Sprouting like flowers on steroids, blog advertising related companies are all the rage now. The latest comes from Roger Simon, Charles Johnson and Marc Danziger who plan to launch a network which would allow placement of ads a large group of blogs rather than the BlogAds service which allows for individual blog selection. While the yet to be named company has not launched nor full details revealed, one wonders why one would take the niche targeting benefits of weblogs, most of which focus on a single topic, and group them all together into yet another massive, nameless, faceless online network. Certainly, there are benefits of scale to advertisers and advantages individual bloggers can realize from this service but the selling point of weblogs in general has been their unique character and voice. Lumping them all into one big ad buy seems counter to what the medium has to offer advertisers. Yet, admittedly, no media buyer wants to mess with thousands of tiny sites when one larger collective will achieve roughly the same objective.
Separately, the three are launching Blog News Service, apparently a news service aggregating blog content. Now the circle is complete. The aggregation and re-reporting of other's content found on most blogs will now be tied up in a bow and spit back as a fancy news service. Intriguing indeed.
Countering the NBA's fancy, action-filled Playoff promotional spots and claiming most basketball games, with lame halfcourt offense and 15 foot bank shots, are boring and unwatchable, quirky Wexley School for Girls Creative Directors Ian Cohen and Cal McAllister have created "To The Bank Y'all," a little video poking fun at the whole scenario. The video focuses specifically on the San Antonio Spurs who, while title winners, Cohen and McAllister claim play a very lame, conservative game. it's amusing enough.
Bike advertising seems to have, suddenly, become as popular as human space advertising. Similar to Bike Ads, Promotion N Motion uses bikes but the three wheeled, backwards tricycle style bikes. Mounted on the bike, above the driver, are large billboard-like banners on which advertisers can place their messaging. Currently Promotion N Motion serves the San Francisco area. Priced at $35 per hour, per bike weekdays and $50 per hour, per bike on weekends, it's quite an economical means to deliver, in a novel manner, a local message.
In the face of all those high profile, overpriced, try oh-so-hard to be oh-so-cool consumer television campaigns, business to business print campaigns usually get about as much attention as an agency traffic manager. We're doing our part to change that by highlighting a recent print campaign for Tekelec, a telecommunications solutions, network performance management technology and value-added applications company. Oh yes, there's only a few in the world who even know or care what that means but without this type of company, there'd be no functioning networks over which to have that elicit online affair or, on a more more utilitarian note, check email.
With the tagline, "Tools For What's Next," the Tekelec print ads speak to the fast changing world of networking and the company's nimble approach to helping companies react to and plan for fast approaching technologies such as GPRS, 3G, VoIP, IPTV, SIP, LNP, CALEA and IMS. Don't stretch your brain muscle too much, we worked in tech advertising a long time and we still don't know what some of those terms mean. The point of the campaign is that Tekelec does and they're riding the technology wave right along with you. Work was done by Hanft Raboy & Partners. You can see the full sized ads here, here and here. (They're PDF's)
Thirdway, a consultancy run by former brand managers, has launched a weblog, The ThirdWay Blog, intended to offer commentary from the client side. Heading up the blog is ThirdWay, Inc. President and Adjunct NYU Professor of Marketing David Vinjamuri who spent 15 years working at Johnson & Johnson, Coca-Cola and DoubleClick, among others. From a brand managers viewpoint, Ninjamuri rates television commercials and discusses what, in his and other writer's opinions works and what doesn't.
flickr user strph brings to our attention this toilet paper promotion placed, appropriately, on a roll of toilet paper. While ads on a roll of toilet paper might not be so bad what with a captive audience and all, strph points out marketer's continual perception of consumers as idiots citing the coupon ad copy, printed in bold, "Please Remove Before Use." Perhaps this was just the marketer's cheeky way of telling consumers not to shit on their offer.
AdJab points to a post by Craig's List founder Craig Newmark in which Newmark says current.tv, the new Al Gore, community-created, viewer voted content cable channel, should make commercials part of it's communal approach by allowing viewers to give thumbs up or thumbs down to commercials.
While this might be a fair indication of whether or not a spot proverbially "resonates" with the viewer, the system lacks one important element: why. Why are the ads voted off or blessed as acceptable content. As Newmark writes in his post, "The devil's in the details..." and developing a system like this that would truly deliver feedback marketers need in an abuse-free manner is, certainly, a tall order.
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