Aaahh the social web. As you can see in the image above, the Portland Ad Federation has an annual awards fest, The Roseys, that honors local agencies who provide the best creative work in marketing and advertising or, as a quick Google search returns, “Portland Advertising Federation: Celebrating 100 Years of Setting the Standard for Portland’s Creative, Design, and Media Community!” [I have a problem with that byline - can an advertising federation set 'the standard' or should the federation be setting standards?] Anyway, I digress.

So, as noted above, PAF has recently launched a web site created by Anthill Marketing for this year’s show, with the motto – “Nothing Says I’m Better Than You Like A Rosey” and “Our City Is Better Than Your City.” On the site you can ’spin a wheel’ [whoop-de-doo] and a needle comes to rest on such intelligent phrases as the ones below:

Austin: “Award winning copy in Austin: Yee-Haw”
Boulder: “There are two things Alex Bogusky can never take away from you: your pride and your Rosey”
Seattle: “Fast Company’s 2009 most creative city. How depressing is that?”
San Francisco: “Goodby this, Goodby that. Fuck Goodby”
Vancouver B.C.: “Remember, this is the city that brought you Alan Thicke and Lover Boy”

Well, well, well… [another side note: you've all heard of a band called The Weakerthans right?]

I’ll cut to the chase – I can see exactly what Anthill/PAF were trying to achieve – “edginess” “talking points” “hope this goes viral” etc etc. Basically they want a social media smackdown; bring it on, Portland will fight that fight, look at our logo we are raising the finger at you, yeah you San Francisco and you Goodby…. unfortunately it comes across as if we’re back in high school here, meanwhile not all of Portland’s creative community has embraced the tone of this campaign.

And so, along comes The Nosey Awards! Two Portland creatives [egged on by me I have to admit,] @adognamedpants and @motorcoatdave, created that site along with the Twitter name @noseyawards and the Twitter search hashtag #noseys. Finally things get interesting…

Here’s a fact – on Twitter no one owns a hash tag. For instance, here’s one #nooneownsahashtag. There, I just created it but I can’t own it because the Twitter community owns it by using it. And so it goes with #roseys and #noseys. Anthill and PAF cannot own #roseys and now that #noseys has come along and is being used by Twitter users who follow the thread, the two hash tags become joined at the hip…take a look at my TweetDeck grab below:

The Rosey Awards can’t shake off the Nosey Awards, they are now one and the same. Wherever the Roseys try to go on Twitter the Noseys will be right alongside. The Roseys and the Noseys can now duke it out all summer long. And this is a good thing. The Noseys are creating a ton of brand awareness for the Roseys – a rising tide lifts all boats. As people pile on this particular bandwagon, both pro and con, those little hash tags will be used thereby elevating the experiential awareness of the Roseys across an extremely wide arc. A campaign like this fits rather neatly into my idea of Authenticity and Authority on the Social Web.

The Roseys and the Noseys smackdown will be worth watching and I know it will create an interesting case study; it might even get more people to join the current 25 people on the Roseys FaceBook Group.

Plausible. Fits with my thoughts on how we can’t help but socialize. This could be a winning campaign..

Pampelmoose, Nemo, DJ Joelskool and Lincoln MKS- Part 4 from Dave Allen on Vimeo.

Once again we road test the Lincoln MKS. This time, celebrated Portland DJ, DJ Joelskool gives the rig a once over testing the gadgets like Bluetooth and the navigation console as well as the pounding stereo system..

Previous episodes:

A Lincoln MKS and Von Von Von – Part 1

A Lincoln MKS with Von Von Von – part 2

Von Von Von Critiques the Lincoln MKS back seat – Part 3

Click to play.

Apple always has something up its sleeve…

Click image to play

As Dave continues the test drive he took the Lincoln MKS out to Portland International Airport to pick up his friend, the acclaimed Belgian electronic artist, Von Von Von, who has just returned from exile in Europe. Hear what Von has to say about coming out of exile and what he thinks of the Lincoln MKS…

Click image to watch the video.

Just down Belmont St from Nemo the ‘billboard bomber’ has struck adding a pair of eyes to the burger and subtly altering the name of the ‘value meal.’ Can’t wait to see what’s next…

Honda Insight – Let It Shine from Honda on Vimeo.

As Rodger Bridges said today ‘page takeover is the new microsite’ and at least this Honda ad doesn’t break the nav. Click here for the full effect.

Click to watch…

Straight to the point. If you sell lingerie you might as well sell lingerie. BlushBerlin.com Via Illegal Advertising.

Oscar Mayer’s latest ad leaves me wondering what there is to blog about. Is a box containing all the necessary ingredients to create ‘a delicious sandwich…in a microwave minute’ really that blogworthy?

In an attempt to boost its lagging profits, Starbucks has developed an instant coffee called Via. According to the Starbucks press release, it is being touted as “a transformational instant coffee that replicates the body and flavor of Starbucks coffee in an instant form.” 

Via is supposed to recreate the Starbucks experience at home or on the go while costing slightly less than a Tall cup of their regular coffee. The company has high hopes for its launch since instant coffee represents 40 percent of all worldwide coffee sales (that translates to $17 billion dollars).

According to Starbucks, Via has been an idea that they’ve toyed with way before the current recession. “We have worked for nearly 20 years to develop an instant coffee that offers customers the quality and taste they expect from fresh-brewed Starbucks coffee, and a unique and convenient way for them to enjoy it,” said Starbucks’ Howard Schultz.

Starbucks may have a fantastic product on its hands, but they are overlooking one key principle: most of Starbucks’ die hard customers frequent its shops for the experience. Starbucks has done an amazing job of branding their stores and creating a warm, inviting atmosphere coupled with great customer service. The folks that frequent their shops love having the ability to customize their drinks in ridiculous ways. It remains to be seen if a packet of instant coffee can live up to the hype.

Another one bites the dust…

Click image to got to video. It’s a music clip and YouTube don’t allow embeds for that stuff remember…

Oh, whoopsy BBDO.

From the Adrants mailbag:

“My skater friends have been sending me a link all day long that shows a blatant – and I mean blatant – BBDO rip off of a [Spike Jonze] directed skateboard video [...]. The original was from the most popular skate video in years, but obviously, someone’s creative director hadn’t seen it:”

o Original, and far superior.

o The fraud.

Find more videos like this on AdGabber

Find more videos like this on AdGabber

Sensitive people please avoid, sense of humor required.

I’m feeling that they’ve lost their way….anyone agree? It seems like they’ve lost focus. Ethical treatment of animals is a noble cause, scantily clad and naked females, sex and hot tubs seems to be off topic to say the least.

Story from the [soon to be sold?] Seattle Post-Intelligencer.

Er, cough, cough…

Hot on the heels of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer’s decline, the LA Times is reporting that its online advertising revenue is enough to cover the costs for both the online and print editorial teams.

Upon hearing this news, Jeff Jarvis excitedly announced that “What this tells me is that we are on the cusp of the moment when online revenue could sustain a substantial digital journalistic enterprise without the onerous cost of printing and distribution. Hallelujah.”

Though, Valleywag is quick to counter this claim, noting that the LAT newsroom still houses more than 660 people. And in December, the newspaper said that its website only generated 120 million pageviews (one Gawker blogger generated double that amount in just one month). Something doesn’t add up. Valleywag also points out that the cost of actually selling the online ad space isn’t mentioned, nor is the fact that the Times’ parent company recently filed for bankruptcy. Stay tuned…

Radiohead’s ‘Down Is The New Up’ is no longer an ironic title – take a listen. Radiohead – Down Is The New Up

Found on The Music Slut.

Adpulp appears to be the unlucky recipient of a brand jack.

Absolutely everything you need to know about using Twitter for Marketing and PR here.

Thanks to @alisamleo

No, really? Just a quickie:

You can ‘friend’ Tide on Facebook

As for P.& G, the company permits Facebook to talk about the results of only a single P.& G. promotion, presumably its most successful to date: for Crest Whitestrips. The promotion began in fall 2006, when P.& G. invited Facebook members in 20 college campus networks to become Crest Whitestrips “fans” on the product’s Facebook Page. Facebook said it was a great success, attracting 14,000 fans.

One could argue, however, that with the additional enticements that Crest provided — thousands of free movie screenings, as well as sponsored Def Jam concerts — a brand of hemorrhoid cream could have attracted a similar number of nominal “fans.”

Read the article here, unless you feel it’s ok to ‘friend’ a detergent, or Spraychel..

The Head of Digital at P&G doesn’t think it works either..

eMarketer has just confirmed our suspicions with its recent report that social networkers frequent sites like Myspace and Facebook to communicate with each other, not with brands.

More than one half of the U.S. population uses social networking sites, yet massive ad revenues have yet to materialize. Selling ad space on social networking sites was already an uphill battle before the economic downturn, but now it’s getting even more difficult. While 79% of all internet consumers have clicked on an advertisement in the past year, only 57% of those frequenting social networking sites have done so.

Barak Rabinowitz has described the challenge of monetizing social networks as the “elephant in the room” of online advertising. He claims that “It’s 400 million social networkers creating and consuming content, clustering around shared interests and activities—all who have yet to be tapped in any major way by Web marketers.”

With a deepening recession and millions of social networkers avoiding online ads by all means possible, what is the answer? How will these sites continue to remain in business if the ad dollars don’t start flowing?

Pic: Adweek

Over at Adweek, Brian Morrissey makes a very strong argument that Facebook advertiser applications are finding very few takers. His overview entitled Apps: The Newest Brand Graveyard, lists four brands with Facebook Apps that are struggling to find users – Fed Ex [1,500 users,] Ford [106 users,] Nike [3,400 users,] and Microsoft [8,500 users.]

For anyone who believes that marketing through social media will work for the brand and/or provide a revenue stream for Facebook this article is worth reading. Here’s an extract -

‘Brands, in general, have found Facebook unforgiving terrain for marketing. It’s well known, for instance, that banner ads perform poorly on the site. (A recent IDC report called advertising on social networks “stillborn.”) But the Facebook Platform, launched 18 months ago — which lets developers create social applications for users — was thought to offer the perfect opportunity to move beyond banners to provide “branded utility.” So far, however, Facebook apps from brands like Coca-Cola, Champion, Ford and Microsoft are as popular as desolate Second Life islands.’

Just last month I posted how P&G’s Head of Digital, Ted McConnell isn’t a believer.

Here’s a thought… Saturday Night Live viewers surely must consist of a few Becks beer drinkers. Maybe Darius the blogger could take a cue from the show [start by watching it Darius] and notice how successful SNL and NBC have been about getting cool content online really fast…, no blog required, just great, great content. Becks I give you J**z In My Pants from SNL:

I love nothing better on Monday morning than reading Adrants – coffee –> Adrants –> laugh at the fails…no one does it better. Today they cheered me up with their usual sarcastic takedown of a company starting a blog and getting it wrong. I can’t believe that it is almost 2009 and companies are still struggling with the simple idea of how to communicate intelligently with their customers via a two-way communication. It’s not difficult guys… Seriously, some of the quips in this Adrants rap on Becks Beer, Becks Launches a Blog. Gets Everything Wrong, should make me cry not laugh. Check it – some extracts:

Beck’s has launched a blog, Different by Choice. Yawn, right? But the way they’ve announced it and the way it’s formatted is so annoying, it can’t be left alone.

In an email beginning with “Hello Important Marketing Blog People,” Beck’s blogger Darius asks, “has anyone told you recently how hot you are?” and then goes on to explain how he “destroyed” 850 other potential bloggers vying for the job “‘cos that is the way I roll.” Ugh. Cue the Agency.com Subway video.

And then with an ego akin to Sean John believing anyone remotely takes him seriously, Darius prattles on, “This is a novel and let’s face it a brave choice by Beck’s to give me a platform to extol my views and ideals on their global website whilst writing on all that I deem to be ‘Different by Choice.’ Beck’s legal department are bracing themselves for the impending months.”

Ooo. Blogger VS. Lawyer! Hey Darius, that one was played out in 2002.

And if all this weren’t enough to make you want to gag yourself with I AM KING, the entire blog site is in Flash. Yes, a blog in Flash, the worst platform to create anything which requires even the tiniest bit of navigation.

OMG!

With hard economic times now resonating worldwide, it was only a matter of time before online luxury retailers like Net-a-Porter had to adjust their marketing strategy. Before the recession, the goal was to sell unapologetically expensive designer clothing shipped in glamorous black boxes. Now, a new mass email features a photo of two 50’s era women sharing a secret with the headline of “You’ve Been Shopping – We Won’t Tell…” The subtext cheekily reads “Your items will arrive in an unbranded recycled brown paper bag and we’ll be the only ones who know.”

This newfound move towards more discretional shopping is in part due to the guilt complex with buying a piece of designer apparel that easily runs upwards of a few thousand dollars while many people are struggling to make ends meet. Conspicuous consumption is now a dirty word.

Even though consumer confidence has fallen to its lowest level in 40 years, a small percentage of the population wants to keep on shopping. They just don’t want family, neighbors and coworkers to know about it.

Alisa Leonard-Hansen over at her blog, Socialized, rips apart very concisely, the new campaign from JC Penny called “Beware of The DogHouse.” She does it so well. A missed opportunity exposed in all its gory beauty. [In the Doghouse is a viral marketing campaign that allows women to put their significant other in the "Doghouse" for bad gift choices this holiday season.] Ach!!

Excerpt from Alisa’s post – Not only is the premise of the campaign utterly ridiculous and condescending–but at its center is what else…a microsite! A microsite, oh why didn’t we think of that before?! Ah, but wait, it gets better. They implemented Facebook Connect. Now, you’d think I’d be pretty excited about it as I’ve been covering FBC since it was first announced back in May of this year…ah, but marketers never fail me. So did they do something useful with the FBC implementation? No! They created this lame microsite and a game by which chicks can put their dudes in a doghouse and do so via Facebook Connect. So, you chose to use FBC to let girls pick Facebook friends/bf’s into some lame doghouse? Because that is super useful and makes much more sense than say, integrating FBC into the JC Penney online shopping experience and thereby including friend data (purchases, wishlists, etc) into the product merchandising model. No, that just makes too much sense. We’ll just stick with this awesome Doghouse thing…sweet!

Finally, an advertiser being honest about social media advertising. Ted McConnell general manager-interactive marketing and innovation at Procter & Gamble Co spoke recently at a forum on Digital Media where he came across as rather negative about social network platforms and advertising. He singled out the Facebook platform, saying “I really don’t want to buy any more banner ads on Facebook.”

Other key phrases of his that stand out –
Social networks may never find the ad dollars they’re hunting for because they don’t really have a right to them.
What in heaven’s name made you think you could monetize the real estate in which somebody is breaking up with their girlfriend?
I don’t think everything every consumer says to someone else and writes down is somehow monetizable by the media industry.
Fragmentation thwarts artificial scarcity.
Performance-based advertising will gain share over CPM

Ted McConnell. [Pic Ad Age]

McConnell’s premise is that social network platforms won’t be able to collect ad dollars because they don’t really have a right to them, which I believe is entirely accurate. And his negativity about the platforms appears to hinge on the wrong-headed idea or a misunderstanding of the meaning of the term “social media” – he asked – “Who said this is media? Media is something you can buy and sell. Media contains inventory. Media contains blank spaces. Consumers weren’t trying to generate media. They were trying to talk to somebody. So it just seems a bit arrogant. … We hijack their own conversations, their own thoughts and feelings, and try to monetize it.”

McConnell’s ideas strike a chord with me as I have found myself on the contrarian side of the social media argument recently. I have argued on panels and in essays that technology did not transform the way we socialize –

When we wrongly consider technology as a ‘new’ medium that simply and efficiently transformed culture, business and society, we forget our own human ancestry. We leave out Nature. In our hearts we want to belong, to share; we fear dying alone and as we age we become thanatophobic – we fear dying. Individuality is an illusion. [By that I don't mean an individual's style, taste, fashion etc, things that set us apart aesthetically from others, I mean we are forever bound to being social animals.] Read the rest of these thoughts here.

We need to rethink the term “Social Media.”

In yet another social media debacle, the VP of Marketing at McNeil Consumer Healthcare, the folks who bring us Motrin, has posted an apology on the company’s web site. After offending millions of moms who carry their babies in those wrap around shawls, McNeil was flayed by a firestorm of criticism from the mom bloggers of the world who Twittered McNeil into submission. McNeil made a cardinal error – they failed to research the very market, new moms, that they were trying to reach and then doubled down and took the weekend off without monitoring the firestorm that was merely smoldering before it erupted. Result – egg on the face and a no doubt expensive ad campaign in the trash can….. Here’s the offending ad –

Michael Arrington at TechCrunch posted an interesting and in-depth article last Friday about the state of Facebook’s finances. Facebook currently has 160 million unique visitors a month and as one of those visitors I have often contemplated just how long Facebook can hang in there if the ad model doesn’t pan out. Presumably, 99.9999% of Facebook’s visitors don’t even think about it nor do they care as long as they can have a Vampire bite their friends.

The article is titled ‘Facebook May Be Growing Too Fast. And Hitting The Capital Markets Again.’ It seems that Facebook’s success could be its downfall.

Before we get to Arrington’s numbers here’s a question – If Facebook’s growth and future potential growth is mainly abroad, with the USA shrinking fast to only 20% of the total global user base, what happens to the idea of Social Media and advertising here in the USA? It seems like a Catch-22 situation for Facebook – its revenues are dependent on advertising income but its advertisers will be faced with pitching their products to either a shrinking USA market or to a larger global user base. Geo-targeting might help as long as there is a heavy use of localization in foreign markets. It doesn’t sound promising given how Facebook users are not especially fond of those push ads on their profiles anyway.

And let’s not forget how MTV Europe stumbled at first as it entered the TV/Cable markets in Europe. One language does not fit all they found really quickly – regional accents and dialects were all important and soon there were many versions of MTV Europe in different countries. Meanwhile Facebook members have jumped in to the fray with their own user-created translated versions of the site.

And companies are still playing with fire by jumping into social networks with their brands. Oliver Marks at ZDNet reports on how Virgin Atlantic Airlines had to fire 13 flight attendants who used the Virgin Atlantic Facebook group to malign their customers in unsavory terms. As Marks points out – “Virgin Atlantic (one of my favorite airlines) seem to have fallen into the classic trap of forgetting that FaceBook is a public forum – looking at their online presence there I see a cocktail of different marketing communication focuses, some slightly irritating, and not much in the way of building a relationship with me.”

Here’s some excerpts from Arrington’s article –

Facebook Is Growing, But So Are Costs
There’s no doubt that Facebook is growing at a breathtaking pace. A year ago, according to Comscore, they had just 74 million unique monthly visitors and 35 billion page views. Today those numbers have grown by 118% and 74%, respectively, to 161 million unique visitors and 61 billion page views per month.

It costs a couple of hundred million dollars a year just to keep the lights on at Facebook. But the real problem is keeping up with growth, particularly storage needs. Add another $100 million or more per year for capital expenditures, and you’ve got a company that’s doing exactly the opposite of printing money.

So How ‘Bout Those Revenues?

eMarketer estimates $265 million in revenue for Facebook in 2008. That’s great, right? Well, not really. The company is still losing money – lots of it – at current revenues. And it’s not clear that revenue will grow as robustly as costs.

As we wrote last summer, most of these international users can’t be monetized today. And to make things worse, bandwidth costs in those countries is generally much higher than the U.S. So the users cost more, and they don’t bring in any revenue.

That international growth might be ok if U.S. growth remained strong. But the U.S. market just seems to be tapped at this point, and gaining market share from MySpace is a battle. As we wrote in August, at current growth rates it will take Facebook 18 years to overtake MySpace in the U.S.

[Update 11/11/08]

“I haven’t heard of anyone purchasing something off an ad on Facebook,” says Angie Tulgetske, vice president of RE/MAX Preferred Choice Properties, which resells timeshares and spends thousands of dollars a month on search ads but avoids social-networking sites. “I wouldn’t think any of my marketing dollars would be spent advantageously there.” From Facebook Tries To Woo Marketers

I wonder why?

Click the image and watch the action…

In today’s Brave New World, beware of those amongst the social media chattering classes advising companies and brands who throw around phrases such as “you need a Facebook page” or better yet, buzz words like viral as in “you should make a viral video,” perhaps even “are you Twitting.” Facebook is getting called out as the place for narcissists [who would ever have thought...!] meanwhile pundits are trying to get their heads around The Naked Generation [Hint: they lay their lives bare online and understand that Britney flies close to flameout but dig the fact that she's a fascinating spectacle all the same.]

I’m not certain if Nintendo has a Facebook page for its game, Wario Land but if you want an example of an online marketing campaign that is simple, effective and fun then this YouTube video is for you.

Brent Terrazas thinks so – “This is disturbing – Don’t say I didn’t warn you. It’s a recent commercial for Domino’s Pizza that features a rapping “Pasta Dude” who gets knocked down by ‘the man’ (or rather, ‘the mom’). It seems like they were going over the top in an effort to be funny, however this is one of the worst commercials I can remember watching in a LOOOOOONG time.”

Oh well….at least it’s being discussed.

Mark Drapeau posted an interesting article on Mashable about new media and how it could help the cable and network TV companies retain their advertising dollars.

In an age of DVR’s such as Tivo, thousands of viewers are time-shifting their viewing so as more and more cable and TV news shows ask viewers to “Twitter your comments” and interact with the hosts those time-shifting miss out on that opportunity. Yet as Drapeau points out – The financial consequence of [viewers] not using DVRs, or downloading the shows from a third-party website, or other new options, is that more people watching the real-time version means more viewer share, which in turn means more advertising revenue.

Will more people start tuning in to watch in real time? With the political race heating up we might just see a switch to traditional TV viewing for a while.

Sports, technology, iconic brands and social networking all wrapped up in one package – Nike+ there are only winners here. The Nike+ Sports Kit has allowed athletes to share their data with friends and others who then compete online. This coming together of computer and running shoe technology between Apple, who’s iPod is a way to gather and upload the runner’s data (speed, distance, steps etc) and Nike who’s shoes include the Piezoelectric accelerometer for measuring the data.

And now a campaign to register runners globally to run a 10k and have every mile tracked whether they run, walk or jog and Nike will count those miles towards a charity of its choice. Time to get away from the monitor.

Click to play.

Looks like fun. Fun sells. Jeep

Modernista [you have to love their web site] and the Stop Handgun Violence organization have rolled out their campaign. Check it out.

Mark Lewman our CD at Nemo who works on the Nike 6.0 brand came up with the idea of freezing the 6.0 shoes into blocks of ice, so Nike found a rad ice sculptor guy to come out and carve an 8 ft tall Mogan Mid. See below.

Then the kids had at ‘em to see who could be the fastest to thaw out the shoes and win a free pair.

More pics here.

Stop 3 of the AST Dew Tour is in Portland this weekend. And if you are 21+ you can come to the AST After Party – click here for info and to RSVP.

According to the New York Times, the number of visitors to female-oriented websites has nearly doubled in the last two years. Along with this unprecedented growth, a few big name women bloggers are cashing in on lucrative advertising deals.

Heather Armstrong, author of the wildly popular ‘mommy blog’ dooce.com is on track to make seven times the revenue that she did in 2006, due mostly in part to the advertising heavily laced throughout her site.

Ranking within the top 500 blogs in the world, part of dooce’s appeal is Armstrong’s authenticity; she doesn’t mince words and isn’t afraid to throw in the occasional obscenity. Her passion shows through, even though most of her posts are waxing poetic on daily life in Utah with her husband, daughter and dog. “It’s really raw and unfiltered, not run through a committee of 12 people who need to approve what you say. It’s the real deal,” she proclaims of her writing. Because of this unwavering honesty, she has established herself as one of the most respected voices in the world of mommy blogs.

Besides blogs focusing on motherhood, makeup, fashion and relationship advice have proved to be the most lucrative topics embraced by women. Part of the sudden push by blogs to cater to women’s needs hinges on the fact that they make most of the decisions regarding household purchases. And, earning their trust (and some of their buying power) is irresistible to advertisers.

For the most part, advertisers are steering clear of blogs promoting serious topics like politics in favor of lighter fare including fashion and celebrities because they’re what women are clamoring for. They claim that these are tried-and-true since they’ve been the staples in women’s magazines for years.

Many women including Armstrong have hit the big time; they’ve been given the opportunity to quit their day jobs and stay at home with the kids in exchange for sharing their daily anecdotes. Advertisers can’t get enough of their candidness and who can blame them? These bloggers’ stories don’t come from a movie script; they’re real life experiences that we can all relate to.

Is it art? Is it life? Is it jeans? Advertising Agency FFL Paris, France and its Executive Creative Directors Fred & Farid have decide to take the “high art” road to advertising Wrangler Jeans. This means we can have arty photos that reek of misogyny – half-naked women who’ve apparently been murdered and thrown into lakes and rivers. Judging by all the negative remarks over at Ads Of The World’s web site the campaign isn’t going over so well.

Nemo’s Creative Director Mark Lewman and me were riffing on his idea of how a company’s work and overall business can be validated in an era of Google, YouTube, Wikipedia and radical transparency et al. The bottom line that we seemed to arrive at is that it is not good enough to deliver good work these days – anyone can do good work. The task at hand is to be trusted to create amazing work and then, when your amazing work is discovered, fame will surely follow.

Here’s Mark’s distilled thoughts so far:
Success in the 21st century means finding balance between two timeless elements Trust and Fame. Your work is who you are. This is the part of the equation you control. To stand out today, everything you do must be awesome. When people encounter what you produce they must find substance and excellence. Just because an idea can be relied upon as great doesn’t mean it automatically wins. It isn’t complete until it has believers; distribution and exposure make an idea stronger and add value through cultural validation. As trust and reliability grows so should the fame.

Jeff Jarvis provides an extension of these thoughts when he writes on Buzzmachine – “All content must be transparent: open on the web with permanent links so it can receive links. It’s not content until it’s linked.”

And then, looking beyond transparency at the barriers to creative expression and its dissemination, it is worth remembering this point that Jarvis recounts elsewhere in ‘The Myth of the Creative Class‘ after he has reconsidered his views on copyright law and realizes that a too stringent application of copyright infringement can stifle the spread of what has been created – “when creations are restricted it is the creator who suffers more because his creation won’t find its full and true public, its spark finds no kindling, and the fire dies. The creative class, copyright, mass media, and curmudgeonly critics stop what should be a continuing process of creation; like reverse alchemists, they turn abundance into scarcity, gold into lead.”

Whereas devotees of fashion once staked out the newsstands to get their latest fix of the freshest magazines, a new movement has been rapidly gaining momentum over the last few years. Online publications designed to imitate their glossy counterparts are popping up and now receiving hundreds of thousands of visitors each month.

While fashion folks are still faithful to their printed publications, the ease and low cost of constantly updating an online version with fresh content in our blog obsessed, 24/7 society has become increasingly important. Additionally, now that many consider social networking to be a cornerstone of human interaction, most of the newer online magazines have the added advantage of allowing people to comment on articles and connect in forums. The letter to the editor page that traditional magazines employ at the beginning of each issue now seems stale in comparison.

Online magazines are now trying to draw a line in the sand between themselves and blogs by focusing on premium photography, full length articles, and high end fashion with information and direct links to the designers.

The traditional magazines have always done a fantastic job of offering many of the quality elements that their online counterparts are now just perfecting such as beautifully photographed spreads and in-demand designer items. But, now that they’ve caught up in their appearance and offerings, major advertising revenue is coming into play. And, many companies love the prospect of advertising within an online publication because the rates are often less than half of the cost to grace the pages of traditional glossies (which can run $60,000 to $100,000 for a single page).

As online publications continur to raise the bar on quality and gain more advertising dollars in the process, the mainstays of the print world will have to tighten their budgets. After all, they are the ones that have to worry about rent, the cost of paper and printing, employing a roster of regular staff members and delivering the magazines to newsstands every month.

We seem to have dropped into a musical theme over the weekend and with that in mind I wanted to point out a post that David Byrne wrote on his blog. As you can see above he is pondering the idea of less press and pr and more online discovery. I believe Byrne is doing the right thing as there will be plenty of buzz around a new Byrne and Eno album on the blogosphere. And Byrne and Eno are both influencers and trusted sources. Those two elements alone will help any PR 2.0 campaign gain traction. I posted a slide show about PR 2.0 here, and also wrote an essay about Social Media, Blogs and Advertising which can be found here. Meanwhile I’m looking forward to spreading the word on the new Byrne and Eno album, Everything That Happens Will Happen Today. You can hear a cut from the new album and download it too. Click Here.

Dreamy, carefree video episodes extolling the beach culture delights of 10 Cane Rum. Brought to us by Mother, NY. There are more of these here.

Riding the wave of consumer interest and awareness of healthy and organic foods Whole Foods, the up-market grocery chain, rapidly spread into middle and upper class neighborhoods around the country. Consumers with plenty of discretionary income to spend flocked to its stores and it soon earned itself the sobriquet Whole Paycheck, a phrase the companies executives would like to now remove from common parlance.

With the economy in the dumpster people are now reigning in on discretionary spending and to make matters worse for Whole Foods, consumer interest in organic food appears to be leveling off after several years of double-digit growth, according to the Hartman Group, a market research firm specializing in health and wellness. [Found on NYT]

With Whole Foods stock off 70% since 2006 is this a company that has stumbled like another former leader in the discretionary spending market, Starbucks? The cost of fuel and the high rise in food prices are definitely hurting the consumers pocketbook now they are turning their backs on high-priced grocery chains like Whole Foods.

This is not to say that consumers who are heavily committed to organic foods and are happy to pay a premium for them will stop buying organic. More likely it’s those customers who were attracted to the “idea” of organic, pulled in by savvy marketing from companies who never used the term organic to describe their produce, who will steer away from high-priced organic foods and go back to regular produce at cheaper grocery chains. As everyone jumped on the organic band wagon sales soared but now it is consumers economic woes that are dictating where their groceries monies will be spent. The trend appears to be that meat, produce and dairy that is organic continues to sell but products such as breakfast bars or cereals and other similar food categories labeled organic are now less important to shoppers.

Whole Foods problems do appear to mirror those of Starbucks‘ – they were both once Wall Street darlings whose stocks soared for years, but with aggressive strategies for expansion by building more stores rapidly both chains were unable to maintain their margins and Wall Street punished them. They also relied heavily on customers paying a premium for what they saw as a premium product and that only works in times of prosperity not in an economic downturn.

There is also the hyper-local aspect of consumer habits these days. Farmers Markets and even cooperative shares in small organic farms are becoming very popular these days. These markets and farms offer consumers access to locally grown organic produce at the right price and also the feelgood aspect of supporting their local communities. Think local, eat local may be a phrase that becomes popular but it won’t help a national chain like Whole Foods. Whole Paycheck may very well haunt them and their shareholders.

Related Post: Starbucks Fires Head of Entertainment Division

At Nemo we have recently been spending much of our time in “thought leader” mode, to coin a phrase. Like any modern integrated marketing and branding company we are charged with advising our clients on how to approach the convoluted and ever-shifting world of social networks and social media advertising.

On this blog I have outlined many thoughts about why companies shouldn’t necessarily dive headfirst into the world of blogs and social media – here’s a post that includes a useful ‘how-to top ten’ list.’ It’s entitled “Why Does Corporate Social Networking Fail? It’s not cynical, and hopefully it’s useful to anyone pondering the issues of how their company should be represented online.

If we look at social networking before the advent of the internet, pre-Facebook etc, it literally meant that we gathered in tribes; ‘birds of a feather flock together’ goes the old saying. It’s as true today as the day the phrase was coined. Many people who have like-minded pursuits happily gather socially at predetermined venues or destinations to share their love of something. During my different life-stages in England growing up, that meant for me – soccer, pubs, punk rock.

Today we see the ability to share common interests multiplied as never before and of course I do mean “see” it; it’s called the Web and it lives up to its name.

At Nemo we don’t pretend to have the answers. We are still asking the questions. So I decided that it might be a good idea to invite Rachel Masters, Ning Inc’s VP of Strategic Development, to talk to us about the Ning social networking platform and the tools they are providing for anyone to build a social network.

Rachel walked our audience through a few examples of companies using the Ning platform to connect with their core consumers, but none was as compelling as the Saturn Cars site. It’s a great example of a company understanding and embracing America’s love affair with the automobile. If you love your Saturn this is the go-to site. If you are a marketing executive at a company that is thinking of embracing social media then have your team take a look at Saturn’s Ning network. It might just make you look like you understand social media….

Here’s a transcript of the talk on OakHazelnut from @caseorganic who was in the audience. And here’s a video of part of Rachel’s presentation.

For decades now the dream of media types and ad firms has been to convert the humble remote control from a mere volume and channel changer to a spangly ‘product buying module.’ Tivo and Amazon are announcing a partnership today that introduces a “product purchase” feature via Tivo’s DVR service.

The idea is simple – turn the Tivo remote into a tool for buying the products being advertised and promoted on commercials and talk shows. If a talk show host talks up a book, Blu-Ray disc or CD, Tivo viewers will see onscreen menus with links to buy those products.

The NYT reports that – In the months ahead, TiVo plans to begin offering this feature to advertisers and programmers, so that the chance to buy products and have them delivered will be presented to viewers during commercials and even alongside product placements during live shows.

“Just a few years ago, we were viewed with great paranoia as the disruptor,” said Thomas S. Rogers, chief executive of TiVo. “Our goal now is to work with the media industry to come up with ways to resist the downward pressure of less advertising viewing and create a way for advertising on TV to become more effective, more engaging and closer to the sale.”

Tivo is now positioning itself away from media industry disruptor – offering its customers ways to skip ads, to media industry saviour, but not without Mr Rogers sowing the seeds of paranoia – “As DVRs get more popular, “the majority of commercials in home will be fast-forwarded through,” he said. “It is critical that there be a form of advertising and a transactional solution that underpins the DVR, or the economics of television are going to be substantially undermined.”

Q. How do we reach these young people? A. You don’t, you wait for them to invite you

The social media folks and their blogs have been buzzing lately over a story that seems to have come from Deloitte but perhaps was more widely circulated by the WSJ. Josh Catone at Sitepoint drilled down further into the story from where it got picked up by Marshall Kirkpatrick on ReadWriteWeb.

Both Josh and Marshall have great points and their posts are a good read. Marshall’s post had the most provocative headline – Corporate Social Networks Are A Waste of Money, Study Finds. I thought I’d pick up the story there – A Waste of Money. Companies have a bad habit of throwing money at everything that moves, especially if it looks like “something we should be doing.”

Here are my thoughts distilled from my own writings on the subject and insights borrowed from Josh and Marshall’s posts:

Here’s an extract from my essay ‘On Social Media, Blogs and Advertising.’ – To understand and embrace social networking is to place the idea that says “technology makes this possible” to one side and embrace the idea of the basic human need to stay in touch with other like-minded people at all times. As Clay Shirky says “The desire to be part of a group that shares, cooperates, or acts in concert is a basic human instinct.” Read the rest of this post here.

With that thought what follows is:

Businesses can not “build a community” however much money they throw at the idea. They merely need to look outside of their own walls, find the influencers who are already championing their products and join the communities that already exist.

Businesses can not attract “visitors” as measured in traffic to their sites. People who enjoy their products will be talking about them elsewhere in other communities. See above.

Businesses have to realize that having a Facebook page for their products makes them look ridiculous and could actually harm the brand. See my post about Spraychel and “her” Facebook page brought to us by the folks behind I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter®

It is the way of businesses to make predictions about their market. They should not invest in software that makes predictions, or even social-networking technology, unless they have discovered a clear market need.

Positive word of mouth marketing by online communities that enjoy a businesses’ product is a far better metric than the ratio of visits to the corporate web site or its community.

Online communities led by influencers that champion a businesses’ products are doing just that, championing the products not the corporation that brought them to market.

So what should businesses do? Here’s a list that I have reworked to address businesses as it was originally written with rock bands in mind.

They should:
01. Run a blog to which actual company members post regular updates.
02. Ensure that the blogosphere is alerted to any new and breaking news or important posts.
03. Offer early access to special offers and discounts for their customers loyalty.
04. Give away free samples of their product.
05. Be active in their customers online communities.
06. Never push unwanted messages to their customers.
07. Ask their customers to interact directly with their product, for example through competitions and giveaways.
08. Allow the sharing of their products amongst a community.
09. Work closely with influencers.
10. Embrace radical transparency. Openly discuss their problems with their customers and allow negative comments to remain on their blogs.

That’s the top ten; number 11 in my list would include – have dedicated staff working on your company’s online communication 24/7.

Read more of our thoughts on Social Media here.

I love coincidences. Or maybe I should say that as you spend your waking time fully immersed in your daily activities you should deliberately give some of that time over to your subconscious, then there would be no such thing as coincidence; we would just call it awareness.

I posted my summer reading list recently and mentioned that I am buried in E.O. Wilson’s wonderful intellectual adventure ‘Consilience; The Unity Of Knowledge,’ in which he argues just that, the need for unity of knowledge – a common system of knowledge. Today in the New York Times I read an interview with Dr. Wilson and, not for the first time in his career, he is challenging common wisdom. He is arguing that the gene is not the only level at which natural selection acts and because he has new data about the genetics of ant colonies now believes that natural selection operates at many levels, including at the level of a social group. Interesting; what does this mean for all you social media advertising gurus?

He argues that we have long been conditioned to believe that natural selection favors only behaviors that help the individual to survive and leave more children. His studies of ant colonies, a passion of his for many decades, suggest otherwise. He says there is another level at which evolution operates – social groups. He suggests that we may have genes that underlie generosity, moral constraints, even religious behavior, that benefit a group at the expense of the individual. He will be working on these theories for his next book. I can’t wait to read it.

So what genetic code could Dr. Wilson possibly unravel that would explain the human proclivity toward having “feelings” for inanimate objects? Cars are cherished, protected and nurtured like family members. Ships are regularly christened with female names and referred to as “she” or “her.” Houses, cities, buildings, mountains – this urge to have “feelings” for inanimate objects is the same urge that drives humans to want to save the Earth; it is a controlling urge and is a by-product of Christianity.

All of which brings me to the brilliant Spike Jonze and his Ikea ad. [Full disclosure - Nemo and in particular our creative director, Mark Lewman, have deep ties to Spike.]

The ad works from a simple premise; play on our emotional attachment to inanimate objects – in this case a desk lamp that is discarded. In the first second, as the woman leans in to turn off the lamp, we hear a click of the switch or is that maybe a goodbye kiss ? The lamp is then dumped outside alongside a trash bag. It’s raining… How do we feel as the piano tugs at our heartstrings? We should feel nothing, it’s a ridiculous situation, but in many people it may trigger deep human responses to abandonment. That illusion is shattered by a man with distinctly Scandanavian/German overtones to his accent, who berates us for having such stupid feelings.

Spike spent exactly one minute reminding us, if we are really watching and tapped into our subconscious, that the human need to control other animals and inanimate objects is foolhardy and doomed to failure. It won’t stop us buying new desklamps though.

Well, either Gary Busey has or GotVMail has. Gary appears to be “tired and emotional” as Private Eye would say, so it’s sure to be viral.

The engineers and technologists who designed and built the giant Airbus A380 may well be proud of their accomplishments in attempting to reduce this huge aircraft’s environmental impact. As their web site says “[they took] a fresh approach to its environmental impact, too. With a new wing design and composite materials accounting for 25% of its structural weight, the A380 is a much more efficient aircraft all round. And by producing only about 75g of CO2 per passenger kilometre, the A380 is contributing to the aviation industry’s commitment to constraining greenhouse gas emissions.”

So, a full A380 carrying 525 passengers between London and Los Angeles, a distance of 8750km, will produce 344,531,250gms of CO2. Yes that’s 344 million – I’m just saying…hat’s off to the marketers for using grams instead of pounds. They’re European, so they can.

The site also mentions that “The A380 burns fuel per passenger at a rate comparable to that of an economical family car.” All I can picture here is 525 cars driving 8750km. And what is an “economical” family car?

They go on – “There’s the extra space per passenger afforded by its twin, full-length, wide-bodied cabins. The cabin air, recycled every three minutes to keep the atmosphere fresh. The natural light provided by 220 cabin windows. And while the A380 feels more natural inside, the environment outside benefits too. From the dramatically reduced external noise levels. From the lower fuel consumption and significantly improved CO2 emissions per passenger kilometre. From the increased capacity at airports and the reduced need for expansion.”

I love that phrase natural light provided by 220 cabin windows because every flight that I’ve been on the attendants can’t wait to tell the passengers to please lower your window shades as the “entertainment” i.e bad movie or TV, is about to begin. Whether you like it or not you are forced to sit in a dark stuffy tube while people with headphones on guffaw at lame jokes. Good use of “natural” though.

And this is a good one – “From the increased capacity at airports and the reduced need for expansion.” The boast here is that the ‘planes are so big they can deliver more folks to be packed into your airport’s long lines at immigration reducing the need for the airport authorities to expand their airports. Brilliant! What a relief for those in charge of our comfort while we struggle through their over-crowded airports, they don’t need to do anything but allow Airbus A380’s to land.

It gets better – “Some operators might, for example, choose to seat their First and Business class passengers on the upper deck –providing a corporate jet-like environment for these clients – while configuring the A380’s main deck for an all-Economy layout.”

Dear Airlines, when you configure the ‘planes for your fleet, why not put the great unwashed underneath with the freight and be done with it?

Once the mainstream media and the more hysterical tech blogs have got over the fact that the success of the iPhone 3G launch caused Apple’s servers to be overloaded, we can sit back and take stock.

I own the iPhone v.1 and I’m currently happy without 3G access so I remain content with my device. One reason for staying put with the original model is that the new software update from Apple brings some rather cool new applications [or Apps in the vernacular,] that improve the original phone’s productivity.

I chose a couple of productivity apps, Zenbe, a list sharing tool and Jott, a voice to text tool. I got AirMe for uploading my iPhone pictures up to my Flickr account and added MPG and Spend [no link available, tsk, tsk] so if I care I can track my miles per gallon in the Element and set budgets for my gourmand extravaganzas. These apps all perform well without G3 and most were free. One app that fell into the epic fail bucket was Reqall. Couldn’t sign up on the iPhone and couldn’t load the web site either. Fail! Turns out that Jott does the same stuff anyway.

The most interesting app of all is Loopt which enables users to broadcast their whereabouts and send a status of a broad set of services and find interesting locations and reviews nearby. This could be the next breakout social networking platform as it works best from the phone [mobiles, not just the iPhone] and is simple to update ala Twitter. In fact it has a Twitter plug-in so you can post once and hit Twitter too. Follow me on Twitter here.

One problem though – Loopt could be a predators dream. In fact Loopt’s Be Safe page spells out in no uncertain terms that you need to control who has access to your location.

Anyway, here’s my thinking behind the title of this post. David Griner wrote a post entitled Are Blogs Still Good Places for Conversation? which at first glance I took as simply a Google bait tactic. The answer would seem to be “of course they are.” He raises a good point but I still believe a good, well written blog is the place for conversation. Twitter, a micro-blog, is not. I use my Twitter account to drive traffic back to my blog where the conversation can really open up. After all Twitter only allows 140 characters so truncated updates are the norm, which is fine. If I follow Marshall Kirkpatrick on Twitter I get up-to-the-minute breaking tech news from him but I prefer to read his blog at Read Write Web for a more in-depth review. On both my blogs, the other being Pampelmoose, I enjoy reading comments that can often be longer than the original post – something that is impossible with Twitter.

Joining the conversation and being invited in are two things I have stressed when it comes to advising our clients on their forays into social media advertising. A blog is the right venue for extending conversations, not a micro-blog. By all means post links to your original content stories to Twitter so that interested followers can link to your blog. Be sure to use FriendFeed to share your blog posts with others, use Tumblr too for the same reason, but understand that many of the social networking arenas, Twitter, Loopt even Facebook, are way ahead of the general online populations’ capacity to juggle all of them, and those folks not partaking in every widget, bell and whistle are your customers too.

Run a blog, embrace radical transparency, get invited in to communities that might enjoy your products and join the conversation. But whatever you decide to do, don’t do this – OHSU Director’s Blog. If you don’t immediately see why feel free to ask me.

This might work. Let’s not forget that women/sex always sells. I found the ad on one of my favorite spill-the-beans web sites, Hipster Runoff. Although why the thong needs to be organic I have no idea….

John Mellencamp, free songs via Vanity Fair

Thinking about social advertising and targeted marketing perhaps we should take a leaf out of the book of the rock stars. The biggest story last year in the music world was how Radiohead bucked the recording industry’s distribution and marketing system and gave away their new album. The short story is that they simply told their fans that they could go to a Radiohead web site and pay whatever they liked to download the album, with $0.00 being an acceptable amount. It was an extremely successful campaign – not only did most people pay for the files but the band received unprecedented amounts of positive media coverage around the globe.

Other bands have followed the model not least Trent Reznor and his band Nine Inch Nails. The band released a limited edition 2,500 units of a coffee table book that included multiple CDs and DVDs. It was exquisitely packaged, signed and numbered and cost $300.00. It sold out in two days.

I believe this form of social marketing could serve as a model for companies that have customers who are literally fans of their products. And I don’t mean Apple.

If we think of the bands mentioned above as companies that sell product then we can take a look at what these companies have been doing to increase sales of their product. Here’s what they do online:

01. They have blogs to which actual band members [think executives] post regular updates.
02. They ensure that the blogosphere is alerted to any new and breaking news or important posts.
03. They offer early access to special offers and discounts for their customers loyalty.
04. They give away free samples of their product.
05. They are active in their customers communities.
06. They never push unwanted messages to their customers.
07. They ask their customers to interact directly with their product through competitions.
[Both Radiohead and Nine Inch Nails had remixing competitions where they made tracks available to their fans for that purpose.]
08. They allow sharing of their products amongst a community.
09. They work closely with influencers.
10. They openly discuss their problems with their customers and allow negative comments to remain on their blogs.

Number 11 in my list would include the fact that they have dedicated staff working on this online communication 24/7.

These “companies” also use printed media to their advantage too. John Mellencamp has hooked up with Vanity Fair magazine to get two free song downloads into the hands of his fans. This is a win-win for both parties. Here’s the link if you fancy grabbing the songs.

In an article in the Wall Street Journal today [subscription req.] a report says that YouTube will will fall short of revenue expectations. The twist to this chatter is that Google has found that 80% to 90% of video watchers hate to watch pre-roll advertising and they leave the video the minute they see any hint of a pre-roll. The story goes that Google intends to ignore its own research and go ahead with pre-roll anyway.

And the reason that most pages on YouTube are ad free? Because Google is fearful of showing that it is profiting from copyright infringement. They already in the middle of a copyright infringement lawsuit filed by Viacom. That apparently leaves Google with only 4% of the videos being legally a-ok to advertise around as they have been approved by the copyright owners.

Bottom line for Google and the lawsuit they face, is that it is very unlikely they will receive a ruling in their favor to make money from copyright-violating content. It also will be a barrier to entry for anyone trying to launch a social media advertising program around these big content sites. Even Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation doesn’t own the copyright to hundreds of thousands of songs on its MySpace site.

It’s not often I come across a major musical artists’ web site and find that I can say to myself – “these guys got it right.” Today I visited John Mayers site and although I’m not a fan of his music the site is a great example of how to get the message across simply and elegantly while giving his fans the ability to interact on many levels. The tie-in with Blackberry is genius too. The Blackberry micro-site just spreads the Meyer messaging and interactivity far and wide by offering exclusive Meyer content – audio, video, pictures and more.

John says “hi.”

John Meyer has a blog and he seems to use it, at least I hope it’s him because the most egregious offense is having someone else blog for you. I’m going to keep checking back on this one. In fact there are multiple blog links on the home page. This one is written by “Scotty” who may be in the band or may be the T-shirt vendor, it’s hard to tell. The blog focuses on the new T-shirts – “A collaboration with Loomstate – a completely organic, sustainable tee. Very limited… We only made 587 of the shirts, each hangtag is hand-numbered.”

And there’s even a place to send in your encore requests for the shows you’ll attend. Customer happy time I reckon. And client happy too, Blackberry made a wise choice sponsoring this musician.

Credit: Mayer web link found on the Mediapost blogs.

The news today is that Proctor and Gamble is getting into the music business. Just as Starbucks is going in the opposite direction and exiting the CD sales business, more brands are jumping in to fill the void left by the collapse of the CD retail store business. Music sales in the UK were once again down 11% over the same period in 2007.

For the labels, attention from product companies is a good thing. I see the logic here. CD sales are plummeting and online sales are not filling the void, a company comes along that wants to license the record label’s music to promote a brand and it appears that a match has been made in heaven. Rhianna had a lot of success this way working with Totes Isotoner to help them improve sales of umbrella’s. Umbrella was the title of her hit song, I wrote about her arrangement with Totes here.

Proctor and Gamble, and other companies using music to promote their brands, are jumping in deeper though:

“At a time when online file-sharing is rampant, record stores are closing and consumers are buying singles instead of albums, getting into the music business might seem like running into a burning building. But as record labels struggle to adjust to a harsh new digital reality, other companies are stepping up their involvement in music, going far beyond standard endorsement contracts and the use of songs in commercials. These companies — like Procter & Gamble, Red Bull and Nike — are stepping outside of their core businesses to promote, finance and even distribute music themselves.”

I believe all of this extra-curricular activity by these brands may pay off for them in the long term. The music fan has shown her willingness to buy music online although only singles, not albums. Album sales are no longer the preferred format. The labels created this nightmare for themselves when they scrapped the single as a sales format. They blamed their losses on file-sharing online but they ignored their own disastrous moves in the market place. They weren’t listening to their customers. And then they began to sue them. Even Apple can’t persuade music fans to buy albums.

There is a lesson here though and it is one that Starbucks learned the hard way. Brand and product companies should not get too deep into the music sales business. The P&G deal with Def Jam may work well as it is a joint venture where presumably each side does what they do best – Def Jam runs the label side, P&G markets its product with Def Jam music and pays for everything.

I discussed the following issue in a recent post: To the music fan music becomes cheapened by being used as a commodity to sell products. The artists behind the music have their celebrity enhanced and they then go on to use their brand to sell more products. Music fans understand that music is now a commodity and refuse to pay for it. The music industry and the artists both complain that no one pays for music and to account for the decline in sales accuse us of stealing it online. The commodity is over-priced; no one is buying it.

Unless you are a brand with a product to sell.

That’s not a boast. Another answer to that question is simple; if you write a blog, you own PR too.

Press releases by the thousands hit editors desks and inboxes daily. The best editors have no doubt created a system for separating the wheat from the chaff when it comes to a good story, but they are still gatekeepers although their gates are becoming smaller and easier to bound over. We are in the age of PR 2.0 as Brian Solis calls it. He as written a paper entitled ‘The Social Media Manifesto – Integrating Social Media into Marketing Communications.‘ He spells out his case very succinctly and avoids most of the jargon that you might expect in a paper on this subject [although some clichés remain.] You can read it here.

A Press Release? Here’s one definition from many that I found online – ‘An announcement of an event, performance, or other newsworthy item that is issued to the press.’ The definition is straightforward and very, very dry, a phrase that unfortunately describes every press release I’ve ever seen. So how does your story get noticed through the crowds and the white noise?

You could go crazy with all the options that are available but I’m thinking that a less is more approach may be more effective. Again common wisdom suggests that you should use Digg, Del.icio.us, MyBlogLog, Facebook, MySpace, Bebo, etc, etc. Although those tools are all undoubtedly useful, the problem is that you have to manage all of these accounts and that is time consuming. Also is your story relevant, to say your Facebook group? In fact have you asked yourself – “Does my company even need a Facebook group?” Just because you can doesn’t mean you should. And of course this all begins with the best story that you have to tell, otherwise all of your efforts using any social media will fail. A non-story is a non-story, period.

This is our current approach at Nemo:

We have multiple blogs and bloggers and we experimented with social media for a while before jumping in and writing about our ideas and thoughts. Social Cache is an example of how we intend to participate as thought-leaders and contributors. We are not selling anything here.

Our blogs have distinct voices and authority in the areas of music at Pampelmoose, fashion at Nubby Twiglet, art and design at strange|beautiful and photography at Nemo Productions & Photography.

We create videos and upload them to YouTube and Vimeo [33,460 folks watched that one,] and we drop our photos off at our Flickr site.

We have a Muxtape so you can listen to what we are listening to.

We have LinkedIn profiles for all of our executive staff, here’s our Creative Director, Mark Lewman’s. We even have a Facebook group. [I'm struggling with this one, more later.]

We are lacking in the blogroll department. We need a stronger blogroll on Social Cache.

We have our own Ning social network specific to our company. It’s been in private beta but soon it will be unleashed to the world. Here’s a sneak peek of some of the Nemo team celebrating the delivery of new web sites that we built for HP Blackbird and VooDoo PC. Click those links to see our work.

Find more videos like this on NEMO

When it comes to PR and marketing at Nemo we are following the basic rules of social media. We listen and we participate. We wait to be invited in. We start conversations. We encourage comments.

And we love our employees, even when they leave us…watch the video below.

Find more videos like this on NEMO

Crazy, entertaining, popular? Yes.

Watch it here. Some folks mention 45 million views but I don’t see those numbers. As of today it has 3,262,406 views. Still, nothing wrong with those numbers. As Seth Godin asks, are you sponsoring or advertising on the right sites?

Via Seth’s Blog

In the many years that I have had a MySpace page I have never once clicked through on any of the ads pushed to me. Here’s an example in the clip I took from the home page above. I never read Spin Magazine and I can’t stand Coldplay. Even the tag line from Chris Martin – “Our album will probably save the world” fails to entice me as the comment is so shallow. The good news though is that the digital issue of Spin is free. Now they’re thinking.

Social Media is no longer viewed as just a hobby or a passing fad. According to Adweek, a handful of advertising and PR agencies are seeing the potential of web-based client promotion and have recently launched Social Media divisions in addition to their more traditional offerings.

As more advertising dollars continue to make their way to the internet, Brain Sells notes that “more than just ad dollars following a trend or digital hype, the growth is being driven due to real changes in behavior: (the) rising number of people online, the introduction of cheap laptops and the growing popularity of TV shows on the Internet.”

Furthermore, ChasNote shows us the migration of U.S. ad dollars in which the amount of money spent online in 2007 swelled to $21 billion, an increase of almost 26% from the previous year:

The social media teams at various agencies are becoming savvy enough to realize that buying up ad space on large networking sites like Myspace and Facebook is not necessarily the answer. Michael Nathanson, an analyst at Sanford C. Bernstein & Company states that “the jury’s still out on MySpace’s ability to monetize” and “we don’t have much conviction in the long-term ability to grow this business based on what we’ve seen lately.”

Instead, the future is pointing towards more focused ad campaigns targeted at niche blogs that have highly faithful followings. As Dave Allen, Director of Insights & Digital Media at Nemo Design says, “Companies should be advertising directly to those niche groups and networks that include people who would like to hear from their brand. (On other social media sites) the brands need to wait until they are invited in. A mass, scatter-shot approach to the large social networks will only fail.”

The bottom line: there is no quick way to propel a company to the top through social networking; it takes time and the earning of users’ trust. The competition is constantly growing and social media users are becoming increasingly savvy. Patrick Garrett, Outrider’s U.S. managing director is right when he proclaims that “social media is a long-term investment.”

Spraychel, the brand mascot for ‘I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter Spray®’ has her own Facebook page. Oh, and she’s also running for President…. I Can’t Believe It’s…oh never mind.

A shadowy social network group.

Facebook is getting an assist from Visa Inc.’s marketing machine in its struggle to lure more advertisers. To date, Facebook has not had as much success as was expected in garnering revenues from advertising. The plan with Visa appears to be aimed at small businesses who are using Facebook to look for new customers.

Michael Liedtke reports:
Visa’s service is designed to provide small-business owners with tools and tips on attracting new customers, trimming costs and other ways to make more money. Businesses that belong to the Visa network on Facebook also will be able to communicate with each other to share ideas or even negotiate deals. Internet search leader Google Inc. is providing some of the features on Visa’s business network, including maps, calendars, word processing and a new template for creating expense sheets and business cards. And The Wall Street Journal and Entrepreneur magazine will contribute articles addressing questions posed by businesses that belong to Visa’s Facebook network.

Facebook’s struggle to produce revenue from its site sounds similar to the problems that MySpace has been having. Facebook has 80 million users who play games, share photos, rate music and track their friends’ activities – the idea that they can be bothered to click through on an advertisement that is not relevant to them, and one that just randomly appears on their home page or profile, is a marketing stretch.

As Michael Liedtke writes:
…while the array of applications have helped make Facebook even more popular, few programs are producing revenue for the site, and Facebook still hasn’t proven that its social playground is an effective advertising forum. Finding the right advertising approach also has been a challenge for other social hangouts like News Corp.’s MySpace. Even Google, which runs the Internet’s most lucrative ad system, has had trouble marketing on social networks.

Advertisers and marketers are labouring under the assumption that the information that Facebook has gathered about its users makes it easy to target different groups of them. This is a dubious notion at best. They are a moving target.

As Liedtke points out: …..some advertisers fret that Facebook’s audience will resent commercials amid all the site’s frivolity. Others are leery about their brands showing up on Web pages featuring racy or unsavory content.

Stay tuned.

After reading Nubby’s post on The Power of Celebrities as Brands I came across a post on Sasha Frere-Jones’ New Yorker blog where he talks about Jeff Leeds, a music reporter for the New York Times, who was recently laid off. Frere-Jones has entered into an email discussion with Leeds where they discuss music writing and criticism today:

LEEDS: I’m not sure that it’s so easy anymore to write about the art without acknowledging the commerce or vice versa. It’s also just more fun, as a writer, to inhabit the middle. There is a case to be made that the cultural role and the experience of music now are just inextricably tied to commerce and the new ways that artists and listeners perceive each other. Even as a fan, isn’t your relationship with music and artists at least somewhat different depending on whether you subscribe to e-music, share a station with a friend on Pandora, or watch someone’s show on your cell phone? Is U2 still the same U2 if they’re in an iPod ad? I think the message and the medium are much more intertwined than they were ten years ago.

FRERE-JONES: This behavior parallels the world of online friendships, at least in form. People who could just as easily call or e-mail each other decide to make conversations public through blogs or Twitter or MySpace comments. The platform chosen for each message changes the effect of the words, who can read them, and how long they will hang in the air. (The Web is creating a multiple-exposure version of memory: words remain, reappearing over and over, even if nothing more than cocktail chat. “Nice dress!” echoes in the hall of mirrored servers. An LOL is not an LOL is not an LOL.)

LEEDS: I think that sort of transparency, where we’re all declaring our positions publicly, is here to stay. In music it means that all these little tribes and congregations of fans can mobilize in really powerful ways. And that in turn is contributing so much to the changes you see in the relationship between the artists and the machinery, the industry underneath and around them. It’s a crucial space to watch. I always think of music as Patient Zero in all the disorder that is changing everything in entertainment and media, including, by the way, newspapers. It’s worth paying close attention.

Leeds and Frere-Jones are suggesting here that transparency, aided and abetted through the use of social media, affects the way that music fans “perceive” the artists and the music industry. With its machinations no longer hidden from them, fans interact differently with their favorite musicians. As musical artists use their celebrity to sell products one area where this perception could become dangerous is over-exposure.

In an article in the New York Times, Nothing Sells Like Celebrity, the story of the teenage R&B pop star, Rhianna, her song ‘Umbrella’ and her deal with the umbrella manufacturer, Totes Isotoner, is typical of the arrangements made between a celebrity’s brand and a product these days:

“Rihanna and her representatives wanted Totes to do more, however, than merely use her [song] to peddle a product. They wanted Totes to create customized umbrellas featuring sparkly fabrics and glittery charms on the handles — all recommended by the emerging star and her team. Totes also guaranteed the singer a percentage of the sales of the umbrellas”.

Apparently the arrangement between the star and umbrella company was successful but what does this say about the future of music as an art form? As Leeds says – “I’m not sure that it’s so easy anymore to write about the art without acknowledging the commerce or vice versa.” To paraphrase him – Is Rhianna still the same Rhianna if she’s in an umbrella ad? Do her fans blur the line between seeing her in a video on MTV and then seeing her in a Totes ad?

Sales of hip hop and R&B music have dropped off precipitously lately and many have blamed the over commercialization of the music and its ties to products; too much bling in other words. Does hearing a song repeatedly through an advertisement cheapen the artist and the song? And then in turn, does social media – Facebook, Twitter etc, allow these “little tribes” as Leeds calls them, share the idea that ‘too much exposure is quite enough thanks, we’re moving on to the next artist’…become gospel? I think so. Leeds and Frere-Jones are on to something.

As these all important “little tribes” spin off into tightly-knit social groups online, all of which will independently coalesce around their favorite subjects, be it knitting, hang gliding, musicians, movies, actors et al – the large social media sites and networks will fracture into millions of laser-precise spin-offs. As Frere-Jones says, the words and messages of these “little tribes” become “echoes in the hall of mirrored servers.” As he also says, the web and social media are “creating a multiple-exposure version of memory,” – is that U2 on MTV or U2 in an iPod ad, I may ask myself?

Beware all marketers who intend to try and reach these ever-shifting, nomadic, online groups; as I said in a prior post – the people who are members of these groups don’t exist, only their personas do.

The music industry should be careful too. Music becomes cheapened by being used as a commodity to sell products. The artists behind the music have their celebrity enhanced and they then go on to use their brand to sell more products. Music fans understand that music is now a commodity and refuse to pay for it. The music industry and the artists both complain that no one pays for music and to account for the decline in sales accuse us of stealing it online. The commodity is over-priced; no one is buying it.

As celebrities are constantly followed in the media with their every move recorded and scrutinized for a slew of gossip shows and blogs, a side effect has emerged in the form of the ‘human billboard.’ Now more than ever, celebrities themselves have morphed into lucrative brand names, hawking everything imaginable from credit cards and cars to perfume and yogurt.

The line between celebrities and the products they’re pitching has become increasingly fuzzy as the two merge to create mutual benefits. Brands are now relying on hot stars to not just stamp their name on products, but to co-design their own lines that capture the attention of their rabid fan bases. 

The Power of Celebrity Endorsement

While the endorsement of products and services by celebrities is nothing new, there has been steady growth in this area over the last ten years with an estimated 14% of all U.S. advertisements including stars last year (via marketing research agency Millward Brown). 

Why is this phenomenon so powerful? Why do stars sometimes earn more from advertising revenues than they do from their actual day jobs?

The truth is that companies would not be paying celebrities exorbitant fees to stand in as spokespersons for  their brands if they didn’t see a positive effect on sales. People want to be a part of something bigger than themselves and if they truly believe that their idols actually use the products they are paid to pose with, sales and (website traffic) can go through the roof.

Consumers are constantly shown glimpses of a celebrity’s lifestyle and even though they may not be able to afford the cars, mansions, and private parties, they can at least buy the fragrance, t-shirt and sunglasses their idols (appear to) prefer. It’s easier to live vicariously through products and services than to look inward to the real issues. 

Controversy: The Downside of Endorsements

When a company chooses a celebrity to endorse their brand, it’s all about image. To make a partnership successful, they have to decide whether a person’s image is in line with their values and further enhances their reputation. When Magic Johnson announced his HIV-positive status in the early 90s, he was swiftly dropped from endorsements, though the companies claimed it was the affair factor that sealed the deal. 

Sometimes controversy can help a celebrity land even more endorsement deals after the dust has settled. Supermodel Kate Moss weathered a scandal in 2005 when she was caught snorting cocaine. Her lucrative contracts with Chanel, Burberry and H&M were dropped, yet Yves Saint Laurent and Gucci held on. Since her release from rehab, she has landed even more endorsement deals from the likes of Calvin Klein, Longchamp, Bulgari, Stella McCartney and Virgin Mobile. Amazingly, Hollywood.com claims that these deals have reportedly brought Moss’ earnings from $10.3 million before the bust to $17 million after!

Celebrity Power and Ranking

The numbers for celebrity endorsements in advertising are down this year after hitting an all-time high of 19% in 2004. In the over-saturated world of advertising, this may be the beginning of a trend. Many companies are now realizing that their roster of brands are being overshadowed by the bold-faced celebrity names they once courted. While the celebrities promoting the products are gaining increased notoriety, the company image can be lost in the shuffle. In the last few years, Pepsi has dropped Beyoncé and Britney Spears for this reason.

Companies are now looking to the two year old Davie Brown Index to see how hot a celebrity is. Ranking a total of 1,800 celebrities, the D.B.I. determines a celebrity’s ability to influence a relationship with the brand and to also encourage consumer purchases.

The Future of Advertising

The future of advertising may be in ‘friend endorsements.’ Allen Stern of Center Networks makes the case that most of us would rather have our best friend recommend a product to us over a paid celebrity. This is becoming increasingly easy since many of us are connected into tight webs of friends, family members and acquaintances with similar interests via social networking sites like Myspace and Facebook.

The reason why we value the opinions of friends over celebrities comes down to one thing: TRUST. Celebrities are instantly recognizable and even likable, but that doesn’t mean that a consumer fully trusts their endorsements when making purchases. For this reason, social networking truly is the wave of the future for advertisers.

First the email in my inbox.

Introducing Keeping Score with Audrey!

Starting this week, TrueCredit’s Newsletter Editor-in-Chief, Audrey O’Dell, brings you a new blog in the Learning Center. Inspired by readers’ questions, Audrey will offer you the scoop on how to get the most out of credit card reward programs and uncover new and different ways to pay off credit cards (debt snowball, anyone?) and that’s only the beginning! Ever wonder how the credit crunch is going to impact you personally? (Maybe it already has!) Whether your mortgage rates will go up or your credit card rate will come down? Ever transfer a credit card balance to another card offering a lower rate—and then been sorry? Or was it a good idea? Read about these credit issues—and more—in Keeping Score with Audrey. It’s just one of the great features TrueCredit brings you to help you manage your credit. Make the TrueCredit Learning Center a regular pitstop on your road to credit health.

Ok I’m interested – I visit Keeping Score With Audrey.

The first thing I notice is the text on the page is left justified so tightly it almost escapes the page but the instant giveaway that this “blog” is not actually a real blog is the simple fact that no one is home. You cannot comment, all you can do is read what is basically an ad for True Credit’s services. You cannot contact anyone, there is no ‘about’ page – who is ‘Audrey,’ does she even exist?

Wait, there’s more – if you attempt to navigate away from this “blog” you receive the following message:

True Credit’s management have made a poor decision here. They clearly do not understand how important authenticity is in the blog world. If they had really done their homework this area of their site would not exist as it stands today. They have broken all the rules of how to reach their customers online.

Obama’s viral timepiece.

These days the advertising and marketing world is all abuzz with phrases such as – Social Media, Social Advertising, Facebook Ads, Mass Media Networking Advertising…..etc, etc.. In the last two weeks I have been a panelist at the L I S A seminar in Portland and the Hawaii MusicTech Conference in Honolulu. L.I.S.A., which is an acronym for Lessons In Social Advertising, was aimed at marketers and advertisers who [for some reason] don’t understand social networks or haven’t yet worked out how to advertise effectively to them. It focused on topics such as ‘What is social advertising?’ and ‘How do you get young people to recommend your brand?’ The Hawaii MusicTech panel discussed how musicians could effectively use social networks such as Facebook and MySpace to reach an audience and communicate with them.

Two sides of the table as it were. One group wants to advertise, or push, their messages to a mass audience, while the other wants to create a network of like-minded people who hopefully will pull content such as free MP3s and then “evangelize” on behalf of the musicians by spreading messages by electronic word of mouth. With no hint of schizophrenia I happily migrate between both camps.

To understand and embrace social networking is to place the idea that says “technology makes this possible” to one side and embrace the idea of the basic human need to stay in touch with other like-minded people at all times. As Clay Shirky says “The desire to be part of a group that shares, cooperates, or acts in concert is a basic human instinct.” Think about rock concerts for a minute…..

Most people that take a position on social networking and advertising come at it from a technological point of view, as in “technology has created the means for everyone to be connected and to stay in touch.” I disagree with that statement because it removes nature from the game. It is entirely natural for humans to want to interact as often as possible as we are all social animals. Cities are no more artificial (technological) than the hives of bees. Therefore the Internet is as natural as a spider’s web. People who believe that technology is driving our interactions are missing the point – we ourselves are technological devices, invented by ancient bacterial communities as a means of genetic survival. Bottom line – social media is as natural as apple pie as we all want to be as connected as possible – we can’t help it. [A really good book from which I have borrowed some thoughts is 'Straw Dogs' by John Gray, professor of European thought at LSE, published in the UK by Granta.]

Online networks might be seen as antidotes to boredom at work, school or college. These new social networks do more than transmit information about their members, they change behaviour by propagating moods. These days we can all share “news” really fast, even about ourselves – for example, my Facebook or Twitter status might say “I’m heading to the beach in Waikiki…” and the mood that simple statement makes might become very contagious.

The Internet confirms what we have all known for a long time – the world is ruled by the power of suggestion but in the case of social networking it is “influencers” that lead the suggesting. Then suggestions might become “group think.” John Gray writes – “in evolutionary prehistory, consciousness emerged as a side effect of language. Today it is a by product of media.”

So, the question currently being asked by companies and advertisers is “how do we market and advertise to social networks?” Having to ask that question suggests the rocky ground that online advertisers are standing on. For instance, Jack Myers sees nothing but doom and gloom in online marketing: He says “Advertising is simply not a sufficient revenue model to sustain content companies into the long-term future.” And goes on -

“I have preached evangelically for nearly three decades about the bifurcation of the media and advertising marketplace into 1) a transactional commodity business model and 2) a relationship-based brand-focused premium marketplace. Most media companies and agencies are investing appropriately in the technology resources required for their transactional businesses. [But] Brand building, relationship-based business models and premium-priced enterprises require completely new and innovative models, and can take years before they generate returns that justify the investments. Industry realities place enormous pressure on executives to adhere to traditional business models, and companies that foster and advance innovation are often drained of resources before they can deliver the return-on-investment demanded by the stock market, equity rights holders and VC investors. Typically, implementation of new business models must be forcefully imposed by the CEO, need the blessing of investors, and they cannot be managed by executives trained exclusively in the ways of traditional media and advertising.”

Neil Perkin in a slideshow entitled ‘What’s Next in Media’ that can be found here says that today – Social Media is counter-intuitive to communications media. Here’s one of his slides that shows just how counter-intuitive things have become for marketing online:

Meanwhile, the old way of marketing is through push messaging and therein lies the mistake of many of today’s marketing managers. Take a look at this slide to see how things don’t stack up nicely into a marketing message or ‘drop’ that has been long planned waiting its turn on the calendar.

The Linear model above reminds me of traditional TV and Print advertising. Some people in advertising and marketing today still view the Internet as a “channel” rather like TV.

Let’s consider another buzz phrase – viral marketing online. The success of YouTube in extending an advertising campaigns length and reach is now common currency. We’ve all seen the videos, perhaps even this one – My girlfriend and the Wii Fit. 2.2 million views and going strong.

The viral aspect of YouTube pleases advertisers and marketers because they can take pride in the statistics – 2.2 million viewers, that’s great! Not so quick though. The wise online marketer knows that it’s not all about page impressions. Broad use of metrics is far more important – users, time-spent, interactions and pass-alongs. The Wii certainly got a lot of exposure in that video but how can the results be tracked? Where’s the ROI?

Those YouTube stats don’t show the whole picture. It is clear that the video is very popular and it fits the rules of users, time-spent, interactions and pass-alongs, but there is no clear ROI except in its “value.” By value I mean that the brand is being talked about, the brand via the video is being shared, people are “spending time” with the brand. The ROI though is difficult to judge. Even if Wii sales were to jump by 5% in one week can we really say it was due to this “viral” campaign. Probably not. The video’s value will continue throughout its lifetime on YouTube. Talk of value over ROI makes marketing managers queazy.

Viral campaigns are not just online. From Adrants: Jack Goldenberg tells the story of how he and Kevin Glennon turned a custom-made Obama for President watch into what could become a fairly sizable viral campaign for the candidate.

“Most people think of viral marketing as something they’ve seen on YouTube or a similar site. But in reality, a viral is any communication that causes one person to be so affected by “experiencing” the viral that they communicate it to another.” He also argues that “Happy Meal toys were an in-home reminder of the need to visit McDonald’s. Kids would see two or three of them on their desk in their room and say, “Mom, Dad, we HAVE to go back to McDonald’s. I need 3 more Star Treks Happy Meals to complete my collection…..the Happy Meal was viral – kid to parent-multiplied by the millions of kids who frequented McDonald’s.”

That’s an example of an early viral campaign. We can perceive its “value” but we can’t perceive its ROI. And that’s why Jack Myers, as I quoted above, says “(completely new, innovative models) can take years before they generate returns that justify the investments.” If as marketers we don’t understand social media and merely pay lip service to viral marketing then we are basically flying by the seat of our pants.

Chris Anderson, editor-in-chief of Wired Magazine and blogger at The Long Tail, has pitched in to the social media advertising conversation with a post entitled You may be on Facebook But the Money’s in the Long Tail. He also posits that “social networks should be a feature, not a destination.”

As Chris says, and I agree, “I’ve been thinking a lot about how to integrate social networking into websites better. Right now the world is focused on stand-alone social networking sites, especially Facebook and MySpace, and the fad of the moment is to take brands and services there, as companies build Facebook apps and MySpace pages in a bid to follow the audience wherever they happen to be. But at the same time there’s a growing sense that elements of social networking is something all good sites should have, not just dedicated social networks. And that suggests a very different strategy – social networking as a feature, not a destination.”

He has a proviso too – “social networking to me means the tracking of individual preferences and behavior and giving users the ability to draw upon implicit or explicit connections between them and other users to do something useful.” This brings me to Ning, a social network platform that both Chris and I like. As he says “Ning, suppresses its own brand for the sake of those of the microsites it hosts.” Go here to see how the hip hop/rap label, Rawkus, uses Ning as its entire web presence.

Chris goes on to say – “As I think about the current Facebook craze and the notion of it as an all-encompassing platform, sucking in functionality from other sites across the board, I find myself skeptical. With my Long Tail hat on, I think that one-size-fits-all will fail in social networking, just as it has everywhere else.”

Meanwhile MySpace admits that it is not making as much money through ads as it would like. See Selling Ads For MySpace is Hard Work. MySpace COO Peter Chernin said:

“We remain incredibly optimistic about social media. But there are specific challenges 1) Tons of inventory. Lack of scarcity creates a liquidity challenge. Working on bringing big brands aboard. 2) People who are visiting social networks are there for different reasons, different uses. Figuring out how to target. 3) What’s the value of a “friend”? Trying to figure out new metrics to communicate with marketers.”

Bottomline: It’s the wild, wild west out there.

Anderson points out that ad rates on MySpace go for an astonishingly low $0.13 cents per CPM (one thousand impressions.) So that’s $0.13 on a general-purpose social network like MySpace and on his Ning-hosted network DIYDrones he’s getting $7.00. Even with a more generous scenario–$0.50 on MySpace and $5.00 on a focused Ning site–the difference is still a factor of ten. He believes that as big networks like Facebook and MySpace struggle to target ads based on the faint signals of consumer behavior in a generic social network, the smart money is going to the niche sites, where laser-focused content and community makes targeting easy. I couldn’t agree more. Also see: Facebook Ads Don’t Rock an experiment by Bob Gilbreath, an advertising executive who ran an ad on Facebook. It’s a real eye-opener. And another – Ad CPMs Are Higher In The Tail. And of course companies are springing up that think they have the answer to your problems in dealing with big social networks. Here’s one.

What this all points to is that companies should be advertising directly to those niche groups and networks that include people who would like to hear from their brand. The brands need to wait until they are invited in. A mass, scatter-shot approach to the large social networks will only fail.

Companies also need to consider Radical Transparency. For those unaware of this concept there’s a great article here on Wired Magazine’s site. I also wrote about it myself when Wired’s web site crashed. The basis of this theory is that you open the company’s doors [only as much as you like] by creating communication between your company and its fans and detractors. It’s a big step and for some, especially executives, it will cause a great deal of unease.

Wal-Mart used this approach to great effect. Here’s the original story from the New York Times and here’s just one bloggers’ reaction. And here is the Wal-Mart blog.

As the NYT article says “Known for its strict, by-the-books culture — accepting a cup of coffee from a supplier can be a firing offense — Wal-Mart is now encouraging its merchants to speak frankly, even critically, about the products the chain carries. This unusual new Web site, which was quietly created during the holiday shopping season, has become a forum for unvarnished rants about gadgets, raves about new video games and advice on selecting environmentally sustainable food.

Corporate blogs are nothing new — General Motors, Dell and Boeing have them — but Wal-Mart’s site, called Check Out, turns the traditional model on its head. Instead of relying on polished high-level executives, it is written by little-known buyers, largely without editing.”

And the key point there is “without editing.” Once a company opens the doors it can not close them. If a company starts a blog [and it should] it can not moderate the comments. And the CEO and other executives should not be contributing to the blog if they do not have the right “authority” or “voice”. By that I mean authenticity. It’s an overused word at times but in the right context it is completely accurate. If a CEO were to jump on the blog to blow her own trumpet non-critically about a company’s service or product the readers would see through it immediately. Being authentic means the blog author is a “trusted source” and this trust can never be abused.

A blog is a micro social network. My blog garners around 100,000 unique visits a month and its adherents are seeking out what I have to say about music, technology and the web. I am well versed in those things. I have an opinion about them. I also provide free music downloads from artists that I have “filtered.” I only post music from artists that I like and I believe that my audience will like them too. In short I have become a trusted source [people like my opinions,] a filter [people share my musical tastes,] and I am an influencer [I push certain artists and online companies that I support,] as well as an authority [people believe that I know what I am talking about.] A company’s blogger or bloggers need to have all these bases covered if they are going to safely cover the company’s communications through the blog.

Meanwhile the executives have to sit back and allow the comments, both good and bad, begin to flow. They can never interfere if they want the blog to be taken seriously. They will feel insecure and perhaps a little nauseous but if they wait it out it will work fine. It works for Wal-Mart, the world’s biggest retailer.

A company with a good blog policy will be listening to its customers and then shaping its communications around that data. It will also create content that is both relevant and hopefully surprising. Influencers will pass along the good stuff creating the viral moment that marketers pray for. Then people in the outer circle of the influencers will also start to talk about the brand, and as they do the company has to make it very easy for its core fans to spread the word. Do not fear negativity, it is just more communication – let it roll. There should never be a barrier to communication or interactivity. Remember, it’s not about technology, it’s about people. Bloggers have to be about having an opinion and sharing it but never about reporting….it’s a two-way conversation.

Sometimes people look at it backwards. Points 1 and 2 in this slide are wrong. As I said at the beginning of this post, we are technological beings and we are naturally immersed in technology; it can’t be any other way. And you can’t enforce social cultures online as there is no central “being.” Facebook’s “soul” is merely the millions of disparate people who are members. When Facebook goes away, as it will, those millions will migrate to the next application that allows them to socialize freely and easily.

For marketers this is a huge dilemma. In social media we create a selfless or virtual “self” – for instance, in the Facebook friends network one might see a coherent global pattern but that pattern only emerges from the activity of all its members (friends). The group or network seems to be centrally located but in fact it is nowhere to be found. No one has the slightest idea what these people do or want; they actually don’t exist. The good news is that within each of any of these social network groups resides at least a couple of influencers; again, companies and brands must wait to be invited in. These are parties that can’t be crashed.

Dave Allen, Director, Insights & Digital Media, Nemo Design.

The following URLs link to people, companies, articles or stories that are referred to in this post:

Grammy’s Hawaii MusicTech Conference
LISA 08
Content Marketing = Brand New Marketing
What’s Next In Media
My Facebook profile
My Twitter
My music and technology blog, Pampelmoose
Clay Shirkey’s blog
Jack Myers’ Web Site
Neil Perkin’s Blog
Wii Fit YouTube video
Adrants Obama watch story
Obama watches web store
Wired Magazine
You may be on Facebook but the money’s in the Long Tail
Social networks should be a feature not a destination
Rawkus, a social network on Ning
Selling ads on MySpace is hard work
Bob Gilbreath’s Facebook ad experiment
Ad CPMs are higher in the tail
Lotame.com
Blog reaction to Wal-Mart blogs
NYT story on Wal-Mart blog
WalMart blog

Even with a barrage of endless new options, today’s teens are still partial to many of the ‘old school’ brands that were popular with past generations. Last winter, networking website Habbo conducted an online survey of teens ages 11 to 18 and asked them to name their favorite brands.

Many of the biggest brand names in their respective genres were rattled off as favorites including Coca-Cola (beverage), McDonald’s (fast food), MTV (TV channel), Seventeen (magazine) and Nike (shoes).

With a constant link to the internet and access to so much outside information, it seems surprising that teens would identify such mainstream brands as their favorites. This may partially be due to the constant exposure of their big budget advertising campaigns that span the globe.

Nike: Staying Ahead of the Curve

Nike stands tall amongst its fellow footwear competitors with 40% of the market share for shoes. The brand recognition among teens has surely benefitted from one of the most recognizable logos in the world (the swoosh) and the empowering “Just Do It” slogan that has managed to cross all race, economic and gender barriers since its 1988 inception. Nike has been especially aware of teen consumers’ changing preferences with two notable additions to their roster being the Nike 6.0 and Nike SB lines. By focusing on the hot action sports and skateboarding sectors, they have remained a viable competitor in the fickle teen market.

Nike has also smartly followed in the footsteps of Vans, adding a larger amount of ‘lifestyle footwear’ to their product mix. Both brands have realized that while not all teens participate in sports, they will still gobble up the stylish soft good offerings.

Market Saturation Equals Recognition?

Though some teens may not actually prefer McDonald’s over its #2 competitor Burger King, its market share is so broad and the convenience of its locations so unparalleled that the iconic golden arches immediately come to mind.

A Case of Impressionability

Habbo, the site responsible for the brands survey is a social networking site aimed at teenagers with chat rooms that are set up in the form of virtual hotel rooms. Each user creates an avatar representing themselves and purchases credits to buy virtual items like furniture for the hotel rooms. 90% of Habbo’s users are between the ages of 13 and 18 and for this reason, it receives sponsorship from large corporations as well as bands targeting teens.

The broadness in age of its survey respondents should be noted. Teens on the younger end of the spectrum may be more impressionable; perhaps they haven’t branched out from their mainstream brand preferences yet, many of which they’ve been exposed to over the years in their households.

As teens mature, it’s normal for them to broaden their scope to lesser-known brands, many of which have less visibility (and smaller advertising budgets). This can be part of their allure since the need for individuality and the push towards the customization of products is an integral part of growing up.

While many of the top brands of our past will remain viable for future generations of teens, they should keep an eye on the smaller up-and-comers, many of which are playing by their own sets of rules.

Freshbooks hired Boston artist Jazz Martin to paint a mural on the booth during the HOW Design show in Boston.

In an age saturated with advertising everywhere you turn, you’d like to think that you’re one of the ’smart ones.’ You’re an individual that is impenetrable to the multimillion dollar marketing blitzes being doled out in an increasingly rapid succession.

Though 77% of Americans claim to be very perceptive to marketing pitches, many still end up being defined by their ’stuff,’ whether they realize it or not.

When making purchases, we sometimes rationalize our decisions by claiming that our choices are based on quality, price, comfort and convenience. We convince ourselves and those around us that these decisions have nothing to do with marketing. Apple products are preferred because of their superior quality (the sleek stylings are secondary). Coke is deemed to have the best taste (the billion dollar marketing budget doesn’t have any relevance). Manolos are the most comfortable, well-made stilettos (it doesn’t make any difference that Sex And The City’s Sarah Jessica Parker wears them as she struts through the streets of Manhattan).

The modern consumer is typecast by marketers as having become completely resistant to all advertising, but the truth is much deeper. Instead, they have fully embraced specific brands on their own, many of which lack mainstream ad campaigns. Marketers are quickly adapting to this new phenomenon and becoming more stealth in their techniques. Often, these tactics are so seamless that they have become imperceptible to the consumer. While they may feel that the lack of a defined campaign relates an aura of street cred and lacks the obnoxious connotations closely related to corporate powerhouses of the past, this is exactly what marketers are striving for.

Products are now regularly launched without an explanation as to what they are, what they do, or who should use them. The benefit of this approach is that consumers are invited to define it for themselves in a way that’s perceived as being a unique, individually focused experience. They have every reason to believe the product is a reflection of their values and needs because they’ve never been told any differently.

It’s natural to use possessions to aid in self-expression but there’s a fine line between doing this and in leveraging items to make ourselves into someone else. No matter what your views are, it’s important to remember that stuff is nothing more than…stuff.

There is no business more maligned right now than the music business so it’s always a surprise to me to find that brands and their agencies haven’t been following the story. Where once every college students dream was to graduate and land that much-sought-after job in the mail room at Warner Bros Records, I would argue today that they are far more interested in joining Google or one of the myriad of new media start-ups rather than getting a job at, or being signed to, the now unsexy music business. In fact one of them is no doubt creating a new, new, new media company as I write.

And then along comes Macys’ American Rag brand campaign – from AdWeek under news, non-traditional – a series of documentary Webisodes will follow the lives of five young people who want to break into the music business. The series, “Ragged Road,” launches in the fall. WPP Group-owned MEC Entertainment developed the show, which will play on YouTube. Nancy Slavin, svp of marketing at Macy’s merchandising group, said this marks a first for the brand in “doing something wholly dedicated to a communications strategy on the Web.”

So Macys’ merchandising group has plunged head first into a web-only strategy. Brave. The clothing brand targets 18-24 year-old males and females and they have deduced that music is one of the passions of this demos primary targets – true, but – music is just one of the passions not the primary passion.

“There’s a lot of people who want to get into the music industry, but don’t know how to go about it. So, we said, let’s find five people who have a passion for the business and want to see what the career opportunities are and what different paths there are to get into the music industry,” said Chet Fenster, managing partner at MEC. – I believe that statement is rather insulting to kids today, it sounds like a justification for making the webisodes rather than reinforcing a need that came out of a focus group session with young people.

All five cast members will be wearing American Rag clothing. They will also be given the opportunity to shop for the brand as they travel across the country. For YouTube users interested in buying the clothes, the Macy’s site will serve as a shopping portal.

Cast members huh? I don’t understand why the agency didn’t find a cool young band that are actually working hard on the road but are struggling to make it. That would have been the truly authentic route to go. Driving a bunch of “cast members” around the country on a bus and giving them “the opportunity to shop for the brand” as they go doesn’t sound so compelling to me. A more authentic way into the music market was showcased recently by Dennys, the restaurant chain, with their Adopt-A-Band campaign where they picked up touring bands and gave them a helping hand in the way Kids like their fashion to be unique. of free meals and other opportunities. Bands and music fans are very nocturnal and always hungry at after hours so this made sense in many ways. Dressing up a “band” in American Rag outfits and giving them a bus to travel on is so fake. It doesn’t take into account the harsh reality for thousands of young touring bands in the USA (gas at $4 bucks a gallon anyone?) nor does it take into account young kids’ propensity for mashing up their fashion sense into something unique, their own style.

It appears that marketing and advertising companies have hit some road blocks when it comes to online advertising; perhaps road block is not the right term, multiple forks in the road may be more correct. The new, new thing for the ubiquitous panels and conferences on the subject is the question how do we wrestle and pin down users on the big social networks and push brand advertising at them?. Currently there is no simple answer to this conundrum.

In a keynote address at the Interactive Advertising Bureau conference June 2nd, the co-founder and CEO of Social Media Networks, Seth Goldstein said – “Social media is killing advertising, a few years ago people started to become more interested in each other [online] and less interested in advertising.” Currently standard banner ad response rates are under 1% and search is not geared to brand advertising therefore social media is the next frontier for major marketers to attack but how will that be done?

Social Networking offline

One problem is that there is too much focus on the big social networks such as Facebook and MySpace. Wired’s editor-in-chief, Chris Anderson, argues on his Long Tail blog that social networking should be a feature, not a destination because the one-size-fits-all model of Facebook and MySpace will eventually give way to a multitude of narrowly focused sites with social networking built in, such as the 220,000 niche networks hosted on the Ning platform. With CPM’s at rock bottom on sites like MySpace he argues that the smart money is going to the niche sites, where laser-focused content and community makes targeting easy.

Marketers need to understand that within these hundreds of thousands of niche communities brand advertising will only work if the community invites them in. The brand ads will also have to be highly relevant to the community and be content-driven at the same time. Pushing branded ads into these communities will backfire. [As a user I find the ads that Facebook pushes at me highly irritating as they have no context to the content I share with my friends.] The brand has to join in the conversation within these communities too and that means listening in on the many quiet conversations that take place all the time on the sites – the chatter could be about shoes, handbags, tech gadgets, music, film, beer who knows?

The other way that marketers could deal with this problem is to reverse their thinking. Ensure that their brand customers’ web sites have a social network feature on their respective home pages. Attract the customer to the brand site and then let the more vociferous and influential fans of the brand get the discussion going; lovers of the brand will soon follow.

It’s a woman’s world, at least this weekend. Sex and the City, the big screen spin-off of the very successful HBO series of the same name, starring Sarah Jessica Parker and Kim Cattrell, pulled in an estimated $55.7 million since opening at midnight on Thursday. Apparently by late Friday, fans were sending messages and even photographs to Parker’s cellphone of women in line outside movie theaters across the country. Making a movie about a group of female friends, for women who no doubt brought their group of friends to the cinema, looks smart. Look for copycat attempts from Hollywood.

Meanwhile, for the guys, Mad Men returns to the TV screen real soon.

On May 22nd as the actress Sharon Stone was about to enter a fund-raising gala for the American Foundation for AIDS Research, she said this to a journalist: “I’m not happy about the way the Chinese are treating the Tibetans because I don’t think anyone should be unkind to anyone else. And the earthquake and all this stuff happened, and then I thought, is that karma? When you’re not nice that bad things happen to you?”

In the resulting firestorm of criticism in Chinese news media and on blogs that followed her remarks, Dior, which has a contract with Ms. Stone for a face cream, removed her from advertising in China, fearing a backlash. Like many global luxury brands, Dior, which reported double-digit growth in China for the first three months of the year, looks to emerging consumer markets as a major source of revenue and obviously does not want to get embroiled in a political debate about China and its actions in Tibet.

I can understand that American’s want to be very vocal about the situation in Tibet but I’m not sure that they are reading the signals from the Chinese people too well. The Chinese, particularly young people, are adamantly against any interference from the West in Tibet and are strongly supportive of the Chinese government’s actions. Ironically, Chinese youth and young adults are looking to the West, and especially the big brands, to improve their lifestyles as they spend more on consumer goods. This puts brands such as Dior in a sticky position – use celebrities such as Sharon Stone to sell their wares but then muzzle them when they speak out about the conditions in Tibet. In America, Stone would merely be exercising her right to free speech but in China it is seen as meddling in their internal affairs. If Stone feels very strongly about the situation in Tibet why did she sign on as a model for a brand that wanted to use her in Chinese advertising? Money often speaks louder than words…until now that is. Chalk another one up to the bloggers.

Electronic Arts, the world’s largest video game company, said it made the deal with Ikea, the Swedish furniture manufacturer, in response to requests in online players’ forums for more modern, realistic furniture. “Because we have such a direct relationship with our players, the players help shape the product strategy,” said Nancy Smith, president of the Sims label, which has sold more than 100 million copies.

The deal is yet another example of how the traditional lines between paid-for content and marketing material are blurring in the media world. Companies that sell products and services are increasingly eager to place their wares inside television shows and other media rather than relying on stand-alone commercials. Media companies like Electronic Arts, meanwhile, are looking to sponsorship deals to help recoup the growing cost of developing games.

Michael Goodman, an analyst at the Yankee Group, said that last year, marketers spent about $180 million on in-game advertising, including sponsorships like Ikea’s deal. He has predicted that spending would rise to $332 million this year, but said he was considering lowering that forecast slightly, as growth seems to be slower than expected.

The key to the Ikea relationship was the audience invited them in as part of their gaming experience. Other brands looking at the success of Ikea / Sims deal should really understand if they are invited to the party before they toss down millions to be on a billboard or be included in the product placement. Just because you can pay doesn’t mean you get to play!

Eric Pfanner wrote about the relationship with Ikea and Sims 2 in a May 29th, 2008 article in the New York Times.

May 28, 2008

Red Bull cola…..huuumm…does that sound good?

I had a Red Bull phase. At 3pm I would down an 8 oz can to get thru the end of the day. After 3 weeks my gut was killing me and I couldn’t get any sleep. I was irritable and even my pee changed color. (sorry about the very personal note). However, I am a Red Bull brand fan. The ties into action sports, the entrepreneurial energy of launching their brand, the unconvential marketing all work for me. I must confess, the taste of Red Bull is, well, NASTY. However, the idea of choosing a Red Bull cola over a Coke….REFRESHING!

Kenneth Hein post on BRANDWEEK the week of March 25th all the lovely stats about the state of the cola industry as a whole. Red Bull has been taking a beating as the new market share they have invented, is being gobbled up by energy drink copycat Monster. Since Red Bull is still growing as a whole and has built a brand that has matured enough to safely venture into newer, well established, crowed waters of the cola industry.

Here is why Red Bull can have success, the brand is built on performance and being relevant for this generation. If kids are going to spend money, they want to spend it with in their extend group of piers. Red Bull is closer to home for them. A cola is a cola. I am sure the high end ingredients are the bomb, at then end of the day I hope the waiter at the restaurant are not correcting my order for a Coke by asking do you mean Red Bull cola. I think the lawsuits are the bars over the Red Bull vodka have become silly and frivolus waste of tax payers dollars. I digress.

Red Bull has built the brand from the ground up and the infastructure is there to support a brand extension such as cola. I am excited to see what they do for marketing and how they will WOW the mainstream with their brand. Seems the cola world could use a little waking up! With Coke and Pepsi slipping in sales and parents teaching their kids that colas are bad for them. Lets stay tuned and watch how Red Bull will tackle this market.

Every waking moment we are inundated with brands from all over the globe. We have our brand loyalties but when something new comes along that can offer the same plus more, we tend to find a reason to jump ship. The brands we tout determine the general perception of who we are by the overall population. But that’s what we want, right? After all, when we adopt the mission of each brand, don’t we suddenly become their soldiers in a war for users reiterating the bullet points and three line tags that they have strategically written and milled over in little conference rooms just for the pure objective of speaking directly to us and our demographic? Planning all the right words, the right slang, and just the right length to appeal to the short but detrimental period of time we will absorb this information. Probably the easiest and most obvious for all of us computer dwellers is the MAC, PC rivalry. You are either one or the other. And when the argument arises, both speak with such conviction that one would think it was Gates and Jobs being summoned for that short period of time. Of course we all know MACs are better.

So, the point of all this is really to steer you in the direction of something I found called “Brand Tags: A collective experiment in brand perception.”( www.brandtags.net ) Its an addictive little site that allows you to give a single word or a phrase for a random brand logo that it shows you. You also have the pleasure of seeing what other users have written. A guy by the name of Noah Brier ( www.noahbrier.com ) put this together as a little experiment. I must say I can’t stop. So go ahead and give it a whirl. You just might surprise yourself on what you come up with. 

Well it seemed like a no-brainer, right? Wrong according to Urb Magazine’s blog.

“We didn’t do it together so it ends up being just this weird long song with sort of everybody with lots of their own personalities separate,” Santogold told Gigwise when revealing the track.

Urb says – Maybe it’s the lack of interaction between artists that keeps them from ever even talking about important issues, let alone record songs in an attempt (however vain) to make the world a better place. Or maybe it’s just that with the record industry on it’s ass, musicians have to learn to make due with the money they can earn when they can earn it, leaving less time for charity. Maybe it’s just easier to sellout when facing a ProTools file, rather than your actual peers in a recording studio.
Listen—we love Pharrell, Santogold, The Strokes AND Converse.But if Bob Dylan, Stevie Wonder, Bruce Springsteen, Hall & Oats and two dozen other A-listers could get into an actual recording studio together to make “We Are the World,” couldn’t today’s rockers try just a little bit harder?

(LOS ANGELES, Calif.) Times are tough for touring artists and Denny’s wants to help. Denny’s restaurants has just launched a unique new music program entitled Adopt-a-Band to provide free meals, promotional support, and concert after-parties to “adopted” bands on tour across the U.S.

The preferred choice of late-night dining crowds across the country and strongly entrenched in the after-hours lifestyle culture, Denny’s is not only supporting local bands on the road, but also enhancing its menu with new late-night options.

Inaugural adopted bands include EndeverafteR, Forever The Sickest Kids, Foxy Shazam, Saving Abel, Switches and Take The Crown.

Denny’s is also a proud sponsor of the 2008 Sasquatch! Music Festival May 24 – May 26 in George, Washington. To feed hungry bands and music fans, Denny’s is constructing a Denny’s Lounge in the campground featuring favorite late-night and breakfast standards.

A new Denny’s online music hub, will feature songs, tour dates and road diaries from all of the adopted bands; a place to vote for future adopted bands; blog updates with current music news; and a visitor gallery where bands and fans alike can submit photos from concerts and Denny’s late-night visits. Bands can also enter to become a Denny’s Adopted Band on the site, while fans can enter to win prizes from each participating artist.

Find more videos like this on AdGabber

72andSunny enrolled Mr Madonna, Guy Ritchie to helm the spot for Nike’s Arsenal footy team, The Next Level. One question – football or soccer?

In an article that is related to the previous YouTube post the NYT reports that speakers at the leadership conference of the American Association of Advertising Agencies urged the industry to stop wallowing in self-pity and get on with the challenges ahead.

Here are some of the comments:
“We should just stop talking about what was,” Tom Carroll, president and chief executive at TBWA Worldwide, part of the Omnicom Group. “It’s like driving in the fog, you’re not sure what’s ahead of you, but you have to keep driving.” Mr. Carroll acknowledged that it would be hard work to “change the way we do our business,” but called it a necessary response to the profound shifts in media, consumer behavior and technology that are remaking the advertising landscape. He illustrated his point with a rhetorical question, “How’d you like to be in the CD business?” [Ouch!]

Lee Clow, chairman and chief creative at TBWA, who in wearing onstage his trademark garb of a T-shirt, jeans and sandals was perhaps the most casually dressed speaker in the 90-year history of the conference. “Stop whining,” The new realities “shouldn’t be scary,” he said, because they offer “a huge opportunity for us” to become far more useful to marketer clients as they seek more effective ways to sell products.

I thought this was a good one – - -“If you want to participate, you’ve got to start hiring young people,” Mr. Clow said, “and don’t tell them what to do — ask them what to do.”

“Strap on your seat belts,” advised Irwin Gotlieb, chief executive at the GroupM unit of the WPP Group, which is composed of large media planning and buying agencies like MediaCom and MindShare. “In order to achieve any kind of success, we — meaning media agencies and creative agencies — are going to have to cooperate and collaborate in a very different way than we have in the past,” Mr. Gotlieb said.

“All these challenges will no doubt put a strain on all our organizations,” he added. “Every one of us will be re-engineering and re-inventing, but the end result will be a positive one.”

“The system worked well for 40, 50 years,” Mr. Silverman said, referring to the model of paid pitches that interrupt programming. “Now we have to think differently and do each other’s jobs.”

“Our studio has to think a little more like an advertising agency,” he added, “and the advertising agency has to think a little more like a studio.”

Eric E. Schmidt, the chief executive of Google, told the audience that digital media will “create new opportunities for advertisers and new opportunities for information.” He added, “The scale of this is underappreciated.”

The opportunities will come in the form of “developing new forms of storytelling,” Mr. Schmidt said.
“We’re not creative,” Mr. Schmidt said of Google, seeking to reassure the attendees that the company did not seek to usurp agency functions. “We’re sort of boring.”

Google held an event last month to pull together executives from companies such as Hewlett-Packard, Pepsi and General Mills and try and persuade them to run advertising on YouTube. Google’s challenge is to teach these executives that YouTube is more than just a site for users to upload goofy video clips, it’s actually more of a social network activity site. As Google executives pointed out using YouTube is more engaging than watching television as there is much more interactivity. And one of Google’s execs, Dave Eun said that “he thought advertisers were far too focused on well-known television brands, and that some of the best video comes from smaller outlets like the Sundance Channel and the Professional Bull Riders Association.” Google is also trying to get the industry to set standards for online videos, on the assumption that standards will help advertisers spend more on video ads.

Starbucks continues to struggle and is now looking to “examine all aspects of our business that are not directly related to our core” according to this article. This means that the first decision was to let go of Ken Lombard, the unpopular head of Starbuck’s entertainment division. That wasn’t unexpected, I covered this earlier this year. The unexpected part of the re-org is that Starbucks’ Chief Technology Officer has been chosen to run “the division which selects and markets music, books and other items sold in Starbucks coffee shops.” Mmmm, watch this space.

Here’s an excerpt from the article:
“Starbucks shook up its entertainment division on Thursday in the latest bid by the company to invigorate its sagging sales. The chief of Starbucks, Howard Schultz, center, and Ken Lombard, the entertainment unit president who has left the company. The overhaul comes a day after Starbucks said it would post weaker-than-expected earnings for the second quarter amid slumping sales and a darkening outlook for consumer spending.

In a statement, the chairman and chief executive, Howard Schultz, who has previously taken steps to bolster the chain’s coffee offerings, said the company was “committed to examining all aspects of our business that are not directly related to our core.”

As part of the changes, Starbucks said Ken Lombard, president of the entertainment unit since 2004, had departed. Chris Bruzzo, the chief technology officer, will take the reins of the division, which selects and markets music, books and other items sold in Starbucks coffee shops. Starbucks also said it would turn over management control of Hear Music, its in-house record label, to its partner in that venture, the Concord Music Group.”

Related Post: Starbucks’ Hear Music Program Messes Up.

If you are firmly committed to using only truly green products and if you care deeply about a company’s carbon footprint it would be hard to have much sympathy for Fiji Water. Without digging too deep online I found many articles that have assessed the cost and energy that is required to bottle Fiji Water and transport it to the USA. For instance, Ask Pablo at the Triple Pundit website calculated that “a bottle that holds 1 liter (of Fiji Water) requires 5 liters of water in its manufacturing process (this includes power plant cooling water).” And to deliver one bottle of Fiji Water to the USA consumes “81g of fossil fuels, 720g of water, and 153g of GHGs per bottle delivered to the US from Fiji.” Clearly this is not good news for a product that promotes distance and exoticism as its marketing advantages.

To counter this criticism the company has embraced openness and has a blog, the Fiji Green Blog. While this is a welcome move it also puts the company in to an awkward position. Their willingness to accept open comments on their site is commendable – check out the critical comments posted on the blog by the public. I have to take issue with the blog’s title though – Fiji Green. The company’s main web site is also titled Fiji Green. The use of the word ‘green’ suggests the influence of a marketer here and there is a danger in labeling a product ‘green’ when it is clearly not – the public is suspicous.

Media Post reports “According to an Ipsos Reid study conducted this spring on behalf of Icynene, seven in ten Americans either ‘strongly’ or ‘somewhat’ agree that when companies call a product “green” (meaning better for the environment), it is usually just a “marketing tactic”. Consumers appear to be wary of companies who label their products as being green, or environmentally friendly, acknowledges the report. In the US, 75% of the men believe that labeling a product green is just a marketing tactic, compared to 65% of the women.” And AdAge.com reports that although consumers “have better-than-average recall when it comes to remembering green advertising. The bad news: They aren’t buying into the claims.”

Fuji Water then is between a rock and a hard place – it needs to rethink how it markets its product to green consumers. The only bottled water that’s truly ‘green’ is the water you pour into a recycled container at home yourself from the kitchen sink. That action doesn’t conjure up visions of tropical jungles and faraway destinations but it will help reduce the environmental impact of shipping bottled water halfway around the earth.

Back in 1992 the US Government released a pdf of how to discern if a product that is marketed as ‘green’ is truly ‘green’ and made from recyclable material. And Earth Day is April 22nd.

Update April 18th 08: Bottle Maker to Stop Using Plastic Linked to Health Concerns, Canada Likely to Label Plastic Ingredient ‘Toxic’

The Nike ad.

The man himself – Saul Williams

Will Ferrell and Heidi Klum solve the left brain vs right brain dilemma.

“My main task in writing the drawing book was to dig down underneath everything I knew about art and drawing to try to find the most fundamental level of ‘thinking’ that goes on in drawing,” she said. “What was I seeing, how was I ‘seeing’ what I was seeing, and how was I transforming those perceptions into a drawing? It makes my brain hurt even now to remember the effort required by that seemingly simple task.” – Betty Edwards in her book Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain. 

I have written many songs in my lifetime. Frantic bass lines over frenetic beats mostly, and then, in conjunction with other like-minded musicians together we formed the complete whole entity recognizable as the “song.” My all time favorite song I’ve written with others? ‘Natural’s Not In It’ with Gang of Four, found first on its ground breaking [so I'm told] debut album, Entertainment! and later as the title track to Sofia Coppola’s movie Marie Antoinette. A close second? Evaporation by another of my bands, Shriekback, from its album ‘Care’ which also made the movie soundtrack ranks being as it was in Michael Mann’s ‘prequel’ to Silence of the Lambs, Manhunter.

The act of songwriting or the forming of musical ideas is a nonverbal form of intellect; we musicians cannot ignore the artist within, the one that resides in the right hemisphere of our brains, but being a nonverbal activity it obviously can be hard to describe the process that takes place from the germ of an idea to the seeding and ultimate fruition of a song – the left, logical hemisphere of the brain is of no help here. Unfortunately for some time the idea that the partitioning of our more creative thinking, tapping a mental connection via countless synapses that form the route to the right side of our brains, was dismissed and often scorned. Of course now we know the theory has been well tested and confirmed; simply put the left side of our brain is where our language center resides; it is the logical, linear problem solving and processing half of our brain. The right side, the side I use the most I reckon, is home to spatial perception and nonverbal concepts; it is the nonlinear, high-concept source of the imagination and of pleasure. It’s my ‘ideas centre’ where the songs, the ideas and even this post come from. I write less songs these days but I write much more; two thirds of my day at Nemo Design is spent over-heating the right hemisphere of my brain.

Which brings me to creative businesses; where are they headed and who will lead them? You might be surprised to learn that the current common wisdom points to a new generation of business leaders who “get the right brain thing.” In an article in the NY Times titled Let Computers Compute. It’s The Age of The Right Brain there’s this nugget – When General Motors hired Robert A. Lutz in 2001 to whip its product development into shape, he told The New York Times about his new approach. “It’s more right brain. It’s more creative,” he said. “I see us as being in the art business,” he said, “art, entertainment and mobile sculpture, which, coincidentally, also happens to provide transportation.” [That sounds positively McLuhan - see post below.] The article goes on to point out that today someone with a master of fine arts, M.F.A., trumps someone who holds a good old M.B.A. The point made that rings loud and clear is that if G.M. says it is in the art business, every company in any other industry is, too.

My most successful songwriting was mostly in collaboration with others – the whole being greater than the sum of its parts. It was about investing in each others ideas and sharing and adding to the burgeoning art piece or project with complete openness – today we call that radical transparency; nothing hidden, nothing guarded, no walls, no barriers to entry.

So, after considering the worth of being a right-brained musician, a songwriter, a blogger, a creative who finds himself running Nemo Design’s outward-facing digital properties I’ve come to this conclusion – I’m in the right place because Nemo has been set up with tools that provide a success formula for the future [left brain,] and that the right brain is King in our business [right brain!]

At Nemo Design we need to harness the power of the collective whole, understand that at the core of the company we are fundamentally operating as a ‘right-brained unit.’ When we require logic and strategy our left brains won’t let us down but the thinking and all the fun, the pleasure centre, the high concepts and the imagination all reside to the right. We no longer need to verbalize our ideas; we can now show them interactively in motion, in film, in video, in graphics, in projections on buildings, in sculptures, in events, in our actions because actions speak louder than…. 

So what does the future look like for branding, marketing and design companies like Nemo Design and similar companies such as Anomoly, Odopod and Crispin, Porter + Bogusky?

Who innovates, who creates in collaboration with others, who shares in the wealth of knowledge and experience that employees hold in their heads? Does it have to be put in words or business plans – left brain. Or expressed creatively through drawings, film, music, design and song – right brain? If Nemo Design embraces ideas and innovation (right brain) over execution and strategy (left brain) what will it look like in 5 years?

This morning the day began with me catching up on last Sunday’s NY Times Business Page and a story entitled Thinking Outside the Company’s Box. The article discusses one of the oldest barriers to innovation amongst large technology companies – Not Invented Here, wherein even the most creative people have a persistent bias toward their own creations versus the ideas of people from other companies. As I was pondering the way companies get round this dilemma (which had me also contemplating “The Curse of Knowledge,”) I came across a blog post from Adrian Ho at Zeus Jones who’s post outlines how large companies, e.g. Apple, “don’t really use advertising agencies and instead rely upon innovative business ideas to communicate their benefits and values to their customers.” Ho mentioned in a comment elsewhere that he wasn’t touching upon an ad agency version of “Not Invented Here” known as “Not Created Here,” (in fact he’s tip-toeing around it,) but rather was making comparisons to Alex Bogusky’s “Anything and everything is an ad” quote and what Ho sees as the “dangers of ad people presenting ideas about how to run a client’s business under the banner of everything is an ad” and how he’s “seen presentations go horribly wrong” because they were built upon that premise.

Which brings us to this thought – If “everything is an ad” should businesses communicate with their customers by simply continuing to run their business and therefore do they need an ad agency at all?

What are their options? Here’s a list for starters: Radical Transparency, a Facebook Page or Group, delivering groundbreaking stylish and functional products that brand the company and change how its customers approach communication, or an unfiltered company blog written by employees. And then there’s authenticity.

Back to the beginning; Not Invented Here and Not Created Here are both roadblocks to innovation and creativity. In the first case, large companies such as Google buy up other companies that bring them an edge in new technology or an opening into a new market. In the second case, Ho argues that “Rather than creating “communications objects” that help to grow a client’s business, agencies who champion the idea that “everything is an ad” should instead be helping to magnify and extend the communication and marketing effects of the client’s own business objects.” Which really means that a cultural shift within agencies needs to take place – agency creatives have to listen to the clients ideas rather than presenting something from scratch; one size does not fit all, companies need to embrace innovative business ideas to communicate their benefits and values to their customers. This morning another article in the NY Times caught my eye – How to turn a herd….