Brand Central Station

Well, not really “beefcake” – maybe more of a pressed, tofu thing.

Anyway, the Beyond Madison Avenue blog report on PeTA’s latest promotion: The Sexiest Vegetarian Next Door contest.  Poitics aside, it looks like the promotion is fun and well-executed but not particularly well-promoted.

In a slip that might be as Freudian as they come, PeTA has failed to exploit this promotion to their advantage – as pointed out time and again by the BMA bloggers.

The headline in this week’s edition of B2B Magazine proclaims the good news that marketing budgets for B2B marketers is going up in 2008.  The survey of 213 marketers found that the majority of those interviewed (over 50%) anticipated a budget increase in the 5-14% range over last year. 

That sounds great on the surface, but what a closer examination of the story will tell you is that the biggest parts of the budgets seeing increases are online marketing and event marketing/trade shows.

What’s this mean for agencies and trade pubs trying to ride the wave of increased budgets for 2008?

It means it “ain’t gonna happen” – not this year, anyway. (more…)

Research cited in this eMarketer entry says that nearly 90% of online buyers read customer reviews at least “some of the time” before making a purchase.

The article goes on to provide some interesting insights into how consumers are continuing to expand their knowledge about product features and benefits from other consumers via online reviews, etc. before making their purchase.  The eMarketer report on user-generated content and e-commerce will be coming out in March.

Sign up for it here.

Thanks to Steve Rubel and his Micropersuasion blog for this tip.

I hit on this all the time when I’m working with clients.  We’ve got to make sure our messages are relevant and engaging.

Seth Godin has said the same thing … only better.

That’s why he gets the big bucks and I’m still hacking away here in Iowa.

Be sure to check out the Digg comments on this post.

Duct Tape Marketing’s John Jantsch recommends a great trick for discovering what customers really value. 

John recommends that during the customer interview process, you ask them a simple question: “What would you Google if you were looking for this kind of service/tool online?”

Try it and you’re almost sure to find some potentially powerful keyword phrases that you may not have considered before.

Thanks, John!

Or, at least, he will be. 

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cQ60n9DiAEM&rel=1]

With this coming out on May 22 and Lucas launching a Star Wars animated movie this summer, is there any wonder why Paramount has decided to hold off the Star Trek Movie to Summer of ’09?

 Look for a big box office this summer.

It’s not an environmental thing.  It’s a Mountain Dew thing.

The Eyes on Creativity blog has been keeping watch on this effort and has some good things to say.

Hysterical spot for Old Spice.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jPYWTkP9NDM&rel=1]

Thanks to Copyranter for bringing this up and several other recommendations of hilarious tv creative.

See, it’s not all bad.

John Jantsch and his incredibly useful blog, Duct Tape Marketing, had one of the best posts of the day yesterday – and not for what John wrote (“What does your drink say bout you?”) but for the comments it generated.

Who thought coffee could be so interesting?

Crain’s NY Business reports the New York Times will be cutting 100 positions out of their newsroom by the end of the year.  From the sound of things, it sounds like some of the editorial leadership will have to leave, too:

“[The] low-hanging fruit is gone, and so is some of the high-hanging fruit,” said Times executive editor Bill Keller.

Late last year, the Times cut half a dozen support positions and instituted a hiring freeze. The paper’s ad revenue dropped 4.7% in 2007, compared with about 7% industry-wide. For the year, the company reported earnings of $209 million on revenues of $3.2 billion.

The Crain’s article credits this piece on Gawker for the tip.

Do you hate that guy that seems to be an expert on everything?  Well, thanks to the Creative Generalist, we’re able to give you this link to a guy who isn’t an expert on anything.

Meet the Non-Expert.

It’s a humorous series of information (or is it misinformation) about a wide variety of topics.  Which begs the question: “What kind of questions do the Non-Expert(s) answer?”

Well, for starters:

“My understanding is that the term “begs the question” has essentially been bastardized, whereby laymen (i.e., us) have misconstrued or broadened its meaning, and in the process have pissed off a very small group of anal-retentive, scholarly types (i.e., them).

Now, I assume that when you use the phrase, like most other people, you use it to mean something like, “Well, that opens up another can of worms.” For example: Your 16-year-old son gets in a fight with a bouncer at a strip club. Sure, it’s bad enough he’s rumbling with bouncers—and you are probably in need of some parenting books—but you might say the whole situation begs the question: How did he, being underage, get into the strip club in the first place? And did he at least get a lap dance before he was thrown out? (Let’s hope so.)”

And so it goes …

As reported via Adotas:

Jim Rome, the popular sports-talk radio host, has signed on with HipCricket to create a closer relationship with his listeners (also known as “Clones”).  Rome’s clones can now participate in a daily “Huge Text of the Day” (as long as it doesn’t suck), additional contests and program changes.

The alliance seems to reflect the fact that sports fans are coming to rely on mobile media devices more and more.  ESPN and a host of other sports services have inked deals with cellular phone carriers to provide updates and other streaming content.  The deal between HipCricket and Rome is viewed as a “logical extension” of Rome’s show and is accessible by any phone with text messaging capabilities.