Tag Archives: advertising

Adding interesting ads to mediocre products

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Couple of bullets from a podcast with Seth Godin, during which he talks about ad agencies;

“What ad agencies ought to do, in my opinion, is not focus on selling ads anymore. And instead, focus on getting in deeper within the clients, and help the clients make products that people want to talk about.”

“The problem is that ad agencies have defined themselves as the people who take the mediocre products and add interesting ads to them, and washed their hands and say, we can’t do anything about what the factory brings us. And my answer is, of course you can, and the clients actually want you to, you’re just not working hard enough to get that piece of business.”

[via Learfield InterAction]

Okay, how about some bonus spots?

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Betsy Lazar –Executive Director of Advertising and Media Operations at GM– gave a keynote at the rcent Radio Advertising Bureau conference in Dallas. According to INSIDE RADIO, she was pretty specific in her advice to broadcasters;

“…doing business the old way won’t cut it. Pitching schedules of :30s won’t do it. What GM wants is ideas that show involvement by the station. Things that come from mining the listener database and exploiting the station website in fresh ways.”

Ad Age reports that GM “slashed ad spending by more than $600 million last year, a drop so stunning it should convince even the staunchest doubters that the age of mass-media marketing is going the way of the horse and buggy.”

In that same issue of INSIDE RADIO: Bank of America analyst Jonathan Jacoby admits his survey of 34 industry pros last week in Dallas is not statistically significant. But he says 43% of them (14-15 people) said they’ve “used or plan to use Google/dMarcto sell airtime.”

dMarc founders leave Google

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Looks like Google’s plans to reinvent the way radio ads are bought has hit a rough spot. Online Media Daily reports Chad and Ryan Steelberg, the founders of dMark, an automated radio ad placement company purchased by Google in January 2006, have left the company.

The brothers resigned amid reports of growing tension between dMarc, the company they founded, and Google over differing approaches to radio ad sales. There was also said to be tension over the limited remuneration dMarc could expect under the performance-based terms of its original deal with Google.

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.

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.

Google deal with CBS Radio imminent?

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Merrill Lynch broadcast analyst Jessica Reif Cohen expects Google will team with a CBS Radio in a wide-ranging advertising deal. In a nutshell, Google would allow advertisers to bid for radio airtime using some of the same functionality as its online sales tool. But again, no deal has been announced.

Cohen estimated that a Google deal to sell 10% of CBS Radio’s advertising inventory would generate approximately $200 million in revenues and that the upside for CBS would be two-fold: “1) attracting new (likely smaller) advertisers to its platforms a la Google’s experience with search, and 2) creating a more efficient sales model that reduces the friction/cost of selling advertising.” [LostRemote]

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.

Talent more important than size

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That is one of the lessons of Web 2.0, according to AdWeek’s Bob Greenberg:

“Long before they became global behemoths, the great (advertising) agencies of the past were small businesses built around people of uncanny creative ability. What’s amazing is that our competition in the future will come from exactly where we started: small teams of creative geniuses with ideas galore on how to capture the hearts and minds of consumers. Only now they probably don’t work in agencies. At the same time, they have a fully democratized means of content distribution that doesn’t rely on captive audiences. Lesson No. 2: Talent is more important than size.”