Today we received an unsubscribe request from a customer who requested, or better put, demanded that we remove him from our mailing list. While such an event hardly qualifies as a business catastrophe, most marketers probably admit to feeling a little pang of loss with each customer unsubscription. It means that the customer has either lost interest in your company’s offering or, even worse, he has become utterly annoyed by some of your recent promotional tactics. In the pharmaceutical business, where I operate and where this episode took place, such mass unsubscribes (or “opt-outs” in permission marketing terminology) sent to multiple suppliers are quite common as physicians desparately struggle to gain control of their mail boxes.

Our particular unsubscribe came with a silver lining — the customer requested that all future promotional correspondence should be sent exclusively by e-mail and, to seal the deal, he provide the e-mail address where such information should be delivered. Possibly our physician thought he was being witty, knowing full well that most suppliers in this business — including many of the big pharma companies — are far from e-marketing savvy. Fortunately, we have been preparing for this day for years and will switch our promotional messages to e-mail with the flick of a database switch. Many suppliers will not be ready and will simply drop this physician from their distribution lists. A shame really. While this is the first time I have seen an opt-out from postal mail accompanied by an opt-in for e-mail, it is certain not to be the last. In fact, we may be witnessing the birth of a new pharmaceutical communications model. I imagine that more and more physicians will turn to this solution as a way to manage their mail boxes, but still remain in touch with selected business partners. The beauty of an e-mail subscription model is that the customer can take greater control of marketing process, allowing advertising messages which are considered interesting while filtering those messages which are less relevant. For advertisers this implies dramatic change in the way things are done. Gone are the days of mass mails and one-to-many marketing programs. Instead, marketers will have to write compelling, personalized text just to have a chance of getting in the customers’ inboxes.

While skiing at Rinerhorn last weekend, I glanced down from the gondola and noticed a curvy toboggan run (Schlittelbahn) on the side of the mountain. The ski slopes beaconed and I passed on the chance to rent a toboggan. Of course, its always possible to experience these sorts of things second-hand on the internet. Someone has taken their digital camera along for the ride and posted the resulting video on Youtube. A little further research reveals that Davos not only is birthplace to its own toboggan model, the Davoser Schlitten, but also claims to have held the world’s first toboggan race back in 1883. Perhaps I should have tossed the skis for a toboggan after all.

Rinerhorn mountain near Davos, Switzerland. Perfect conditions. A light dusting of powder. Sun with occassional passing clouds. Not a soul on the mountain, save one. I am in ski nirvana.

For those considering a ski trip to the Swiss alps, there is no better time to come than at the tail end of the season. If the ski god is generous with the powder, January can also be a wonderful month, but you may have to contend with bitter cold. Consider the virtues of spring skiing instead. Around mid-March, the rest of the world conveniently forgets about skiing, as winter vacations come to an end and the novelty of powdery slopes fades. Did I mention that I had the Rinerhorn pretty much to myself for the first hour or so? It was enough to make me forget about the endless t-bar lifts this side Davos.

In my day job as a marketer, I have recently undertaken a particularly daring project. I am working on a model to predict customer actions, specifically which customers will defect in the future. However, after reading up on the science of prediction, I’m starting to wonder if I’ve gone on a fool’s errand.

Prediction, as it turns out, is an extremely elusive art and the path to accurate forecasting is strewn with broken promises, false starts, disheartened scientists, and dead hedge funds. It has been said that a person could predict with absolute certainty (i.e. knowing) what number would be rolled in a craps game, if he or she knew all every detail of the die roll, such as the size and shape of the die, the material and lay of the table, the direction and velocity of the throw, and so on. The same could be said for virtually any physical action, from predicting home run swings to forecasting traffic accidents. Unfortunately, we neither have access to the entire universe of relevant data concerning the die roll/baseball swing/vehicle motion nor a computer powerful enough to process all the information and spew out an answer. And, in case we are not disheartened already, all this just applies to physical actions, not the infinitely more complex analysis of emotionally driven human actions. Customer loyalty most definitely falls in the human action category.

All is not lost. While we cannot predict things with certainty, we can ascertain the probabilities of things happening. In fact, there is rich history of calculating probabilities and, with a little searching, one quickly finds success stories from fields as diverse as quantum mechanics and behavioral finance. In fact, good statisticians have been doing this kind of probability modeling for a long time. Its interesting that predictive analytics is absent from the traditional toolset of marketers. I can certainly imagine the reason for this oversight — marketing people are notoriously shy around numbers. Now, I believe that marketers who can’t handle spreadsheets and math equations are a dying breed, but that discussion is best left for future blog posts. The point is marketing can benefit from statistics in many ways. What marketer would not want to know which customers are likely to abandon the company’s services next month?

My simple mission of predicating customer defections doesn’t seem so impossible anymore, and, furthermore, I won’t even need access to a supercomputer to do the job. I never expected to predict outcomes with absolute certainty, just to know more about future customer behavior than I know now, which is very little. I’m looking forward to plugging in a few variables culled from my web analytics reports and seeing if there is link to specific customer behavior. I’ll be bouncing off the walls with any positive results and won’t even worry about the whole correlation versus causation issue until later.

It was only a matter of time before laptops became something more than a portable computer. The ASUS Sideshow Notebook brings the standard lightweight laptop into realms once reserved for PDAs, Smartphones, and MP3 players. The laptop itself is nothing new, but the separately-powered secondary display on the outside lid of the laptop is a stroke of genius, as any harried business traveler will confirm. How many times have you wished for a way to retrieve that one important email or look up that certain street address, but not had the time/space/patience to open and boot up your laptop? Sideshow has a limited set of functionalities at this time, but the laptop paradigm has been altered and the gates to all sorts of future applications opened. Let’s take a moment to drool over this development and then watch what the market brings in the coming months. I’m no technology reviewer, just a casual market observer. Its far better that we let someone with a good eye for the technical specifications do the dirty work.

Does Pandora have a future? Just a couple of days after writing about the wonders of Pandora and other internet radio services, I came across a number of news stories concerning a new, seemingly insurmountable challenge to the fledgling internet radio industry. The Copyright Royalty Board, a body set up by the U.S. Congress for determining music royalties, has issued a revised fee schedule for internet radio broadcasts that will likely prove ruinous for most, if not all, internet radio providers. Linux Journal (of all places) has a detailed writeup on the Copyright Royalty Board decision and its implications for the internet radio business.

Its not a good time to be an internet radio broadcaster. Nor a paying subscriber. Nor a music lover. Nor an unsigned musician, for that matter. The music industry is engaged in a fullscale war, with copyright law as the weapon of choice. Given that consumers have been in the crosshairs for so long, it should hardly come as a surprise that broadcasters have been forced into the frey as well. Where this latest development will lead is anyone’s guess, but the broadcasters do have one asset which the individual consumer does not have — a large base of loyal listeners that stands to lose a valued service.

In the heyday of the dot-com boom, I recall listening to internet radio over Spinner, a little application with around one hundred streaming music stations categorized by genre. I have great memories of Spinner’s Acid Jazz station playing for hours, as I hacked away at the marketing plan for a startup company. Spinner was eventually acquired by AOL and has descended into relative obscurity.

Cue the next generation of streaming music services. Pandora impresses with the music genome project, its extensive catalogue of songs and their musical attributes. As a listener, you create stations based on a single song or artist and Pandora proceeds to deliver music with similar musical characteristics, such as instrumentation, melody, or lyrics. You can rate individual songs positively or negatively, providing Pandora with further information to refine the station according to your preferences. The results are impressive — a well refined station plays like your own custom radio station without the commercial interruptions.

There is an on-going debate about which service is best as helping people discover new music. Another provider, Last.fm, relies on social recommendations and culls related songs according to popularity (a kind of Pagerank algorithm for music?) rather than musical character. Regardless of which selction methods works better, Pandora, and probably also Last.fm, are both great for those extended moments of passive listening. The right music can energize productivity: I turn to my Gotan Project station for projects involving right-brain thinking, while a retro Cars station seems to work exceedingly well for blogging.

In a couple of months, the citizens of Europe will be subjected to the one of the more kitschy, forgettable, and partisan competitions of modern times, the Eurovision song contest. Eurovision, for those fortunate enough to live outside of the Old World, is a televised song contest in which each country submits one band and one song to a supposedly democratic vote of all other countries. A few performers, notably ABBA in 1974 and Céline Dion in 1998, have managed to establish successful music careers out of their Eurovision debuts, however, the vast majority of songs are as memorable and inspiring as department store elevator music.

Regardless of what you think about the quality of the talent, Eurovision does have a certain degree of pure entertainment value. The voting, in particular, is quirky and confusing to the first-time viewer. A some point you being to wonder if you are watching the same show as the voters, as ratings seemingly have very little to do with song just performed. What is actually happening is classical European politics: Scandinavians voting for Scandinavians, former East Bloc for former East Bloc (as if the wall never came down), Slavs for Slavs, Iberians for Iberians, Cypriots for Greeks, and so on. It all quite amusing, until you realize these same rules apply to just about all aspects of European civilization, from the diplomatic workings of the European Union to the management policies of European corporations. Its all quite predictable, once you know the playbook. A couple of Oxford academics have even researched the subject and identified the voting blocks, in case you still wondering what those hidden voting patterns are.

In recent years, performers have started competing with each other to find the lowest common denominator in song quality, perhaps in realization that real talent is purely optional. This year, DJ Bobo will be representing Switzerland with a suitably bizarre song “Vampires are alive” and should have a good chance at claiming the top prize.

Its only been a few days since my first posting on this blog and already the first visitors have arrived. Google Analytics has captured the first four visits to www.angelsadvocate.net. No blog should be without Google Analytics or a similiar web analytics solution. Many basic analytics applications are free and fairly easy to implement. The rush of watching visits from all corners of the globe on your website is worth the extra effort alone. Of course, it would be a shame not to delve into the wealth of marketing information placed at your disposal. Implementing Google Analytics tags on this Wordpress blog proved to be child’s play, thanks to Wilfred van der Deijl’s Ultimate Google Analytics plugin.

Tracking performance on this blog should prove enlightening. Aside from writing passable prose, submitting a sitemap to the search engines, and doing a fair amount of linking to internal posts and other blogs with related content, I don’t intend to do much in the way of so-called search engine optimization. In other words, the blog will have to stand on its own, without the advantage (or perhaps disadvantage) of submissions to blog aggregators, link lists to related sites, comment postings linked to this blog, pings notifications across the blogosphere, analyses of keywords, and whatever else is in vogue with my fellow bloggers. I have an instinctive feeling — completely unsubstantiated by any form of real research — that these measures are of limited usefulness with search engine positioning anyway. Having said that, I reserve the right to change my opinion should someone manage to convince me that doing such things can actually have a reasonable return on investment.

In the meantime, it appears that I have a budding fan club in the Far East. I’m not sure what compelled residents of Karatsu and neighboring cities in Japan to visit my posting on ski pistes and sunshine, however, they do appear to be the only inhabitants on Earth who are currently interested in my writings.

Though sparsely covered in the Swiss press, the story of Switzerland accidently invading the Principality of Liechtenstein is old news in the blogosphere. On March 2nd, 170 infantry recruits lost their way in the night and walked several kilometers into the territory of their neighboring country. Liechtenstein is just 25 kilometers long by 12 kilometers wide, so the Swiss army managed to conquer a sizeable portion of the principalilty before realizing that something was amiss and turning back. Asked how this incident could have happened, one recruited matter-of-factly explained “Es war alles so dunkel dort” (“Everything was just so dark out there”).

According to the Liechtensteiner Vaterland, the invasion took place somewhere in the southern part of the principality near the town Fläsch. I took the liberty of drawing a possible invasion route.