Owner: Kolbrener branding blog URL:http://www.kolbrenerusa.com/blog Join Date: Fri, 20 Jul 2007 15:41:14 -0500 Rating:0 Site Description: Features the thoughts of Kolbrener employees on branding, advertising, marketing, design, interactivity, and whatever we want Site statistics:Click here
Mentos Viral Marketing 2.0 2007-07-19 17:43:39 I love Mentos’ most recent viral marketing initiative: MentosIntern.com. Props to Elizabeth Cannon, Mentos’ brand manager, and Paul Bichler, creative director at Bartle Hegarty, the agency that created the concept. According to Cakke, a blog focused on domain name values, MentosIntern.com is “the fastest-growing domain name we’ve ever seen” based on its generating more than 30,000 Google hits on the phrase “Trevor the Mentos intern” in less than three weeks. You don’t need Paris Hilton to say, “That’s hot.”
Check it out as covered by Advertising Age in its July 16, 2007 issue:
Mentos late last month hired Trevor Day, a sophomore University of Cincinnati drama student, as a virtual intern to do the world’s bidding from his cubicle in the company’s U.S. headquarters in Erlanger, Ky. People can call, e-mail or chat with him and enter jobs for him on his calendar at mentosintern.com.
Of course, the key ROI measure for the campaign is not the number of site hits ne Read more:Viral
, Marketing
Real Time Tweaking 2007-06-28 16:28:23 This week MTV Networks became the first national network group to partner on an ongoing basis with Visible World, the direct-response company that empowers advertisers to update their campaigns in real time. Cool technology, but I believe it is really limited to only live television events. When it comes to regularly scheduled programming combined with DVR and downloadable trends, I just don’t see the impact.
Read more:Tweaking
Jonah Bloom Goes Out On A Limb 2007-06-22 10:15:56 I just read Johah Bloom
’s June 18th Advertising Age article “Why the iPhone Will Be a Big Success.” It is not a bad article, but with all the sea changes in our industry you might think that the Editor of Advertising Age would find a more compelling topic to address. Talking about the iPhone naysayers and forecasting iPhone’s success isn’t the “going out on a limb” type of commentary I expect from Mr. Bloom. I hope Jonah
gets back to the topics that draw us to his column such as advocating for a change agent at the 4A’s, discussing consumer-created ads and advocating for a tighter relationship between marketing and PR.
Peter Krikovich Got It Right 2007-03-06 13:47:07 Peter Krikovich, CEO of Cramer-Krasselt, got it right when he told CareerBuilder’s VP-consumer marketing, Richard Castellini, to f—off. In less than 36 months, C-K had helped CareerBuilder become famous and overtake Monster.com to become the market leader among online career sites. C-K produced metrics that most CMOs would sacrifice their first born to achieve. Yet, due to a below top-ten ranking in the USA Today super bowl poll that ranks the event’s commercials, a poll widely questioned in value, Castellini called for an agency review.
If CareerBuilder’s law firm consistently kept them out of litigation and won 99% of their cases and then lost a minor case, would they fire them? No. If CareerBuilder’s accounting firm consistently minimized CB’s tax burden, but it was then disclosed that they had missed a small tax deduction, would they show the firm the door? No. So why is it in advertising that companies often dismiss their agency with little caus Read more:Peter
, Right
Hello Houston and Don’t Call Me Boston 2007-02-01 15:27:53 No, I’m not quoting an astronaut communicating with the Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center. I’m talking about Kolbrener. I spent the day yesterday in Houston
speaking with the executive team of Additech. Additech builds and operates a unique at-the-pump automotive care system that enables consumers to conveniently perform routine auto maintenance while they refuel. We met to discuss the evolution of their marketing and advertising.
During our meeting, we talked about numerous marketing strategies and tactics including guerilla marketing. Ironically and unbeknown to me at the time, the City of Boston
was wigging out over “Lite Brite” type signs used as part of a guerilla marketing campaign to promote the late-night Adult Swim cartoon “Aqua Teen Hunger Force.” State, local and federal authorities shut down the Boston University and Longfellow bridges, and blocked maritime traffic from the Charles River into Boston Harbor. Bomb squads scrambled throughout the city and its Read more:Hello
Ad Age’s 2006 Agency of the Year Is Faulty Logic 2007-01-30 09:53:47 I understand the logic behind Advertising Age naming the Agency of the Year the consumer, but Jonah Bloom and his team’s logic at Ad Age is flawed. And my argument is best supported by the Viewpoint article Tim Williams wrote in the July 24, 2006 Ad Age.
Tim argues that agencies aren’t in the advertising business anymore. Rather, they are in the brand experience business. An agency must enhance the experience with a brand, not just the perception of the brand. As such, agencies just don’t think about what the messages say, but also how and where and to exactly whom they are delivered. They think about the pre, during, and post-purchase experiences. They agonizingly reflect on data and demographics segmenting target audiences while pondering and prescribing the best and most cost-efficient marketing strategies and tactics, both traditional and non-traditional, to reach those audiences. And overall, they are integrating the brand across all the available marketing chann Read more:Logic
Simpsonize-Me 2007-07-21 18:31:26 The Simpsons movie promotional blitz is on! The arsenal includes commercials, billboards, sponsorships, print, and my favorite, posters in 7-11s. Now add the Be Yellow campaign.
Upload your photo and the Simponizer will turn you into a resident of Springfield. You can then place your character into a screen saver, wallpaper desktop, and more. The website supplies all the tools to also turn your creation viral. The application is powered by BetaFace, and Cortona Creative Communications is the agency behind it.
Other successful, similar campaigns include Become an MM and Wedding crashers.
You can click the image to enlarge the ‘Simponized’ version of me.
Oh yeah…
I did Potts too
Websites go green by going black 2007-07-24 16:58:14 This never crossed my mind, but your website is more green if it is black. In January of this year, Mark Ontkush wrote a blog post that claimed if Google changed their page background to black, they would save 750 megawatt-hours a year.
As Mark says:
As noted, an all white web page uses about 74 watts to display, while an all black page uses only 59 watts. I thought I would do a little math and see what could be saved by moving a high volume site to the black format.
Take at look at Google, who gets about 200 million queries a day. Let’s assume each query is displayed for about 10 seconds; that means Google is running for about 550,000 hours every day on some desktop. Assuming that users run Google in full screen mode, the shift to a black background will save a total of 15 (74-59) watts. That turns into a global savings of 8.3 Megawatt-hours per day, or about 3000 Megawatt-hours a year. Now take into account that about 25 percent of the monitors in the world are CRTs, and at Read more:Websites
Whatever Happened to Parental Responsibility? 2007-07-26 16:25:10 The week’s Advertising Age reports that even after Big Food, 11 major food marketers including Kellogg, Kraft Foods, General Mills and Unilever, voluntarily shifted or eliminated $1 billion in kid-targeted junk-food marketing, critics, watchdogs and regulators such as Federal Trade Commission’s Jon Leibowitz are now pressing for more restrictions on more marketers including media companies. They are going after Viacom, Time Warner, the TV Networks as well as ConAgra, Chuck E. Cheese and Burger King. The FTC is preparing subpoenas for 44 food and fast-food companies to examine how they are marketing products to kids.
What does this mean? Coca-Cola and Hersheys won’t aim advertisements at kids younger than 12. Mars/Masterfoods won’t advertise any of its candies to kids. PepsiCo, Kraft Foods, Kellogg, General Mills, McDonald’s, Unilever and Campbell Soup will limit all their marketing of food to children younger than 12 to more healthy foods. No more Cap’n Crunch. No more Read more:Parental
, Responsibility
Social bookmarks, not social spam 2007-07-26 14:34:45 Let me say this very loud and clear, if your website is not compelling, search engine optimization will not help you.
The latest online marketing trends include search engine optimization, and now we can add social bookmarking.
Wikipedia defines social bookmarking as:
A social bookmarking system or network, users store lists of Internet resources that they find useful. These lists can be accessible to the public by users of a specific network or website. Other users with similar interests can view the links by topic, category, tags, or even randomly.
You digging what I’m furling?
For those of you not enamored with social bookmarking, congratulations, you are either ahead of the curve or unaware to the power these sites wield.
Many believe in taking a client’s webpage, placing targeted keywords in the social bookmark’s title, description, and tags and submitting. They claim excellent results, massive jumps in search engine result pages, and traffic you could only pray for.
Agency billing gets comical 2007-07-25 12:48:12 For those of us who work for agencies, you understand the importance of constantly updating timesheets with your hours on a project.
The Puppet Agency, created by Blue Sky Agency, produces videos of typical daily occurrences within advertising agencies. Episode 2 may hit home for those of you who have large or conglomerate agency experience.
When asked for his hours, the art director says “3 hours playing solitare, then one writing headlines, so uh… let’s say… I don’t know, 17?”
You can view the episode below:
All-Bran: Take a load off 2007-08-01 15:17:42 All-Bran cereal has a new commercial, which really speaks to the brand’s promise.
The construction worker in the commercial had problems staying regular until he tried All-Bran. The advertisement never comes out and says what ’staying regular’ is or how All-Bran will help, but their metaphors are pretty hard to miss (especially 14 seconds into the commercial).
Makes a pretty cool viral video too.
Via Ad Rants
International SEO? Easy - What would Google do? 2007-08-04 17:48:18 How do you optimize a website with international search efforts in mind? Put yourself in a web surfers shoes, and think W.W.G.D. (what would Google
do).
There is a different domain extension for every country, and a country specific Google for France, Russia, Pakistan, etc. You’re in Australia looking for “website hosting“, Google returns 9 web sites with .com.au domain extensions, 1 .com, and a blog post (via universal search).
How do I optimize for that? Real quick, Dude Where’s My Car style:
Identify the specific countries you are targeting - and then - buy a country specific domain - and then - host your website on a server in said country - and then - gain relevant links from websites with the same domain extension.
On Google’s Official Webmaster Central Blog, Google addressed international search efforts in an August 2, 2007 post:
In our understanding of web content, Google considers both the IP address and the top-level do Read more:International
, SEO
Reanimated Redenbacher, aka Deadenbacher, Is Now Truly Dead 2007-08-08 12:26:45 As reported in the July 30, 2007 Advertising Age, Crispin Porter & Bogusky lost ConAgra Foods’ Orville Redenbacher brand. While the campaign created a lot of buzz, the basis for much of CP&B’s fame, it was simply disturbing. At Kolbrener, we’re usually big fans of CP&B’s work, but unlike the creepy-cool King, the reanimated Redenbacher was more creep than cool, so much so that he was dubbed “Deadenbacher.” CP&B was trying to unlock the power of Orville and we applaud them for their effort; however, we weren’t surprised to read that ConAgra called an agency review and made a move.
Campaign Logos 2008 2007-08-08 09:59:35 The Iraq War, Health Care, Tax Reform, Social Security, Terrorism, Global Warming. All issues to debated until the elections determine who wins the 2008 Presidential Election, for sure. But none of those topics come into play in this forum. What matters here is the design of the political campaign logos — these identities are as varied as the candidates themselves.
In my opinion, the logo that stands out initially is John McCain’s. It’s black, his name is featured prominently and the swash of yellow sits nicely afoot the only logo with an identifiable element — the military star. There’s no doubt the star represents his military service and compared with the generic stars and stripes found in the other marks, this element is very distinguishing. If you didn’t know anything about any of these candidates prior to seeing these marks you could deduce that McCain had served his country.
Another element that caught me was the green swoosh in John Edward&rs Read more:Campaign
, Logos
Denny Green finally to be featured in Coors Light parody 2007-08-10 13:45:33 Who remembers when the Bears beat the Cardinals last year? Better yet, who remembers DennyGreen
’s press conference?
Must have seemed a dream come true for Coors
Light on a couple levels. First, it’s hi-larious, second, Denny says “If... Read more:parody
BP Is Greenwashing 2007-08-23 18:41:32 This summer Kolbrener published a newsletter on Greenwashing, the practice of talking the green talk in your marketing and advertising but not necessarily walking the green walk. Essentially, if you’re going to execute a campaign incorporating...
Are Any of Your Targets Transumers? 2007-08-20 16:14:00 There is a new marketing type in town and they are called transumers. As classified by Rainer Evers in a trend briefing on trendbriefing.com, transumers are “consumers who are more interested in the experience rather than owning.” Well, yeah . . ....
Props to Pat Fallon 2007-08-16 16:12:56 I simply wish to give props to Pat Fallon. It was reported in the August 6, 2007 Advertising Age that Pat, the legendary founder of his celebrated namesake agency, was “shifted into an emeritus role last week in a restructuring by parent Publicis...
Form two lines! 2007-08-16 15:50:36 I just wanted a cup of coffee! There I was waiting in line at a popular coffee establishment for the better part of 15 minutes for a freakin’ cup of coffee! Maybe the barista is working off a hangover? Maybe the 4 people ahead of me...
BtoB Headlines And The New Math 2007-09-13 12:19:02 Online ad spending seen topping radio spending
B-to-b ad pages, revenue down
‘Journal’ reorganizes ad sales department to pump integrated sales with Web properties
Online newspaper advertising up 19%
Time Inc. to shutter “Business 2.0”
Yellow Book...
NFL Kickoff advertising, Manning’s mind 2007-09-07 10:26:27 Just when you thought advertisers had run out of ideas on how to exploit Peyton Manning
, welcome to Manning’s Mind. Responsible for further inflating Manning’s ego are NFL Mobile and Sprint.
The concept is to take on Manning by testing...
How to choose a college? Football and Billboards. 2007-09-27 13:11:44 What’s with all of the college and university billboards?! You studied hard, you took your SATs, your guidance counselor made a few uniformed suggestions. Maybe, you bought a book that had a Zagat’s type description of colleges and... Read more:choose
, Football
, Billboards
Smile. You could be in advertising — literally! 2007-09-24 17:02:59 So imagine that you’re at an event with friends and someone takes a picture of you. Then, that exact photo ends-up in an ad for a cellular phone company — without your consent! Can you imagine?
That’s exactly what happened to... Read more:Smile
, literally
Kolbrener on KDKA 2007-10-12 08:38:33 George, I know you’re ‘geeked’ out
It eases my mind? 2007-10-09 20:52:25 “It eases our mind to know who our catcher is going to be next year. That’s one less headache for us right now.”
I’ve lost my d-damned mind!!!!!! I’ve been an avid sports fan since 1969, when the “miracle...
Blogging: Where does everyone find the time? 2007-10-09 09:23:23 Over the last three weeks here at Kolbrener, I have been slammed. Yes, slammed. Numerous projects, late hours, weekends - of course, it’s all good. I am really into what we are working on. However, when you add in some family time, I have no time... Read more:everyone
, Blogging
Why Lie? I need links 2007-10-05 12:03:02 Why Lie? I need links
. There I said it.
A link coming from a topically relevant website? You bet! Your website was registered 10 years ago? Skip the $12 birthday check Grandpa, more links please! NASA.gov is one of your backlinks?! Are you taking...
Marketing and Sales: “Two great tastes that taste great together.” 2007-10-28 10:43:04 You got chocolate in my peanut butter!
You got peanut butter on my chocolate!
That very successful 1970s launch for what is now a ubiquitous treat is the perfect metaphor for the way marketing and sales disciplines often view each other. To make... Read more:Marketing
, Sales
, taste
, together
Relax, it’s FedEx… and it’s Friday 2007-10-26 14:50:22 It’s been crazy around here recently. Project after project, and it seems there are not enough hours in the day.
As busy as we have all been, no one has been more inundated than George Potts.
Lore of George’s work ethic and... Read more:Relax
, FedEx
, Friday
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