If there’s one book on marketing you rush out to buy this fall, choose Brandwashed!

This is not a paid endorsement, merely the most creative and well-written look that I’ve seen at product placement, technology and the power that companies continue to have over consumers…ever. I’m trying to pitch it as a psychology class to my alma mater.

Did you know that you are first targeted by businesses at the age of 24 weeks? In the womb. The inspiration of Mr. Martin Lindstrom‘s latest is a Keeping up with the Joneses type experiment. A family moved into a wealthy Californian neighborhood with the intent of seeing at how concentrated peer pressure and product placement appeared to be and how well it worked. Because the publishing-company-created Morganson family was affluent, approachable and easy to respect, the result was that their peers and neighbors wanted to embody their purchase decisions. I reached out to Mr. Lindstrom about the development process of Brandwashed and his history in the marketing and advertising worlds.

You can’t have started much younger than this guy. As a kid he loved LEGO, (understatement, the man had a LEGO bed…actually I’m a little jealous and impressed by this) and was enamored by the idea of opening his own LEGOLAND. When visitors were a wee bit lacking the first day, Lindstrom decided to approach a local advertising agency for a sponsorship. His dedication to his craft must have been apparent; they accepted and 131 guests arrived the next day to see the newest branch of the LEGOLAND franchise. Unfortunately, guests 130 and 131 were representatives from LEGO who were none too happy with the situation. Regardless, enterprise and creativity were instilled in Lindstrom from an early age.

Lindstrom hopes that if readers take anything away from Brandwashed it will be the idea that we’re all Brandwashed. Here comes the psychology- “The more we think we’re immune the more brandwashed we are.”

In his journey to withdraw from the product/consumer frenzy, Lindstrom gave himself a goal. One year without brands. Nada. Toothpaste? Had to be generic, the kind you get on plains. Bananas, no Chiquita for you. Anything that subconsciously you would allude to with a store or brand reference, went out the door. When I asked Lindstrom which brand he missed the most? (And you’ll have to read Brandwashed to see if he was successful in his endeavor) Pepsi. Which interestingly enough, he’s since “quit.”

In reading Brandwashed: Tricks Companies Use to Manipulate Our Minds and Persuade Us to Buy, I was more often surprised than not reading case study and statistics. Lindstrom shares the Carmex industry as a shocker — they infuse an addictive substance into the lip balm, creating a continuous need for the consumer to apply more. Naughty, naughty Carmex! Seeing as how the inspiration for the Morganson experiment was a recent movie, I asked if Lindstrom thought the movie was an accurate portrayal of brand placement. He agrees it was extremely accurate and a fair representation of sale increases due to word of mouth and consumer-to-consumer advertising. One product advertised by the Morganson family saw an increase in sales of over 1000%.

Unfortunately the future of brand placement, at least if you’re opposed to it, isn’t going anywhere anytime soon. Lindstrom believes the future holds a complete integration of editorial messages and commercial messages.

“It’s sad but true. It’s happening because the TV networks are struggling to retain attention around their programs (TIVO) so they need to integrate the commercial messages into their editorial work. We’ll also soon see plot placement where the entire story is about a brand (think about Master – the dog in a Chile TV show sponsored by the brand Master). Can we avoid it – no – but we can inform about – hence Brandwashed (this is a product placement – now you’re warned) ;-D”

Well then maybe Lindstrom’s upcoming goals are spot-on: educating companies. This coming week he’ll introduce the 10 new ethical guidelines for companies worldwide to adapt. He’s created these with the help of 2,100 consumers. His hopes? That he can persuade 10% of Fortune 500 companies.

“Word-of-mouth is the answer- both online and offline. It is very clear to me that our filter goes up when we’re exposed for advertising – lowering the effect that it has. The same is happening for product placement as we get more and more used to it. Next frontier will be word-of-mouth — and possibly contextual advertising — both online (which is happening in a big way on Facebook and elsewhere) and in the real bricks-and-mortar world (like contextual shopping carts etc).”

Brandwashed: Tricks Companies Use to Manipulate Our Minds and Persuade Us to Buy

Related articles

• Brandwashed by Martin Lindstrom (futurelab.net)
• Brandwashed by Martin Lindstrom (neurosciencemarketing.com)
• Is Your Brand Evil? (neurosciencemarketing.com)
• Author Hopes His New Book Redraws Ethical Lines in Marketing (mediabistro.com)
• It’s the Product, Stupid (neurosciencemarketing.com)

While most people seem to be appalled, I am amazed at how well old television shows can get a facelift when it comes to product placement and relevant and timely promotions.

Since all television is, anyway, is a delivery vehicle for advertisement, revising popular sitcoms into ad-delivery-vehicles actually gives some life to products that could otherwise go out of syndication. via The Consumerist:

For the past few years, networks have been digitally inserting ads and product placements for new products into old reruns. Shannon just noticed one in a rerun of a 2007 episode of “How I Met Your Mother.” In the background on the shelf is a magazine with an ad on the back for the new “Zookeeper” starring Kevin James.

Here’s the original scene:

You might be wondering why after a while of participating with social media marketing, Facebook marketing specifically, you are still stuck on that level where people don’t seem to care about you or your brand. You might look around and notice that others are doing a great job in it. You might ask yourself “What am I doing wrong”?

You then revisit your marketing plans and strategy and see that there’s nothing wrong with it, as it may seem. Sometimes it is not about what you are doing, maybe you are not doing anything wrong, it may sometimes be about the things you are not doing, things that you don’t know.

Let us say you do listen to your customers or your fans. You determined what they want and what they need based on the things they like or the things they are telling you, but do you know who your customers really are?

It is impossible to know them personally one by one, but Facebook itself offers a lot of information about your customers that might be useful to you and your plans. You don’t have to personally ask them about these things, you just need the permission to access them.

Your customers are people, people vary from age, personality, ethnicity, industry, beliefs , principles and other things. This also means that their needs and perspective for content also vary.

If you know who your customers really are you can divide them into groups, you can specify how you can reach each group and what sorts of information you are going to reach them with.

So now you might think that you are providing the right content to the right audience, approaching the right people in the right wa, but it still doesn’t seem to show any improvement, what else is wrong?

Again, there’s nothing wrong with that, you might be lacking something. Something so crucial in advertising and marketing, which is so called TIMING.

Timing is everything for lots of things including marketing. You might be giving away the right things but not at the right time. How would you know that it is time to throw something up? Christina Warren of Mashable relates crucial information from a study conducted by Vitrue :

We know that users are spending increasing amounts of time online on social networks like Facebook, but when exactly are users the most active? Social media management company Vitrue just released a study that identifies the days and hours users are most active on the Facebook channels maintained by companies and brands.

…

The three biggest usage spikes tend to occur on weekdays at 11:00 a.m., 3:00 p.m. and 8:00 p.m. ET.
The biggest spike occurs at 3:00 p.m. ET on weekdays.
Weekday usage is pretty steady, however Wednesday at 3:00 pm ET is consistently the busiest period.
Fans are less active on Sunday compared to all other days of the week.

Never fail to study and pay attention to even the smallest details, the smallest piece of information may be the key factor.

We use Twitter to get connected. To be connected to family members or with our friends and peers. But many use the power of Twitter to promote or advertise brands to a larger audience.

If we use Twitter for “family-affairs” protecting our tweets is a great idea, but if you want to use it for branding then protecting your tweets defeats the purpose. You use it to shout your brand out proudly, so why hide your tweets?

In a post in by Peter Shankman, “Why You NEED to Unprotect Your Tweets“, a mail to his friend was included saying :

Hey ______:

UNPROTECT YOUR TWEETS. Simply put: Twitter is a way to enhance your brand. You have fans. They want to feel connected to you. If you don’t make your tweets accessible, they feel left out, even if they ask for permission to follow and you grant it. A super-high majority of the people who go to your twitter site and see that your tweets are protected WILL NOT bother to request access. As such, you lose 90% of a potential channel to reach your fans. UNPROTECT your tweets IMMEDIATELY, and simply be smart about what you tweet – Anything you tweet, just remember that it’s public and it goes to everyone. You’re smart like that, it’s not like you’re going to get drunk and tweet naked photos of yourself. So unprotect your tweets and open up a whole new way for your audience to interact with you. You’ll appreciate it. Trust me.

Privacy is a good thing, but being private has its own time and its own place, definitely not in advertising.

Holiday season is coming, it’s the time of year again to be generous and give gifts to one another. Some find it hard to look for suitable gifts for their loved ones. Well, if you are thinking of getting something for your dad or your husband, The Home Depot’s Gift Center showcases diverse tools selection from Husky! It offers you high-class products from screwdrivers to sockets and wrenches and all are for LOW prices, all under $20 and some are under $5. Great choices, great prices.

Here are the list of tools :

13-Piece Powertek™ Precision Cordless Screwdriver Set – ($9.88)

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Replaces 48 Sockets – replaces 6 Bolt Styles and 8 Socket Heads

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It really doesn’t matter what you will give to a loved one this holiday season, it’s the thought that counts. But then again, you would want to give that person something he can use and be useful to him.

View the Husky Ads here : http://huskytoolsnews.com/

(This has been a post for an Abraham Harrison LLC client)

Advertising is not a one-shot bullet to success but rather a continuous process in achieving a higher perspective. We all know that making an advertisement takes a lot of effort, and money of course, so there is a tendency to make use of the same ads over and over again. There is nothing wrong with that but they should at least consider the trend of the current advertising and the technology not to mention the time. A post from versacreations.net entitled “Advertising works the way the grass grow” it somehow compared advertising to the backyard with grasses growing every week :

We find that advertising works the way the grass grows. You can never see it, but every week you have to mow the lawn. ~ Andy Travis

Sadly, many marketers – whether on the agency or client side – don’t look at it that way. They would think hard and work hard to get a really good idea and execute it. Voila, it works. Everyone celebrates and leaves it as is because the good old adage says “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”

Technically, nothing wrong with keeping the same advertisement if the message is still relevant. However, there are other things to consider. Are the images, words, tone of voices relevant to the fashion of the day? I remembered seeing a pharmaceutical company’s TVC year after year during Christmas season since I was in high school. The product is reputable, the message is relevant, however, everything in the commercial looks dated ! After 20 years, even the dashing actor that did the commercial don’t look as suave and cool.

There really is nothing wrong about reusing past ads as long as it is “in” and it still works.

In the next Super Bowl, Ford Motor Company will not be advertising because it is planning to focus more on the online ads and trying to speed up publicity through social media. According the article of Frank Watson, “Ford Drops Super Bowl Ads For Online Spends” :

“Customers are spending as much time with the mobile smart phone or online as they are watching TV now, so our advertising dollars have to flow to where the people are,” Ford’s marketing chief Jim Farley told Reuters in an interview.

Farley joined Ford in 2007 and has been aggressive in taking advantage of digital marketing. The company leads the way in use of Twitter by any of the big 3 US car companies – having two accounts @Ford and @FordCustService compared to GM’s @GMblog and Cheveolet’s @Chevrolet.

The car industry has embraced social media. Chevrolet has even been advertising on Twitter.

Farley is “betting Ford can use Facebook and Twitter to accelerate the word-of-mouth recommendations long familiar to the auto industry and help the blue-oval brand connect with younger and richer people.

Farley said he learned at Scion that the only way to push past consumer skepticism is “to break into their world.”

Whether it’s a good decision or a bad one, we will see the results of this choice of Ford in the near future.

You direct traffic to your website to attract users that are possible consumers. There are some ways to make users come and visit your site and browse around. Inviting them to look at your site is one thing but making them stay is another. Let’s say that your site is full of eye-candy and publicized carefully and widely. You have everything rolled out for them to look at. Now, how will you make them stay a little longer to really digest what you showcase and maybe make them visit more often if not regularly? Here are some ways enumerated by Gabriella Sannino in her article “How to Bring Visitors to Your Site – And 6 Ways to Keep Them There”:

6 Ways to Keep Visitors on Your Site

1. Remember every page is a landing page.

Your services page can be a landing page, but so can your home, about or terms of service pages. You can’t assume that anyone seeing your about page came from somewhere else on your site. Build each page as if it’s the first page your visitor will see.

2. Less link bait more truth.

Many people use link bait as a way to get people to their site. However, if your content doesn’t somehow match the link bait, it’s going to upset some visitors. A few sites have actually lost a lot of visitors due to a high amount of link bait articles. You can link bait, but use it cautiously, carefully.

3. Fulfill your promise.

You promised them something that made them click on your link. You have to make good on that promise. If you have a “how to”, give them “how to”. If you promise a free report, don’t try to sell it to them. If you promise them they can learn how to play poker by reading your article, teach them to play poker (or at least give them pointers).

In other words, never, NEVER lie in your headline. They’ll never trust you again if you do. You can give misleading headlines (“Why You Don’t Need SEO”) to tweak their curiosity, but immediately correct it in the beginning of the content on the page.

4. Repeat yourself.

The headline of a page should repeat the headline of the ad or search result. If it doesn’t, the visitor may lose interest, be confused or feel cheated.

5. Don’t tease.

This isn’t flirtatious fun; this is business. Don’t tease the visitor in the first couple of paragraphs. Immediately step into the goods. Now, with articles/blogs, you can lead them in with a series of questions to show them you understand their pain, but don’t make it a long lead in.

6. Use your friends and family.

Here’s the biggest problem with you writing for your visitors: you’re a professional and they’re laypeople. They may not understand the terms you use. Before putting any content out on the Net, run it by friends and/or family. Given they are going to be honest with you of course. If they stop and say, “what’s this mean”, you need to use a different word or give an explanation. Example: This will help you increase your ROI (Return on Investment). Basically, understanding what is going to convert and what is dead in the water.

It is really good that you have people visiting your website, but it’s great that you have frequent visitors that can probably be your loyal consumers. Invite them over and make them stay.

Reinvention Summit invites you to be a part of the first ever Virtual Summit for the Future of Storytelling as we all try to reinvent the whole world through the creative process of storytelling – blogging.

The starting date is November 11 and you can still join up to the 22nd, Reinvention Summit encourages you to participate through the following ways :

• Write a Blog post with your POV on reinvention/storytelling
• Record a YouTube video with your POV on reinvention/storytelling
• Reveal your personal reinvention story in blog or video post
• Share the LINK to free download of Storytelling Manifesto
• Share the LINK to Reinvention Summit (access starts at just $11.11)
• Share the Coupon Code to Reinvention Summit (REINVENTION)

The sessions of the summit will be recorded for playback and that’s why you can still blog and promote through the 22nd. This innovation in the world of storytelling is a road to further understanding the power of narrative. As you contribute to this summit there will also be a bonus for your efforts and talent that you will share, they offer contributors a discount coupon that you can share with your audience, a complimentary download of their Storytelling Manifesto and a FREE PASS for you :

• Coupon for $25 OFF an Activators or Explorers Pass. Use code: REINVENTION
• “Believe Me: a Storytelling Manifesto for Change-makers and Innovators”. Our 88-page gift to you! Complimentary download is available at http://www.believemethebook.com
• To Redeem your FREE Press Pass send an email to Jodi with the words Blogger Outreach in the subject. Include the following information: Name, Email, Twitter ID, Blog URL. You will receive an email Monday, 11/8 with summit details and access information.

It sounds really awesome to be a part of this world changing event. You express how you feel while telling your own stories, collaborating with fellow storytellers, and painting a bigger picture for the future of narratives and blogging itself.

This is not just for bloggers and storytellers, entrepreneurs and marketers will also benefit through this summit, you can learn how others can communicate and spread their stories with lots of people, applying the same philosophy,you would also like to spread words about your products and services to people. This is quite an investment to storytellers and marketers, they will enhance the connection to the world with new tools, vocabulary and frameworks of storytelling.

The summit is a convergence of excellence and expertise as reflected to its selected speakers which includes John Gerzema, Tiffany Shlain, John Elkington, Nancy Duarte, Julien Smith, Annette Simmons, Johnny B. Truant, Katya Andresen, and many others that are crafted with artistry of narrative.

Being produced by Get Storied, this summit is also made possible by a lot of their friends and partners.

So even if you are a professional or self proclaimed blogger, you can join this innovative summit to have some new insights or techniques on storytelling or just wanted your story to be heard of many who are in the same industry.

Here is the whole invitation for the summit : Bloggers are the Ultimate Storytellers!

Facebook is undeniably the most popular social networking website, this is one of the reasons why Facebook dominates online display ad views in the US. In the data released by Comscore, a digital market intelligence firm, Facebook has a total of 297 billion online display ads which is 23% of all display ad impression. In the article “Facebook dominates online display ads in the U.S.” by Venu Archalla, it was stated:

Roughly speaking, the numbers suggest that nearly one of every four display ads viewed in the United States was on Facebook’s website. This marks as an increase of over 13.9 percentage points from 9.2 percent in Q3 2009. Yahoo sites with 140 billion impressions (11.0 percent) finished second followed by Microsoft Sites with 64 billion impressions (5.0 percent) and Fox Interactive Media with 48 billion impressions (3.8 percent). Google sites with 35 billion impressions (2.7 percent) finished at the fifth place.

Overall, the online display ad market showed strong gains as compared to last year’s soft environment thus indicating that the days of advertising recession are over. Almost 1.3 trillion display ads were delivered to U.S. Internet users in the third quarter, a 22 percent jump from a year ago. This also means that an average U.S. Internet user was hit by more than 6,000 display ads over the course of the quarter.

Indeed the numbers say it all. With this data we can all infer that the recession even for advertising is history and the industries will soon be back to the track of progress.

Twitter begins the trial of posting advertisements on individuals’ streams or timelines, whether they follow the marketer or not. Twitter slowly make changes to the way they advertise. Based on the article Twitter Begins Publishing in Users’ Streams by Edmund Lee:

Showing an advertisement within the stream of any Twitter user is a significant change, as some users may see it as a disruption or even an intrusion into their typical Twitter experience. CEO Dick Costolo told Ad Age in April that the company would be looking at possibly selling advertising into a user’s timeline in the fourth quarter of this year, though he cautioned it would happen slowly. “Is it great in search and horrible in the timeline? We are going to test and test and test,” Mr. Costolo said at the time.

Twitter’s other ad products also started out with a smaller segment of users. Promoted Tweets, for example, initially appeared on searches on Twitter.com, and the company only recently allowed third-party Twitter readers such as HootSuite and TweetDeck to display these Promoted Tweets, for which they also got a cut of the revenue. Advertisers have also been buying Twitter’s other ad product, Promoted Trends, which show up at the top of a list of trending topics on Twitter.com. This list is generally seen by a smaller segment of Twitter users, as many use third-party clients, not all of which show the trend list.

The new timeline ads are said to function as an extensions of Promoted Tweets which are targeted by keyword. Those ads only appear at the top of searches; the new ads will scroll by as a normal tweet would.

Of course not everybody will be in favor of this change, some users may find this ads disruptions or spams, but on the other hand it’s another way to enhance the publicity of the products and services the marketers’ offer.

One of the most popular ways of interacting with consumers or fans while advertising at the same time is maintaining a Facebook Fan Page. Most people, if not everyone, are on Facebook so you are targeting a very large audience when you do so. Marketers and the owners of the pages can spread news and updates through posts to every fan’s wall. Here are some tips to increase fans and promote your pages given by Nick Stamoulis through his article Facebook Fan Page Promotion Tips:

Facebook Fan Page “Like” Box

Every Facebook fan page has the ability to be embedded directly into the structure of your website increasing the amount of people that might hit that “like” button. Once they hit the like button and they are signed into their Facebook account (which many are) they automatically become a fan of your page. Now every time you post something on your businesses wall your Facebook fans will see it.

Twitter Stream

If you have a Twitter account that is somewhat active feel free to drop in the link to your Facebook fan page once in a while in order to see some new fans come aboard. As long as you are not posting a link every 10 minutes your audience will respond over time with some new fan sign ups.

Social Bookmarking

You can even take your Facebook fan page and submit it into the social bookmarking websites once in a great while. I wouldn’t recommend doing this often because it could look spammy but if you do it once a very great while you could generate some nice fans coming over to see what you have to offer.

Email Newsletter

If you have a regularly scheduled newsletter submit a link to your Facebook fan page in your newsletter. If your newsletter recipient list has a good deal of emails you could really see this work to your benefit especially if you have a nice progression of new sign ups coming aboard to your newsletter list.

There are many ways you can build and promote your Facebook fan page online. Do not try using any quick scheme software programs to get the job done because I can guarantee you that you will eventually have your account shut off. Facebook does not take kindly to that approach. Do it with taste and marketing and your efforts will be rewarded tenfold.

Having an organized and active fan page can really increase the popularity of the products or services you offer. Fans, once they “liked” your page, they will automatically suggest their friends to subscribe to your page too, so it is really a fast way to spread information about you and gather more fans and customers.

The first thing you need to understand in marketing is that, you are giving what the customers like and not what you want to give them. It should always be about your target, which is in this case, your prospect consumers. Brendan cooper stated on his article “Social Media Marketing:it’s not about you”:

Marketing isn’t about you. It’s about your audiences. But it’s surprising how often people get this the wrong way around.

These phrases crop up fairly often:

• ” No one will be talking about us online”
• “I really like sites with lots of animation on them”
• “I don’t see why anyone would want to follow X”

The important words to notice here are “I” and “us” – because it really doesn’t matter what you think.

First, your individual preferences. OK, so you might like websites with lots of animation on them but you’re just one person. You have a gender (presumably), an age, a demographic. And it’s highly unlikely that your preferences match those of your audience. So if you’re running a structural engineering consultancy and you’re saying you like animations then that’s fine – but not if you’re a 20-something woman who thinks a polished brand is everything, while your audience is overwhelmingly 40-something males who just want facts.

Second, your expectations. Look, the web is really really big, and diverse, and weird, and getting bigger, more diverse and weirder all the time. I’ve totally given up predicting what I might find when I go online for a client. I’ve found entire Facebook pages dedicated to absolute all-c0nsuming hate for clients, and I’ve come across endearingly amateur videos singing their praises. You just cannot make any assumptions until you go out there and look.

The real goal of social media marketing is to attract consumers, and show them what they need that you could offer, not to show them what you wanted them to see. You should take every opportunity to advertise in any way possible not confiding in what you just wanted to do in the first place.

Last year Pepsi decided to forgo any Super Bowl advertisements and instead go all out in social media campaigns. This year they’re plannign to combine the two for an even stronger ad presence. According to Jack Marshall in his article Pepsi Returns to Super Bowl With User Generated Ads:

Following the decision not to buy ads for its beverage brands during the 2010 Super Bowl, PepsiCo yesterday said it will air a total of six :30 spots during this year’s game, all of which will be created by consumers for a chance to win a total of $5 million in prize money.

Entrants will submit creative for PepsiCo’s Doritos and Pepsi MAX brands via a dedicated site at crashthesuperbowl.com, from which ten finalists will be selected and announced in January. Consumers will then vote for their favorite ads to determine two winning spots for each brand, with PepsiCo executives selecting a further two. Each of the ten finalists will receive $25,000 in prize money and a trip to Dallas to attend the game in a private luxury suite. The six winners will be awarded a maximum of $5 million, depending on the success of their ads in USA Today’s Ad Meter panel, and a contract to create additional ads for the two brands in 2011.

Commenting on the campaign, Lauren Hobart, CMO sparkling beverages for PepsiCo, said the brand was “excited” to return to the event, adding, “We believe that great ideas can come from anywhere and we’re excited to give Pepsi MAX fans the chance to showcase their creative talents on one of the world’s biggest stages.”

I think combining old school marketing with social media marketing and crowd sourcing can only work out well for Pepsi.

LG Portugal is taking an innovative approach to marketing their merchandise. They are creating content in the form of videos like this one that people actually enjoy watching and want to share. Really, it’s not a huge and new idea, but one that many companies seem to have forgotten or passed over. Entertaining your customers is just as important for a brand as it is for a performer. Without that entertainment the market will completely forget your message and your brand.

Check out the video here:

What are your thoughts?

Oh Pepsi. . . why would you make such a bone headed mistake like using music that you haven’t secured the rights to use? Especially when there are plenty of options for music that isn’t tied down by any of these problems. Pepsi used the song “Why Can’t We Be Friends” by the band “War” in this commercial spot:

The guys from War claim Pepsi stole their “signature song” for a national ad campaign … and now the band is opening a $10 million can of whoop ass to make things right. -TMZ

As of now on Jamendo alone has 1552 albums (each containing several pieces of music) available, licensed under an attribution only Creative Commons License. Which means you can use this music in any of your productions for the cost of a line in the rolling credits!

Kevin MacLeod has skads of royalty free music available to use as you like as long as you give him credit and even has options for applying for a Sans Attribution License in those cases where you cannot credit him (such as in a commercial).

There are many other royalty free / creative commons music sources including Free Play Music and places like RoyaltyFreeMusic.com (which offers royalty free music at a low cost).

With all of the options for royalty free music. . . don’t be like Pepsi. Don’t use music that you don’t have a license for in your productions, especially since there are plenty of pieces of great music readily available.

I was forwarded this video Honda has out for their very cool U3-X personal mobility device, apparently designed for people determined to reduce their physical activity to zero:

WARNING: DIVE for the mute button. The background music has been designed by heartless sadists who aim to make the baby Jesus cry. Also, ignore the subtitles if you wish to retain respect for Honda.

Pretty actresses, amateurish but decent camera work, and then… a soundtrack stolen from infomercials and porno films. WTH?!

Really Honda? You invest a gazillion yen in developing a game-changing piece of technology, spend tens of thousands more dollars producing a video, then after all that time, effort, and money, you dump a fecal mix of music on it that evokes the emotional reaction : CHEAP, CRAP, SWINDLE.

The soundtrack of a film is its key vehicle for evoking emotion, particularly in the case of ads and promotional videos that have only seconds or minutes to establish a lasting impression. When you present futureware like the U3-X, you aim to create passion, excitement, and respect. Why waste and undermine your efforts by using music that sounds like it was produced for a made-for-video naked Thighmaster ad? Why spend millions to get that far, then throw a heap of crap music on it as a $50 afterthought?

My company doesn’t do music production, but I know lots of brilliant, talented, skilled soundtrack firms that do. For your next such video please contact me and I’ll connect you with the right people. I am a life-long, religious Honda driver and hate to see a Honda #fail, plus, I love the baby Jesus, and don’t want you to keep making him cry.

Earlier this year Grey Germany put out three condom ads for Doc Morris pharmacies. They were attempts to wittily imply that the human race could have been spared three uber-butchers of the past century (Mao Tze-Tung, Adolf Hitler and Osama bin Laden), and the horror and suffering they brought, by a simple condom (a Doc Morris condom, natch). The humble rubber as a superhero and savior of humanity — there definitely is potential for some wonderful, dark, absurdist humor in that idea.

I can totally see how a certain young, urbane sector of German society could find these ads really quite funny and compelling — as they did the suicide-themed Pepsi One ads done last year that offended so many outside the target demographic.

Now, unfortunately for Grey and for Doc Morris, not everyone thought the “Evil Sperm” ads were funny. Quite a few people thought they were racist, insensitive, offensive and inappropriate — and now those adjectives are associated with Doc Morris pharmacies in people’s heads.

That’s the way it is with humor — sometimes you nail it, sometimes you bomb. Humor is powerful in both directions.

A simple allegory for old-media folks who still don’t get it: Standing up and telling a fart joke while drinking with friends in your rec room = low risk. Standing up and telling a fart joke while drinking with friends at someone’s wedding party = high risk.

With internet advertising and PR, you are always at someone’s wedding party; you are never safely behind closed doors. If you try to be loud and draw attention to yourself, as advertisers and PR folk generally do, the people at the next table are going to hear it — and if you’re testing the limits of good taste with your humor, the odds are that those uptight grandmas and squares and stuffed shirts who just don’t appreciate your super-edgy wit are going to think poorly of you and perhaps even whack you with their cash-filled Vera Bradley handbags.

Here are some realities of the media world of 2009 that old-school advertising and PR would be well served to note:

• You can’t expect your messaging to stay contained within your target demographic. The information you put out will spread, and that spread is beyond your control. There are only two reasons why information doesn’t spread once it is out: a) people are just uninterested in your message, b) it’s in a language people don’t speak (which is really just a subset of “a,” frankly). Note: Images like the “Evil Sperm” ads are language-less, so they will jump the language barrier with glee.
• You can’t put the toothpaste back in the tube. There is no memory hole with the internet. Book-burning is so 20th century. Babelsplatz was yesterday. If you put it out, it is there to stay (even if folks like Ads of the World are willing to censor).
• Hiding and praying it will go away rarely works. Like every good stand-up comic knows, if your routine is bombing, the only thing you can do is keep talking. It’s double or nothing. The only treatment for unfortunate speech is more speech.

So, what does this mean concretely? How does the modern PR/advertising flack deal with the fact that we live in a world where toothpaste gets irretrievably out of the tube and will probably ooze into places we never wanted to have it? Well …

• Craft your message with the knowledge that it will likely go where you didn’t intend it to go. One thing this could mean is don’t do messages that, while they may resonate with one of your customer demographics, are bound to offend others. Grey’s “Evil Sperm” and Pepsi‘s suicide ads fall into that category. Alternately, if you can’t resist putting out offensive stuff, because it’s just so incredibly funny and will make your targets buy and your colleagues green with professional envy, then have your mea culpa marketing strategy ready in advance to take advantage of the probable result — a social-media shitstorm — as Pepsi did with its suicide ads (more on mea culpa marketing below).
• Don’t humiliate yourself by begging (or worse, demanding) bloggers to go back and censor your screw-up. As a blogger, I say deleting posts is cool only in the rarest of circumstances — generally only when an innocent individual will be hurt or put in danger by the information — never when it’s just embarrassing to a company. Trying to get bloggers to censor information is just going to offend them further, make them question your ethics and increase the chance that they will react to you with animosity.
• Have your mea culpa machine ready to roll. If you offend with your communications, keep communicating — your best hope is to dilute your screw-up with evidence that you really are upstanding folks who made a little mistake. If you are really good at this, you can jujitsu the negative into positive and come out well ahead, with free positive publicity and goodwill among influencers and your target markets. How do you do this?
  1. 1. Listen to those criticizing you and understand how you offended — this means tracking all negative mentions and understanding their gripes.
     2. Figure out what you are sorry for, what you are not sorry for and prepare your response accordingly. Be honest. Don’t be arrogant, though — if you’re not sorry enough, or for the stuff you should be, it’s likely the social-media sphere will make you truly sorry if you screw up your apology as well.
     3. Connect with your detractors personally and as a real human being. This means actually reading their posts about you; figuring out who they are and what their perspective and values are; and engaging them on their terms, in their language and with a convincing apology — and above all, as a living, breathing, fellow human being, not as a faceless corporation or as a smooth-talking, snakeskin-suit PR wanker.
     4. Connect publicly with your detractors’ negative coverage of you. Comment on the relevant articles where appropriate, write your own articles on the subject if appropriate, guest blog a response/apology on a detractor’s site where appropriate. Be smart though. Screw this part up, and you may just fan the flames high again, rather than douse them with the cooling water of an effective mea culpa.
     5. Maintain the relationships going forward. Now that you’ve invested the energy into converting a detractor into a friend, or at least a “tolerater,” maintain that relationship with communication — share information, ask guidance, get feedback. These former detractors can save you from future screw-ups, or at least are likely to deal with you a bit more sympathetically the next time you blow it.

In essence, it’s quite simple, just remember these three things: On the internet, you are always talking to the whole world, whether you intend to or not; be cognizant of who your message will offend and decide deliberately if you are willing to offend them; and if you must offend, have your mea culpa machine ready to go before you pull the trigger.

This is the media world of 2009 — it’s simple transparency and good human relations. There’s really no excuse for blowing it. (Via AdAge)

My dad, Bob Abraham, was an Ad Man at BBDO in the 60s, then he moved into photography in the 70s before evolving into multi-projector slide shows and multimedia production after we moved to Honolulu, Hawaii.

Back in the 80s, the bottom went out on tourism as the Japanese bailed Hawaii and so did many US tourists. Anyway, the first thing my dad’s clients did was cut promotion, cut ad and creative budgets — generally cut off their nose to spite their face.

Well, twenty-years later, I am experiencing the same thing, as a purveyor of digital PR. Alas, this is an historical problem, as Derrick Daye reaffirmed in his post, Recession Marketing Success Requires Boldness.

All Ad Men, PR Pros, Media Buyers, and Marketers know that this is the perfect time to get an advantage over your rivals because everyone is decimating their marketing, PR, and ad budgets and going “dark,” leaving many of the best ad placements available and at prices you could never imaging circa 2005.

The long-story short is that “during and after the recessions of 1949, 1954, 1958 and 1961, they found that almost without exception sales and profits dropped off at companies that cut back on advertising” and “studies also revealed that after the recessions ended, those companies continued to lag behind the ones that had maintained their advertising budgets.”

Here’s a longer excerpt from Recession Marketing Success Requires Boldness for you to check out:

Over the years hundreds of studies have been conducted to prove companies should maintain advertising during a recession. In the 1920’s advertising executive Roland S. Vaile tracked 200 companies through the recession of 1923. He reported in the April 1927 issue of the Harvard Business Review that the biggest sales increases throughout the period were rung up by companies that advertised the most. After World War II, Buchen Advertising, Inc. decided to plot the sales of a large number of advertisers through successive recessions. In 1947, it began measuring the annual advertising expenditures of each company. When they correlated the figures with sales and profit trends before, during and after the recessions of 1949, 1954, 1958 and 1961, they found that almost without exception sales and profits dropped off at companies that cut back on advertising.

Their studies also revealed that after the recessions ended, those companies continued to lag behind the ones that had maintained their advertising budgets. In 1979 another study by ABP/Meldrum & Fewsmith, covering the recession of 1974-75 and post-recession years, showed similar findings. They found that “companies which did not cut advertising expenditures during the recession years (1974-1975), experienced higher sales and net income during those two years and the two years following than companies which cut ad budgets in either or both recession years.”

Does the above advertisement ring of eugenics?  I am fascinated by the obsession that this nation — and Great Britain and Europe — had with “discouraging reproduction by persons having genetic defects or presumed to have inheritable undesirable traits” during the late 1800s through to World War II, when it disappeared for obvious reasons (see above).  In fact, when it comes to eugenics, America has a very dark secret.  We Americans, anyway, have an obsession with better, smarter, and stronger.

I hate eugenics and I don’t think it is funny.

There is enough threat of breeding ourselves like Race Horses already through partner-selection and so forth, that I really don’t find the implication of this ad campaign at all.

I have been seeing this all over my news feed but thanks to AdFreak for finally saying something smart on the subject, Use a condom, thwart that evil Hitler sperm:

Do condom ads reflect the mind-sets of nations? In the U.S., we get faux-patriotism and soft-core porn, while the French have safe sex on the beach. Now, from Germany, comes a dour dose of angst via Grey in a campaign for Doc Morris Pharmacies. The message: Use a condom, and be sure you’re not bringing the next Osama bin Laden, Adolf Hitler or Mao Zedong into the world. Of course, you’d have to sleep with one of those three to risk that—and I imagine most would abstain, especially in the case of Hitler, since he’s been dead for almost 65 years. Or maybe the ads are just generally likening sperm to invaders and terrorists. The bad hairdos should be enough to frighten anyone away. Via Ads of the World.

I am the newest blogger over at the AdAge Global Idea Network, a gig that only started a couple weeks ago. I love it. My editor is Matt Creamer. Matt and I rushed this post last night. I received the email three hours ago, IMed Matt, and we got it out now. I love blogging for this. I hope you enjoy this new post, Pepsi Apologized to Me For Its Suicide Ads:

Pepsi Apologized to Me For Its Suicide Ads
A close-up look at how the marketer is handling fallout from its controversial German ads

This week, PepsiCo got into hot water with more than a few folks after some suicide-themed ads many found offensive were brought to light. Here’s how they’re using social media to apologize to consumers—including me.

I received an email from B. Bonin Bough of PepsiCo, @boughb on Twitter, responding to my tweet about the recent post that Matt Creamer wrote a couple days ago, “Pepsi Opens a Vein of Controversy With New Suicide-Themed Ads”, about some ads that were run here in Germany in a lifestyle mag—ads Pepsi says it won’t run again after they received heavy criticism all over the web.

I’ll excerpt the first part of the email from Mr. Bough, who holds the title of director-social and emerging media and is based at Pepsi’s Purchase, N.Y. campus:

I saw your tweet and I just wanted to make sure I responded personally. We agree this creative is totally inappropriate; we apologize and please know it won’t run again. Also, thanks for the feedback and the Digg, it is important to discuss these types of issues.

My best friend committed suicide and this is a topic very close to my heart. So again I offer my deepest apologies.

Feel free to follow-up via twitter to me – @boughb or Huw – @huwgilbert or respond to this email.

Thanks, Bonin

I know you all think I am going to mock Bonin, but I won’t. I think this was a very bold and risky maneuver and worthy of praise rather than a tarring and feathering. And his outreach to me, a nobody, was accomplished within two days. When I replied to Bonin, asking if I might be allowed to post his email, he replied back that I could post his email but to try to “treat it kindly.” I hope I am.

I don’t think that Bonin knew that I blog for AdAge or that I know a bit about how the marketer is surprised about how well-traveled the ads have been. The old we-didn’t-think-anyone-here-would-see-it approach. Well, that’s the Internet for you. Someone passed along the scans of the PepsiMax ad, “One is a Very Very Lonely Calorie,” to the alert gang here at AdAge.

Within two days of tweeting, I received a note from @tweetmeme, a sure sign that my tweet had gone memetic (and that I had played at least a bit part in the mad traffic to the AdAge post as well as the resulting 40 comments.)

Here’s how fast and furious social media works. The article was posted on AdAge at 4:36 PM EST on December 2nd. I read it and Tweeted at 6:16 PM EST the same day. And then I received said email from Mr. Bough at 5:21 PM on December 4. The lesson here is that social media has eyes everywhere and the network to make sure that advertisers can no longer hide stuff in niche markets. There is a word in intelligence about just this thing, and it relates to messaging and propaganda: backwash. Social media makes backwash inevitable. Here’s another one from Intelligence: blowback. Backwash leads to blowback.

There’s no way to isolate this kind of advertisement. And there is an inverse proportion between how badly you want your ad to remain niche and the sensationalism surrounding its discovery. It’s a really obvious point, but one still clearly worth stating: The internet makes it impossible for any marketer to control which geographies and demographics see any particular communication. You can’t even really control what media it appears in. Think you’re creating an edgy print ad that will only be seen in a German magazine? Think again. In the blink of an eye, your ad is on the web. You know, the world wide one. And all kinds of people are pissed off.

What I like about what “Bough, Bonin {PEP}” did here is that he responded almost immediately, rather personally, and opened himself up to us social media mavens. Bravo! Full marks. Another thing I like about his apology is that there is a very good chance that I am being played, that Mr. Bough is playing reverse psychology on me. Yes, he readily approved my posting of this message when I asked, which leads me to believe that the very act of clicking on the post right now is just going to help PepsiCo with an amazingly-savvy viral marketing campaign for PepsiMax.

(Cross-posted from over at Chris Abraham — Because the Medium is the Message)

I just received this newsletter from the gang over at WebProNews AU, Blogging To Better SEO, that puts into words a lot of what we do for our clients every day as part of our Social Media consultancy and even what we do incidentally for our Public Relations clients.

With all of our social media outreach, we at Abraham Harrison LLC work on providing earned media for our clients. As I wrote in The current crop of advertisement methods is too ephemeral, it is important to decide where you want to spend your limited resources. Do you want to spend it on contextual ads? Contextual ads can drive a lot of traffic immediately to your target, to be sure, but when you stop paying for your key words, everything comes to a halt. All that traffic goes away… and, even while you’re paying for the ads, the conversion might not be there — it might just be a waste of money, a budget burn.

When you put your time and budget into blogger outreach, social media outreach, and blogging, your results may be less immediate than they are with ads, but whatever coverage you get, whatever earned media — and it can be an astounding amount of coverage, too — never goes away. Never! It becomes permanent record on the Interwebs, stashed and findable on Google until the Internet collapses through some sort of evil DNS hack.

Blogging To Better SEO by Manoj Jasra

[...]

[Manoj]: Why kinds of benefits can an organization expect with the implementation of a blog (and some of the natural SEO benefits that come with a blog)

[Lee Odden]: When a blog publishes AND promotes useful content, the benefits include:

• More content to be spidered by search engines and an increased footprint of the brand via search
• More links from other sites to the blog and improved search engine visibility
• Non-search engine traffic from social media sites and direct links from other blogs
• Direct communication with customers and prospects via RSS
• Depending on the blog structure and content, increased contacts by journalists that want to use blog content or authors as subject matter experts
• Increased leads or sales as a result of blog content – direct or indirect

[...]

I tell anyone who will listen to me that the current crop of advertisement methods is too short-lived. The moment you spend the money and your ad runs, that is the moment it is either gone to the grave or becomes a patient existing on life support. Either you’re smart and willing to keep it alive, in conversation, online on YouTube for the spots, or on a blog somewhere for the print work — or you feel compelled to keep on throwing money at it ad infinitum, because contextual ads, banner ads, etc, only last as long as you write checks.

What my specialty is is online conversation marketing, online public relations, and online earned media. When you earn peoples’ attention and when they choose to speak about you, your clients, and your services, then you have a gift that keeps on giving — this is content that lasts well past the campaign and into the future. This is both the sort of thing that Google loves — it is SEO catnip — and it is just the sort of content that flows, both upstream to A-list bloggers and to mainstream media and down to your readers, aggregators, and to other bloggers and other blogs.

If you want to see some examples of powerfully successful blogger outreaches, check out International Medical Corps (IMC) 2008, Survivor Corps Operation Survivor 2008, and Fresh Air Fund Summer 2008, Jerry White’s I Will Not Be Broken book promotion. In many cases, these campaigns are close to a year old, yet they still still live in hundreds and hundreds of blogs and feed Google’s index until all of these blogs are taken down. It is really amazing how effective this sort of “advertising” promotion works. What’s better, when the campaign is over and the client “turns off” our tap, the content continues living and isn’t just shut off like it is with banners, buttons, and contextual advertising. Very interesting, very cool, and powerfully effective.

Remember how much fun Communication Arts is to page through? — CA is intoxicating! Well, every ad you make can be as interesting, as long as you’re willing to come out of your art department and share your process, share your experience, share your steps. Keeping those ephemera alive through narrative, sharing, conversation, and story, is what social media is, it is what customer service is, it is surely what branding should be.

Anyway, There is a lot of opportunity in this time of chaos, of this time of transition. The same sort of transition (and opportunity) happened when PCs came online, replacing the IBM Selectric II; when the Internet changed E-Commerce, threatening to eviscerate bricks and mortar stores, and it is happening now, more than ever, with advertising, marketing, and PR.

I call it white knuckle syndrome: holding on to the handholds you have, frozen on the face of the cliff, because you don’t know where the handholds of the future are. This chaos is pretty amazing to watch as the economy pitches and GM bails on Super Bowl.

Advertising knows it needs to jump off the locomotive before it pitches into the gorge (the bridge is out!) but reaching out to the proffered hand of the guy in the helicopter seems pretty risky too. But, as the current handholds become chalky and you start to feel them crumble under your weight, you’ll need to find somewhere else to go, and quick!

To me, Chris Brogan said it best the other day on Twitter, “customer service is the new PR.*” Looking at what @comcastcares has been able to do, customer service is the new PR, the new marketing, and the new advertising.

So, as those handholds start to get chalk and begin to crumble, it is important to at least set your eyes on a new handhold — or maybe a helping hand — before your original handhold turns to powder.

And for you who have yet to do the reading, please check out Cluetrain Manifesto and Naked Conversation.

(Cross-Posted via Chris Abraham — Because the Medium is the Message)

Avenue A/Razorfish, the digital ad and media planning service has partnered with Pluck, the social media technology company to create AdLife, which apparently will be a traditional digital advertising tool with social media marketing elements.   It will incorporate things like user-generated content in online ad units.

This could be a big deal.  Or maybe not.  I want to know more.  I’m wondering how the content will be generated.  In real time?  How will it be delivered/transferred to an ad unit?  If a guy in Boise writes a review for a book and it ends up on an ad, will I get that ad even though I have no idea who the guy from Boise is?

Sounds like I’ll be contacting some PR folks.  Or, for that matter, I’ll just ask Shiv Singh.

I just witnessed the most disgusting ad presentation I’ve ever seen on the internet.  The ad itself wasn’t intentionally meant to offend, but it’s format did something that was inexcusable.

Being a native New Englander, I often  got to  Boston.com to check out sports stories.  That’s what I just did a few minutes ago.  Right there, in front of me, was a story “Northboro Native Killed in Washington DC Accident”.  A photo of her shows a pretty, young fresh faced young woman, with a beaming smile.  Now that I live in the DC area, I was especially intrigued by this.  I was once 22 and lived in DC.  Young.  Idealistic.

So I went to click through to read the story.  In the corner of my eye, I began to notice  a ‘growing’ ad coming across the page.  One of those ads that form images across a web page.  In this case they were images of the walking footprints of what looked to be that of a hiker.  The footprints continued across the woman’s face and would not let me click through to read the story.  That’s because just as I pressed down on my mouse, the ad crossed over the exact spot where it was pointing to.  Suddenly, I was transported to another site, the landing page of the ad.  Tourism in New Brunswick.

When I finally got back to the site I wanted to be at and clicked through the story I wanted, I began reading:

A Northborough woman and Amherst College graduate beginning her career in Washington, D.C., was killed in the nation’s capital yesterday morning when she was run over by a garbage truck while riding her bicycle to work.

…beginning her career…killed in the nation’s capital…run over by a garbage truck”…riding her bicycle to work”…

Her young life snuffed out just like that.  Full of promise, full of life, now gone.

But we want to show you this ad first – the ad is more important.

This is definitely not the way to do things, folks.  These ad formats, while enticing, should not be used by news outlets.  At least on their front pages.  News outlets cover news and news is more often bad, or in some cases, tragic.  It isn’t worth the ad dollars.

Advertisers shouldn’t necessarily shy away from using these formats, but they should be very judicious in where they buy them.  They should look for sites that viewers come to be entertained.  I don’t care how effective they are.  Use another formats on front pages of news sites.

From Drew B’s Take on Tech PR via Nixon McInnes & Chris Abraham:

“Only 18% of TV ad campaigns generate positive ROI”

“The average person is exposed to 3000 advertising messages a day”

“36% of people think more positively of companies who have blogs”

I quickly realized that StumbleUpon is the coolest and hottest social bookmarking service nobody has heard of.  I love it but I don’t nearly use it enough: either as a stumbler or as a marketer. I found this on Blog Marketing Journal and thought I would open it up to you:

In case you are not familiar with the concept, StumbleUpon allows you to pay for visitors to your pages, five cents per visitor or click. The question is, do you consider this to be a simple form of paid advertising, or paid social bookmarking.

I have done some experiments with paid Stumbling and what BMJ says is true:

If you set a limit of $20 per day, you will get 400 visitors. They may stay on your page or they may spend five seconds and disappear. Where the situations changes is when they thumbs up your page. That’s a stumble and can lead to more than just the 400 visitors.

So, in this case, content is key, and good content will result in conversions and interest.  If you just throw money at it without thinking your content or strategy through, you will be disappointed with the results, especially since there’s nobody on the planet more savvy than the gang from StumbleUpon — these are earl-adopters and are just the people you want to love you but these are the worse people to piss off. Just because you’re paying to have your content promoted doesn’t mean that people are prevented from digging the content down (thumbs-down) or writing scathing comments.

Either way, I encourage you to install the Firefox or Internet Explorer plugin and start playing with it — you need to register first, of course. I also encourage you to throw some money at the pay-to-play paid StumbleUpon advertising scheme — it is amazing fun and if you have any cool content at all, it is so much more rewarding that trying to game digg or even organically start StumbleLove — if you’re not really into Stumbling (I have friends who actually spend their evenings Stumbling in lieu of TV) then paying to get started is a very good idea and worth a test — you can check out the FAQ first:

Overview

• How does StumbleUpon work?
• Can I see a demo of StumbleUpon?
• What kind of content works well with StumbleUpon?
• Where will my content appear?
• How can I get Viral Marketing from StumbleUpon?
• Do I need to create an ad?
• What am I paying for? What do I get?
• How is this different from PPC, pops, banners…?
• Why doesn’t StumbleUpon do pops, banners…?
• How does StumbleUpon prevent click-fraud?
• I have a suggestion/question/feature-request, who should I contact?
• Is StumbleUpon right for my business?

Features

• How can I target a specific audience?
• What kind of traffic volume can I expect?
• How can I increase how much traffic I get?
• Can I set spending/traffic limits?
• Can I use tracking code?
• My Google Analytics / Urchin stats don’t match. Why the difference?
• What frequency caps does StumbleUpon use?
• Can I promote multiple URLs?
• Can I create multiple campaigns?
• How long does it for a new campaign to start?
• How can I tell if my campaigns are performing well?
• What kind of reporting is available?
• I want a Run of Network (RON) campaign – how do I do that?
• How do I target just a certain city, but not by topic?
• How can I target multiple topics/demographics?
• How do StumbleUpon members know that my site has been sponsored?
• Can I make any changes to my campaigns?
• How long does the review process take?

Content Guidelines

• Are there any content restrictions for the URL’s submitted?

Payment

• What forms of payment does StumbleUpon accept?
• How long before my funds are active and traffic is delivered?
• What is the process for requesting a refund?
• How long does it take for refunds to be issued?

Your Account

• I forgot my password, how do I get it back?
• One of my campaigns was not accepted, what can I do?
• Can I stop or pause one of my campaigns?
• How can I rename my campaigns to better organize them?
• What is Approval rating?

Contacting StumbleUpon

• Questions about StumbleUpon Advertising?

Via Chris Abraham.

In my last post, I talked of the coming disruption of the three way relationship between marketer, agency, and media property. Essentially it centers on the idea that marketers (who are often behind themselves) are becoming increasingly dissatisfied with the lack of digital savvy of their agencies and are now turning to media properties for strategic ideas and creative capabiliites. And these media properties are making themselves all the more ready, willing, and able to carry out the needs and wishes of the marketers.

I believe that that’s happening. But there’s still a big problem with that model. Consistent brand messaging

On a micro-level, this new way of doing things makes perfect sense. Crafting an marketing campaign tailored to the offerings of an online property could maximize the effectiveness of the campaign itself. For that media property.

But last I looked, most advertisers don’t use all their spend on one property. They’ll pick many properties in many channels. They’ll test here and there. They’ll sometimes concentrate on branding, sometimes concentrate on direct , sometimes (and the web makes this more possible, concentrate on both.

If the marketer – the company that is the end client – has to tailor each of its marketing messages to that of the publisher, chaos could result.

Publishers will need to realize this and further expand their services, sort of becoming almost full service for their advertisers. But still, this still could run into brand confusion as each publisher will owe it to their paying client to create the most effective campaign for their specific property or properties, leaving potentially different and confusing brand messages across several media properties.

Wise agencies should see this as the window of opportunity and work with publishers before they even get clients to formulate the framework for effective marketing campaigns that can perform very effectively over a cross section of properties and platforms.

Then, Funny:

Now, Funny, still:

Another crazy ad from John West Seafood: