Wal-Mart Tries to Be MySpace. Seriously!

Retailer’s ‘Social’ Site May Be too Unhip and Strict to Catch Teen-Apparel Dollars

COLUMBUS, Ohio (AdAge.com) — It’s a quasi-social-networking site for teens designed to allow them to “express their individuality,” yet it screens all content, tells parents their kids have joined and forbids users to e-mail one another. Oh, and it calls users “hubsters” — a twist on hipsters that proves just how painfully uncool it is to try to be cool.

 

 

The Hub is where teens can go and register to become ‘Hubsters’ — Wal-Mart’s ideal of a hipster.

Desperate to appeal to teens with something other than pencils and backpacks during the crucial back-to-school season, Wal-Mart is launching a highly sanitized, controlled and rather unhip site at walmart.com/schoolyourway. Teens are invited to create their own page, “show it to the world and win some fab prizes,” including a chance to have their videos appear in a Wal-Mart TV commercial. Wal-Mart’s agency is GSD&M, Austin, Texas.

The opening page shows video of four teens — a bubbly fashionista, a Texas football player, a quirky skateboarder and an aspiring R&B singer from New York — who are clearly actors reading a script, although the videos are positioned to appear authentic. Within, there are pages such as “Beth’s Backyard Club,” where you find a picture of her in a strapless prom dress above the approved quote: “I’ll school my way by looking hot in my Wal-Mart clothes to school to catch a cute boy’s eye. …”

‘Are these real kids?’
The site is an attempt at closing the trend gap Wal-Mart now faces as Target wins more teen-apparel dollars. But if Wal-Mart thought it could win over Amy Kandel, 14, of Columbus, Ohio, it was wrong. “Some of the kids looked like they were trying to be supercool, but they weren’t at all, and they were just being kind of weird,” she said. “Are these real kids?”

Nor did it impress Pete Hughes, 18. “It just seemed kind of corny to me,” he said.

Wal-Mart declined to comment.

No doubt leery of all the problems with MySpace.com, Wal-Mart’s site disqualifies any video with “materials that are profane, disruptive, unlawful, harmful, threatening, abusive, vulgar, obscene, hateful, or racially or ethnically-motivated, or otherwise objectionable.” That’s why “pending approval” notes dominate pages already created and content is limited to a headline, a fashion quiz and a favorite song. Wal-Mart also plans to e-mail the parents of every registered teen, giving them the discretion to pull a submission.

Moreover, the retailer reserves the right to edit the commercial created with the winning video, obviously hoping to avoid the fate of Chevrolet’s Tahoe, which allowed consumers to create their own video spots unchecked and ended up with some unflattering results.

Don’t expect a subversive, ironic ad
So a subversive, ironic ad by a savvy teen on how her dad’s hardware shop closed down after the retail goliath rolled into town would likely be “otherwise objectionable” to Wal-Mart.

The tight controls will work against Wal-Mart’s goal to make the site more edgy and will instead cement the retailer’s image as a conformist brand, said Tim Stock, a researcher with New York-based Scenario DNA, a research firm devoted to studying Gen Y.

“The second you try to create boundaries and draw a line around content and put a box around content, it becomes something else. Teens aren’t searching for what a company deems relevant, but what they deem relevant,” Mr. Stock said. “You can’t own it. When anyone tries to own it too much, then it becomes a problem. That’s the impression I get on this site.”

A lot at stake
And there’s a lot at stake here. “Wal-Mart really needs this to work,” said Irma Zandl of youth-marketing firm Zandl Group. “Over the last year, we have been getting increasingly bad feedback from teen girls about Wal-Mart in contrast to Target — especially Wal-Mart’s apparent lack of cleanliness, messy layout and lack of stylish attire. This attempt at ‘we media’ is terrific. We’ll have to wait and see if it’s enough to overcome in-store issues.”

But it won’t change the shopping habits of Molly Morgan, 14, who goes to Wal-Mart only when her mom does to buy groceries and spends her monthly $150 clothing budget at Abercrombie & Fitch, Hollister and Nordstrom.

The Columbus teen doubts she’ll submit a video or enter the contests because “it, like, takes a lot of time, and it’s not very likely you’ll win.”

Bix sees green in online contests

“American Idol proved not just that we love watching the highs and lows of wannabe superstars, but that a surprising number of us wanted to be up there. It’s these two factors that make Bix, a company enabling public and private contests online, think the service it’s about to launch is a winner.When I first played around with the Beta site, I couldn’t stop thinking it was just another entry in the online karaoke space. With a healthy dose of skepticism, I then spoke with CEO Mike Speiser. By the end, because of their business model, my perspective had changed.

Bix is trying to address a real business problem: diminishing effectiveness of brand advertising. In the US alone, advertising accounted for $143B in 2005, with most of that dedicated to print and TV , which is why the old adage holds: “Half my advertising dollars are wasted – I just don’t know which half.”

Speiser believes that controlled sponsorship of a legally sanctioned online contest, be it karaoke, short films, photo essays… all of which the Bix engine supports, is a powerful brand advertising concept. As someone who has faced the very problem Bix is trying to address, I think he’s right. Online contests present not just a branding opportunity, but open a new direct channel for the marketer, allowing multiple opportunities to deliver coupons and offers.

But will people use it if they see it as nothing more than a marketing vehicle? If the corporate sponsors offer good enough prizes, they’ll find performers. And if the performers offer enough of the good and even more of the bad, people will watch.

The site is certainly easy enough for the mass consumer to use. I spared the world my singing, but I watched Speiser create a contest and karaoke video. Setting up a contest is quick, as is creating and uploading a video with a webcam. Also, viewing content, voting and sharing are all simple enough tasks.

Still, there is a lot of work ahead of them. The user interface needs an upgrade to attract serious corporate advertising dollars; Bix needs to optimize for mobile users (mobile was a huge factor in American Idol voting); and it will have to soon go international, before someone else does, to tap what’s likely an even better market.

And certainly, if successful, competition looms. Sites like Youtube and MySpace have already proven they can make stars. And Fox, with MySpace and Ksolo in the same portfolio, will find the market tantalizing if Bix takes off.

The site is still in invite-only Beta but will launch broadly in the coming weeks. It will be free to all comers for a few months as they roll it out, but the company believes advertisers will soon realize contest sponsorship is a service worth paying for. Then we’ll see if Speiser and his investors are right and the ROI keeps them coming back for more.”

Venture capitalists awash with cash — may soon beg you to take some

“Fundraising by venture capital firms and their cousins, the buyout firms, is on track to hit new records.In the second quarter of 2006, fifty venture capital firms raised a total of $11.2 billion, the highest level since the first quarter of 2001, according to a report.

The firms typically are required by their own investors to invest their cash, regardless of how many good ideas there are out there. So it’s a great time to be a small or even large company looking to snag cash from these firms. Disclosure: You may have to certify that you are alive and breathing to get some of this dough, but that may be about all.

Thirty-five “buyout” and so-called “mezzanine” funds raised $30.8 billion. These firms tend to raise larger amounts of cash than venture capital firms because they invest billions into deals like buying whole divisions of companies and spinning them out into separate companies.

Emily Mendell, of NVCA, said the buyout/mezzanine numbers for the first half of the year — $53 billion — represent record levels, and that 2006 should be a record for the year. Venture capital levels, however, are still lagging the ridiculous bubble-era — when more than $100 billion was raised in 2000.”

A new Web revolution is picking up steam, and the next Google or Microsoft could emerge from the companies that are in the vanguard

“SAN FRANCISCO – Things are really crackling in Silicon Valley these days. There’s the frenzied startup action, the rising rivers of VC cash, even the occasional bubble-icious long-term stock prediction (Google $2,000, anyone?).

There’s so much happening that the buzzword recently employed to try to encapsulate the era — “Web 2.0″ — now seems hopelessly inadequate, defined and redefined into near meaninglessness by squadrons of aspiring entrepreneurs, marketers, and other fortune hunters.

So it seems a particularly useful moment to wave away the smoke and home in on what’s really core. Don’t be distracted by the Valley’s hype-o-meter pushing toward the red: There’s something very real — and very powerful — afoot.

Driven by ubiquitous broadband, cheap hardware, and open-source software, the Web is mutating into a radically different beast than it has been. And that is leading to the creation of entirely new kinds of companies, new business models, and oceans of new opportunity.

We are in the early stages of what might be better thought of as the Next Net. The Next Net will encompass all digital devices, from PC to cell phone to television. Its defining characteristics include the ability to interact instantaneously with any of the more than 1 billion Web users across the globe — not by, say, instant messaging, but by evolving instant-voice-messaging and instant-video-messaging apps that will make today’s e-mail and IM seem crude.

The Next Net is deeply collaborative: People from across the planet can work together on the same task, and products or tools can be rapidly tweaked and improved by the collective wisdom of the entire online world.

The new era is also creating a realm of endless mix and match: Anyone with a browser can access vast stores of information, mash it up, and serve it in new ways, to a few people or a few hundred million.

Most striking, the Next Net creates endless possibilities for entrepreneurs and established players alike to take advantage of the Web’s new power. They are building on the success of early standard-bearers — Flickr, MySpace, Wikipedia — but also moving beyond those pioneers in creative and fascinating ways.

In this blog, we identify business solutions, whose approaches help illuminate where the Web is headed and where the opportunities lie. Most are startups, a lot of them with less than 10 full-time employees. Few are currently making money, and it’s a given that many will fail. But it’s equally likely that somewhere within this group lurks the next Google or Microsoft or Yahoo — or at least something that those giants will soon pay a pretty penny to have.”

MySpace #1 Claim

“A press release reporting that for the first time, www.myspace.com has surpassed Yahoo! Mail as the most visited domain on the Internet for US Internet users. To put MySpace’s growth in perspective, if we look back to July 2004 myspace.com represented only .1% of all Internet visits. This time last year myspace.com represented 1.9% of all Internet visits. With the week ending July 8, 2006 market share figure of 4.5% of all the US Internet visits, myspace.com has achieved a 4300% increase in visits over two years and 132% increase in visits since the same time last year.”

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