Ok, so they may never win a Cannes Lion. I’m not too cool to admit I love the Budweiser Clydesdales.
And I am not alone. You’ve probably heard that Budweiser reversed a decision not to run a Clydesdales spot this year based on fan demand. Although I suspect the initial ‘no’ was just an engineered Facebook page traffic driver.
Today started happy. I wasn’t headed anywhere on #Eurostar. Then, TechCrunch made me even happier that I wasn’t Eurostar’s agency.
I’m not linking to all of the blog brouhaha because this post isn’t about Crisis Dos & Don’ts. (My employer has better folks for that.) This is a personal ponder on why us agencies preach so much better than most advertisers practice.
TechCrunch usually writes about web 2 start-ups, but you have to assume their savvy editor knows enough about the marketing agency model to understand we cannot do anything on behalf of clients that they haven’t actually commissioned. Yet it seems the age of transparency means being outed for sins of omission. Harsh.
For literally years now, as one micro example, I have counseled clients to claim back their brand-jacked Twitter urls. Even this small step however, falls in the cracks between corporate departments. My own take-away from this latest #fail case is to work harder to jump those divides.
Clients often ask me who ‘owns’ social media. By which they mean, does it sit in the PR, digital, research, or customer service budget? So I draw my little overlapping Venn circles and explain about the hybrid teams needed, but is that a good answer? Oh, it is the right answer. But is it a useful answer? It would be great to get comments from client side people here (or here).
Frankly, this confusion is all our fault. Although perhaps mostly the media agencies’ fault (sorry mates). Since brands first went online (circa Netscape Navigator), agency enabled clients have marked ‘digital’ as just another ‘channel’ in their marketing plan. (I don’t have the strength in this 20th year of the world wide web to explain how whack that is, but probably you already know.) These new applications weren’t built as marketing channels any more than highways were built for billboards.
And here we are entering 2010 with a new, fairly skinny linear line item on that spreadsheet, misleadingly called social ‘media’. It shouldn’t take a crisis to see that that line should instead be a circle around the whole company. But maybe it does.
Please follow me on Twitter in case we get stuck on a train.
It used to be that we got validation when other people commented on our blog posts. Now that warm feeling happens when people repeat one of our tweets. As Twitter replaces RSS, the RT replaces comments.
Ok, I promised not to write about Twitter anymore, but this is more about the twitterverse.
Dan Zarrella wrote a great report on The Science of Retweets, which naturally got massively retweeted. But it is the emotion of the RT that created it in the first place. Because it wasn’t a function that came with the app, but an invention by the users. A retweet is a compliment. A vote of solidarity. An event promotion. A shout out to someone you know. A way to get the attention of someone you want to know.
Now that Twitter has finally added a built-in retweet button, I hope it doesn’t change the nature of the gesture. A retweet is that slap on the back everyone needs. Please RT if you agree.
I was
lucky to be part of a great panel moderated by Gordon at media140 on brands and
personality. A topic similar to the question I get asked most often by our
clients at H&K — “How should my brand behave in social media?”
Sitting in my inbox is an email from the organizers asking, “How can we make Cannes Lions even better?”
My answer: Change your name and focus from “Advertising Festival” to “Marketing Festival”.
As excited as I am about PR being included this year at the Cannes Lions International Advertising Festival, there is a certain irony in being invited for the first time during a recession. 2009 is predicted to be much more subdued on the party front. Pity…PR people may be newbies at Cannes, but they are the gurus of stylish events.
I had to lol at the radio this morning. They were screaming how the stressed out Susan Boyle story is all over the news. Well, it is everywhere because mainstream media loves singing the same tune. Old media’s own re-tweeting system means bits of sensationalized gossip gets relayed from outlet to outlet, building up an ephemeral thundercloud of noise.
Last night our agency had a sweet evening event (#hksocial) which I was jazzed about because we invited one of the best UK examples of a brand embracing social media.
Dogs Trust is a wonderful charity that helps educate folks that “A dog is for life, not just for Christmas®.” They live and breathe their brand promise to “never put a healthy dog down.”
Have been busy at work recently thinking about words. We are all guilty of playing buzz word bingo via Powerpoint, even though the game is so deadly dull.
One word that is omnipresent in marketing decks is Consumer, while those of us that come from the interactive space have adopted User from the software dudes. I like the latter because it is active (and doesn’t make me think of people as giant mouths). Not a new debate; others have written good stuff on this topic. Plus, real people don’t really like being labeled Consumers. Do you?
I am so tired of defending Twitter. (Not that they need me to. These are guys that have Google on caller ID and Stephen Colbert on speed dial.)
I am just so bored with how mainstream attention is gained only along side the sneer of unengaged pundits pretending it is all a passing craze.
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