Eco-friendly products, eco-design, eco-technologies, eco-renewable energy, eco-sustainable development… and this list could have no end. No doubt that the 21st Century is the eco-century. While not being a new idea, it has been a few years that sustainable development has taken centre stage under the political, social, and industrial spotlights. Ancestral cultures already recognized the need for cultivating harmony between the environment, society and economy. What is new is the perspective from which those ideas are looked upon: they are placed in the context of the Information and Globalisation Age, with all what it means. In a nutshell, there are no more limits on Mother Planet Earth: possibilities and dangers are endless.

What is also new is the power that sustainable development has earned in business communication. “Sustainable” and “eco” words are now pervading all marketing and sales pitches. For every advertiser or marketer, the game today seems to try and find a (often artificial) way to obtain an eco-label for their products or to demonstrate their sustainable value.

There are obviously some privileged playfields, and the tourism industry is one of them. To take one concrete example, what do you think if I’m telling you Sri Lanka?
Ceylon teas, elephants, gems, spices, ayurvedic medicine, ecological sites and friendly denizens are some of the positive images that should come to your mind. And that’s also what all travel companies will put forward to make you dream about this exotic destination. But to try and tease your interest, they will also describe their pre-packaged travel services by using various labels such as ecotourism, sustainable tourism, eco-adventure, nature-based tourism, responsible tourism, green travels, and so on.

And you already know that: the eco-trend will accompany you all along your travel path. In your hotel, you’ll be offered ecological skin care, while in tourist shops you’ll be able to buy all kinds of local eco-products. The good news is: more than ever, it is today possible for the true eco-concerned tourist to travel with responsibility and contribute to the sustainability of the destinations and the welfare of its inhabitants. On the other hand, the conscious traveller needs more than ever to develop his ecological literacy and to learn how to filter the marketing claptrap.

To finish up and to follow-up with Sri Lanka, here are below two interesting examples of innovative eco-products and advertising that I recently came across with.

Recycable Elephant Dung-Made Paper: Sri Lanka elephant population is about a tenth of the estimated total of 40,000 Asian elephants in the wild. On average an adult elephant produces about 180-200 kg of dung per day. An amazing project resulted into producing handcrafted, multicoloured paper products made from 75% dung and 25% recycled paper. You support the elephant cause with your money, and they give you back a nice, truly organic product that they manufacture right from their intestines. Now, that’s what I call fair trade!

Word-of-Mouth Water-Tanks: Another example is a word-of-mouth, outdoor social advertising initiative developed for the We Can (End all Violence Against Women) campaign: in tsunami related camps, water-tanks are providing an unexpected platform for the campaign messages.

Aahhh…motivation is everything. It’s been a bit of time since my latest post. But some of you dudes recently requested me to go back to my keyboard and blog writing habits. For that, I owe you much gratefulness.

Get reassured: Doctor Marcom’s brain has not fallen sleep. Nor has it been washed dry by some obscure thought manipulator. No, the true reason of my short silence lies in a 15 day period of pure escape holidays. As simple as that: 15 days en el pais del sol y de la tequila (the country of sun and tequila), Mexico!

It was my first time in Latin America and I can claim it aloud: not a single disappointment! The sun warmed my skin on a daily basis and Mexican people welcomed me warmheartedly, spicy Tacos and pure tequila rejuvenated my palate and nose, and Salsa and the Spanish language never sounded as sensual to my ears. One sense missing? That’s right: what do my eyes have to tell about this latino paradise?

I won’t tell you about the dreamy sunsets or bombas latinas. Everybody’s eyes can see that, even if sometimes with different appreciation filters. What surprised me more than I would have thought was Mexican advertising. Obviously, I had not forgotten to take my digital camera with the hope to snapshoot some typical Mexican street ads. What surprised me most in street advertising was that I did not see it! During my 15-day staying, I did not see a single advertising sign in the streets. Not a single sign advertising products, but… dozen of signs advertising political candidates for the coming presidential county elections (below are two photos of the signs of ’senores’ Diaz Borioli y Dr. Heriberto).

The reason for that was quite simple: the local government of Puerto Vallarta decided to protect the sea-side, summer-resort mood of their city (more than 200,000 inhabitants) from product advertising. I guess this happens in most summer resorts, but this was the first time that it caught my attention so strongly. You can’t imagine how an ad free world can be soothing. This time, less was more!

What is an expert?
What is a generalist?
How would you define the word expertise?

Instead of writing a long and complex post to try and answer those almost philosophical questions, let me provide you with two very simple but meaningful sentences:

• Experts know everything about nothing.
• Generalists know nothing about everything.

That was Doctor Marcom’s fast food for thought for today! Think about it!

On 21 January 2006, French record retailing giant FNAC will launch their new advertising campaign to promote FnacMusic, their music download web site.

The advertising campaign has been developed by BDDP & Fils agency and aims at increasing the awareness and notoriety of FNAC web site. The visual used for the campaign displays an interactive children flip book. Each page of the flipbook is made of three independent sections, which you can turn and mix to create original musician characters. On a single page, the same character can then have the head of a funky Motown singer, the chest of an upscale, white jazz saxophonist, and the legs of a young, grungy guitarist.

While conveying an entertaining feeling, the message behind the ad also stresses the richness and user-friendliness of FNAC’s download music offering. They promise you easy-to-download musical entertainment, whatever your musical tastes, whoever you are. As easy as ABC! ‘As easy as a child’s game’ (’simple comme un jeu d’enfant‘ in French), as French people would say.

From 21 January 2006 on, the poster will be displayed in the 68 French shops of FNAC, and displayed on FNAC web site and printed customer publications.

When Canadian Sociology Professor Marshall McLuhan predicted in the 1960s that media (television) would create ‘the global village’, none of us could have imagined to what extent the Internet would have revolutionized the way we would work and live just a few decades later.

With the Internet today, you can search and find just about everything in just a few clicks: personal information about your boss, colleagues or neighbors, the latest book of your favorite author, a second-hand car, an exotic 10-day vacation at the other side of the world, a new job, a new flat, a one-night sexual partner, or even your love mate for life. That’s for the benefits!

Any drawback? Sure there are, and not from the lesser ones. Some have already experienced the dark side of globalization by getting their job stolen by incredibly cheaper, more docile third-world workers. Why do we need to pay a programmer $40 an hour in Europe or in North America, while programmers in India do well on $3 an hour? For a very interesting article related to the topic, please read The New Face of the Silicon Age - How India became the capital of the computing revolution. The article also gives the list of the top 5 US employers in India: General Electric (17,800 employees), Hewlett-Packard (11,000 employees), IBM (6,000 employees), American Express (4,000 employees), and Dell (3,800 employees).

My Job Went to India	Debugging Indian Computer Programmers: Dude, Did I Steal Your Job?
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So, is the outsourcing threat real?
You might answer yes when thinking at the personal, individual level. We all have an acquaintance of ours who has been on the dole since his company decided to export his technical skills to China. Or at least, we have heard about a man who heard about a man who… A popular trend today is indeed to communicate about such frightening but exciting stories, be they urban myths or sheer reality. You can even find web pages displaying jobs at offshoring risk. Eye-catching communication at it’s finest!

But what about the global level? Globalization is a complex and sensitive topic, leading to extremist pro and con positions. You will find plenty of contradictory articles on the Internet and as many contradictory theories by brilliant economists and researchers. What side are you on?

In the business community, companies have started to understand the importance to communicate clear, positive corporate messages related to globalization. If skills outsourcing remains a dangerous topic to be banished from corporate communication in most cases, one angle to talk about it positively is to make it part of a social initiative. For a few years, this has been a trend that developed under the label ‘Corporate Responsibility in the Global Economy’. Corporations leverage their sponsorship or participation in education initiatives to claim their commitment to social causes in the global economy. This is particularly true for software editors, whose technology and related skills can be easily exported. The most recent example is the one of SolidWorks - an engineering/CAD software company – that decided to donate software, training, and engineering expertise to help rebuild Rwanda’s infrastructure. Pro-globalization will call those companies well-meaning. Anti-globalization activists will see economical dangers and political manipulation.

To end up with and for your reference, here is link toward a very activist web site – Gone with the World - from which I took the following food for laugh/thought:
Mr. X: I bet you Americans don’t even know where India is.
Mr. Y: I most certainly do; it is right between me and a paycheck.

From 5th to 9th January 2006, the Paris Furniture Fair (‘Salon du Meuble’ in French) – a major European Fair and first Fair of the year – welcomed 1,000 companies from 40 countries and 40,000 international visitors in the chic, French capital.

Benefiting from the network of one of his colleague (network is everything! Thanks Muriel), Doctor Marcom was able to get a free invitation and go and drag his feet to this fair for his well-earned week-end. My initial objective was to find the very special pieces of furniture I have in mind and I still miss to furnish my newly renovated flat, while collecting original ideas to decorate my interior. Once there, my marketing-perverted eyes immediately saw opportunities to write a post for this blog.

Exhibitors’ offers concerned all items related to furniture and home furnishings and interior design. Three major sectors awaited visitors:

• The Wide Market welcomed manufacturers of modern and classical furniture, large distribution and bedding.
• The VilleAge regrouped classical furnishing products adapted to todays needs in a specially adapted scenography and presented the market’s trends.
• The Metropole brought together industrial firms and editors dedicated to contemporary furniture (kitchen, bathroom, lighting…) and working with designers.

From a marketing standpoint, my visit was both eye-teasing and refreshing. Compared to high-tech fairs or other IT tradeshows where all companies’ booths look the same (basically demo screens + demo makers + sales reps + meaningless goodies + big logos and posters displayed everywhere on the booth panels), visiting the Paris Furniture Fair was a bit like walking though cinema studios.

Even if some exhibitors’ booths poorly displayed dozens of furniture pieces next to each other, some others had developed unique, conceptual booths. While the former used a stone-aged marketing method known as cataloging (which may make sense according to the brand positioning), the latter showed their pieces of furniture in meaningful contexts, placing the products either in real-life use situations or in showcase environments reinforcing their brand values.

For examples, you could test the user-friendliness of modern kitchen furniture in a booth resembling an ergnomic lab, and then walk a few meters away into a jungle-like booth to enjoy exotic Thai furniture. Another example was a huge box-shaped booth that was all covered with the feathers normally used to fill in quality pillows. Penetrating the obscurity of this ‘house of feathers’ – entitled ‘The dreamy life of a bed’ (in French: ‘La vie rêvée d’un lit’), you could see a video explaining the life of a bed being projected on the walls of the room, but also on the screen-white bed sheets, sofa and curtains. Being also a good example of partnership marketing, the initiative was co-developed by the following brands to promote their bedroom products: Zoltan, Calligaris, Sciae, Rossini, Celio, Roset Contract, Dunloppilo.

Be it for their ergonomic, educative, esthetic or poetrical qualities, all those guerrilla marketing initiatives promoted a form of direct product experience by the visitor and possible future customer. When marketing is at the cross of education, entertainment, and arts…

For Christmas 2005 and the New Year 2006, the famous Spanish lottery organization - La Bruixa d’Or - offers the possibility to send X-mas ecards from its web site.

The Flash e-card displays the logo man of La Bruixa D’or, who will be your messenger to announce your best wishes to your family, friends and colleagues in a light-speed, singing and joyful Spanish. This Spanish Santa Claus uses his broom first as a microphone, and then as a guitar while mimicking the famous tap dancing of ACDC guitarist Angus Young.

The site also offers other ‘X-mas goodies’ such as a melody for your mobile phone and the possibility to alert you by SMS if your number comes out in the special Christmas lottery. The card is definitely very funny, even for those not understanding Spanish. A user-friendly interface enables you to choose among different messages for your card, should you want to use it to send your X-mas or New Year wishes, to congratulate someone for an exam success, and so on.

It is one of those viral marketing initiatives that may generate very good return on investment. For the affordable development price of Flash ecard, La Bruixa d’Or will be able:

• To collect a good number of email addresses, among which a certain number of prospective customers.
• To boost its brand awareness.

Autodesk - one of the leading software editor in 2D/3D design and modeling – is conducting a survey on new communication technologies such as blogs, podcasts, and RSS feeds.

The survey - that can be accessed from their home page – asks visitors about:

• Their profiles (age, sex, profession, industry sector…)
• Their information-gathering habits (independent media, vendor web sites, personal blogs…) and possible needs as far as product search, usage and assessment are concerned.
• Their ties with Autodesk products (which ones do they use and how often and deep?).

Most questions focus on blogs and aim at assessing the respondents’ degrees of knowledge and enthusiasm for this new communication media. At the end of the survey, you are provided with the following list blogs related to CAD and Autodesk solutions: Angel’s Civil 3D Thoughts, AutoCADder, Beside the Cursor, Beth’s Cad Blog, Blaugi, CAD Panacea, CADDManager.com Blog, Civil 3D - Paving the Way, HyperPics, In the Dynamic Interface, JTB World Blog, Mistress of the Dorkness, PR, Marketing and the Business of CAD, Revit OpEd, RobiNZ CAD Blog, Scott Durkee, sDotson.com, Taylor Technologies Autodesk | AutoCAD Software News, The Architect’s Desktop, The Autodesk Informer, The Mad Cadder, TLConsulting, Will render for food…, WorldCAD Access.

While some companies – including some selling high-tech, ‘Space Age’ products - are still using Stone Age marketing and communication, others always try and leverage emerging technologies not only to facilitate the product innovation in their R&D department, but also to revolutionize their marketing and communication strategies and boost their sales.

From a customer’s point of view, Autodesk’s blog survey demonstrates their commitment to innovativeness and customer relationship management. Also, the list of blogs that they provide at the end of the survey - while presenting the traditional risks related to the endorsement of second-hand information - will undoubtedly generate very positive word of mouth among the most dynamic individuals in the CAD and Autodesk communities. If only 50% of the bloggers cited in the list take the info back on to their blogs (and believe me, they will!), I let you imagine the power of that information spread: this is very cheap and efficient viral marketing!

Yes, this is one more post related to AIDS. It has been the 4th this month and the explanation is two-fold:

• Advertising against AIDS is always very creative.
• The cause itself deserves our best attention.

So, I wanted to benefit from the World Aids Day 2005 to make December 2005 my month against AIDS. This is my personal way of spreading the word and contributing to the global effort against the disease.

As already reminded in a previous post, AIDS can affect everybody. It also affects the youngest among us, children. It can affect them in two ways:

• Either directly, by infecting them: you have to know that one child dies every minute of every day from the disease.
• Or indirectly: AIDS deprives children from their parents everyday.

That’s what reminds us the winning poster design of an international advertising competition - co-sponsored by UNICEF and Clear Channel Outdoor (one of the world’s leading outdoor advertising companies) - to raise awareness of the enormous impact of HIV/AIDS on children. The poster - created by a South African ad agency named Bester Burke - depicts a child’s drawing of two graves, marked by crosses, and a girl, with the words ‘Mommy, Daddy, me’. It was chosen from 300 entries.

After blogs and podcasts, vlogs are the latest, hottest communication means in the new media space. The word vlog is the blend of ‘video’ and ‘blog’. A vlog is a blog which uses video as the primary content. iTunes also uses the term video podcast to describe a vlog.

In a way, vlogs can be considered as democratic TV. Getting your own vlog is like getting your privately-own TV studio, and producing your own TV-show. It’s quick, it’s easy, and it’s free or it requires a very affordable investment in tools. With vlogs, you can communicate anything you like to the world with all the possibilities that the video format has to offer:

• You’re no more simply telling people what you think, be it with written or oral words.
• You’re no more restricted with the motionless nature of photos and illustrations.
• You don’t need anymore to be an expert multimedia designer to create complex high tech animations.

With vlogs, you can now and simply SHOW the world what you think. The vlog community is increasing on a daily basis, including already famous vloggers like the ones from RocketBoom or Steve Garfied. Vlogs can also integrate virtual videos, like the homemade one produced by Alex Chan with software from a $70 video game (a technique called machinima): The French Democracy. The author wanted to make a political statement, countering what he deemed an inaccurate coverage of the riots in French suburbs. The video spread worldwide like wildfire, illustrating the increasing of blog-empowered, individual communication.

From a communication standpoint, vlogs clearly open brand new doors. Let me give you two concrete examples that directly come to my mind.

Example 1: Vlogs for municipal, governmental and public communication.
Imagine that you are the mayor of a nice, little village lost in the countryside. Your objective is to reinforce local identity among your citizens. Why would you hire an expensive TV company to develop your local TV channel with all the editorial, contractual and technological intricacies that it implies, when you can get your own vlog for the simple price of a journalist in charge of producing your contents on a regular basis. Not only reinforcing local identity, your vlog - being accessible worldwide - may even be one of the best way to develop tourism in your region. Obviously, this also applies to big cities wanting to promote district, social and cultural initiatives, or others.

Example 2: A vlog as your interactive resume.
Certain jobs are more ‘visual’ than others. Vlogs may be the ideal media for artists and others (such as actors, lecturers, live journalists, stuntmen, painters, graphical designers, architects, jugglers…) to promote their skills and arts. If I were an actor, what a better way than my own vlog to demonstrate my performance skills: one emotion a day and all the casting directors get it. On Monday, they get my smile. On Tuesday, they get my anger. And Wednesday, they get my crazyness. And so on. Be creative!

That was for the positive aspects related to vlogs. Still, don’t be abused. Vlogs also come with shortcomings, that is, the ones related to the video format:

• Today’s technology does not enable to get rich and efficient indexing of vlogs by search engines. As such, vlogs distribution is limited by its very own nature.
• The video format is linear. It requires the viewer to learn the information at the speed and rhythm predefined by the video. This is also true for the audio format, whereas textual information enables reading back and forth, skim-reading and so on. Text-based information versus audio-based and video-based information: this is an old debate!
• The video format is a heavy one, especially when speaking about the Internet and other mobile technologies. Even if good compressors today exist, a video file will always remain heaviest to download/broadcast than a text file.

All in all, vlogs are democratic, free and easy video communication that can turn any citizen into a TV journalist. They can also be considered as an innovative way to transform professional communication: applications seem obvious in the fields of e-learning, internal communication, and PRs, just to name a few. The launch of Apple’s video-enabled, 5G iPod has recently boosted ‘vlogging’. Vlogs integrate quite well in the mobile technology trends and can be a relevant marketing tool to touch those young, modern and mobile e-communities. Don’t be a laggard, surf the wave: vlog it and see if it works for you!

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