Category Archives: Business & Marketing

Sheryl Crow reads (and plugs) the Wall Street Journal

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“Adventures in Capitalism” was the tag line for The Wall Street Journal’s previous ad campaign, in 1997, to promote the brand. The paper was recently made over — taking three inches from the width and adding an emphasis on forward-looking journalism — so it’s time to freshen up with a new campaign. [MSNBC] “Every journey needs a Journal,” says the new tag line, positioning the paper to speak less to readers’ inner Striver than their inner Seeker.

The ad blitz — which begins next week in major publications and Web sites — are essentially celebrity endorsements, highlighting the Journal’s role in the inspiring “life journeys” of a diverse mix of people including singer Sheryl Crow, “Freakonomics” coauthor and University of Chicago professor Steven Levitt and Jack Burton, founder of Burton Snowboards.

The Journal wanted people who weren’t megafamous but who “had an interesting life journey, read The Wall Street Journal and were successful.” Ping me if you spot one of these ads.

AgWired: Guerilla video

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I refer you, once again, to AgWired for a good example of how easy it is to add video to your blog or website. Chuck Zimmerman is covering the International Poultry and Feed Expos in Atlanta. His posts include –as always– still images and audio. But he is increasingly dropping in short video clips.

He’s just roaming around the floor in this clip but he could just as easily have stopped to interview an exhibitor or speaker. The operative word here is “easily.” He ran the video through Windows Movie Maker (free) for a quick edit and a title…uploaded to YouTube (free)…and then embedded their flash player in his post. Done.

Contrast that to dragging around a cameraman and sound guy (expensive) who have to get back to a studio for post-production (expensive: time and money). Then you gotta get it to the TV station or cable channel and blah, blah, blah. Chuck is carrying everything he needs on his back and if the expo hall is wifi’d…all he needs is a place to sit down.

Get A Mac: Surgery, Sabotage, and Tech Support

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Get a Mac In the first new Mac ad, PC is getting surgery in order to receive all sorts of upgrades to run Windows Vista. Tech Support involves the PC receiving a camera upgrade (via masking tape to the head) so that he can do important business things like videoconference, only to find out that Macs come with built-in iSights now so they don’t need to upgrade. In Sabotage, the PC has decided to sabotage the commercial altogether and replace the Mac with another actor who says everything the PC wants him to say. [Infinite Loop]

The men and/or women responsible for writing these commercials are the very same people that played Keep-Away with the fat kid’s hat a lunch time in the 7th grade. Until he cried.

Seth Godin on the iPhone

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Seth says there are two kinds of people in the world:

“The folks that want (need!) an iPhone, and those that couldn’t care less. And of course it’s not just Apple and it’s not just phones. It’s every single industry in the world. You’re not likely to convert one group into the other. What you can do is decide which group you’d like to market to.”

There you go. I am in the first group and Jobs sold me in the first five minutes.

Marketing through cell phones

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Brandweek has a good article on how marketing on cell phones is finally starting to work:

“Crammed into his seat on his way into Manhattan, a businessman uses his cell phone to log onto Weather.com just to see if there’s some sunshine on the way (“Seventeen inches of snow expected by the weekend.”) Just then, a bright blue banner ad with white lettering pops up on and grabs his attention: “Aruba” …He clicks on the banner ad, and his phone dials an 800 number, connecting him to an Aruba Tourism booking agent. “

The article includes several good examples.

Why social media is important to marketers

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I don’t know how old this info is (or how accurate) because I can’t find the original post, which is somewhere on the Church of the Customer Blog. Bart Cleveland includes these factoids in a recent post at Small Agency Diary (AdAge.com) to underscore why social media is important to marketers:

  • By March 2006, 84 million Americans had broadband at home, a 40% jump from 2005 figures
  • By March 2006, Pew estimated 48 million Americans were regular online content creators
  • By the end of 2005, 139 million people in the world had a DSL (broadband) connection
  • In 2005, $6.7 billion worth of digital cameras were sold in the U.S.
  • About 41% of all cell phone owners use them as content tools
  • By the end of 2005, just over 1 billion people were online — that’s 1/6th of the world
  • Asia represents the world’s most populous online segment
  • By July 2006, 50 million blogs had been created and their number was doubling every 6 months
  • About 7,200 new blogs are created every hour
  • By 2006, 10 million people were listening to podcasts in 2006; by 2010, it’s expected to be 50 million people
  • About 100 million videos are viewed every day on YouTube; about 65,000 videos uploaded every day
  • In 2006, MySpace had over 100 million registered members, most of them from the U.S.

When advertisements become recommendations

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“As we move to an age where the only true advertisements are recommendations, what is the role of the traditional advertisement going forward? Recommendations I understand. They can come in many shapes and forms. People you know and trust telling you about products and services they like … A matching engine that takes your “buying” intentions and connects them with someone else’s “selling” intentions.”

[JP Rangaswami via gaping void]

How Google Audio Ads work (PowerPoint slides)

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The folks at ZDNet’s Digital Markets have some PowerPoint slides that illustrates how Google Audio Ads work. And this from Voices.com:

“Google has positioned the Audio Ads system to serve both top-level advertisers, as well as the advertising agencies themselves. The graphic also shows 75% of the transactions coming from the agencies, and only 25% from independent advertisers. This is likely because advertising agencies already have media planning and media buying personnel, not to mention existing relationships with local and regional radio stations.”

The lables in the little blue rectangles are: Radio Stations, Networks and Rep Firms. Which suggests that advertisers will simply have another option for placing their ads on radio stations. And if Google can make it easier or cheaper or more effective (i.e. feedback, reports, etc)… they’ve added value to the process.

Update: Google Audio Ads

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From Inside AdWords blog: “Over the last year, we’ve been working hard to integrate the dMarc advertising platform into Google AdWords. We’re happy to announce that the integration is now complete and we’ve recently begun a U.S. beta test of Google Audio Ads with a small group of AdWords advertisers.”

If you haven’t been keeping up, here’s how Google describes their Audio Ads:

“Google Audio Ads brings efficiency, accountability, and enhanced ROI to radio advertising by providing advertisers with an online interface for creating and launching radio campaigns. You’ll be able to target your customers by location, station type, day of the week, and time of day. After the radio ads are run, you will be able to view online reports that tell you exactly when your ad played.”

A couple of days ago, Mark Ramsey (Hear 2.0) pointed us to an application page on the Google website.

Ad Specialist Application — Thank you for your interest in joining the Google Ad Creation Marketplace. We’re looking for some of the top audio ad specialists to join our Ad Creation Marketplace – a searchable directory of talent to help AdWords advertisers to create radio advertisements. For advertisers new to the radio space, or who are starting a new campaign, the Marketplace provides an invaluable starting point for finding the talent they need.

So, I decide to buy some Google Audio Ads. I search the Google Ad Creation Marketplace database for someone to write and produce my spot. We agree on a price. I send some copy. They email back an MP3 file. I’m off to the races. Maybe. Mr. Ramsey is skeptical and I confess I am too. But if it works… it could have a profound change on how advertiser buy and place ads.

Update: According to News.com, the radio ads are running in more than 260 metropolitan markets, covering about 87 percent of the country