Marketing Pilgrim

Data portability has been a big buzzword for the last couple years. Just about everybody has gotten in on the act, from MySpace to Facebook to Google. Even Yahoo has a universal login option.

An new data from commenting platform Echo suggests that the Yahoo ID is doing pretty well for itself (despite launching almost a year after the others). Echo allows commenters to post from a number of profiles, including Facebook, Google and Twitter—and Yahoo ID is the most popular choice:

Over a third of their logins use Yahoo IDs. Facebook sees a quarter and Google a little less. One in ten use Twitter and one in 14 use Open ID.

Although Hulu has seen great acceptance, popularity and even ad rates—commanding as much as 10% of the online video ad market—it still may not be enough for its creators to call it a success. Hulu may be under more ad pressure than almost any other video site (yes, even YouTube), as Ad Age reports:

Hulu is the No. 2 video site on sheer volume of video views behind YouTube, yet no one is yet making much money from its model: not its network backers, other content partners and least of all Hulu itself, which has a hard time paying for its bandwidth bills.

I watched the movie “The Blind Side” this weekend. Being a sports fan I was interested in it but being a human being I was touched by it. I recommend anyone take a few minutes away from things being offered as entertainment these days and watch this one.

Why am I telling you this? Because there is a part of the movie that relates to the famous poem by Alfred Lord Tennyson “The Charge of the Light Brigade” (don’t worry, this won’t be a spoiler for the movie at all). I never paid close attention to the poem until yesterday but the second verse reads

“Forward, the Light Brigade!”
Was there a man dismay’d?
Not tho’ the soldier knew
Someone had blunder’d:
Theirs not to make reply,
Theirs not to reason why,
Theirs but to do and die:
Into the valley of Death
Rode the six hundred.

Did you just poop your pants? Maybe a little bit?

You actually have nothing to fear, unless of course you do actually hope to remain the “interactive agency of record” for your clients. Not that they will no longer require your services, it’s just that a new Forrester reports says that the role will become obsolete.

You see, “the agency of record” will need to be able to handle both traditional and interactive marketing–the lines have blurred. If you’re not the agency of record, you’ll still have a role to play–even if it’s a niche role that your firm specializes in.

Fortunately, you still have some time to prepare for this migration. Apparently, there’s still so little overlap between the “big 5″ agency types–advertising, direct, media buying, interactive, and PR–that companies are not going to be able to put all of their marketing eggs in one basket–at least not yet.

I will file this under “I didn’t know that although I am not even close to surprised” for obvious reasons. Google gets to make a claim about its Chrome browser that others like Firefox and Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 8 and Apple’s Safari can’t. That claim is that it survived the Pwn2Own 2010. Forbes tells us a little more

The Pwn2Own competition in Vancouver is a yearly demonstration of the software industry’s utter inability to keep its products safe from determined hackers. This year, researchers cracked Firefox, Internet Explorer 8, and Safari in minutes, winning $10,000 each, bragging rights and the hardware those applications were running on.

But more notable is the one survivor of the competition’s browser category: Google’s Chrome.

Care Bears?

Have you lost your marbles?

Well I’m not sure yet, but here’s the story.

This week I was taking a break from some coding to relax a little bit with my 21 month old niece. We decided to turn on Care Bears. This specific episode is called Lucky charm. Here we see the story of a young girl with low self confidence who is taught to believe in herself and to create her own luck.

I think this is an incredibly important message not only for children but also for entrepreneurs and businesspeople alike. It’s easy for us to write-off doing something worthwhile by making excuses for ourselves or our companies. By doing so we are able to hide behind our own insecurities and never move forward, taking risk and confronting the challenges they are required to do amazing things in life and business.