Archive for April, 2009

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13
Apr
09

don’t wait for congressional hearing’s to find out what executives are thinking…

By Joshua Woolery Leave a Comment
Categories: Communications, Social Media and Twitter

exectweets31ExecTweets is a new application is now available for Twitter users. The service, which was created via a partnership between Federated Media and Microsoft, includes some of the United State’s most influential business leaders, and was created to enable twitter users to easily follow the tweets of top business executives.

ExecTweet aggregates the tweets of executives and allows users to give “up” or “down” ratings to each executive’s tweets. The ability to search for executives by industry is my favorite piece of functionality of ExecTweets. Government, Healthcare, Media/Advertising/PR and Retail are just a few of the industries available for Twitter users to search.

When you go to the “about ExecTweets” page, you’ll notice that many Fortune 500 companies have a presence on Twitter. This includes Adam Brown (Coca-Cola), Barry Judge (Best Buy) and Dave Minifie (P&G).

ExecTweets, which is currently only available in beta, should prove to be a valuable tool for Twitter users to gain helpful insight from executives who are leading some of  the world’s largest corporations.

09
Apr
09

The newspaper of the future

By Beth Hardy Leave a Comment
Categories: Uncategorized

750936_browsing_2With the recent demise of the Rocky Mountain News and several other newspapers, I’m obviously very interested in how papers are going to evolve in order to survive. The Washington Post’s column “Life After Newspapers” by Michael Kinsley shared several ideas recently on how this endurance could potentially occur.

Kinsley writes about some of the ways newspapers got where they are today and the “armada of boats” the industry missed along the way. But he also mentions several ideas that have been thrown about regarding ways to save this sinking ship. Some of these suggestions include:

• Newspapers should become nonprofit foundations

• Foundations should supply investigative teams and foreign bureaus and other expensive accessories

• Limits should be placed on the nefarious practice of “aggregation” – Web sites lifting the news, via links, from other sites (this topic was discussed at a meeting this week of the Newspaper Association of America)

• Customers should be forced to pay

Overall, Kinsley explains that no one really knows right now what the newspaper of the future will be. But I wholeheartedly second his thought that it will be “more or less like the one of the past, only not on paper.”

I believe newspapers will always provide great value and we’ll always depend on them to get our news. But the evolution seems to revolve around how people will want that news, and online is certainly the direction it’s all going.

08
Apr
09

tropicana: the results are in!

By Joshua Woolery 1 Comment
Categories: Ads, Brand Loyalty, Packaging and Uncategorized

In January, we wrote about Tropicana’s packaging disaster. At that time, we could only speculate the damage on sales suffered by the brand. Now that the numbers are out, we thought we’d give it another go.

Advertising Age’s Natalie Zmuda, recently reported that Tropicana suffered a 20 percent sales decrease between January 1 and February 22.

According to Zmuda, “The entire refrigerated-orange-juice category posted flat unit sales and a 5% decline in dollar sales during the period.”

tropicana-packagingoldversusnew

Competitors have benefited from Tropicana’s rebranding fiasco.  Many of them, including Minute Maid and Florida’s Natural, posted double digit unit sales increases in the same time period as Tropicana’s loss.

Naturally, Tropicana doesn’t see a correlation between the 20 percent decrease in sales and the botched rebranding effort.  Zmuda reported that a spokeswoman for Tropicana in an email said, “No dots to connect here.”

I would much rather prefer that Tropicana admit the rebranding campaign was a complete failure. The company needs to give credit to consumers for getting the brand to go back to a more familiar and well-liked design.  The one thing that Tropicana can’t do, is pretend that this didn’t happen and let Minute Maid, Florida’s Natural, etc., run off with disgruntled consumers from this incident.

07
Apr
09

the power of YouTube

By Joshua Woolery Leave a Comment
Categories: Viral and YouTube
Tags: ,

According to a ComScore report published last month, YouTube surpassed the 100 million-viewer mark for the first time in its history.

YouTube is a tool that often doesn’t get used enough by marketers but clearly should be considering its viewer numbers. MarketingProf’s recently published an article titled, “How to Market on YouTube.” This is a great article for marketers that presents tips and success stories.

According to the article:

“Jonathan Mendez of optimizeandprophesize.com is an evangelist for the power of tags for marketing on YouTube. His advice is to make copious use of tags on your videos (ensuring, of course, that the tags are all relevant to the content), to spread your tags out among your clips, to use adjectives to make your videos more visible to folks searching based on their mood, have some category descriptor tags (bearing in mind that YouTube’s default search settings are Videos, Relevance and All Categories), match your title and description with your most important tags, and don’t use natural language phrases or waste tag space on words like “and” or “to.”

My favorite success story from the article is about Blendtec and their viral campaign. I like it because of its originality, honesty and effectiveness. For example, the newest video on their YouTube channel attempts to blend the U.S. Bailout.

Click here to read the full article.

03
Apr
09

Leave it to the passengers

By Beth Hardy Leave a Comment
Categories: Bad PR, Passengers, PR and Ryanair

In early March, Ryanair, Europe’s largest low fares airline, invited passengers to submit their most creative ideas for the company’s next ancillary charges. This contest came about after Chief Executive Michael O’Leary announced that the airline is considering charging passengers to use the on-board toilets in an effort to reduce costs.

Only passengers could have come up with these wacky and hilarious ideas. Following are some of the best Ryanair has received thus far:

·        Charging for toilet paper – with O’Leary’s face on it
·        Charging €2.50 to read the safety cards
·        Charging €1 to use oxygen masks
·        Charging €25 to use the emergency exit
·        Charging €50 for bikini clad cabin crew

cardWhat a good way to turn a potentially damaging situation into something fun and engaging for your clientele. This contest will hopefully help ease the pain of extra charges, even if those involve paying to use the toilet.

02
Apr
09

coffee table literature becoming extinct

By Joshua Woolery Leave a Comment
Categories: Ads, trends and Uncategorized
Tags:

In the past week, two prominent print magazines have announced they will be ceasing production of their product Blender and Maxim.

Blender announced last week that April’s edition, featuring Kelly Clarkson on the cover, will be the last issue. The publication has been around since 2001 and according to Eric Danton, Blender “positioned itself as a general-interest music rag, with big-name stars on the cover and big-interest topics inside.”

Maxim also announced very recently that their UK version will no longer be available at newsstands and will be replaced by the U.S. version. June will be the final print edition but, Maxim UK will still be available online. The Guardian quoted the publisher’s chief executive, James Tye as saying:

“The Maxim brand remains the best-selling men’s lifestyle magazine in the world, but Dennis Publishing must move with the times and recognise that the future of the brand in the UK is online.”

According to SmartBrief, magazine ad spending has been decreasing and is forecasted to continue its downward spiral moving forward. Below is a chart that accompanied their article.

adspendingdown

The fall of these publications is unfortunately a sign of the times and becoming all too common. Magazine publishers have a tough road ahead of them. The ones that end up successful will be the ones that find creative ways to supplement lost print ad revenue with alternative revenue streams.

01
Apr
09

April Fool’s Pranks

By Beth Hardy Leave a Comment
Categories: Uncategorized

When I was searching for April Fool’s pranks to share here today, I was almost certain that I wouldn’t find any related to marketing or PR. Happily, I was wrong.

The Museum of Hoaxes has a top 100 list of April Fool’s hoaxes of all time, and many of the jokes were orchestrated by media outlets or by companies that used advertisements as the vehicle for their pranks.

Following are a few of my favorites. Vote below on which one you like best.

The Swiss Spaghetti Harvest

1957: The respected BBC news show “Panorama” announced that thanks to a very mild winter and the virtual elimination of the dreaded spaghetti weevil, Swiss farmers were enjoying a bumper spaghetti crop. It accompanied this announcement with footage of Swiss peasants pulling strands of spaghetti down from trees. Huge numbers of viewers were taken in. Many called the BBC wanting to know how they could grow their own spaghetti tree. To this the BBC diplomatically replied, “place a sprig of spaghetti in a tin of tomato sauce and hope for the best.”

The Left-Handed Whopper

1998: Burger King published a full page advertisement in USA Today announcing the introduction of a new item to their menu: a “Left-Handed Whopper” specially designed for the 32 million left-handed Americans. According to the advertisement, the new Whopper included the same ingredients as the original Whopper (lettuce, tomato, hamburger patty, etc.), but all the condiments were rotated 180 degrees for the benefit of their left-handed customers. The following day Burger King issued a follow-up release revealing that although the Left-Handed Whopper was a hoax, thousands of customers had gone into restaurants to request the new sandwich. Simultaneously, according to the press release, “many others requested their own ‘right handed’ version.”

Sidd Finch

1985: Sports Illustrated published a story about a new rookie pitcher who planned to play for the Mets. His name was Sidd Finch, and he could reportedly throw a baseball at 168 mph with pinpoint accuracy. This was 65 mph faster than the previous record. Surprisingly, Sidd Finch had never even played the game before. Instead, he had mastered the “art of the pitch” in a Tibetan monastery under the guidance of the “great poet-saint Lama Milaraspa.” Mets fans celebrated their teams’ amazing luck at having found such a gifted player, and Sports Illustrated was flooded with requests for more information. In reality this legendary player only existed in the imagination of the author of the article, George Plimpton.

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