Brand Central Station

There seems to be a lot of death in the media business lately.  There’s the deathwatch conducted daily via @themediaisdying on Twitter, there’s the whole “Social Media is killing PR” meme and my screed that actually Social Media is killing Journalism.  Now Ken Dardis, blogger at Audio Graphics, weighs in on the death of radio as we knew it.

Ironically, Ken may be the “most right” out of all of us.

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Adrian Chedore, the global CEO of Synovate was interviewed yesterday (12/04) by Marketing Daily and provided a look ahead for market research and offerred some helpful advice for businesses of all sizes.  Primary among his observations was the recommendation that the future for research lies in understanding the trends and forecasting the outcomes of markets on the macro level combined with the use of social media to engage in “really in-depth” conversations to understand the attitudes of frequent users who drive those markets.

Technology enables marketers and business managers to see their enterprise and the markets in which they operate on a grand scale.  Trends are easier to spot and business models can be altered accordingly.  But to really understand the “why” behind those trends, you have to get to know the customers who make up the markets.

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Every Friday I’ll be posting a motivational poster …

If you think you can do better, go here or here and make one for yourself.  Then send it to us and if we post it, I’ll send you a Brand Central Station t-shirt.

Are you Mary or Rhoda? 
Jan or Marsha?
Jeannie or Samantha?
Romey or Michelle?

I suppose the real question should be: Are you “Sales” or “Marketing”?  Check out our handy guide below and find out for yourself.

Hat tip to the Funnelholic blog.

Last year’s New England Patriots went the entire NFL season without a loss.  A perfect 16-0 and then blew it in the Super Bowl.  Not since 1972 has a team gone without a loss in the National Football League.  That team, the Miami Dolphins won the Super Bowl and still sits as the only team to accomplish that feat.

What most people don’t remember, though, was that just four years later there was another perfect season in the NFL.  That year, the Tampa Bay Buccaneers went 0-14, doing the perfect season “in reverse.”  That is also a record that stands unmatched.

Until now.

The lowly Detroit Lions stand a fair chance of running the table for the rest of the season and racking up sixteen losses in a row.  That would put them ahead of the ’76 Bucs (the NFL regular season was stretched from 14 to 16 games a decade or so ago), but leave them far short from the ’76-’77 Tampa Bay franchise record of 26 lost in a row.

But in case you were concerned about the Lions, don’t be.  These guys are truly terrible.  So bad, in fact, that the NFL is now reportedly considering stripping the franchise’s traditional Thanksgiving Day game from the team and awarding it to a pairing that would be more competitive.

While some of us grew up on a holiday tradition of watching the Lions stink it up at Ford Field every Turkey Day since 1934, this is a purely business matter for the league.  The ratings for this past game (against the Tennessee Titans) were off 22% from the year before.  It’s kind of sad when you remember that the 1965 Thanksgiving Day game between the Lions and Baltimore Colts was the first color television broadcast of an NFL game.

Ad Age Global reported that more than 400 “hooligans” crashed Georgina Hobday’s 16th birthday party in Brighton, England after she advertised it on Facebook.  The report in the UK’s Daily Express, said the group of party crashers included a 20-strong gang of thugs known as the Facebook Republican Army.

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I’ve been watching the Twitterstream over the past two weeks as the Big 3 CEO’s made their first presentation for a governmental bailout and now as the CEO’s return for “Round Two.”  What’s been interesting to watch is the indignation expressed by professional marketers who are enraged – not by the requests for huge amounts of money – but by the lack of thought put into the “pitches” made by these gold plated executives.

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Intersting news breaking this week about the use of mobile phones in the US.  Apparently, like much of the rest of the world, a majority of Americans now carry their cell phones with them “at all times” – even inside their homes.  This coming from a study released this week by Knowledge Networks.

In other parts of the world, where the hard wiring required for phones for the past 100 years ran up against ancient buildings, incredibly dense populations or remote locations, mobile phones were often adopted as the appliance of choice for people who wanted to stay in touch.  The distribution of phones in countries like Japan and Germany lead phone companies in those countries to adopt a later, more versatile standard for mobile communications – resulting in an explosion of SMS and other mobile communications streams.

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If you operate an advertising agency or a public relations firm, the following should be as unexpected as the news that we were in a recession: business development is getting tougher and 2009 looks to be even more of a challenge than 2008.

I can hear the groans already.

Thanks to Michael Gass and his 2008 New Business Survey (as reported on the New Business Hunter blog), we’re able to identify three key factors making ’09 look more daunting than ever:

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In every social order there are those at the top and then there are the rest of us a few rungs down the ladder (some a few more rungs than others).  That’s even true in the Twitterverse where there are some folks who are bound to attract more “followers” than others.

Hey, movie stars Tweet, recording artists Tweet, politicos Tweet, journos Tweet.  In a land where no one can utter more than 140-letter tomes at a time, it’s amazing who you can find, follow and friend.

But just who should you really be following?  In a service with over 2 million subscribers (some claim there are more than 3 million), it’s tough to know which conversations are worth dropping in on. 

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Plenty of media sources reported server crashes for some retailers hoping to cash in on a “Cyber Monday” sales bounce to kick off the holiday shopping season.  But while 404 messages were as common as slip-and-fall incidents in the parking lot of your local mall, the damage to concerned retailers (i.e. Victoria’s Secret, The Gap, Old Navy, Banana Republic, Borders, Comp.USA and Home Depot to name a few) could be significant.

Here’s why:

This holiday season is brewing up a “perfect storm” for a financial disaster when it comes to Q4 sales for retailers.  Not only is 2008′s holiday shopping season five days shorter (thanks to the floating Thanksgiving holiday and leap year), it also has one fewer weekends than last year.  Add to that the fact that we’ve all just learned that the US has been in a financial recession since last December (still not clear as to what took so damn long to figure that one out) and a majority of consumers are saying they’re tightening their spending belt this year.

The result: it looks like the first few days of the holiday shopping season will be the only chance any retailer stands for making a “silk purse” out of the sow’s ear that is 2008.

Prelminary reports on Black Friday and the following weekend were that sales figures were up marginally over 2007 (+3%) – but none of the pundits are expecting that positive margin to hold.

Monday was a bad time to have your server go down.

I’m sure we’ll get plenty of explanations as to “why” things happened the way they did.  Let’s hope these retailers are around next year to put the lessons they’ve learned to good use.

Here’s a pretty funny little video about the birth and development of a new idea at your typical ad agency. 

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PoUntrhdfOU]

I pulled this off the NE Creative Blog but I’m not sure where it originated from.  If anyone has any information, please pass it along and I’ll update my post so folks are credited accordingly.

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