If your planning on playing the green card (not the immigration one) in our marketing, you might not want to bother. A recent study from Landor Associates finds 58 percent of people don't give a crap about environmentally friendly practices such as recycling, social responsibility or the use of natural and organic ingredients. The study only surveyed 510 people over 18, hardly a representative sample of the country, but indicative of America's environmentally lazy attitude. The only ting that will force people to give a crap about this is to force every town in America to deal with their own wast rather than ship it off to some far away "transfer station." Oh wait. We tried that.
You guys over at celebu-obsessive BBDO might want to read up on a bit of new research from college marketing experts Alloy Media + Marketing which just released a study that found adults age 18-30 place far more emphasis on a brand's social responsibility than its use of celebrity endorsers. Of course any survey that queries people on the importance of not-for-profit causes, community activism and environmental friendliness as compared to the importance of celebrity endorsement is bound to skew results in favor of the "right" answer.
The trouble with this survey is that it measured perception and intent, not actual behavior and the opening of a wallet. A better and more valuable test of what influences a person's actions after being exposed to a brand's message would be to compare purchase behavior of various brands with said brand's use of celebrity endorsers, socially conscious practices and the brands reliance on it's "image." Of course, these sorts of studies have been done many times before but are usually proprietary in nature because it involves a brand divulging sales figures, etc. Point being, studies that measure action versus intent and far more relevant.
- In China, Intel employees get branded every morning with during their ritual exercises and this song.
- One Adrants readers thinks a recent Ad Week headline "Mazda N.A. Imports Marketing Exec" describing the movement of one of its employees from Japan to America is offensive. We think it's quite catchy ourselves.
- Here's a few outtakes of those kids in the Adidas World Cup 2006 Impossible Dream ads.
- If the U.S. Senate approves a constitutional amendment to prohibit flag-burning, Commercial Alert is urging U.S. Senators to define commercializing the flag as a form of desecration of the flag.
- WebAdvantage.net has released a study which queried marketers on their use of online video. Thirty percent are experienced in the medium but 63 percent of those 30 are concerned with keeping people involved with the ad.
- AdFreak says two out of the three Sea-Doo films are pretty good. We'll take thier word for it since, like many bloated sites, it wouldn't load well for us. Then again, that could just be our crappy Internet connection. And if you're wondering what Eric Roberts is doing these days. Here's your answer.
- Jack Morton has published a white paper which finds experiential marketing to be more likely to "increase understanding, lead to action and inspire advocacy."
- Nokia is running a blog-based campaign in Toronto and Vancouver to promote its new 6682 phone. The company has promised to send bloggers the phone for free if they qualify (age, blog size, location, etc.)
- An Iowa construction company which is building the Iowa Speeday is promoting the track by outfitting ten of the company's cement trucks with Iowa Speedway decals.
- Crispin Porter + Bogusky's VW Configurator, which was developed in part by IQ Interactive, took home a Cyber Lions Grand Prix.
- It's in French so we're not sure what it's all about but we do know it's for Coke BlaK. We've also seen the hippy-dippy floral/bubble theme before. Yup, we have and it was for Coke's M5 project.
Because sometimes a press release actually offers usable information, "A new survey on the state of integrated marketing communications, released by the Association of National Advertisers (ANA), reveals that 67 percent of marketers develop integrated marketing programs across most or all of their brands, but only 33 percent say they are very happy with their efforts. The findings, based on responses from more than 85 major advertisers, were released today at the ANA's first annual Masters of Integrated Marketing Conference at the Grand Hyatt Hotel in New York City." Now that we know what we already knew, we can move on.
ClickZ columnist Hollis Thomases is writing an article about agencies and online video advertising and she's interested in how those of us in the industry are using video. She's posted a survey here and would love it if you'd spend about five minutes answering less than ten questions.
Aap Global, the company that created the technology behind elevator handrail advertising, is now licensing the technology to partners internationally.
MySpace is now part of the PointRoll Include program. We're not sure how all those teens will take to the company's Fatboy, BadBoy, TomBoy, PaperBoy and TowelBoy expand-o-banners creeping all over their pages.
We're not quite sure how but this game, Maconomy X, is supposed to induce creatives into filling out their times sheets.
Doubleclick has released a new white paper, Best Practices for Optimizing Web Advertising Effectiveness, that aims to share help marketers improve their online advertising efforts.
Two college professors, University of Colorado Marketing Professor Paul Her and the late Binghamton University Associate Professor Yong-Soon Kang, are about to poke a whole in the ad industry's love affair with sex as a tool to sell. In June, the pair will release a study, "Beauty and the Beholder: Why Pretty Faces Don't Always Help Sales," conducted among 200 college students that will show sex-laced advertising can backfire. We hope everyone ignores the study.
Let's see. A magazine gives you a few pictures and words 12 times a year. The Internet offers billions of pictures of women in various stages of undress and enough online games to play until one is 152. Marketers screw up a lot of things but they're pretty good at following the eyeballs. Mediaweek Monitor says ad pages in men's magazines have dropped four percent through June. Conde Nast admits they had a terrible first quarter for Details.
For those interested in examining trends and marketing buzz, Trendio.com has launched as a stock market for buzz-words: words that appear in the news are quoted in real time based on their presence in 3000 news sources. The goal is to provide a picture of what the media are talking about, which topics are in and which are out. There's also a game that allows users to manage a portfolio of words as if they were stocks. Users can buy and sell words and try to gain virtual dollars based on their feeling on which topics will get the most coverage, and rise the most in the coming hours, days or weeks. If trends and buzz words are you thing, then, I guess, so is Trendio.
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