When Arnold Schwarzenegger first came to the United States, he started a small bricklaying business with fellow bodybuilder and immigrant Franco Columbu. The business wasn’t off to a good start.
They quickly re-invented their business model into a service that was much more expensive than the competition and sold themselves in a way that played up their European heritage. They would seduce their LA customers by saying that their method of bricklaying was different because it was „Austrian Bricklaying“.
I didn’t know this. Neither did I know, that Arnold worked as a bricklayer, neither did I know, that he was such a clever guy in marketing. Or was it only his fellow bodybuilder? But then, it’s Arnold, who’s now a Governor, isn’t he?
David Armano, bringing us back to marketing, concludes:
Sometimes the best marketing involves exaggerating certain „truths“
Occasionally brands are built not from strengths, but from turning perceived weakness into strength
And asks us:
Have you figured out what your weakness is? Is there a way to turn it into a differentiating strength?
Adfreak points me to a nice Nokia Advergame. You are the driver of a French Lady who apparently needs to take care of some dubious business in Paris. So you drive her around the beautiful city:
Instead of re-creating the city using computer animation, they shot actual footage on the Ile St. Louis. While you’re driving, you can fool around with Nokia’s car kit by using its GPS features and changing the music.
On the site, it takes ages until the game has loaded…
And the game controls seem a little sluggish – but maybe it’s just my PC.
And it’s well worth it. The grafics are brilliant, and having lived in Paris for a year, I actually recognised most of the spots.
On the financial news site StreetInsider.com, for example, videos from The Wall Street Journal, a Dow Jones property, are running within ads on the site. In one, Emily Friedlander, a Wall Street Journal reporter, narrates a video feature on the TKTS booth in Times Square; Sam Schechner of The Journal speaks about marriage in TV shows; and Jonathan Welsh visits a motorcycle show.
After the three videos, a commercial from Pantene Pro-V, a hair conditioner, appears. In that case, Google shares the ad revenue with StreetInsider.com and Dow Jones.
This is a step of Google to move away from pure text and image based advertising to the segment of big money: TV adverts. And quite possibly, a first test of acceptance since they’re probably still working on all sorts of ways of how to monetise YouTube.
Founded as a text-based search company, Google’s early advertisers were smaller companies and advertisers who bought ads to generate direct sales rather than to build brand recognition.
Large brand advertisers still spend the bulk of their money on television advertising, but Google sees potential for them to spend more online through the use of video ads.
„The driving reason to do it is to make more money selling ads,“ said Barrett.
I’m impressed by their sharpness. Or by Clickz actually publishing that quote?
Till now, the News Corp division has done little to capitalize on the information that, when paired with SDC’s ad optimization technology, will allow for highly-refined audience segmentation and contextual micro-targeting.
So what’s new?
Anyway, apart from that, it is of course the right move. A little late – and it can’t just be due to the fact that they had to go through „a ton“ of potential firms for acquisition.
Wo ich sonst so bin...