The cars themselves may still have a long way to go, but some recent announcements about what OnStar can do are amazing.  OnStar being the service offered by General Motors that incorporates GPS  and communication into vehicles – particularly useful in crash situations (though they can also unlock your car for you if you lock the keys in the car). Not so long ago, OnStar started advertising that when a vehicle is in an accident, OnStar will immediately put a phone operator in touch with the onboard communications center in the vehicle to determine if the driver is conscious and if they need emergency assistance.  The ad showed the phone operator on one half of the screen saying something like “do you need help?” and the injured driver responds “yes.”   From there, because the operator has the GPS information they can transmit the coordinates to local emergency teams.    I also learned that OnStar recently switched to Microsoft Virtual Earth for mapping to better visualize and communicate the precise location of the accident.  All very impressive.

The part that got me really excited is something I saw advertised in the paper today.   They call it Injury Severity Prediction and I think this is a great example of changing a “how” in emergency response and in a way it parallels things like the ATM and airport check-in today, but I will get to that in a moment.    We know that the auto industry has all kinds of statistics on crashes and how much worse you will be injured if you aren’t wearing your seatbelt or how different a side impact is versus a head on, and how much speed impacts injuries, and so on.  Well, from what I can tell, OnStar is now taking a lot of that data and putting it in the car,  and when the car is in an accident, the car takes the equivalent of a data snapshot of that information at the point of impact (are they wearing seat belts, head on or not, what speed, etc.) and communicates that back to the OnStar operator immediately and they can then instantly make some pretty good assumptions about the severity of the accident and communicate that objective, trustworthy data to emergency teams so they can be sure to take the right equipment.  In a situation where what matters is accurate and timely communication, this is a brilliant application of statistics and technology. “How” the information gets to emergency crews  gets much better and faster.

So how is this similar to the ATM and airport check-in?  Those are both cases where work was “outsourced” to the customer, where the customer now does the work of the bank teller and the passenger does the work of the airline employee.  With OnStar Injury Severity Prediction we have a case of the communication being “outsourced” to the car in a way that is a lot faster, a lot more reliable, and in cases where the driver is unconscious it makes something possible that wasn’t imaginable ten years ago.  Bravo OnStar.

Now why don’t you loan some of your smart people to other areas of GM to help them rethink other parts of the business.

-Ric

Many people remember the scene in the movie This is Spinal Tap where the character played by Christopher Guest, Nigel is explaining to Rob Reiner that his amplifiers have the ability to be louder than any other amplifier, showing him that they go to “11” on the dial instead of the usual ten.  Rob Reiner asks why they don’t just adjust each notch on the dial so each is just a little louder and have it just go to ten like everyone else, and Nigel looks at him as if he’s a complete idiot (a moment of thick irony) and reminds him “but these go to eleven.”

So when I recently saw this blog entry “25 logos with hidden messages” out at graphicdesignblog.org, I saw the FedEx logo that I often talk about with the hidden arrow, and I also saw the new logo for the Big Ten college sports conference I couldn’t help but laugh a little.  And I expect Nigel would also crack a grin.

I am a medium sports fan, so I was aware that Penn State was added to the Big Ten conference making a conference of eleven, and I remembered thinking it would just become the big 11, no big deal.

Not so much according to this blog posting.  Evidently they felt there was so much brand equity in Big Ten they couldn’t change to Big Eleven (I actually think it would be written Big11 if they were to follow Strunk and White).

So their idea of a solution was to put the number 11 in the middle of the logo, almost like columns holding up the “T” in ten. Umm.  Really? Wow.  That’s “truth is stranger than fiction” funny.

Luckily, Penn State is a big program, so I am sure there was no debate about fractions, like a Big Ten and a Half, but to have eleven schools in a group that is honestly all about the schools, I think it sends a pretty bad message all around about the intelligence of the conference.  I vote they rethink the name and have it be Big11.  Otherwise it’s the conference of 11 schools known as the Bit Ten, and that’s just not thinking.

Maybe we should ask Nigel what he thinks.

-Ric

This morning I was reading my trusty New York Times and I came across a full page ad for the Jay Leno Show.  Hoping to post an image of the ad in this post, try finding an ad like that in an internet search . . . Anyway, right in the middle of the page it reads  “DVR-PROOF programming year-round” and immediately started wondering where NBC is going with this.  First of all, it’s an ad aimed at advertisers, and if that weren’t obvious from that line, the next line “Live ads in Leno generate 152% higher brand recall than similar branded content in primetime,” well that removes any lingering doubt.  Second, and more importantly, the DVR-PROOF label is an obvious reaction to the popularity of TIVO and other Digital Video Recording devices that are in many ways the evolution of the VCR.

I have seen a number of articles about how the success of the DVR means more people are able to fast forward through ads, and the advertisers are not only not getting the “impressions” they are paying for and that makes it hard to get to their customers.

So it’s a clear case of needing to rethink “how” to connect with the customer.

Some marketers have resorted to integrating their products into the programs, where the stars are using the products, and that seems pretty smart to me.  Recently the American Idol program had the remaining contestants on the show do a spot for Ford that aired on the show, and that seemed like a good idea, but not DVR-PROOF.  I am a little surprised some haven’t experimented with ads that work in both fast forward and regular speed – you could have a large stationary picture of the product (like a Pepsi billboard) in the background so when the person fast forwards, the person still gets the impression, and there are probably even more clever ways than that.  I think that would be clever and effective.

But DVR-PROOF sounds like NBC is trying to keep TV in the 20th century and we have seen a number of efforts like that in the past (like forcing YouTube to remove their content) and that is just not smart.  There may be some calculated gamble that the kind of people who will watch this new show aren’t really the DVR crowd, but the simple point is that they shouldn’t resist the DVR trend, denying it won’t make it go away.

NBC needs to figure out how to help their advertisers get to their markets in a post DVR world.

That’s what I think.

-Ric

Abraham Lincoln is quoted with saying “I would have written a shorter note if I had time.”  Twitter is in some ways forcing that shortening habit.

Having recently, reluctantly, joined the ranks of Twitter, and only very recently begun to wrap my brain around this phenomenon, I have to wonder if Twitter, and to a lesser effect Facebook are going to transform a major “how” we do something in the workplace.  E-mail.  And while I am still no fan of Twitter, my guess is that this Twitter effect is a mostly positive one.

I distinctly remember long conversational e-mail discussions ten or more years ago.  From time to time I still see a long e-mail, but even then it is broken up with bullets and indentations making it look more like a PowerPoint slide than a letter.

Twitter only allows you to type 140 characters, and while most people also put a link to a longer blog entry (or mad or something) so they can give you at least an entire thought, and Facebook also has some limitations on characters in some of their message formats, I think the “good” change is that it forces people to condense their message into a small space. To think before you just spew text into an e-mail.

It has to be enough of a hook to at least get people to click on the link.   Forcing people to boil their idea down into 140 characters is a good skill to build and I honestly think it will end up making e-mail communication more efficient (though Emily Post would barf on the spot if she witnessed our modern day e-etiquette).

That’s what I think.  Now I am off to host a birthday party for an eight year-old boy on a BEAUTIFUL sunny day in Seattle.

-Ric

P.S. Yes, I was tempted to confine this blog post to 140 characters, but like Abe I didn’t have time.