Targeted cable advertising

Ads specifically geared to your household! Yes, cable companies are finally going to be able to do what the direct mail business has been doing since the beginning of time. The New York Times reported that Cablevision Systems is planning to announce the largest project yet using targeted advertising on television.Read full post...

During the month of March, most of America’s sports-minded souls have found themselves “on the road to The Final Four.” I heard that CBS-TV broadcast 96 hours of college basketball action in one weekend alone.

And, if you’re part of an NCAA office pool, you’ve probably spent a lot of those 96 hours glued to your TV. That’s because gambling helps the sports world go ‘round.Read full post...

Marketing for non-profits

I know, I know, I know…everybody’s got something to worry about or stress over with the economy plummeting down the tubes of Americans’ own greed and poor planning. It only makes sense that companies are looking to their marketing departments to start cutting corners wherever possible.

However, in our beloved advertising industry, we cannot let that stand in the way of our creative teams continuously expressing their imaginations and keeping their ideas fresh. Read full post...

Facebook

In the last couple of years, Facebook has gone from a college photo-sharing site to a business-networking platform for self-promotion, advertising and multimedia interaction.

Official numbers from Facebook indicate that they have 222 million users and are growing at the astounding rate of about five million new users a week. The surprise here isn’t their growth rate, but that baby boomers are the fastest growing demographic for the site.Read full post...

An example of viral marketing.

Ken Block’s spirited gymkhana video finally made AdGabber today. For those of you not familiar with Subaru beyond taking your Labrador and 2.5 kids for an off-road picnic, the company has an amazing history of hooliganism thanks to the spirited Impreza line and the tunability of its turbo four and chuckability of AWD.Read full post...

Thinking outside the box

So much is made of “thinking out-of-the-box” that it is beginning to sound trite. And where is the line that differentiates out-of-the-box thinking from way-out-there thinking or out-in-left-field thinking? Does that really matter?

Sometimes the solution you end up with is perfect—maybe not for the problem you began with, but for something else. I guess what matters is the process by which you arrived at that particular solution. It’s what happens when we try to reach beyond ourselves. Sometimes it works out perfectly; most often it doesn’t or hasn’t gone far enough.Read full post...

Customer Relationships Management

A travel-related client of ours recently came to us looking for marketing vehicles which could energize its aging loyalty program member list and have trackable ROI. With the travel industry seeing hard times this change in direction is quite timely, with many companies transitioning from an awareness focus to a retention focus.Read full post...

Good is the new green.

You remember Gordon Gecko and the whole greed thing? (Or maybe you’d rather forget.)

Then we did a segue into Green. Environmental responsibility was the new Holy Grail. Remember those spots by Subaru about their plant in Ohio? And how recycling was the new “we are the world”? (Apologies to whoever that was who started that because that was really cool.)

Well, here we are staring down a quadtrillion bajillion dollar budget deficit and everyone’s looking around going “Who, me?”Read full post...

Copywriting

I sometimes wonder whether some agencies even read the copy aloud before it’s approved.

Two examples come to mind: A prominent lizard has been the spokes-reptile for an auto insurance giant that frequently tells viewers that they can save “… hundreds of dollars or more on car insurance.” Moron car insurance? I don’t want that! Or how about the pharmaceutical hair remedy whose ads claimed that in clinical studies, “most grew some hair.” Most gruesome hair? I want none of that either.

My point? Just remember that you need to look at the creative product from all angles before it leaves the agency. You never know who may look at the work the wrong way.

Photo courtesy ABC News.

When you think of US Airways and all the negative press they’ve had in the past year about lost luggage and delays, you would never imagine that a plane crash would finally give them positive exposure.

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Creativing and Advertising

Here are five observations on getting the most out of the people you depend on for breakthrough marketing communications, or what 10 years on the client side and almost 30 years on the agency side have taught me. Among other things.

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Image courtesy TVGuide.

According to Nielsen, nearly 37.8 million U.S. viewers tuned in between 10 a.m. and 5 p.m. to watch inauguration events on a total of 17 broadcast and cable networks.

This is the most viewers on an inauguration day since Ronald Reagan’s in 1981 (41.8 million viewers).

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Dangling Modifiers

First of all, a modifier is a word or phrase that describes something or someone. So you have to ensure that the modifier is modifying the thing it’s supposed to be modifying. Let’s say you’ve been going to pogo-stick conventions for a number of years. You attend a really cool convention in Wisconsin and you want to tell fellow enthusiasts about it. You start out: “As a 15-year veteran of pogo-stick conventions, the most recent shindig in Sheboygan was a stellar event.”

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Radio

What do people hate most about radio? The commercials! The steady growth of listenership to commercial-free satellite radio music formats offers compelling proof. A growing number of listeners are more than willing to pony up $12.95 a month to be spared the relentless onslaught of irritating, irrelevant radio spots.

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