Several mobile phone companies are now selling Wireless Broadband packages for connecting to the Net, using a wireless card. With a card like this, practically the whole country is a hotspot.
I use Wi-Fi quite a lot, and find this irresistible. My typical work day includes logging in to my Web-based email from a variety or places –vendor’s desktops, Starbucks, Schlotzsky’s, Borders Books etc. Very useful when working with tight deadlines. But I still have to drive up to the nearest hotspot.
Dan Rather is now a magnet for criticism. He is pilloried by not just from those intent on shining a light on the ‘liberal media,’ but by those who want to advance the theory that the old order passeth.
Last week, too, another group was out there tossing rotten tomatoes at the New York advertising celebration of advertising icons such as Tony the Tiger and California Raisins. I don’t agree with the argument that these milestones of advertising are best forgotten. The Michelin Man, the Energizer bunny, and even Smokey Bear did serve a purpose –maybe not the same purpose today, as they did a few decades ago. (Imagine how boring insurance advertising would be without the Aflac duck and the Geico reptile?)
Looking at the week’s events, the icons are not the most important –they simply grab the most media, because they can’t help generating PR like they were supposed to! The topics of Advertising Week included pressing issues such as “Barbarians at the remote” and “life without the Internet,” so it’s hard to complain that these Madison Avenue types are are a backward looking bunch.
Scott Donaton, in Advertising Age (Sept. 20, 2004) makes an important observation about the irony of the “march of icons’ in a city (NYC) that is hardly the center of the advertising universe today. He correctly calls the event a sort of self-congratulatory gesture of an industry needing to restore confidence in itself. But, hey, the 4As chairman Ken Kaess stated it as one of the week’s objectives! Of the 3 groups targeted by this event, the ad industry was on the top of his list. (for the record, the ‘general public’ was # 3 on the list!) This ‘confidence’ thing is not an American ad agency problem, for sure. I worked at JWT and O&M in Sri Lanka, and we battled with these issues almost fifteen years ago!
But I do agree, that there are other pressing issues. In the same issue of Ad Age, an editorial on P&G underscores the point about how the ad industry needs to get to grips with reality –the issue of ‘agency conflict.’ This obsession with the competition –competing agencies, that is—has more serious consequences than a fixation over Mr. Whipple.
To get back to the conenction between ad bashing and ‘Rather’-bashing, the new thinking in journalism won’t come by banishing a 70-year old veteran. It will arrive when the networks face up to the reality that the Net has whetted people’s appetites for ‘just the news’ –that is news that is not fixated on the old ‘icons’ of journalism –sound-bites and toppling presidents.
Sony and Apple may be the two most creative companies on the planet. I say this not just because I am a Vaio user, and a Mac follower. The marketing, design and PR around the iMac, the Sony-Ericsson phones, and the Walkman are stories we relate around campfires and boardrooms. (Did you know it’s the 25th anniversary of the Walkman?)
Then there’s iTunes, a whole new ballgame, and there’s the NW-HD1 (extreme left image) from Sony, the iPod killer –at least from Sony’s point of view.
No matter what device emerges or what download service grabs the limelight (even Wal-Mart has an $.88 cents a tune download service, and Microsoft isn’t far behind) you can trust Steve Jobs to always generate the kind of PR that translates into sales.
Interesting project by Milton Glaser, the self-professed idiosyncratic designer. <a href=” Glaser says here and here, that his Light Up The Sky project in New York this week, is intended to not simply be another protest idea:
“What was needed was a solution that would not create civic disorder.”
Given the level of disruption being talked about and planned, it’s a welcome statement.
Now that blogs are demonstrating to everyone how uncomplicated content and tracking can be, it won’t be long before Web authoring software follows suit. Communicators like Shel Holtz have been saying it for years now, that it’s about time Communications and Marketing people started wrestling away Web content and design –at least at a basic level–from the tech folk.
Interesting article (the typical ‘5 reasons’) by David Aponovich at MarketingProfs yesterday on why Marketing folk should become more hands on when it comes to content management on the Web. He observes that:
“The rise of new job titles is one indication that many companies are getting it; directors of interactive marketing, directors of Web content and other professionals are bridging the divide between marketing strategy and technology.”
‘Getting it’ is one thing. Doing it, is another!
And now, a shameless plug:
Ragan Communications is holding a workshop by in November on Web Content Management. Here’s the link.
“Advertising is all about having a perfect tan and driving a cool car. It’s all about image.”
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Glen Hiller, graphic designer, Berkely Springs, WV
This quote has a very odd context, and happens to bear relevance to what I am working on right now –an article for IABC magazine on the changing role of advertising. Laura Ries has agreed to an interview. If you recall her book, (co-authored with her dad, Al Ries) “The fall of advertising and the rise of PR” made some unsettling points about how advertising has been so obsessed with image, that it’s being relegated to an ‘art.’ No different from how painting, when it gave way to photography, continued to live as an art form, losing its communications function.
Incidentally, Hiller is a graphic designer, who was dismissed from his job at a design and ad firm, Octavio Designs, because he protested the Iraq war at a Bush appearance. See article. Why was he dismissed? It offended the ad firm’s client, apparently!
I have been fascinated by stories popping up around the world of the use of mobile units to bring email and an Internet connection to towns that are off the grid.
This story of ‘motomen’ in Cambodia is just one of them.
I have written about this for an upcoming editorial in LMD, posing the question whether companies may be able to ‘adopt’ villages in remote parts of the country in Sri Lanka, and other Asian countries using mobile Wi-Fi units.
“What if teams of cyclists could be engaged (sponsored, by some corporate benefactor) to ride out to ten small towns a day, spend a few hours circling the community, during which time people without access to cyber café’s connect to the Net?”
An early experiment used a bicycle, as in Yury Gitman’s Magicbike project in the US. So I was really excited to see that a company is actually modelled on this idea. The picture above is off the Web site of First Mile Solutions. As you can see, the mobile internet idea has legs –4 in this case.
Great article by Mark Lasswell Business 2.0 (August ’04 issue) about how product names bomb, when companies try to take them global.
Most of us have heard of the Chevy Nova (which translated into “won’t go” in Latin America) and Perdue Chicken’s line “It takes a strong man to make a tender chicken” that in translates into “it takes a sexually aroused man to make a chicken affectionate.”
But I hadn’t heard that the Pajero from Mitsubishi translates into a ‘wankermobile’ in Spanish speaking countries. Explains why, over here in the U.S., it’s called the Montero. The Paj has been the notorious SUV of politicians in Sri Lanka. Makes sense.
For more bloopers, check this link.
This year may go down as the year of the viral marketing –or should that be the year of ‘subservient’ marketing?
After the wacky Subservient Chicken Web site featuring a man dressed as a chicken, came the ‘subservient president.’ This week, AdWeek reports that Crispin Porter & Bogusky has done it again for Burger King.
AngusDiet is a patently fake health site –populated with birds, fountains, and happy people—sprinkled with cynicism, humor, and a printable ‘honorary doctorate’. Even an Anthony Robbins-type of motivational film clip that ends with the line “Respect the angus. Respect the beef!”
It’s easy to see health advocates stomping all over this. But in the end, the question will be asked if this faux site is a viable marketing tactic. Maybe it is not supposed to be anything but a buzz generator (even targeting blogs like this!) to make the connection between the word ‘angus’ and Burger King.
To add to Clear Channel’s misery, Howard Stern supposedly blogs. Even without it, he manages to get his message out as in this comment on a section of the MTV site.
“This is a joke and a smokescreen that it’s about sex,” Stern said on Wednesday (June 30). “I dared to go on the air and say that I do not support George W. Bush, I support John Kerry … all of a sudden, Clear Channel took me off the air in six markets. When you criticize the president, you get thrown off the air.”
Businessweek (July 12, 2004) reports that Stern was influenced by Michael Moore’s book “Dude Where’s My Country.”
An interesting sidebar: There’s a Web site run by radio consulting firm Jacobs Media, which shows communicators the limits of this ‘indecency’ act. You can test your ‘Indecency Quotient’ here.
Sample question about what’s permissible on air:
Double entendres such as “Están cambiando el aceite” (“they’re changing the oil”) in a foreign language are safe. True or False?
Don’t know? Take the quiz!
Hoipolloireport 