Mothers control the majority of all household spending, and they are increasingly exercising their spending power online. Plus, moms want to do business with retailers that are respectful and responsive to their needs and concerns.
Retailers that understand this meet mothers on social networks and talk honestly with them about a variety of topics, including the safety and health aspects of their products, according to eMarketer.
The road to hell is paved with good intentions. Take, for example, the marketing of Electronic Arts’s blockbuster new video game, Dante’s Inferno. Last year, the company set about trying to educate the public not only about the game but about a 14th-century literary classic and the very nature of human morality. What ensued was one of the most complex campaigns in video-game history, one that got EA burned for fakery and sexism, and then—thanks to a bold change of direction—lauded for intellect and creativity. It’s also a case study in surprising frugality, with a $200,000 guerrilla budget that yielded 47 million impressions of coverage. Today, AdFreak walks you through the nine circles of hell with the man who led the innovative and controversial marketing campaign for Dante’s Inferno. So, put on your asbestos gloves and get ready to descend into damnation.
To Hell and Back: EA’s Guerrilla Marketing Campaign for ‘Dante’s Inferno’.
When proofreading a document, you want to ensure your message is clear. You have an idea in your mind, you transform it into words, and you hope the person reading it understands.
The words we choose are often too conversational. If you nonchalantly said certain words or phrases in conversation, your idea could make perfect sense and not disrupt the cohesiveness of the discussion. In writing, even if an informal tone is appropriate, little differences can affect your message’s clarity and effectiveness. You want to choose formal words even amidst a humorous, witty, or casual subject matter.
Proofreading Pointers: Three Ways to Polish Conversational Writing
Public relations practitioners spin for a living. There, I said it. I dared to utter the “S” word. Get over it and listen to why the profession’s revulsion to the word is just misplaced and counterproductive aggression.
A few years ago at the Public Relations Society of America International Conference in Detroit, the keynote speaker caused quite a stir among the attendees when she use the word “spin” several times while discussing the PR profession.
Because that struck such a chord, I’ve been keeping an eye on reactions to the word whenever it’s used around PR people. For the most part, I’ve noticed that too many practitioners young and old, entry level to veteran, are bothered by it.
A few months back, I invested in a trip to Chicago and spent four days with peak performance coach Tony Robbins.
If you don’t know Robbins or his work, he is worth knowing. He grew up in a household with little money, often experiencing holidays with no food and a rotating door of four absent fathers.
His career took shape in the early 1980s as he walked on the beach, 40 pounds overweight, listening to the tune “Barracuda” and feeling a big change was needed.
At the age of 19, after working with other legendary speakers like Jim Rohn, Robbin’s path of success included conducting seminars, radio shows, writing books, and coaching.
Have you ever wondered why a recruiter never called after you submitted your résumé? If so, you are not alone.
Here are nine scenarios and some advice:
Situation: Too many responses and not enough time: One advertised job can bring as many as three hundred responses in less than three days. It is logistically impossible for a recruiter to reply personally to every applicant.
Advice: Network your way into the company. This is the best way to circumvent the tidal wave of résumés recruiters face daily.
People often ask me what it takes to be or to hire a great connection planner. Does a candidate need to have a media background? Can yesterday’s brand planners morph into today’s connection planners? Is it more about creativity or strategic smarts?
My short answers to the above are no, yes, and both (but leaning toward the latter). Ask someone else in the field, though, and you could get different answers.
Chocapic, the chocolate cereal from Nestlé, is promoting its sponsorship of the new movie “Arthur and the revenge of Maltazard” with an Augmented Reality application that turns the cereal package into a game console. The online portion of the campaign, recently featured on the Creative Zone, has a teaser game that can be played with or without a webcam.
A great post was written originally on Jawbone.TV about the Chocapic Augmented Reality campaign and we would like to thank its author, Todd Denis, for letting us re-post the blog for our readers. Enjoy. Continue reading
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.”
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
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
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.
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
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
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.
Jason Uzarraga 