Facebook Marketing

Many brands are looking at new ways to market their products, and social network marketing is a brand new discipline riding the wave of this new revolution. Thus, brands like Nike and Ford have ventured onto Facebook. The idea is to create an application that would provide branded utility for Facebook users. Nike created an application that helped baseketball players find pick-up games and manage leagues. But despite global ambitions, Nike has only attracted 3,400 users per month. Some major criticisms of these apps by major brands is that they are sometimes tied to launch and forget campaigns, some provide little interactivity, some are overly complicated, and often they are little more than advertisements. That tension between product promotion and consumer utility will play a role in the future of this new advertising medium. See AdWeek's full article here.

Suicide in Ads?

The latest print advertisements for Pepsi Max depict on lone animated calorie committing suicide in various graphic ways. Ad Age discusses if this sort of animated suicide is something that is acceptable in ads. And if it is unacceptable, is it still good advertising, due to the buzz it has generated. Up until now, this topic has been fairly taboo, with GM pulling its robot suicide ad just last year. Do even animated attempts at dark humor cross a very significant line into poor taste?

Top Ten Best Advertisements of All Time

When an advertiser releases a campaign, about the best they can hope for is for people to like it, remember it, and hopefully buy the product. Truly great advertising, however, takes on a life of its own. It works its way into pop culture. USA Today conducted a poll to determine what are the best ads of all time. All the great ones are on there: Mean Joe Greene, Budweiser Frogs, Apple's 1984, and many more. Check them out here.

Guerrilla Marketing

Guerrilla marketing is all about coming up with creative ideas to really grab the attention of consumers. It involves thinking outside of the box of traditional marketing. Adweek has a great feature article about some of the best guerrilla marketing tactics of the year including some pumpkin carving in Times Square. It is sure to get your creativ juices flowing so that you can come up with some creative guerrilla marketing ideas of your own. Here is an example of what guerrilla marketing can look like.

JC Penny

"Give just a little of your self to me. My heart is in the moment. My hands are here to give to you." This little jingle has been hammered into my head recently. I have to admit, it's a catchy tune, and good advertising. When I watch TV, its usually through online sites like Hulu, and as a sponsor of hulu, I get to watch this JC Penny ad a lot. I think that any ad, if watched more than about forty times slowly begins to drive consumers insane. JC Penny's release of this new campaign is here, but I have to say I'm ready for the release of their next one.

November's Most-Recalled Ads

Every advertiser wants to have sticking power. They want their ads to be memorable. Thus, being a most-recalled ad according to Nielson is a prestigious honor, and it shows that they are doing their job. For the month of Novemeber it was Apple who took home this top spot, with its latest installment in the Mac/PC comparison commercials. Check it out here.

Whopper Virgins

Burger King has recently launched a controversial new campaign where they record the real reactions of consumers from obscure corners of the globe as they have their first Whopper. Some claim that indiginous people should not be used to sensationalize a product, but BK has indicated that it wants the ad to be talked about and if that means controversy so be it. I have to say, it bothers me that my area of choice purposely tries to generate controversy to try to sell products. I think there are better ways to sell products, and these sorts of campaigns are mildly disappointing to me. For more on BKs new campaign check out Advertising Age.

Where Advertising comes Alive...

I must apologize to my followers. It has been said that the advertising hasn't com alive in a while, and that has been all too true. Still, get ready. There will be a lot of advertising coming alive very soon. I have been busy with a senior thesis, from which I would like to share some advertising related conclusions pertaining to SMBs (small to medium sized businesses). Mass market advertising gets a lot of attention, and even here, it recieves the biggest focus because of its broad appeal. Still, with the constraints imposed upon SMBs, it is often non-traditional marketing methods that can yeild the biggest return on marketing investment.

Niche marketing with its smalle scope, lower costs, and ability to win is a great strategy for marketers at SMBs. According to Jay Conrad Levinson, Guerrilla Marketing tactics allow SMBs to capitalize on the strengths inherent with being small, and make their marketing more efficient. I would recommend Guerrilla Marketing for those in SMBs, and would encourage some of you to check it out. If you want to find out more about marketing advice for SMBs, follow the link or post a comment, and I can upload my thesis so you can see where all the advertising has been for a while.

Sprint and the Common Man

I don't know if any of you have seen Sprint's new advertising campaign. In these ads, Sprint's CEO comes on camera and just chats about phones. I have found these ads absolutely hilarius, even though they aren't really meant to be. Dan Hesse made just under 4 million dollars last year at Sprint and he wasn't even the CEO. If he earns a comparable salary to Sprint's last CEO he will stand to earn ten times that all told. Still, watch him in this commercial. Here a guy who makes close to a thousand times what I make in a year is pretending to be just one of us. "Can you even believe they still call these things phones with all that they can do," as though the CEO of Sprint doesn't know how to work his blackberry. He's sitting in a diner, no suit, no tie, his sleeves rolled up, as if to say, "look at me. I'm a common man. I'm just like you. These are tough times, but I understand, because I'm like you. Pay no attention to my salary, or to the fact that while you are concerned about losing your house, I'm concerned about losing my yacht. Remeber me Dan Hesse, a common man." I think that's pretty funny.

"Zero" Frustration

Although I enjoy advertising, and I am constantly looking for advertisements that represent what I think is a good ad, I have been bombarded by what may be the most terrible ad ever. I think many of you know exactly what I'm talking about. I'm talking about Toyota's recent "Saved by Zero" ad. This advertisement is played almost continuously during certain programs, and its repetitiveness makes me want to scream. Still, is someone at Toyota some sort of secret genious for this? I mean it actually does get veiwers attention, its impossible to ignore, and though it violates most rules of advertising, and the reaction has been mostly negative, who knows. Here's a link to the horrible ad if you wanted to do that to yourself.