Brand Central Station

I was away for two days but now I’m back. Attended a great Venture Capital/Angel Investor conference and learned a ton. Fell behind on the blogging though, so I’ve added some extra posts of interest for you to explore.

Don’t forget, Monday’s a holiday in the US so I won’t be posting again after Friday until next Tuesday.

Ever wonder what that cute girl behind the counter at the convenience story was wearing? Well, Ché, a Dutch men’s magazine is there to help with a public service campaign, of sorts.

Inventive out-of-home media found on the Coloribus blog. Love it!

Technorati Tags: Outdoor, Out-of-Home Media, Advertising, Creative, International Marketing, Coloribus

… the hazards of naming your product or company for use in another country. (from the Strategic Name Development blog)

… why you should never ever use over-exaggerated statements in your copy. (from Jim Logan’s new SmallBusinessGurus web site)

… the morality of marketing. (from Seth Godin’s blog)

… the power of story-telling in blogging. (from Darren Rowse’s ProBlogger blog)

Technorati Tags: Marketing, Branding, Blogging, Opinion, Seth Godin, John Jantsch, William Lozito, Jim Logan

The first edition of the Adnews podcast was posted on August 19 and despite the best intentions of blogger Mike Delgado, we’re all still waiting for another installment. The Adnews blog has seen a little more action, but not much.

The premise of the podcasts might be problematic. In his first transmission, Mike explains that he’ll build a weekly summary of marketing stories derived from the usual industry sources. He’ll add some additional information gleaned from ad-oriented blogs and wrap everything up in under ten minutes.

To be truthful, by the time Mike has done his weekly wrap-up and posted it to his site, the news is so old that most of us who keep up on it may not have much interest in hearing him read it back to us.

Here’s hoping the delay in getting installment #2 of the Adnews podcast up is the result of Mike fine-tuning his concept and creating a truly unique voice worth tuning in to hear.

Good luck, Mike.

Duct Tape Marketing’s John Jantsch makes a great point about the power of branding and the ability of a product name to add legitimacy to the every day. According to this post in John’s blog:

“Naming and documenting your success systems offers a prospect proof that you do indeed have a system, you follow steps that assure results. In many instances you can communicate how much more valuable your process is by simply showing them that it is more complicated than you make it look and that you actually do much more for them than they ever knew.”

We do the same at B&LPR. Brandcrafting is the name of our methodology for message development. Another process we use to help identify and make adjustments to brand messages going from one culture into another is Cross-Cultural Branding.

Product and process names don’t have to be overly-clever, either. Names that succinctly paraphrase the process used aid with understanding. A “No Hassles Guarantee” is pretty clear and intrinsically more valuable than a plain product guarantee.

Technorati Tags: Marketing, Product Naming, Naming Systems, Brand Names, Duct Tape Marketing, John Jantsch, Brandcrafting, Cross-Cultural Branding

Okay, so maybe it won’t wind up on the reading list at Harvard Business School, but Andrew Taylor, the blogger behind the Artful Manager, has pointed to a clever text on intellectual property law. The comic book “Bound by Law” is a textbook in comic book form.

The book outlines the ins and outs of intellectual property, but in a format that keeps an artist’s attention and with a story line that makes a connection.

Do you have any other books that engage, entertain and inform that relate to the creative disciplines? Steve Krug’s “Don’t Make Me Think” for web design comes to mind.

Send me your suggestions.

Some claim that the future of marketing is definitely experiential, WOM, “buzz” or any one of about a dozen so-called “specialties” out there today. Traditionalists keep going back to a deeper understanding of public relations or direct marketing to find advertising’s future.

Well, Fast Company’s bloggers claim to have found the future of advertising – and it’s in the toilet.

Among other places.

Disruptive marketing tactics that help create unexpected connections between consumers and brands seem to be the next “big thing” in the ad world. We showcase some of that work – featured primarily in the international blogs that concentrate on ad creative (like Frederik Samuel’s blog or Coloribus or others).

Sure, AdFreak, Cool0r and others have blogged about this billboard – I just thought it was worth sharing.

Romenesko points to this post in the NY Times (reg. required) covering the final days of one of America’s premiere newspaper companies.

The debate about click fraud continues but our friends at the Business Pundit blog have put a new twist on the discussion by asking us to consider reverse click-fraud.

Is there such a thing?

I guess that can be a whole new debate.

In this post, the folks at the Webtivity Design blog break down the difference between the contenders and pretenders when it comes to web site designers. Webtivity provides a series of evaluation criteria including:

- Services
- Pricing
- Unique Look
- Continuous Support

They even provide a link to this site – which provides an exhaustive listing of web service and site design companies.

Technorati Tags: Web Site Design, Creativity, Web Design, Web Designers, Webtivity Designs

Small business blogger Anita Campbell provides some critical links and important points in this post about the role of the press release for entreprenuers. According to Anita:

For small businesses the new press releases can be a valuable vehicle. You write and distribute a press release using one of several online free or inexpensive news distribution services for small businesses. If you do it right, by optimizing the release for search engine purposes using keywords, and typically paying a reasonable upgrade fee between $30 and a few hundred dollars, you get:(1) a keyword-optimized Web page that links back to your site,
(2) your release gets included in Google News and Yahoo News,
(3) journalists may notice your company indirectly, through seeing it in Google News or elsewhere online.

Anita also provides links to a couple of free posting services that allow you to put up your news release. One of these, PRWeb was just recently acquired by a “pay” service, so I’m not sure how much longer it will be around.

The problem with all the hoopla surrounding this kind of “free” PR and the importance of having your news release indext by search engines is that the list of journalists who use Google, Yahoo! or some other search engine to get their story ideas is very, very short.

This is not to say that posting your release and making it available to the world through search engine optimization is a bad idea. To the contrary, it should be one of many tactics corporate communicators should pursue. But if you want real media coverage, writing your release and then pitching it to a well-defined and limited number of reporters and editors is still your best bet for big coverage that will generate significant buzz.

Technorati Tags: PR, Public Relations, News Release Writing, SEO Optimization, Publicity, Free Publicity, Anita Cambell, Small Business Marketing

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