Being Buff: Marketing the social economy

Innovation doesn’t always mean blazing trail. Sometimes it means finding new value in well worn paths. A case in point is the Canadian upstart company Laughtertising.

While everyone else is chasing the latest shiny, new social media object and writing off traditional media as on its death bed, Laughtertising is betting on the most unlikely of places to make money: private radio. The company produces funny, spoof ads it plans to sell to radio stations to play between real ads.  The idea being that listeners will hear the spoofs and won’t know if they’re real or fake – they’ll just know they make them laugh. They also won’t know when the spoofs are coming – so what will they do? They’ll listen more closely to the ads. The idea is beautiful in its simplicity. It’s disrupting the king of disrupters – radio ads.

In addition to a damn good idea Laughtertising also has excellent execution. The spoofs are great. I put them on my iPhone today and listened to them over and over, having a great chuckle each time. Lastly, the company’s timing couldn’t be better. Consumption of cheap entertainment like radio goes up in recessions – and who couldn’t use a good laugh these days?

Posted in Advertising, Radio | No Comments »

I was listening to episode #137 of Mitch Joel’s Six Pixels of Separation today in which he recasts episode #121 of Joseph Jaffe’s Jaffe Juice podcast featuring a panel conversation on podcasting with some social media royalty. The chat included Adam Curry, Mitch Joel, Cliff Ravenscraft, Shel Holtz, Mignon Fogarty (Grammar Girl), Terry Fallis, Lee Hopkins as well as Jay Berkowitz, Dave Guerra, and Jay Moonah.

The conversation provided lots of great insights into the state of podcasting including a good discussion on making money off podcasts if that’s your goal. One thing in particular that caught my attention was Adam Curry’s comments about how his company Mevio uses the transaction business model. That means Mevio host plug products and tell people how they can buy it and the client only pays Mevio when they do. So the "let’s hope it works" element of straight ads is gone. Companies only pay when someone actually buys something – but they still get the benefit of the promo even if someone doesn’t buy.

So a company selling, say fair trade goods, need only search out podcasts and vodcasts offer transactional spots that serve their target audience. They don’t have to be shows with big audiences – just the right audience.

This raises two interesting questions:

1) do any such shows exist and, if so, how many?

2) do any of them to transactional promos?

Google here I come.

Posted in Advertising, Podcast, Vodcasting | No Comments »

Ok, no I didn’t but the title is catchy and perfect for the subject of this post: pay-for-post. That’s where someone gets paid to write a blog post and fully discloses that they were paid.

This topic blew up in the social media space after uberblogger Chris Brogan, did a fully disclosed, sponsored post for Kmart on his Dad-O-Matic blog. Lots of people attacked him for taking money to blog. Mitch Joel interviewed Chris on episode #134 his Six Pixels of Separation podcast and asked lots of tough questions making it clear Mitch thought pay-for-post was a bad, failed idea in general – and a bad choice for Chris in particular. I got in to the act with an audio comment, that Mitch played on episode #135, where I defended Chris because he fully disclosed that he was paid for the post. However, I was just listening to #135 where Mitch talked more about this and now I have a more nuanced view.

Mitch’s point was that pay-for-post erodes the credibility of the social media space because you don’t know who’s been bought. If some people aren’t disclosing that’s true but this conversation is about those who do disclose – and that is a really grey area. Here are some questions emerging from the greyness:

1) If a company pays someone to post, the person writes something balanced or even critical, and the company keeps paying them to post – doesn’t that raise the credibility of social media?

2) Does the fact that someone isn’t doing disclosed pay-for-post necessarily mean they aren’t biased? They may have clients that affect what they write that they don’t disclose.

3) Is pay-for-post inherently bad because it means those who can pay can buy exposure whereas everyone else has to earn it?

A great conversation…

Posted in Advertising, Blogs | No Comments »

Thanks to Christopher S. Penn for tweeting about Barack Obama becoming the first presidential candidate to buy ad space inside a video game. According to the Associated Press story that Chris linked to:

“Nine video games from Electronic Arts Inc., ranging from the extremely popular "Madden 09" football game to the street racing "Burnout: Paradise," feature in-game ads from the Obama campaign. The ads — they appear on billboards and other signage — remind players that early voting has begun and plug a campaign Web site.”

So the question is: is video game advertising for you? And the answer is: it depends on your target market and your budget.

One thing to consider before making your decision are these stats: “every week, over 25% of Internet users worldwide play online games, which amounts to over 200 million people. This number is growing at a rate of almost 17% each year.¹”  Those facts comes from Google’s press release last week announcing that the Internet ad giant was expanding its Adsense program into video game advertising. According to Google:

“For instance, in anticipation of a sporting event, an advertiser can use the technology of AdSense for Games to feature its logo within that sports event’s accompanying online game and reach its relevant demographic as a result.”

The Google release says the ads will be video, text or image based. A CBC story on the programs mentions video ads that will run before and after a player plays a game or reaches a new level.

As for knowing whether your target audience plays video games and, if so, which ones, I’ve had no luck so far finding stats on video game user demographics in Canada – so please send links if you know where I can find that. But hey, we are in an age of experimentation so if you’ve never tried Adsense here’s a neat way to check it out . And, if you do, please share your results.

Posted in Advertising, Video games | No Comments »

In a previous post I praised the innovative marketing of local real estate agent Elaine Taggart who had used a post card designed like a newspaper, called “The Taggart Times”, to build hype around “some new person” that she was going to introduce.

Well, if her goal was simply to increase her name recognition then I think she had already succeeded before wrapping up her campaign – if this second post is any indication. But then she brought it all to a close in very memorable fashion.

It turns out the mystery person is her identical twin sister Diana who has just moved to Ottawa – and who is also a real estate agent. And they are going to sell together under the brand The Twin Team.

What a great way to capitalize on a natural born quality. The only misstep in this simple, short, memorable “campaign” was that the new website, www.thetwinteam.com doesn’t exist yet. The URL goes to Elaine Taggart’s page. Once . But aside from that, the campaign worked – at least with me – as it got me thinking, “Hey if their marketing is more innovative than everybody else’s maybe their house sale skills are too. They’re worth a look….”

That’s good marketing.

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Sometimes all it takes is putting a new twist on an old technique – like the postcard.

The picture above is a postcard I recently received from local real estate agent Elaine Taggart. I had received a number of cards from Taggart before that all went in my recycler becase I don’t need a real estate agent – but this one caught my attention. That’s because I found the mock newspaper format cool and the caption below the photo of the little girl on the left also intrigued me. It says, “This recently discovered photograph depicts a mystery person with Elaine Taggart (right). People of Ottawa are now scratching their heads and wondering who could be so close to Elaine. Who is this person? Will we ever know?”

The text under the headline “Big changes coming for local sales representative” includes this paragraph, “what most people don’t realize about Elaine is that she has been harbouring a secret wish for the last 25 years, but how does that wish relate to real estate? Many people have wondered why she wont’ reveal the identity of the person next to her in the photograph. Can you guess who it is…? Stay tuned.”

I have to admit, I am curious. Now that doesn’t mean I would buy a house from Elaine – but she did get me talking about her.

One opportunity she is missing is linking old school to new school: there is no mention of the card on her website and so no easy way to let people speak back to her about what they think.

Posted in Advertising, Old school | 1 Comment »

Just got an article in my Google alerts about Adbusters losing a court case aimed at forcing Canwest Global and CBC to run their PAID ads. The networks refused to sell Adbusters time to run ads that pointed out that over 50 percent of the calories in a Big Mac come from fat; called for an end to the age of the automobile; and promoted Buy Nothing Day.

Now this raises a number of questions/comments in my mind.

First, I get why the Canwest, being private, would tell Adbusters where they can put their ads but CBC surprises me, especially since they’ve been showing some hip these days with shows like Spark and Search Engine.

Second, why is Adbusters, of all organizations, focused on fighting its way into the mainstream media in this age of social media? I searched in vain for their ads on YouTube and their website reflects no social media that I can see.

Adbusters should get with the social media program….

Here’s the link to the article:

http://www.marketwire.com/mw/release.do?id=827774

Posted in Advertising, Television | 1 Comment »