A Better Course

• Facebook’s Tracking of User Activity Riles Privacy Advocates, Members – WSJ.com
  Facebook, critics argue, takes its advertising beyond that by collecting specific data about its users’ activities on outside sites and broadcasting that data to their friends and acquaintances
  (tags: wsj facebook privacy online)
• swissmiss: simple, stunning IKEA ads
  I like what IKEA have been doing with their advertising recently – here are some more examples of that.
  (tags: advertising design ikea swissmiss branding)

• FORTUNE: Legal Pad Louis Vuitton loses dog chew-toy case — again «
  The court found that consumers were unlikely to think that the inexpensive dog toys were made by the luxury house, which sells its monogrammed handbags (for between $995 and $4,500) only from licensed Louis Vuitton stores or department store boutiques.
  (tags: luxury lawsuit funny louisvuitton fortune)
• Threadless: From Clicks to Bricks | Business Week
  Web retailers can be unprepared for the costs of running a store. Companies used to displaying their products online have to find the best way to showcase them in 3D. The retail experience has to be appealing enough to prompt people to travel to a store.
  (tags: threadless businessweek online retail)
• Imitation Hits the Marketing Business. Again. – New York Times
  The issue of what constitutes originality —and what might instead be homage, borrowing, mimicry or plagiarism —has been vexing industry professionals for decades. Although an idea cannot be copyrighted, a specific expression of the idea may be protec
  (tags: nytimes advertising creative plagiarism marketing)

• Making News, Without Saying a Word – New York Times
  It is not true that Ms. Hilton, who served jail time for violating probation after a drunken driving arrest, told reporters, “The elephants get drunk all the time. It is becoming really dangerous. We need to stop making alcohol available to them.”
  (tags: parishilton media nytimes funny elephant)
• Bosses to Be Thankful For | Business Week
  It’s easy to focus on what our managers do badly and lose track of what they do well. The good news is that even when managers’ good qualities go unheralded, their teams still benefit from exposure to their leadership styles
  (tags: businessweek leadership management)
• People Do What People See | Business Week
  The first person that I should try to change is me. My standards of excellence should be higher for myself than those I set for others. To remain a credible leader, I must always work first, hardest, and longest on changing myself
  (tags: businessweek leadership johncmaxwell)
• Sony Needs a Hero for PlayStation3 – Bits – Technology – New York Times Blog
  A price cut from Sony is coming, and Ms. Frazier said she expects that to boost sales of the PlayStation 3. In the meantime, Sony can only hope it gets to be a bigger part of the cyclical resurgence of the video game industry.
  (tags: sony nytimes business nintendo microsoft computergames)
• Neuromarketing » Starbucks vs. McDonalds: Coffee War Heating Up
  60% of sensory experience of drinking espresso comes from the retail environment. While Nespresso is battling to improve the perceived quality of home-brewed espresso, the same issue could dog McDonald’s.
  (tags: neuromarketing mcdonalds starbucks coffee)
• HEMA – online winkelen
  Beautiful piece of Flash advertising. Sometimes enagaing with an advert _is_ engaing with a product…
  (tags: hema advertising flash design branding)

Russell Davies writes about the personalised advertising promised by social networking that “the people who can be arsed to do a little bit of research […] plunge into a kind of direct marketing uncanny valley where the more desperately they try to personalise their message the more I’m reminded that they’re not really my friend”.

The idea that perfect marketing is just information is certainly a compelling one, especially in an industry such as mine, where impulse buyers are as close to being non-existent as makes no difference. We need to target people who are highly likely to be interested in business education, and we need to give them enough information to make an informed decision about that. The idea that the information itself is enough is appealing; it tells us that we can all have a product that can sell itself.

However, there still needs to be something about the information that will make you want to keep reading. When Russell speaks about the more ‘personal’ information they utilise the more it freaks me out, I’m reminded of the “personalised” children’s books in which your child’s name and interests are shoehorned into a usually boring, poorly written story – they’re always dissapointing, compared to the childhood satisfaction finding an (even minor) character with your name in a book you are enjoying.

Information is not good marketing when it is ‘pure’ information; it’s good marketing when it’s surprising, or the way it’s presented is unexpected – when it makes you want more of it.

The tube station near where I work has had advertising screens installed. The best adverts for these are ones which depend on four screens (about as many as I can take in at once) showing different parts of an advert for the same product.

One of those was on the screens today; it was for a Windows mobile device. The first three iterations were a camera tracking past London landmarks with parts of the operating system overlaid. The fourth – no doubt meant to be a punchy summary – was the XP Blue Screen Of Death.

Do you use your own products as part of your marketing? If yes, can you be sure that’s a good idea?

• russell davies: the uncanny valley of relationship marketing
  I suspect we’re going to get flashing, dancing, animated equivalents of the mis-spelt welcome message you get on your hotel TV when you check in.
  (tags: russelldavies socialnetworking advertising online web2.0)

• The campaign trail | Primary colour | Economist.com
  “I love my wife and my five sons and their five wives. Wait a second. Let me clarify that. They each have one.” – Mitt Romney campaigning in New Hampshire, ABCNews.com, November 10th
  (tags: politics america theeconomist)
• Prada, Ferragamo go head to head in luxury IPO race | Reuters
  Italy’s luxury goods firms, often still family owned and run, have started to seek outside investment to fund international expansion and cash in on booming demand for designer goods in new markets like Asia.
  (tags: luxury italy business reuters)
• Who Needs Budgets? | Business Week
  In companies that have rejected detailed budgets, business units set goals based on benchmarks eg, return on capital. They measure KPIs such as profits, cash flows, customer satisfaction and quality. KPIs fulfill the self-regulatory functions of budgets.
  (tags: businessweek management marketing analytics)

• FT.com / Companies / Retailing & leisure – Luxury goods push up Burberry profits
  But the group faces a possible slowdown in the luxury-goods market and currency fluctuations. Growth rates in the industry over the calendar year may fall from 18 per cent in 2005/6 to between 8 percent and 12 percent, according to HSBC.
  (tags: luxury burberry markets ft)
• Paying to Hear the Complaints – New York Times
  RelevantMind mines internet forums in niche categories (eg, road bikes, cooking, snowboarding) for customer conversations. Aaron Mann, the CEO, said that the service enables vendors to see which products get the most attention, for better or for worse.
  (tags: feedback nytimes marketing analytics)
• You Say Fake Ads, They Say Satire – New York Times
  Aspiring writers are using Craigslist as a writing workshop where they test their stabs at social satire on the more than 30m visitors that the site draws each month. Their ads ostensibly seek a soul mate; what they’re really looking for is an audience.
  (tags: nytimes craigslist online web2.0 writing)
• FT.com / Home UK / UK – Finally, blogging is blessed on high
  what else but Mr Becker’s blog could President Bush have been referring to when he said that the Nobelist was “being honoured for broadening the understanding of economics and social science…”
  (tags: garybecker blogging ft)
• Selling to Former Buyers | Business Week
  “The reason mailing out packets, offering discounts isn’t always effective is because the inactive accounts may feel they are being sold to. There may be good reasons why the inactive accounts are inactive”. Why not ask for their thoughts?
  (tags: marketing businessweek)

• Murdoch Said to Stress Free Access to Wall St. Journal’s Web Site – New York Times
  The WSJ has an affluent readership and charges high rates for online ads. With more readers, “you dilute the premium quality of that audience” In addition, as sites post more ads “I think we run some risk of alienating the audience through oversaturat
  (tags: media publishing wsj nytimes advertising online)
• The Tables Turn for Dilbert’s Creator – New York Times
  Emma Lewis, the lunch manager, describes Mr. Adams as someone who should be shielded from tough decisions the way a crawling infant needs to be protected from household hazards.
  (tags: scottadams nytimes management leadership)

Two charity campaigns have been interesting in the last few months. The most recent is Oxfam’s “Rubbish Presents” campaign:

Advertising their line of gifts in time for Christmas. It’s likeable because it’s obviously self-mocking; the celebrities in the advert look genuinely distressed, the language used (“Speak out against the horror of”) is an exaggeration of the kind of language that would be expected in an advert for a charity. The message, however – essentially sometimes rich people get Christmas presents they do not like – forces perspective without playing on feelings of guilt.

Likewise, Amnesty’s Unsubscribe campaign (link includes embedded video) brings a very everyday language, and a very everyday action, to a cause that will, for most people targeted, be far from everyday. “Unite against terrorism. Unite against human rights abuses in the ‘war on terror’. We did not sign up. We do not approve. We unsubscribe.” Again, it’s using a familiar irritation of relatively privileged adults (unwanted direct marketing) and its solution (unsubscribing) and putting it in a context that is so serious that the advert is disconcerting.

There are familiar themes in charity advertising – a problem is presented in emotional terms, along with the solution. It would be interesting to know how much of a response these less emotional but, I think, more engaging adverts attract.