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Lions and Tigers and Plane Wrecks, Oh My.

September 27th, 2011

Phil Falcone, a twenty-first century hedge fund manager, is making a three billion dollar bet on LightSquared, his new wireless network.

According to his website, LightSquared “will deploy an open wireless broadband network using a technology called Long Term Evolution (LTE), the most widely adopted 4G standard in the world. The LTE network will be combined with one of the largest commercial satellites ever launched, to provide coverage of the entire United States. The network is designed to support present-day and emerging wireless devices without restrictions.”

Do you understand what they’re doing? I do too, kinda, sorta.

I get it that LightSquared is developing a satellite-based wireless network and will somehow make mobile applications better. But I don’t know why they’re doing it nor what’s in it for me as a consumer.

Unfortunately for Falcone, AT&T, Verizon and others have figured it out. And those telecommunication giants are so concerned with LightSquared’s business model that they’re trying to keep it from succeeding.

Their advocacy group, the Coalition to Save Our GPS, is trying to block LightSquared from providing a 4G wireless network in rural areas.

On the coalition’s website, it claims LightSquared “plans to transmit ground-based radio signals that would be one billion or more times more powerful as received on earth than GPS’s low-powered satellite-based signals, potentially causing severe interference impacting millions of GPS receivers—including those used by the federal agencies, state and local governments, first responders, airlines, mariners, civil engineering, construction and surveying, agriculture, and everyday consumers in their cars and on handheld devices.”

Pretty scary, huh?

What the coalition doesn’t say is that if today’s GPS receivers had been designed and constructed differently in the first place, there would be no problem. But even though the manufacturers of older GPS receivers were put on notice by the government for interfering with LightSquared’s legally licensed spectrum, they did nothing. Instead they are now using political channels and fear tactics to get their way.

By blaming LightSquared for a potentially fearful doomsday scenario (first responders getting lost, planes colliding in midair, your car’s navigation system not working, etc.) the major telecoms can confuse the issue and redirect blame directly onto their potential competitor. And because the problem is mostly technological, few consumers, investors or legislators understand the actual issues and will instead make up their minds based on the emotional cues of the lobbying.

It’s not as if there’s not regulation already. The Federal Communications Commission allowed LightSquared to start buying broadband spectrum in 2003. According to Falcone, “We were mandated to build this network and now the GPS community is saying, ‘They’re interfering with us.’” (But the other companies) “didn’t put the proper filtering on their devices. We’re not interfering with them. They’re interfering with us.”

What’s more, Falcone said “99 percent of the problem” will be solved by LightSquared using a different part of the broadband spectrum. This is a surprisingly cooperative move considering that the interfering companies are clearly leaking into LightSquared’s real estate and not the other way around.

Do you understand the controversy better now that Falcone has explained the situation? Me neither. We still don’t understand what LightSquared is doing or how it will benefit us. Falcone’s delivery was a professional business-like response, but it was full of “speeds and feeds” tech-talk instead of emotional consumer benefits. Again surprising because Falcone is a straight-talking Minnesotan and could state his case clearly and concisely.

It should come as no shock that the most successful tech company on the planet, Apple, exorcised these “techxplanations” years ago. In his March iPad event, Steve Jobs said, “…a lot of folks in this tablet market are rushing in and they’re looking at this as the next PC…and they’re talking about speeds and feeds just like they did with PCs.”

As Joshua Topolsky, editor of Engadget, wrote,

“Apple no longer has to compete on specs and features, nor does it want to…it’s not the RAM or CPU speed, screen resolution or number of ports which dictate whether a product is valuable; it’s purely about the experience of using the device.”

Just like Steve Job’s video announcements, Falcone has gone on TV. His goal is to inform people that LightSquared is investing in innovation and exercising their free market prerogatives while the entrenched GPS and communications players are using old-school scare tactics to halt their vision. But moving the conversation from “speeds and feeds” to emotional benefits has worked spectacularly well for Apple and could help solve LightSquared’s problems, too. More importantly, there’s a lesson here for all of us to keep our marketing communications “all about them” and to remember to appeal to our consumers’ emotions before we appeal to their intellect (“hearts THEN minds”).

Tags: Apple, AT&T, Branding, Branding Speaker, Coalition to save our GPS, Engadget, FCC, Federal Communications Commission, Joshua Topolosky, LIghtsquared, Long Term Evolution, LTE, Phil Falcone, Speeds and Feeds, Steve Jobs, Verizon
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The Revolution Might Be Televised. You May or May Not Notice.

April 12th, 2011

Some revolutions start with a bang. “The shot heard ‘round the world” is how Ralph Waldo Emerson waxed poetic about the opening salvos of the American Revolution at the battles of Lexington and Concord.

About 135 years later, “The shot heard ‘round the world” was used to describe the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria that plunged Europe into World War I.

Other revolutions don’t announce themselves with such fervor. Do you remember when you started using a cell phone, started emailing or first used Facebook? Those activities probably didn’t seem like such big deals then but one day you woke up and everyone was doing it. Unlike the introduction of Apple’s iPod, iPhone, and iPad, most technological advances seem to just kind of happen. One day you know a little bit about them and by the next week they’re ubiquitous. When you weren’t watching the world just seemed to change, causing enormous upheavals in various industries including journalism, advertising, education, and banking. As I’ve said before, “The future started yesterday.”

There’s an old wife’s tale about boiling frogs. Why any old wives would want to actually boil a frog is beyond me. But that’s not the point of this story so please bear with me.

The idea is that if you drop a frog into a pot of boiling water it will jump out the very second it feels the heat. But if you start the frog off in a pot of cool water and then slowly turn the heat up, the frog will sit quietly until it’s parboiled.

Some revolutions are like that. They happen so quietly and so discreetly that you don’t even realize that they’ve occurred. They just become part of the air we breathe and the ground we walk on and we take them for granted as if they’ve always been there.

With that in mind, take a look at this Starbucks’ ad created by advertising wunderkind Dave Lubars, creative director at BBDO.Study it carefully and tell me what you find unusual. The letters in the headline are in different shades of brown but that’s not so odd. The descriptors Starbucks uses to identify their drinks (“Decaf,” “Syrup,” “Milk,” etc.) have been changed to romantic terms such as “Working. With you,” “Alone. Together,” “Table for Two,” but that’s not it either. And instead of just stamping the Starbucks trademark on the bottom of the ad the logo has been cleverly inserted by including it on a product shot, in this case a Starbucks cup with a frothy cappuccino in it. But that’s not it either.

What’s unique to this ad are the models, specifically the models’ sex. The model in the front is almost certainly male but the model in the back, in the red plaid shirt, could be a man or a woman. And all the details, from the watch to the bag, add to the ambiguity.

This is the first ad that I’ve seen from a major advertiser where the couple could be heterosexual or homosexual, depending on the viewer’s point of view. Do you want to see a man and a woman? Then there they are. Do you better identify with a gay couple? Then that’s who’s in the ad.

Most big companies only show gay couples in ads specifically aimed at gay audiences. The obvious thinking is that while the companies want to take advantage of the vast economy of gay consumers, they don’t want to risk offending other, less tolerant customers. But I’ve seen this ad in both Rolling Stone and The New York Times and while both have substantial gay readership, neither caters exclusively to that specific market.

Starbucks’ ad is really an amazing bit of sleight of hand – an ad chameleon that changes its orientation based on who is looking at it. I’m really looking forward to seeing the rest of Starbucks’ campaign – I’m curious to see if this piece is a one-off anomaly or the first shot quietly fired across the bow of the sexual orientation of traditional advertising.

I’ve read that Starbucks is also running this campaign on TV. I truly hope they’ve figured out a way to maintain their now-you-see-it-now-you-don’t androgynous approach. If they don’t, Gil Scott-Heron will be right after all. The revolution will not be televised.