This was the working keycard a hotel I was at recently gave me:

[Technorati tags: marketing advertising]

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Kurzweil Educational Systems, which makes scan-to-speech systems for the blind and dyslexic, has been purchased by Cambium Learning, a company serving “at-risk” students.

In 1976, Ray Kurzweil invented a system that would read a page out loud. At that point it cost $100,000 and was the size of a major kitchen appliance. Kurzweil Computer Products became Xerox Imaging Systems in 1980. In 1996, KES was officially launched on its own. In 1998 it was purchased by Lernout & Hauspie. When the founders of L&H were led away in manacles because they were despicable con artists who should rot in hell, the company bought itself back, completing the transaction in November, 2001. Since then the company has continued to innovate and has been making a profit by doing something good. [The facts in this paragraph came from here.]

I know some of the folks at KES well. One of them is, in fact, my cousin-in-law. These are folks who have been working for years with intense and heartfelt focus on helping people with disabilities integrate further into the world. The company has become a living member of the communities it serves. It’s been through tough times. I hope and assume that this new acquisition means KES will be around for a long, long time. [Technorati tags: kes kurzweil blind dyslexic lernout cambium]

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I’m doing a little guest blogging at Tom Peters’ blog. For example, I just posted something about Netflix’s way of deciding who gets which titles when…

As I’ve said before, I’m a big admirer of Tom, so I’m thrilled to get to blog there for a bit. [Technorati tag: TomPeters]

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The brilliant Paul Graham is offering to seed some summer projects that could turn into start-ups. Take a look… [Technorati tag: PaulGraham]

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Online Media Daily reports that MSN Search has started a “viral campaign” created by an agency called 42 Entertainment. But I don’t get what’s viral about it.

The main page, MSNFound, aggregates six phony blogs supposedly written by a demographically-appealing set of people. The individual blogs are one-entry and not very interesting. In fact, they are interest-averse, as so much marketing is. For example, the one by the so-called conspiracy theorist has a small banner about the “Enron/Afghanistan connection,” but it’s not linked to anything.

The aim seems to be to get you to click on links that are in fact queries so you can see the magnificence of MSN Search. But it in fact is confusing. The surfer dude’s “blog” suggests you do a search on “Tad _____” (where the blank is autofilled each time by the software with something different such as “Huntington Pier” or “Apprentice”) to see some “surprises.” The only surprise is that MSN Search puts a photo of the dude and a paragraph from his blog above all the legitimate entries and doesn’t explain how it got there. It’s just confusing. (In normal searches, the paid-for links are visually set off and the phrase “sponsored links” shows up in a too-faint gray.)

So, what’s supposed to be viral about this other than that by calling it viral, you get people like me to write about it?

(Disclosure: I was a member of the group of people MSN Search targeted for schmoozing shortly before the launch.) [Technorati tags: marketing MSNSearch ]

I’m going to guess that this is the marketing project Scoble rips a new one for.

In response to Scoble, Pamela Parker Caird of The River wonders if a campaign can go viral these days without bloggers.

Sean Carver of MSN responds.

Sean, it’s not that I’m taking the site too seriously. I admit that I’m probably out of your demographic, but why would I want to come back to this site? And if I don’t come back, how am I supposed to figure out that it’s actually a a “search engine ‘opera'”? I understand that it’s supposed to be entertaining but to me it just wasn’t. That’s sort of the opposite of viral.

But, then, I also think the MSN Search tv ads are a waste of electrons. After 28 seconds of random images dancing around a search box, we learn that MSN Search exists. Is there some reason we should go to MSN Search or is its mere existence supposed to be enough of an enticement? But, I assume this ad tested well, so I’m just showing my naivete.

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Over at Worthwhile I’ve posted a rumination – including a short play! – about why tech marketing-speak goes so wrong.

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NewEgg is my favorite place to buy hardware: Near rock-bottom prices, no-hassle returns, lots of information about what you’re buying, customer reviews for every item, no monkey business about shipping costs. I have a good feeling buying from NewEgg.

But I hate their marketing campaign: “Shop there, buy here.” We’re supposed to go to our local computer store, waste some salesperson’s time, get her expectations up that we’re going to buying from her, and then buy at NewEgg because Newegg’s prices are low … and those prices are low because NewEgg asks us to steal services from another store.

I don’t have a good feeling about buying from a parasite.

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Tim Bray points to a presentation by Brian Nielsen and Mikkel Hippe Brun on how Denmark is adopting the OASIS Universal Business Language (UBL). Tim writes:

Check out slides 4 & 5: they estimate the annual savings achievable from invoicing in UBL at somewhere between €100M and €160M. I may be out of step with the crowd but it seems painfully obvious to me that UBL is going to be huge and I don’t understand why more technology vendors (including my employer) aren’t refocusing their e-business strategy around it.

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The Head Lemur has a scathingly funny bit about Lovemarks. Let’s just say he’s not as kind to the idea as I was. A snippet:

When I was a teenager we had lovemarks. They were called hickeys. That is where you sucked on the body of your partner until you raised a bruise.

And Doc‘s not feeling too well-disposed towards the idea either:

“To me, lovemarks achieves 100% marks in both rationalization and delusion. An expensive psychosis, if not an especially harmful one.”

Gotta love the title Doc gives his piece: “Cool! Involuntary tatoos I might love!”

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Lovemarks — a site, then a book — is the product of Kevin Roberts, CEO of Saatchi & Saatchi, the ginormous ad agency.

Lovemarks are brands that “inspire loyalty beyond reason.” (“Lovemark” is a play on “trademark,” I assume.) Roberts analyzes products using The Love/Respect Axis:

Because brands “have run out of juice,” his ad agency “looked closely at the question: What makes some brands inspirational, while others struggle?” The 2×2 above says the difference is love. Yet, oddly, the site instead focuses on respect — “At the core of every Lovemark is Respect” — and says nothing about love. Instead, the main explanatory page talks only about the “three intangible, yet very real, ingredients” of respect: Mystery, sensuality and intimacy. The site has a few sentences about each of these, and love — what really differentiates brands from lovemarks — pops up only in the first sentence in the section on intimacy: ” There is nothing more personal than love!” I find this confusing.

Why does Roberts focus on respect instead of love, despite his own analysis? Could it be that spelling out how to get us to love a brand would come across either as cynically manipulative or something beyond the control of marketers? (Note: This is based on the lovemarks site. I haven’t read the book.)

And that gets at why I’m not ready to have my ticket punched on the Lovemarks Express. On the one hand, it’s useful to think about why some products are special to us. And as victims of marketing, we’d probably be better off if companies adopted the Lovemarks approach. On the other — and maybe I’m just projecting my own cynicism onto Roberts — Lovemarks isn’t just a way of analyzing brand loyalty, it’s a formula for creating it. Yes, “Remember only the customer can decide Lovemark status”…but now that you know how it happens, go forth and Lovemark your brand. It’s like “experience marketing” that teaches you the tricks for convincing people that The Olive Garden is a rustic cafe outside of Florence instead of earning their respect as a damn good restaurant on the second floor of the Youngstown Mall. You want brand loyalty? Be a great freaking product. Also, it wouldn’t hurt if I grew up watching my mother use it.

For me, the best part of the site is the page with the latest reader nominations for lovemark status. This morning anyway it’s delightfully loopy in the way we earthlings are — Shah Rukh Khan, the Lotus car, DisneyWorld, Whistler (the town in Canada), books by Nicholas Sparks, the Australian Breastfeeding Association, all of Europe…

(Thanks to Tony Goodson for the link. And Hugh MacLeod suggests a “Lovemarks-Cluetrain Deathmatch.” Hah! In fact, already last August RageBoy was taking a bite out of Lovemarks’ ass.)

OK, it looks like Roberts meant to type “Love” instead of “Respect” in the sentence: “A Lovemark’s high Respect is infused with these three intangible, yet very real, ingredients: Mystery, Sensuality and Intimacy.” I say this based on another article by Roberts. There the subsection entitled “A Recipe for Love” begins: “By focusing on Mystery, Sensuality and Intimacy business-as-usual can be transformed with new emotions and new ideas.”

Yet, this article is more off-putting to me, precisely because it promises S&S’s clients that the agency can move them from respect to love. For example:

Now the new challenge is Love and Love demands the same investment and the same rigour we brought to the capture of Respect. Our client Toyota gets it. Don Esmond at Toyota USA crystallized the new Toyota challenge: “It’s time to move from the most respected car company in America to the most loved.”

But the elements of love Roberts lists are, well, jejune. For example, he defines “sensuality” by listing the five senses. If that were the case, then everything would be sensual. Sensuality may be a particular quality of sensory experience or it may be the way particular sensations touch earthbound elements of our soul, but it sure ain’t just the five senses. And listing the five senses does nothing to advance our understanding of love. The points about mystery and intimacy range from the pretentious (“Myths and icons — a reference library of the heart”) to the true-but-well-known (“Passion — to energise the relationship”). This “recipe for love” does not fulfill the promise of transforming business with “new emotions and new ideas,” especially since his lead example of a company that does this well is Starbucks. (Hugh Macleod usefully contrasts this with this.)

The more I read, the less I like it. Is the Lovelinks approach better than having to listen to the same tagline 563 times while I’m on hold? Absolutely. Is it still about manipulating me? Yup.

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