Brand Central Station

Here’s something fun to work on if you have a few minutes – and interest in earning a few bucks.

On Friday, the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) posted an invitation to contractors to submit designs for a new “Art Works” logo.  You can download your own copy of the RFP off our site or from the NEA’s site.  The open period for questions (best asked after you’ve reviewed the RFP) ends at 5pm (EST) on Wednesday, February 10.  All material must be summited to the NEA for review no later than 5pm (EST) on Friday, February 26, 2010.

To be honest, this release caught my eye because NEA Chairman Rocco Landesman announced the competition at a Miami-area high school for art and architecture and I immediately thought it was a student competition.  I have an 18 year-0ld, aspiring designer and thought it would be a great opportunity for him to stretch his creative muscles and maybe pick up a buck or two.

Then I saw the government’s estimated budget for this project.

$25,000.

For a logo.

Wow.  Talk about your stimulus package.

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They say the fasted way to kill a bad product is with good advertising.

I suppose it was just a matter of time before the Mancrunch stunt finally raised enough hackles in the gay community to motivate a few curious bloggers to do the legwork necessary to find out what was really going on.  Kudo’s to Lyndon Evans for writing a blog post that provides a fairly concise summary of the whole affair.  A second post debunking the Mancrunch controversy, written by Alex Blaze, provides even more sordid details on the site, its ownership and makes a direct connection between the site and other online dating sites of questionable moral values (i.e. these other sites promote affairs and secret/discreet relationships focusing primarily on sex).

(NOTE: Both links go to sites with gay content and may be considered NSFW in some situations.)

And here’s one other thing of note – it looks like this stunt (and the ensuing controversy) isn’t a first-time experience for Mancrunch’s ownership (represented by Bridge & Tunnel PR’s Dominic Friesen and Elissa Buchter).  As pointed out in a piece appearing in Tuesday’s LA Times (by Dan Neil), another site represented by Friesen and Buchter – AshleyMadison.com – ran the same gauntlet last year, generating tons of press and web links in the process.

The tv guys have caught on, as Mr. Neil reports in his column:

Martin Franks, executive vice president of planning, policy and government affairs at CBS, told Reuters: “A whole cottage industry has grown up out of trying to make use of network turndowns. . . . They’ve found a loophole in an otherwise well-intentioned process.”

So what’s the point of this whole exercise?

It’s all about search engine placement and creating as many in-bound links as possible for the lowest possible cost.  Because search engine placement means traffic and for web sites that charge desperate people a monthly membership fee – traffic means big bucks.  If you were searching the Internet for this kind of site, you would find over 2,000 stories about Mancrunch listed before the first link to a competing site.

Mission accomplished.

It’s too bad they had to hijack the Super Bowl to do it.  But for those of us not in the targeted demographic, we’ll hardly notice.  None of these marketing shenanigans are going to impact the telecast of the game – unless the Mancrunch people have a “Heidi moment” planned for the fourth quarter.

UPDATE: 02/03 @ 10:00 pm – Popped back into the office this evening and found a link to an article covering this issue that included an interview with me.  Big thanks to Michael Tripplet at Mediaite.com for taking the time out of his day to call me and talk about this entire situation in more detail.

I have to admit, I’m a natural born skeptic.

And when I received a news release yesterday about the brewing “controversy” over the Super Bowl spot submitted to CBS by Mancrunch, I had my doubts.

As I’ve noted in my other post on this subject, I tried to confirm a few facts in the previous story and wound up leaving messages or missing late-night call backs.  Today, however, after being approached by Mancrunch’s PR guys for a second time, I submitted some questions (in bold) that were quickly answered by Mancrunch’s spokesman, Dominic Friesen.  What follows is the entire exchange, verbatim – and after that, my thoughts on this entire thing: (more…)

Echoing around the media blogosphere today (at over 1,700 5,000 18,000 posts and counting) has been the news that CBS Television is “considering” a television spot from a reputed dating site for homosexuals called Mancrunch.  And when we say “considering” we take that to mean they’ve received the commercial and, presumably, an order to air it in the Super Bowl for a couple million bucks – but the spot is going through a review by someone in the the Broadcast Standards & Approvals department of the network.

In the meantime, Mancrunch has turned on the publicity machine – generating maximum buzz by getting the red meat journalists at FOX News to bite on the story and proclaim that CBS is considering airing the gay dating site ad during the Super Bowl.   That, in turn, has lead to posts on the Huffington Post, LA Times and several other news sites to continue giving the story gravitas.

This is all great for Mancrunch and, I suspect, of very little consequence to CBS.  And why is that, you might ask …

… because as of this point in time, none of this “news” is confirmed.

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Vancouver-based Vitrium Systems announced the launch of a new, online service that allows marketers to embed a registration form into PDF’s. The new system, dubbed PDFSalesLeads, allows marketers to take advantage of the portability of electronic sales literature while providing an interactive form inside the document that will allow the reader to provide the contact information required to carry the sales process to the next step.

During a sneak peak of the new service, Vitrium’s Manager of Marketing and Communications, Randa Codron, explained how PDFSalesLeads provided a solution to the dilema of making prospects register to download PDF’s online or giving digital documents away without any idea of who’s reading them. “PDFSalesLeads allows users to complete their registration information inside the PDF while they are engaged with the content,” she explained. “You can set the form up to appear on any specific page, so the reader has a chance to decide whether the information your providing is something they want more information about.”

Furthermore, the technology stays with the document, so PDF’s that are passed from one user to another also pass along the interactive registration form. All registrations are collected in real time back at the PDFSalesLeads web site and can be integrated into SalesForce.com.

View an online demo.

This is a handy break-through for small and mid-sized marketers who want to expand their reach via the Internet but can’t spend a lot of wasted time sorting through irrelevant leads or trying to follow up on bogus registration information. At just $49 per month, the service is affordable.

The possibilities of this technology appear to go beyond simple registration. During our conference call, I asked if there were plans for creating other interactive forms that could be imbedded into PDF’s. While Randa couldn’t be specific, it does sound like PDFSalesLeads may be just the first of a number of utilitarian products to roll out of Vitrium’s R&D team.

We’ll be watching for more developments from Vancouver in the future.

Editor’s Note: This is the first guest post by a contributing writer to the Brand Central Station Blog.  Mary Ann Johnson is a member of Team Position2, experts in search and social media marketing and sent us this post on behalf of the team.  You can learn more about Position2 by visiting their web site.

by Team Position2

Social Media Monitoring has become a hot topic of discussion over recent times. A brand makes or breaks its name by its users.

With the huge outbreak in the online media and platforms like, blogs, forums, microblogs and different types of social networking sites people have an effective place to express their opinions and influence others. In the online world people own the brand. Social Media Monitoring is to keep track of all the conversations happening in the online world.

Social Media Monitoring is all about figuring on what the objectives are, listening, refining the talks, analyzing and taking action.

Social Media Monitoring and analysis can be used by a brand to improve a product, get feedbacks, customer service, market research or any marketing and communication.

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