A nice parody site: Very Successful Brand Manager tells you everything you need to know to be a very successful Manager. I especially like the part of „Enlarging your logo: is it safe?“
Your ego, your logo, your lego. The building blocks of your soul. Make one bigger and the other will grow. Make it small and you might as well go home.
As someone once said, “more is more.� So forget it when the agency says, “be bold.� You are bold! You are a master of your own destiny. You are a very successful brand manager.
Since I don’t read the NY Times every day, I was glad about the post by AdJab telling me that the Times has redesigned. Looks much nicer now, especially to my European eyes&taste.
There’s also a bunch more streaming video within the site as well as the ability to create a personalized page. The streaming video is reportedly a move designed to satisfy the demands of advertisers looking to buy pre-roll inventory.
This is typical. We have video news on someGerman websites, to. But none of them have yet included ads. But now I just know, they will.
Hot of the press, the NY Times has an article about the whole Chevy incident, quoting a spokesperson from Chevy:
A spokeswoman for Chevrolet, Melisa Tezanos, said the company did not plan to shut down the anti-S.U.V. ads.
„We anticipated that there would be critical submissions,“ Ms. Tezanos said. „You do turn over your brand to the public, and we knew that we were going to get some bad with the good. But it’s part of playing in this space.“
And further down they quote Drew Neisser of Renegade Marketing:
companies had such a strong desire for user-generated advertising that they were willing to accept the risks. „There’s this gold rush fever about consumer-generated content,“ he said. „Everybody wants to have consumer-generated content, and Chevy Tahoe doesn’t want to be left behind.“
Hey, it’s the new fad amongst marketeers! Not bad, this trend. I like these kind of campaigns anyway!
(Even though I can’t be moved to participate – yet!)
I hadn’t blogged about the new campaign of Chevy yet, in which they ask users to compile their own ads and put it up on their website. (There is a lot of interesting stuff out there in the „consumer generated media“ space and I am currently just collecting everything on delicious.)
Adjab and Adpulp now mention something that will always happen when you start a campaign like that and don’t check the ads before they go live on the website: There are a couple of spots that contain messages that Chevy is, most likely, not in favour of. These kind of spots will always appear in all sorts of places – even more so in the future, now that we have sites like YouTube and mobile phones that can film videos. But these happen to be part of the Chevy challenge, and they’re live on their website.
But there is one spot that could pose a problem to Chevy. Not only regarding their image, but also legally:
Like Snow? Beautiful landscapes? Be sure to take it all in now because…
Tomorrow this asshole’s SUV will change the world
Global warming isn’t a pretty SUV ad
It’s a frightening reality
ExxposeExxon.org
Tahoe� An American Revolution (source)
Now this one spot I am sure they’ll delete. I don’t think they want to get into trouble with Exxon. And they can without loosing their face, because in the rules it says:
or which might subject Sponsors or its licensees to unfavorable regulatory action, violate any law, infringe the rights of any person, or subject Sponsors or its Licensees to liability for any reason.
I also think it’s OK. It’s about Chevy and it’s target group. It’s not about any other brands.
Should they, however, pull the other ads that are negative about Chevy or SUVs, it will most likely have a negative PR effect on them. If they let people upload anything without prior control, they should stick to it.
I agree with Steve Hall: let’s hope the reason they left the videos online is their sense for the rules of the new media – and not just the fact that this happened over a weekend.
There is a new myspace-linkedin-like site up called zaadz They are still in pre-Beta mode. Honestly: pre-Beta? What exactly does that mean for me?
And this what that site is all about:
Our Mission. That’s easy. We’re gonna change the world. […] The quick version of what we’re gonna do: build THE most inspired community of people in the world… Imagine social networking with a purpose, a community of seekers and conscious entrepreneurs circulating wisdom and inspiration and wealth and all that good stuff. Fun fun fun.
Somehow all of this sounds very ambitious. Almost too big. And like they’re playing in a competition where many other communities already gained ground.
By now I also heard from some friends who actually do watch television regularly, that the Eric Cantona Spot appears on a view German stations – mainly the sports channels, of course. Sofar, I haven’t seen it myself, though.
Wo ich sonst so bin...