Brand Central Station

(Company press release)
 Drink Me magazine launches its first issue this month in San Francisco. Published by Open Content, Drink Me is the only lifestyle and entertainment publication about drinking and bar culture created for enthusiasts.

“Thirty months in the making, we’re finally here,” says Daniel Yaffe, president of Open Content. “It’s been a long and exciting road. We hope our readers take time to explore and enjoy as we offer up all the alcohol culture one could ever ask for, bottled up and ready to drink with a little tag that reads, ‘Drink Me.’ Welcome to our world…”

(more…)

This article of the MarketingVOX blog caught my attention last week. Specifically this bit:

“Some 3-5 percent of phone users click on banner ads on their screens – higher than the 1 percent click rate of computer users, according to Jeff Janer, chief operating officer of Third Screen Media.”

If Sprint Nextel and Verizon are getting into bed with Yahoo! and other search companies, then what does that mean for the independent phone directory people? More importantly, how are small and medium-sized businesses going to be able to take advantage of this technology on a local scale?

The benefits of this technology are pretty obvious: more precise targeting and a rich database on customers broken down by phone number. It’s a database marketers dream come true, isn’t it? The real question is how will consumers react.

Our prediction: If the mobile phone companies stumble by streaming tons of unwanted, irrelevant crap over their customers’ phones, we’re looking at the next generation of spam. On the other hand, if revenues generated by advertising are used to reduce (or eliminate) the cost of the phone service and the content is accurately delivered (relevant), consumers may consider ad content to be a product benefit.

This Wall Street Journal article has more info.

We’ve spent a great deal of time talking about the power and importance of a corporate vision. Once you’ve gone through the process of clarifying a vision for your company and you’ve had a chance to share it inside your organization, there’s still something you need to do in order to bring your vision to life.

You need to make a public declaration.

The media – whether it’s a blog, a corporate newsletter, television, local newspaper, whatever – has a way of making promises firm and turning ideas into commitments. And depending how you handle it, vision-related media coverage can be tremendously validating. But don’t do it just for yourself.

Every key constituency group has a relationship with multiple sources of news and information. The time you invest in understanding those people who mean the most to your brand and what matters most to them pays off as you craft and present messages that reflect the values and beliefs represented by your vision and the promises made by your brand.

Don’t consider the publication of your corporate/brand vision to be a one-time effort, however. You need to realize that media messages don’t last long at all (consumers are exposed to millions of commercial messages a year), so in order to build recognition of your brand and its unique attributes you’ll need to reinforce your vision and messages in the media over and over again.

Hey, this brand-building thing isn’t easy.

Monday Night Football ended its run on ABC this past week, marking the end of a television institution. MNF will be moving to ESPN (ABC’s sister network) next year for more money per game. Numbers for NFL games on Fox and CBS, on the other hand, have remained fairly consistent (and profitable) over the past year.

You can read the whole story on MediaPost.

Blogs, podcasts, discussion boards – they all constitute the part of the blogosphere we refer to as “social” media. That means these tools are often written by civilian, non-journalists and encourage feedback (usually in the form of posts) from readers and other like-minded individuals.

This recent post on the CNet site, however, shows one of the inherent weaknesses in the social media model. Spammers or, worse yet, well-intentioned but clueless bloggers can do more damage to the brand they are promoting no matter what their intent.

In this particular case, it’s the Microsoft Xbox 360 that is the vehicle for a reckless and less-than-successful bid to convince the video game blog “Joystiq” to cover the US introduction of their product. Here’s a summary of what happened:

Over the weekend, editors at the video game blog “Joystiq” reported that they received a series of crudely written e-mails. Each one, purporting to be from a different writer, alerted them to the fact that Xbox 360 kiosks–which play demos of games and show off the next-generation Microsoft console’s multimedia capabilities–at Wal-Mart stores would soon be featuring a playable demo of “Perfect Dark Zero.”For example, writes Joystiq editor Vladimir Cole, PootAmbassador penned a missive that went, “A sales associate at Wal-mart said they get a playable demo of Perfect dark 0. Has anyone else told you or am i the only one who knows?” 

To make matters worse, the phantom publicist continued to post comments on the Joystiq blog – usually using poor English and names that sound more like something that would come out of a late-night, fraternity party than anything else.

The offending flack didn’t seem to realize that the techno-geeks at Joystiq would be able to track all of the messages back to their originating IP address (which they did) or that action can be taken against them thanks to the CAN-SPAM law.

All of this work (if that’s what you want to call it), is lumped into the category of “buzz marketing” by the mainstream marketing and business press. This poses a potential problem for buzz marketers and other WOM providers. As long as there are buzz/word-of-mouth marketers intent on using “stealth” to trick journalists and consumers to pay attention, they’ll always face a skeptical public and an even more skeptical media.

Let’s face it, lying to the public is bad policy and a very bad practice. I hope the XBox 360 doesn’t suffer as a consequence of this action.