Why not? Because Simmons and partner Tricia Clarke-Stone want to help agencies, not compete with them. How does that work? Narrative‘s founders say they will use its nascent creative team to produce the “marketing solutions” and digital campaigns that said agencies will then promote. The group already has a couple of clients in Sprint‘s Boost Mobile and Simmons’s own site GlobalGrind.

Simmons and Clark-Stone aren’t exactly new to the promo game — GlobalGrind doubles as a marketing company that’s already served some big-name clients like Pepsi, Tide and Toyota. They see their new venture’s purpose as filling a “gap” in an industry ill-equipped to serve a public for which “urban culture is [now] the mainstream” regardless of race, background or geography. But how can Narrative not compete with agencies when its service description sounds so similar to those of its prospective “partners?”

Simmons has obviously done great work in the past, and we don’t doubt his promotional prowess — but this is a strange rollout, no?

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Looks…cool. But what does it mean?

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Why? Because it will help them better understand exactly how their mobile ads influence sales — and it will help client teams use real-world data to demonstrate the success of Google ads and cost-per-action (CPA) campaigns. According to Google’s blog post/announcement, a recent study showed that nearly 3 in 10 web searches lead consumers to visit a store, contact a business or make a purchase. So this is a big deal to any client who sells products online.

If you have any clients in the food/brick and mortar retail sectors, Yelp‘s announcement should be of interest as well: the site’s “revenue estimator” will show the owners of small businesses how many “leads” come directly from their Yelp pages and related promo campaigns — and make estimates as to the ultimate dollar value of that traffic.

So will we be using either of these tools? What effect might they have on our relationships with clients?

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

And they should. Brands ranging from Heinz to Chanel to POM to Maker’s Mark define themselves at least in part through their packaging. In cases like these, the public can easily identify the brand just by looking at the bottle. Pepsi, of course, wants to be a youthful brand — parlance for a hip and carefree edginess that hopefully sells itself to one’s equally cool peers — and hopes to leverage that image with a new “asymmetrical” bottle.

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But what if we could present target audience members, investors or even clients with all these different kinds of media in one self-contained, embeddable package? Marketing veteran/entrepreneur Tim Bahr thinks he has found the solution to this challenge with the NextWorks “content capsule”. Here, for example, is his company’s own promotional unit:

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

So what are companies like McDonald’s, Taco Bell and Burger King to do as the human species shifts away from greasy burgers and buckets of soda? Well, offering healthier choices is the logical place to start. And Burger King is doing just that: the company just announced the Spring 2013 debut of its new turkey burger, which will retail for $3.99. This new offering is the latest in a not-so-new trend for fast food brands as they scramble to keep up with the public’s changing diet.

However, these changes also reflect a tacit admission by fast food brands that their traditional menus are unhealthy. As PR people, we advocate transparency and telling the truth. But we also recognize that by offering a turkey sandwich, apple slices or reduced fat shakes, fast food chains may in fact lose some of the public’s support. After all, how many times have you heard this conversation:

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The old-school camera company went bankrupt more than a decade ago, and the folks who bought the name quickly began making money by licensing it to other brands. PLR IP Holdings, LLC nows owns the rights to all things “Polaroid”. A licensee agreement with Fotobar LLC tied the brand even more closely to the smartphone craze with a planned series of “FotoBar” locations aping the Apple Genius Bar retail model.

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PRSA Chair and CEO Mickey G. Nall says the app, which is of course based on the organization’s Code of Ethics, will give folks in the industry “easy access to real-time guidance to know that what they’re doing is right.”

The app’s features include official statements of professional values, in-depth explanations of the various PRSA code provisions and professional standards advisories on issues like plagiarism, the ethical use of interns, the “greenwashing” phenomenon and the appropriate use of non-original content. It also includes updated links to related PRSA blog posts, an ethics quiz and an “ask us a question” feature that sends your ethical quandary straight to the organization’s resident expert.

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OK, so Samsung president JK Shin tends to exaggerate a bit. In case you missed it, yesterday’s big tech news concerned the debut of the Samsung Galaxy S4, the company’s latest volley in the ongoing marketing war between Samsung and Apple, the world’s biggest smartphone companies.

We agree that features like the “SmartScroll“, which detects when a user is looking at the phone and responds accordingly, are very cool. But from a PR perspective we’re more interested in Apple marketing chief Phil Schiller‘s decision to make the media rounds and slam his competitor before yesterday’s product rollout. Frankly, we see this as a bad sign for Apple.

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Of course we all have our mailing lists and Twitter columns–but a marketing platform called MyPRGenie, armed with the tagline “Turn Buzz Into Leads”, hopes to put everything you need to connect and push content to the best media contacts in the palm of your hand with its new “marketing suite” app. The company’s press release states that “Sales professionals have had access to this kind of data for years but this is the first time such a system has been added to a public relations platform”. We spoke to company founder and CEO Miranda Tan for details.

How did you build the database?

We focused on media contacts only. With the launch of the MyPRGenie crowdsourcing platform, we plan to use crowdsourcing and the latest technology to help us build the most up-to-date media database as oppose to the old fashion way of researching and mining for media contacts.

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Here’s the thing: M&C is the same firm responsible for the triumphant return of once-dead cheapo beer brand Pabst Blue Ribbon.

That’s right: the same guys who turned PBR into the go-to brew for drunk punks, amateur “performance artists” and philosophy students around the country (the world?) are now responsible for managing the future fortunes of the Twinkie.

Can they bring the brand back from the dead using the same nostalgic/ironic strategy? Mr. Metropoulos himself says yes!

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Marvel owns some of the hottest movie properties around, but Hollywood blockbusters aren’t enough to preserve the brand in an era of diminishing returns for all corners of the publishing world. So what does Marvel plan to do to expand? Quite a bit, actually.

First, the company offered free digital versions of the first issues of top titles like X-Men, The Avengers and The Fantastic Four for a limited period ending today (hint hint). The purpose of this move was to familiarize more people with the beginnings of these timeless stories, but as an added bonus they may help everyone forget the terrible casting of Jessica Alba as Mrs. Fantastic. The rest of Marvel’s brand reinforcement (don’t say “rebranding”) strategy also focuses heavily on the digital sphere: The biggest single step forward may be the launch of the Marvel Unlimited app, a tool to help mobile fans read their favorites without having to worry about the stupid Flash player screwing everything up. Calls to action? Check. User friendly? Check.

Marvel also has some unique digital-only projects in the works.

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Not only will the book bear her name, it will also once again build on her most enduring product, the Fifty Shades of Grey series (working title Softcore for Dummies). Fifty Shades of Grey: Inner Goddess (a Journal) will be “a how-to guide” published by Vintage Books, and it will consist of James’s thoughts on the writing life in addition to her personal “getting in the (writing) mood” playlists and a few blank spaces for the aspiring literary superstar to record his or her (OK, her) own notes on the subject. Sounds like a great marketing scheme, no? Oh, and it will all come in a handsome “bonded” “soft leather” cover–we could probably turn that one into a double entendre but this daylight savings time thing is a real buzzkill.

We understand the urge to wring even more publicity out of one’s greatest cultural achievement. If we were E.L. James we would probably do the same thing. But should the world at large really take writing lessons from the mind that created these PG-13 masterpieces of linguistic contortion?

• “He’s my very own Christian Grey popsicle.”

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This chewable jolt is hardly your grandma’s Doublemint or Juicy Fruit–it seems that brands like those just weren’t exciting enough for the demanding, limited-attention-span Millennial set, so Wrigley’s just had to give them more of what they love most: drugs! The company claims that Alert is designed for “consumers 25 and older who want a portable energy product that will let them control their caffeine consumption”, but we know better. (Also: this product is sadly not related to Stay Alert chewing gum, which is marketed specifically to members of the U.S. military.)

While those big drink brands face lawsuits and the city of Chicago considers banning drinks with more than 180 mg of caffeine per serving, energy addicts can just get their chew on as long as they don’t mind the “bitter, medicinal taste”. Our favorite part of the campaign rollout has to be this quote (from a company representative, no less):

“The taste expectations are different for someone who wants to chew gum for energy than for someone who chews gum for flavor. If you come at this as a piece of gum that you chew for enjoyment it’s not going to deliver on that.”

OK, so maybe it’s really not for the kids! But now we finally have a new twist on that classic “walking and chewing gum” question: can one chew Alert and drink Four Loko at the same time?

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Like meteorologists, we look at developing trends and prevailing conditions, combine that information with our knowledge of past behaviors and established algorithms, and make an educated guess as to how the weather—in our case the public—is going to act. PR is part art, part science.

So when a legendary and coveted brand like Apple makes any sort of decision, most of us assume it’s the right one. You can’t argue with success, and Apple has had more success than just about any brand on the planet. It is difficult not to become excited when Apple makes a major announcement, as it recently did in revealing that its long-awaited iWatch will debut in 2013.

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