MarketingInsideOut.com

There’s no motivation like a PR nightmare.  This from Ad Age:

Two weeks after news that taking Ambien could result in binge eating and driving while asleep, sales of sleeping medications began tanking, finally causing Sanofi-Aventis to wake up and advertise the safety of its product. And it looks like rivals won’t be far behind.

The print campaign for Ambien, the $2.1 billion leader in the insomnia category, began three weeks after The New York Times reported March 8 that Ambien was linked to traffic arrests around the nation by drivers who had no memory of getting behind the wheel, and two weeks after researchers at the Minnesota Regional Sleep Disorders Centre and the Mayo Clinic found that some people who take Ambien binge-eat while sleeping.

In the two weeks after the Times’ initial report, prescription data specialist Verispan Yardley, Pa., found that the number of new prescriptions for all sleeping medications slid more than 7% from the previous month. That’s a big reversal, considering that sleeping pill prescriptions grew a whopping 55% between 2001 and 2005.

I’ve thought more than once about taking something like Ambien since I’m pretty much an insomniac, but I probably would have been one of those sleep-walking binge eaters.  So instead, I surf, read or watch Lifetime (or the man hater channel as my husband calls it) until the wee hours of the morning.  Until I’m either totally exhausted or bored out of my mind.  But at least if I go on a binge, I’ll remember it.   

April 30th, ABC/Disney will become the first broadcast network to offer top entertainment shows online for free. The catch is that you can watch the entire episode and jump from scene to scene, but you won’t be able to skip ads.  Ads on launch will include several blue-chip advertisers like Ford, AT&T, Suave, Procter & Gamble, Universal Pictures and many more according to the article in Ad Age.

Internet TV is still in its infancy, but I’ll hand it to Disney/ABC in that they are bold and agressive in trying out different technologies and business models. It’s amazing how much has happened in just the past few months. Between the shows available on iTunes and AOL’s In2TV and NBC’s Webcasts of the evening news and Google Video’s for-pay episodes of stuff like I Love Lucy and other developments, a lot of TV has made the transition to the Net all of a sudden. Content owners seem to be a lot more open-minded and experimental than they were when music started to go digital…and that can only be healthy.

This from Ad Age

Outgoing 4A’s Chairman Ron Berger jump-started the annual gathering of ad agency managers with a wide-ranging broadside that slapped down prominent industry figures like Martin Sorrell, Bob Liodice and Jack Klues.

What’s sure to be known as Mr. Berger’s “I think our business could be better if…” speech offered an unusually rousing start for a conference that typically has all of the contentiousness of a Scotch following a round of golf. The address comes as Madison Avenue has been taking hits in recent years from the press as well as from marketers and other agencies.

Too bad people only really say what they think on their way out…

People have been personalizing stamps, credit cards, and gift cards online for some time, so why not design-it-yourself (DIY) commercials?  Whether the viral marketing phenomenon becomes a pandemic is debatable, although you can argue that some of these homemade commercials are infectious in the way they’re attracting attention – both intended and unintended.  Consider the recent online contest for the Chevy Tahoe which generated a reported 2.4 million page views on http://www.chevyapprentice.com/ and led to more than 21,000 submissions, including thousands of faux ads by critics of the SUV. 

While GM screened the ads for offensive content like last year’s tasteless suicide bomber spot that plagued Volkswagon, the company did not play censor, which was well advised from a PR perspective.  Imagine the outbreak of public opinion had the company stonewalled its critics.

Meanwhile, the viral marketing bandwagon continues to roll along as popular brands like AllStar Converse, Microsoft, Toyota, L’oreal Paris and Sony jump on board.  Mastercard offers a Web site where people can create their own versions of the “Priceless” ad campaign.  Mutations of viral marketing are also appearing like the “Subservient Chicken”  who closely resembles Bozell’s former agency mascot “Flippy” (laid to rest after falling victim to bird flu). 

As a participant sport, viral marketing represents a pick up game that’s fun to play without risking the “agony of defeat” experienced by major league teams.  And the buzz created for the brands involved is not something to sneeze at, even though it may cause advertisers an occasional headache.  

Under the slogan “Because there’s always more to the story,” WTWP AM-FM, a joint venture of The Washington Post and Bonneville International Corp went on air Thursday launching not only a radio station, but also a continuous promotional vehicle for The Post. 

According to this story in The Post:

The station’s premise is that print journalists can be lively radio broadcasters.

That premise struck me as a tall order. But they got lucky on Day 1 when just over an hour after they went on air, they were able to immediately report on American journalist Jill Carroll’s release after three long months of capitivity in Iraq. 

But the big question that even The Post itself broached is: 

Can it sustain such immediacy and intimacy daily and evolve into what one of its managers has optimistically described as “NPR on caffeine”?

Newspapers are under enormous pressure because by the time they go to print, most of the news is old news.  We’ve already heard it on the tube or read it online.  So this venture is one way The Post is trying and stem the erosion of its audience/circulation.