As seen on this TwitPic page. Funny.
It’s an advertisement for BeenUp2, what looks to be a new microblogging service that lets users post pictures and videos from camera phones “while your friends and family chit-chat about it live!” Looks kinda interesting, but I’m already buried up to my eyebrows in both social networks, microblogging services, and socialmicrobloggingservicenetworks for now.
Wow, the reviews aren’t treating Samsung’s iPhone-non-killing “Instinct” too well, so here’s a new tactic from Sprint: pay people to put the Instinct in a “home movie” on YouTube. Notice that the language doesn’t specify “your” Instinct; just someone’s Instinct. Any Instinct you can find.
Funny how iPhone owners appear more than happy to put their phone in YouTube home movies, spoofs, testimonials, and otherwise “zomg iPhone!” spots for free.
Fast Company has an in-depth piece about Microsoft’s new ad campaign to rebrand as cool. Redmond sidestepped its typical ad agency for this endeavor, opting for Crispin Porter & Bogusky:
Nothing is doing more to carve away at Microsoft’s reputation — and contribute to its loss of market share — than the assault launched by Apple two years ago in the form of the “Mac vs. PC” spots featuring The Daily Show satirist John Hodgman. The ads became immediate pop-culture fixtures, spawning more than 1,000 video spoofs on YouTube and taking home last year’s Grand Effie, the ad industry’s highest honor for effectiveness. “Nobody messes with anyone in the tech industry the way Apple has messed with Microsoft,” says Enderle. “It’s the first time I’ve ever seen a major national campaign that disparages a competitor, and the competitor just sits back and takes it. If somebody tried to do that to Oracle, you wouldn’t be able to find the body.” Gartner media research analyst Andrew Frank credits Apple — whose annual media spend is less than half of Microsoft’s nearly $1 billion budget — with single-handedly rebranding Microsoft “as a kind of self-conscious and self-absorbed nerd that is out of touch with the normal lives and needs of its users.”
Yes, for the record, I quoted a publication that quoted Rob Enderle. He may be a frigtard when it comes to Apple products, but he’s pretty spot on here with his assessment of Apple’s “Get a Mac” campaign.
Even though Microsoft is switching gears and going with a different and immensely successful agency, though, I can’t help but think it’s still missing the mark. Fast Company says Apple spends less than half the money Microsoft does on marketing each year, and yet its ads are so much more effective. Maybe Microsoft took note of that nugget of detail, but this $300 million push with a new ad agency screams that it’s still getting caught up in minor details and not paying attention to the bigger picture.
Apple’s marketing works because its products (generally speaking) really are more appealing, easier to use, cooler, and [insert whatever your non-marketing reason is here]. People aren’t buying Mac products just because Justin Long usually gets the upper hand. It’s because Apple’s great (and notably simple) marketing turns people on to great products. And those people show Apple stuff off to their friends and family because they found computer stuff that works and that they can get excited about.
The fact that Dell, HP, and the world’s other major PC manufacturers have practically had to force Microsoft into selling XP for at least another four years says that people aren’t excited about Vista. Chopping Vista’s retail price spoke a few volumes on its own as well.
If Microsoft is spending $300 million to rebrand itself as “cool,” it had better be spending an exponentially greater amount on listening to complaints from businesses and consumers, and then fixing all the things that are wrong with its products. A tech company will not get consumers’ attention with marketing anymore if its products can’t back it up.
No, not the credit cards. I mean the “Starbucks Card,” the equivalent of a gift card that you can “register at the website” and auto-deposit a daily, weekly, or monthly allowance onto.
There’s been no real benefit to these cards since Starbucks began offering them (aside from the gift card aspect and interesting designs, of course). Dumping an allowance onto the card didn’t really do anything but let Starbucks make interest off your money.
But in a Westminster, CO Starbucks today I saw a small flier that introduces some new benefits to registering and using these cards. Specifically:
Finally, some nice perks to using these card. We buy enough beans to make the free tall drink worth it, and free refills mean I can afford to spend a little more time working away from the house.
Now, Starbucks, let’s talk about those calculatedly painful-after-45-minutes hard wood chairs.
Insightful post from Daniel Jalkut, the developer behind MarsEdit and FastScripts, on the convenient and simple power Twitter provides for user-powered marketing:
The point, to me, is that the kinds of conversation being facilitated by Twitter are exactly the kinds of talk that foster product endorsements, explicit and otherwise. While publicly blogging your affection for a product takes some deliberation and determination, it’s easy as heck to quip “FastScripts, FTW!” in a moment of delight, or “I’m really digging the new FlickrExport” as you put a product through its paces. Spontaneous declarations of truth are a major part of Twitter culture, and this works perfectly for word of mouth marketing.
New services for tracking topics and conversations over Twitter appear almost daily, it’s really quite a spectacular phenomenon. It’s equally interesting to hear exactly how people like Jalkut are using these tools.
For Chrissake, someone drop-kick their marketing dept over to Viacom so they can take a shot at re-branding MTV into the ground already.
[tags]branding, marketing[/tags]
Intel announces plan to unify product naming scheme | Ars Technica - But! But! Customers like having billions of options and crazy naming schemes! It gives the folks down in marketing something to do!
Hey, I didn’t write it - whoever designed and approved this image for Microsoft.com did.
From Google’s AdSense blog with An effective pairing of AdSense and e-commerce:
the site’s owners decided to use Google AdWords to drive qualified traffic to their site
I love how advertisers are changing the language in this age of increasingly targeted marketing to more or less now read: ‘publishers attract more readers because they use our advertising tools.’ When in the history of modern media has any marketing agency been able to claim that readers are flocking to a publication because of the advertising?
Incredible presentation by Alan Thys that explores how much our thinking around brands, products and experience needs to change in a world where everyone is a reporter, and people trust their friends and community more than a company or news anchor.
via Logic+Emotion
Linkblog
2 days ago 