Apple TV Buys Google, Announces New Channel

Apple TV doesn't try to do everything. It can't receive or record cable or satellite TV, so it isn't meant as a replacement for your cable or satellite box, or for a digital video recorder like a TiVo. It can't play DVDs, so it doesn't replace the DVD player. Its sole function is to bring to the TV digital content stored on your computer or drawn from the Internet. Like a DVD player, it uses its own separate input on your TV set, and you have to change inputs using your TV remote to use it.

Just like the Ipod, Apple TV is all about simple, elegant -- err, I mean, cool (as cool is the new elegant) technology that delivers media content ("software for your life") for your personal entertainment.

Now what could better fill that delivery system than YouTube? Hours and hours of personal and professional videos streamed to your TV by the Apple TV.

Much as Sony sought movie studios, we will probably see Apple setting up a more sophisticated Itunes video capability. However, what Apple will realize is that, when it comes to video, the studios aren't as poor and desperate as the record industry was when to comes to selling their content.

In a now brilliant move, to be announced in five years, Steve Jobs will buy Google, allowing him to use I-Thou Tube (renamed in honor of Martin Buber) as a streaming device for video content for paid and unpaid media.

In addition, as an extension to the personal MacBooks, which will be the size of a paperback and fit into your messenger bag or cargo pants pocket, Apple will rebrand Google as IGoogle and launch a new personal search service that will allow you to go back and rebrand your life, from your birth certificate through those embarrassing movies your parents took of you in the elementary school chorus until the present day -- framing your personal biography for posterity and allowing at the same time to share your experiences with millions of other people, while accessing the world's stored information for your personal use.

And St. Augustine asks how many angels could dance on a pin? Now it's how many lives can dance on an HDMI connection.

GPS Shopping: Seek and Ye Shall Find

Luke Chapter 11: Verse 9 - And I say unto you, Ask, and it shall be given you; seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you.

If Mammon represents a significant deified aspect of the internet, then Nearby Now and GPShopper have the tools for you. These companies are developing mobile Internet applications that allow shoppers to use their cellphones or PDAs to search the inventory and prices at local malls, reducing the expeditions to Sawgrass and Palisades to focused forays.

Just think no more Lewis & Clark treks through the Mall of America, using strollers for portage and swatting at the gnats of hawkers who hold empty promises of bargains.

Now, after you've seen it online or heard about it from that neighbor, you can journey to the cathedrals of commerce and know that your effort will not be wasted, your shoe leather shall not be worn and neither shall you want anymore.

According to the New York Times, NearbyNow tested its application at the Eastridge mall in San Jose. After shoppers signed on, they received a message listing sales in progress and asking users to type in the brand or product they were seeking. Jeans showed 90 stores. Levi 501's showed 14.

With these tools, when K-Mart wants to advertise a blue light special, you can have a thousand shoppers stampeding from all over the mall to the store.

Unfortunately, retailers do not have a good enough handle on their inventories to be always able to reflect what they have in stock. So, yes, there will be some disappointments.

But if you are looking to drive traffic, these tools can be a godsend.

In many categories, retail stores are more and more becoming showrooms. Consumers search for it online, then they go into the store to touch it and try it, and then they go home to buy it online. What a great expense those fancy retail environments are quickly becoming.

However, these technologies can revitalize stores, helping to move merchandise, motivate browsers and attract shoppers who ARE ALREADY IN THE MARKET.

You won't need truffles for these applications. What retailers do need, though, is the desire and the know-how to buy the technology coming down the pike. It is not enough to make the store fun to shop. You need to also help make people want to buy. If I were a marketer at retail chain, I would want to drag my IT person into the chair next to me and start partnering on the future of shopping. That's a faith they both need to believe in.

Pop-Up Stores: This Year's Nano Promotion

Whatever happened to test markets? Once upon a time, you could test your new product in a whole self-contained city. Based on consumer reactions in Dallas and Houston, at Lever Brothers, we knew that Surf laundry detergent was going to be hit with its revolutionary odor-inhibiting perfume. P&G even fired its Texas sales team because our test market blew them away.

Following the need for more privacy, we soon began using BehaviorScan test markets in even smaller cities (Indianapolis) where you could partition different ad messages to different consumers, know the different dollar rings at different chains and tailor your promotions.

But city-wide test markets became too expensive. Confidentiality and Speed became ever more important to both you and your competitors – who can knock you off faster than a regional rollout from Kansas City to St. Louis. P&G thought they had a huge winner with soft chew cookies (and they did) but the competition copied them quickly and knocked them off at the knees before they crossed the Mississippi. In this instant message age, you can forget about keeping anything a secret.

Then everyone went black box with Nielsen (and still do). No one knew what you were testing or thinking (including most consumers) and millions of dollars were spent on complex algorithms that were as clear as the Eurythmics singing Sweet Dreams (Are Made Of This).

Now, in this time of nano-testing, we have “pop-up stores.” What could be more brilliant: flash testing new products in flash stores. Faster than a jump drive. Both Product and Retail Format are here and gone in the blink of an eye.

When Malcolm Gladwell and everyone who ever took an instant dislike to someone they just met or a bit of food they just tasted formulated their own arbitration of taste, we get the ultimate marketing boost.

In Chicago, Kraft is testing its DiGiorno Ultimate pizza in a pop-up story on Michigan Avenue, which was, in its immediate previous incarnation, a pop-up store for Lexus. Now that's a Universal Serial Bus everyone can jump on. Or, in the case of Kraft, Universal Cereal Bus.

In the town of deep-pan pizza, the Augie March chutzpah of Kraft to go head-to-head with Pizza Uno in the Loop is great. What a wonderful in-your-face exercise in test-marketing the pizza and gaining notable publicity – all at a relatively modest cost.

I just hope that the Kraft urban ethnographers are in the store, extra napkins in hand for the patrons, recording the reactions for future innovations and modifications for line extensions (e.g. freeze-dried pineapple).

One of the first pop-up stores was Target’s boat off Chelsea Piers in 2002. If Target was using a destroyer, I bet Wal-Mart was planning a battleship for plowing its way into New York. Now the Behemoth of Bentonville is set for the New York B&T (Bridge and Tunnel) crowd. New York City will give Target the space they wouldn’t grant Wal-Mart. Hubert Humphrey Minnesota values vs. Arkansas Land-Grant imperialism – okay, you choose.

Meanwhile, Target launched its Isaac Mizrahi women's clothing collection with a pop-up store at Rockefeller Center in New York. If imitation is the sincerest form of mid-market taste, we saw J.C. Penney do it at Rockefeller Center when it introduced its Chris Madden home collection in 2004. Meanwhile Fila introduced a new sportswear line on Melrose Avenue in Los Angeles in 2005, and Nike popped up in New York's SoHo neighborhood when it launched a special edition basketball shoe named after LeBron James.

With more and more companies exploring nano-stores, think of the promotional possibilities inside super-centers and club stores. Costco and Wal-Mart could carve out a whole free-standing section of real estate and rent it out to major CPG manufacturers for big-time nano/pop-up promotions.

Come visit the Kraft Store in Wal-Mart and assemble your own meal and buy the week’s groceries. Try Kroger’s Unilever Laundromat where you can do your wash with Wisk and fill your cleaning bucket. Chill at Costco in the Sony Concept Store where you can buy LCDs, music, stereos and DVDs.

The question is whether or not this transient marketing approach builds brands. It’s great for excitement and publicity but that’s strictly short-term.

Like all promotions, pop-up stores are good for a spike. However, they cannot be as good as building imagery and value over time.

I would still want to be sure that I had the right position, the right communication of benefits and an excellent integrated marketing plan that covered the basics of brand building. And that the pop-up stores was only one facet of my marketing efforts.

That way I could cover myself in this nano-test, knowing I was not only securing my present but also planning for my future. Oh, and pass the napkin because the pizza wasn’t half-bad.