2007 May archive at Gypsy Bandito

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Archive for May, 2007

Marketing, PR, Advertising, Branding… and Sex

Published May 29, 2007 in PR, Advertising and Marketing. 1 Comment

So when I started my career, I was aiming for Journalism, got shanghaied into PR, eventually moved on to marketing, and now branding is probably my favorite aspect of any project I get involved in. About the only thing I haven’t dabbled in is advertising — which is a total lie because I help develop properties and products that advertisers can use to disseminate their message.

Nonetheless, I still have trouble drawing lines to distinguish each of the four. It seems to me that anyone who specialize in one, knows a considerable amount about the other, and has probably even specialized in at least one of those others at some point in their career. In fact, when I attended Geek Dinner Montreal, I thought the question would be a great ice-breaker. All I learned, however, is that:

which ever of the four someone specializes in is the one that they are most likely to say is the most important (usually on some technicality or for some specious reason).
and asking a question like that encourages people to take you for an idiot, so that there’s then no way that they’ll listen to your own input as to how you might think the hierarchy or relationship between the four might differ from how they see it.

In any case, I came across these great images via Pronet Advertising. They were on Ads of the World, and probably elucidate some of the key differences between the four better than any know-it-all-industry-insider has ever been able to.

In fact, I think the only one that falls short of the truth is the branding one. Whereas the other three exemplify how it’s accomplished, the branding slide simply shows the result. Mind you, I believe that the only way that branding could be better depicted in this specific context would probably not be appropriate for the audience. After all, it would probably have to entail the girl watching footage of the man being a great lover, or at least a friend saying to her “Didn’t Sheryl say that he’s a great lover?”

One way or another, I think whoever it was that was behind this one knew what they were talking about. It’s funny to think, though, that as one of the most powerful marketing tools, sex is also particularly useful in delineating the difference between marekting, PR, advertising, and branding.

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Swicki — Social Media Search Product

Published May 25, 2007 in Search Engine Marketing and Social Media. 2 Comments

If you’re not reading this though your feed reader, you might have notice the big, bad search box across the top of the site. It’s a Swicki, and I just wrote an extensive review on the product as a whole for the SearchAnyway Blog.

What I said was overwhelmingly positive. In fact, I think that it has the potential to be a Google-personalized-search-killer. I’m not saying that it could be a Google-killer, I’m just saying that as far as the rationale for personalized search is concerned, I think that Swicki does it better. First, it is a lot more flexible and give the user a lot more choice — a point that Google’s personalized search product receives a lot of scathing criticism about. Secondly, instead of being micro-cosmic like Google’s personalized search, it harnesses the whole idea of Web 2.0. In fact, I’m surprised that with all their forward-thinking PhDs, Google didn’t think of this first. After all, their other products seem to similarly work along the lines of social media. Then again, Google might just end up buying this up too.

What remains to be seen, however, is exactly how Eurekster handles its branding strategy. The Swicki product is still in its beta phase, and my guess is that only geeks and online marketers really know that its there right now. What they need to do next is get out of beta and makes sure that people know that they’re out there. There are two ways that I can think of right off the bat in which they can do that.

First, they need to approach celebrity bloggers about trying out the product. In fact, they need to form concrete relationships with these publishers so that (1) the swickis they install on their sites work off of meaningfull tags, and (2) these publishers actually put in the effort to make sure that an online search community really does grow around their Swicki.

Secondly, they need to tap into the backlash against personalized search. There are two main camps here, and a considerable overlap in membership between the two: (1) those concerened about privacy, and (2) those who disagree with Google on how it enhances user experience. If they played the alternative-to-personalized-search card, I imagine that they’d be able to attract a lot of geeky-publishers who wouldn’t require as much coaching to turn their own swickis into online search communities.

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For Kids, By Kids

Published May 23, 2007 in PR. 0 Comments

You can probably all remember when Gap first had their PR troubles over child labor. It’d be interesting to know how Web 2.0 would have affected the first page of Google results on the company if the scandal broke today. Nonetheless, it’s a scandal that won’t be forgotten any time soon, and the satirists over at The Onion are using online video to remind us of it.

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Breaking Off a Piece of “The Break Up”

Published May 20, 2007 in Advertising and Video. 3 Comments

I came across this little number on Logic + Emotion. It’s a commercial for Microsoft Digital Advertising Solutions. It was produced by a guy named Geert, and judging by the blog he set up to promote it, I’m really behind the curve on picking up on it.

Anyway, he wants to know whether he should make a sequel. I think that he should, but I think he needs to take a different approach if he is going to bother.

First of all, I don’t think that the sequel should follow these characters. He should engage new story lines — many of them. This would make the message seem that much more ubiquitous.

Secondly, he needs to learn from his own message that consumer just isn’t a sounding board and bear in mind that users are some of the most creative content producers around. Each sequel should have a distinctive feel.

Finally, he needs to really take that last point into consideration and see what he can do about engaging actual users. He needs to get them producing sequels. That’s what viral video is all about. It’s like Mitch Joel pointed out:

Marketers [will] best be able to gauge success not by how widely spread their creation was, but rather how many new iterations were created out of it and how extensively those spread.

Geert needs to really put his viral video to the test by seeing just how infectious it can be.

And oh yeah, he needs to stop posting the video in every single post of his blog. I get the whole SEO thing. I get the whole exposure thing. I get it, I really do. But it looks cheap and shameless.

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Viral Vimeo Part IV

Published May 16, 2007 in Video. 0 Comments

So here is the continuation of the Viral Vimeo Experiment that I was trying to conduct when things went awry. In the coming days, I’ll be filming a number of my colleages doing similar things.