Brand Central Station

Suzanne Vranica from the Wall Street Journal, provided this interesting article on Welch’s new campaign for their core, grape juice product.  The campaign consists of full-page ads in People Magazine that include a “peel-and-lick” sticker to give readers a taste of the product.

It’s not the first time a lickable ad has been used by a national advertiser, though.  CBS ran an ad for its Jimmy Smits-vehicle, Cane, that featured a lickable ad promoting the rum produced by Smits’ character’s distillery.

First Flavor, a small company in Bala Cynwyd, PA that created the lickable technology handled the assignment for Welch’s.

From the AdDesign Goodness blog …

Who would have thought to use slapstick humor to promote the World Wildlife Fund?

You’ve heard the advice: sell the benefit not the feature, time and again, haven’t you.  Now the Copyblogger blog provides this post where they explain the physiological reasons why humans prefer benefits over features.

It’s a fascinating piece that puts you into contact with the research from scientists who study this sort of stuff.

To sum up author Brian Clark’s point:

when you focus on beneficial messages in your copy, you’re creating an anticipatory response that is no different from experiencing the reward itself. A dry recitation of features is not going to pull this neurological trigger, and that’s why copy that focuses on features alone fails.

You’ve got to tell people the story they (and their brains) want to hear.

The hardest thing for many people is mistaking features for the benefits that the features provide. A feature is a descriptive fact about your offering. The benefit of that feature is what someone gains or avoids losing as a result of that feature.

MarketingVOX provides this snippet about a promotion conducted at the Chicago Museum of Contemporary Art.  The event drew 2,500 people, a third of whom participated in the “Digital Post Office of Love” event.

“We wanted to create a fun and engag­ing activity and to build up the text mes­saging list,” president David Wachs of Cellit told DM News. “Those who opted in for the game received follow-up messages asking them if they would like to opt in to receive alerts for upcoming museum events.”

From the DM News article:

Each text message appeared instantly on a large interactive display for all par­ticipants to view and the intended recipi­ent received a notice on their cell phone. Six hundred people played the game and more than 800 text messages were sent.

This is just one of an ongoing series of events that MCA does with the mobile phone. The museum, which targets peo­ple in their mid-20s to mid-30s, also uses mobile to promote prize giveaways and for event reminders.

The “Digital Post Office of Love” event was marketed through the mobile phone, as well as through e-mail and ads in Time Out Chicago.

Sounds like fun.

Crain’s NY reports the estate of JRR Tolkien is suing New Line Cinemas for royalties on the Lord of the Rings film trilogy.  The estate and fellow plaintiffs say they only received $62,500 as an up-front payment of the 7.5% of gross receipts they were promised.

Let’s see now.  The LOTR films grossed about $6 billion ($6,000,000,000).  7.5% of that would be $450 million.

The writers’ strike was hard enough on Hollywood.  The last thing producers need is for the Tolkien estate’s negotiation team to show up at their door (see photo).

One of my favorite blogs on the Internet is the Namewire blog, written by Bill Lozito at Strategic Name Development.  The other day, Bill wrote an article about Ralph Lauren’s just-launched collaboration with JC Penney (via the Ralph Lauren American Living brand). (more…)

I caught onto this article during my daily scan through blogs and articles.  It seems the effectiveness of ads run in social networking spaces (like Facebook, bebo and MySpace) aren’t as lucrative as originally thought.  But the real news isn’t the statement that Google’s $900 million guaranteed ad deal doesn’t look like it will pan out – the real news is that “the MySpace Generation may be getting annoyed with ads and a bit bored with profile pages.”

Yikes

(more…)

Sounds like Minneapolis-based Fallon may be the big winner of the Microsoft business currently under review.  They were up against a very hot Crispin, Porter + Bogusky for the business.

AdRant’s Steve Hall provided his own, unique perspective on not just the possibility of a Fallon win but also on a CP+B loss.

The agency that came up with this cheap-shot concept or the slacker client who agreed to it.

A tip of the hat to the Copyranter who pointed this out in the first place.

It’s happened before, but never with this much fanfare or attention.  eBay is feuding with its customers again.

I must admit, I have an interest in this fight.  It’s my wife.  She sells stuff on eBay.  But she’s not as hot as some of the “Power Sellers” who have called for a boycott of eBay February 18-25 to protest the online auction service’s new policies on rates, release of payment through PayPal and (most controversaly) significant changes to its rules on feedback left by sellers about buyers.

Now Money Magazine is wading into the fray with an article and a post on YouTube asking for disgruntled eBayers to contact them for interviews (note: the post requesting contact from disgruntled eBay sellers was removed overnight Sunday evening). (more…)

I was reading a recent piece by Seth Godinand I got to thinking (I’m sorry, Seths posts tend to have that effect on me)…

Why is it that clients and their agencies of choice seem to fall out of favor over time?  The average lifespan of an agency/client relationship is less than three years.  Adweek just reported that 45% (or thereabouts) of big company CMO’s indicate a preference for change this year, alone. (more…)

Oh, this is a juicy one found on Media Bistro’s PR Newser blog.  Apparently, Lansing (MI) based Sterling Corporation, the PR firm for the MGM Mirage casino in Michigan, has been accused of creating a faux-grassroots “Gambling Watch” mailer which blasts two new casino projects in the state that will compete with Sterling’s client. 

It appears Mike Connell, a reporter for the Port Huron Times-Hearld in Michigan was the one who blew the lid off the story with this article.

Thanks to Media Bistro for this one.