MarketingInsideOut.com

Excellent concept with stopping power for a not so compelling subject — knitting.  Up close the blood is made up of individual stitches. Knit one, pearl two, stab phone. It just might work to eliminate some stress.

From Ads of the World. Created by CIA Comunicación, Barcelona, Spain for client Katia Wool.

I never had a word for it before. Now I do. My teen daughter is into communitainment-ing. And she’s not alone. If you’re a parent of a teen or spend much time around them, you can probably relate.

The symptoms: they are always on…online…on MySpace…on IM…on a photo sharing service…on an online game with friends…on I-tunes…on their cell phone texting…on the spot in sharing some crazy video with their friends (sometimes all at the same time).

They don’t watch much TV. But nonetheless, when you start to worry that they are becoming desk-potatoes and anti-social and you force them to disconnect and go outside to get fresh air or exercise or go to the mall or a ball game, it’s not uncommon to find them in groups on their cell phones texting others and even one another. As more of them convince their parents to buy them smart phones, they are taking and sharing video, mobile myspacing and so much more.

A report released last month by Piper Jaffray’s analyst Safa Rashtchy entitled ‘The User Revolution’ describes how users are going from simply exchanging information, to sharing information, ideas, content and entertainment, all within a social context, as part of a process dubbed ‘Communitainment’.

In a story in Adweek, Rashtchy pondered whether the younger viewers were cutting back on something else? It turns out they are cutting back on some of the more traditional entertainment avenues. But the communication on IM and MySpace is entertainment for them. To them, communication is not what it is to us. If we’re talking, we want to exchange some information, then we’ll get back to our work, or we’ll go watch a movie or some TV for entertainment. For younger people those [communication and entertainment] activities are intertwined. They send music and video files to each other, and that activity, by itself, is fun for them. It is not the same as what we call communication. He believes that increasingly, people on the Web, especially younger people, are going to gravitate toward content consumption in a way that is not direct content consumption but, combined with something else that is tied within the idea of social community.

The report suggests that “Communitainment” will at least partially replace other forms of content–i.e., TV, magazines, and even big Internet sites in favor of niche content sites. And the importance of the trend is not just in shifting traffic patterns but, more importantly, in the way users view content as a free-flowing part of the communication spectrum.

So where do marketers fit? When consumers watch TV, there is an understanding that they get commercials in exchange for free programming. With “Communitainment,” that ‘understanding’ doesn’t exist. Content is created and shared by users. It’s a closed system and advertisers have to find a way to get into it. And that point is critical if Rashtchy is correct in his prediction that “communitainment” will rise from 30% last year to 50% over the next decade. But once you get in, you’re actually part of the family. The content family. Part of the family, that is, if advertisers can indeed gain consumers’ trust.

From Emarketer.com

“Blogs, like podcasting and virtual worlds such as Second Life, offer a passionate niche audience. At the same time, they typically are not suited for repurposed content, and require special attention from marketers to work well as part of a campaign. This is partly why blogs are not considered very effective by most US advertising executives, according to the American Advertising Federation.”

Tonight I stumbled on the Coke Zero website and ended up being sucked in for a while. It’s an interesting approach. Instead of the “diet” premise, they are playing on the idea that Coke Zero is a case of taste infringement of regular Coke. The website spins up the taste infringement concept in some entertaining ways. Some of the videos on the site are purported to be real lawyers being fooled. Hummmm??? And there’s a “Ruin this Man’s day” section as well as “Sue a Friend”.

I did a bit of searching and quickly found a New York Times story from Monday on the overall effort.

“The campaign is based on an oddball thought, that the executives at Coca-Cola who sell the flagship Coke Classic brand want to hire lawyers to sue their co-workers who sell Coke Zero. The grounds for the imaginary lawsuits would be “taste infringement” — that is, it annoys the Coke Classic executives that no-calorie Coke Zero tastes so much like their sugared soft drink.

In one commercial, a person identified as an actual lawyer who is not in on the joke, tells two actors portraying Coke Classic executives: “It’ll be dismissed. You’ll be humiliated.”

From the NYT article, it sounds the marketing angle they’ve taken with Coke Zero (designed to taste like a no-calorie version of Coke Classic) is paying off — “45 percent of Coke Zero sales are incremental” rather than borrowed from Diet Coke.

The campaign was created by Crispin Porter & Bogusky.

We all know what happened. It shocked many of us (it certainly did me). CareerBuilder put its account up for review February 23 saying the reason was that the Cramer-Krasselt Super Bowl ads failed to rank in the top 10 in USA Today’s viewer poll. And Peter Krivkovich said “no thanks…we won’t play” and resigned the account.

TZ’s Bobbin Wages scores an exclusive podcast interview with Peter Krivkovich, CEO of Cramer-Krasselt where he explains why they were so shocked by the client’s absurd move; what kind of example C-suite executives should set for their companies and what this says about client/agency relationships in general.

Terrific interview worth listening to. His points about setting an example at the C-suite level and standing for something certainly resonate.

This guy is good. Beatbox how-to by Maïté.

Never ceases to amaze me how creative people can be. Especially when beer is involved.

Via Gizmodo:

“Here’s a do-it-yourself project where a guy has taken a small refrigerator and equipped it for automatic beer tossing. It’ll toss a beer to you 13 feet away, and it’s perfectly accurate every time.”

Every beer drinking couch potato’s dream.

Cadbury Schweppes and MasterCard are testing 750 vending machines in the Dallas area, New York and Chicago to answer a key question: Will people spend more at vending machines if they can use plastic?

The early answer is, yes.

Some of the machines were installed in January and have seen sales increases of 5 percent to 35 percent without any change in prices, said a vice president with Cadbury’s U.S. beverages subsidiary.

According to Vending Times, an industry publication, vending was a $46 billion business in 2005, and it was virtually all cash. That makes it an appealing target for banks that issue credit cards.

This according to TMZ.com:

“ABC is looking to an unlikely place to find the next big television show: Geico TV commercials. The show would revolve around three pre-historic men who must battle prejudice as they live their day-to-day lives in modern Atlanta.”

I’m sure it was a simple decision for ABC. It’s a great campaign. People love it (read the comments on TMZ).

But:

1) What if it bombs? Would it taint the effectiveness of the Geico spots?
2) I’m assuming ABC would have to pay some type of licensing fee for the concept. But my guess is The Martin Agency (the actual creators of the concept) would not get any of it. (See update below.)

The agency industry is largely governed by an hours-based work-for-hire compensation system where the client owns the ideas not the agency. Agencies typically sell their ideas based on the number of man-hours it takes to create. It’s possible Martin has a unique deal with Geico, but normally agencies don’t get to retain the rights to their work. (If you don’t know much about the challenges in agency compensation, here’s a good background article.)

The Martin Agency is a well-respected shop with terrific work. I’m sure they’re excited and flattered that their work has impacted popular culture to the point where a network wants to make a show about it. And it will certainly increase their profile in the industry. BUT…you can’t take that to the bank.

Agencies have long rued compensation arrangements that size them up by the number of man-hours they commit rather than by the success of their solutions. So some agencies are starting to push for compensation packages that are more value based. Crispin Porter’s deal with Haggar, in which the agency took an equity stake as part of its compensation, and New York-based Anomaly who has priced itself based “on the subjective theory of value” where on its client Virgin America the company will get a percentage of the revenue from the sales of an in-flight entertainment system it helped to design are among a few that have inked new types of deals.

While the compensation issue is far from resolved, progress is being made. In fact, on the agenda at the ANA Advertising Financial Management Conference in May is a session entitled “Creating a Value Based Agency Relationship” where the premise is that benefit of this type of compensation aligns the interest of the agency and the client.

This simple guerilla campaign for HP Printers is both eye catching and smart. Publicis Graffiti Argentina.