NevOn

Transforming corporate identities beyond the razzle dazzle

The Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas certainly was the place this week for many companies to announce a dazzling array of new tech products, alliances and ventures.

The best place I found to keep up with what was going on was the excellent Engadget CES blog which had a non-stop stream of posts. Another good resource - CES Blog 2006 from VNU. Certainly far better efforts than the CES' rather lame blog.

Amongst all the new products and cool things being talked about, I found two corporate announcements of particular interest, one from Eastman Kodak Company and the other from Intel Corporation.

A press release (reg required) on Thursday afternoon from Kodak has Antonio M. Perez, Chairman and CEO, talking about the future of digital imaging and a new alliance with Motorola. Buried down in the body text is this small paragraph:

[...] Perez also unveiled the latest evolution of Kodak’s brand logo. This new look moves the Kodak name out of the traditional yellow box; giving it a more contemporary design, a streamlined rounded look and distinctive letters. This introduction is the latest step in the company’s broad brand transformation effort, which reflects the multi-industry, digital imaging leader Kodak has become.

And here's that new logo alongside the one that's familiar worldwide.

For such a major transformation goal, I found it surprising that Kodak revealed their new brand image in such an understated way. Little specific information in their online press center to give you real insight into their strategic thinking and what this means for organizational change other than the corporate-speak in the press release (so you could think it's no more than a bit of razzle dazzle) and a page about the evolution of the logo over the years.

Perhaps this is indicative of Kodak's corporate style and the way they do things. I found much more information in a feature yesterday in the Rochester Democrat & Chronicle (where the image above comes from) which gives you quite a bit more insight:

[...] The new mark, based on a customized typeface, is designed to give the company a contemporary look but be flexible enough to apply in new ways and new venues across Kodak's varied businesses - everything from tiny handheld digital cameras to computer software to the letters on Kodak buildings around the world.

The logo is one part of Kodak's larger effort to redefine its brand-name identity, through advertising, public relations, supplier and partner relationships and other in areas. "We want to break out of the box, in a lot of ways," says Betty Noonan, director of brand management and marketing services at Kodak.

While this gives you some more knowledge, it doesn't give you any sense of how Kodak plan to break out of the box or in what ways.

Contrast this approach with that of Intel, who pulled out all the communication stops to get their new message out to the world.

How to be an internet millionaire

Daily Telegraph: A student who hoped to graduate without debt by setting up a website offering internet advertising space has made £519,000 in only four months. Alex Tew, 21, a first-year business management student at Nottingham University, said he hoped to achieve his aim of making a million dollars - £578,000 - early in the New Year. "I thought I might make a few grand but I've made a fortune," he said. "It's been a crazy adventure."

This is the story of the MillionDollarHomePage, an internet site Tew set up where you can buy advertising space at $1 per pixel.

As of today, Tew has sold 990,000 pixels. Now he's auctioning the final 1,000 pixels on eBay. Bids close on 11 January.

Does he really need a business management degree?

What is 'it'?

Designed by German engineers and developed in Sweden by renowned Japanese scientists.

It can hold 2,500 of your favourite songs.

It has sleek design and incredible handling.

It can even cook chicken.

What is it?

No spoiler in this post - visit What Is It? to find out.

Oh alright, a little hint: clever online advertising.

Micropublishing: The next wave for advertisers

In its 24 October edition, Business Week has an analysis of the recent sale of Weblogs Inc to AOL from the point of view of the potential for advertising in blogs.

Written by Stephen Baker, one of the bloggers on BW's Blogspotting, the article focuses on what it calls the "promising new micromedia model" where "blogs are cheap, easily updated, and can focus on a niche market with passionate followers - an advertiser's dream."

The interesting bit - how Weblogs can expand to meet advertiser demand:

[...] So [Jason Calacanis, Weblogs CEO] is counting on AOL to give him the resources and freedom to run a blog empire from his base in Santa Monica, Calif. The former publisher of the Silicon Alley Reporter has proven adept at quickly zeroing in on target audiences and hiring part-time bloggers from all over. Jim Bankoff, the AOL exec who negotiated the deal with Calacanis, wants Weblogs to develop loads of new blogs, including sites with audio and video channels. "Micropublishing is the next wave," he says.

Indeed. The article also mentions the deal announced last month between Gawker Media and Dutch publisher VNU to launch European versions of Gawker's Gizmodo gadget blog (if you visit Gizmodo, note the little flags at top-right of the screen - links to the localized versions).

Some good comments to the article, especially this contra one:

The "blogosphere" will disappear much like the "webosphere" did in the mid-'90s. Once the e-commerce benefits were noted and capitalized upon, the geeks were out, the F500 in. No reason to think blogs will be that much different. Web 2.0 may remain the domain of the true believers - wikis and whatever comes next - but consider blogging to have already jumped the shark. Few consumers will really know or care about the difference between a corporate Web site and a corporate blog. The core of transparency will likely go by the wayside on many of these blogs once "big media" has taken control. Discerning consumers may be able to note the product placements and other BS in posts, but non-discerning ones won't - and that's the marketing payoff. I say this as someone with one company that has a blog as its only Web site and another company that consults on blogs. Hope I'm wrong, but I don't think so.

That's not a bad argument, although not one I agree with - I don't believe for one second that the blogosphere will disappear as the commenter envisions it might - and neither does Jason Calacanis. Take a listen to a 20-minute podcast where Stephen Baker interviewed him last week following the announcement of AOL's acquisition.

The broadband siren call

We all want fast always-on internet, right? Not a measly 8-megs-fast (that's what I get here in The Netherlands), something blisteringly fast:

Give me speed that terrifies the old and exhilarates the young. Let me download life with wild abandon. Make it ludicrously affordable, that I may infuriate my friends (but make it easy for them to switch once they have seen the light). Bind me not by annual contracts, but convince me to stay loyal. And give me 24/7 telephone support in case I ever feel lonely.

Don’t cease to innovate.
Don’t give me less than the best.
And don’t ever cap my dreams.

Compelling stuff. Great ad copy from Be's sponsor page in the PodcastCon UK brochure given out at the conference in London on Saturday, promoting Be's 24-meg broadband internet service in the UK.

Mind you, 24 megs seems positively pedestrian compared to the 100 megs that you can get in Japan or in South Korea - a statistic that Yat Siu mentioned when speaking at Les Blogs in Paris last April.

Whatever the speed, make it...

Exhilarating to many.
Frightening to some.
Compelling to all.

Brand creativity on show

I spent a couple of hours yesterday strolling through the 11 halls of the RAI Center in Amsterdam taking in the sights and sounds of the IBC 2005 exhibition.

This is a massive show. Imagine - over 1,000 companies exhibiting their wares occupying all 11 halls of the RAI. That's about 72,000 square meters (216,000 square feet) of exhibition space. Plus, there are outdoors exhibit areas.

My two hours yesterday was really a whirlwind tour; you need at least half a day if you want to spend any time on looking at a particular company's offerings and chatting with the reps on the stands.

So with my trusty Olympus C-3030 Zoom digital camera - only 3.3 megapixels but still pretty good after four years - I captured a good flavour of the show with shots of various exhibitors' stands and other things going on. Those 75 photos are online as a Flickr photo set.

One thing that always stimulates my curiosity is the tags or strap lines companies use with their logos. Especially with companies whose names are not that familiar to me, it's a fun exercise to view such imagery and think about my interpretation of them. What message(s) do I understand? How different might that be from the message(s) the companies concerned think they are communicating? I took quite a few photos of such logo-tag combinations, included in the Flickr set.

See what you think.

Alfa Romeo sponsors car blog

Italian blog portal Blogo.it has secured another first - Italian car maker Alfa-Romeo is sponsoring Autoblog.it from today, 1 September.

This is the first blog sponsorship deal for a European blog by a major automotive brand, Blogo.it said.

In a press release, Blogo.it's Luca Lizzeri said, "in January 2005 Autoblog.it had 20,000 page views in the whole month. At the end of August, page views were more than 25,000 per day, 500,000 in the whole month notwithstanding the holidays. And the 'back to work' growth record is very encouraging for September."

In July, Blogo.it announced a sponsorship deal with Ducati, the superbike brand, for its Motoblog.it motor bike enthusiasts' blog, the first sponsorship for a commercial blog in Europe.

Blogo.it certainly is blazing a trail in Europe in its success in attracting major commercial sponsorship for niche-interest consumer blogs.

Mars dog blog gets it right

With the focus on blogging in Europe and North America, it's good to have an opportunity to broaden one's horizon and gain some insight into contrasting uses of this medium in Asia from a business and marketing perspective.

Niall Cook reports on what two consumer product companies are doing with blogs as integral elements of advertising and marketing campaigns - Unilever with their Sunsilk shampoo brand in Malaysia, and Mars with their Cesar dogfood brand in Singapore.

In the case of Sunsilk, they have a character blog. What a pity. Such lame things are a waste of time, a view I've clearly stated before. But read the detail in Niall's post to make your own judgment.

Mars have done it right, as Niall reports:

[...] Mars, on the other hand, is doing some great things with the Cesar brand in Singapore, having launched My Cesar, "Your companion to online blogging". This blogging community encourages Singaporean dog owners to "create your own personal doggie blog where you can impart your thoughts about your favourite pooch."

Cesar could have done the same thing as Sunsilk. They could have set up a blog for the dog in the adverts, turning him (or her) into a canine character blog. But they didn't. They understand that consumers no longer want brands to talk at them, but give them the tools to talk to others.

Unlike a character blog, this approach creates genuine engagement. And that, surely, is what any company looks for.

More than ego-stroking the Top 500

ClickZ News: Feedster is floating a new top 500 list of blogs, ranked according to their accumulation of inbound links. Media buyers say they're watching the list, but they disagree on its value as a consideration tool for ad placements in blogs. The "Feedster 500," which challenges the long-standing Technorati 100 list and claims to contain "the most interesting and important blogs," will no doubt stroke the egos of many bloggers who appear on it.

Undoubtedly there's some truth in that last line. In my case, I'm really flattered to be in the list at number 221, now that Feedster got the right blog listed (see the comments to my post yesterday to understand that).

Yet at least one person thinks I'm a complete hypocrite after my post yesterday in which I questioned the validity of Feedster's list because it originally included my other blog, one that hardly appears on anyone's radar other than my own.

In an email, regular reader Joanne (I promised not to ID her more than that) gently asks, "How can you put the Top 500 logo on your blog after your post last night when you said you couldn't trust the list at all? Why should I trust it, or you?"

Those are good questions. In my reply to Joanne, I tried to give her some answers that didn't appear disingenuous (no doubt she'll tell me how successful that was) without being defensive of something I don't feel a need to defend.

Great resources for communicators

One blog that's in my RSS reader and which I regularly scan is Adverblog by Martina Zavagno. A great resource always full of interesting news and info about campaigns and on the global advertising and marketing scene.

Martina's put up two useful lists - one that lists advertising and marketing blogs, and another that lists advertising agencies who blog.

For PR agencies, look no further than the excellent PR Blogs List by Constantin Basturea. And if you'd like some insight from Constantin about all the many resources for communicators that he's created, have a listen to the conversation that Shel and I had with him a week ago.

Two professionals giving to the community. Great examples.

Logo nostalgia

If you have fond memories of some of the greatest corporate symbols of the past century that are no longer with us, Logo R.I.P is a terrific website to visit for a trip down memory lane.

This logo, for instance - the Robertson's Golly, a famous symbol in the UK for a range of market-leading jams and marmalades, disappeared from view just after the turn of this century. A victim of political correctness as much as changing social acceptance and adaptive marketing needs.

The imaginative website includes photos of many departed logos in graveyard settings as well as a book of condolences where you can leave comments with each logo listing. The 50 or so departed corporate emblems include those from well-known companies (some of which are also deceased) such as BP, NeXT, 3M, British Steel, Enron, Reuters, BOAC, Pan Am, Procter & Gamble, UPS, Delorean, Spratts, and many more.

The website is the online version of the book, Logo RIP: A Commemoration of Dead Logotypes, created by communications agency The Stone Twins in Amsterdam.

A great nostalgia trip with some great corporate designs.

Anti-drug web ads grab attention

Eye-catching, isn't it?

I spotted this web ad on the US News.com site when reading an article about corporate blogging (a very good and well-written article, by the way: see separate post).

The ad certainly grabbed my attention. Not only this one - the page also displayed two banner ads, one horizontal the other vertical. No way could you miss this message!

So what is the message? Clicking on the ad takes you to Parents: The Anti-Drug website, part of a US government drug prevention campaign:

TheAntiDrug.com was created by the National Youth Anti-Drug Media Campaign to equip parents and other adult caregivers with the tools they need to raise drug-free kids. Working with the nation’s leading experts in the fields of parenting and substance abuse prevention, the Campaign hopes TheAntiDrug.com will serve not only as a drug prevention information center, but also as a supportive community for parents to interact and learn from each other.

This is imaginative advertising. If the clear goal is for you to click on the ad, I would guess that the success rate must surely be in the high 90 percent range.

Once you've clicked through to the website, you're then presented with an equally-imaginative and nicely-designed site with information presented in a way that's easy to read. Not only that, the material itself is well-written, addressing the subject matter in a non-nonsense but objective fashion. The site offers its content in English and five additional languages.

Whoever's responsible for this campaign, the website and the advertising - kudos!

Ducati sponsors motorcycle blog

Italian blog portal Blogo.it formally launched Motoblog.it today, a new consumer blog on motorcycles with Ducati as the launch sponsor.

This is the first sponsorship for a commercial blog in Europe, says Blogo.it's Luca Lizzeri, and the first big sponsorship for a blog in Italy. It also represents Ducati's first step into the blogosphere. Ducati sells high performance motorcycles in more than 60 countries and has won thirteen of the last fifteen World Superbike Championship racing titles.

Blogo.it is the first and biggest nanopublishing company in Italy, now with 11 commercial blogs.

Details about the launch in Blogo.it's press release.

PR gaffe burns Wal-Mart PR director and agency

Daily Telegraph: The Wal-Mart publicity manager behind an advert that equated the retail giant to victims of the Nazis has resigned. Peter Kanelos, who had overseen public relations in Arizona and southern California on behalf of Wal-Mart, left his job yesterday, a few weeks after the company apologised for its PR gaffe.

And what a PR gaffe! This story in Saturday's Daily Telegraph said that Kanelos is understood to have been responsible for a full-page ad in the Arizona Daily Sun in Flagstaff, Arizona, on 8 May that featured an historic photo from the Nazi Germany era that showed Nazi supporters throwing books into a large fire.

According to the Telegraph's report, the text read: "Should we let government tell us what we can read? Of course not. So why should we allow local government to limit where we can shop?" The ad was taken out by Protect Flagstaff's Future, a lobby group financed by Wal-Mart that was fighting proposals that would limit large superstores in the Arizona city.

Another casualty of this PR gaffe is Highground, the PR and lobbying firm based in Phoenix, who created the ad. The Telegraph story quoted Wal-Mart saying it was "no longer working with HighGround."

I really can't imagine why anyone would think to use anything associated with Germany's Nazi era in advertising. Quite a bit of chat (and some strong anti-Wal-Mart opinions) around the blogosphere.

It's another blunder by Wal-Mart, the Telegraph said, which has been struggling to clean up its image in the face of criticism of its labour practices and effects on local communities. It was forced to take out a second ad apologizing to Flagstaff residents for the first one.

RSS as the self-contained information experience

Following my post a few days ago on getting more from your RSS feed, in particular on using Feedburner's new Total Stats Pro service, I read a very interesting report on ClickZ about RSS advertising.

In the report, ClickZ managing editor Pamela Parker interviews Feedburner CEO Dick Costolo to discuss his company's experimentation with advertising in RSS feeds.

But, this isn't the part of the story that caught my attention.

The part that did is the discussion segment on what the increasing popularity of RSS means:

"If RSS popularity continues to increase, and it becomes less and less a vehicle for driving site traffic but more and more its own content-viewing medium, that presents an interesting situation to publishers," Dick said.

He admitted, though, the company didn't look at full-text versus partial-text feeds. It could be readers are becoming more reluctant to click out of the feed reader, but it could also be that more publishers are providing full-text feeds, giving people fewer reasons to click away.

I believe this is precisely what's happening - RSS aggregation means that you capture content from a wide range of different online resources (blogs or traditional websites) into your preferred RSS reader which, in effect, becomes your web browser and your single view on that aggregated information.

Indeed, if you use a web-based aggregator like Bloglines or NewsGator, you're already using a browser. Desktop readers like FeedDemon have a built-in browser so, again, you're already using a browser. To access, view and manipulate the information you want, you don't really need any other application - for most people, it means you can read and interact with all that content just within your browser.

I also think that Costolo's comment on RSS feeds becoming less a method for driving traffic to a blog or website and more as a 'self-contained information experience' to be an accurate one. I think that's what is beginning to happen as more people get switched on to RSS, especially in the workplace. That's certainly how I look at it now.

That's one of the things that makes yesterday's news about NewsGator acquiring Bradsoft, the maker of FeedDemon, especially interesting. If NewsGator now has both web-based (cross platform) and desktop (Windows) aggregators, they're in a pretty good position to shape - if not drive - the development of the means that enable you to have that 'self-contained information experience.'

Add their Microsoft Outlook aggregation capability to that mix and you have an offering that looks pretty irresistible to organizations - the enterprise customers. Clearly a big opportunity. (Which makes me wonder what moves Microsoft might be considering - maybe at the end of the year or sooner, we'll be reading an announcement about their acquiring NewsGator so as to integrate everything with Office.)

Which comes back to the overall ClickZ report. What do such developments mean for content publishers and advertisers?

Advertisers in particular will have to figure out new and more effective ways to catch those eyeballs. Already some RSS feeds that carry ads are beginning to look like junk mail, and people don't like that - see this post in December by Jason Kottke, for instance (and read the comments).

There's little doubt that RSS as a communication channel is now really taking off. Figuring out the balance between advertising/marketing needs and readers' needs is the next trick.

As with so many things in this new communication world, the audience (readers) is firmly in charge.

Podcasting is disruptive for radio advertising

Fast Company: Podcasting is the newest disruptive technology threatening traditional radio -- and making the satellite guys nervous, too.

Intro to a well-written short piece in Fast Company on the threat podcasting presents to radio, which also says:

Podcasting has the makings of an audio version of the blog phenomenon, allowing any bum with a microphone and a PC to become a shock jock.

Great description. Shel and I are a coupla bums with a two microphones and PCs!

Here's the alarm bell for radio:

[...] And how's this for disruptive potential? TiVo-like editing technology on MP3 players could render radio advertising meaningless. Wireless communications could update programming without a computer download.

Related NevOn posts:

• Kick-starting a broadcasting revolution
• Podcasting: 'Significant growth by 2010'
• The future of radio arrives
• Yet more signs for podcasting growth

Will Paris' podcast have character?

I've heard this already described as a 'character blog':

Podcasting is hot. But it just got hotter. Paris Hilton invites you to join her on "The Paris Hilton Podcast -- Countdown to House of Wax," beginning on April 29. Join Paris and friends as she shops, parties, poses and publicizes in the days leading up to the May 6 opening of House of Wax.

I suppose you could argue that it could be a 'character blog' in that the site (it's not a blog) and the podcast center around the actor playing one of the main characters in this horror flick (R rated in the US, but only a 12 in The Netherlands - go figure) that opens in much of Europe towards the end of May.

Yet as the podcast's protagonist is a real person, ie, Paris (according to the blurb on the site), it can't be a character. But if the real person is playing the role of the character, maybe it could.

That's actually a silly and pointless argument. I don't believe it would be regarded as a 'character blog' at all (anyway its the podcast that's the focus, not the website) as it clearly looks like its the actor and not the character who is the star of the audio show. And everyone will know that.

We'll find out more about what the podcast's like when the first MP3 is available sometime today via the RSS feed. (I say the 'first MP3' as I imagine this will be the first of others to come. They wouldn't go to all this effort, and create all that expectation, just for one, surely.)

Whatever it turns out to be, I'm impressed with how Warner Bros is developing this promo vehicle for the film to embrace wide-ranging communication channels. There's already quite a bit of reporting by mainstream media about the podcast. And lots of buzz in the blogosphere. Adam Curry had a paid commercial on Wednesday's Daily Source Code (MP3, 15.6Mb), which he says is his first paid ad. He's hoping to interview Paris tonight (US time) about the podcast.

Pretty good audience targeting, I'd say, especially via the Daily Source Code.

Not only all this, but there's also the 'House of Wax Podcatcher,' a special edition of iPodder, in Windows and Mac flavours:

The House of Wax Podcatcher helps you find, subscribe to and download podcasts onto your portable media player. Using RSS technology, podcasts are audio distributed in the MP3 format and will play back on any portable media player. The House of Wax Podcatcher comes pre-loaded with "The Paris Hilton Podcast."

Some imaginative integrated marketing and communication going on here. It certainly has character.

Incidentally, stay tuned to Adam Curry's website in the coming days. He's about to make some announcements re the Podshow offering that he's been readying for kickoff. Plus he's developing a new podcasting application called CastBlaster which has just entered a closed beta testing phase.

So what about 'character blogs'? Well, in spite of the many posts defending them, I will stick to my guns: I believe character blogs are a waste of everyone's time. Certainly every one I've seen so far is exceedingly lame. So I'll stick with what I said last week: just because you could doesn't mean you should (there's a definition of character blogs in that post).

Firefox blush at browser protection ad

CNET News: The Mozilla Foundation passed on using a condom-themed poster to tout its Firefox browser, but volunteers want to revive the ad to emphasize the software's security features.

And here's the Firefox poster that isn't going to run, at least for now (click on it for larger image):

Why isn't it running? Because it might cause offence to some, according to comment in a post at Spread Firefox:

Some time back over at SpreadFirefox.com, we started an effort to make a college poster to help spread Firefox. The results of this effort was a great poster that showed a rear view close-up of a person wearing bluejeans with a Firefox-wrapped condom in the hip pocket. The slogan was "Always use protection." Everyone involved loved it and we were days from taking it to print. The project was spiked because of concerns that it would offend some people.

Some lively discussion in the comments to that post.

I really can't imagine how this poster could possibly cause offence to anyone (you should see the sexually-explicit poster advertising on the streets here in Amsterdam!), certainly not the people who Firefox planned to target - college kids in the US. A highly-appropriate theme, I'd have thought, well focused for that target audience. Or maybe they are worried at offending the teachers?

Anyway, I bet we do see that poster run. If not, at least the image repeated in blog posts like mine. Now that's a an idea for some viral advertising...

Fake blog cheapens Diageo brand

In writing about how lame he thinks the Captain Morgan's Rum fake blog is, Joël Céré says:

I think it is less bad than the Mazda experiment as at least it allows for comments, and there are regular postings. Although there are some speculations on how such new blog got so many comments so quickly. Gus thinks that Captain Morgan should thank the agency’s “assistants, interns, secretaries, college students, elance or maybe just one guy/gal with a strong pot of coffee and a really wild imagination.” I would agree with that.

Joël points to a string of conversations (from BlogPulse's new conversation tracker) talking about how poor this effort is, adding:

[...] So should Captain Morgan walk the plank? If you take it as a commercial blog and therefore have very low expectations, it is not too bad in its category. But ultimately time will decide. When the ad agency’s interns will cease to be incentivised to keep it alive, it will be up to the good decent Internet people to judge. The ones who don’t bother giving up their home address so they can have a discussion with a bottle of rum.

It's a very slick site indeed, apparently put together by the brand's ad agency (the brand owner is Diageo). So this brings to my mind a pithy and succint commentary by Hugh McLeod on the perils of allowing your advertising agency to get involved with your blog:

[...] The fact is, ad agencies hate blogs. They utterly despise them, even if they tell you otherwise. They hate them because if done well, they're cheap and they're easy. Frankly, they're in the business of selling you stuff that is neither.

They also hate blogs because blogging rewards authenticity and punishes insincerity, whereas the ad agency business model does EXACTLY the opposite. Blogs have a fundamental conflict of interest with the economics and ethics of running a traditional ad agency, and no slick, Cluetrain-savvy agency pitch is going to change that.

My summary: ad agency + fake blog > critical blog posts > negative opinion  = cheapens brand.

Firefox NYT ad poster delays

As one of the contributors to the ground-breaking Firefox double-page ad in the New York Times in December, I ordered the poster version from the Mozilla store expecting to receive it in early January.

A couple of emails in early January reported on delays finalizing and shipping the poster as corrections were being made (name spellings, etc). Fine. They are good at their communication in letting you know what's going on, so I was ok with that.

But here we are in February and still no poster in the mail. And today arrived the latest update from the Mozilla store:

We’re sorry for the continued delays, and we sincerely appreciate your patience, but we are still finding and fixing errors in the New York Times poster. It’s taking longer than we expected to ensure all names are present and correctly spelled. The project was simply far larger than anyone expected. We will update everyone again as soon as we have a better idea as to the date we’ll actually be able to ship the posters. Again, thanks for your patience.

So if you're waiting for your poster, now you know why you're still waiting.

In related developments, plans are advancing for a full-page colour ad in The Netherlands.

From Mozillazine:

Following the advertisement in the New York Times and the German ad in FAZ, some people in the Netherlands want to do the same in a Dutch newspaper. They chose De Telegraaf, simply because it’s the biggest newspaper in the Netherlands. De Telegraaf gave a 55% reduction and the costs of one full colour page in De Telegraaf are now €35.000,-. That’s about US$46,000. The plan is to publish this ad just after the Firefox 1.1 release if enough money is collected.

A pretty tough job if comments to Mozillazine's post are anything to go by (lots of disagreement with the media choice). As of yesterday, a little over €7,500 has been raised leaving over €27K still to go. Firefox 1.1 is now planned for release in June (see roadmap).

Yesterday, Spread Firefox reported that over 23 million copies of Firefox have now been downloaded.

McDonalds deceives with fake blog

What do you make of this? Kevin Dugan writes about a website and faux blog from McDonalds as part of their advertising in yesterday's Superbowl:

[...] Anyway, I dutifully visited the site and was intrigued initially to see it also had a blog. Then I realized it is a fake blog. Even the post comments are bogus. Boo. Hiss. What's the point? No one in their right mind would believe the blog is real. So while it is not deceptive, it still stinks. The site is so very camp to begin with; the fake blog is simply trying too hard.

A faux blog is one thing as part of a marketing and advertising campaign. All part of today's marketing mix, it seems. But, note what Kevin says - the comments to posts are fake.

That looks like deception to me. And some people say PR has an ethical problem!

Superbowl advertising is the hot conversation

So the Superbowl happened yesterday. In scanning my RSS feeds this morning, I see that sporting event has occupied the written oupourings of just about the whole blogosphere across the Atlantic.

(In case you're not sure what the Superbowl is - it's "a football game played each year to determine the championship of the [American] National Football League." That rather dry description comes from The American Heritage Dictionary. There are more definitions/descriptions here.)

Hardly any of the bloggers whose RSS feeds I read actually talk about the game itself - everyone is talking about the advertising at the event. And there are lots of conversations.

Chris Pirillo points to a very convenient place to go to where you can view all the Superbowl ads - the iFilm 2005 Superbowl Ads Showcase with 68 commercials plus some that were banned.

And no 'wardrobe malfunctions' this year.

Oh, and if you're wondering, the winners were the New England Patriots who beat the Philadelphia Eagles 24-21. Looks like it was an exciting game. But nobody watched it, though, because they were all watching the commercials!

For really exciting football, without all the body armour and commercial breaks every five minutes, I'd recommend rugby. The Six Nations Championship is well underway with three great games this past weekend - France vs Scotland, Wales vs England and Italy vs Ireland. Great video highlights on the BBC.

The genius of Apple coolness

I had my first true iPod experience today. You know, the feeling of coolness as you're out and about in public with those little white buds sticking in your ears with the white cables dangling down that disappear under your jacket.

Yes, I did succumb to strong temptation when I was in the US last week and I bought an iPod Mini.

So I was downtown at lunchtime today. Took the tram to Leidseplein, listening to one of Adam Curry's Daily Source Code shows during the journey. (If Jackie Danicki gets her podcast kicks on a bus in the Earl's Court Road, London, then I can get mine on the number 24 tram in Amsterdam.)

You get looks from people. Knowing looks, especially from those with dangly bits in their ears. Might even exchange a smile or two. Even a wink if your cable is white (but you have to be a bit careful with a gesture like that, especially if it's a girl).

Wow, this is a great social tool. Unspoken potential connections, all because you have some things sticking in your ears.

Earlier this morning, I read a great post by Steve Crescenzo who talks about Apple's Genius Bar in San Francisco. That was in my mind as I popped into the Apple Centre MacHouse to see if they had an iPod Mini dock. I was in luck.

Then, just out of curiosity, I asked if they had any iPod Shuffles in stock. That question was greeted with gales of laughter, including from me! Oh, we did have a good laugh, truly a Pythonesque moment! As it seems everywhere, Shuffles continue to be in big, big demand so you have to wait until more stock arrives.

In chatting to the sales guy, I noticed one thing. The way he spoke, he had passion. He was excited about iPods. He spoke animatedly all the time. He loves these products. While this store in Amsterdam didn't have a Genius Bar like the one Steve describes, I bet that sales guy's attitude is reflected among all the other employees.

It shouldn't be too surprising, really. They're working for a company that it seems everyone around the world thinks makes some of the coolest, most desirable, products on the planet. Everyone wants one. Everyone is talking about them. Everywhere you look, there are posters advertising them. You have a groundswell of consumer and media positive-ness that would make any employee just feel good about what he or she is doing working there, and good about being a part of all the coolness that's going on.

Of course, lots of other companies makes lots of great products, and whose employees love being part of their experience. But I've rarely seen the passion. So while the Genius Bar concept hasn't yet hit Apple's Amsterdam stores, that doesn't matter - they have geniuses there anyway.

Yep, this is coolness, I thought, as I left the store and crossed the street to the crowded tramstop...

Maybe this is the future of search

Yesterday Microsoft announced the release version of its new MSN Search tool, and, as reported by CNet News, gears up for a marketing and advertising blitz to imprint its offering in consumers' minds:

As expected, MSN, a unit of the software giant, has taken its Web search technology out of the laboratory, and placed it on MSN's newly redesigned home page in 25 countries. [...] It is the subject of Microsoft's newest ad campaign, which includes television, print, Internet and outdoor promotions.

MSN Search Vice President Christopher Payne would not disclose ad spending, but he estimated that 90 percent of Americans, as well as U.K. and Japanese residents, will encounter the campaign. Television ads, for example, will run during the Super Bowl, the Oscars and the Grammys. "Oh, you're going to notice it," he said.

There's an insightful article in yesterday's Financial Times that discusses in some depth what the future of computer-based searching might look like, and makes this key point:

[In the future,] finding information would not involve going to a separate place - a search engine - to ask a question. Instead, the answer would present itself wherever you happened to be, and in the most appropriate form. "Search will become more and more important and less and less visible," says [Craig] Silverstein at Google. "It will be ubiquitous and invisible." At that stage, depending on your point of view, Google and its rivals would either be one of the most powerful forces shaping everyday life or just another invisible cog in the great Information Age machine that is being created out of the internet.

The FT article includes these notional news flashes from the future:

May 2008. Google launches G-Life, a substitute for the fallible human memory. By searching your e-mail, instant messages and telephone calls, and with the help of voice recorders set up around the home, you can now recall everything you said or wrote.

November 2008. Yahoo!'s new MobileBuddy, a voice-activated search engine, gives you real answers wherever you are. No more long lists of websites to pick through: just ask it what you want to know. MobileBuddy will also vibrate if the groceries you are about to buy are available more cheaply elsewhere.

October 2009. Regulators uncover e-mails that hint at the scope of Microsoft's search engine ambitions. According to its critics, by building its search engine into Windows, Office and other software, Microsoft is on the way to controlling access to the world wide web.

January 2010. 10 years after America Online bought Time Warner, Google acquires Walt Disney. The mania for internet distribution again has the upper hand over entertainment "content".

Fanciful? Perhaps. But the FT says that the search-engine business is at the beginning of a wave of innovation that could change many aspects of everyday life and reshape parts of the information industry. Google has demonstrated the power of search, Microsoft and Yahoo are in hot pursuit and a crowd of other search companies are seeking a gap.

Financial Times | 'Friendly' engines that manage the data of daily life (paid subscription required)

Such crystal-ball-gazing isn't unlike the reverse look envisioned by EPIC which was demonstrated to participants at the New Communications Forum 2005 last week by keynote speaker Andy Lark.

Last word from the FT's article:

Ultimately, all the random, unstructured information contained on web pages and other data-repositories could be subjected to a form of structuring that made it more intelligible to machines. This is the idea behind the Semantic Web, a vision of the future internet promoted by Tim Berners-Lee, creator of the World Wide Web.

Online ad market in Europe set for shake up

New York Times: A motor scooter in Manchester, an apartment in Amsterdam, a poster in Paris. All are available via Craigslist, an online bulletin board that presents a new challenge to the established players in the estimated $100 billion global market for classified advertising.

This story in today's NY Times highlights changes in a relatively traditional market in Europe, where classified advertising on websites has mostly been an extension of traditional print media.

There have been some great success stories, though. One that comes to my mind is Auto Trader, part of the Trader Media Group (ownership details), founded in the 70s by UK entrepreneur John Madejski. Today they have online ad sites in The Netherlands, Italy, Ireland and South Africa, plus six affiliate sites in the UK, generating annual revenue of over £280 million (€400 million).

Big changes, though, could be coming soon to the whole online classified advertising market through innovation, fast-mover advantage and good old traditional competition:

Though the international Craigslist sites are available only in English for now, the formula seems to be catching on, if more modestly than in the United States. The London site attracts more than 150,000 unique visitors each month. [...] The Paris site, begun in November, already draws 50,000 unique visitors monthly. Other recently added sites, including Amsterdam, Dublin, São Paulo, Brazil, and Bangalore, India, have drawn slightly less traffic.

[...] the international sites could eventually pose a significant threat to newspapers and other, more specialized publications - on paper and the web - that traditionally earn significant portions of their revenue from sales of classified ads, specialists in the field say. "It's got to scare anyone who takes money for advertising," said Jim Townsend, the editorial director in Houston of Classified Intelligence, a consulting firm. In the San Francisco area, Classified Intelligence estimates, Craigslist is costing newspapers $50 million to $65 million a year in lost revenue from employment ads alone; because other ads on Craigslist are free, it is hard to gauge the overall effect, Mr. Townsend said.

In September last year, eBay bought a 25% stake in Craigslist. And last November, eBay bought Marktplaats, the biggest Dutch online auction site.

Looks like a market about to undergo some big changes.

New York Times | Craigslist Circles the Globe With Online Classifieds, One City at a Time (registration required)

The new face of advertising

A 20-year-old US man is selling advertising space on his forehead to the highest bidder on eBay, BBC News reports. Andrew Fisher, from Omaha, Nebraska, said he would have a non-permanent logo or brand name tattooed on his head for 30 days.

"The way I see it I'm selling something I already own; after 30 days I get it back," he told the BBC Today programme. Mr Fisher has received 39 bids so far, with the largest bid currently at more than $322 (£171).

BBC News | Technology | Man auctions space on forehead

So if a blogger like Jeremy Wright can auction his services, why not a guy auctioning his face?

Talking to consumers + blog mining = the new market research

Financial Times: When Procter & Gamble is deciding whether to put its advertisements on television or elsewhere, it puts a call in to Nicosia, Cyprus. The same holds true for Nissan and dozens of other leading corporations and marketing-services agencies.

The calls are requests for help and go to Nicosia because the city is the home of Integration, a small consultancy that has gained prominence by taking on one of the biggest questions facing advertisers: how to pick the best medium for a particular marketing message.

This interesting report in the FT last month focuses on the work of Integration and its founder and CEO, Oscar Jamhouri, a former executive of the BBDO ad agency. It discusses in some length Jamhouri's approach to market research.

For example:

For a measurement guru, Mr Jamhouri's methods are surprising. Rather than use the hard data of advertising and sales figures, he bases his findings on meetings with consumers. He tries to get round the limits of question-and-answer sessions by prodding them to behave as they would in a sales situation. Then he listens. [...] Based on this interaction, Integration rates the impact of each contact in a category - its "contact clout factor" - and produces a score, or "brand experience share", that advertisers can use to decide between media.

This kind of measurement will only grow in importance, Mr Jamhouri argues, because consumers are getting more difficult to reach through television advertising. A new, more furtive generation of consumers is emerging and the big task facing advertisers will be to find them, he says.

"Ninety per cent of the success of a brand (in the past) was built on the mass media," he says. "P&G was the king of mass media. They knew how to manage it and that made them a success." Now, "there has been an explosion of media and contact consumption and the challenge is where do we get these guys. How do we reach them? How do we engage?"

Financial Times | How to make contact with the consumer (paid subscription required)

For the answer to Jamhouri's questions - How do we reach them? How do we engage? - take a look at the ideas contained in a report in the Wall Street Journal, also last month, reporting on how some companies are now paying close attention to blogs as part of their market research:

The growing popularity of blogs and other online forums has prompted companies to pay more attention to what is being said about them on the Internet, and has given rise to a new kind of market research aimed at finding useful information in the sea of online chatter.

The Journal quotes the (now well-known) case study of the Kryptonite bike lock fiasco and what can happen when a company doesn't pay attention to what its consumers are saying in a medium where news, good or bad, travels very fast.

Wall Street Journal | Companies Mine Blogs For Market Research (free access)

Add these two things together and you have an effective market research method.

Website usability lessons still to learn

Via Boing Boing, I came across an interesting report on how people react to advertising when visiting websites. No prizes for guessing the most hated advertising technique - pop-up ads.

The report by Jakob Neilsen shows the 11 most hated advertising techniques.

My current 'favourite' is in there - sites that automatically start playing voice commentary or music, or both, as soon as you land on the website. Boy, is that irritating!

I don't find pop-ups so bad these days simply because my browser of choice (Firefox) does an excellent job at blocking them. Internet Explorer does now have improvements in this area, yet whenever I use IE, invariably there will be pop-ups (or worse, pop-unders).

In his report, Neilsen says:

Advertising is an integral part of the Web user experience: people repeatedly encounter ads as they surf the Web, whether they're visiting the biggest portals, established newspapers, or tiny personal sites. Most online advertising studies have focused on how successful ads are at driving traffic to the advertiser, using simple metrics such as clickthrough rates.

Unfortunately, most studies sorely neglect the user experience of online ads. As a result, sites that accept ads know little about how the ads affect their users and the degree to which problematic advertising tricks can undermine a site's credibility. Likewise, advertisers don't know if their reputations are degraded among the vast majority of users who don't click their ads, but might well be annoyed by them.

Looking a little more into Neilsen's research, I discovered a report by his company, Neilsen Norman Group, on Designing Websites to Maximize Press Relations: Guidelines from Usability Studies with Journalists.

You have to buy the report (from $248) for the detail, but the executive summary on the website does have some very useful info on areas of web design and usability that is most helpful from a PR point of view.

It's what journalists need that's the interesting thing, as the research points out:

The Web is one of the most important research tools for journalists. When asked how they would get basic information about a company, all the journalists in our study said that they would begin by doing some Web research. About half the journalists started by visiting the target company’s website; the other half started by searching an outside service (mainly Google, but also traditional services like Dow Jones Interactive and Lexis-Nexis). This finding emphasizes the necessity for having a clean corporate website with a clearly labeled Press or PR section that can quickly provide answers for journalists. It also emphasizes the need to be well represented in external search services and databases, especially since the trend over time is that more journalists are relying on search engines (mainly Google at the time of this writing).

Journalists are not gullible, and they do not take a company’s own word as truth. On the contrary, they almost all stressed that press releases are useful only to find out how a company is trying to position itself. We strongly recommend that a company’s PR area have links to external sources, including press coverage, since articles from independent newspapers and magazines are often considered to be much more credible than the company's own press releases. We have seen similar findings in studies of prospective customers evaluating products on consumer- and business-oriented sites, so links to external press coverage will also help promote sales.

So many corporate websites just don't take into account anyone's - let alone journalists' - needs for finding credible information about the organization. Links to external information? Don't see much of that on far too many corporate sites. Another one - not easily finding a simple link to contact someone.

The research also includes the top-five reasons journalists gave for visiting a company's website:

1. Find a PR contact (name and telephone number)
2. Check basic facts about the company (spelling of an executive's name, his/her age, headquarters location, etc.)
3. Discover the company's own spin on events
4. Check financial information
5. Download images to use as illustrations in stories

Very useful information. This report is worth reading by PR practitioners and anyone who's responsible for producing and developing a website.

Firefox NYT ad appears

Today the much-heralded Firefox full-page ad in the New York Times appeared. Except it's not a full-page ad - it's a two-page spread:

As explained in a post today on Spread Firefox:

[...] Thousands of us rallied together in 10 short days to pull off the largest open source fundraising campaign in history. And today, we can see the result of our efforts. We're on two full pages in The New York Times because our message is big - much bigger than the ad itself. This is just the precursor to what will become a broadening campaign of Firefox advocacy throughout the world.

So take a good look (you're going to have to!); these folks were willing to put their name out there and be the first to publicly support Firefox and our community at a scale never before attempted in open source history. We owe them a debt of gratitude for taking this risk on the behalf of the 50,000 member-strong Spread Firefox community.

What we have accomplished so far is nothing short of incredible - and I know full well that this is only the beginning!

You can download a PDF of the ad. Looks like all 10,000 names are indeed mentioned. Small type, as you might expect! I found my name in there (at 800% magnification).

Another milestone for a very successful marketing campaign.

Download tally today, by the way - over 11 million and counting.

Half of all search engine marketing directed by agencies

As a follow on from my previous post about search engines, InternetWorld365 has a story today that Jupiter Research has reported that search engine marketing (SEM) agencies now direct the majority of SEM spending in the United States. Just a few years ago, most SEM spending went directly to the search engines.

InternetWorld365's report says that SEM is becoming a more mature market like traditional advertising in which agencies play a substantial role. Indeed, the report says, while just 31% of search marketers use an agency to manage their SEM campaigns, those marketers account for 51% of the total spending on paid search, according to the survey. This marks a significant increase in the spending directed by agencies over the past 18 months.

InternetWorld365 | Research reveals half of all search engine marketing directed by agencies (registration required)

Google AdSense one driver of domain name growth

VeriSign reports 5.1 million new domain name registrations during the third quarter – the largest quarterly growth in new domain names in internet history.

A report by Internetnews.com says that this is nearly a half-million more than the previous quarter's addition of 4.7 million, and puts the total number of domain names around the world at 66.3 million. The figure for all of 2003 was 60 million.

Verisign said that much of the credit for the newfound growth in domain names in 2004 goes to the pay-per-click advertising industry. Other factors include the increased access and availability of the internet and improvement in the global economy.

"The Google AdSense program and other programs like that, that's spurring on the increased, rapid purchase of domain names in the U.S.," said Raynor Dahlquist, VeriSign name services group acting vice president.

Internetnews.com | Ad Programs Drive Record Domain Name Growth

Podcast your voice brand

Music and sound can be an integral part of a business's brand, say Fast Company and Strategize. Many leaders listen to music to inspire creativity and innovation. And it's been found that corporate voicemail welcome messages can make an impact on your business and bottom line.

The Top 100 Voice Brands project collects recordings of answering machine messages at US companies such as AT&T, Bank of America, Pfizer, BestBuy, and Alamo Rent a Car. You can nominate additional voice brands, and organizations can even request a voice branding audit to gauge how they're doing.

So what is a voice brand? According to the project:

It's the unique combination of voice talent, words, call flow and spirit that greets and guides callers. The voice brand is largely experienced over the telephone today, but that's changing. With the telephone, computer and television morphing into similar multi-function devices due to digital convergence, a company's Voice Brand is being heard on web sites, multimedia CD ROMs, kiosks, cards, point of purchase devices and who knows what else.

In the "who knows what else" category, add podcasting.

As a communication tool, an audio message that's podcast would neatly fit into the voice brand definition. So I can imagine concise audio content that includes voice brand elements that would reinforce the corporate brand as well as deliver the specific message.

As with advertising in RSS webfeeds, it's just a matter of time.

Unconventional thinking comes to traditional ad agency

News that the bastion of traditional advertising, J. Walter Thompson - part of the WPP Group communication services conglomerate - has hired someone in a key senior role who represents the new face of creativity with an interesting track record of original, unconventional and non-traditional thinking.

The Wall Street Journal reported last week that JWT has hired Ty Montague, a creative director known for both guerrilla marketing tactics and award-winning TV ads, as chief creative officer and co-president of the firm's flagship office in New York.

Montague was behind the hoax marketing campaign for a Sega videogame last year that typifies new guerrilla marketing techniques. He hired a man to spend part of his day leaving voice mails for game developers complaining that Sega's American football videogame caused him to lose control of his emotions. The man also  created fake blogs to spread the word about the "dangers" of the videogame. (I posted some