A few years ago I found a radio program playing locally called the Forbes Radio Program. It was business focused and only played in Utah on weekends. The host was Gordon Deal, and I loved the program because it was entirely focused on business and the economy. It was kind of like NPR’s Marketplace show, but even more so. But…
Advertising and Marketing
Commentary on bad advertising, good advertising, lame marketing techniques, advertising services, business marketing and advertising, outdoor, radio, TV, print, local, direct, and so much more.
First of all, if you spell “fluorescent” as “flurorescent” or “flourescent” then you’re not an idiot. At least, not unless I am too.
Moving on, this is a product review of one of the most basic products known to American mankind–the light bulb. I say “American” mankind because there are still countries today where most people don’t have electricity and…
It is entirely possible that someone in management at Starbucks one day thought “You know, our country really needs more people to get out and volunteer to help their communities and the people around them. Wouldn’t that be great if we could encourage that? What if we gave away a free drink to encourage that kind of behavior, and then…
GM Goodwrench has been running a series of radio ads that have gotten progressively more and more annoying until I can’t contain myself anymore and have to vent. They’ve all featured a rock song in the background with the lyrics “I can’t stop thinking about it”. The song is annoying enough, as though I and other motorists just can’t get…
In no way is this an attack on anyone…well, maybe it is, but if it is, I’m attacking myself as much as anyone else.
This is for all you designers. You creative types. You who work with branding. You people at the advertising, marketing, and design firms and who, in the 80s and 90s, wore thick-rimmed glasses and black turtlenecks.…
18
Jun
Laundromat Marketing
Unless you’re a laundromat owner or know somebody who is, you can entirely ignore this post.
If you’re a laundromat owner, then it’s likely you’ve got some sort of budget for marketing your laundromat, and most of that marketing budget probably goes towards yellow pages and coupons in Money Mailer. That is, if you do any marketing at all other…
I just became aware of a trademark/branding issue that affects someone I know. I don’t know the guy well, by any means, but I know who he is, and I figured “Hey, I should probably let this guy know about this, just in case he’s interested.” So I went to his website, clicked through to his contact page (how about…
Now honestly, who would create an ad like this and honestly think “Yes, this is the type of woman who needs to lose 25 lbs.”
Not that this topic is new. The controversy over marketing, its effects on young women, the apparent rise in diseases like anorexia and bulimia and the subsequent need for eating disorder treatment programs…
You’re probably not like me, but if you are, you wonder how people are able to spend thousands of dollars per month on a billboard that can’t be read by anyone in a moving car or which is so ugly as to make customers less likely to buy the advertiser’s products. For those of you who feel my pain, I…
This post is a question, not a statement. The question is how does one go about marketing a high-quality B2B product or service to customers who are at best price-sensitive, and at worst just plain cheap? Add to the situation that the product/service is a new offering, and the marketplace is already crowded with offerings that claim to be high-quality.…
I am not a professional copywriter, but I know when I don’t understand something. I respect those companies that can clearly and concisely communicate what it is they do and I admire the skills of the copywriter or marketer who creates good messaging. Getting your message across to the majority of recipients shouldn’t be a measure of excellence but rather…
Getting a link from Digg’s homepage can mean tens or even hundreds of thousands of people visiting your website. A public relations consultant can get 100 or 1,000 times the normal value of a press release if they can somehow get it on Digg’s homepage, where links to content on other websites stay or go away depending on how many…
The Delta Center is no more, long live the…Energy Solutions Arena?
Those who know me know that I’m not into mainstream sports. The worst date I’ve ever been on…well, second worst, was when my soon-to-be-wife took me to a BYU basketball game. I was miserable the entire time and couldn’t wait to leave. The only part I was…
The title is not “How to Create Controversy,” it’s “How to, Create Controversy.” Or should that be a semi-colon instead of a comma? I can never remember.
Based on purely unintentional and anecdotal experiences, I’ve come to the conclusion that if you want to drive more traffic to your blog and get more comments there are two ways to do…
I’ve become fascinated by what companies do when they are having serious problems, especially when they include advertising as part of their survival strategy. My fascination stems from how many of these “We’ve got to turn things around, fast!” advertising campaigns merely confirm to the public that said company is not just in trouble, but their demise is already a…
Many technology (and engineering firms and auto manufacturers for that matter) have a fundamental misunderstanding of why people buy things. Some people buy a product instead of a competing product because they’ve researched the technical specs, features, capabilities, etc. and for those reasons they feel one product is superior to another. But the vast majority of consumers (i.e. the general…
I recently was invited to participate in a marketing research study on blogging. The study was conducted by Nora Ganim Barnes, Ph.D., Chancellor Professor of Marketing and Director, Center for Marketing Research at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth.
Pet peeves? Yeah, I’ve got a few. One of them has to do with being poorly marketed to. I don’t mind people marketing to me, but for the sake of Pete do your research and use your basic intelligence to create something that will have at least a chance of reaching me.
This post is in no way related to a previous post in which I promised free iPods to anyone who referred a search engine optimization client to MWI.
This is about something you’ve probably heard of, may have participated in, or maybe you just thought it was a scam. I thought it was a scam, or at least something…
Don’t you hate it when you’re almost finished with a blog post and then you accidentally hit the keystroke to go back a page in your browser, and when you hit the forward button it reloads the page and you lose everything you typed? Arrgh! So, as I was saying…
I just stumbled onto Ignition Consulting Group the other day,…
I often wonder how it is that adults can so easily forget what it was like to be a teenager. I think about this frequently, because I frequently see marketing and advertising campaigns, designed to target the 13-20 year-old demographic, that are so completely out of touch as to be damaging to the brand, product, or service being marketed.
One…
Sure, there’s nothing new about an online magazine, they’re all over the place. But I’ll bet you probably haven’t seen one like Worked Magazine.
Leave it to skaters to think “Well, what if the online magazine actually looked and worked like a real magazine?”
Go to http://www.workedmagazine.com/, and then click on the right where it says…
Have you heard the Training Table’s radio ads lately for their low-carb burgers? When I say they’re a little behind I don’t mean that’s what you get from eating them, I mean they missed the boat, they’re not on the ball, they’re not with it, they’re a tad bit off.
18
Jun
CEOs Who Blog
Just saw a link to a page of CEO bloggers on Paul Allen’s blog.
http://www.beam.tv/beamreels/reel_player.php?XkNbYWSwTr
I don’t know who made this, I don’t know anything about it. I’m too lazy/busy to find out at the moment. But it’s hilarious and had to be posted.
15
Apr
Guerilla Marketing
What exactly is guerilla marketing? It’s a term used to describe marketing that is unconventional and generally inexpensive and maybe just a bit sneaky. It comes from the jungle’s of Central America where neo-Fascist rebels called Serbs engage in guerilla warfare, which is a type of advertising campaign designed to undercut the local phone companies and free Guatemala from its…
15
Apr
Mail Order Chickens
Another entry in the saga of “attraction-based marketing”–Mail Order Chickens.
http://www.mailorderchickens.org/
Despite the fact that I’m incredibly busy at work, I couldn’t help but spend 15 minutes looking at this bizarre website. Apparently it has something to do with social causes related to Ghana, IMF, the World Bank, and Christopher Walken.
I’m sure someone else is doing this but I’m going to start my own one of these days–The Bad Billboard Project.
Basically I’m going to stop my car on the freeway in the middle of traffic whenever I see a bad billboard and take a photo with the digital camera I haven’t bought yet and then I’m going to criticize…
A few months ago we started house-sitting for my in-laws. Part of the deal is that we have to pay the bills for Dish TV, which comes with Tivo. Actually, I’m not sure if it’s Tivo, but evidently Tivo has done a good enough job with branding that I don’t know the name of any of the competing services.
In…
“And sometimes…it’s all about the gold.”
Overstock.com is a Utah-based online retailer. They believe in not paying an ad agency to come up with their ads, but rather soliciting ideas from employees. Here are the results:
http://www.overstock.com/cgi-bin/d2.cgi?PAGE=staticpage&page_id=2440
:: Update :: The specific commercial I refer to in this post has been removed from the page I link to above. Maybe…
