Tug of War - Creative vs. Media

In the continuing tug-of-war between what drives the train--creative or media--a top Unilever executive Thursday came out in favor of creative. While there is an argument that lackluster ads can still deliver a message with shrewd placement, Babs Rangaiah said if the creative does not drive demand, a strong media plan is not likely to save the day. Rangaiah, the director of global communications planning at Unilever, said if the creative appears banal, it's time to yank the media spend and use it somewhere else.

MediaPost Publications - Advertising Week: The Future Belongs To Creative - 09/26/2008

I firmly believe and will continue to believe that the new advertising era that has dawned requires that we embrace complexity, whereas the old advertising era that is lingering beyond its much ballyhooed demise worshiped at the altar of simplicity.

While a great, persuasive message must be "simple" in its singularity of focus and incisiveness, the act of developing that message and disseminating it across the mediasphere will only continue to befuddle and perplex those of us who don't ... again ... embrace complexity.

How each simplified meme is launched into that matrix; and how each grows on its own without negating its brethren in the chaos of an on-demand world, is the work of big brains and fearless intellects.

Ack ... I got on a soap box. Apologies.

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Notes from the Digital Generation Gap - Mom X vs. Mom Y

A recent study conducted by NewMediaMetrics found a significant difference in the types of digital behavior embraced by the X and Y generations when it comes to child raising. Gen Y is much more attached to media that connects them to other moms (online communities, blogs, video-sharing sites, etc.), while Gen X moms are more likely to embrace the web for task-oriented activities like shopping online and uploading photos. The study concludes that this might signify a shift in the way that marketers should be targeting the next new generation of moms online.

Research Brief » Blog Archive » Y Moms Connect Through The Internet; X Moms Task

More evidence, if you will, for my theory of the new generation gap. The key point is it's all coming to pass very, very quickly. The changes in attitude, media behavior, shopper behavior and general worldview are quick and clearly defined.

What does this mean for marketers? We need to toss our assumptions about how interactive creative works. We need to recalibrate how we judge ideas in the early stages of planning and development. We can't fall back on yesterday's best practices, even though they still feel freshly minted.

And it means that the marketers who persist in clinging to the tried-and-true may find themselves scrambling for new structures as early as first quarter 2009. Could happen.

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The Winning Online Branding Strategy

Too often, we advertisers focus on the fact that online advertising is so deliciously measurable that we forget what it is we really want to measure. Because of this, we optimize for the wrong metrics, putting us on the wrong sites and networks. Would it meet your goal to have campaigns that have a wide reach but end up hurting your brand? Take low cost, direct response campaigns for example. It's great to spend low for each customer acquisition. However, if you are a high-end fashion brand, showing up on every site out there, including alongside questionable content in social media sites, could hurt your brand equity. Your goal may not be to reach as many potential buyers as can be.

MediaPost Publications - The Winning Online Branding Strategy - 06/12/2008

I was talking about this exact issue yesterday in a client meeting. It takes a great deal of patience and effort to sort through these issues. Our work culture - both on the agency and client sides -- doesn't yet allow us to take that time. Or to take it seriously. Until we change, we will only fall farther behind.

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Enterprise Adoption of Web 2.0: It's Happening - ReadWriteWeb

If you're a business who has been ignoring the Web 2.0 trend and the spread of social media: look out, the tide is shifting and you're about to be left behind. The rise of social media didn't happen overnight, the power of the internet to unite people, the ubiquity of broadband, the rise of Gen Y, the development of new technologies for socializing on the web - all of these things and more have led to the rise of social media. And this new force is affecting change in the way that companies do business - now and for many years to come.

Enterprise Adoption of Web 2.0: It's Happening - ReadWriteWeb

The lead of this article seems a tad harsh ... or overly hyped up. Nevertheless, the message is clear. Social media for business and, duh, consumers is quickly reaching maturity -- or as I prefer to say around the office and with clients, it's becoming "normal."

Other examples of formerly "techie" activities that have reached normality:
- Getting email on your wireless device; the Blackberry is normal while the iPhone is superbly normal
- Browser plug-ins; Flash is normal
- Digital photography on both ends - a digital camera and web-based sharing/printing apps; Flickr is normal
- GPS; does everybody give their TomTom a pet name? (Ours is "Jane")
- File sharing; iTunes is normal; with Miro and legal Napster, P2P is normal
- Blogs; the Huffington Post and Maya's Mom are normal

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murketing » “Buying In”

"Buying In has vast social implications, far beyond the fields of marketing and branding. Most importantly, from the policy point of view, it obliterates our old paradigm of companies (the bad guys) corrupting our children (the innocents) via commercials. In this new world, media-literate young freely and willingly co-opt the brands, with most companies being clueless bystanders desperate to keep up. Consuming and interacting with products has become the new turf for the identity politics game, stirring the kind of savage feelings previously reserved for matters of ethnicity and class. I really don’t know if this is good news or bad news, but I can say, with certainty, that this book is a must-read."
– Po Bronson, author, Why Do I Love These People?

murketing » “Buying In”

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Viral Marketing ... Gone Bubonic

LOS ANGELES (Hollywood Reporter) - Viral marketing has gone positively bubonic. While this unconventional approach to building buzz online is nothing new, it has achieved full-blown plague status in the walk-up to the summer movie season."Forgetting Sarah Marshall," "The Dark Knight," and "Hancock" are just some of the movies employing viral marketing -- and the sheer volume is only part of why this strategy has becoming problematic.For the uninitiated, viral marketing involves hatching multiple interconnected Web sites that plug a movie by extending its story lines online. That in turn gets blogs and social networks linking in -- hence its viral nature.Gone are the days when marketing a movie online involved simply buying a URL like DarkKnight.com and uploading a trailer. Warner Bros. has launched more than 30 Web sites during the past year in support of the latest in the "Batman" franchise, a trail of virtual bread crumbs intended to sate fans until the July 18 release.Although the bulk of these campaigns play out on the Internet, they also frequently move offline, often in the form of wacky public events intended to amass die-hard enthusiasts. One "Knight" site provides clues pointing to screenings that were scheduled for Monday in 12 different cities.

Studios' viral marketing campaigns are vexing | Technology | Reuters

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Crowdsourcing is the Future of Marketing : Clickadvisor

What’s the future of advertising got to do with crowdsourcing? Well, Paul champions the idea that part of the future of advertising is crowdsourcing (using collaborative tools to generate insight to deliver real value) (Paul cites the Starbucks crowdsourcing platform as an example).

Crowdsourcing is the Future of Marketing : Clickadvisor

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Building a Brand with Widgets

The cards were stacked against A&E Television Network as it tried to generate positive buzz about its new series, Parking Wars. For one, it's a reality show about meter readers. Two, the show doesn't feature celebrities. "We thought if we could find a clever way of increasing consumer interaction with the concept behind the show that we would increase curiosity in the show itself," says Lori Peterzell, A&E's vice-president for consumer marketing.So A&E hired area/code, a multimedia game developer, to build an online game based on Parking Wars. Played on the social network Facebook, the game has users park virtual cars on friends' profile pages, or "streets," while slapping tickets on cars parked on their own page and avoiding tickets themselves.

Building a Brand with Widgets

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iMedia Connection: 3 reasons to ditch your microsites

Sean X Cummings, the director of marketing at Ask.com and a former colleague, has captured all the reasons (and more!) why I dislike microsites. I prefer to see marketers sincerely invest in their primary brand websites.

I do not even know where to start with my rant on microsites. They are the bane of the online space, produced by those who do not comprehend the implications of launching them and do not understand the underbelly that they leave behind. They are expensive, they use up agency resources, they become orphans almost overnight, and they are only useful in providing traditional agencies with fodder for winning more business.

iMedia Connection: 3 reasons to ditch your microsites

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MediaPost Publications - Nielsen Funds Most Ambitious Ethnographic Study Ever, Will Benchmark How People Actually Use Media - 02/25/2008

I have been describing the need for a new media anthropology for the past year or so. Advertisers and agencies need to feel confident about exactly how people are using media. There is a great deal of complexity in all of this; and agency people are infamously allergic to complexity. We're going to have to get over that. Prediction: Agencies will embrace complexity and drive value for clients by absorbing media complexity and translating it into effective integrated marketing communications. (Or go home!)

IN WHAT IS LIKELY THE most ambitious ethnographic study ever observing how people actually consume media, Nielsen Media Research is funding a highly regarded academic research group with $3.5 million to follow hundreds of people around to see how they use both traditional and emerging video platforms inside and outside their homes.

MediaPost Publications - Nielsen Funds Most Ambitious Ethnographic Study Ever, Will Benchmark How People Actually Use Media - 02/25/2008

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