Posted by truecreek on September 1, 2009 under Opinions. Everyone has them. | 
By Joseph Young
So are you a Marvel, or a Disney? The more and more I think about it, I’m a Marvel guy. Just can’t get enough of Iron Man. My wife Lin, is a Disney, without a doubt.
The acquisition of Marvel Entertainment by The Walt Disney Company was announced yesterday to great fanfare. It was just all over the map. You have to congratulate the PR folks. The whole introduction was very well done.
To think: the amount of collective creative talent that will be put in place upon the completion of this deal will be just incredible.
But is the deal weak? From today’s news, consider this:
- Sony Corp.’s Columbia Pictures is developing the next three “Spider-Man” sequels, starting with “Spider-Man 4″ set for a May 2011 release.
- News Corp.’s 20th Century Fox has the long-term movie rights to the “X-Men,” “Fantastic Four,” “Silver Surfer” and “Daredevil” franchises.
- Viacom Inc.’s Paramount Pictures has a five-picture distribution deal for Marvel-made movies, the first of which will be “Iron Man 2,” set for release next May. Paramount said it expects to continue working with Marvel and Disney.
Add to that, Sony and News Corp maintain their rights in perpetuity unless they fail to make more movies.
If these terms are true, that’s a BIG ouch to me. This can’t all be about merchandising, theme park rides and retail store locations, can it?
UPDATE: It looks like the comment above just might be true. According to BusinessWeek, Walt Disney CEO Robert Iger has stated that the deal is all about Marvel’s 5,000 plus characters, combined with Disney’s success with consumer products, theme parks and rights and license fees. The movies are going to have to wait.
Posted by truecreek on under More Dam News |
By Sharon Jayson
College students say social networking makes them more narcissistic, a national survey reports today — and they also believe their generation is the most narcissistic of all.
That’s what a majority of 1,068 college students said when asked about narcissism in a poll on social networking sites in June by Ypulse.
More than half (57%) said their peers used social networking sites such as MySpace, Facebook and Twitter for self-promotion, narcissism and attention-seeking. And 92% said they used MySpace or Facebook regularly. Two-thirds said their generation was more self-promoting, narcissistic, overconfident and attention-seeking than others.
The survey was done with Jean Twenge, associate professor of psychology at San Diego State University and co-author of The Narcissism Epidemic.
Other researchers, however, say self-promotion doesn’t have to be a negative.
“We all kind of put on our best face when presenting ourselves in social situations, online or offline,” says Nicole Ellison, an assistant professor at Michigan State University in East Lansing who studies social networking. “When good things happen to me, I put that on Facebook, and when bad things happen, I also put it on Facebook. It’s a structure to receive emotional support.”
Houston Dougharty, vice president for student affairs at Grinnell College in Grinnell, Iowa, says today’s students are altruistic and care about helping others, which doesn’t say “narcissism” to him.
“I think there’s a negative connotation to narcissism that I would not want to promote as a description of this generation.” Social networking is “a celebration of individuality and sort of promotion of one’s own personality,” he says.
But Twenge says her research suggests growing narcissism in Generation Y, based on 40 questions used for decades. Scoring 21 or more indicates more narcissistic traits, she says. In the 1980s, one of seven scored in that range; now it’s one in four. “We see this change over time in narcissistic traits, but I was very interested to hear whether young people saw that in their generation,” she says.
Posted by truecreek on August 28, 2009 under Opinions. Everyone has them. |
Great article from Milan Martin. He speaks of the truth. If cultures don’t mesh well, it’s going to be a challenging creative business relationship. Been there and done that.
By Milan Martin
For the past several months, we’ve been in the throes of a pitch. A big pitch. We really wanted to work with this client, so we threw ourselves into it. Multiple creative teams across several offices, customer focus groups, brand videos — the whole nine yards.
If there’s one thing we’ve learned about pitching over the years it’s that you absolutely have to show your true colors. With this pitch, we went to great lengths to give these prospective clients a taste of what life would really be like for them if they chose us.
When they visited our agency, did we take them to Chez Francois for lunch? No. We had Shake Shack brought in. Double cheeseburgers, black-and-white shakes and fries. On paper plates. Because that’s us. We’re burger-eating, jeans-wearing, show-you-an-idea-even-if-it’s-not-completely-baked-yet kind of people. And that doesn’t work for everyone.
Misrepresenting your agency culture or your personality in a pitch would be like convincing a beautiful girl to marry you based on your common love for Michael Bolton. You may have won her hand, but you’ve got a lifetime of Michael Bolton ahead of you. And if you weren’t a Michael Bolton fan to begin with, the thrill of “victory” will soon fade with each rendition of “When a Man Loves a Woman.”
On the same token, we asked as much from them. How do you see agencies in the context of your marketing organization? What would your current agency say about you? Talk to us about how you like to work. SHOW us a day in the life!
So throughout the pitch process, we made several visits to this prospect’s corporate headquarters. It was a nice building in a corporate park in suburban New Jersey. At first glance, nothing out of the ordinary. But each time we drove into the parking lot we noticed something strange: large groups of people in business suits walking in gang-style through the parking lot, some engaged in gregarious conversation with each other, some more stoically focused on some unknown mission.
We never really said anything to each other about it, but each of us, we later found out, was trying to imagine where these people were walking to. To us city folk, we can’t imagine not having at least two Starbucks within a half-block walk, so maybe these poor suburbanites were walking to the closest Starbucks, three miles down the road. Or were they on a “Blues Brothers”-style mission from God?
The big pitch day came and went. Two questions rested heavy on our minds. Did we do everything we could to win? And where the hell were all those people in the parking lot going?
Well, we won the business, and in our first, much more casual, immersion meeting with these great, shiny, new clients, they opened the floor to us for questions. At this point, one of our account guys raised his hand with a furrowed brow. “Here we go,” I’m anticipating, “a smart question, maybe about the detail behind their segmentation or their CRM program.”
“So, uh, yeah. Where are all the people in the parking lot walking to?”
Keep in mind, the contract’s not even signed at this point, so for a brief moment in time I was a little worried our first question of this newly christened relationship wasn’t more … strategic.
“Where do you think they’re going?” the head client responded with a grin.
(“Don’t say mission from God. … Don’t say mission from God.”)
After a minute or two of us awkwardly trying to guess, they finally revealed that it was simply a part of their corporate culture. They drive to and from work, have desk jobs and work long hours — this just gets their heart rates up for a few minutes a day.
Logical enough.
As luck would have it, just then our new clients realized that this was their team’s scheduled “walk” time. “You want to see our culture, do you?” the head client offered. So off we went. Walking. Around the parking lot. In 91-degree heat.
And you know what? It was an amazing way to get to know each other, cut through the formality established by the oak in the conference room and have a “date” out of school. One last chance — for both parties — to “speak now or forever hold their peace” (or at least for the length of the contact).
Fortunately, we don’t mind getting a little sweaty. But if we were the type of people that were worried about staining our Louis Vuitton shirts or scuffing our Prada shoes (we’re more Gap kind of people), we wouldn’t exactly fit within their culture.
They invited us into their culture. And we fit into theirs the way they fit into ours (they’re big fans of Shake Shack).
Since then, each time we’ve visited, there’s been time allotted on the agenda for a “walk around the parking lot.”
And so far, it’s a very happy client-agency relationship.
Now, you’ll no doubt ask: “If you had won the business and in that pre-contract meeting found out that you had nothing in common and didn’t really like each other, would your agency have walked away from the deal?”
Maybe, maybe not. I guess it would depend on the severity of the culture riff. But what I will say is that if you’re looking to establish deep, long-standing relationships with your clients, sharing your culture, honestly and openly, in the courting process is critical.
Otherwise, you may be in for a whole lot of Michael Bolton. And nobody wants that.
Posted by truecreek on August 17, 2009 under More Dam News |
Nice concept. Excellent execution.
Posted by truecreek on August 13, 2009 under More Dam News |
By Stacy L. Wood and C. Page Moreau
New high tech products are a way of life for today’s consumers, but many innovative new products face a special hurdle to marketplace success: their complexity makes them difficult for consumers to learn how to use. While consumers may desire the functionality of a particular new product feature—say, the ability to hot-sync one’s mobile phone’s calendar feature to a desk-top computer’s calendar program—learning how to use such a feature may take some learning effort. How do consumers react to the learning curve? The answer often is, “not well.” Consider your own experience with complex products such as computers, software, mobile phones, mp3 players, TiVo, etc.
Likely, our own experience mirrors what has been shown through marketplace research—consumers’ expectations of usage difficulty have caused a significant number to delay purchases, while actual usage difficulty has caused many to return purchased products.
This research investigates the consumer’s new product learning process. What we find is that learning has an influential emotional component. Specifically, learning to use a new product can evoke an emotional response, (independent of the emotions produced by the attributes or benefits of the product itself), and that learning-based emotional response can influence product evaluations over time.
We used two empirical studies to demonstrate this consumer-centric process of innovation. The first study was a laboratory study examining participants’ reactions as they learn how to use an innovative new PDA.
The second was a longitudinal quasi-experiment examining participants’ reactions to a new web-based course management interface throughout the course of a semester. While the frustrations of wrestling with a new product’s instruction manual are familiar, three surprising findings emerge from these studies.
First, positive or negative emotions that arise from the learning process are not related to the products’ benefits (or lack thereof) but are independent assessments of the process of learning. In other words, difficulty in learning to use a product can create negative emotion even if the product is good (i.e., has strong net benefits). For example, a consumer may find a new product feature is both desirable and works well, but still have a difficult time learning how to use that feature. While the product features themselves might generate positive emotions if they are good, the learning process creates distinct emotions that are independent of the more traditional “consumption emotions.”
Second, although these “learning” emotions are process-oriented, they still have a significant and stable influence on product evaluations. In this way, we evaluate a product more positively when it offers a smooth learning process, independent of our assessment of the product’s net benefits. While it may not seem rational (since the pain of learning is only experienced initially and the product’s use may far outlast this initial learning period), these learning emotions can impact more stable overall evaluations of the product. Perhaps, as consumers, we blame a product when it has made us feel stupid and reward a product when it has made us feel smart.
Third, the emotion experienced by the consumer during this learning process is driven primarily by the consumer’s expectations for learning and early use. Thus, a consumer may experience the same challenging learning experience as positive if she anticipated difficulties prior to use or as negative if she did not. This last finding suggests that consumers’ emotional experiences can be influenced by both managers, via the early formation of expectations, and by the consumer’s own product-related expertise. Consumers with expertise in the product category will be differently impacted than novice consumers.
Marketers or salespeople may be tempted to make unreasonable claims about how easy a new product is to use as such claims are likely to increase a consumer’s likelihood of trial. But this research shows that setting unreasonable expectations for ease of use can cause a backlash of negative learning emotions that will impact the consumer’s evaluation of the new product.
Marketers must take care to encourage trial while setting fair expectations. How might this be done? Best Buy’s new Geek Squad program may be one humorous way to remind consumers that it sometimes takes a “special kind of person” (i.e., a nerdy technophile) to set up complex consumer electronics. The mere presence of the Geek Squad offer may serve to set consumers’ expectations so that, if they set up the product on their own, they are happy, but they are neither surprised nor upset if they find that they need to call in the experts.
Given the growing problem of innovation discontinuance (i.e., when consumers reject a new product after purchase or trial), understanding how marketing communications (e.g., product demonstrations, advertising, programs) and consumers’ own expertise interact to influence expectations is important. Especially for quickly evolving electronic and high tech products, product returns are costly both in terms of retail logistics (e.g., lost sales, restocking costs, repackaging and selling used products) and lost opportunities.
If a consumer has successfully made it through the early steps of the innovation adoption process—awareness, evaluation, and purchase—and then rejects the innovation post-trial, he or she may be unlikely to consider other alternative choices or related innovations in the future or, even worse, may be a source of negative word-of-mouth.
Posted by truecreek on July 29, 2009 under Opinions. Everyone has them. |
The Great Depression, by far the biggest economic downturn of the 21st century, taught an entire generation of Americans a horrible, yet valuable lesson. After Black Tuesday, when the stock market totally collapsed, life for many of these people would never be the same.
Jobs were gone overnight. Banks failed. Entire industries were devastated. Commodity prices plunged, taking with them so many family farms. Tent cities sprung up all around our nation. Life had never been harder.
As a nation, the shock to our collective system was so severe that our grandfathers and grandmothers became cynics. No one trusted the banking system. People started hoarding cash, hiding it anywhere they could. We became a nation of savers, simply because we didn’t want to expose our families to a repeat of the disaster.
And they never forgot.
The same shift in our financial psychology is happening again. After seeing their collective portfolios dive 40 to 50%, people are now on the sidelines, watching the market, willing to accept next to nothing in return simply because they are afraid to lose even more.
Savings rates have increased by ten fold, according to some statistics. Six fold at the very least. Consumer’s behavior has changed and in my opinion, for good.
My clients are seeing this firsthand. We are too. Financial conservation is back in vogue. The average homeowner is doing everything they can to clean up their household balance sheets. This popular frugality has permeated virtually all segments of our population, from the poor to the very wealthy.
And we are learning a lesson we will never forget. Just like they did back in the 1930s.
For those who think that we will bounce right back to the ways we did things before this hard recession started, think again. We are witnessing a sea change in the way the consumer deals with the economic realities at hand.
I find it very hard to believe that those lessons will be quickly forgotten.
Posted by truecreek on July 21, 2009 under Opinions. Everyone has them. |
As advertisers, we are all aware that it is becoming increasingly difficult to cut through the clutter of the multitude of messages we are receiving daily from those companies that want to share their wares with us.
So many in fact that it has become extremely difficult for an advertiser’s message to stand out from the pack. Add in the prospect of the increasing use of DVR’s and other time shifting technologies and you have a real advertising challenge on your hands.
There is however, one advertising tactic that is gaining greater acceptance. That tactic is cinema advertising.
In “The Arbitron Cinema Advertising Study”, the evidence is very clear: consumers are showing increasing acceptance of movie theater advertising. Younger viewers and those who frequent movies now see the on-screen commercials “as part of the entertainment experience.”
What a wonderful treat. We finally have “a willing and attentive audience.”
According to the study, more than 45% of the respondents had gone to the movies at least once, with 60% of those watching the commercials prior to the start of the movie. It was also determined that the perception of the method of advertising is positive, with over 63% stating that they “did not mind the advertisements they put on before the movie begins” with the younger audience being even more receptive.
So, give cinema advertising a try. Better yet, just give us a call and we’ll get things moving.
Posted by truecreek on July 20, 2009 under Opinions. Everyone has them. |
Seth tells it like it is.
By Seth Godin.
Sometimes people push back on posts of mine they don’t like by telling me I’m out of bounds. Somehow, they say, I’ve crossed the boundary of what I’m allowed to write about. They are angry that I’m now writing about something outside my defined area.
I’m usually taken aback by this, because I didn’t realize I’d actually agreed to any boundaries.
Brands run into this all the time. Consumers give them boundaries. Nike isn’t allowed to make a computer, for example (unless they partner with Apple). It turns out, though, that marketers decide to believe in these boundaries a lot more than consumers do.
A beautifully made product or service (one that we agree with) gets a lot of slack, regardless of its source. Virgin is a great example of this. Branson can market cola and airplanes with the same brand, largely because we like what he makes. In Korea, there are a few massive brands that are ‘allowed’ to market anything they like, from dishwashers to cars. Google is allowed to market the very cool new Squares, of course.
The real problem is that when marketers believe they are going out of bounds, the work they do tends to be lousy. Starbucks attempt at chocolate, for example, wasn’t as good at being chocolate as their coffee is at being coffee.I think that’s because the marketers at Starbucks feel they have permission to care about coffee, but chocolate is merely an extension, an additional profit center, not a passion.
I’m not arguing for carte blanche craziness with your brand. American Express can do travelers checks and credit cards and could have done PayPal… but no, they probably shouldn’t launch a line of whiskey any time soon. I am, however, arguing that once you have permission to talk to someone, finding new products or services for them is a smart way to grow.
Posted by truecreek on June 23, 2009 under More Dam News |
1. As for what potential suppliers shouldn’t do: “It’s the basics. Never lie or cheat us. You shouldn’t make a promise and not be able to keep it. Nothing disappoints us more than have an empty shelf and have to explain that to a customer.”
2. “We are really in the business of taking care of our customers.”
3. He suggested that the CE industry should “focus on simplicity [and] get away from bells and whistles. The majority of customers not tech-heads. They just want a good experience and good things to happen.
4. Categories that are introduced which are too complicated,” he noted, “won’t come into market.”
5. “Commoditization does not mean sameness to me. It isn’t a four-letter word. For the customer it means ‘I can afford it and understand it.’ This industry thrives on innovation … and the faster consumers understand technology the faster it reaches more people.”
6. “Our model is not to become a high-cost A/V specialist. Everyone has their place and the mass customer is more educated than ever before.”
7. And when it comes to new technology in the near future that will drive business, Severson said “the digital shift in media,” flat-panel TVs that feature IPTV, 3-D TVs and mobile video should all be standouts.
8. Looking back, Severson was pleased with the relatively smooth DTV conversion. “The industry, in conjunction with CEA, retailers, government and broadcasters, did a great job.” He said the biggest surprise for him was that “converter-box sales would be a big blowout item. We were really wrong and underestimated what the government and the broadcasters would do on awareness to see how much it would happen. It was a big surprise and a phenomenally successful item.”
Posted by truecreek on under The Work |
A real nice piece of work from Rebecca, a fine writer and member of The Creekbed.
Posted by truecreek on under Opinions. Everyone has them., Research |
Well, studies are starting to show that people are beginning to feel better about things and that’s a good thing for all kinds of businesses.
Just go to the mall and look at all the shopping bags people are lugging around. Traffic at car dealerships is up. My local Panera is busier than ever.
Are your customers starting to see the good side of life again?
Posted by truecreek on June 22, 2009 under More Dam News |
By Ryan McCarthy.
Sorry, Paul Simon, Kodak is taking your Kodachrome away.
The Eastman Kodak Co. announced Monday it’s retiring its most senior film because of declining customer demand in an increasingly digital age.
The world’s first commercially successful color film, immortalized in song by Simon, spent 74 years in Kodak’s portfolio. It enjoyed its heyday in the 1950s and ’60s but in recent years has nudged closer to obscurity: Sales of Kodachrome are now just a fraction of 1 percent of the company’s total sales of still-picture films, and only one commercial lab in the world still processes it.
Those numbers and the unique materials needed to make it convinced Kodak to call its most recent manufacturing run the last, said Mary Jane Hellyar, the outgoing president of Kodak’s Film, Photofinishing and Entertainment Group.
“Kodachrome is particularly difficult (to retire) because it really has become kind of an icon,” Hellyar said.
The company now gets about 70 percent of its revenue from its digital business, but plans to stay in the film business “as far into the future as possible,” Hellyar said. She points to the seven new professional still films and several new motion picture films introduced in the last few years and to a strategy that emphasizes efficiency.
“Anywhere where we can have common components and common design and common chemistry that let us build multiple films off of those same components, then we’re in a much stronger position to be able to continue to meet customers’ needs,” she said.
Kodachrome, because of a unique formula, didn’t fit in with the philosophy and was made only about once a year.
Simon sang about it in 1973 in the aptly titled “Kodachrome.”
“They give us those nice bright colors. They give us the greens of summers. Makes you think all the world’s a sunny day,” he sang. “… So Mama don’t take my Kodachrome away.”
Indeed, Kodachrome was favored by still and motion picture photographers for its rich but realistic tones, vibrant colors and durability.
It was the basis not only for countless family slideshows on carousel projectors over the years but also for world-renowned images, including Abraham Zapruder’s 8 mm reel of President John F. Kennedy’s assassination on Nov. 22, 1963.
Photojournalist Steve McCurry’s widely recognized portrait of an Afghan refugee girl, shot on Kodachrome, appeared on the cover of National Geographic in 1985. At Kodak’s request, McCurry will shoot one of the last rolls of Kodachrome film and donate the images to the George Eastman House museum, which honors the company’s founder, in Rochester.
For McCurry, who after 25 years with Kodachrome moved on to digital photography and other films in the last few years, the project will close out an era.
“I want to take (the last roll) with me and somehow make every frame count … just as a way to honor the memory and always be able to look back with fond memories at how it capped and ended my shooting Kodachrome,” McCurry said last week from Singapore, where he has an exhibition at the Asian Civilizations Museum.
As a tribute to the film, Kodak has compiled on its Web site a gallery of iconic images, including McCurry’s Afghan girl and others from photographers Eric Meola and Peter Guttman.
Guttman used Kodachrome for 16 years, until about 1990, before switching to Kodak’s more modern Ektachrome film, and he calls it “the visual crib that I was nurtured in.” He used it to create a widely published image of a snowman beneath a solar eclipse, shot in the dead of winter in North Dakota.
“I was pretty much entranced by the incredibly realistic tones and really beautiful color,” Guttman said, “but it didn’t have that artificial Crayola coloration of some of the other products that were out there.”
Unlike any other color film, Kodachrome is purely black and white when exposed. The three primary colors that mix to form the spectrum are added in three development steps rather than built into its layers.
Because of the complexity, only Dwayne’s Photo, in Parsons, Kan., still processes Kodachrome film. The lab has agreed to continue through 2010, Kodak said.
Hellyar estimates the retail supply of Kodachrome will run out in the fall, though it could be sooner if devotees stockpile. In the U.S., Kodachrome film is available only through photo specialty dealers. In Europe, some retailers, including the Boots chain, carry it.
Posted by truecreek on under Opinions. Everyone has them. |
In this day and age of more and more functionality in hand-held devices and the like, I thought this little bit of research from CNN was very telling. Most of the folks are like me. I just want the damn thing to ring.
While not the most profitable segment, I’m sure, with almost 50% of the base looking for the only the basics, the cell co’s need to market to that group as well.
Question: Does your cell phone have the features you want?
Yes, it’s perfect: 30% 76,933
No, I wish it had more stuff: 21% 54,065
I just want it to ring: 49% 127,040
Posted by truecreek on June 5, 2009 under Opinions. Everyone has them. |
The other day, I had the chance to see a new infomercial by one of those new debt consolidation companies. The spot was produced in such a fashion as to look like CNBC or some kind of financial program, complete with two crawls on the bottom of the screen.
But what I really have a problem with is the placement of video within the spot of the President speaking behind a lectern, as to insinuate some sort of endorsement. Now, the disclaimer is in a small, ghosted font across the bottom of the video, and it says the usual stuff, but that’s not enough.
The spot is a blatant attempt to position the product, which in this case is debt consolidation, as a government sponsored entity.
Where is the FTC?
While you’re at it, shut down the robocallers and the junk faxers, too.
Posted by truecreek on June 3, 2009 under Opinions. Everyone has them. |
Posted by truecreek on June 2, 2009 under Opinions. Everyone has them. |
If you haven’t noticed yet, the rates are coming down at a lot of four and five star hotel properties. In some cases, way down.
Almost all of the finest hoteliers are offering discounts to their customers, with some at levels never seen before. Plus, many of them are packaging, with spa deals, food discounts and the like. Vegas is dirt cheap.
So the next time you are planning a trip, be sure you look into some of the properties you wouldn’t have considered, due to price. You might be pleasantly surprised.
Posted by truecreek on May 29, 2009 under More Dam News, Research |
Another article by Mark Dolliver. Essentially the same thing happened during the adoption of the internet. It took a while, but eventually the greatest amount of growth in use was coming from the older population. In some cases, much older.
Most growth at social networking sites comes from users 30 and older.
By Mark Dolliver
NEW YORK Though social networking still skews young, the practice has been gaining ground among Americans who are on the wrong side of age 30.
Indeed, while noting that use of such Internet sites remains most common among the young, a report on the subject by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press says that “nearly all of the recent growth in social networking has come among older people.”
The report, analyzing survey data gathered at the end of March and through much of April, shows 43 percent of 30-39-year-olds saying they use social-networking sites — about twice the proportion (21 percent) who said so in a December 2007 survey. The increase has been proportionally even steeper among 40-49-year-olds (from 11 percent then to 29 percent now) and 50-64-year-olds (from 6 percent to 16 percent). The current figure is highest, at 70 percent, among the 18-29-year-olds. But that’s nearly unchanged from the December 2007 poll, when 67 percent of respondents in that age bracket said they use such sites.
If you think the older folks join a social site and then seldom revisit it, think again. When people who use the sites were asked how often they check in on them, the 18-29-year-olds had the highest proportion (at 23 percent) saying they do so several times a day. But the number of respondents saying they do this was quite sizable among the 30-49s (15 percent), the 40-49s (16 percent) and those 50-plus (14 percent). When you combine the several-times-a-day tallies with those saying they check in on the sites “about once a day,” the gap between the 18-29s (48 percent fall into those two categories) and the 30-39s (41 percent) isn’t terribly wide. (The equivalent figure for social networking’s 40-49s is 36 percent, and it’s 34 percent for those 50 and older.)
The same survey inquired into respondents’ attitudes about the wisdom of sharing personal information online. The poll’s wired respondents split almost evenly between the 43 percent saying it’s “a good thing” and the 44 percent saying it’s “a bad thing” that the Internet “makes it possible for people to share pictures and personal things about themselves with others.”
Men were significantly more likely than women to say it’s a good thing (49 percent vs. 37 percent). And, as you’d expect, younger respondents were more apt than their elders to hold that opinion. The “good thing” vote was 62 percent among the 18-29s, 48 percent among the 30-49s, 35 percent among the 50-64s and 19 percent among those 65-plus.
Though 67 percent of the poll’s social-networking-site users came down on the “good thing” side of the debate, 23 percent said they regard such info-sharing as a bad thing.
Posted by truecreek on under More Dam News |
We’ve been discussing this exact same thing with clients for several months now and it seems like we’re almost there. Brand advertising on TV will once again be back in vogue, with some nice budgets behind it.
By Mark Dolliver
Will ad agencies need to wait until the recession has certifiably ended before they see a rebound in their clients’ spending? A survey released today by the Association of National Advertisers gives a glimmer of hope that marketers’ expenditures will turn upward sooner than that.
In online polling last month among members of the ANA’s Brand Marketer Leadership Community panel, 68 percent of respondents said they plan boost their media budgets as the economy recovers; 41 percent said they’ll increase their spending on social networking/word of mouth. As for the timing, 73 percent said “they would ideally implement these increased marketing activities three to six months before the recession ends, and an additional 16 percent as soon as it ends.”
A renewed focus on long-term brand-building will represent a shift from what many marketers have been doing as the recession deepened. The ANA’s report of the findings says two-thirds of marketers “have shifted their emphasis to more short-term strategies in the last six months.” Such a shift is reflected in the answers respondents gave when asked to cite the areas in which they’ve cut back. Fifty-six percent said they’ve cut media budgets, and 41 percent said the same about sponsorship/events activities. The activity most likely to have been increased amid the recession: “pricing deals,” cited by 47 percent of respondents.
For all the flux in marketers’ use of media, TV remained atop the standings when respondents were asked to say which media are effective for building brand equity. Sixty-four percent cited TV. Though down from 80 percent in a similar February 2007 poll, that still put TV ahead of online (61 percent) and “guerrilla/word of mouth/buzz marketing” (57 percent). Lagging farther behind were magazines (51 percent, down from 67 percent in 2007), radio (30 percent, down from 36 percent), outdoor (26 percent, down from 35 percent) and newspapers (19 percent, down from 36 percent). Social media garnered the most mentions as “the media channel that marketers would like to use but have not yet been able to implement.”
Elsewhere in the survey (conducted in conjunction with marketing-services firm ‘mktg’), respondents were asked about the factors they watch most closely as indicators of “brand health” — i.e., the degree to which brand equity is increasing or declining. “Customer experience/satisfaction” was cited by 48 percent of respondents — up from 37 percent in the 2007 poll. “There is less focus on traditional metrics such as brand image and awareness, which tend to be lagging indicators of brand health,” says the ANA report of the findings.
Tags: Ad Business, Advertising, advertising agency in alexandria virginia, advertising agency in DC, advertising agency in northern VA, advertising agency in Northern Virginia, brand, brand strategy, Commercials, Research, strategy, television advertising
Posted by truecreek on May 27, 2009 under More Dam News |
By Jonah Bloom
There are many ads today from our imperiled banks, insurance companies and automakers telling us that we can still trust them and should still buy their products. But there’s one word consumers haven’t heard much that might serve these companies better than their current dirges: sorry.
That thought came to mind as a rash of “We’re sorry” ads broke out recently across the pond in the U.K. As a native of Britain, I should note that being sorry is our national pastime. (My parents, who are always profoundly apologetic, often on my behalf, fondly recall the time I briefly knocked out my 10-year-old self by walking into a parking meter and came to fuzzily apologizing to said inanimate object.) I’ve often wondered whether this propensity has anything to do with some deep-seated national guilt at the many atrocities committed by our former empire.
Regardless of its origins, these days it manifests itself in nothing more serious than an underwear manufacturer apologizing for charging bigger-breasted women more for bigger bras. Yes, Marks & Spencer recently ran a national campaign apologizing for this. The headline, of course: “We boobed.”
This mea culpa hit more or less at the same time London’s Evening Standard newspaper, relaunching under new ownership, ran a major outdoor campaign saying sorry: “Sorry for Losing Touch,” “Sorry for Being Negative,” and so on.
Sunny Delight also decided to confess its sins. It’s running ads in a number of U.K. women’s weeklies, with the wording: “Britain’s mums told us where to stick the artificial ingredients. And it wasn’t in the bottle.” The drink has been relaunched as a healthful option.
Apologizing in ads isn’t new. Under fire, it’s crisis 101. In the auto industry, we’ve seen many variations, from Renault apologizing to the French people for its various missteps in the early ’90s to various apologies alongside product recalls to GM’s semi-apologetic “Road to Redemption” campaign.
Yet despite a mountain of evidence that American people feel they’ve been let down by car companies, banks, insurers and, indeed, corporate America as a whole, we haven’t heard a whole lot of sorry.
Doug Wojcieszak, author of an apology-strategy book called “Sorry Works!” and founder of a company by the same name, says it’s not a cultural thing, and that, in fact, sorry works in the U.S. “It works very well here because of our immigrant culture. Many of us screwed up elsewhere, that’s why we’re here. Americans get mistakes — they just don’t get or like coverups.”
Perhaps the problem is CEOs and lawyers don’t want to admit culpability for anything that’s gone wrong. But even that doesn’t stand up as an excuse, according to Mr. Wojcieszak. Most of his work has been in the litigation minefield of health care, where he’s building a growing body of evidence that failure to apologize is often a key factor in malpractice becoming a lawsuit, and, conversely, that apologies defuse more potential legal situations than they create. “Even senior health-care executives are starting to understand that apologizing actually takes away the urge to litigate,” he says.
Of course, as any savvy marketer, or properly-adjusted human being, knows, there are two conditions that have to be met for contrition to mean anything. You have to mean it, and you have to be able to show meaningful ways in which you’re changing whatever it was you’re apologizing for.
But assuming that many of the people at America’s bailed-out banks and automakers probably are pretty sorry about way they mismanaged their businesses about now, I can’t help thinking that it’d be a valuable start for a bunch of companies generally regarded as having been too arrogant to see the mistakes they were making to share their regrets with the public.
Posted by truecreek on May 25, 2009 under More Dam News |
By Eve Tahmincioglu
The blogosphere has begun to chronicle a disturbing phenomenon in offices around the country — endless stretches of uninhabited desks and cubicles where friends and colleagues used to sit.
“I was wandering around the office, as I tend to do when I need to look busy but need a break, and I noticed that we have a lot of empty cubicles around,” writes Office Scribe in her Asleep Under My Desk blog recently. “… I think we need to start renting these empty cubicles out. I made a crack on my way back from lunch how we need a doctor who can see patients in one of the cubicles.”
Even though she’s trying to joke about it, Office Scribe admits she’s bummed out by the emptiness.
Office Scribe, who didn’t want her name used for fear of losing her job as a sales assistant for a major travel company in Chicago, has seen about 60 of her co-workers get the axe since December.
“When the economy tanked, we had two sets of layoffs, and the people we were sitting next to are gone,” she says. With so few people left, there are now large swathes of empty cubes between departments. “You have to go searching for people. It’s kind of like we have little tribes now.”
Alas, Office Scribe may feel lonely, but she’s far from alone.
Mass layoffs throughout corporate America have created cubicle and desk graveyards in office buildings from coast to coast. After years of shrinking office space for employees, the recession has brought about a new trend — more room for workers to stretch out.
The average square foot per office occupant has risen to 435 square feet so far this year, from 415 square feet in 2008, according to International Facility Management Association, or IFMA, in a soon-to-be released report.
“There is simply more space per person in the workplace, meaning there are fewer people occupying a greater amount of space, and this is just over the course of a year,” says George Deutsch, a spokesperson for the association. “We attribute this to the economic downturn and layoffs our nation is currently dealing with.”
It’s creating morale problems for employees, not to mention logistical nightmares for companies and the facilities maintenance staff.
Posted by truecreek on May 22, 2009 under More Dam News |
By Eliot Van Buskirk
TuneCore is poised to partner with Amazon’s on-demand CD-printing-and-distribution service, Wired.com has learned. It’s a deal that could put powerful new physical publishing options in the hands of musicians, even as the world goes increasingly digital.
The service is expected to be announced Thursday, linking Amazon with TuneCore, a novel digital distribution startup that’s made waves signing the likes of Trent Reznor, Keith Richards and other stars seeking a way out of the label system, as well as slews of garage bands and hopefuls on their way up.
Tunecore will charge just $31 a year in upfront fees to handle a 10-track CD from pressing to delivery, passing all other costs through to the buyer. In other words, the service promises to remove nearly all of the risks of short-run CD manufacturing, which can cost musicians hundreds or even thousands of dollars for discs that rarely sell enough to cover expenses.
“As an artist, you have unlimited physical inventory, made on demand, with no upfront costs and worldwide distribution to anyone who orders it at Amazon.com,” said TuneCore CEO Jeff Price, formerly of indie label SpinArt Records (Pixies, KaitO, Apollo Sunshine).
The deal comes as physical music sales are tanking and as major CD distributors like Amazon seek to evolve to a digital model. Yet Price suggests that there may be life left in good old physical storage media, with a slight twist. Why would people buy music on CD if it’s also available in iTunes, Amazon MP3 and other digital stores?
“Why not?” responds Price, who says he believes the costs are so low it will makes sense for lots of bands to try it out. “Let the music fan decide how they want the music.”
In addition to competing with downloads and streaming, one obvious drawback to this model is that you can’t sell an on-demand CD at shows, where enthusiastic fans are most likely to pick one up. But Price says labels wondering why artists still need them now have yet another thing to worry about. When you can sell CDs on Amazon for 30 bucks, who needs a label? Certainly not Reznor, an early TuneCore adopter who once paid the service 38 bucks to distribute a quadruple-length album through Amazon MP3.
Amazon already offered on-demand CD printing through its CreateSpace acquisition, for a flat fee of $5 per disc. TuneCore’s massive footprint means far more bands will use that service, because it’s now just another checkbox in the system they already use.
For TuneCore, the deal expands its primary business helping indie artists get digital distribution through online outlets such as iTunes, Napster and Amazon MP3. TuneCore will now compete directly with CDBaby, the current leader in low-volume CD manufacturing and distribution. CDBaby charges $278 for 100 discs, although it recently lowered its minimum order to just five copies.
Brooklyn-based TuneCore gave us a peek inside its accounting system, which shows the most successful artists on the service regularly earning upwards of $20,000 per month. Chump change this is not.
As with its digital distribution service, TuneCore passes 100 percent of Amazon’s payout to the artist — about 40 percent of the retail price. If one of Amazon’s 80 million customers buys your 10-song CD on Amazon for $8.98, you’ll receive $3.59. After selling just nine discs, you’re in the black. TuneCore takes care of the UPC code, artwork, bar code, CD label design and so on, so that artists can concentrate on writing songs — and cashing checks.
The on-demand CD partnership with Amazon is just the latest in a long string of successes for the 2006 startup, whose distribution catalog dwarfs those of the labels.
“There’s more music released in one day on TuneCore than there is on a major [label] in the course of a year — in three days, more than all the majors combined, and within a month, all the majors and indies combined,” explained Price. “TuneCore artists have generated over $32 million in revenue from music sales over the past 22 months.
“Some of the artists, frankly, have been selling more than the Billboard Top 40 artists,” he added. “It’s just not being picked up by the mainstream places [like SoundScan] that track sales.”
As their label contracts expire, some fairly heavy hitters are signing up for TuneCore. In addition to Reznor and Richards, the service now handles distribution duties for Joan Jett and other luminaries. But unsigned bands are always found among TuneCore’s top sellers. For instance, Never Shout Never sold over 250,000 songs in 60 days, as well as 30,000 T-shirts (also handled by TuneCore).
Universal Music Group — the biggest record label in the world — has also partnered with TuneCore to offer additional services to its indie artists. For $50, Universal’s Grammy-winning producers will master your music for CD before it gets distributed. And for another as-yet undisclosed fee, Universal’s art department will also design the high-resolution PDF that iTunes now requires with each album submission — all they need is four images and the names of your songs.
Posted by truecreek on May 21, 2009 under The Work |
Posted by truecreek on under Opinions. Everyone has them. |
By Maki
I’ve signed up for a Twitter account a long time ago and used it sporadically because it never really did appeal to me. Last week I decided to give it another chance and installed Snitter, a desktop application for Twitter.
I started using it actively and gradually developed an avid interest. I think Twitter is a manageable process that can be adopted for all types of lifestyles, busy or inactive. You’ll just need to integrate it within your normal workflow. It’s addictive but once you understand how to use it, it’ll be a very effective tool indeed.
Having read a great deal of other articles on Twitter, I decided a do a quick summary of all the ways you can use Twitter for both your professional or personal life. Some of these methods go beyond the use of Twitter as a lifestreaming device:
1. Personal Branding. Twitter is a social media platform you can use to build your personal brand. It has the primary benefit of developing a casual persona and establishes you as a social personality that is connected and approachable. As Twitter adoption increases, new users will be drawn towards well established Twitter personas.
2. Get Feedback. Need an alternative perspective on how a website looks or the right course of action to take? Blast out a message asking for advice and you’ll receive replies from other users. This collective intelligence can be used as fodder for articles or projects.
3. Hire People. Need a good logo designer, marketer or programmer? Send out a message asking for recommendations. This is a very quick and easy way to hire freelancers or even companies based on familiar recommendations.
4. Direct traffic. Twitter can be used to get traffic to your websites or the sites of friends. If you ask your friends to tweet about it, the message will spread faster and further as other active users pick it up. There is a viral nature to all types of news, even on a site like Twitter.
5. Read News. Twitter users often link to useful sites or articles and can be a source of scoops and alternative news. You can also subscribe to Twitter feeds for specific websites/conferences, which allows you to receive and view content quickly. This is very useful for active social news participants.
6. Make New Friends. Like any other social network, Twitter has a built-in function for you to befriend and track the messages of other users. This is an easy way for you connect with people outside of your usual circle. Make an effort to add active users you find interesting. A Twitter acquaintance can be developed into a long lasting friendship.
7. Network for benefits. Twitter can be used as a socializing platform for you to interact with other like-minded people, especially those in the same industry. It can be used to establish consistent and deeper relationships for future benefits such as testimonials or peer recommendations.
8. Use it as a ToDo list. Use Twitter to record down what you need to do while you are away from the computer. Mark the tweet as a favorite to file it for referencing. Another alternative is to use an Online task management service that is synced with Twitter. One example is Remember The Milk.
9. Business Management. Twitter can be used as a company intranet that connects employees to one another. Workers can liaise with each other when working on group projects. Particularly useful when certain workers go out often in the field. Updates could be set to private for security reasons.
10. Notify Your Customers. Set up a Twitter feed for the specific purpose of notifying customers when new products come in. Customers can subscribe via mobile or RSS for instant notification. Twitter can also be used to provide mini-updates for one-on-one clients.
11. Take Notes. Twitter provides you with an easy way to record important ideas or concepts you want to explore further. Include links relevant to ideas you want to explore. Note taking can also be done offline via mobile applications.
12. Event Updates. Businesses can use Twitter as a means to inform event participants and latest event happenings/changes. This is a hassle-free way of disseminating information, especially when you don’t have the means to set up a direct mobile link between you and the audience
13. Find Prospects. Twitter can be used as a means to find potential customers or clients online. Do a search for keywords related to your product on Twitter Search and then follow users. Tweet about topics parallel to your product and close prospects away from public channels by using direct messages or offline communications. Discretion and skill is needed in this area.
14. Provide Live coverage. Twitter’s message size limit prevents detailed coverage of events but it can allow you to provide real-time commentary which may help to spark further discussion or interest on the event as other Twitter users spread the message. Very useful for citizen journalism.
15. Time Management and Analysis. Twitter can simply be used to keep a detailed record of what you are doing every daily. This might be boring for others but this type of usage is useful when you want to analyze how you spend and manage your time.
16. Set Up Meetings. Twitter can help you organize impromptu meetups. For example, you can twitter a message while at a cafe, event or art gallery and arrange to meet fellow users at a specific spot. It’s an informal and casual way of arranging a meeting.
17. Acquire Votes. Send a link to your stories you’ve submitted in other social news sites like Digg. Sometimes your followers will vote up the stories because they agree with it. This allows you to acquire more support for your efforts on other social media websites.
Posted by truecreek on May 19, 2009 under Opinions. Everyone has them. |
Another shot of my Mom, this time striking the pose in a moss-green lace and white broadcloth tank-top swimsuit and a beach coat with a zipper front. The fashion photo, by Leombruno-Bodi, appeared in the May 1954 Glamour.
Just amazing what you can find on the web, sometimes when you’re not even looking.
Posted by truecreek on under The Work |
Tags: Advertising, advertising agency in alexandria virginia, advertising agency in DC, advertising agency in northern VA, advertising agency in Northern Virginia, b to b, business to business, Comcast, design, four color print, medical advertising, True Creek
