One of my partners attended ad:tech 2006 in Chicago last year. The organization, which also holds events in New York, San Francisco, London, Shanghai and Sydney, bills itself like this: Continue reading
Author Archives: winterSmith
Could more lives have been saved at Virginia Tech?
I’m going to try and do this without looking like a vulture – I hate those who profiteer off the misfortunes of others and don’t want to be guilty of that crime myself – so let me begin with full disclosure. I’m a principal in a mobility consulting firm that offers the kinds of services I’m going to describe below. This makes me an informed observer, but it also makes me someone who might benefit financially from what I’m proposing. Take this for what it’s worth.
First, when things began unfolding in Blacksburg yesterday morning, the university notified its students via e-mail. There are a lot of problems with the response, starting with this: college students don’t use e-mail, at least not any more than they have to. More…As a recent Chronicle on Higher Education article explained, e-mail is for old people. Continue reading
Somebody in West Bygod gets it
Check this wonderful bit about the new West Virginia Tourism campaign:
Readers flipping through the newest edition of O, The Oprah Magazine might stumble upon an ad headline that reads, “Whatever you do, don’t come to West Virginia!” Continue reading
Pet food contamination crisis: this was preventable
Imagine. It’s 6:28 am. You slowly rise through the many-layered fog of sleep, edging toward wakening, toward daylight, your body’s clock instinctively anticipating the impending blare of the alarm. As consciousness fans away the haze, realization hits like a drum of icewater and you bolt up in bed screaming. It wasn’t a dream. Oh, gods…
You really are the head of branding and PR for a major pet food company.
42 cat food brands and 53 dog food brands are under recall. It’s bad enough if you’re a bargain or store brand, but it’s positively hell if you’re riding herd on one of the industry’s premium brands – Eukanuba, Nutro, etc.
These last few days, your world has been engulfed by The Suck. Continue reading
One love, one bank
Start here, if you haven’t seen it already.
This little internal morale-fluffer seems innocuous enough, and by middle-aged corporate white guy standards it might even pass for clever. Hey, maybe if you’re part of the Bank of America context and you know all the people personally, this rip of the U2 classic is actually pretty funny and uniting and let’s-run-out-of-the-room-and-conquer-the-industry inspiring.
However, in a world with YouTube and zillions of people who see everything they ever cared about commodified and used to sell toothpaste every day, BoA has perhaps crossed a line. No, there won’t be torches and pitchforks and a mad dash to the barricades (a la the OJ/FOX “If I Did It” trainwreck, which has now been cancelled), but there is this: now the BoA brand is being mocked by a very popular comedian and an alternative guitar icon in a way that effectively positions the bank as the anti-brand of choice for millions. A former student of mine told me a few minutes ago that he was going to call his friend, who’s in a very popular band, to suggest that they start covering the BoA version, too.
Wow – how very viral.
There are lessons here. For one thing, corporate meetings ain’t Vegas (what happens there doesn’t necessarily stay there), and for another, when you do something that you think is funny, you need to be sure that your key constituencies agree with you. If the Pat Boone crowd you work with is laughing but your customers are more the Green Day type, you might oughta seek some external validation. (And if you need to be told this, you’re probably in the wrong line of work to start with.)
Time will tell whether this achieves the sort of mythic status of, say, the Appalachian is Hot Hot Hot debacle, but as somebody who doesn’t believe art’s higher purpose has anything to do with moving product, I can only hope so.
Death might not end your career, but you’ll have to forfeit creative control
Cobain beats Elvis as richest artist (deceased)
By Andrew Gumbel in Los Angeles
Published: 25 October 2006
Death is not always the dumbest of career moves, especially if you are a rock star of enduring appeal. Kurt Cobain, the one-time frontman for Nirvana who committed suicide in 1994, earned $50m (£25m) over the past year, according to Forbes magazine’s annual list of Top-Earning Dead Celebrities published yesterday.
That figure catapulted Cobain into first place, beating the most reliable of posthumous money-spinners, Elvis Presley, as well as a predominantly musical dozen of also-rans including John Lennon, Ray Charles and Bob Marley. (Story.)
Fascinating stuff. For my part, I’d like to earn a bit of money before I die. But that’s just me, I guess.
The full top ten looks like this:
- Kurt Cobain ($50m – £26.3m)
- Elvis Presley ($42m – £22.1m)
- Charles Schulz ($35m – £18.4m)
- John Lennon ($24m – £12.6m)
- Albert Einstein ($20m – £10.5m)
- Andy Warhol ($19m – £10m)
- Dr Seuss/Theodor Geisel ($10ms – £5.3m)
- Ray Charles ($10m – £5.3m)
- Marilyn Monroe ($8m – £4.2m)
- Johnny Cash ($8m – £4.2m)
Oddly, this list arrives at a time when I’ve been thinking about a related issue – the question of control in the image business. Once you begin cooking for the Kennedys you lose a great deal of your ability to control your own brand, and every time I see another dead celeb being danced around like a grotesque digital marionette hawking product, I have to tell you, I get a little queasy. John Wayne. Humphrey Bogart. Steve McQueen. And now Audrey Hepburn, expressing herself to sell skinny black pants for GAP.
We live in a world where people become brands and identities are routinely co-opted by the demands of celebrity and commerce, and it’s a little disturbing to realize that if I became famous, video of me shot today could be deconstructed and reconstructed after I die and put in service to things I would never support in life. Hell, by that point they won’t even need video – just give them a couple photographs and they’ll create the rest.
Aren’t there some pretty powerful ethical questions in all this? Sure, a lot of the income in that list above issues directly from the continued sale of the work the artists produced while they were alive, and that’s fine. But there ought to be a line somewhere, right? For instance, all recording artists have outtakes laying around. Songs that aren’t released, often for good reason. If an artist chose not to release a song while alive, isn’t it unethical to cash it in after his/her tragic death?
This question is actually part of a much larger issue I’ve been pondering lately – has the “digital revolution” completely annihilated the possibilty of controlling message and image? Well, that’s a rhetorical question. The real conversation needs to address the negotiational strategies and tactics that have to replace old modes of control (primarily a marcom and PR question) and the ethical implications of image and visual communication (on the ad side).
Hmmmm….
Need some TV time?
So, you look at the situation and realize that you need to make a short-term TV buy (or up the frequency of an existing buy). To quote one of my favorite cartoon dogs, “Ruh-roh.”
As Dr. Denny notes over at 5th Estate, thanks to an election that’s mounting in importance to both parties, there isn’t any air time to be purchased.
According to a report from Broadcasting & Cable:
[The $1.6 billion] exceeds initial forecasts of $1.4 billion and approaches the $1.61 billion spent in 2004, a presidential-election year. “Candidates may have more money to spend than there is time to buy,” says Evan Tracey, COO of CMAG. [emphasis added]
Wow. Good news for broadcasters, bad news for those who didn’t plan ahead.
Of course, this is only likely to effect smaller, local marketers, but there are possible implications to be considered past the 2006 election cycle:
- Broadcast outlets have to take the political money, regardless of whatever impact it might have on their customers. This is especially true in an environment where multiple factors are undercutting the value (real and perceived) of traditional media as a marketing tool. It’s always dangerous when you have to say no to those who pay your bills on a regular basis, though.
- There’s a lesson here for the big national advertisers, too. This is likely nothing compared to the frenzy we’re going to see around the 2008 elections. They might want to think about pushing out their planning and buying even further than usual, because by April of that year there might be no time left. Hard to say at this point, but if I’m in charge of the planning process, I’m going to assume the worst, and then add three months additional lead time on top of that.
- Finally, if you’ll indulge the social/political/media analyst in me for a second, what might this all mean for the news coverage emanating from the broadcast outlets? Mass media facing eroding credibility as marketing channel – check. Political spending a reliable and lucrative source of income – check. Political controversy drives the urgency to spend – check.
Hmmm.
Small event illustrates big-time lesson
Last weekend I tripped across an almost archetypal case study of what can happen when a business does everything right on the traditional branding front, but pays too little attention to the customer’s hands-on interaction with the brand.
My wife and I drove up to Raffaldini Vineyards in the heart of North Carolina’s emerging Yadkin Valley wine country for the winery’s Second Annual Italian Festival. Continue reading
The local angle
I live in the North Carolina Piedmont Triad, a thriving little 12-county market that includes Greensboro, Winston-Salem and High Point. Like most similar markets, there’s a keen interest in growth – for obvious reasons. And I’m fine with that – we’re all in favor of improved economic and cultural opportunities.
But sometimes I wonder what kind of pictures local leaders and developers have in their heads when they imagine how they’d like their city to be. The Triad Business Journal has a running poll inviting reader input on a rotating series of issues facing the market, and today’s question really jumped out at me: Continue reading
WTF branding moments
I attended a great show last night: Jeffrey Dean Foster & the Birds of Prey, with the legendary Mitch Easter opening for them. Free show, three blocks shut down, end of summer celebration, the whole nine yards. (More on the show, which was really wonderful, especially once the rain hit.)
Anyway, events like this always have plenty of sponsors. The local civic development sponsoring body has banners out, and three or four key corporate backers have their logos and messaging displayed prominently, according to the size of their financial investment. Pretty standard stuff. Continue reading
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