Corporate Engagement

Vin Cerf (google) on leveraging social media (VIDEO)

Great Marketing Quote from Peter Drucker

Strategic Public Relations.

"Because the purpose of business is to create a customer, the business enterprise has two--and only two--basic functions: marketing and innovation.

“Marketing and innovation produce results; all the rest are costs. Marketing is the distinguishing, unique function of the business." – Peter Drucker

Simplified for effect, of course, but not a long way off the reality. Strangely, many organisations cut back on innovation and marketing when things get a little tight often induicng a downward spiral.

Aussies on the Advertising Age's Power blog list

Advertising Age maintains a growing list of 626 marketing, advertising and PR blogs. Here is the small group of Australians on the list:

# 5  -   Problogger

# 63 -  Bannerblog

# 98 -  Servant of Chaos

# 104 - Duncan's TV ad land

# 175 - YoungPR

# 206 - Get Shouty

# 224 - Better Communication Results

# 353 - Media Hunter

# 355 - Corporate Engagement

# 397 - The Marketer

# 408 - PR Disasters

# 477 - ineedhits Search Marketing Blog

# 534 - Ryan's view

# 546 - Insight

# 579 - The Jason Recliner

Simple brand analysis is best

Three Telltale Signs of an Agency's Ineptitude: Branding Strategy Insider:

"The final clue that your potential agency is, perhaps, not your optimum partner for the future is the way in which they discuss brands. It may only be semantics, but there is a very high correlation between the number of different concepts a marketer uses to describe brands and their actual knowledge of the topic. There are only three key concepts in branding: brand positioning (what you want the brand to be); brand equity (the current value of the brand, measured in whatever manner you see fit), and brand architecture (to describe the relationships that exist between one brand and another). Any good agency will restrict themselves to variations on these three terms. A bad agency will throw a veritable dictionary at you. You'll get brand personality, brand values, brand essence, brand disintegration, brand casting - and so on and so on."

Great post I recommend you read the lot.

Commonwealth Bank: Determined to be more expensive

The Commonwealth Bank is a good case study of how a business can undermine its own advertising and marketing strategies. In late January the Bank announced an expensive an ongoing campaign around the message 'determined to different'. According to the media release for that campaign:

Central to the Bank’s new advertising direction is a mantra that the Bank and its staff will adopt as it strives to become Australia’s finest financial services organisation through excelling in customer service.

"’Determined to be different’ is a declaration that sums up the Bank’s new attitude that will set it apart from its competitors. It will ensure that the Bank puts the customer at the centre of everything it does by understanding their needs, then meeting and exceeding their expectations," said Barbara Chapman, Group Executive Human Resources and Group Services.

"The Bank has been changing internally to live up to our vision of excelling in customer service and this has been evidenced in the improvements in our customer satisfaction ratings. We believe that now is the right time to let our customers know that we are changing."

"This promise to our customers sets the standard we will be judged by. It’s a commitment to be innovative in our products and our service, today and tomorrow," Ms Chapman added.

Horrible bumpf isn't it? The TV ads are ridiculous, too.

Yesterday, the Commonwealth Bank announced an interest rate increase on loans of 0.35% but only 0.25% on deposits; the largest increase for borrowers

HOMEBUYERS with mortgages with the country's biggest bank yesterday faced the largest interest rate increase of the current cycle when the Commonwealth Bank raised its standard variable rate by 0.35 percentage points to 9.32 per cent.

The Commonwealth's move is 10 basis points higher than the 0.25-percentage-point rise in the official rate imposed by the Reserve Bank last week.

It raised the bank's mortgage rates above those of its competitors the National Australia Bank and Westpac, both of which went further than the Reserve, at 0.29 percentage points and 0.3 percentage points respectively.

So will customers remember the droll 'determined to be different' TV ads or the reality of a mortgage rate increase that exceeds those of its customers.

Murdoch's Premier League looks to expand

Pat's Football Page: EPL - The British Empires New Colonialism.

They used to say the sun never set on the British Empire, if some EPL officials get their way we'll soon be saying the sun never sets on the EPL. The marketing whiz's at the long-ball league have devised a new scheme to consume as much of the worlds capital as possible.

Which all makes me wonder, how far can marketers take the game away from its community origins before people lose interest?

The same battle is now happening in cricket with the creation of the Indian twenty20 league. Some of our retired greats have signed up and now Gilchrist has retired and is headed for India.

Twenty20 is a travesty, and the Indian league is shaping up as a real circus, but it seems incredibly popular, and it will generate buckets of cash.

In some ways, the Indian twenty20 circus can be seen as a similar exercise to the English Premier League. Great entertainment, great players - but english? Not much and not for much longer if the rent seeking marketers get their way.

I long for the days when sport was called games and it was fun and healthy for everyone.

New Leadership!

The truth undercuts Telstra's Big Pond

Get Shifted!

This kind of Editorial/Advertising clash would be difficult to find in traditional media, however with computer assisted banner ad placements we might see more and more of this online.

Screen shot lifted from Get Shifted!

Oh, stick a Big Mac in it!

How's this for unscientific hogwash:

Fast food giant McDonald's continues to raise the ire of Australian parents, with the restaurant chain winning an award for the most manipulative food advertisement on television.

The award recognises the most manipulative food ad on television and is voted on by the 2900 members of the Parents Jury, a web-based forum for parents to voice their views and advocate for the improvement of children's food and physical activity environments.

Professor Boyd Swinburn from Deakin University said the result clearly highlighted the continuing frustrations parents had about toys being used as marketing gimmicks for unhealthy foods.

"The message is loud and clear. Parents are fed up having to contend with McDonald's enticing their children to want its food by using free toy giveaways," he said.

The message is loud and clear that the vast majority of parents who join a forum to advocate the improvement of children's food already hate McDonald's.

Talk about a skewed sample.

Professor Swinburn said food and drink companies often used clever wording and phrases in their ads to make their product sound healthier than it actually was.

And you, Prof, never use "clever" sampling to force an argument.

Did it occur, even for a nano second, to the journalists writing this tosh that this survey isn't worth a cold fry?

This speaks for itself

From The Hidden Persuader:

"Gary Walker and Huw Williams, senior directors at AMV BBDO, said: Unlike Hollywood films, bullets don't leave perfectly clean symmetrical holes, they leave big gaping wounds in kids faces, bodies, arms and legs. If this little film makes just one kid think twice about picking up a gun, then it's a start."

Meanwhile:

Believe in children

By Benjamin Haslem

I think this is a clever and very powerful advertisement.

Ad a day late

Super Ad Blooper Adds To Long List Of Howard Government Waste.

The Howard Government’s wasteful spending was on display again last month when a newspaper advertisement for the Superannuation Co-Contribution Scheme was published the day after the scheme’s cut-off date.

I wonder how many times this kind of stuff up happens in government and the private sector?

Need an advertising slogan

Try this site

Online marketing is about tracking behaviour

How Marketers Hone Their Aim Online - WSJ.com.

When Pepsi-Cola North America wanted to make a splash on the Web this spring to promote its new low-calorie vitamin-enhanced water, Aquafina Alive, the beverage company didn't run ads just anywhere on the Internet. It placed ads only on sites it knew would be visited by people interested in healthy lifestyles.

Pepsi was using an increasingly popular online advertising strategy called behavioral targeting, in which marketers analyze consumers' online activities to figure out who is most likely to be interested in its product -- and then place ads on whatever sites those consumers are visiting.

In this case, the beverage giant worked with independently owned New York-based behavioral ad network Tacoda Inc. to identify health-conscious people by looking at traffic to sites about healthy lifestyles over a month-long period. Then Pepsi arranged to place Aquafina Alive ads on some of the 4,000 Web sites affiliated with Tacoda so the ads would pop up whenever these health-conscious consumers visited.

The result? Pepsi recorded a threefold increase in the number of people clicking on its Aquafina Alive ads compared with previous campaigns. "We've never been able to get to this level of granularity," says John Vail, director of the interactive marketing group at Pepsi-Cola North America.

A fast food tax?

SSRN-Cheap Donuts and Expensive Broccoli: The Effect of Relative Prices on Obesity

While the magnitudes of our estimates suggest that relative price changes can only explain about 1 percent of the growth in BMI and the incidence of being overweight or obese over this period, they do provide some measure of how effective fat taxes would be in controlling the obesity epidemic. Our estimates imply, for example, that a 100 percent tax on unhealthful foods could reduce average BMI by about 1 percent, and the same tax could reduce the incidence of being overweight and the incidence of obesity by 2 percent and 1 percent respectively.