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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