Op-Eds

We welcome back Don Seaman, manager of marketing communications for TVB, which is the non-profit trade association of America’s commercial broadcast TV industry. Now that he’s given us his Super Bowl take, the exec discusses skipping out on this year’s TV upfronts, but doesn’t hold back on reflecting. Take it away, sir.

There was a time, not so long ago, that the networks held back some surprises for some buzz to be made from the actual Upfront presentations.  The events meant something, whether it was an announcement of a surprise renewal or cancellation, a new star joining the network family, or just a major timeslot change.

These days, announcements are made to the press over the weekend.  The events are basically just a way to pay Coldplay their legally binding royalty fees for using their song all week.  You can even find clips of the new shows released in advance of the presentations.  If this trend continues, in ten years the Upfronts may just consist of a login code to get in and a Groupon free drink deal as the after party.

Read more

Launch a social media campaign that will build your brand and deliver results in our online Social Media Marketing Boot Camp starting June 7. Speakers include Abigail Cusick (Bravo Digital), Gregory Galant (Sawhorse Media), Alex Leo (Thomson Reuters Digital), Jim Tobin (Ignite Social Media), and many more. Read the reviews.

Now that he’s done pontificating about Pinterest for the time being, our regular contributor and HUGE senior marketing strategist Josh Seifert returns in time for awards season. As the headline suggests, our scribe points out how digital has evolved, but digital awards–eh, maybe another story.

With this year’s marketing awards season in full swing, I recently took a closer look at what’s winning awards in digital these days. With full credit to everyone who recently took home a CLIO or a Webby, I have to admit that digital awards have become a bit of a head-scratcher for me. If awards are meant to recognize excellence in the medium, I’m not sure what’s going on.

The Webbys are possibly the highest profile digital awards and, honestly, have done a great job of raising the profile of digital in websites, online film, interactive advertising and mobile, in too many subcategories to count. Each year, I log in to vote in the People’s Voice Awards (usually at someone else’s behest) and, after arbitrarily casting a few votes, quickly become bored and abandon the site. The field is simply too broad, maximizing the number of winners (and entries), at the expense of the overall relevance of the awards.

Read more

Wow, how long has it been since we’ve heard from our pals at the Egotist network?  We think it was Des Moines back in June of last year, but anyhow, the folks are back and beaming their ad scene reports from Alberta. Yes, Alberta, so let’s hear what’s going on with our neighbors to the northwest.

Alberta is a tough market. Talent that starts here seldom stays. We’re continually bleeding great creative people into Toronto and Vancouver. When talent leaves it makes it harder for local shops to hang on to great accounts.

Our market is home to two massive communications providers: Shaw and Telus and Westjet, an extremely successful airline. All of which have agencies of record out of our market.

But we’re not suffering. There’s a serious digital pedigree here. We’re home to Critical Mass, who recently moved offices to accommodate their 300+ sized team in Calgary. Evans Hunt has had explosive growth. Two years ago they sported a team of 12. Now they have more than 40.

Boutique shops like Sajak&Farki dazzle blue-chip accounts like Toyota with their playful interactive work.

Earlier this year MacLaren McCann Calgary won Mark’s – a national clothing retailer – keeping the account in Calgary.

Alberta is the birthplace of iStockPhoto & Veer. Some might even argue the micro-stock market as a whole.

There is no shortage of jobs. Almost any agency you might call is hiring. It’s rare to hear of big layoff news. It was a surprise when Veer closed its Calgary office in January. All that talent!

Of course many got snapped up right away. Or they joined Uppercut. A creative studio founded by 18 of the Veer alumni.

Here’s a little peek into the happenings of Alberta:

• The well awarded agency, WAX in Calgary recently posted four open positions in a day. Something’s going on over there.
• Trigger Communications’ Creative Director, Patrick Doyle left earlier in the year to focus on sustainable businesses and donate time to causes as a freelancer.
• Watermark lost Mark’s as the incumbent to MacLaren McCann. But turned around and picked up Edo Japan, a national restaurant chain.
• Studio Dialog revamped their website. It sounds mundane until you see how ridiculously great their work is.
• Audio production shop 6° is up for an Emmy for their work on ESPN’s Monday Night Football Season.
• DONOVAN Creative wins EEDC achievement award
• Karo won a “tourism Oscar.” The Diamond award for its Travel Alberta video, “(remember to breathe).”
• Foundry‘s founder, Zahra al-Harazi, was named Chatelaine’s woman of the year

The Alberta Egotist covers advertising, design & interactive in Alberta Canada.

Do you care about your Klout score? Well, if you’re all hung on “your ability to drive action”, here’s a little ditty from Megan Wintersteen, strategic planner at Blacksburg, VA-based digital shop Modea, who discusses the art of “Klout bombing.”

The credibility of a Klout score has been a controversial topic for some time now. Regardless of whether or not you believe in it, one thing is for sure – Klout has spawned one of the most spectacular Internet pranks to date: Klout Bombing.

Klout is a tool that measures the influence of a social media user across a variety of topics. Beyond Klout-assigned topics of influence, users may also award +K’s to each other as a demonstration of expertise.  A Klout Bomb occurs when the awarded topic is something sarcastic, ironic or derogatory towards that person. In other words, something he or she typically would not want to be affiliated with.

I would know because I’ve been Klout Bombed.

One of my wise-guy coworkers decided it would be funny to +K me in “Prison” on Klout (for the record, I’ve never been anywhere near a prison). After expressing my dissatisfaction, other coworkers and friends found entertainment in increasing my influence in “Prison,” and it ultimately became a running joke around the office.

Read more

Two op-eds in two days, you say, and it’s not even Super Bowl time? Why not. Here, John Paolini, executive creative director/partner at NYC-based operation Sullivan, which has a notable client list from the looks of it, offers us his take on not only Tiger Tiger Woods Y’all, but the ifs and hows on whether athletes in general can rebuild their brand in the wake of scandal and more.

 

Tiger Woods is back.

Well, sort of. With his first PGA-tour win since 2009 at the Arnold Palmer Invitational last week, he’s back in the spotlight as a golfer—not a sexting adulterer.

All eyes are on the 37-year-old as he heads to Augusta this Thursday for the Masters. If his streak continues, we wonder if maybe he’ll be the greatest golfer of all time after all—he trails Jack Nicklaus by just four major titles. Could the steel-minded prodigy we used to love win back our hearts with more wins on the course?

Maybe… but probably not. Tiger Woods’s personal brand took a big hit in 2009 when his sex scandal revealed how little we really knew about golf’s biggest star. Scandalized celebrities certainly make comebacks. They repent, they reinvent themselves, and they come back better—and with more valuable brands—than ever. But for several reasons, I don’t think Tiger’s brand will ever fully recover.

Read more

Let’s check in as we do every month with our pal and HUGE senior marketing strategist Josh Seifert, who this time turns his attention to emerging social media powerhouse Pinterest (which recently even enticed a certain world leader to join). There’s really no need to preface things any further as the hed should adequately tease Seiftert’s topic of discussion today. Take it away, sir.

Ever since a creative director colleague introduced me to Pinterest to put together moodboards, I’ve slowly watched what seems like every single Facebook friend begin following my mostly empty boards. For anyone still unfamiliar, Pinterest is essentially a digital corkboard that lets users “pin” images from various websites, saving them to “pinboards” viewable by the rest of the community. Users can then “repin” things they find on others’ boards, to add it to their own. It’s a terrific tool for finding inspiration, saving stuff you might be interested in later, or just managing ideas visually.

A handful of brands have been quick to start taking advantage of Pinterest—HGTV, Kate Spade, Whole Foods, West Elm. As a highly visual site, fashion and home décor (and brands within those verticals) are pretty obvious fits for Pinterest. More surprising is a recent survey that found 70 percent of users share recipes or other cooking-related photos. As more users begin using Pinterest in more ways, all kinds of brands will surely follow and either create their own presences, or begin using “Pin It” buttons to make content on other digital properties shareable on the site.

Read more

Since yours truly is back home from SXSWi, figured I’d give the floor to someone who can offer some fresh, outside perspective on the Austin happenings. This little ditty comes to us from Tim Letscher, senior strategist at Carmichael Lynch, who like others can’t help but mention Highlight.

SXSW Interactive is called many things – geekfest, spring break for nerds, networking lovefest, etc. – and of course there’s the inevitable debate about whether or not it’s jumped the shark. But with thousands of tech/startup/marketing folks packing the streets of Austin, there’s no doubt that at SXSW we collectively crash into the future.

One of my personal highlights this year included Sunday’s keynote from futurist Amber Case, in which she boiled down the advancements in computer interfaces into the three properties of water – solid, liquid and air. Your thousand-button TV remote is a solid, with a tiny nub for every function. Your contextual iPhone keyboard is liquid, adding or changing buttons to suit any task at hand.  What’s to come is the invisible interface, one that is ambient and helpful based on the context of where and what you’re doing. Millions of us walk around with supercomputers in our pockets and bags. iPhones and Droids and Windows phones that know where you are, where your friends are, what time it is, what the weather is like, etc.  And we’re headed towards an even more connected future based on proximity and commonality.

Speaking of proximity and commonality, one app making a big splash at SXSW this year is Highlight, which uses data from your Facebook profile and in real-time shows you who is close by and if you have mutual friends or shared interests.  Already, a colleague noted that he “found” a friend he hasn’t talked to since junior high.  Pretty cool.

So where do brands fit in? Soon enough they will soon forge relationships around those serendipitous moments provided by apps like Highlight — though they must tread carefully, and it won’t be right for every brand. (Especially because of the potential creepy “Minority Report” factor.)  Done right, brands will augment these experiences in a way that’s useful and valuable to consumers. Done wrong, the damage to a brand’s reputation would be hard to repair.

Our pal Josh Seifert, HUGE senior marketing strategist, returns with his monthly diatribe, this time discussing, yes, the Facebook Studio Awards, which we’ve touched on in the past. Are they worthy, are they relevant or are they even needed? Drop your science, sir.

The concept behind the Facebook Studio Awards really hits the nail on the head. When everything in digital can be measured, evaluated and judged based on some sort of performance metric—rightly or wrongly—the existing crop of industry awards doesn’t fully recognize and celebrate what is actually successful in digital. Unfortunately, awarding marketers for using what you’re shilling is so self-aggrandizing as to be nearly meaningless.
Read more

As our Super Bowl post-game coverage winds down, we give you this write-up from Don Seaman, TVB’s manager of marketing communications, which is the non-profit trade association of America’s commercial broadcast TV industry. Here, the exec discusses his interesting, rather busy Super Bowl viewing experience.

I’m a Giants fan.  I also work in the media industry.  But it pains me to admit that up until Saturday, mine was  among the 30 percent of homes that still don’t have HDTV.  With the Giants in the Super Bowl, it became a moral imperative to experience the game in the best way possible, at least from my own living room.  After all, I had a responsibility to the TVB to make this some cutting edge viewing research.

The thing is, in 2012 watching the game on your living room HDTV isn’t the only “best” way to watch the game anymore.  And no, I didn’t spring for the full 3D TV experience.  It’s bigger than that.  Today, you can virtually have an “all-access” pass to the Super Bowl while still being hundreds of miles from the stadium.

Read more

Our Super Bowl series continues as we top the week off with a piece from John Maxham, who has spent the past two years as partner, ECD at Seattle’s own Cole & Weber United.

As we get ready to watch the Super Bowl and, of course, dissect the ads that go along with it, I’d like to call attention to a subtle form of marketing that is (almost) as old as the big game itself. Because when we gather together on Sunday, beers in hands, remotes at the ready, we will be sitting down to watch Super Bowl XLVI, not Super Bowl 46.

The use of Roman numerals in Super Bowl titles has become a widely accepted, if not often discussed part of the season finale. It dates back to Super Bowl 5, excuse me, Super Bowl V, when the championship game was a relatively new concoction.

Read more