MarketingInsideOut.com

I loved the YouTube Underground contest. It was incredible to see some real talent get a chance at public exposure. The winning video definitely had my vote. It is simply AWESOME. And what is really amazing is that the video was written, directed, and animated by the band itself in an apartment in Oakland on a ZERO dollar budget. That is creativity.

Check out all the winners on YouTube. (The video for “The Way It Is” is amazingly creative as well.

Very powerful! The copy reads, “Racism. The more you apply it, the uglier you become.”

Powerful. Excellent campaign from Saatchi & Saatchi Australia. See more>

They come across as so prim and proper, but underneath the Brits are so not. Check out this new product and the TV spot.

iBuzz Two is the world’s first music-activated sex toy for couples. Plug in two sets of headphones and you and your partner can simultaneously listen to your music and enjoy the sensations from two vibrating bullets.

I guess it was only a matter of time………

This ad, running in the Cannes section of the November Creativity from Draft FCB congratulating all the winners from last summer’s ad festival in Cannes, is a pefect example of creatives jacking off.

They are now calling it a “terrible mistake” according to a story in today’s Chicago Sun Times:

A Draft FCB spokesman admitted the ad was “a terrible mistake,” and further claimed the work was “submitted without proper approval.” But he refused to say who at Draft FCB created the ad or who was responsible for submitting the finished effort to Creativity.

Congrats Draft…way to step in it! You just furthered the perception that direct shops really do suck at creative.

Hummmm??? Don’t you just wonder what all the conservative Wal-Mart customers think of the agency now representing their favorite shopping hangout?

The first time I saw the spot, my reaction was: why the hell is that woman rubbing a glue stick on her head? Is this some wacky viral prank? It just seemed too bizarre to be real.

I had absolutely no idea what it was for. All I knew was that you “apply directly to the forehead.” The ad created in-house by HeadOn has production values so hideous they seem intentionally campy. (They’re not.) The horrible graphic background. The way the volume fades in and out on the VO. The big, yellow-arrow (as if you didn’t know where the forehead was on the human body). And above all, the very image of this chick rubbing goop back and forth across her head. It’s mesmerizing in its cheesiness and like nothing else on television right now.

From Wikipedia:

In many ways, the commercial is revolutionizing television commercials as a whole, as it introduces a postmodern element to advertising. With a slogan looping three times, and no clear explanation of what the product is, or what the product does, the commercial creates an intrigue and notoriety that many commercial companies are seeking.

But the commercials annoy the hell out of people. Yet they managed to get a lot of buzz going. How about a file to make your own HeadOn ringtone just so you can really irrate all those other people in that boring meeting. Plus they sure did spark parodies that served to increase brand exposure even more.

Strangely enough the second round campaign, which launced in September addressed viewer annoyance head on. Now they have people on their commercials that talk about how MUCH they hate HeadOn commercials, but how much they like the product.

Smart strategy. In many ways (although I hate to admit it because they are so cheesy) the campaign is pure genius. Slate said it well in their review:

With this one 10-second spot, the makers of HeadOn have torn down all the pretenses that have gummed up the advertising industry for years. Production values? Persuasion? Emotion? Humor (of the intentional kind)? These are stalwarts of the old, outmoded advertising paradigm. The new, head-on (or HeadOn) approach holds that advertising is about blunt force.

I suspect most advertisers avoid the broken-record technique out of fear that it will annoy people. Which it does. But so what? Maybe a small percentage of us will snootily refrain from buying HeadOn—as an act of protest against an ad we find irritating—but this is a small price to pay when millions of other folks are now familiar with HeadOn, curious about it, and unlikely ever to forget its name. The repetition method serves no purpose for a well-established brand (“Coca-Cola: Pour it down your esophagus. Coca-Cola: Pour it down your esophagus”), but for a new product fighting to get noticed, it makes a lot of sense.

In the end, after seeing the spot several times, my curiosity got the better of me and while at a local Walgreens one night picking up a perscription I picked up the HeadOn package and read it. AND..because I suffer from headaches routinely, I bought it. (Their sinister plan worked on me.) And you know what, it works….IF you catch the headache really early. Otherwise you just feel this strange cooling sensation…directly on your forehead.

At first when I read it, thought it was some kind of prank by Ad Age… I mean come on…pubic-hair-dying kits?

But it’s real. Betty offers multiple colors plus pink for the fun at heart.

This NY startup is getting big PR buzz. The company began building buzz this summer with a brief appearance on the “The Tonight Show” With Jay Leno.

Last week, the web site was on pace for 2 million visits annually.

Brings new complexity to the “true blonde” concept. Suppose they’ll come out with a touch up kit for dealing with dark roots?

Apparently Yum brands dooesn’t think there’s enough business here on Earth for the Colonel, so they are advertising to ET.

Perhaps there’s less clutter in the media marketplace for our long-fingered friends.

This from MSNBC:

KFC is hoping to draw attention to the new logo with a giant, 87,000-square foot version of it that can be seen from space. The massive logo consists of 65,000 1-foot square painted tiles that were laid out in the Nevada desert over 24 days.

If you’re a marketer and you still think social networking sites and blogs are the cloistered domain of computer geeks and something you can ignore…think again…or start polishing up your resume.

Fast-forward to today with consumers of all types flocking to social media sites to share brand experiences. Social Media such as blogs, wikis, forums and user-generated content sites like flickr, delicious, MySpace and YouTube have become both a source of information and entertainment. While this new age of digital word of mouth is dramatically shaping the way brands are perceived, many marketers and business managers are still amazingly unaware of the influence of social media on everything from brand reputation to purchase behaviors.

The influence traditional media and marketing have over consumer perception is waning as people use the plethora of digital technologies to circumvent traditional sources to obtain information and entertainment from each other. Simply look at the recent comScore and NetRatings traffic numbers for the likes of sites like YouTube and MySpace, and you quickly get a lesson in the power of user-generated content in endorsing or condemning a product or service.

According to Technorati CEO and founder, David Sifry’s most recent “State of the Blogsphere”; there are now 57 million blogs (about 55% of which are active), about 100,000 new blogs created each day, and 1.3 million posts a day (that’s double the volume of this time last year). At the current growth rate, the blogsphere is doubling every 236 days or so.

The interesting number that really caught my eye is the number of “authoritative” blogs (authority is a ranking assigned by Technorati based on tracking the number of distinct blogs that link to it over the past 6 months). The fact is there are more authoritative blogs than there are traditional outlets in any single medium.

There are 30,488 “high authority” and “very high authority” blogs. (This “authority” level means they each have more than 100 other blogs linking to them in the last 6 months.) For context there are about 13,000 radio stations, 9,000 TV stations, and 17,000 magazines in the US. (source: Forrester Research) That’s a lot of voices, a significant readership and a lot of influence.

Rueters reports that blogs are a more trusted source of information (24 percent) than television advertising (17 percent) and email marketing (14 percent). But blogs still lag behind newspapers (30 percent) in the credibility department. This according to a survey commissioned by Hotwire, a public relations consultancy working in the technology sector.

The evidence relative to the influence of blogs on everything from public opinion to purchase decisions is growing. In this article, on the impact of blogs in the b2b sector, a KnowledgeStorm/McCann survey of purchase behavior found that 53% of respondents said blogs influence their purchase decisions. That influence looms even larger over regular blog users. Of the respondents who said they read blogs daily, nearly 69% said blogs influenced their purchase behavior.

As a marketer, if you don’t have a program in place to monitor your brands in the social media, put one in place. Because detecting influence and understanding its role in how people perceive and adopt your product or service online can give you a powerful tool for marketing programs, advertising approaches and competitive business intelligence.

Being a cynical ad person, rarely does an ad really stop me in my tracks. But this one sure did.

Spnsored by the United Church of Canada and designed to encourage discussion at the wondercafe.ca web site, I’d say by the threads I read that it’s a good start.

The entire campaign is worth checking out as it this article in the Globe and Mail. Gutsy move on the part of the church leaders. It will be an interesting story to follow to see if it works as hoped in making the church more relevant.

It’s just around the corner. With a 22% expected increase over last year, e-Marketer predicts that sales growth will come less from newcomers this year and much more from experienced online buyers who increase their spending. A chunk of my money is already adding to the kitty. I don’t know how I managed to get all my shopping done back in the pre-online commerce days. There are just not enough hours in the day.