tdog.blog

I have a confession to make…my wife and I were vegetarians for the better part of the 1990s and early 2000’s (all the way up to about a week after 9/11, actually), and for at least four of those years, we were vegans. (That’s right, those annoying people you can’t take out to dinner because they can’t eat eggs, dairy, honey, meat, or even talk to you if you have at some point thought about ingesting an animal product.)

My cholestorol never went down during this period (apparently, my cholesterol is already naturally low). I actually gained weight during these years, and was always hungry. In fact, I pretty much missed fried chicken, sushi, and a good old steak. And a simple lunch of milk with a PB&J.

But I digress. I find the following viral campaign just hilarious, if not for Nestle’s use of experiential marketing, then for the thought of all those vegans that were annoyed by it.

Check it out

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Hmmmmm……okay, then.

check it out here

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I think you’d enjoy some of these–here they are, the pantheon of IT horror projects, from ERP to big government to Y2K.

The one I like the best?

The ultimate cautionary tale for any IT manager about to pull the trigger on a new ERP implementation? FoxMeyer Drug. Following an SAP R/3 implementation in the mid- to late-1990s, the company’s bankruptcy trustees filed a $500 million lawsuit in 1998 against SAP, and another $500 million suit against co-implementer Andersen Consulting, claiming the companies’ software and installation efforts had contributed to the drug company’s demise.

Lots o’ links to back stories for all the juicy details.

Enjoy

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Apparently, engagement, or what the branding cognoscenti have been using as a metric to show how we interact with digital branding efforts, is dead. At least, its dead according to Steve Rubel in Advertising Age.

After reading his piece, I had a good laugh about the whole engagement thing. Sounds like more puffery to me. Why is everyone so focused on the brand? If I may paraphrase Lennon, “Brand happens while you’re making other plans.”

Drive leads. Sell stuff. Get customers talking to others about how great we are. The brand is owned by the marketplace, not you. Don’t worry about the brand. Do you think that Nationwide Insurance, with all its hype about “We’re on your side” is really such a good thing to all the folks they’ve stiffed in the Gulf States? Of course not. They can pay 1000 branding guys to prop up their brand, but the fact is, they’re not doing so hot.

As marketers, we shouldn’t care about brand engagement. Instead we should focus on how we get people connected with each other and measure the number of times we helped them do so. That’s why venues such as Second Life, YouTube, Facebook and other social networks are so hot: They allow people to connect with each other.

Full Article

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A recent piece by Carol Krol over at B2BOnline.com leads off with:

It is a potent symbol of the evolution of the direct-marketing landscape when a search marketer identifies himself as a direct marketer.

Uh, er, any marketing that uses a marketing medium to get the customer to respond directly to the message/offer/medium is a direct marketer. At least, that’s the way I see it. If you use SEM ads, then guess what, the user directly responds to that ad and goes to a landing page of some kind, which may or may not have an offer with attached form to close the loop. If this isn’t classic two-step direct marketing, I don’t know what is.

The article claims that there is more blurring of branding and direct marketing, and that a lot of folks who really are in the direct marketing business don’t like to label themselves as such.

What’s up with that? Are all the cool Madison Avenue kids going to look down their noses at you if you dare to create effective, measurable marketing that actually brings in leads, customers, and sales? Is it only cool to have the kind of useless (and expensive!!!) advertising that gives your CEO bragging rights any time he goes golfing with his other CEO buddies (”Hey, did you see our two-page ad in the Wall Street Journal last week?” — never mind that the service his company is selling would have been better served in other media).

In any case, I keep seeing a trend when it comes to business and marketing topics. Everyone wants to complicate things. As I once told a good friend of mine seeking advice on starting a successful consulting practice: “Launching a business is easy. Talk to ten people in your target market and find out what keeps them up at night. Find the one thing from this list you can solve or make better (either through talent or desire) and offer it to them as a service or product. Make sure that you make more money than you spend, and that you communicate to the marketplace regularly. When you do that, make sure you say the right things, in the right places, to the right people, with the right vehicle.”

Done. And I guarantee you that with a Google Adwords campaign, direct mail solicitation, or other measurable media, I can continue to create effective marketing. Of course, I won’t have bragging rights. Sigh.

Full article here

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