ANA Marketing Maestros

New Media to Sell Old

by Mark Fogelberg

With all due respect to a certain futurist/CEO, many people - especially the people I would like to converse with - still read books. Perhaps its the portability, the on-demand entertainment possibility, the ability to engage one's imagination.

Books = Still Very Good.

So when a publisher makes a smart effort to market books differently, there's greater hope for a pulp future.

For the new release, Celebutantes, St. Martin's Press put its marketing dollars behind the creation of video trailers. (Celebutantes is the story of 26 year old Lola Santisi as she narrates her way through Hollywood in the days leading up to Oscar.) The trailers are as well-produced as ones for movies and video games - you know those video screen thingies meant to extinguish book reading. Using video and contemporary marketing channels to market an older product form? Nice.

St. Martin's Press set up a channel on YouTube for the trailers. Since this is PG blog, I'll allow you to find your own way to it.

It will be interesting to see how the book sells upon its release. For those not interested in paper, I am certain that a celluloid pixel version is being shopped round them thar Hills.

Search Engine Friendly URLs

By: Irina Skaya

In today’s digital age, the Internet plays a crucial role in the consumers’ lives and changes the way companies advertise.  Every day millions of people use the Internet for research, purchasing products, acquiring information relevant to our hobbies, interests, connecting with family and friends, etc. Based on the number of Internet users, Internet advertising can be used as a valuable tool to improve the growth and profitability of companies.

To increase traffic to the company Websites, it is important to present successful and memorable URLs in ads.  Here is a cool blog that distinguishes good URLs from bad ones. 

Best Practices for Creating Search Engine Friendly URLs:

- DON’TUSEALLCAPSTANGLEDUPTOGETHER.COM
- No hypens/or slashes
- Use words instead of numbers
- Use YourSlogan.com when running an integrated campaign
- Brevity is virtue
- If .com or .net is unavailable, find a new brand name
- No need to include www to indicate that it's a URL

Watching for the Commercials

by Mark Fogelberg

For everyone who looks forward to the Superbowl for the commercials, a little bit of salvation has arrived.

Firebrand, a TV, web and mobile platform promises to deliver full screen live video and full web functionality for advertising content. Yes, it's a commercials only "multichannel" of content delivering over 5,000 spots.

This could prove a quite amazing tool for marketers. One gets a captive audience that has actively sought out a marketing message. The marketer is then given the opportunity to engage and reward this viewer. The demo shows a Levi's ad which links to a promotion which the viewer can enter while still watching the chosen spot. (Quite cool tech.)

With nearly every session at our Annual Conference touching upon digital's role at the marketing table; with the needs for ROI measures of marketing activity; with the permeation of marketing and brands on daily lives of individuals, here's an idea whose time has come.

Tune in on your TV/browser/mobile.

Summer Friday Tea Partay

It was bound to happen.

After standing atop the preppie heap for nearly a year, P-Unit and his Cape Cod Crew have had their ode to Smirnoff Tea attacked by West Coast haters.

Boyz N The Hillz debuted a video immediately attacking East Coast cred and spilling over into a West Coast diatribe. The fact that both videos are allowed to co-exist on the Smirnoff Tea official site should only add fuel to the fire.

Marketers embracing consumer generated content must be vigilant against times when said content crosses the line. What will happen when this battle of rhymes escalates into all out war? Here's hoping that Smirnoff parent Diageo steps in to broker some sort of accord. The prepster community must find ways to heal, to mend fences.

(With tongue planted firmly in cheek, I am out.)

Marketers in the Blogosphere

By Will Waugh

I like to keep track of what ANA members are doing in the blogosphere. I get asked who's blogging all of the time by our members . Marketers' appearance in the online world plays an important role with consumers and end users that demand transparency in the companies they give their loyalty too. Thanks to PRWiki for keeping me up to date as more marketers are set to enter this space in 2007. A brief list:

• McDonald's VP of Corporate Social  Responsibility hosts Open for Discussion focusing on what this major advertiser is giving back to the community
• Oracle has so many blogs that they actually have a directory of blogs
• Wells Fargo and their popular Guided by History blog
• Southwest's Nuts About Southwest is a perfect representation of their brand in the blogosphere
• Cisco's High Tech Policy blog
• Marriott's CEO Bill Marriott on a plethora of issues, including brands.

We are just scratching the surface here. There are many more marketers who have jumped in and jumped out. I expect to see more involvement here in the coming months/years as it gets harder and harder for marketers to communicate with their audiences.

Technorati tags: blogs marketing consumer

Great Ideas Will Create Relevancy

By Barbara Bacci Mirque

A recent ANA survey highlighted that integrated marketing now tops the list as the issue that keeps senior marketers up at night. You have heard me say before that ANA members tell us that the best way to tackle this is to start with the idea and let the idea be the media channel integrator. That was emphasized at the recent 2007 ANA Advertising Financial Management Conference. Bob Lachky, EVP, Global Industry Development & Chief Creative Officer, Anheuser - Busch Inc., talked about how the “Wassup” campaign (here are few of the ads along with some interesting consumer generated versions) began online then spread virally, eventually running on television.

Jeff Hicks, President, CEO and Partner, Crispin Porter + Bogusky, told a similar story for Coke Zero and its very funny campaign with Coke attorneys (again, thanks YouTube). Great ideas will create relevancy so the media should be an outgrowth of the idea, not the other way around. Both of those campaigns were extended into television once they were picked up in the conversations occurring online and it was the consumers who said these campaigns should also run on television. So once again, advertisers should be aware of and participate in the conversations happening around and about their products and services. Start with a terrific brand idea and let that determine which media channels you use. This is great learning from some very smart advertisers.

Technorati tags: budweiser marketing coke creative

Speed to Satisfaction: Snap and iReader

By Kaitlin Villanova

The average search lasts somewhere around 15 minutes, and so does the average attention span.

Snap  is an efficient time-saving search tool whether you are using Yahoo!, Google, MSN, or in my case a Kaitlin search (thanks to pimpmysearch).

Snap offers a solution that is “visual, fast, and interactive” far superior to the text-in text-out search paradigm. When you hold your mouse over the link a window preview of the site pops up allowing you to make a judgment on the site without having to click-through. This will force marketers and designers to make the sites more visually appealing and aesthetically welcoming..

iReader has a similar model to Snap, it is a browser extension for Internet Explorer and Firefox. The difference is, rather than just providing a visual screen shot of the site, it scans the text and puts the information provided in the site into a two or 3 point bullet form.

It is difficult to judge which is  a better model, if you are looking for a visual preview of the site before you visit, then Snap is for you. If you would prefer a snapshot (no pun intended) of the content on the site then iReader may be a better fit…personally I use both.

These esoteric web tools are welcoming to the not-so-techy user for little or no cost. Marketers must prepare their sites to be visually appealing with rich content that will give the user a reason to return.

Technorati tags:Snap marketing iReader

Twitter Wants to Know: What Are You Doing?

By Kaitlin Villanova

Want to learn exactly what your consumers are thinking and doing and when? Twitter.com allows for that kind of intimacy. The community of “connected” users can communicate to friends their up-to-the-minute activities via IM, text, or email. Think of it as shorthand blogging.

Rather than writing a blog about how you are eating lucky charms cereal, then searching online for an image of the familiar leprechaun on a red box, just text message your Twitter account and save yourself a whole lot of time.”

Some Recent Twitter posts:

“BTW [by the way] I am in the apple store right now”

“Going to get a haircut, it is so warm out”

“Designing second life for you!”

Blogger Kevin Dugan writer of Strategic Public Relations Blog admits “Thousands of geeks texting random thoughts and keeping us up on their mundane status probably has value.”

Example of Twitter's usefulness in the community from Israel Hyman's Twitter microblog:

Robert Scoble wanted to have Kathy Sierra’s speech from SXSW (South by Southwest a music festival in Austin Texas, that has attracted a strong following amongst web creatives and entrepreneurs) so he asked via Twitter if anyone had a link to the audio. Within a couple minutes, someone gave him a link, which he posted via Twitter, and a few minutes later I was listening to the talk in Arizona. Twitter is microblogging at lightning speed. It’s an “always on” chat room.”

Now that you  have a better understanding of Twitter, it’s your turn to upload an image, invite friends, and answer the twitter question: What are you doing?

Technorati tags: twitter community social networks

Marketing is #2 on Bright New Careers List

By Will Waugh

I wasn't looking but it popped up on my Yahoo! home page this morning. Seven Bright Careers for 2007 and Beyond highlights Marketing at #2 right after Physician Assistant:

This isn't your grandma's advertising. Today's marketers are developing business strategies in a rapidly changing media environment. To keep up with the media revolution, many businesses are hiring 'new media marketing coordinators' and 'marketing media strategists.'

I am not sure what my "grandma's advertising" was but this excerpt is spot on with indicators we are seeing from ANA members.

Who Knows Media -- Marketers or Agencies?

By Barbara Bacci Mirque

By now you all have heard about Jim Stengel’s speech at the AAAA Media Conference in which he talked about Second Life and our own ANA CEO Bob Liodice’s avatar! But here is something you have not heard about and something which struck me as a very telling paradigm shift: There was the 40-something Global Marketing Officer of The Procter & Gamble Company, a somewhat conservative company, telling the audience of media mavens about the importance of Second Life to P&G. When Mr. Stengel asked for a show of hands from the media types to see how many had visited Second Life then how many actually had created an avatar, very few folks raised their hands! This confirms what I have heard from many advertisers in my own ANA work about "enhanced" television – more and more advertisers are leading their agencies into new media, not the other way around. When I started out in this business in the mid 80’s as an assistant product manager at The Frito-Lay Company, we expected our advertising agencies to be innovative and inform us about what was hip and cool – now it appears to be the other way around and the "clients" are the ones who are personally and professionally experimenting with new media forms and directing their agencies to look into them. What a difference in the last 20 years!

Technorati tags: media marketing procter & gamble second life