Marketing

Quotes for the week ending 13 December, 2008

/ Angelo Fernando / Leave a comment

“sliding down Hell-in-Handbasket Ln.

AdRants about Virgin Mobile, commenting on the offensive/kinky video featuring an intoxicated Mrs. Claus.

“Goodbye, eyeballs—hello, conversations”

Article at Ragan.com featuring Katie Paine’s six steps in social media, where she advises against going for the nebulous value of media, and focusing on that which is measurable.

“This Wasn’t Quite the Change We Envisioned.”

Headline of Op-Ed by Barack Obama, quoted in Politico, which notes the rising dissatisfaction of Liberals with Obama’s centrist policies.

“There are still opportunities to defuse this.”

Duncan Clark, on the  Chinese government’s plan requiring foreign computer firms to submit security technology -which includes data encryption secrets –for government approval.

“…to bring the joy and the interest of our Islamic art to an Australian audience.”

Artist Phillip George, on his line of 30 Inshallah surfboards featuring Islamic art on display a beach in Sydney.

“When it comes to gaining consumer confidence, company blogs are the used car salesmen of the media world.”

Mark Walsh, on the news from a Forrester Research report that only 16 percent of people trust corporate blogs.

“You naysayers can laugh all you want. You’re just troglodytes caught up in old-word illusions like “ROI” and “profit” and “sales.” You probably scoffed at pioneering technologies such as Betamax, CueCat and Friendster, too, didn’t you? You talk trash about Web 2.0 and we’ll use the power of social media to bankrupt you just like we did Pepsi and Motrin”

AdAge columnist, Ken Wheaton, making fun of the Web 2.0 cheerleaders.

“Old World Perspectives on New Technology Is What Ails You.”

Response to the article above, by reader Rodney Mason.

Quotes for the week ending 29 November, 2008

/ Angelo Fernando / Leave a comment

“The impending total collapse of the dollar will render the true value of the average savings account or investment portfolio roughly equal to a bucket of warm piss.”

Thomas J. Wurtz, CFO of Wachovia, quoted in a press release about a new, daring billboard ad campaign

“If wearing your baby hurts your back or neck, you need positioning help, not Motrin”

Josh Bernoff, on the huge headache –um, backlash–Johnson & Johnson got on account of the ad about ‘wearing your baby’ in a sling.”

“Let’s face it: your beautifully lit, ideally scouted, model-perfect spot is likely going to be consumed in a 320×240 window. In that environment, Martin Scorsese would have a difficult time distinguishing between something shot on a Panavision Genesis versus a $150 Flip.”

Lewis Rothkopf, on the need to leverage broadband to narrowcast and target messaging in the way broadcasting has never done.

“Cheer up, it could be worse: it could be flu we’re facing and not merely a once in a 100 year meltdown in the financial system.”

Comment about a six-part drama, Survivors, on BBC1 where the story involves 90% of the population being wiped out in a flu pandemic.

“You get 14-year-old boys yelling out `I love you!’ because they learn these English expressions and try to use them.”

Kathleen Hampton, a teacher, using Skype to teach English to students in Korea in a reverse-outsourcing business from a town in Wyoming with a population of just 350.

“It’s not that we now have a president who’s black. It’s that for the first time we have a president who’s actually green.”

Oakland, Ca-based green-collar evangelist, Van Jones at GreenBuild conference this week.

“It’s a terrorist strike. Not entertainment. So tweeters, please be responsible with your tweets.”

A Twitter messge from Mumbai from primaveron@mumbai as the awful terrorist attack on the city broke out. Bloggers and the media took to new media to report the standoff and rescue operation

YouTube mashups as attack weapon

/ Angelo Fernando / Leave a comment

Johnson & Johnson learned the painful way how a social media could be used against you. See previous post and the YouTube video by angry Motrin mom.

This is not exactly a new approach. It was only last November that someone called out Unilever on it’s Axe positioning,  mashing up the brilliant Dove commercial about ‘real beauty’ and the same company’s sex-ridden ads for Axe —below.

These videos tell a different kind of story. The Motrin video is vary basic, the anti-Axe quite slick. Yet they achieve a few important things:

  • They assemble and summarize supporting evidence against the offending brand
  • They make the problem seem big enough to recruit new supporters of the cause
  • They provoke the marketer to react

To think, not too long ago, the only tool at one’s disposal when offended, was a letter to the editor of your local paper!

Quotes for the week ending 22 Nov, 2008

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“There is no ‘bailout clause’ in your credit card contract. Yours truly, Consumer Reports.”

An ad appearing for Consumer Reports

“The greatest influencer is family and friends. The internet is second. Motor shows are third.”

Nigel Harris, the VP of Ford Motor Co. in China, on the automaker’s marketing strategy in the number 2 car market in the world.

“It’s almost like seeing the guy show up at the soup kitchen in a high hat and tuxedo.”

House Representative Gary Ackerman at the hearing of the House Financial Services Committee, commenting on the news that the Ford, Chrysler and GM top executives came to Washington in private jets, just to ask for a bailout.

“Lively no more.”

Message at virtual world site, Lively, (a Google attempt at Second Life) announcing that it was pulling the plug on the experiment.

“Have you ever wanted to mark up Google search results? … Starting today you can”

Google announcement of a more dynamic search application where users could customize and even delete the results to fit their needs.

“Frankly, Obama could appoint his dear mother-in-law as secretary of state, and if he let the world know she was his envoy, she would be more effective than any ex-ambassador who had no relationship with the president.”

Thomas Friedman on the ‘star quality’ appointment of Senator Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State.

“We are attempting a 180 degree shift in perspective: seeking an algorithm first, problems second. We are investigating core micro- and macro-circuits of the brain.”

Professor Dhamendra Mohda, a IBM scientist working on a $4.9 million grant from DARPA to replicate neural networks in computers that may be eventially applied to data analysis, decision making or even image recognition.

“Virgin launches Wi-Fi in the sky”

News that Virgin Atlantic will begin the first Wi-Fi service on ovember 24th called GoGo, with a live 30-minute inflight recording to YouTube by 30 Rock‘s Keith Powell.

“You can experience public diplomacy in real-time as Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy, Colleen Graffy, travels to Bucharest and twitters along the way.”

News at DipNote on another social media initiative adopted at the highest levels of public diplomacy in the US.

Quotes for the week ending 15 November, 2008

/ Angelo Fernando / Leave a comment

“We are now offering a 25% Discount on all Collectable McCain/Palin08 products left in inventory”

Fire sale notice from the McCain-Palin campaign store.

“Simply put, things are already close enough between Change.gov and the Google Gang.”

Chris Soghoian, at CNetNews, commenting on Google’s relationship to the incoming White House administration. He also recommends BitTorrent for Pres. Obam’s fireside chats.

“massive employee raiding.”

Agency.com’s complaint that Scottsdale-AZ based agency, specifically Don Scales, a former Agency.com staffer, has been poaching its employees and clients.

“I go dark some weekends and evenings until 8 p.m. because my kids come first. It’s not easy, but I don’t need to be big on Digg.”

Jason Falls, Head of social media at Doe-Anderson, interviewd by Jason Baer

“Martin Eisenstadt doesn’t exist. His blog does, but it’s a put-on. The think tank where he is a senior fellow — the Harding Institute for Freedom and Democracy — is just a Web site. The TV clips of him on YouTube are fakes.”

The not so shocking news that an unnamed source for the Sarah-doesn’t-know-Africa-is-a-continent story a fabricated person, carefully set up by two film-makers. Many media outlets were duped.

“Create a video hub for the executive branch – call it GovTube – that aggregates all video content throughout the government in a searchable, user friendly video portal.”

One of the recomemndations by Dan Mannet, at TechPresident, for how the new administration could use multi-media.

Times are tough. Compete, don’t complain

/ Angelo Fernando / Leave a comment

Yawn. There’s a lawsuit being filed by Agency.com against Scottsdale-Arizona based iCrossing.

Having been within earshot of the folks as they trotted out the Agency.com hires (and this was more than two years ago) one has to wonder: Was Agency in a coma all these years? On the other hand, what is it complaining about. If you can’t hold onto your employees by providing the proper incentives, would a court order do the trick?

Let me sidestep a personal angle here and comment on what’s at stake in a tight economy.

  • Eat your own dog food. Marketing agencies seem to be great at coming up with solutions for their clients, but are embarrassingly bad when it comes to applying some of it to themselves.
  • Empower your employees. Employees beat brochures. And trade shows. And junkets. The iCrossing I remember ran ran a top-down operation that was ridiculously incongruent with the bottom-up world it operated in.
  • Reputation is (that awful word again) sticky. Companies get too busy propping up a reputation with press releases and forget to monitor and respond to chatter. Agency.com has some great bylines in major trade pubs, but some bad google juice it warned after a YouTube incident that still hangs around.

The 140-character pitch and getting creative with Twitter

/ Angelo Fernando / 1 Comment

The over-used acronym KISS, could very well stand for Keep in short, stupid!

It’s probably more relevant today than it was a couple of years ago, where we are battling channel fatigue and attention deficit all at once.

So I was really interested in this post by a friend, Nathan Wagner, who just started his blog, Relevant Chews, about the need to hone down your elevator pitch to Twitter-length. Great food for thought.

On a similar note, I came across the Twinterview format (an interview using Twitter, if you have not guessed) also innovative, not just because of the way it uses the collaborative micro-blogging platform for the back and forth, but for the need to condense the Q and A into relevant chewable bites, if I may borrow from Wagner. I have to say I am guilty of sometimes framing a question that sounds more like a statement. (I am working on it.)

The reality is that the people we interview have a lot to say, so Twitter may seem a bit too condensed. But this might be one way to respect a person’s time, and get the interview when the he/she is on the move, undistracted, and ready to ‘talk.’ As we see in Jason Baer‘s twinterview with Scott Monty of Ford, both manage to squeeze in details, and url’s to make the exchange great.

What could we learn from Obama -the brand?

/ Angelo Fernando / Leave a comment

John McCain was the original, durable brand as far as the media was concerned. What was on the wrapper was nothing compared to what was inside.

If we deconstruct his campaign we would see how, as I had mentioned even before the results, his team badly managed the brand, the positioning, the distribution, the user experience.

But Brand Obama is something else entirely. It was all about connections. Well managed, for sure. Strategic as good as it gets. Someone commenting on the Fast Company cover story in March this year said “the Obama brand is a short lived one, I would not want to put on any product I was marketing”.

Another response from one Tim Leberecht was very telling:

“The Obama brand is all software and only a little hardware, and it comes with an open SDK (software developer kit) — a dynamic, modular platform that both individual campaigners and institutional networks can plug into.”

A brand that individual networks can plug into. Now that’s what all brands must aspire to be.

It’s almost like describing the iPhone. Not just for being a shiny object but for being something people could connect to, customize, create their own apps (T-shirts, signs, even graffiti!).

Compare the image on the left to this response from a French Minister, Rama Yade:

“This is the fall of the Berlin Wall times ten … On this morning, we all want to be American, so we can take a bite of this dream unfolding before our eyes.”

The brand undoubtably infected them.

Don’t vote for these guys

/ Angelo Fernando / Leave a comment

As I made my short list of whom to vote for in my district & county, I struck out a few people for the simple reason that they have come off so negative. I get it. Negative ads move the needle a bit, but not where I come from.

There were a few other marketing-related reasons as well why I thought they don’t need to be in charge of things.

  • They use some very, very old, unverified databases – I get mailers to three versions of my name. I have two words for them: database cleansing.
  • They present half-truths (as verified here) that assume the voter is dumb, and that we only get our information from their 9″ x 6″ flyers.
  • They kill a lot of trees to get their message (fiscal conservativism, responsible stewards yada yada).
  • They use the same format, same size, possibly the same print company. Did they not get the memo: one size fits nobody? The guy who sent us hand-addressed “letters” from his wife? Oh, come on!
  • They have no clue about variable-data printing. If they need to ask what this is, their campaign staff don’t need my tax money.