This is Violence

The Longview: Old Spice on Twitter

Back in August I wrote about some data I had collected on the Old Spice Twitter account and now, six months of data later, it seems like a good time to hang up this project and move on to something else.

Before I do that though, I thought it would be good to take a look at what happened, think a little about what I would have done differently, and finally to publish the data I collected.

What Happened
There were a few things that prompted me to start this project. First was shear level of attention the project got. I can’t think of another brand effort on Twitter that got the ad industry talking more than this one. Second was the lack of data available on the project. While I’m not an analyst of any sort, as a strategist, data matters a huge amount to me and at the time I started this, baseless blog conjecture was the only form of data available. While my data won’t tell us anything about sales, my feeling remains that some insight is better than none. Finally, I’ve been doing this long enough to know that the ad industry is great at remembering the names of successful projects, but a lot less good at remember how or why those projects worked (subservient chicken, I’m looking at you). My goal with this is to provide some level of historical context for this project so that people can look back understand it at hopefully at least a slightly deeper level.

So what insights can we gather from 6 months of data?

For the most part, I think what I said in August still stands up.

“Much of the conventional wisdom around brands on the web these days centers on the notions of communication and reciprocity. The idea here is that if a brand wants to be successful within the context of the “social web” they’ll need to act a lot more like people and a lot less like companies. But looking at the Old Spice campaign - I have to question some of that.

It’s worth noting that the Old Spice account follows back less 1% of the people that followed them. Also, their rate of communication is about .8 tweets per day. At the same they have about 1% daily increase in followers - about 1,000 per day. Basically - @oldspice was looking a lot like a celebrity account: lots of followers, very little following. This had me wondering if people were following Old Spice the brand, or Isaiah Mustafa, the spokesman? Further confusing the issue though is that unlike those accounts, there isn’t much human connection coming through the account. It’s mostly humorous non-sequitors, and even then, there’s not much of that being produced.

In fact - nearly the entire catalog of bi-directional communication, supposedly the point of brands in the social space, happened in a very short window right before the end of the campaign. This was the time when Wieden was staged their famous video twitter responses.”

I ended that post thinking two things:

1) People who followed the account we’re connecting with Mustafa, not Old Spice
2) That either the conventional wisdom how digital marketing works was wrong, or that the Old Spice campaign was actually a traditional T.V. campaign that happened to be on Twitter.

Since then, a couple things have happened that I think bolster point one and begin to point to answer for point two.

From June 22, when I started this, to September 8, the Old Spice account went from about 91,000 followers to almost 119,000. A net gain of about 28,000 followers in about two and half months. From September 9 to January 23 the account went from about 119,000 to about 119,840. A net gain of about 840 followers in about four and half months. Although the rate of tweeting stayed at about 1 per day, and the tone of the campaign remained consistent, people were clearly no longer interested in following it.

What happened on September 9? That was the day WK launched their new campaign for Old Spice with Ray Lewis replacing Isaiah Mustafa.

Back in August I closed with a couple questions

“…was the Old Spice campaign one of the best social media/web/interactive campaigns ever, or, was it actually the perfect example of what a post-web T.V./broadcast/traditional campaign should be?

If it’s the former, than I think we in this industry need to reexamine our canon of what makes great digital advertising - because we seem to have gotten a lot wrong.

If it’s the later, than I wonder if this isn’t an accidental (or intentional?) example of just how effective the internet and the web have been in totally blurring the lines where content lives and instead leaving us to focus entirely on the nature of the content - in this case, traditional “lean-back” content using Twitter as a distribution channel.”

As I’ve watched this campaign go forward, I feel more and more certain that the Mustafa era of Old Spice was in fact the 2010 version of how traditional advertising should be done: tightly integrated across multiple channels, but using the mechanics of traditional broadcast advertising.

Given WK’s mastery of this format, it’s not that surprising.

All the activity in the digital space, and especially on Twitter, was almost completely tied to television. So much so that the only real activity that happened on Twitter was when it was used to direct people to other commercials. Commercials made in near real-time, but commercials. Whether intentional or not, the Twitter account never had a life of its own outside the T.V. spots and the character they created.

So what to take away from this? Well, without access to WK’s long-term strategy for the brand, without clean sales data, and without budget insights, it would be hard to draw any meaningful conclusion about overall success based on a handful of Twitter stats. But I think it does serve as a brick in a larger understanding of the nature of brands online.

It’s not at all a shock that if your goal is to create an online footing for your T.V. campaign, this would seem to be a great model. If, however, your goal is to create an active community outside your T.V. advertising, it would seem the conventional wisdom is at least more right: you’re going to have to create a uniquely compelling and ongoing reason for people to join.

Just as with T.V., single spikes in activity online seem to only create single spikes in interest. The important thing is understanding what you’re trying to achieve - no single approach is good for everything. If your goals are the sort of goals advertising is good for, than I think it could be worth looking at how WK conducted this campaign.

If this campaign reenforced anything for me it’s that in the end, advertising is advertising, no matter where you put it. The web is an amorphous medium, capable of looking like a lot of things - though some better than others. What it doesn’t do is take a set of ingredients and make them something different. If you pour advertising ingredients into the web, advertising comes out.

What Would I Have Done Differently?
Well, a lot.

First of all, I wish I would have tracked a couple other accounts to compare against. For example, back in August I made the comment that Old Spice account felt a like a celebrity account to me - I wish I had been tracking at least one celebrity account to see if it acted the same way. Also, I wish I had been tracking another CPG-type brand just to set a baseline. Finally, I wish I would have tracked my own account over this timeline, again as a baseline.

Also in hindsight I just wish that I had more data. If I had to do it again I would have at least tried to keep track of @ replies coming from and going to the Old Spice account. I want to have a better sense of what the conversation, or lack-there-of looks like. Something I have in my notes, but didn’t track well enough to include it in the final data, were the kinds of tweets the account sent out. At some point I noticed the account started sending out more DR-type tweets and it would have been nice to be able to see what effect those had.

At the same, as much as I would love to have this data, tracking Old Spice data isn’t my full time job and making the process of data collection easy is part of the reason this happened at all. I could have set up a Radian 6 or ScoutLabs account and gotten everything I wanted and more, but I wonder if I would have been able to keep it up long-term. Unlike the work we do here at Fight for our own clients, this one was purely a side project for me.

What’s Next?
So that’s the end of this project. I already have a couple ideas for followup projects and hopefully I’ll be able to take what I learned from this experiment and make those better. I have to admit - it’s hard to have 6 months of work into something and then start over knowing that it will be months before I have a useful base of data again. On the other hand, I think the marketing industry as a whole, and advertising in particular, is overly obsessed with “today.” We too often lose the the insights that can only be gained by watching how “today” turns into “tomorrow” and then “6 months ago.” Sometimes the only way to uncover the fundamental truth of something is to be able stand back, sometimes miles back, and look at the broader ways things relate to each other. It’s understanding those truths that drives me as a strategist, drives everyone at Fight, and ultimately is what I think results in the sort of culture shaping work I think we all want to make.

The Data
This zip file contains my original Numbers file, and an exported Excel file. The Numbers file has all my charts formatted properly but I think the Excel file should be serviceable too. I marked in purple the date (9/9/10) as the date Ray Lewis was introduced to the campaign. Marked in orange are 3 days that show what seem to be odd changes in the number of tweets shown for the account. I’m not sure what’s going on here - it could be something totally normal that I’m just unaware of, or it could be some system error on Twitters part. I’m just not sure.

This data is, for whatever it’s worth, free to take and do whatever you want with. If you do something interesting with it, I’d love to hear about it.

Apple and Research

“None. It isn’t the consumers’ job to know what they want.”
- Steve Jobs in response to the question “How much market research did you do for the iPad?”

That research isn’t always something that’s loved by the ad industry shouldn’t be news to anyone. And the “Apple doesn’t do research” meme has proven a convenient out for many people who rather not be bothered in that it combines the industry’s two favorite loves: Apple and doing whatever they want, why-ever they want. While this specific Jobs quotes is the one that’s been making the rounds on Twitter this week, it’s really just the latest in a line of Jobs quotes that, for as long as I can remember, people use to disavow research.

But I think there is a danger in the way a lot people misunderstand the quote which is this: The products that Apple makes don’t just fall out of the sky - Apple actually does TONS of research. The distinction that needs to be made is how, when and why Apple does their research.

The first important thing is how Apple is able to get their data: iteration. It’s pretty rare for Apple to release a truly new product, and they do so far less than most other similar manufacturers. The basic form of the current MacBook Pro has been getting revved for over 10 years now. The iPhone has been only incrementally updated since it’s release, and the iPod and iPad we’re both developed, by Apple’s own word, using insights gained from the iPhone. Working like this allows Apple to watch actual customers use their products, understand what works, what doesn’t, and adjust that product from a consistent base rather than re-invent it.

Which leads to when Apple gets their data. Because they don’t reinvent their product line every year, they’re able to get their data and insights in what is effectively the middle of a product’s lifecycle. This is important because it means the data they’re gathering is real-world, but also that they have the opportunity to actually implement changes based on that data.

Finally, both how and when Apple gets their data points to why: they may not be looking to customers to tell them what to make at the start of a project, after all - people are awful at knowing ahead of time what they want. Rather, they look to see what they’re customers are doing with Apple’s products and then use those insights to improve the next iteration.

The challenge for most companies in adopting this model, agencies especially, is that they’re obsessed with constantly reinventing their products. Every campaign is a make-or-break, big idea that’s built from scratch. With no foundation to work from, there are really only two options: One: ask people what they want - which is dumb. Again: we’re all pretty terrible at predicting the future. Or two: use no data and hope you’re right. The problem with that though is, just like everyone else, we’re all pretty terrible at predicting the future.

Of course, this is just one aspect of research - and it’s just one aspect of the research Apple does too. Before the launch of their first stores, for example, Apple hired consultants to inform them about Gateway’s experience in the retail space. They also famously built out full prototypes of the store to test it. The results of these tests lead Apple to completely rethinking their original concept.

In the end, it’s not the mode of research that concerns me. Every project, client and agency is unique and will require its own solution. What does concern me is the underlying narrative of this meme that says that somehow research leads to worse products. Clearly Apple does research. Clearly it doesn’t negatively affect their products. Can we put this one to bed now?

Pernicious Blogging

You can’t tell someone their baby is ugly and expect them to smile back.
Similarly - you can’t tell an entire industry of people they’re terrible and except them to thank you for it.

So it’s really no surprise that Peter Merholz’s blog post “The Pernicious Effects of Advertising and Marketing Agencies Trying To Deliver User Experience Design” raised more than a few hackles. Last time I checked the post had generated over 70 comments - most of them in support of ad agencies - and at least 4 other response posts. I suppose this post makes 5. What’s weird though is that each time I sat down to write this post, I couldn’t figure out how to start. The reason?

I actually don’t disagree with a lot of what Peter says.

I’ve spent nearly my entire career working in agencies - an experience that I found dissatisfying enough that it drove me first to create this blog - largely devoted to critiquing agencies, and then to starting my own agency to address many of the very points Peter is making. But the thing is, when I read Peter’s post, I found myself going to my keyboard not to support him, but to call him a jerk.

It’s a strange position to be in, and frankly I don’t like it. I’ve always been a huge supporter of Adaptive Path - over the years I’ve gone to their UX Week conferences, sent co-workers and bosses to their UX Intensives and MX conferences. I’ve passed around their blog posts and videos and received just as many from colleagues. In my bag right now is an Adaptive Path notebook. I’ve always found their work insightful, thought provoking, and importantly - far reaching. Just as their MX conference’s seek to move UX thinking into the “C” level of organizations, I’ve always felt their ideas where the sort that you didn’t need to be a designer to take to heart. As a strategist, I never felt like UX was something that was intrinsic to design. In fact, a core tenet of Fight is that we help our clients by helping their customers.

So it was a little off putting when I read this:

“Many of these firms come at [UX] from an honest place. A desire to make the world a better place, and a recognition that improving user experiences can do that, even if only in a small way.

And then there are the advertising and marketing agencies.”

Uh, what?

“The thing is, these agencies do not come at user experience from an honest place. Ad agencies, in particular, are soulless holes, the precepts of whose business runs wholly contrary to good user experience practice.”

Wow.

“In a perverse way, I also find ad agencies to be instructive, because it’s one of those situations where the best thing to do is pretty much the opposite of how they practice.”

Okay, now you’re just trying to hurt my feelings.

There is, of course, more - which I’ve chose a few select cuts:

“When criticizing ad agencies, you have to begin at the core — advertising, as it is widely practiced, is an inherently unethical and, frankly, poisonous endeavor that sees people as sheep to be manipulated, that vaunts style over substance, and deems success to be winning awards.”

“Ad agencies, by their nature, see people first and foremost as consumers, or, as Jerry Michalski once said, “a gullet who lives only to gulp products and crap cash.” Advertising and marketing perspectives give priority to the client over the clients’ customers, to the degree that it’s acceptable for advertisers to encourage people to behave against their own interests if that’s what serves the client.”

“As clients realize that their problems exist across multiple channels and platforms that should work together (web, mobile, retail, collateral), it’s common that they look to their ad agencies to help them deliver services across these channels. However, when you approach it from the viewpoint of marketing, where “the brand” is the top priority, you’re designing from the inside-out, and the results is a superficial gloss, where brand standards and visual identity are consistent, but there’s no appreciation for how users actually behave in these different contexts, and there’s no attempt to coordinate internal client teams to work in concert.”

I could go through each of these and point how Fight isn’t like that, or how Peter’s lack actual knowledge of how advertising works is apparent throughout, but others have already done that. And ultimately it’s these response posts - or more specifically the ease at which they flow - that is really what pisses me off about his post. In an effort to make a point, Peter goes for cheap shots that are so histrionic and over the top that they ultimately undermine any actual argument. Any agency can reply simply “we’re not like that” and move on without needing to address the larger, actually important and actually real problem that sits at the center of Peter’s article.

Because they aren’t like that. Because no place is.

There is no agency where soulless creeps sit in dark offices strategizing about how they’re going to screw over their employees, clients and customers all at once. There is no agency where they talk about customers as cattle that crap cash. Sure, there are assholes - but there are assholes in every industry. The Glengarry Glen Ross world Peter paints though is so facile and so easy to discount that it removes nearly any pretense of a seriousness from the post. Which is a shame.

What could have been a meaningful outsiders observation on the state of advertising instead resorted to the type of hack-ish, hyperbolic rhetoric he’s ostensibly fighting against. And this is the real failing of the post, because the industry is sick. The culture is dysfunctional, and it does need to change. But the thing is, there are so many of us out there trying every single day to make that change. People who believe that there is a way help our clients put their products into the marketplace in different, helpful, and meaningful ways. People who believe in not adding to the cultural pollution that affects so much of marketing, but instead want to make the very products and services Peter is now claiming we cannot. In doing so, he’s just added another front to our war: myopic advertising d-bags on one side, and now myopic high-horse design firms on the other.

Marketing - and even advertising - isn’t going away. As long as there is commerce, companies will need ways to contextualize their products. They will need to differentiate their products. They will need to communicate with their customers. Do things need to change? Of course, and many agencies won’t make that change and they’ll perish. But some of them will change, and more importantly, new agencies and new thinking will come into being. We could use a little support.

In the end Peter’s post demonstrates, with troubling efficiency, the very lack of insight, lack of critical thinking, and lack of knowledge that he accuses ad agencies of pedaling. All on a blog set up to advertise his companies core offering - insight, critical thinking and knowledge. Worse, it shows that what I believe to be one the core problem facing the agency world - the dogmatic belief that good ideas have a certain form, come only from certain places, and that only certain people are capable of having them - is present at Adaptive Path too.

And that’s just sad.

Ad Agencies and the iAd Promise Land

I saw this today from Ben Malbon:

What Ben is hopeful for is the prospect of relevance for online display advertising discussed in Edward Boches’ article.

You should go read the post, but the basic premiss - as it has been all along with iAds - is that digital advertising is finally going to come into it’s own now that Apple is in the game.

But there is a structural problem to Edward’s argument, and it’s a problem that has been consistent from nearly every ad person I’ve heard speak about the promise of iAds, which is that fundamental problem with online display advertising lays in the creative execution of it.

That’s not true.

“…Apple is hoping that iAds deliver a quantum leap in advertising story telling as they have the potential to combine the cinematic beauty of great TV advertising (visceral imagery, animation, special effects), the interactive nature of the web (games, choices, navigation), the sharing and involvement of social media, and the tactile (digitally speaking) sensation of turning pages.”

That’s Edward’s quote, but the thinking isn’t unique to him. Here is the problem with this line of rationale though: all those things - the “visceral imagery”, the “animation”, the “games, choices, navigation”, the (ugh) “turning pages” - these have all been at our creative disposal for years. There is nothing technically or creatively new with iAds. Once you take that away - what we’re left with is Apple’s moderation of the ads and the minimal novelty of an ad in an application, on your phone.

But more succinctly from Edward

“Display doesn’t work because the creative sucks and the options are limited.

No, it’s not. And no they’re not.

But lets lay that aside for the moment. I think what ad agencies are really hoping for is something, anything, that will let them keep doing and thinking what they’ve always done and thought. And that’s what Apple is selling them.

I’ve written about this so many times even I’m bored with it - but the cultural underpinnings of contemporary advertising are so strongly tied to the concept of broadcast narrative story telling that I don’t believe they can collectively imagine a world where this doesn’t work. This is laid bare in one of Edward’s comments after his post:

“Could iAds be the Super Bowl spots of the digital age?”

And this isn’t to pick on Edward, but just to point out how fully contained within the world of “the copy writer and the AD create a narrative, the customer consumes that narrative” advertising culture is. Even the metaphors are about T.V.

But the internet, and the way people want to use it, is showing us that it’s a non-narrative, product based system. People install applications, or go to websites because it provides some value to them. How many millions of web sites are there? And there are already what, 250,000 application just on the iPhone? Yet, all I have is 24 hours each day to split between everything have to do and everything I want to. And every day, there is another site, and another application, but the same 24 hours.

My question - given that, why would I spend even one second watching a banner ad, let alone minutes interacting with it? If I want entertainment on my phone, I’ll watch a movie on Netflix, or I’ll play a video game. If I need to accomplish something - the last thing I want to see is your advertisement.

So here is my advice - if you’re working for a brand right now, doing something on the internet, make something that is useful for their customers. Make something that makes them relevant online. Make something that, when their customers give you 1 or 5 or 10 minutes out of their 24 hours, leaves them better off.

Don’t make them turn digital pages to watch your T.V. ad.

Some Questions about the Meaning of OldSpice

The Portland Ad Federation had an event with Dean McBeth from Wieden+Kennedy to talk about the Old Spice campaign. I wasn’t able to attend, but it did motivate me to do a little analysis of a project I’ve been working on for about a month.

Ever since July 22nd, about the time the Old Spice campaign ended, I’ve been tracking their twitter stats. How many people they follow, how many people follow them, tweets, and so on. Why track this? I’m not really sure other than that I found the campaigns transition from T.V. to the web unique and I wanted to see what the tail looked like. While I think things like ROI are critical, without continuous access to sales numbers all the industry talk about the role this campaign played in that regard is really just blog fodder. It’s fun, but sort of pointless. What really interested me was the nature of the campaign - how it existed in the context of contemporary advertising.

I’m not an analyst of any sort, and until I heard about Dean’s presentation, I hadn’t done anything other than keep a daily (or nearly daily) tally of a handful of numbers. Hearing about the PAF event though, I decided to dump them into a spreadsheet and see what, if anything, was there. Here’s what I got:

From 07.23.2010 through 08.29.2010 the Old Spice Twitter account looked like this
They followed 719 people
They had 116,848 people following them
They were on 3,669 lists
They tweeted 1859 times
Note: that tweet number is slightly odd though because on 08.26 they had 1909 tweets.

If you’re curious what that looks like - here you go:

Interesting.

Much of the conventional wisdom around brands on the web these days centers on the notions of communication and reciprocity. The idea here is that if a brand wants to be successful within the context of the “social web” they’ll need to act a lot more like people and a lot less like companies. But looking at the Old Spice campaign - I have to question some of that.

It’s worth noting that the Old Spice account follows back less 1% of the people that followed them. Also, their rate of communication is about .8 tweets per day. At the same they have about 1% daily increase in followers - about 1,000 per day. Basically - @oldspice was looking a lot like a celebrity account: lots of followers, very little following. This had me wondering if people were following Old Spice the brand, or Isaiah Mustafa, the spokesman? Further confusing the issue though is that unlike those accounts, there isn’t much human connection coming through the account. It’s mostly humorous non-sequitors, and even then, there’s not much of that being produced.

In fact - nearly the entire catalog of bi-directional communication, supposedly the point of brands in the social space, happened in a very short window right before the end of the campaign. This was the time when Wieden was staged their famous video twitter responses.

And here is where I get to the confusing nature of this campaign. For a campaign that’s been regarded as the best social media campaign of the year, and even the best web campaign of the year - it doesn’t look a lot like what we’ve assumed social media and the web look like: It’s not interactive, it’s not communicative, and the one technical boundary it pushed - the video twitter responses - was a boundary of traditional media, not digital. To the extent that there was engagement at all, it was limited to the terms of the brand: they choose a tiny fraction of the communication directed at them to respond to, and then retained absolute control over the tone and length of the “conversation.”

In the end, this all sounds a lot like a different medium: T.V.

Now, it seems like lately, “T.V.” or “broadcast” has become a sort of dirty word in digitally minded circles, but that’s not at all how I mean it here. But everything I’ve written to this point raised a big question for me: was the Old Spice campaign one of the best social media/web/interactive campaigns ever, or, was it actually the perfect example of what a post-web T.V./broadcast/traditional campaign should be?

If it’s the former, than I think we in this industry need to reexamine our canon of what makes great digital advertising - because we seem to have gotten a lot wrong.

If it’s the later, than I wonder if this isn’t an accidental (or intentional?) example of just how effective the internet and the web have been in totally blurring the lines where content lives and instead leaving us to focus entirely on the nature of the content - in this case, traditional “lean-back” content using Twitter as a distribution channel.

The Importance of Farmville

Among Time magazine’s 50 Worst Inventions there are many that probably deserve to be there: Hair in a can, the parachute jacket, and popup advertising among them. But two that stuck out to me as being misplaced on the list though were Foursquare and Farmville.

Both are regular targets of ridicule as time-sinks, examples of wide spread vanity, and general creepiness; and while they may be all those things - worst inventions they are not. In fact, I think there is a lot we can learn from the popularity of each. In either case, rather than mocking these games and their fans we might be better served instead by looking at what they’re telling us about societies own short comings and how we as designers, developers and strategists can not only respond to them, but try to alleviate them.

Think about this from Jane McGonigal’s recent TED presentation

“We know that we are optimized, as human beings, to do hard meaningful work. And gamers are willing to work hard all the time, if they’re given the right work.”

Then consider Time’s take on Farmville - “more a series of mindless chores” than a game. To me, the real criticism lays at a society and industrial system so devoid of meaning or fulfillment that people get more out of tending a make believe farm.

Similarly, in describing Foursquare as “Just another tool tapping into a generation of narcissism” and creating “another layer onto a generation living virtually” I have to wonder if the author has ever actually played the game. In fact, Foursquare is an outstanding example of how a game can actually move people out into the physical world. After all, you can’t really play the game without going out into the world, and the more places you visit, the higher your score. If anything, it’s the pressure coming from brands and agencies trying to find an angle and those who ask “but how does it make money?” that have pushed Foursquare away from the core that made it popular in the first place. Instead of focusing on how to make the game play better, the Foursquare team has ended up focusing on how further enable coupons and business oriented reporting tools.

While it’s easy to poke fun at either of these or write them off as nothing more than mindless wastes of time, doing so misses the message in each. While businesses decry the loss of passion and dedication of their workforce, and brands fret about a lack of relevance, the solutions are staring us in the face.

What if though, instead of that next micro-site; you, your agency, and you client actually tapped into this need for meaningful work and provided the structure and toolset for people to do it? What if a brand project was able to motivate people in the way Farmville or Foursquare does, but for something more than digital farms?

Here is a small example of how Fight is trying this:

A while ago, one of Fight’s clients, Portland General Electric came to us with a challenge - how could they use the web to get people more information about energy efficiency? While we could have set them up with a Twitter account to send out efficiency tips, or a micro-site about wind farms we decided to go a different direction. We instead started a project called Operation Switch. The purpose of Switch is to give people simple missions - installing CFL light bulbs, or washing your laundry in cold water - that while individually small, have a huge benefit when done collectively. After the first mission, Switch participants managed to make changes that will result in 14,445 fewer pounds of CO2 in the atmosphere.

We’re still in the early stages of the game, and it’s likely that we’ll continue to tune things along the way, so far peoples response to being given work that means something and then shown the results of their work, is proving that the desire to act is there it’s just up to us to help make it happen.

Face of Media

Last week I had a chance to sit down with Bret Bernhoft from the Face of Media podcast to talk about brands on the web, what competition means now, and a little about what Fight is up to these days.

You can listen to part one here. And Part two here. For you convenience, I made sure to annoyingly tap on the table in both, so you don’t have to worry about missing that.

Bret has interviewed some other really interesting people (most with far more pleasant voices than mine), so while you’re there, you should check some of the other interviews out.