Sweethearts, which have managed to remain a staple of Valentine’s Day for 145 years despite tasting like fruit-flavored chalk, have announced that they’ll be adding the phrase “Tweet me” to their conversation hearts this year. Sweethearts and Twitter seem like a match made in brand heaven. As Biz Stone, Twitter’s co-founder, put it, “It’s even more proof that people can say anything in short messages. A 140-character message may seem short. Sweethearts are even smaller.” The messages clearly needed a little updating, as past high-tech phrases now seem absurd. Like “Fax me.” Really, who faxes a love note? Probably the same sort of weirdo who publicly declares their love in 140 characters.
Monthly Archives: February 2010
Apple should have thought a little more about the iPad brand
Proof that the marketing strategists behind the iPad should have thought harder about their branding.
‘World’s Greatest Spokesperson’ Touts Nationwide
Nationwide Insurance is back in the funny business.
The company’s ads are aiming for humor again with a campaign called “The World’s Greatest Spokesperson in the World.”
The effort, via independent Durham, N.C., agency McKinney (which picked up the account from TM Advertising in 2009), shows the spokesman returning after a lengthy hiatus in the woods, where he’s grown a thick beard. After shaving, he dons a suit and starts practicing with a wooden microphone and an old corded phone to get his moves back.
A narrator informs us that the spokesman was once so persuasive that when he left, the global economy crashed 150 percent, and “it was said that his words carried so much weight that you had to lift them with your legs.”
Critique: Augmented Adidas
Adidas is describing its newest line of shoes as “the first augmented reality experience in footwear.” To the AR uninitiated, that phrase sounds a bit clunky. How about “the first line of footwear that speaks in tongues?”
More precisely, it’s the first line of sneakers with a coded tongue. Hold up one of the sneakers with its AR-embedded label to a Webcam, and voila — you’re invited into a private, urban, celebrity-and-game-filled virtual world, the Adidas Originals Neighborhood. The first game, based on the Adidas Star Wars collection (created in collaboration with Lucasfilm), debuted in early February, and two more will roll out throughout the spring and summer under the Adidas theme line, “Celebrate originality.”
A New Zip Code
Until recently, the online local space was considered sleepy at best, dormant at worst. Yet no one doubted its potential at some point down the line.
But now, a confluence of factors is spurring interest in the local Web. As a result, several major online media companies are embarking on ambitious content plays in the segment, including AOL’s local news project Patch.com and MSNBC.com’s purchase of EveryBlock.com. Plus, both Google and Microsoft have recently shown interest in purchasing the local listings guide Yelp.
Google Buzz may be a lesson in viral backlash Therese Poletti’s Tech Tales
It was a frequent outburst over a slew of Facebook updates and tweets as Google Inc.’s (GOOG 538.94, +5.82, +1.09%) Buzz, its latest foray into social networking, got the wrong kind of buzz. This was probably not the kind of viral chatter the top execs at the GooglePlex envisioned when they named, perhaps prematurely, their newest product Google Buzz.
In Silicon Valley and beyond, many critics and consumers were saying “Buzz off” to the company’s attempt to turn its popular free Gmail service into a social network.
Google Buzz may be a lesson in viral backlash Therese Poletti’s Tech Tales
Yahoo Expands Search Ad Platform
The Web giant continues to innovate by launching a pair of products
When Yahoo signed its search ad partnership with Microsoft last year, it promised that the deal did not mark the end of the Yahoo Search brand and that it would continue to innovate in the space.
On Wednesday, the Web giant unveiled a pair of new search ad products that go a long way toward keeping that promise. First, during a special search marketing event held at the company’s Sunnyvale, Calif., campus, Yahoo announced it was testing Y!our Ads, a product that delivers text ads that take into account users’ previous search histories, rather than serving ads based solely on specific search terms. Continue reading
Yahoo’s Up for ‘Pushdown’
These types of ad units support bigger, bolder placements
(ADWEEK) The Online Publishers Association, in its effort to get the digital publishing world to adopt bigger, bolder ad creative, just got a major boost from a nonmember.
Yahoo has quietly begun rolling out the OPA’s “Pushdown” ad unit — a placement introduced nearly a year ago as a means of creating more intrusive, brand-friendly creative units for the increasingly commodified display ad market. Continue reading
Social Media Tactics Help Drive Brand Searches
Recent studies point to a strong connection between social media marketing and tactics such as paid search. This means that companies need to carefully align their social media efforts with other online initiatives — and that requires strategic planning, according to eMarketer.
A study of U.S. Internet users by comScore, GroupM Search and M80 found a significant amount of brand leverage when paid search campaigns were combined with social media efforts.
Among survey participants who were exposed only to paid search ads for specific products, 23 percent searched on product terms after seeing the ads.
However, when paid search was combined with social media marketing relevant to those products, 38 percent of respondents searched on product terms.
More impressively, when paid search was combined with social media influenced directly by the marketer, 65 percent of respondents searched on product terms.
Dell: From Silent to IdeaStorm
In five years, Dell went from being the poster boy of ignoring the emerging social Web to becoming a model for how to orient a company around social media. Its journey began in 2005, when Facebook was barely beyond a dorm room project. Problems with Dell customer service percolated on blogs under the moniker “Dell Hell.” The company, founded by Michael Dell with a focus on customers, reoriented itself to be more responsive. Continue reading
Pepsi: The Speed of Digital Culture
At a time when many brands are stuck in experimentation mode in social media, Pepsi is placing a staggeringly large bet on it. Pepsi was absent from the Super Bowl for the first time in 23 years, redirecting money to an ambitious social marketing-centered program called Refresh Everything that will direct $20 million to charities. According to Pepsi execs, the program is appealing because it rested on four big trends: crowdsourcing, doing good, sharing and transparency.
Refresh Everything is the culmination of years of social-media work done by Pepsi, the perpetual No. 2 behind Coca-Cola in the soft drink market. Pepsi’s still a big spender in traditional media — it spent $89 million in U.S. advertising on the brand in 2009 — but Coke outguns it by a 33 percent margin. Social media, offering a more level playing field, is where Pepsi is making its stand with one of the largest commitments to the space yet seen. Continue reading
Beefing Up Banner Ads
In October 1994, Hot Wired ran the first Web banner, an ad placement for AT&T carrying the promise of a new era with the message, “Have you ever clicked your mouse right here? You will.” In the ensuing time period, the banner has generated billions of dollars in revenue but has also come to be seen as a symbol of failure. Its place as the pre-eminent form of Web advertising was eclipsed in 2000 when Google borrowed the paid search advertising system pioneered by Overture and turned it into a moneymaking machine. Since then, the display advertising business has played second fiddle to search, despite the fact that search pages make up only a fraction of Web traffic.
That situation is slowly changing. A new Web ad architecture is developing that promises to remake how advertising is bought and sold, borrowing the best of paid search auction systems while going beyond their targeting to allow advertisers to show each ad only to the audience they want. The automated exchanges, fueled by vast amounts of Internet user data, provide promise and potentially peril to all parts of the industry, from clients to agencies to publishers. “It’s going to facilitate a lot of brand dollars coming online because they’ll be able to buy audience — and right now it’s really hard for them to do it at scale outside of a few portals,” says William Morrison, an analyst with ThinkEquity.
Google Starts Buzzing in Social Media Sphere
In a sign of the digital times, Web giant targets social-networking as the next frontier for its Gmail platform
Looking to cement and possibly expand its stature as the Web’s top resource for information — a position that is gradually being threatened by social venues like Facebook — Google has introduced Google Buzz, a product designed to transform Gmail more of a social networking environment.
Over the next few days, Buzz will automatically roll out to all Gmail accounts with no downloads required, according to a blog post by Gmail product manager Todd Jackson. Buzz is initially all about sharing diverse content, while its grander ambition is to make Gmail a conduit for much of the information traveling among networking sites. Continue reading
Multitouch Skin Transforms Any Surface Into a Touchscreen « Wonderment Blog
Coming soon! Popsci reports that a multitouch skin that can make any surface a touchscreen will be released this summer.
Portuguese company Displax will “market a multitouch capable, super-thin polymer “skin” that can be applied to any material — flat, curved, opaque, transparent, you name it — creating a digital muli-touch surface virtually anywhere, from a wristband to a desktop to a pane of clear glass.”
Very cool. Displax says that the skin will be able to detect even the subtlest of touches – even blowing on it. A futuristic, sci-fi existence is creeping closer, becoming more and more of a reality.
Google’s latest social foray takes on Facebook
SAN FRANCISCO (MarketWatch) — Google Inc.’s launch of “Google Buzz” is the company’s latest attempt to catch up with Facebook and Twitter after one big fail in social networking.
Remember Orkut? The social network was launched with much fanfare by Google in 2004. You had to be invited to use it, the same approach it later followed with the launch of Gmail. It generated hype and “buzz.” Now, Orkut is mostly popular in Brasil and India but ranks nowhere near the 350 million active users on Facebook.
Jason Uzarraga 