A Better Course

• Finland: Nokia Buys Ad Concern – New York Times
  Nokia, the world’s largest maker of mobile phones, agreed to buy a marketing company, Enpocket, to gain technology for placing advertisements through text messages and e-mail.
  (tags: advertising nytimes strategy nokia)
• No Bees on the Inquirer – New York Times
  But when it came to a plan to place a large inflatable honeybee and two large banners to promote the Jerry Seinfeld and Renée Zellweger film “Bee Movie,” scheduled for release Nov. 2, on the side of the newspaper group’s landmark building, the neig
  (tags: advertising nytimes)
• Times to Stop Charging for Parts of Its Web Site – New York Times
  The Times will also make available its archives from 1987 to the present without charge, as well as those from 1851 to 1922, which are in the public domain. There will be charges for some material from the period 1923 to 1986, and some will be free.
  (tags: nytimes advertising business history publishing strategy research media)
• Seth’s Blog: Two kinds of ‘don’t know’
  If you discover that users are afraid or resistant to what you’re trying to get them to do, more information is the incorrect response. The effective technique involves changing the design and inputs of what you’re doing so that this group is more recept
  (tags: blog sethgodin marketing business)
• Google to Sell Web-Page Ads Visible on Mobile Phones – New York Times
  Last week, Google said that all of its online AdWords advertisers, which are said to number in the hundreds of thousands, would be eligible to have their ads appear next to search results on cellphones.
  (tags: google advertising mobile nytimes)
• SpongeBob Pushes Deeper Into Electronics Aisle – New York Times
  “We’re finding that kids have one foot entrenched in kid-dom and another entrenched in technology and things you might normally associate with adults,” said Leigh Anne Brodsky, president of Nickelodeon and Viacom Consumer Products.
  (tags: advertising merchandising nytimes children)
• MySpace to Discuss Latest Effort to Customize Ads for Members – New York Times
  “We are blessed with a phenomenal amount of information about the likes, dislikes and life’s passions of our users. We have an opportunity to provide advertisers with a completely new paradigm.”
  (tags: advertising business myspace strategy nytimes marketing)
• Starbucks Reviews Its Policy Against Marketing to Kids – WSJ.com
  Starbucks Corp. is reviewing its longstanding policy that calls for not marketing to children and is considering adding new drinks and smaller drink sizes for kids.
  (tags: marketing children starbucks wsj)
• A Window of Opportunity for Macs, Soon to Close – New York Times
  The Mac’s presence in the retail world remains limited, a shame given the rare opportunity for Apple to gain market share that opened up when Vista arrived.
  (tags: apple marketing nytimes technology retail)

• Pitchfork Gives Music 6.8 | The Onion – America’s Finest News Source
  “Coming in at an exhausting 7,000 years long, music is weighed down by a few too many mid- tempo tunes, most notably ‘Liebesträume No. 3 in A flat’ by Franz Liszt and ‘Closing Time’ by ’90s alt-rock group Semisonic,”
  (tags: theonion funny criticism)
• Images to Help Law Firms Recast Their Image – New York Times
  The old ads “felt safe and comfortable for lawyers and transmitted what lawyers wanted to project, which was that these people were fine lawyers and worked at the highest levels of their profession,” Mr. Sanoff said. But the ads said nothing about the
  (tags: advertising corporateculture corporate branding nytimes law)
• Yahoo Will Sell Ads for British Site – New York Times
  Yahoo, after missing out on advertising partnerships with the social networking companies Facebook and MySpace, has forged an agreement with Bebo, owner of the most popular social Web site in Britain.
  (tags: yahoo bebo web2.0 advertising nytimes)
• MySpace Goes Hollywood | Business Week
  “At the outset, MySpace was a blank canvas for our users,” says MySpaceTV.com General Manager Jeff Berman. “What we’re doing now is giving some of the best creative folks we can find a blank canvas to create the kinds of content that a MySpace user wants.
  (tags: businessweek myspace media web2.0 technology)
• Google’s gPhone Draws a Crowd | Business Week
  “Mobile platforms will become very common in the next year,” believes developer Craig Hockenberry. “We are on the cusp of a major shift in mobile technology.”
  (tags: google technology telecommunications businessweek opensource)
• How the Wii is Winning | Business Week
  An unqualified positive comment (merely “good”) is a 4/5 on the scale. However, comments like “extraordinary,” “excellent” and “this is the best console ever created” are all rated at a five, for example. Same goes for the negative end of the scale.
  (tags: businessweek computergames marketing microsoft sony technology nintendo)
• Making Over the iPod Family (Again) – New York Times
  The only way to pause, change songs or adjust the volume is to take the iPod out of your pocket and use two hands to summon the on-screen controls. In that regard, music playback is, oddly enough, the iPod Touch’s least successful feature.
  (tags: ipod apple nytimes technology)
• FT.com / Companies / Media & internet – Web users differ from mainstream agenda
  The news agendas of traditional media websites have very little overlap with news sites based on stories selected by web users themselves, according to a new study comparing the content of mainstream sites in the US with popular user sites such as Digg.
  (tags: marketing ft media web2.0)
• Wal-Mart rolling out new company slogan | Reuters
  Wal-Mart said it will begin running TV ads on Wednesday illustrating “how saving money on the little things adds up and helps families live better.”
  (tags: advertising walmart branding reuters)
• Sony unveils new Blu-ray recorders to fight HD DVD | Reuters
  Sony Corp (6758.T: Quote, Profile, Research) said it will launch four models of new Blu-ray high-definition optical disc recorders in November in Japan, as its format battle with the HD DVD camp heats up.
  (tags: bluray hddvd sony reuters technology)

• Burger King to limit ads aimed at children under 12 | Reuters
  “Burger King is currently developing a healthier meal for children including flame broiled chicken tenders in the shape of a Burger King crown.” It appears the product will drive advertising (healthier food to advertise to under-12s) and be nauseating.
  (tags: burgerking reuters advertising health policy)
• Yahoo’s Open Invitation | Business Week
  Yahoo has released source code for Yahoo’s e-mail, letting third parties create small programs that mesh with users’ address books and other mail services and is working with partners on applications that let users embed other sites and services on their
  (tags: yahoo businessweek open technology web2.0 strategy)
• Who Needs Hackers? – New York Times
  Steven M. Bellovin, a professor of computer science at Columbia University, said: “Most of the problems we have day to day have nothing to do with malice. Things break. Complex systems break in complex ways.”
  (tags: nytimes technology)

• Scoring Money from an Online Crowd | Business Week
  After musicians register on SellaBand, their fans, called “believers,” can purchase $10 “parts” of the group online. The money gets held in escrow until the band raises $50,000. A Business Week article on extending the Marillion business model.
  (tags: businessweek music online web2.0 disruptive)
• paidContent.org – The Economics of Content – Online Advertising Currently In Style with Fashion Marketers
  luxury marketers tend to be very traditional when it comes to marketing—that accounts for an increased reliance on print versus the web over the past few years. But now, high-end marketers like Chanel are beginning to open up to new media.
  (tags: advertising branding luxury marketing paidcontent web2.0)

The toilets at Soba are a superb example of a business instigating a conversation with its customers. It’s also almost certainly a mistake.

The door isn’t meant to be a toilet door; it’s got a long, thin window on the left hand side. For the sake of decency, this is covered with paper on the inside, which naturally means that the paper is covered in writing. Most of this is pretty standard for women’s toilets; dates, locations, the information that the sitter loves London. But at head height, someone’s written “Please put a coat / bag hook here!”. Underneath that, someone else has written “Yes!”. There’s still no coat or bag hook.

The great thing about this feedback (and the shame about the staff ignoring it) is that it’s so easy. There is paper where you want to hang your bag, so you write on the paper that you want to hang your bag there. Of course you have a pen – you’ve taken your bag to the toilet.

As a marketer, I’m constantly trying to work out what our current and potential customers have done, what they want to do, and how they think we can help them. There are problems with the data at every level; web analytics packages can only tell you so much, people forget what went wrong while they’re filling out the feedback surveys. What can be done to help people to feed back on a problem as soon as they have it; how can we make telling us what’s wrong and telling us how to fix it as instinctive an action as writing on the only available paper?

• At CNN, No Reuters, or bin Laden – New York Times
  A grainy 75-second tape of Osama bin Laden’s latest message ran in a seemingly endless loop on Fox News and MSNBC. Reuters had obtained an excerpt and distributed it to clients. Unfortunately for CNN, the channel had ended its 27-year relationship with
  (tags: reuters nytimes cnn media)
• Seth’s Blog: How to spend $20 million
  The key is to not give price protection to early buyers (that’s unsustainable as a business model) but to make them feel more exclusive, not less.
  (tags: apple iphone marketing publicrelations sethgodin)
• In Favor of Disruption – New York Times
  Executives think there is an opportunity to exploit increasing availability of knowledge, a faster pace of technological innovation, and “a growing number of consumers in emerging economies.” Asked whether they had taken “active steps” to capitali
  (tags: nytimes strategy technology emergingmarkets research mckinsey opinion)
• A Medical Publisher’s Unusual Prescription: Online Ads – New York Times
  Elsevier hopes to sign up 150,000 professional users within the next 12 months and to attract advertising and sponsorships. The publisher also hopes to cash in on the site’s list of registered professionals, which it can sell to advertisers.
  (tags: publishing media advertising nytimes)
• FT.com / Lex – Console wars
  The current frontrunner is a rejection of the “one box” idea. Nintendo’s Wii has leapt off the shelves at more than twice the monthly rate of Microsoft’s competing games console, the Xbox 360. Despite being launched in late 2005, giving it a year
  (tags: computergames nintendo sony microsoft strategy ft)
• Small, offbeat trends can change the world | Reuters
  Multiple small trend groups are harder for marketers or politicians to target, but offer opportunities for those who identify new or often-ignored groups.
  (tags: marketing reuters tippingpoint segmentation)

It’s generally necessary to know what your audience want from your product, and a lot harder to know how to communicate that to the aforementioned audience. The promotional material for Team Fortress 2 is doing an amazing job at conveying fun :

First, the generic teaser:

Then it gets better.

Meet The Heavy:

Meet The Soldier:

It’s successful not just as a way of keeping interest (there are, presumably, going to be “Meet The…” videos for the rest of the characters) but as a way of making people want to play the game – ultimately, the point of any marketing. There’s no reference to how the game plays; the videos just make it look fun. Even I want to play a game made by people who can be that funny, and I’m currently struggling with New Super Mario Bros. for DS.

I’ve been re-writing my CV recently. I’ve not done that for about a year now; the year before that, there was never really a time when I wasn’t writing my CV. In the last year, though, I seem to have done a lot of reading and re-writing other people’s CVs for them, which led me to believe that it was a task I quite enjoyed.

This is far from the case. Other people’s work achievements are easy and even fun to write about. One’s own work achievements seen nebulous to the point of non-existent, even the ones you can actually put numbers to.

It would be incredibly useful to have access to a site that matches people up with others (specifically, one other) in the same industry, and you write each other’s CVs. You obviously need to be prepared to share what you’ve done, and probably where, but other than that the CV can be really quite anonymous. Up to a point, there are unlikely to be any identifying details (and when you’re going for Marketing Director of Moet Hennessey Louis Vuitton, maybe it’s time to write your own CV).

I like the idea that this would persist, as well, that you’d always write the same person’s CV and they’d always write yours; in the same way that you know what your friends are good at, you’d get a feel for what your ‘partner”s skills were and writing their CV would get easier over time. Until, naturally, you found yourselves competing for the Marketing Director of LVMH job.

• Business schools and research | Practically irrelevant? | Economist.com
  Business education suffers from what Professor Barwise describes as “physics-envy”. A love affair with theory-driven research can be traced back to the 1950s, when many of today’s leading business schools were first launched.
  (tags: businesseducation research theeconomist)

I thought I was really going to like the new Gordon’s campaign when I saw this:

I love this – it’s so simple, but so effective. Whilst it features a celebrity very prominently, there’s almost no reference to that celebrity; it’s hardly even an endorsement. The message is no more complex than “Gordon[‘]s don’t like (and by extension, don’t make) mediocre things”. Gordon Ramsay has two obvious qualifications for being in the advert – he is called Gordon and is, we imagine, impressively exercised by the word “average”.


From this, I’d assumed that they whole campaign was going to be built around the idea of adjectives that the Gordon[‘]s like or dislike. I’d respected the fact that the endorsing celebrity’s brand was so obviously in second place to the product’s brand. A well placed adjective has (in the direct mail I’ve been involved in recently) doubled response rates, so building an entire print and outdoor ad campaign around brand-defining adjectives looked like an excellent idea.


Consequently, I was increasingly disappointed in the next adverts I saw:



This one’s not so bad – there’s still the big adjective, there’s still the Gordon/Gordon’s parallel, but it’s not developing quite as I expected it to (and Brand Ramsay is flexing its muscle somewhat)



The above makes explicit a link that was really better left implicit, if you don’t want to insult your audience; these things are called Gordon. This is the kind of advert I’d expect to see in the initial stages of an agency presentation, before less clunky ones were developed. It’s also more Ramsay than it is about gin.



See comments above about Brand Ramsay; this also has the thoroughly unfortunate brand association (for an alcohol product) with being loud and sweary. It’s also an artless endorsement – “I am shouty Gordon Ramsay and I choose this gin!”


It feels so much like a missed opportunity – so much could have been said about the brand, but more has been said about the famous person in the posters.