Peter Jones’s ten rules for entrepreneurial success
March 28, 2008 – 8:30 pm
Ingenious creative advertisements for WMF Knives by advertising agency KNSK, Hamburg, Germany. Take a closer look and you will notice that the sculptures are carved out of fruits and vegetables such as carrot, pineapple, radish, strawberry and others. Fine print reads ‘For those who value precision: WMF Grand Gourmet blades. Unsurpassably sharp and manufactured from unique special blade steel’.
Click on the image to view in higher resolution.
6 more pics of WMF Knives advertisements after the jump.
This week Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger issued a statement urging philanthropists to support the creation of free online textbooks. Wired Campus reports:
“This week Mr. Sanger posted a public appeal to philanthropists in the form of an online petition, outlining his vision of a world where textbooks cost children nothing. He's asking other Internet users to sign on, and about 20 have done so as of this writing. (The letter focuses on K-12 textbooks, but it seems that a similar logic could be used for college textbooks as well.)
“Sometimes the simplest ways are the best,” says Mr. Sanger in the petition. “This opportunity is 'low-hanging fruit.'”
Unfortunately, the statement doesn't lay out any specific details or a plan for making the textbook project possible. But, hopefully, it will encourage conversation and get people to seriously consider altering the textbook industry. If the idea catches on, online students may be able to learn exclusively from no-cost virtual materials sometime in the near future. See full article.
Related Entries:
Wikipedia Co-Founder Launches Rival Online Encyclopedia - 19 December 2005
Free Downloadable Textbooks Save Students Money - 24 April 2007
How to Save on Textbooks - 31 August 2007
Want to Save on Textbooks? Start Now. - 27 November 2007
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mary hodder posted a photo:
funny.
While I am presently an offline/online media relations guy, my background spans a variety of media and tactics. As such, I have always been fascinated with the phenomena of Superbowl advertisements. What other event allows you to generate buzz simply by making a media buy?
When it comes to search, it is nearly useless to play Monday morning quarterback with Superbowl advertisements. Whether Budweiser had a funnier ad than FedEx is not necessarily relevant to our world. But in order to determine whether companies maximized their $2.7 million investment, it is important to assess the lasting impact on searches for their products.
In a trend that is sure to continue, many companies endeavored to drive traffic to their website in hopes of generating online buzz. Godaddy.com was certainly the most explicit about this tactic, sending viewers online to catch a racy forbidden ad featuring NASCAR sensation Danica Patrick.
An immediate analysis would have declared Godaddy a winner, with two million hits to their website immediately following their advertisement. Unfortunately, the hype didnt last. Disappointment with the not-so-racy-as-advertised advertisement turned into negative buzz, and nobody is talking about the ad today.
Even if the end product had been more effective, how would it have helped Godaddy? One of the benefits of purchasing a Superbowl spot is that people search for their favorite ads the next day. Thus, Godaddy will become more closely associated with Danica Patrick. It is not clear to me how this drives their business model, which is to sell domain registration services.
When it comes to failure to capitalize on post-game searches, however, Gatorade stole the show with an absurd ad featuring a dog drinking out of a dish. In addition to being confusing and devoid of a punch line, the ad could only compel you to search for dog bowl, or dog drinking to try to find the ad. Unless Gatorade is doing battle with Petsmart, this represents a wasted opportunity. Basic rules of brand compliance apply to the search world as well.
In fact, I would argue that the night emerged with only one clear victor. Tides Talking Stain ad, which featured a shirt stain literally drowning out a prospective employers list of accomplishments, was a masterpiece. Entertaining enough to be memorable, and smart enough to speak to a male audience, the ad was hailed as a smart, brand-savvy winner.
The sheer quality of the ad generated continues to drive Online searches, and the search engine path to finding it aligns with Tides business model here. Anyone unfortunate enough to need a search for shirt stain in Google will see the ad on the first page of searches. Happen to have an interview coming up? Want to know how to fix that nasty stain out of your fancy suit? A search for stain Interview yields numerous references to the Tide Stain Stick. Quite a feat considering Spray n Wash has had a similar product on the market for quite some time.
In short, the campaign plays into the way people truly interact with the web.
5,500 customers have taken their hand at crafting their own talking stain ads, via an online contest sponsored by Tide and powered by YouTube. Thats 5,500 forceful brand advocates with strong communication skills. In addition to the hundreds of thousands of YouTube clicks on the ad itself, the official parody site has become one of the top 50 most subscribed channels on YouTube, with nearly 500,000 clicks on the top ten videos alone.
Is it selling Tide Sticks? You bet it is. The pack of six Tide Sticks is the number one selling stain remover on Amazon, and outsells even the brands familiar powder detergent.
Given Tides recent success, rest assured that companies will endeavor to emulate the model. Expect silly viral campaigns, contests and the like, to abound in the wake of the 2009 Superbowl as agencies look for ways to justify tremendous financial investments in their work.
My prediction: The Patriots win, and most of these companies fail because they have yet to understand how people interact with brands online.
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The three-month old Flocke German for “Flake,” as in snowflake had a private early-morning outing before the zoo opened, the Nuremberg city government said Thursday. She is due to make her public debut on April 9.
Now here’s the kind of prediction that I like to hear: eMarketer’s John du Pre Gauntt says that “2007 was not ‘the year of mobile marketing’ that it was advertised to be, and 2008 won’t be either.” I don’t have anything against mobile marketing itself, I’m just tired of the hype. So a down-to-earth look at the future of mobile marketing is what I want.
eMarketer’s key points:
- Text-message–based campaigns will dominate
- Mobile marketing affects many different industries—and it affects them all differently.
- Consumers are resistant, especially to targeting based on personal information that their phone and/or provider will store.
- Most mobile users are still paying for nearly all their data services, making them even less likely to welcome advertising on their phones.
The report also addresses the possibility of advertising revenues subsidizing subscription rates. This seems like the solution to a lot of problems: the mobile companies still get paid, customers get low enough rates to afford data services and advertisers get their creative seen.
On the other hand, advertisers might desire better targeting, customers are opposed to receiving more advertising and mobile companies would probably prefer to continue to charge both advertisers and customers at current rates. The eMarketer report realistically concludes that “Before mobile marketing can truly get moving, many obstacles will have to be overcome.”
Amen.
Content summary: New FIR Book Review and FIR Interview podcasts coming in April; next FIR Live on BlogTalk Radio in planning; discussion: pros and cons of social media for small/medium business; Dan York reports on FriendFeed, the dark side of the internet, and more; the Media Monitoring Minute with CustomScoop; lawsuit filed against Cisco for employee blogger posts; bad PR practice isn’t about new media training; Bell Canada’s internal ‘blog jams’; advertising: URLs out, search boxes in; listeners’ comments discussion; music from Mike O’Hara; and more.
[Messages from our sponsors: FIR is brought to you with Lawrence Ragan Communications, serving communicators worldwide for 35 years, www.ragan.com; Save time with the CustomScoop online clipping service: sign up for your free two-week trial, at www.customscoop.com/fir.]
Show notes for March 27, 2008
Welcome to For Immediate Release: The Hobson & Holtz Report, a 60-minute podcast recorded live from Wokingham, Berkshire, England, and Atlanta, Georgia, USA.
Download the file here (MP3, 27.5MB), or sign up for the RSS feed to get it and future shows automatically. (For automatic synchronization with your iPod, subscribe with iTunes; good podcatchers include Juice and DopplerRadio, and RSS aggregators that support podcasts such as FeedDemon.)
In This Edition:
Links for the blogs, individuals, companies and organizations we discussed or mentioned in the show are posted to the FIR Show Links pages at The New PR Wiki. You can contribute - see the home page for info.
If you have comments or questions about this show, or suggestions for our future shows, email us at fircomments@gmail.com; or call the Comment Line at +1 206 222 2803 (North America) or +44 20 8133 9844 (Europe); or Skype: fircomments; or comment at Twitter: twitter.com/FIR; or at Jaiku: fir.jaiku.com. You can email your comments, questions and suggestions as MP3 file attachments, if you wish (max. 3 minutes / 5Mb attachment, please!). We’ll be happy to see how we can include your audio contribution in a show.
Join the FIR Discussion Forum and extend your conversations with the FIR community. You can also join the FIR Facebook Community and become an FIR friend.
So, until Monday March 31…
(Cross-posted from For Immediate Release, Shel’s and my podcast blog.)
© 2008 - visit the author for more great content.
Proofreading Philly tries to capture typos, wordos, and all other kinds of grammatical mistakes that we see around the city. But we need your help! gmail.com?subject=proofreading%20philly”>Email photos to us from your computer or your phone, and show the city that you care about good grammar.
Phillyist Angela forwarded this on to us. It’s a letter sent to Inquirer subscribers from the Pennsylvania Treasury. But despite all the presumed brainpower between the two, they couldn’t catch a silly typo in the second paragraph.
Or perhaps we’re about to start getting lolInky and lolTreasury…
MP3 File Length-30 minutes, 26 seconds
Deborah Harper, President of Psychjourney, interview Mr. Bruce Goldstein, author of Puppy Chow is Better than Prozac: The True Story of a Man and the Dog Who Saved His Life published by Da Capo Press.
Bruce Goldstein and Ozzy
Bruce Goldstein is a full-time doggie daddy, an expressionist painter, a screenwriter, and a first-time author. A Staten Island graffiti artist turned New York City commercial artist, Goldstein has worked at several of the most respected, creative advertising agencies, including Chiat/Day, Deutsch and Hill Holliday. His work has appeared in The Bark magazine and New York Dog. Goldstein received a B.F.A. in Advertising Design from The Fashion Institute of Technology in 1992. He lives in Manhattan with his furry roommate, Ozzy. Visit his website www.puppychowisbetterthanprozac.com
YouTube is going to be sharing more statistics about the people who view video clips with those who upload them, according to an AP story. A new program called YouTube Insight could greatly help those adding clips in terms of advertising and when to schedule a new video, among other things. The program debuts today, and Google hopes it will help it make some money from its $1.76 billion purchase. To date there hasn’t been a rush of people eager to advertiser on YouTube. Advertisers are already given information about who views their ads, but Insight reportedly go
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My ideal online advertising strategy: the publisher should be able to choose its advertisers as much as advertisers should be able to choose their publishers. Just like Robin Good’s ideal online advertising strategy Maybe I am just full of crap, and unable to see the beauty of banner advertising bought on CPM, but if I had to express my own sincere thoughts on how I would like advertising to work on my online publications, I would not hesitate a second in saying that the best synergy between advertiser and publisher takes place when both like and attract each other for some reason. If the web is analogous to the new economy of attention, why attempt to keep distracting readers by throwing at them commercial messages that add nothing to the focus they have on your page at the moment?
Advertising Solution. What do I want?
Full English Text Transcription Here is Robin Good for MasterNewMedia. If it comes to online advertising, my dream has already become quite clear, it’s not even anymore a dream, it’s not a painting, it’s not even a photograph, it has become a clear picture in my head and it is a situation in which I won’t be sold by a middle man, an agency, who will go out and sell my site along some others of the same kind while giving me some money for displaying some ads on which I have had very little to say about. My advertising dream includes for me the ability to select each and every single advertiser, that is going to display its messages on my site. To possibly coordinate and help out with the advertiser the best way to communicate to my readers what they want, and to help them communicate so. Maybe directly myself. As well as making sure that I also fully endorse and like the product or service that I am promoting. Would I just allow any product just because they pay me lots of money to be displayed on my site? My idea of advertising doesn’t include that option: you can pay me whatever amount of money you want but I will include you only if I really think that your product or service is really great and if I think that I would possibly I have gone and told my friends anyhow about your product and service, even if you didn’t pay me. That’s the type of level of trust and endorsement that I think the publisher, in my dream universe, would have. So I wouldn’t sell ever space on my site that could be sold along others, or could be sold as to adapt to numbers that an agency is making… “…you need so many eyeballs while I’ve got this and that site, or what have you got? Printers, photocopiers… OK we’ll shoot them out.” Why do I need that? I mean what kind of extra value I’m going to give to my readers? Is this new media or old media? Am I going to interrupt their experience by telling them something that they did not come searching for in the first place, or it’s just an additional distraction. I think we have enough of those distractions right now so, if I’m going to distract or interrupt you in some little way, it is going or should be only about providing you valuable, relevant information in context, on what you have come for here, and what you’re interested in. That’s why I embraced so happily Adsense and with all the limitations and negative trends that are happening with it, I still think it’s an advertising solution that has no counterparts yet, (outside of the other systems that now do the same), and it is the advertising way of new media. The only way I would take AdSense further ahead of where it is, would be to add to it the ability to actually allow me to specifically select the advertisers I would want to display on my site, and not just to be forced to filter out some of the bad ones. As much as advertisers themselves can select to target their campaigns to my site specifically, I would like to have the option of selecting myself which advertisers - possibly without needing to know how much money they bring me - are the ones that I would want to have on my site. Because, while the advertiser, the company promoting, can be good at finding me as a good outlet for its marketing campaign, I may be also a great match-finder for products and companies to find their ideal market through my readers which they know very little about. So I think that this could be win-win situation… …I may be wrong, but that’s how I see it.
What do YOU think?
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