Wednesday, January 23, 2008

Laser Tagging

I love this video. It demonstrates that with some pretty low tech, you can go out there and paint boobs on various downtown buildings.

Actually, it opens the door to some very intriguing guerrilla marketing possibilities. I would love to get my hands on this for a night.

Tuesday, January 22, 2008

The Expectation Economy


Please do me a favor and read this article. Made my head spin a few times.

What happens when your consumers get more educated about your products than you do?
It's going to get ugly for the next few years. A lot of companies and brands that cannot react quick enough are going to be in for some painful experiences. The new, more agile companies won't have it easy either.

If nothing else, there is some killer blogs linked here.

Monday, January 7, 2008

The Facebook Marketing Bible

I found this link today for 24 ways to market yourself on Facebook. I gotta admit, most of these are worthless and just puking up the same info we've heard over and over, but this one really does get in-depth about a lot of avenues that I haven't been familiar with. It's also has some nice short explanations for Social Ads and Beacon if you want to catch up. I'll be putting this guy on my feeder for sure.

Sunday, January 6, 2008

Ron Paul WoW March....Not really that exciting.

Here's a little update from the Ron Paul blog I wrote a few days ago.

Below you'll find an almost 7 minute video showing of the in-game march that Ron Paul supporters launched in the World of Warcraft game. This is for sure one of those instances that the idea of this was much more powerful and will get more press than the actual event itself.

If you know one anything about World of Warcraft, you should know that it has over 9 million subscribers around the world. Those are getting into some serious numbers, and this is why these stories always seem to make it not only in the online blogging communities but also the AP.

The truth to this is this: While there is 9 MILLION people now playing this game globally, they are not playing all together. There are hundreds of different servers and each server may have 10,000 players and from that, there may at best a few thousand playing at the same time. So check out the video below in all it's nerdy and somewhat non-spectacular glory and as yourself the question. What made the impact, the sizzle or the steak?

Wednesday, January 2, 2008

Hot Chocolate Street Team of Awesomness!!!

Ok, so it's time to present something to all of you that tells us as marketers that "Street Teams" are not all created equally.

There's absolutely nothing wrong with the "street team", concept. Brands and their marketing teams need to just start asking the question, Why are we doing this?
Wow, that sounds like a stupid question, huh?

Well just check out the video below. My thoughts will be better represented after your watch it.



#1-Let's start thinking a bit about chilling out on wrapping cars. What is that a 97 Explorer? I'm not making fun of their budget, but there are other ways to be mobile than wrapping a freaking back door of a normal looking truck. Especially when your marketing towards teens.

#2-I feel that a lot of our jobs as marketers are taken up in making the things we do look like winning activations to our clients, retailers, bottlers, distributers, etc. This isn't really our fault, we feel a need to keep our jobs and to make sure everyone in our world thinks we're doing our job. The question is what impact did this make with our consumers. Isn't it? It would be great if we could spend more time making sure that the ideas we have actually reflect the brands that we represent and tell the right story.

#3- Sorry to be a bit shallow, but who do they have giving out this hot chocolate? The first guy looks like someone's dad and the other two guys in the video look like they spend more time playing WoW than talking to teens. Image counts, especially to this age group. Think about it?

#4- Did you see the size of those sampling cups? Hot chocolate does 2 things. Tastes good and warms people up when they're cold. The 1 squirt of hot chocolate that the kids got was more than likely cool by the time that it hit their lips. It looked cold out there, lets give these kids an actual cup of hot chocolate.

#5- Kids don't talk like that. They were great little sound clips and they for sure would impress a room of 50 year old board members, but come on!!! Again, there is no way anyone talks like that, unless they somehow feel like they'll be on a TV commercial. From my experience, kids don't really give a crap what kind of hot chocolate they drink. So either market to the parents that actually buy this crap or give them another reason to buy your product.

It's obvious that we're entering a time where the fringe marketing of 10 years ago is the traditional marketing of today. Let's step it up and start asking the questions of where to go from here.