Best Practices: The Muppets

Leave it to The Muppets to utilize all the best social media strategies available to date to launch their movie. The big lessons here are how early they started working the social media channels, capitalizing on the fanatic love muppets have for all things muppets, and letting the muppets be the muppets. 

http://mashable.com/2011/11/20/muppets-social-campaign/

Steve Jobs champion for innovation

Hipster Humor. Tweet this hipsters.

The Colbert Report
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The State of the Web --Summer 2011 Edition

 It looks like the interweb has been changing dramatically during my maternity leave. The only thing missing from this infographic is the new addiction sweeping dayjobs and productivity known as pinterest. Tumblr who?

http://theoatmeal.com/comics/state_web_summer

Television versus Social Media

The Latest from NoahBrier.com

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Online Media Realities

Posted: 26 Apr 2011 06:23 AM PDT

Whenever someone argues more brand money should shift out of TV it's accompanied by some statistics about how much time people are spending in digital channels. But clearly that doesn't tell the whole story (which we all know, but sometimes fail to admit). Two quotes I ran across today help speak to other side of that coin. The first, from John Battelle in his 5 Question interview over at Digiday (I've been loving these 5 question things they're doing, btw). When asked specifically why the money hasn't followed the attention, Battelle responded:

Marketers haven't seen the clear line between investment and return. They see that with TV. We just can't avoid the elephant in the room. When Kraft puts $25 million into six DMAs [on TV] over one week and sees an 11 percent lift in its scan data off retail, it says let's do that again. That is a direct line between investment and return. That hasn't been established online. It leads all sorts of inteligent people to have six or eight lines of debate. One is that it's the wrong question. Online is a different medium. You can't expect to draw a bright line between investment and return like TV. Another is we don't have the right unit/creative/scalability/measurement. I really think the core is the large marketers who are the drivers of this debate, whether they're actively participating in it or driving it by not moving the money, haven't seen the return yet. They don't think they can trust it.

This sentiment is reflected in this morning's FT Lex column which talks about companies becoming more adept at harnessing the power of social media, including finding some correlation between stock price and the number of Facebook likes added over a period. They close with this, though:

But correlations are one thing and causality quite another. Perhaps a company's share price is rising at the same time as it is adding thousands of new Facebook followers because of a huge marketing push elsewhere. Also, do social media reduce the chance of a brand surviving a big negative shock? The internet is unambiguously good for consumers. But it remains a double-edged sword for companies.

Obviously I'm a believer that there are big opportunities for brands on the web, but I'm also a believer that the situation around why money is moving more slowly than many think it should is not as cut and dry and many want you to believe.

For the love of power point.. and keynote

I AM THE
ORSON WELLES
OF POWERPOINT.

BY OYL MILLER

- - - -

I am the Orson Welles of PowerPoint 2010. 

Next slide. 

I don't let marketing get in the way of a potential masterpiece. You see I don't create mere presentations. I use technology and the language of our times to evoke human emotions from my audience. I don't settle for default settings and I've never met a template I didn't break. 

I'm not a junior sales manager, I'm a storyteller.

At one point, artists and the alleged tastemakers of society scoffed at the notion of motion pictures. However, generations of innovative film directors have rendered fools of those early dissenters of cinema. 

So too will history one day be unkind to those who belittle the artistic merits of my PowerPoint journeys. 

My slides are arranged with a careful eye to typography and design; two well trusted guardians of the Modern Arts.

The transitions I select from the pre-determined palette are individually chosen with consideration for both aesthetics and narrative lubrication. As Alfred Hitchcock once furthered the cinematic transition of the radial wipe, so do I pioneer with the provocative primacy of the PowerPoint Fire Transition. 

No two of my PowerPoints are the same. While I have yet to craft my Citizen Kane, I consider the PowerPoint I gave at the conference in Atlanta last year to be my Taxi Driver. The regional sales meeting in Denver was my Ishtar. And right now I'm experimenting with 3D technology to create a visually immersive PowerPoint experience that will rival the cinematic wizardry of James Cameron's Avatar. 

I don't use PowerPoint in the same manner as my peers. I am a PowerPoint iconoclast. A PowerPoint auteur. Breathing the spirit of Nouvelle Vague into inspired template tweaked slides. I don't use PowerPoint to spew hollow facts and meaningless statistics. I aim to deliver revolutionary corporate poetry into the hearts and minds of marketing vice presidents across this country. 

I believe that sometimes a PowerPoint demands five consecutive pages of full bleed abstract images. Just to make people feel. To get mid-level managers to loosen their ties and take off their name card necklaces. Too much logic is the death knell of any PowerPoint pursuit. 

When I'm faced with a new PowerPoint, I don't think about what my manager is expecting. I think about Shakespeare. I think about that feather at the beginning of Forrest Gump. I think about Marlon Brando's monologue in Apocalypse Now. I wonder how Scorsese would judge my section dividers. I think about how Homer would break the Odyssey down into slides. 

I'm trying to figure out how can I use this ubiquitous PowerPoint program as a vehicle to build my legend. To hone my craft. To start the next revolution, not in business, but in art. How can I use this oft-overlooked format to get me into the Tate Modern?

Such is the stuff of my PowerPointing dreams.

http://www.mcsweeneys.net/2010/9/16miller.html

How to make your agencies work better together...

How to make your agencies work better together...

Brand building and social media—the silo crisis just got worse

http://www.prophet.com/blog/aakeronbrands/20-brand-building-and-social-mediathe-silo-crisis-just-got-worse

We are not witnessing an evolutionary change in marketing communications. Rather, there is now an inflection point which requires new communication models, different people, a revised set of capabilities, new organizational structures, and different ways of partnering with agencies. Firms are recognizing this new reality and are struggling to cope with it, as evidenced in a recent BCG report on this topic, based on nearly 100 interviews with practitioners and others close to the issue.
The maturation of social media is defining the inflection point. Social media provides the power of word-of-mouth communication, involvement, credible information sources, and personal recommendations that is next to impossible to duplicate elsewhere. Pivotal to the inflection point, it has now achieved scale which means that it is an option to some and an indispensable resource to others. But social media strategies are complex, require specialized expertise, and are much more labor intensive than traditional media communication. Further, the challenge of generating integrated marketing communications is made much more difficult by this new media form.
In the research for my book Spanning Silos, I observed that the communication silos both inside and outside the firm, such as advertising, PR, event marketing, and promotions represent silos that often not only fail to communicate and cooperate but actually compete. The problem only gets worse when social media is added because it is even more separated in terms of background, language, and metrics. The silo crisis just got worse.
The solution is to replace isolation and competition with communication and cooperation using teams. So a team is in charge of a communication campaign rather than a set of silos doing their own thing and only being loosely connected. The team should have a central goal with metrics, incentives to work together, and a set of people that are capable of functioning within a team structure.
Who should be the leader of the team? Jim Stengel, the former CMO of P&G, developed the idea that the communication vehicle and the team that generated the home-run idea would become the leader and the others would support. So it might be the NASCAR sponsorship for Valvoline, being the go-to website for baby care for Pampers, a “real beauty” advertising campaign for Dove, or a series of video clips for BMW. But there would be one leader and one focus. The team structure and its leaders could evolve and change over time but the central organizational structure would always be a team.
In any case, it is not business as usual. It is an inflection point representing real change as an imperative.

A logo from the past comes back

NY Cosmos

Does anyone else remember the excitement of the NY Cosmos? We were huge fans as kids and I remember having t-shirts, soccer balls, and shorts with this logo. I am glad to see the logo and team make a comeback. Hope they have more longevity for this round.

It is really interesting to see these old brands be revitalized for future generations. Sometimes brands are more powerful than people realize.