Clothing company, Fidel, is under fire from the New York Post saying "THAT some idiot on Seventh Avenue, who doesn't realize that the dictator of Cuba is about as popular with his people as the dictator of Iraq was with his, has come out with a Fidel clothing line. Ads show a cute brunette in a tank top with the Fidel logo across her chest."
Wasting no time, Fidel fires back saying, "Your article makes the connection between our brand - which stands for loyalty and integrity - and the firing squad execution of "would be (Cuban) escapees". Exactly what is your intention in doing this? Are you purposely looking for ways to slander and embarrass us, or do you actually consider your implications to be accurate?
Your comments are juvenile and unfounded. Making the connection between our brand name and the execution of (Cuban) escapees is preposterous and inflammatory. We are adamantly opposed to the execution of prisoners and to the implementation of the Death Penalty in general - whether on Cuban soil, in the United States, or elsewhere in the World."
Granted Fidel has a point about the "over-reactiveness" and "over-sensitivity" of the media but then again, brand names are very important and they can be damaged overnight if associations become negative whether justified or not. It's really a lose-lose situation for the marketer when it gets to this point.
Interestingly almost all the reactions in the comment section of the company's web site are positive and supportive...except for this guy:
"serves you pinkos right! it's time to get off Castro's dick and pay your respect to the red-white and blue.....if you really loved god you'd call your shitty company Springsteen."
There's always one in a bunch. Going to name your company or product soon or doing it for a client of yours? Better be sure to consider all the potential ramifications of your choices.
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Boston-based Arnold and Maynard, MA based Monster are parting ways as announced today in AdWeek today. Arnold has handled the account since 2000 and Mullen handled it prior. It seems the fall in budget from $60M in 2000 to $30M in 2002 cause difficulties between agency and client and may have contributed to the split..
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Jason Kottke has a novel idea. If advertising were placed in books, it might bring down the cost therby making some literature much more affordable or, in some cases, free. A very interesting idea.
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[via Viralmeister]
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Carat North America has aquired New York based Independent Media Services and will assume IMS clients MTV Networks, Oxygen, New York Post and the Boston Herald.
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About three years ago, there was an uproar over the lack of television programming targeted to and starring black actors. That seems to taken a 180 of late. Initiative Media found that nine programs ranked in the top 20 among both Blacks and Whites. [via MediaLife]
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A few months ago, industry luminaries were up in arms about how TiVo might dramatically change the TV landscape even saying using a TiVo is tantamount to stealing TV. Well, they seem to have come to their senses.
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You've all heard of ad servers that do the job of serving ads on websites. Weblogs pose and interesting challenge to that method of ad delivery. First off, much of a weblogs traffic goes to pages (posts) other than the home page. And not even to the top of the page the post is in but scrolled down to the actual post. This is due to the practice heavy practice of "deep linking" used in the weblog world. What good does ad advertisement do at the top of the page when most visitors are never going to see it because they have been "auto scrolled" down the page?
As the addition of an advertising component to Adrants is considered, this situation was clearly demonstrated on Adrants yesterday. Slate wrote an article about a post on Gawker that then linked to a post on Adrants about the PUMA Ad Sensation. Traffic to Adrants sky rocketed. Ten thousand visitors, in fact, yesterday and 3,000 so far today. Normal daily traffic is between 500-800 visitors a day. If Adrants had an ad program up and running that placed ads only at the top of the page, the advertiser, and Adrants, would have lost out big time on that bonus traffic. Worse, those ads would be counted as served impressions when, in fact, they would never be seen. Not a good ad strategy. What is needed is the ability to "embed" ads (graphic and/or text) dynamically within individual posts based on traffic level so that any ad is always "served" to the most highly viewed area of the site.
I'm sure technology exists to accomplish this but I bet it is far beyond the price point of most weblog operators. Sure, you could do it manually but that would be highly inefficient. Some sort of combination of server log info and ad serving technology would seem to do the trick. Does this exist? Has anyone heard of something like this? Please, do tell. Currently for blogs, there's BlogAds, Google AdWords and TextAds. None of which, if I understand their technology correctly, is designed to address this issue.
Another weblog specific issue that poses a problem to ad delivery is RSS (or Rich Site Summary) delivery of weblog posts. This technology allows weblog operators to send out each post, via a special RSS link, to a newsreader. A newsreader is a piece of software that is used to read these RSS link so the person does not have to continually visit the weblog to see if a new post/articles has been added. Just enter the RSS link into your newsreader and wait for the posts to roll in.
The advertising problem? Again, if no one actually goes to the actual weblog to read the article, any advertising on the page will never be seen. Just like the above mentioned "traffic based" ad delivery system, there needs to be a technology capable of "attaching" ads to RSS newsfeeds as they are sent out. Again, this could be done manually but it would be very inefficient. Perhaps the simple auto-attachment of a Javascript might do the trick.
Please feel free to add to this conversation in the Comment section below.
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A MarketingFix associate of mine, Rick Bruner, will be speaking at Jupiter/ClickZ's Business Weblog Strategies conference in Boston, June 9-10. Read his post about the event, his thoughts on weblogging in business, and details on the conference.
Weblogs are the new CRM.
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Found on Gawker:
-----Original Message-----
From: Michael Becce
Sent: Monday, April 14, 2003 3:23 PM
To: tips@gawker.com
Subject: link exchange
Hello.
I am working with Tony Perkins (Founder/Editor-in-Chief of the Red Herring) on the AlwaysOn Network (AO) - www.alwayson-network.com. We wanted to explore the possibility of having a link posted on the AO site for the same on yours. Please let me know how to pursue. Thanks.
Michael Becce
President
MRB Public Relations
Red Bank, NJ - New York, NY - San Jose, CA
www.mrb-pr.com
MRB is a Founding Partner of the AlwaysOn Network - www.alwayson-network.com. MRB was named "Top 100 Tech-Savvy Small Businesses" - Small Business Computing. At MRB, we don't just work with the press -- we work for the press. MRB has prepared stories in association with 20/20, Associated Press, Business Week, CNBC, CNN, Forbes, Fortune, Newsweek, PBS Specials, Time, The Today Show, Wall Street Journal and many others.
__________________________________________________
Dear Michael,
This is first time I've ever seen a blogger hire an actual PR firm to solicit links from other bloggers. I'm not saying it's definitively a bad practice, but it seems a bit like having your mom run around the playground, asking all the other kids to be your friend. "Little Tony may not be the brightest bulb in the chandelier," she says, "and even his father and I admit he's a pretty ugly kid, but he's such a nice little boy! There was that one time he started a magazine that hyped a bunch of his venture capital investments, but�oh, let's not talk about that! Whaddya say? Play with him for five bucks? No? Ten?"
But I'm open-minded. So I'll make you a deal: when Tony starts writing extensively about the Hilton sisters, Tina Brown, Lower East Side restaurants that haven't opened yet, Harvey Weinstein, the smoking ban, Williamsburg hipsters, Andr� Leon Talley, Radar, Pat Kingsley, Manhattan skyscrapers, OR Colin Farrell, I'll link to Always-On.
Best Regards,
Elizabeth Spiers
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