Exploring In Real Time Together

Six Observations I Am Making About the 2013 NRA Show.

May 22, 2013 By Charlie Hopper Leave a Comment

Of course at this year’s National Restaurant Show in Chicago, there were some old favorites—the guy with the waffle hat, the generous Wisconsin Cheese and Vienna Beef booths, the Rube Goldberg-ish orange juicer machines.

There’s also goofy stuff, like the parahuman/chimeric Digital Dining Costumed P.O.S. system mascot (pictured) (the system might not be goofy, but the wordless mascot was), and Pixe, a company that absolutely insisted they take my photo with an iPad and post it with a goofy caption to a site that would let me “share” after they emailed me a link (forgetting that I can do all that on my iPhone already without them, and without giving the restaurant my email, which I’d rather not do).

Not a lot of swag, either. Are we as a society kind of tired of “swag?”

Anyway.

Here are my Top 6 Observations from spending a day in Chicago’s McCormick Place at the NRA Show (man, I wish it weren’t the same three letters as a certain politically divisive organization).

Observation 1: Coca-Cola Freestyle touchscreen Coke Machines are no longer a thing. It was introduced in 2009, and even just last year the lines were really long at NRA. This year, you could waltz up and get a spritz of your own recipe of vanilla-cherry-Pibb-Lime-Dasani-Powerade-Orange-Fanta any time you felt like it. Now that the machine is all over stripmalled America, it’s not newsy. (Yet it was still the focus of the Coke booth.) Well-distributed, Coke. So…what else you got in your pipeline?

Observation 2: McCormick Place is not set up for the #NRAShow hashtag. There’s almost no place to sit like a dignified person and charge your iPhone or iPad or iWhatev. C’mon, McCormick Place. I know you want to encourage people to walk and only sit down when it’s time to do business in the booths. But c’mon. We’re live-tweeting the hell out of this #NRAShow. That’s the thing we do now to prove to suspicious compatriots who didn’t get to travel to The Presumably Windy City we were responsibly absorbing substance at all moments. An outlet that doesn’t make me sit on the floor? Please?

Observation 3: There are two kinds of people at the #NRAShow. When you’re strolling the show, everyone either looks absurdly confident or worried.

Observation 4: The people who look worried are probably worried about healthcare or, more vaguely, “branding.” As I stood in line to go into a session in room 402A, the folks heading into room 402B were lined up like it was a nightclub—and the topic was healthcare. Later, I overheard one say to another as they left that session, “Well, that probably paid for the trip right there.” Good work, healthcare session presenter. All the sessions I went to that had to do with “branding” filled completely up. I get the sense that everyone recognizes it’s important but worries they don’t quite understand what the hell it is. I base that on the looks on the audience faces, questions in the Q&A period, and content which I would describe as “useful but pretty basic.”

Enthusiasm and A Zealot’s Intensity helps this fellow from Humm in Austin explain to a random blogger such as myself how customers love answering a survey on an iPad mini delivered to the table as if it were part of the bill. It’s the future of customer feedback (my summary, not a verbatim) (exclamation point implied).

Observation 5: In the tech section, the enthusiastic young people are instructed to “Attack!” It’s somewhat humorous: much of the trade show is made of people putting out food and watching people with whom they will never do business grab big hands full, or serious business people there to do actual business with real customers who need the goods they provide to make or sell food. All of these people are rather passive and even a little disinterested in the average NRA Show walker: either they just want you to take the food and go, or they sort of already know who the dealmakers are and don’t want to engage randomly with everyone. But then you wander into tech alley (once again back by the restrooms) and they attack like fleas born into a room with no mammals, and you’re the first warm-blooded creature to enter their blood-starved habitat. They jump on everybody who comes by. They’re searching for eye contact, jollying up each and every passerby, eager to explain themselves no matter who you are. They don’t even ask who you are until they’re way into their spiel. It’s kinda cute.

Observation 6: Creative, socially interactive ways of gathering customer feedback is the newest biggest deal. A lot of the friendly people who accosted those who wandered into Tech Alley were there to helpfully harvest customer feedback (Humm wants to hand out iPads at the customer’s table; Survly wants to encourage customers who had a good experience to use their mobile device to leave feedback on the usual social sites like Yelp and Google Places). And then when I sent the following tweet, you can see how quick the “Talk to the Manager” people reacted, sort of real-time-proving the way their scheme might work:

Leave a Comment
Filed Under: Exploring In Real Time Together, Opinion, Social Thinking

Our long, national Kitchen Nightmare is over. Oh wait, it’s not over…

May 16, 2013 By Charlie Hopper Leave a Comment

You’ve watched this by now?

And you’ve guiltily enjoyed the social media “meltdown”?

You never win a fight with the internet. That’s a rule for all of us—but to fight with such spectacular lack of awareness, such complete blindness to how this was going to play out. Delicious.

News today from Eater announces that these Kitchen Nightmare rejects are going to open again after sullenly shutting their doors and chasing away reporters. They’ll donate proceeds to a cyber bullying charity.

Wow, Amy. Wow, Samy.

Okay, I’ll grant that in a reality TV show edit room, with a skilled and snarky editor, footage can be manipulated to tell more than one story. And I grant that the Kitchen Nightmares reality TV show staff is always going to make host Gordon Ramsay look firm-even-fiery-but-ultimately-fair. Still. You can’t deny that this is a good example of how not to behave when you know there are cameras.

Still, the focus should probably be on the social media response, captured thoroughly here by BuzzFeed.

They got up the next morning and decided to claim they got hacked; so did Representative Anthony Wiener. And him, I wanted to believe.

Learning to navigate efficient food prep, personnel management, cost control and other demands of the restaurant biz often leaves smaller places like Amy’s Baking Company with very little time to think through their marketing plan.

But make this a rule—if you’re not sure how a particular social media site tends to function, proceed with caution: Don’t hurl insults. No caps lock, no threats, no invocations of whichever God is on your side. Don’t whine you’re being bullied. Be unfailingly civil.

In absence of a plan, that’ll be the plan.

Thank you, Amy and Samy, for providing the latest teaching moment for social media advisors.

And for your sake, I hope that soon you may echo the first words out of Gerald Ford’s mouth here:

Leave a Comment
Filed Under: Exploring In Real Time Together, Kind of Funny, Links To Stories, Opinion, Social Thinking

In a world starved for “content,” you could do worse than just copy Taco Bell.

May 9, 2013 By Charlie Hopper 2 Comments

Taco Bell is producing a movie. It has nothing to do with a specific product. Here’s a quote from the news story I got this from:

This summer, there will be an online music documentary about indie bands Wildcat! Wildcat! and Passion Pit. The documentary will incorporate Tweets and other social media messages posted during the bands’ performances at the South by Southwest music festival.

So, see, there’s this buzzword “content,” and Taco Bell is all over it.

I’ve talked about how alive Taco Bell appears in non-traditional media.

I think, for purposes of this discussion, you can define content as “something the brand’s fans are genuinely interested in, and do not interpret as dumb, hype-y, old-fashioned promotion (though everyone quietly realizes that it’s all part of an overall corporate initiative).”

All content isn’t about third-party-topics like South by Southwest. A lot of it is about Taco Bell.

It’s just not crass. It fits with the way their fans think.

Here’s a couple selections from their YouTube channel:

The key, which Taco Bell gets, is to tap into the mindset of the people you want to get in a conversation with. People are doing these Draw My Life videos—and Taco Bell knows it.

(If you don’t know about Draw My Life, I bet that video looked incredibly self-serving. Here, let Smosh fill you in. It’s a current thing.)

That’s how content works. You look like you get it. You look like you like their bands, play their games, and (because we all know people who might work there) kind of are them in a way.

So how should a restaurant approach content? First, get a clear idea of your best customers, and know what they do when they’re out in the world.

Know their memes. Know when their memes are played out. Get their jokes. Make jokes they get. Humbly understand your place in their universe, especially if it’s currently pretty limited.

Invite them behind the scenes to see you’re basically just like them.

Tweeting is not, strictly speaking, content, and this isn’t new news, but when the corporation behaves so much like a person it sounds like your friends having a Twitter War, the result can become content: most major news outlets have at least mentioned this. Whoever was manning the tweet desk at Taco Bell that day and jumped to the smart-assed defense really, really converted a lot of fans.

Look, everyone has online relationships with actual people they have never and probably will never meet—it isn’t such a stretch for customers to have relationships with actual people who work at Taco Bell whom we can infer exist as potential online “friends” even though they’re acting on behalf of the company. We don’t mind anymore. If they’re cool.

And Taco Bell content strategists seem cool.

Everybody knows it’s part of a capitalist strategy.

But if it’s interesting, and it feels like something they agree with, and they feel invited in to respond, and it demonstrates that the brand is on their wavelength, it’s okay.

That Taco Bell Flower Shop Speakeasy video has over a million views.

That’s not just the marketing department at Taco Bell and the production company’s interns watching that content.

2 Comments
Filed Under: Exploring In Real Time Together, News, Opinion, Social Thinking

KFC returns us now to the thrilling era of the catchphrase with “I Ate the Bones.”

April 30, 2013 By Charlie Hopper Leave a Comment

I can’t believe I ate the whole bones thing, is what comes to my mind.

Try the bones, you’ll like the bones. Mama Mia, that’s some spicy bones.

What’s really interesting is, these KFC ads are running simultaneously with the new K-Mart catchphrase attempt.

Talk about your zeitgeist. Does this mean that we’ll soon be battling gasoline shortages, high inflation, and a jowl-shaking president who is forced to resign in disgrace after bumbling hired thieves are caught burgling the opposition’s political headquarters in a DC hotel? Hope not, because that means we have to live through the 80s and Duran Duran again.

Hahahahahahaha.

Anyway. I enjoy those “I ate the bones” ads, and I think they do a good job of making people: 1. pay attention 2. understand what exactly is going on here which is, for some, big news and 3. tend to remember, repeat, and even re-use the line in the personal lives with their friends. There is practically no higher praise for a piece of creative work (besides, “it sold stuff”).

Let’s screen another one:

(I do like the voice of the actor who says, “Original recipe.” I wish I could talk that good.)

Here’s my only quibble. When they roll out most creative lines in other media—billboards are the classic example—often the creative team talks about it and ultimately decides to feature the catchphrase prominently, especially on media with limited story-telling abilities. Like billboards. Or parking lot lightpole signage:

It’s a mysterious sign in the parking lot that, having not seen the TV, makes the experience seem somewhat questionable. Should we go ahead and hang it up?

And if that parking lot lightpole sign said, “I just shipped my pants!” or “I can’t believe I ate the whole thing!” we’d be through here. But it says, “I ate the bones!” And though there might be a viral component to this (I mostly only saw the K-Mart ad on my Facebook feed), the days are gone, gone, gone where you can assume that Mr. and Mrs. America are watching the very episode of All In The Family in which you have chosen to run your “I ate the bones” campaign. Mr. and Mrs. A. tend to miss a lot of TV ads these days.

And if you (like me, actually) are driving through town and see the lightpole sign that says “I ate the bones!” (like I did) you might be forced to think about it a little too much and come up with the idea (as I did, before I knew the score) that the bones might be ground up and included like Jamie Oliver’s nugget paste right in the goo they make the chicken from. That’s not what I really thought, but I had to consider that as one possible interpretation.

Whatever. It’s not what most people will think, probably, but it does point out that we can’t assume that anyone has seen any other part of our campaign, especially if it’s a TV campaign running in this fragmented media landscape. And we always have to consider how an uninformed person might read the sign, and whether the conclusion they might reach (or the image that might come to mind) isn’t really what we want them to be thinking.

I misinterpreted the bones!

Leave a Comment
Filed Under: Advertising, Exploring In Real Time Together, Kind of Funny, News, Opinion