers or Fortune 500 brands. And before there was the web, there were the bulletin board systems, and Usenet, and listservs. All this stuff has always been about individual people sharing with other people. The reason I bring this up is that at some point we got it in our collective heads that the “dot.com” era was the norm, that the web was some sort of cheap media channel to place advertising and that what we’re seeing now is somehow new. It’s not, it’s simply a disrupted system returning back to it’s normal state. While the ad industry is making marketing sites and display ad campaigns or trying to figure out how to sponsor some blogger to shill your product; people are out here sharing, and making their own things, and launching ideas and generally paying less and less attention to you.

The good news is this: as much as the web empowers all these people, it empowers you too. You just need to stop acting like corporation, and start acting like a person again. First things first though: we gotta get off the campaign, it’s a concept that has nothing to do with the web, it has everything to do with you, nothing to do with your customer, and breaks down the exact relationship we’re trying to create. By maintaining this one and done campaign approach to the web your best case scenario is that you make a real a connection with your customer and then pull the rug out from underneath them when the campaign ends. Instead, make something that’s built to last, and built help your customer. Don’t worry about getting your message out, and they will seek you out. Andrew Keller posed a great question a few years ago: why didn’t Kodak’s agency come up with Flickr? How much more relevant would that have been than a banner ad campaign? Yes, it’s absolutely more expensive than any single campaign, but how many campaigns, and micro-sites and Facebook apps has Kodak done since then, and to what end? How would have it have changed their relationship with their customers to say “hey, you like photography and sharing pictures, we like photography and sharing pictures, why don’t we make a product thats all about this thing we all love?”

But there is another thing, while there are somethings you need to do to change up your game, you still have that one thing you’ve always had, your post-up move so to speak: you are an organization. You have the knowledge and the infrastructure to organize people around a task and you have the means to get it done. Thats huge. So yes, the game has changed, and yes, you’re going to have to change. You’re going to have to change your perspective and see things in a different way, but while the web is breaking down a lot of the ways we used to do things, it’s also probably the best way to relate to your customers on human level than anything we’ve had. We can change the relationship to be about something more than you making a product and them consuming it. If you take all the things you already know how to do well, and you change your perspective a little, the opportunity is to take the things that make your brand great and re-envision them through this new position.