Here I am, first time in Asia.  And while I want to do some real storytelling in follow up chapters, this post is more about simple gut reactions from the first 5 hours.  Nothing to do with the flight or anything, but just a free flow of thoughts that went through my mind as I took my first lap around the city.

Some Preludes: 

1) Airport: Longer story here about my missing bag, but I spent about 90 minutes in the airport, and hoenstly, it didn’t feel like Asia.  There were no lines, no crowds and no mess.  And all the signs are in English.  It could have been LAX, except it was more organized. 

2) I step right out from the airport to the train that takes you straight downtown.  $12 from airport to cit center in 25 minutes.  Most disappointing thing – the trains have these neat tv screens and speakers in each head rest, so you can choose to listen or not to the program.  Initially, very cool, but they had about 2 minutes of content, then kept re-running the same ad and opening promo overand over and over.  What a waste of space.

3) But as soon as that train leaves the station, man, the 80 story apartment towers are in full sight.  I expected this from pictures, but I think I expected them to be nicer.  Goeroge and Wheezy wouldn’t live in most of these, even on the top floor. It much just be because we are out of the island and in a poorer area.

4) Land in the Central District and I can tell from the inside that it’s chaos on the outside.  My plan was to hop on the subway to get to my hotel, but the prospect of lugging this thing through people is too intimidating.  An $8 cab ride has my name all over it.  In a rare moment of genius, I have already printed out a map with where my hotel is, which I can show the cabbie.  It’s a eerie quiet cab ride as I gawk at the chaos around me as we zip down the road toward my hotel.  I have lots to ask, but I can’t flip through my Mandarin phrasebook fast enough to get say anything.  And even if I did, how would I know what he was saying back?  Only when I get out of the cab does he give any indication that he actually knows English.  Jerk.

5) Ok, I’m checked in to the smallest room that isn’t on a train.  Plus – we have a awesome view of the harbor, so no compaints.  Vittorio doesn’t get in until later, so I have some time to kill.

6) The subway basicall runs underneath my hotel – very convenient.  I hop on and head back to the Central District,the place I had earlier decided was too busy to be roaming around with a suitcase. I think I have a goo didea and bring my laptop with me, sure that I’ll find an Internet cafe.  Instead this ends up feeling liek a 65 pound weight around my shoulders.  Must rethink these "bright" ideas…  

Actual Hong Kong reactions:

1) Holy shiiiite.  As a guy I met in the Taipei airport described it, "Hong Kong is like New York on a couple of lines."

2) I keep switiching back and forth between being mezmerized and disgusted.  Down one road is a gorgeous office building, and you round the corner and it’s a 80 ear old selling cat claws and god knows what else.

3) My map is proving to be useless.  I think the lonely Planet gus just made it up.  When I think something is a long way awa, it’s around the corner.  And when I think it’s close, suddenly 16 streets that aren’t listed in my guidebook show up.  I can’t find anything.

4) I may have figured out a source of frustration.  Apparently, I apparently came out of the Metro station in a different place thanmy map says I should have.  This would explain why I have been turning my book upside down wondering, "But wait, I know I took a left on Queen’s Way?  How could I possibly be near the ferries?"

5) Yes, that realization solved one problem, but no, I am not getting any closer to being able to follow the directions I am actually writing down for myself.

6) Coolest thing ever – An outdoor escalator, covered of course, that takes you up the hill for 5 blocks.  Imagine one of these going from the Waterfront to the Convention Center.   

7) I cannot figure out the pace of the people.  Everyone is hurring, and then you have 4 ladies lazily strolling down the street, window shopping arm in arm and making sure no one can ever get by.  It’s like a mad sprint, and then you run into a human roadblock. 

8) Lots of cool little places to grab a bite on Wyndham / Hollywood. If I had waited about 30 seconds, I would have chosen one of these places rather than the crappy English place I felt spectacularly lucky to find at the time.  Doesn’t that always happen?  ou give up on finding something cool, have a bite and a beer, walk out the door, and fall into culinary nirvana.  Lesson learned – if no one is in the restaurant, there’s a better one close by…

9) I still can’t get over how I walk by a wine bar that I probably I can’t afford, and then trip into a street vendor selling trinkets and garbage for a quarter 25 feet later.  Then there’s a brand new hotel sitting right next to a apartment building that makes Cabrini Green look luxurious.   There’s no consistency.   It’s decadence amongst the squalor, or squalor embedded in decadence depending on how ou wish to look at it.

10) I see a few random American tourists running around, but I don’t see many Engilish folks at all.  I guess it makes sense that they’ve left by now, but I figured a few would stick around.

11) It’s 4:00pm or so now and traffic is reeeeeeeeeeeediculous.  

11b) Ok, side note here.  Literally, I knew nothing about Hong Kong 36 hours ago.  I bought a guidebook yesterday (or whatever day was the day before I left).  I read probably 3-4 hours on the plane.  And after 3-4 hours of walking around, all the maps made sense, kind of.  It’s amazing the steep learning curve there is for a foreign land, where all it takes is a little exploration and you start figuring it out. 

12) Stumbled into someplace called Pacific Place, which appears to be about the most grandiose shopping mall ever assembled.   Since my messenger bag with the laptop now weighs approximately 452 pounds, this will have to be explored later.

13) Compared to Seattle, I haven’t seen a lot of homeless folks, but those you do see…….well……they are noticeable and you want to avoid them.  I’m not saying you want to hug a Seattle homeless guy, but these Hong Kong homeless look like they would infect you with a whole variety of interesting diseases just by handing them a coin.  Really sad and scary.

14) Well I’ve been back in the hotel room / broom closet for a little while now, and the brain dump is complete.  I know there was no story there (and no spellcheck) but those were the "off the top of my head" thoughts, unfiltered and unedited.    Follow up stories will have some sort of plot and storyline.

It takes a little while to get to the fun part, but this beats anything I can do…

Ok, so it’s an impossible list to create, but try to think about a few bands from the 80’s that you would NEVER exepct to get back together for a new album 20+ years later.  Either through death, drugs, arrest, conversion or whatever, there are bands you just don’t expect to see releasing a CD in 2008.

With this in mind I ask, how in the world did Whitesnake get a record company to greenlight a new project, cheesily enough called "Good to be Bad"?  Anyway, that’s what’s playing on my Rhapsody right now, and I made it through song 1 without shutting it off.  I have to listen to the whole thing just for the sheer shock value. 

I’ll be down in San Francisco this week at Ad;tech.  If you are going to be down thre, make sure to let me know.  And if you aren’t going to be down there, be prepared this week and next for tons of blog posts about new trend and companies in the Web marketing realm.  We might actually get some real 1st person content on this little collection of ether….

So I woke up Saturday mornig, pleased that the sun was out for a change.  So I slapped on my tennis shoes and went for a long walk down Broadway and around Capitol Hill.

I’ll admit being more than slightly displeased with myself for having an extensive internal argument about whether I should spend about 6.5 million of my alloted 2,500 calories on a Sourdough Jack when I arrived at the Jack In the Box.  I knew I’d be getting there in a few minutes.  Of course,  after much deliberation, common sense prevailed and I had decided I would pass the restaurant and leave all the Sourdough burgers in there where they belong.

But it turns out the decision was moot,  because the building was shuttered up.  That’s when I started looking around Broadway, and I begane to understand what people are talking about when they discuss "The Death of Capitol Hill."

Now to be clear, I am a fan of progress. I think the people who contribute the most to the economy ought to be able to live comfortably in areas closest to where economies are driven.  And to be fair, there is no reason a single Jack in the Box restaurant should take up place on a thriving street corner just blocks from the downtown core. But, that’s what makes Capitol Hill interesting, and makes it not Belltown. But with all these new condos going up, the ability to grab a quick bite disappears a little more each time. 

Now, the more I walked, the more bums I wandered across.  A homeless guy trying to trade jokes for quarters outside Dick’s.   A few collections of folks loitering in odd places.  I thought about Capitol Hill, this odd mix of rich and poor, business people and artists, hipsters and tech nerds.  Maybe progres should slow down, and allow some of the old landmarks and apartment buidlings to stay up.

I was following two bums, one guy pushing the other’s wheelchair.  Suddenly the pusher stopped, reached down by a tree, picked up a discarded beer bottle, and drank what must have been a few remaining sips. That swung me the other way.  Just like anything, neighborhoods go through stages.  It can’t stay the same forever, and renters don’t get to dictate the way it gets shaped.  Some people will be able to say they lived through Capitol Hill’s golden age.  And a lot of people will complain how the new Capitol Hill will be devoid of soul.  But a new neighborhood will spring up, and while Cap Hill pushes out some of it’s poor and most colrful people in favor of richer more corporate types, someplace else will welcome them in.  That’s just how it works.

It seems like the winter doldrums have ended, because suddenly the news is awash in one fascinating story after another.  Just when I want to sit down and write my own dumb blog, something comes across my Google reader and I end up lost in other people’s work.

So here’s what got started and not completed last week:

• An analysis of the Sonics situation from 4 perspectives.  Just the fact that Steve Ballmer can’t get any respect from the Wash Legislature tells you somethng about those folks in Olympia.
• Is Obama airing his own dirty laundry all at once in preparation to hit back at Hillary?
• The Spitzer debacle – If he’s Client No. 9, how freaked out are 1-8 right now?
• The Spitzer debacle part 2: I don’t quite understand how she is going to make $1 Million on this.  Is it unfair to say that we, the gossip hungry American people, are the real whores here?
• Is there anything more perfect in the universe than the first two days of March Madness?
• Plus, tons of tech news, an exploding stock market, an investment firm getting a bail out loan, Yahoo merging with MSFT, and on and on and on and on.

I must focus.  Will get something completed shortly.

Too loud to hear!

Ok, so it doesn’t *exactly* say that, but here are a few bullets from a study commissioned by Media agency Starcom USA, behavioral targeting network Tacoda, and digital consumer insight company comScore.

• A very small group of consumers who are not representative of the total U.S. online population is accountable for the vast majority of display ad click-through behavior. 
• Heavy clickers represent just 6% of the online population yet account for 50% of all display ad clicks.
• Heavy clickers skew towards Internet users between the ages of 25-44 and households with an income under $40,000 and are more likely to visit auctions, gambling, and career services sites.
• We can’t count on click-through rate as our primary success metric for display ads; Starcom is more reliant on shifts in brand attitude metrics and analytics tying on-line exposure to sales as the true measures of online advertising efficacy.
• While the click can continue to be a relevant metric for direct response advertising campaigns, this study demonstrates that click performance is the wrong measure for the effectiveness of brand-building campaigns.
• For many campaigns, the branding effect of the ads is what’s really important and generating clicks is more of an ancillary benefit. Ultimately, judging a campaign’s effectiveness by clicks can be detrimental because it overlooks the importance of branding while simultaneously drawing conclusions from a sub-set of people who may not be representative of the target audience.

So, why am I writing about this?  Well, reports like this are not written for fun.  No one just says, "I wonder what a haevy clicker looks like."  There was a purpose for this report, and it’s goal is to obvious lay the groundwork for explaining to marketers that they shouldn’t be spooked by the fact that no one clicks on ads anymore.  Here is an ad network simply building a research report so that their sales guys have an answer for the question of, "Why are my clickthroughs so low?"  Now they can say, "Well you don’t need clicks.  In fact, clicks are bad.  You want the impressions, so let’s do some more CPM deals!"

Now, this of course flies directly in the face of logic.  "But look – we have a real research paper saying clicks don’t matter!"

It’s a funny report when yout think about it.  When Internet advertising got started, accountability was touted as one of its strengths.  Now that ads don’t get clicked on, they want to throw accountability out of the equation.  Moral of the story – take everything you hear in advertising and marketing with a big grain of salt…. 

So, the weekend has officially begun here in Phoenix. 

Last night Old Town Scottsdale took on a somewhat bizarre and surreal transformation.  In the middle of town square, the ESPN studio is set up.  (You have to wonder why ESPN chose a place 30 miles from the stadium to set up their Phoenix Studio.  Perhaps no one at ESPN wanted to spend any time in Glendale. I don’t know.) 

Certainly no celebrities wanted to spend any time in Glendale, and as I documented yesterday, all the mega-parties were being thrown in Old Town.  For comparison’s sake, imagine if a giant shiny new stadium was built up north of Everett for the Super Bowl.  And yet ESPN set up shop and all the celebrities threw parties in Belltown.  Just kind of bizarre.

Thus, the normal “see and be seen nightclubs” were closed for private events (or pay $200+).   Ordinary bars that normally cater to the 30-something set charged $25 cover.  And the college bars were dead.

I guess this is what happens when you schedule the biggest sporting event in the world, on the same weekend as the biggest sporting event in Phoenix, and also split the Super Bowl scene into two areas about 40 minutes apart.  Word on the street was that while Scottsdale bars were filled with tourists, Phoenicians themselves were up at the FBR Open Thursday night, and planning to return Friday and Saturday as well.  In fact, rumors are that few people from this area are going to the game at all, preferring to spend Sunday afternoon at TPC before heading home to turn on the game at 4:20.

But back to Marketing.  Coolest thing – or stupidest depending on your mood – are the walking TV sets.  How can I describe this?  There’s a guy walking.  And he has a harness on his back.  And rising up from this harness to a height of about 8-9 feet, is a flatscreen.  And that flatscreen has commercials.  So if he walks right at you, you would look up a few feet and watch the ad.  These guys are all over the place.  Walking TV Billboards.  They kind of look like Hammerhead from the Cantina on Tatooine.  I’ll try to snap a picture later today.

Now this question came up for debate yesterday.  Suppose a non Super Bowl sponsor, especially a competitor of a Super Bowl sponsor, somehow came up with 500 tickets to the game.  And they ran a contest for fans to get those free tickets.  And those fans had to wear clothing from the sponsor inside the stadium.  Could they be refused entry?  Let’s pretend it’s Burger King.  McDonald’s is a sponsor, so Burger King gets 500 tickets and puts people (maybe even rewards top employees)  in BK shirts all over the place.  Maybe they have to walk around Super Bowl events all weekend.  Now, could they also wear “King” masks?  Or does that step over the line?  Can they hand out business cards with coupons on them?  Is it Freedom of Speech?  Or do corporate rights trump the Constitution?  Just random thoughts…

Funniest and dumbest thing we saw yesterday.  A couple of guys walk in with about seven 21 year old blond girls, all  dressed in a different color of the same mini-dress.  You can’t NOT notice when something like that enters the room.  And all the guys in the bar are asking each other, “Are those dudes rolling with hookers?  Could they be anymore obvious about it?” And then we heard a girl say, “I think they are promoting jewelry, because they all have necklaces with a similar design.”  We never really figured it out.

I’m trekking out to Glendale today to see what the scene is like out there.  I expect this is where most of the corporate guys will be staying, especially those who don’t know Phoenix.  Probably a little different atmosphere.

Now I just wouldn’t be doing my job if I didn’t venture down to Phoenix this week to learn all the tips and tricks the professionals marketers at Super Bowl 42 can teach me.

So, this weekend I’ll be posting some thoughts, revelations and observations from the various venues making up the ecosystem that is the Big Game.

We’ll try to stop by the NFL Super Bowl Experience this afternoon which is essentially the party for the rest of us who can’t gain access to any of the cool ones.

The Arizona Republic and AZ Central Blog has some highlights from some parties, including The Big Ticket Gala, the Matt Leinart Foundation Party, a party I suppose I *could* have attended that didn’t sound too fun, Thursday night’s P.Diddy block party, and a long list of others.

Predictably, every bar in town is decked out with Super Bowl paraphernalia, even the ones 30 miles from the stadium.  It makes for a fairly misleading proposition, when a bar "Welcomes Super Bowl Fans" and then you realize that you’d have to be really really lost if you were an out of town guest.

As if this isn’t enough for one city to handle, Phoenix is also playing host to the FBR Phoenix Open, a 4 day 100,000 person party/golf tournament at TPC.  And just for fun, tonight the Suns host the World Champion San Antonio Spurs.  If anyone goes to work on Friday, I’d be shocked.

Anyway, more to come thru the week, as Marketing’s Reason for Existence approaches.