Marketing genius is getting Napoleon Dynamite (and Pedro) to be spokesmen for the Utah State Fair. You can check out Napoleon’s Sweet Ads here and I’ve saved one here (AUDIO) for posterity. Don’t you just know the out-takes on these were sweet!
An EarthLink spot came on DirecTV tonight and I noticed little Thumbs Up/Thumbs Down icons at the top of the screen. I punchedthe Thumbs Up button on my remote… the commercial paused…and the following offer was displayed:
“Right now, get a TREO 650 from EarthLink for $199 and get $10/month off EarthLink High Speed DSL. Interested? Allow us to send you a free brochure.”
The options were: “No, thanks anyway.” and “Yes, please send me a brochure!” I chose “No” and the ad resumed. I’m not big on coupons and special offers, but for folks that look for deals, this is a step in the right direction.
Rather than distribute via CD, DVD or download, the Barenaked Ladies are making their newest selection of songs, videos and exclusive material available on a USB flash drive. Nettwerk Music Group is releasing “Barenaked on a Stick” beginning today, says the Hollywood Reporter. It plays on PCs, Macs and any other audio product with a USB port — like some car stereos — and costs $30. This 128 reusable drive contains 29 songs, including the band’s 2004 “Barenaked for the Holidays” album, in MP3 format along with live tracks, in-concert spoken quips, album art, photos, videos and more.
ABC News did a story last week about a Boston-area blogger named Paul English who has compiled a “cheat sheet” to get past the automated “customer service” systems used by more and more companies. The company brass would insist these systems are cheaper than putting a human in the loop:
“A customer service call handled by a human in the United States costs a company up to a dollar a minute, and calls outsourced to India cost about 40 cents a minute.”
Yeah, yeah. But the dirty truth is, companies hate talking to their customers and would rather avoid them if in-humanly possible. I’m proud that our company still has a real, live person answering the phone (except on weekends) who really wants to help you find the right person. I put my direct number on just about every email I send.
As for the cheat sheet… now that ABC and NPR have done stories on this guy, you can bet the listed companies are scurrying around like rats, changing numbers so we can’t “cheat.”
In this email/PDA/Blackberry/digital age, business cards seem kind of… quaint. Every few years I toss a couple of hundred when something changes.
Now, at long last, my (personal) business cards reflect who I am. I’m a regular reader of Hugh MacLeod’s blog and a fan of his art (cartoons drawn on the back of a business card). There’s a link on his blog where you can order your own.
“In an ideal situation –weekly or even daily– someone is pumping the weblog with fresh compelling content. But any old content won’t do. Corporations interested in blogging need to add value to people’s lives. That’s the biggest key to a successful corporate blog that keeps people coming back. So what do I mean by add value? I mean give us a reason to read your blog. Give us something we can’t find anywhere else. Provide information that your customers, partners and prospects care about, not necessarily what you care about. Be a resource and a connector.”
Google is also preparing to disrupt the advertising business itself, by replacing creative salesmanship with cold number-crunching. Its premise so far is that advertising is most effective when seen only by people who are interested in what’s for sale, based on what they are searching for or reading about on the Web. Because Google’s ad-buying clients pay for ads only when users click on them, they can precisely measure their effectiveness – and are willing to pay more for ads that really sell their products.
— From an article in the NY Times by Saul Hansell
Okay, one more item on blogging. Patrick Hirsch did a really good piece on how blogs are becoming a marketing tool for small companies on Tuesday’s Marketplace segment on NPR’s All Things Considered. AUDIO: 3 min MP3
Story on AdAge.com by Bradley Johnson (registration required):
U.S. workers in 2005 will waste the equivalent of 551,000 years reading blogs. About 35 million workers — one in four people in the labor force — visit blogs and on average spend 3.5 hours, or 9%, of the work week engaged with them, according to Advertising Age’s analysis. Time spent in the office on non-work blogs this year will take up the equivalent of 2.3 million jobs. Forget lunch breaks — bloggers essentially take a daily 40-minute blog break. Technorati, a blog search engine, now tracks 19.6 million blogs, a number that has doubled about every five months for the past three years. If that growth were to continue, all 6.7 billion people on the planet will have a blog by April 2009. Imagine the work that won’t get done then.
And a week doesn’t go by that someone asks me to explain “this blogging thing.”
“Touting it as the largest giveaway in the 102-year history of the World Series, XM Satellite Radio said Thursday it was giving a free satellite radio to every fan who enters U.S. Cellular Field in Chicago for Game One this Saturday between the Chicago White Sox and the Houston Astros. Fans will receive a coupon good for the new Delphi XM RoadyXT satellite radio receiver which retails for $79.99 plus a World Series commemorative pin.” — Billboard Radio Monitor