With all this X Factor/Rage against the machine rivalry, some Christmas mood is being lost I feel, so here’s the best Christmas song ever, dedicated to our clients, thank you and happy holidays.
To join the festive poll, tweet your favourite to #BestXmasSongEver
Now here’s a quality holiday video from US advertising legend Jeff Goodby, of Goodby, Silverstein & Partners SF, broken from his reverie for the good old days by an upstart new generation ‘Facebook Creative’ who he proceeds to rap battle – brilliant.
StrongMail’s survey of marketer’s spend intentions for 2010, in a flat market, shows the upstarts email, social media and search continuing to cannibalise poor old direct mail and events while advertising remains unmoved.
PR comes in fourth, with a small net gain – damned with faint praise, which begs the question, where does PR fit in an increasingly online world?
Do marketers see PR as just about media relations, just more online than in print these days? I suspect yes. Certainly I don’t think they see PR as the natural place to look for social media or email content, definitely not search, yet these should be natural areas for PR people.
While many marketers say they are going to spend more on social media, they are still going to have a hard time negotiating a separate budget for it, which leaves the door open a crack. More »
I don’t like to have a pop, but material is thin this morning and like when a comedian turns on a member of the audience to distract from his own failings, I’m going to have a go at Ogilvy. On the day Lord Mandleson won The Plain English Campaign’s Foot in Mouth prize for this sentence:
”Perhaps we need not more people looking round more corners but the same people looking round more corners more thoroughly to avoid the small things detracting from the big things the Prime Minister is getting right.”
Ogilvy has come up with this about their new social media product (I think).
The snappy headline:
Ogilvy’s 360 Degree Global Digital Influence Group Launches Insider Circle(TM), a New Influencer Relationship Management Social Media Product More »
YouTube has launched a New Year countdown channel of the most memorable videos of the year, sponsored by Samsung. Like an advent calendar without the religious connotations, each day a new video is revealed. Though the selection process is opaque, the number of views seems to play a big part. This sleepwalking dog from day two for example, Bizkit, has had getting on for 12 million views:
It comes down to this; if Tiger Woods ‘fesses up’ and comes clean about why exactly his wife was ‘helping’ him out of his car at 2 am using a golf club, he risks losing $100 million in sponsorship with Nike, Amex & Accenture to name but three. If I were him, I’d go quiet at this moment, not because its a good PR decision, but because of the stomach turning, mind boggling expense of it.
If, as the world suspects, and would like confirmed, Tiger has been caught firing his Nike sponsored balls on the wrong golf course, it could go down as the most expensive sporting infidelity in history.
He’d still be unwise to put money considerations ahead of reputational ones though, that would be putting the golf cart before the horse. David Beckham and Bill Clinton both survived infidelity scandals with their professional reputations unharmed, though in the states, it plays differently and a public confession seems to be compulsory - it worked for David Letterman recently. More »
It’s that time of year again when hundreds of thousands of children will be tracking Santa’s progress across the world courtesy of NORAD (North American Air Defence Command), a tradition that began in 1955 when calls to a misprinted telephone number in an advertisement for a Colorado store, from children invited to call Santa’s hotline, came through to Colonel Harry Shoup, NORAD’s Director of Operations.
Realising what was afoot, Colonel Shoup had his staff check the radar to see if Santa had started his journey South from the North Pole. Santa was located and a legend born, NORAD using the heat from Rudolph’s nose to track the sleigh.
For 2009, you can track Santa on Twitter, Facebook, Flickr and Google Earth as well as visit his elf-staffed manufacturing facility at the North Pole www.noradsanta.org.
On Christmas Eve, Santa’s journey around the world will be revealed on the site. Here’s footage of the route he took last year QG55UH7B4WVA
The Webby Awards top ten most influential internet moments of the decade, released yesterday has 2006 as the year the online video revolution started “flooding cyberspace with an array of professional and not-so-professional videos” and a quick spin around You Tube this morning confirms that there’s still either TV production quality footage or amateur goofing around, with not much in between.
At the professional end, Stella Artois has dropped back four decades, to 1963 with an eight part, faux retro online TV show to push its green credentials – Le Recyclage de Luxe Show, created by Mother and marketed through Facebook and Twitter. As we’re now watching an average of 10.8 hours of online video a month, according to Comscore and good content is now sprayed around freely on social networks, the days of a predominantly You’ve-been-framed-Tube may be drawing to an end.
A new US study has found that 29% of chief marketing officers have a working social media policy in place.
26% say they have one, but it’s not followed within the company while a further 31% say they are still developing a policy.
The research from peer networking group, the CMO Club, suggests companies are struggling to create social media marketing policies internally.
Budgets for social media are also scarce with nearly 85% of top marketers spending less than 10% of their budgets on social media, and non-traditional communication channels.
Pete Krainik, from the CMO Club, says online marketing is now brand critical, as push marketing gives way to pull. More »
I was going to do something on Google’s new Chrome OS spelling the end of Microsoft but Jedward is obviously more important, especially on a Friday and Wand, the agency that brought us the mattress dominoes viral could be on to another winner with this one for their responsible rubbish clearance client Any Junk.
