There are some places we just don’t want ads to get into. I can name a few off the top of my head: church pews, foreheads, (they have tried) police squad cars, (somewhere in the US, apparently) the few seconds before you hear the dial tone, and cows (attempted in Switzerland, believe me) for example.

I never wanted RSS news readers to become an ad medium, but someone just pointed out how cool it can look. I am not so sure that ‘pretty cool’ translates into ‘very useful’ for most of us who relish the few commercial-free environments left in the real and virtual worlds we operate in.

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This may sound like a plug for IABC, but I have a Brand-related question. It grew out a session called “Restoring trust in a reality-show world” that I plan to sign up for at the IABCs international conference in June. I have been researching this topic for a year, and have a dilemma whether creating trust is more difficult than restoring trust. I am not sure if trust can be restored at all. Can Enron start over? Can Janet Jackson ever… you know!

Here’s my real question: How much importance do you give to a brand name when you are dealing with a company –say for your 401K, a car dealership, your child’s day care, even the grocery store? We make allowances for different levels of trust, depending on whether we are picking up milk, or dropping off our toddler. But does the ‘brand’ really matter?

To turn this question around, who is really in charge of the brand at these organizations? I make brand-conscious decisions every day, not based on the brochures, ads or the press releases, but based on the way the ‘barista’ treated me at you know where, the way the bread rack was stocked in aisle 23, and how many loops of the “your call is important to us” crap I am subject to when I call my service provider. So why is it we put more faith in the ad agency or the PR company than we do our employees? Who really is in charge of the day-to-day branding? When they do mess up, must we turn to the old tools for brand restoration? I think we communicators know the answer to that, but I have not still heard of a place where this happens.

Which is why I am going to be all ears at the trust-fest, which falls into an unexciting sounding track called ’employee communications.’ (I wish we could call employees ‘Internal Brand Guardians’ or some such thing.)

AND NOW A BLATANT PLUG FOR THIS SESSION:

In a world rife with communication spin and slant, it’s no wonder that employee trust has fallen by the wayside. Does that matter? You bet your brand it does! Drawing on Randstad’s research into employee attitudes, Joanne and Don Reichardt offer insightful recommendations for developing an internal communication program that will improve employee trust, loyalty and productivity; strategically align employee communication to support the brand; and raise the perceived value of employee communication at the highest levels of the business.

If you need more information on the sessions, jump off here.

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I am writing an article for IABC, on how political campaigns have been adopting forms of electronic communication. There seems to be a huge divide between a few blog-savvy politicians, and those still spending millions on TV ads. But consider these baby steps that tell me we will see a flurry of activity by the end of the year:

Sonia Gandhi sent a text message to a cricket-obsessed electorate with the words “You are India’s pride. Team India.” India, of course, is a country where SMS has grown by 200%. Mobile phone operators have agreed to use SMS to urge people to go out and vote in the elections this week.

The Prime Minister’s Office, Australia. Australian Prime Minister, John Howard has his own blog, as does Bush and Kerry.

Oh, yeah! Canada. Canadian mobile phone users have been given a 4 digit number to reach their country’s political parties via Text Message.

Mangalore, India –a city in Tamil NAdu, South India. Mobile phones of the media were targeted with an SMS message, IN ALL CAPS, about withholding a vote for two people.

Sri Lanka. The Sri Lankan elections that just concluded may be considered a new model for campaigning. The Marxist party of a former rebel group, the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna, contested and won parliamentary seats after using SMS, and other grass-roots forms of campaigning. So did a new party comprising Buddhist monks, called the Jathika Hela Urumaya. One report, even outlines how SMS was used in a form of negative campaigning. Outgoing cabinet minister, Milinda Moragoda, also uses SMS, but was voted off the island, so to speak, when his party, the United National Front lost the general election.
See the story here.

If you have any recent examples, please email me.

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Advertisers have mixed reactions to what’s called ‘interruption marketing,’ but rub their hands in glee when it is referred to in the same sentence as ‘guerilla marketing.’

Ever heard of the bizarre ‘subservient chicken’ Web site? The following example involves the words ‘viral,’ ‘chicken’ and ‘fast food’ but it has nothing to do with indigestion.

Subservient Chicken is an intriguing Web site for Burger King. The advertising hot shop that created the idea, Crispin, Porter + Bogusky is known for unconventional tactics in brand communication. The site features a man dressed in a chicken costume pacing around red couch. A white bar below it prompts you to “get chicken just the way you like it. Type in your command here.” You can type in commands such as jump, dance, sit etc, and the very odd bird/man character obeys. (Don’t try anything rude, the poor chap crashes to the ground. OK, go ahead, do it!)

What’s going in here? The fast food chain says it is part of a campaign to reinforce BK’s “core equity.” This is code for saying they have brought back the old “have it your way” tagline that the previous ad agency made them run. The Wall Street Journal reported this week that the site had received some 15 to 20 million hits, even though only 20 people had been officially told of the site. In other words, the story had spread in true viral fashion, for absolutely no cost, and in a matter of weeks! I think the exercise is futile, and may have no effect on what really matters: selling more burgers. But you have to admit that 20:20,000,000 is not a bad formula!

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It’s hard to predict where RFID is headed, in the context of an ‘always on’ culture that has to also get used to being always alert.

RFID is a fascinating area to watch, because it brings up issues of privacy and commerce –specifically whether the clothes we wear or what we buy at a grocery store could be monitored, and the implications of embedding the technology in currency notes and passports. But here’s a different angle:

Dan Gilmore writes about the University of Tokyo’s Ubiquitous Networking Laboratory where researchers see a future where RFID tags work with everything around us:

“Someone eyes a radish in a supermarket, and by scanning the vegetable with a handheld device — perhaps one of tomorrow’s smart phones — the customer can learn whether the radish was grown organically and how long ago it was picked.”

He then cites a Microsoft researcher, working on a project named ‘Aura’ that turns a hand-held computer into a scanner –it scans bar codes off a product, wirelessly connects to the Net and then scans databases, including search engines, to provide information about the product.

“The results can be illuminating. For example, Smith shows a supermarket scan of a box of cereal. The top item in Google reveals that the maker had at one point recalled the product because a significant ingredient wasn’t on the label.”

These will be the next generation of communicators and readers. Wireless and ubiquitous, and so small that it would be hard to not carry one.

I am not sure I could handle so much information on a daily basis, but it might change everything from packaging information, how a company markets a product, to checkout counters.

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After my post yesterday, I was pleasantly surprised to hear an NPR story (“Search Engine Wars”) this morning about the cat and mouse game of search engine optimization. As NPR put it, it’s also known as ‘gaming Google.’

I recently wrote an article about ‘Google Intelligence’ for LMD magazine that put forward the idea that people pay too much importance to search engines, confusing the ability to find ‘any subject on earth’ with in-depth research. One reader wrote asking asked if I was making fun of the ‘knowledge’ she could now find online. After all, she said, we could never have found out so much so easily before the Internet gave us so much access.

She missed an important point. I had prefaced it by saying that:

“..this is not about knocking Google and Yahoo!, or showing up the inadequacies of search engines. This is about how the Internet keeps us happy with superficial knowledge gleaned off home pages. It makes us very lazy when it comes to digging deep for information –information that is increasingly managed, massaged, and ends up on a search engine.

And my point is? A search engine can be very smart, but we have to remember that we are only looking at a very limited world view. Just because something is or isn’t listed on Google or Yahoo does not prove or disprove its relevance. Sometimes we need to probe deeper than the bowels of a server.

Yesterday’s cool trick using Google, which I like a lot, proves my point. Google rankings mean nothing, sometimes, even if they tell you how ‘important’ something is at that moment in time.

Having said that, I have to put in a word for a brand new search engine called A9. It’s a division of Amazon, and has some very useful features. What I like most: the ability to keep ‘notes’ on a page reference you find! Check it out!

Blog Search Engine -Search Engine
and Directory of blogs. Looking for blogs? Find them on BlogSearchEngine.com

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I just discovered an amazing Google hack called a “Google Duel for Writers” created by Geoff Peters, a Computing Science and Business student at Simon Fraser University in BC, Canada.

Google Duel for Writers is an amazing way of finding out which words (or phrases) from a group of synonyms, rank higher on Google. You simply type in up to 10 words or phrases into GoogleDuel fields and the results pop up in a few seconds.
http://cgi.sfu.ca/~gpeters/cgi-bin/pear/writers.php

I typed in the following 7 words:
ambience
mood
environment
feeling
nuance
context
scenario

I then clicked on the ‘Let the duel begin’ button. Guess what won?

“Environment” took the victory stand with 25.2 million mentions.

“Context” got just 10.1 million mentions.
“Ambience” got a measly 412,000 mentions.

The original Google Duel works for any 2 words.

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“May I have a class-action lawsuit with that?”

The obesity debate has become extremely polarized, as the blame-game continues.
It picked up some steam as soon as McDonald’s announced that it was discontinuing its super-sized servings. These days, anything McDonald’s does is fodder for journalists, because it’s such an easy story to cover –especially since they can play the blame game no matter what side they take.

A Wall Street Journal Editorial (titled “Supersized silliness”) in March 2004 put it this way:

“If we want the country to resemble Jennifer Aniston rather than 747s, we first have to face up to what’s really causing the bulge.”

ABCs Peter Jennings put it this way:

“According to data from the Department of Agriculture and the Environmental Working Group, sugars (and) fats, the foods the government says we should eat least, got 20 times more subsidies that fruits and vegetables.”

And, in a sound byte befitting the current war on everything, the president of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, hit out at the burger:

“The most prolific weapons of mass destruction in this country are the cheeseburger and a soda.”

The voices that are least heard are those who blame the real culprit: the people who drive up to the restaurant, pry open their wallets, order the product, and actually ingest something they don’t have to.

The restaurant isn’t responsible for making make you obese, any more than a grocery store is responsible for making you buy lettuce, or Krispy Kreme is responsible for pushing up your calorie count for selling you doughnuts!

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