Posts Tagged ‘advertising’
9 Digital Marketing Mistakes I Won’t Make Next Year – Advertising Age – DigitalNext December 30th, 2009
Original here: 9 Digital Marketing Mistakes I Won’t Make Next Year – Advertising Age – DigitalNext.
- I will not get seduced by any new digital marketing toy just because some industry pundit thinks it’s the coolest thing to hit the street. Nor will I believe every promise made by every new marketing technology company.
- I will not abandon common sense in digital marketing and be blinded by digital agencies’ promises that their “new” campaigns will go viral and get millions of people engaged. I will continue to listen to my gut and if it sounds too good to be true, that’s a red flag warning I will heed.
- I will not abandon newspaper, magazines, radio and other forms of traditional media if it is the right vehicle. No matter how sexy digital media may seem because of the perceived lower cost, I will continue to create integrated programs that weave together the best of both the traditional and digital worlds.
- I will not give up my attachment to e-mail marketing. Sorry folks — but e-mail marketing done well drives real business results. If your e-mail campaign did not work, either you had a bad list or an inadequate call-to-action or maybe your agency did not know what they were doing.
- I will not be fooled into thinking that the ad market is going to rebound in 2010. Nope. The ad market will continue to be buffeted by the tides of an evolving economic landscape and by consumers’ ever fickle attraction to new tech toys like mobile devices. These trends will continue to dampen ad revenue for publishers for some time to come.
- I will not blindly follow Google as they chow down every tech industry from telecom to digital publishing in their relentless march toward digital dominance. In the process, they stifle competition and kill real innovation by companies who deserve to succeed.
- I will not diminish my slavish devotion to data-driven marketing no matter what new platforms come out that can behaviorally target any audience any way I wish. I know, I know — the BT folks can slice and dice an audience so many ways that it makes a marketer salivate. But unless I can see, touch and feel the data, I will pass for now.
- I will not start following every Tom, Dick and Jane to gain more Twitter followers. OK, so I only have about 185 folks following me but at least I know they read what I tweet. Quality, not quantity, is what drives social media.
- And my final un-resolution: I will not try appear to be “30-something” (with a suitable amount of hair product) just because I love digital marketing. I know that the median age of people in digital marketing tends to be 27, but my depth in this space has yielded real-world, hard-won recognition. What you see (gray hair and all) is what you get.
Tags: advertising, digital
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[awesomeness] is believing November 15th, 2009
Microsoft released Halo 3 a couple of years ago; making it the largest ever opening for any “entertainment” product – topping Spiderman 3′s 3-day opening weekend and Harry Potter 7′s initial (including pre-order) sales, too.
The campaign won the Integrated Grand Prix at Cannes in 2008, and the Jay Chiat Planning awards this year. It’s brilliant.
It does what a good campaign should do – make you buy into the idea – make you BELIEVE. Watch the case study below:
They even had Neill Blomkamp, who would later direct the 2009 movie District 9 produce a set of three short films (below) called Halo 3: Landfall.
But one campaign doesn’t make a great idea, or a great brand. Microsoft’s follow-up to the Halo franchise is a prequel – Halo 3 ODST – the game deals with the days leading up to Halo 3. The Covenant discovers the location of Earth and launches an attack on New Mombasa in Africa.
This time, instead of playing the human supersoldier Master Chief, you play Rookie, one of the Orbital Drop Shock Troopers (ODST) . While there are many gameplay trailers, the one I’m putting up here is the official trailer to the game.
How do you follow-up Halo 3 / BELIEVE? With Halo 3 / Drop into Hell.
And you have here below the making of the trailer. Attention to detail. Brilliant.
Tags: advertising, awesomness, Believe, branding, Halo 3, microsoft, ODST, Prepare to drop
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[awesomeness] is understanding who you are November 8th, 2009
one brand, two very different routes.
BMW used to be The Ultimate Driving Machine. Then someone decided that was not good enough. So BMW have decided to be all about Sheer Driving Pleasure.
A bit of a mistake, perhaps.
BMW has always had a distinctive edge because of the idea of ‘the ultimate driving machine’. The cars, feats of engineering, have always had a stance exuding presence to the point of arrogance.
That has been an underlying narrative in past initiatives like The Hire series of films (one linked below here), or any of the other commercials like the M5-ThrustIISEC ad or the Balance ads for the 5 Series.
The creative translation of Sheer Driving Pleasure is ‘Jump for joy’. Nice idea, if you are Volkswagen or Mini or Smart; but brand suicide if you’re BMW.
BMWs have always been the car with a point. They’re performance machines. They’re fast. They growl. They push you to be more. If you look up brandtags, you will find the most prominent tag for BMW happens to be a**hole. For a very good reason.
Past communications understood and built on this, but ‘Jump for joy’ is almost an apology and a promise of rehabilitation to quieter pastures for the brand. I’m curious to know where the brand will go next – I hope it’s someplace closer to The Ultimate Driving Machine again. We know that BMW’s had to do a bit of defending against Audi, but this campaign cedes ground that it took BMW many years to make its very own.
Change is good when it makes sense, but I don’t know if Marketing @ BMW did a reality check before they decided to proceed with this exercise. It’s like Churchill deciding to deliver his “we shall fight them to the beaches” in limerick. Schade, as they might say in Germany.
As a side note, Mercedes put out a new ad for its updated E-Class, a little more hard-edged that you would expect from the three-point-star.
Watch this space, it’s going to get interesting in 2010.
Tags: advertising, awesomeness, BMW, brands, identity, jump for joy, marketing, narratives, planning, strategy, the ultimate driving machine
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