Marketers are the new Record Labels, Photo Grass, Boomer Blogs, Joy Division Zune, Virtula House, Obama Eclipses
July 8, 2008
-
Brands and companies are taking on the role of record label. P&G, Nike, Red Bull, Unilever, Converse and Bacardi are all forming relationships with artists and providing payment, publicity and distribution for their songs.
-
For this years Wimbledon Tennis Championship, HSBC commissioned artists Heather Ackroyd and Dan Harvey to create a series of large photographs using one of their favorite mediums, grass.
-
The well known Purple Pundit at PSKF recently completed some trends and product ideation consultancy for a client on Baby Boomers. Here are some of the best blogs monitored for inspiration.
-
To commemorate the release of Joy Division The Documentary, Zune partnered with artist Peter Saville to create a device engraved with the iconic artwork from “Unkown Pleasures”. The Zune is fully customized and comes pre-loaded with the film.
-
In the month of May, Barack Obama’s campaign website generated 1.7 million more hits than John McCain’s, reports Nielsen Online. In total, Obama drew 2.3 million unique visitors in May; McCain reaped just 563,000.
-
Increasingly, companies are tracking blogs as a way of making sure customer complaints aren’t going unanswered. …”The power has shifted, [so] that big companies now have to be worried about one individual with a microphone called a blog.”
-
The first product of The Third Act, Digitas’ newly created video-focused brand content and media relationship unit, is hitting the Web this week: A second season of “The Smart Show,” a Holiday Inn Express Web series.
-
Digital Nomads are already extremely influential. Many of them blog and hang out on sites such as Web Worker Daily. In addition, they shun traditional communication tools such as e-mail.
-
Great piece from David Armano about managing yourpersonal brand online…
-
Michael Kantrow alerted me to UPL8.tv: “Thanks to your friends at POKE, a case of beer and uh, a bunch or random video, we now give to you upl8.tv. Where we’ve created a never-ending stream of semi-curated video creativity (and absurdities) just for you.”
-
Linden Lab, creator of animated world Second Life is announcing Tuesday that some SL avatars have successfully been transferred—or “teleported,” in the jargon of virtual-world fans—to a separate world operated by International Business Machines Co
-
HotPads’ Rent Ratio Heat Maps allow apartment and housing hunters nationwide to visually see where it makes sense for them to rent or buy, based on the ratio of rental and for sale pricing.
-
Designer Michael Kors launched a fashion line inspired by AMC’s Mad Men, a show about a fictional ad agency in the ’60s. Purchases of over $350 will come with a Mad Men season 1 DVD, which was released this month.
-
Agencies needs to adjust to the new multiplatform reality by changing the way they do business and how they are paid, while marketers need to give them more say in price, packaging, distribution and other factors determining a brand’s success,
-
The fall TV season will be notable for new forms of TV ads, including mini-shows, sponsored clips and in-show promos. Programmers and marketers are experimenting with new forms in the hopes of maintaining viewer attention during commercial breaks.
-
The company pages of more established agencies are quite revealing. Numbers like most common job titles, gender split and median age, alongside who’s been hired/ promoted are fascinating pictures of where a company is headed and what’s important to them.
-
BusinessWeek canvassed the Web’s best and brightest designers—from Khoi Vinh of The New York Times’ Web site to Don Norman, Silicon Valley’s chief usability guru—to find out which site designs they rate — and which ones they hate.
-
“We have some wonderful sheds on readersheds.co.uk, but the most quirky ones are the Tardis sheds, full size replicas of the Doctor Who’s famous time machine, but most are used to store garden tools and not travel through space and time.”
-
Omnicom has created G23: staffed by senior leaders, all of them women. They will work for G23 while continuing in their agency posts in fields like PR, cultural anthropology, corporate identity, media services, behavioral planning and digital marketing.
-
The BBC Sound Index analyses what people are writing about, listening to, watching, downloading and logging on to. It analyses this data to make an instant list of the most popular 1000 artists and tracks on the web.
Pike’s Pique
July 2, 2008
I learn that a backlash is brewing against Starbucks Corp. over its Pike Place Roast coffee, which has perked up the company’s sales by attracting new business, but has alienated a small yet vocal group of longtime patrons. (I confess I personally am not a huge fan of the burnt-tasting acidic coffee served by Starbucks).
Starbucks has also been bitten on the bum a bit by its own social media site … “I am shocked and disappointed that you have abandoned your original vision,” a poster identified as WestPalm wrote on mystarbucksidea.com, the company’s feedback site. “You need to wake up before it’s too late.” Thousands of votes of support for his stance and others like it helped persuade the company to restore a bold coffee variety to the afternoon lineup at about 900 of its locations.
Interestingly, new coffee varietals are not part of the 2009 plan …
-
Evidently they will give you $20 for putting the new Sprint Insight in your YouTube video…
-
In a mealy-mouthed compromise on bias-free communication planning, many agencies are still tooting their horns about their efforts to inegrate digital into their offering. Woo! I thought we figured this out already?
-
With wine consumption up in the U.S., especially among younger adults, merchants and others in the industry are using digital tools like video, blogs and information kiosks to try to demystify what’s still considered by many to be an intimidating product,
-
Hasbro and Universal, a unit of General Electric Co., will be rolling the dice on a number of old-time classics, including Monopoly, Candy Land and Ouija. If the projects go well, the companies may even attempt a remake of “Clue.”
-
Activating a brand in social media delivers a variety of benefits. Social media’s conversational nature means that a campaign can deliver a lot more than simply message distribution. Social media can give a voice to a brand’s customers.
Brave Noob World
June 29, 2008
-
A geophysical survey of the World of Warcraft…
Ride The City
June 28, 2008
Though it’s arguably inferior to many European cities, New York does have a growing network of relatively safe bike lanes (thanks largely in part to Mayor Mike). “Ride the City”, currently in beta form, is a site launched earlier this month to help aid the process.
The blurb on the site explains: “The concept is pretty simple. Just like MapQuest, Google, Microsoft, and other mapping programs, Ride the City finds the shortest distance between two points. But there are two major differences. First, RTC excludes roads that aren’t meant for biking, like the BQE and the Queens Midtown tunnel. Second, RTC tries to locate routes that maximize the use of bike lanes and greenways.”
-
Danish Icelandic artist Olafur Eliassons Waterfalls are all spigots finally a-go, this $15 million dollar environmental installation project is set to launch on the banks of NYC’s East River and NY Harbor this Thursday, June 26.
-
The strategy was to entice travelers on the European continent with a vision of “New London” and make it “the place to be.” To do so, Eurostar created its own media called Newlondon.fr, an interactive web platform divided into two sections: NLTV and YPES
-
Ravensburger, a German puzzle-maker created what appeared to be giant boxes of puzzles around Berlin. They were placed at construction sites with the rubble from the demolition at the foot of the boxes looking like larger-than-life pieces of the puzzle
-
Evan Wright’s excellent book about the invasion of Iraq … I hope the film lives up to it.
-
Its HR department in NY has set up a flat-screen TV that flashes offenders’ photos with a message that reads, “I haven’t done my timesheet in x weeks.” An agency rep said the tactic is paying off, with some more diligence on the part of the offenders.
JWT’s Mad Men
June 27, 2008
I came across an article in AdWeek: “JWT this week said that it would run a brand spot on the upcoming release of the Mad Men DVD set, featuring creative that spells out the words “mad men” using letters and logos from the ad agency’s global client roster. The spot, which carries the tagline, “Making brands famous since 1864,” appears at the outset of the first disc in a four-disc set produced by Lionsgate.” You can see the ad here.
JWT’s global CEO Bob Jeffrey gave a rather flabby explanation as to the rationale, objectives and success metrics surrounding this effort: “This is an opportunity for us to leverage our brand,” he said. “All I’m looking for is a nod of the head and recognition for what JWT is… The show has drawn audience of both consumers and industry people, giving JWT a platform that is hard to refuse”, he added.
“Leverage our brand” … “nod of the head” … “consumers and industry people”. Well, I will forgive Bob for having been away from the sharp end of writing business presentations, but … really.
Bob continues: “I always thought that the best way to build an agency is through the work it does for its clients, but this was a different kind of opportunity because of the nature and the content of the show.”
“A different kind of opportunity”. OK.
I guess I have two “issues” with this effort:
1. Why would JWT - long thought of as a dinosaur (or pre-digital anachronism) and only recently reinventing itself as an Agency for the new era (Digitivity Deep Dive Days and all) - want to associate itself with the “good old days of” the 1960s? It seems that, rather than embracing the new landscape, JWT rejects 2008 as dystopic, and would like instead to travel back in time to the old utopia of the 1960s. I might give them a pass on this as wanting to celebrate their heritage, but still think that attaching themselves to that specific era is an odd move.
2. Maybe I am being a tedious comms planner here, but isn’t using mass-market DVDs to reach the marketing community a teensy bit wasteful? As Booz Allen’s Chris Vollmer says: “It suggests that some of the people watching these DVDs must be important influencers somewhere” He also notes “It’s an industry play rather than a consumer play, because I can’t see how it would make sense to a consumer.”
“Some” of the people who will watch are “Influencers”. Hmm. So, assuming JWT paid market rate for this, whichever bright spark at JWT that came up with this idea had to present the budget for approval, look his superior unblinkingly in the eye and say “Probably less that 1% of those who see this will be our target audience”. So: take whatever JWT paid for this, multiply it by .99 and that is how much money they wasted.
And DVDs? Who buys them any more? I thought we all downloaded these days?
I am not the only one who is perplexed. Says Simon Sinek, CEO of SinekPartners: “It sounds like someone reacting to an opportunity to me, and in doing so, JWT is acting like one of their own worst clients”. Steve Hall at AdRants, whose headlines I always enjoy, wrote the immortal line “JWT Uses ‘Mad Men’ DVD Set to Wank Off”. No comment!
If there was a cleverly thought out play to “insert JWT in the national dialogue” (or similar) surrounding this effort, then I can see a glimmer of hope. And if I have missed anything any key points here, in the unlikely event anyone at JWT reads this and would care to enlighten me, please don’t hesitate!
Welcome back to .mac
June 27, 2008
I have had a few .mac accounts over the years … I think I balked at the annual charge, confusing architecture and slow connections and went with gmail instead. I am just now signing up again for my umpteenth iChat account (only so I can be sent large files too big for email).
So I grumblingly filled in my personal details, made a wry face at the “60 day trial” and settled for a - frankly - uninspiring iChat moniker. Then, in an inauspicious start to my Friday morning … this happened:
d’Oh!
Serious point though, apart from my own tightfisted feelings about $100 (or whatever it is these days) being too much for an email+ account, surely it would be an excellent advocacy-building tactic to give all Mac owners a .mac address free? Maybe charge for the extra services? Just a thought…
