A prototype model of the E7 is on a nine-city U.S. tour, as Carbon Motors executives market the car to law enforcement officials and municipal fleet managers.

Unlike conventional police cruisers, which are retrofitted consumer vehicles such as the Ford Crown Victoria, the E7 is the first car designed and built specifically for law enforcement.

The article goes onto list specific design features planned with law enforcement in mind. My favorite feature? This:

The rear passenger compartment is completely sealed off from the cockpit. Molded plastic seats in back allow for easy cleaning and prevent prisoners from hiding contraband.

“Easy cleaning,” you ask? Have you ever seen what a drunk person can do to the backseat of a car?

So what’s promising about this? Carbon Motors is a small startup company in Atlanta pushing a niche car that is street-ready and designed for a highly specific audience. When was the last time we saw a new auto company form outside of the realm of the major manufacturing houses and build an entirely new brand of car? Probably not since the early 1960s. As Seth Godin pointed out in his recent article about the plight of the Detroit auto industry, there were upwards of 1000 car companies 90 years ago, and the result of having thousands of different, independent auto companies was increased innovation.

The Big Three, Toyota, Honda, and all of the other major auto companies were not singularly responsible for all of the automotive innovation of the past 100 years. In fact, innovation was largely driven by the diversity of thought and leadership during the early years of the auto industry. To quote Wikipedia, the same section used in Seth Godin’s article:

Throughout this era, development of automotive technology was rapid, due in part to a huge number (hundreds) of small manufacturers all competing to gain the world’s attention. Key developments included electric ignition (by Robert Bosch, 1903), independent suspension, and four-wheel brakes (by the Arrol-Johnston Company of Scotland in 1909).^[16] Leaf springs were widely used for suspension, though many other systems were still in use, with angle steel taking over from armored wood as the frame material of choice. Transmissions and throttle controls were widely adopted, allowing a variety of cruising speeds, though vehicles generally still had discrete speed settings rather than the infinitely variable system familiar in cars of later eras.

Between 1907 and 1912, the high-wheel motor buggy (resembling the horse buggy of before 1900) was in its heyday, with over seventy-five makers including Holsman (Chicago), IHC (Chicago), and Sears (which sold via catalog); the high-wheeler would be killed by the Model T.

The consolidation of the thousands of small auto companies into a handful of large, powerful auto companies was a drastic change in that it allowed auto manufacturers to finally leverage economies of scale for the first time. By having a larger pool of resources, both human and non-human, these major auto companies were able to develop more efficient production methods that allowed them to produce cars cheaply while remaining cost-competitive.

However, the upwards-sustaining innovative processes of these major auto manufacturers, the process that lead to small incremental improvements and not game-changing improvements, are what have been holding these companies back. The processes developed by the visionaries who consolidated all of those small companies into the Big Three and other large companies have not been changed while costs have risen and demand has fallen, largely due to inept leadership.

Companies like Carbon Motors are intriguing to me, because it shows innovative promise in an industry long-thought to lack it. Folks like those at Carbon Motors are a glimmer of hope, because they are the leaders who could reinvent the auto industry should the U.S. Government do the right thing and allow the Big Three to fail. Perhaps the new auto industry won’t consist of large, bureaucratic organizations who design cookie-cutter cars to please every possible market; perhaps we will see competitive landscape of the auto industry resemble its old former self, where thousands of smaller, more nimble companies competed fiercely to produce cars designed for very specific people with very specific tastes.

Only time will tell, but let’s hope that small upstarts like Carbon Motors and others like them are ready and willing to serve the former customers of the Big Three should they rightfully fail.

But, even so, for an inexperienced single term African-American senator tagged with the most liberal voting record to defeat the heir apparent in his own party and then go on to hold off the much-vaunted Republican machine is a truly remarkable achievement. Much of it has to do with Obama’s instinct for marketing.

First, Obama’s personal charisma, his listening and public speaking skills, his consistently positive and unruffled demeanor and his compelling biography attracted the attention and empathy of voters.

Second, Obama converted this empathy into tangible support. More citizens volunteered time and money to help the Obama campaign than any previous presidential candidate. Indeed, he attracted more donors than the entire Democratic or Republican party nationwide. Almost half of Obama’s unprecedented $639 million in funds raised from individuals came from small donors giving $300 or less.

The list goes on, but you get the idea - politics, like business, comes down to a matter of marketing. Barrack didn’t market policies, like traditional politicians of the past, nor did he really market ideology. He marketed himself, and built around himself a remarkable cult of personality.

This truly was a remarkable election, from the point of view of a marketer. Please read the HBR article for the full scoop.

Preface: This is a post about marketing, not about politics. Should you be inclined to submit comments, please bear this in mind. Political comments aren’t going to get published.

What do Dell, Microsoft, and Governor Palin all have in common? They let their competition succeed at defining them. This is a major marketing problem; short of major PR disasters, like the Jack in the Box E. coli outbreak in the early 1990s, I can’t think of many kinds of marketing/PR problems that are worse than this kind.

First, I think the McCain campaign could have avoided all of this by putting Governor Palin on the entire press circuit and all the talk shows immediately following the Vice Presidential announcement on Friday. Governor Palin was, and to a large extent still is, an unknown quantity to a lot of Americans; this means both significant opportunities and risks for the McCain campaign. Had the McCain campaign gotten Palin to define herself first on all of the talk shows and the traditional press circuit then they could have probably nipped a large amount of the media speculation firmly in the bud. But that’s not what happened.

Instead, the campaign did little to get Palin’s story out through the mainstream media the way they wanted to tell it. So McCain’s opposition stepped up to the plate instead. They labeled Governor Palin as a country yokel; a delicate, fragile woman incapable of standing up to tough questions and scrutiny; a careless mother; and someone who was devoid of any sort of achievement or record. These are the labels that hung in the air prior to Governor Palin’s speech on Wednesday night. It doesn’t matter of they were fair or unfair. So what did she do?

Simply, she capitalized on those low expectations set by the opposition and used the spotlight of the Republican National Convention to surpass them by an order of magnitude that was not to be believed had you taken everything written about her as the gospel truth. That’s all she had to do: demonstrate in a public and prominent fashion that the expectations set by competitors were well below reality.  To quote the National Review Online for a moment:

I would like to thank the US media for doing such a grand job this last week of lowering expectations by portraying Governor Palin - whoops, I mean Hick-Burg Mayor Palin - as a hillbilly know-nothing permapregnant ditz, half of whose 27 kids are the spawn of a stump-toothed uncle who hasn’t worked since he was an extra in Deliverance.

How’s that narrative holding up, geniuses? Almost as good as your “devoted husband John Edwards” routine?

Palin’s nomination acceptance speech last night was a fantastic start for the McCain campaign’s public relations battle in defense of their Vice Presidential selection, but it’s only a start. I expect we’ll see a lot more of Palin on the campaign trail and on the press circuit.

The Parallel to Microsoft and Dell

I see a lot of parallels with this story and the story of Microsoft, Dell, and Apple. A quick passage from Fast Company should serve as a good introduction:

“Nobody messes with anyone in the tech industry the way Apple has messed with Microsoft,” says Enderle. “It’s the first time I’ve ever seen a major national campaign that disparages a competitor, and the competitor just sits back and takes it. If somebody tried to do that to Oracle, you wouldn’t be able to find the body.”

Dell is just as affected by Apple’s marketing as Microsoft is; Microsoft provides the “lame, crappy” operating system and Dell provides the “lame, unreliable, broken hardware.” Apple has, with the help of Microsoft’s own missteps during the initial release of Windows Vista, lowered the consumer expectations for Microsoft products below the level of reality.

Don’t believe me? Watch even one video from Microsoft’s Mojave Experiment - the entire point of that campaign is that the perceptions of Vista fall well below reality and the campaign does a very effective job in challenging and even changing those perceptions.

As the poster in “Eight Years of Wrongness” points out, all of these companies have simply taken attack after attack after attack without offering a substantive rebuttal. The Mojave Experiment is a great start, but that’s all it is: a start. Dell, Microsoft, and other PC vendors should follow Lenovo’s lead and start developing much more direct counter-advertising, like this ad:

So what do I recommend that Dell and Microsoft do? Simply this - take every opportunity to seize the spotlight and directly rebut the expectations set by Apple. Apple’s products are far from perfect and Dell/Microsoft’s aren’t the complete and utter disaster that they’re portrayed to be. Don’t try to set any new expectations or new messages - challenge and correct the dominant ones set by the competition first.

TechCrunch basically made the point yesterday: TwittAds is a bad idea. I wanted to add my two cents from a the perspective of someone who spends a lot of time asking himself “would my company want to buy ads on this site?”

The point of TwittAds is thus: put advertising on your personal Twitter page and hope that your followers click on your Twitter ID, view the ads on your Twitter page, and hopefully execute some monetizable action (like clicking on the ad.) This advertising model indicates a fundamental misunderstanding of advertising from a buyer’s point-of-view.

Seth Godin says thus about advertising in his influential book, Permission Marketing:

From an advertiser’s point of view, the single most important tactic is frequency. Frequency is a simple concept: How many times is your ad presented to a single individual? In practice, though, frequency can create a number of pitfalls.

When advertising agencies measure their campaigns, they look at reach and frequency. Reach is a fairly simple metric. How many different people were exposed to the ad? Frequency, as we’ll see in a moment, involves some more artful measurements.

Seth’s wisdom is still relevant ten years later. Twitter is weak on reach to begin with; the Twitterers with the most followers, like Mr. Scoble, have around 34,000 followers. Assuming that the TwittAd advertisers are trying to target the followers of influential Twitterers running an ad on a single Twitter page, even for someone like Scoble, has insufficient reach to even merit the attention of modest advertisers. The obvious solution to that problem is to place the same ad across a number of Twitter home pages, which I will dissect in a moment.

On the surface Twitter appears to be a perfect mechanism for frequency, at least until you look under the hood. Let’s look at a sales funnel I cooked up:

So where did I get these figures? I made a reasonable estimate based on contextual advertising performance for the final Twitter home page to Advertising Landing Page CTR rate, and the first two rates are determined by my own personal experience with Twitter (I actually read about 1 in every 100 Tweets that I am subscribed to.) I’m not trying to perform exact science here, I’m trying to make a point about how pitifully small a reach of 34,000 is.

So here’s a formula for how we determine the CTR for a particular Twitterer:

Advertising Clicks per Day = Audience * (Number of Tweets Per Day * Average Number of Tweets Actually Noticed by Followers) * CTR from Noticed Tweets to Twitterer’s Home Page * CTR from Twitterer’s Home Page to Advertisment

Let’s plug in some values for Robert Scoble, who is the best-case advertiser that for TwittAd:

Audience	33,482
Avg # of Tweets Per Day	100
Tweets Noticed by Followers	0.01
CTR Tweets to HP	~0.01
CTR HP to Ad	0.01

If you do the math using the numbers that I’ve supplied you learn the Robert Scoble would generate between 3-4 clicks on an advertisement per day. Pitiful.

As Erick Shoenfeld pointed out in the original TechCrunch, the home pages of specific Twitterers are simply not a popular destinations for Twitter users. What Erick didn’t mention is the huge noise problem with Twitter - even if Scoble sent out 100 tweets a day no one reads all of them; in fact, most of them are not read at a level beyond mere skimming.

The other problem with advertising on Twitter is the lack of context of the advertisements - how in the hell do you make sure that the right Twitterers with the right messages become advertisers for the right products? It seems like an impossible challenge to me. Anyone who wants to advertise on Twitter pages is going to have to advertise on more than one, period, and how you do that with any level of appropriate audience discrimination seems infeasible. I guess the philosophy of TwittAd is to take a handful of ads and broadcast it to one amorphous, untargeted audience and hope that the combination of “frequency and reach” can yield enough sales for advertisers to overcome the huge waste of marketing dollars spent on the uninterested portions of the audience.

This is just Web 1.0 advertising with Web 2.0 spoilers - indiscriminate broadcast advertising is ineffective and smart advertisers avoid it. This is the principal reason why the original Web 1.0 bubble crashed - the failure of the indiscriminate broadcast advertising model. Once again Web 2.0 entrepreneurs disappoint me by failing to learn the lessons taught in the first crash.