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Well, okay, given the HELL we've all endured with friends forwarding an endless stream of jokes and movies, I guess social networking has always been a part of email marketing.
But now even big brands are doing it.
Some of our clients have quietly begun featuring sharing features in email blasts. And Nike has been working the angle, too, with email blasts promoting its Lunartrainer+iD product line, according to Marketing Vox.
In December, the athletic wear brand started including ShareThis in its email blasts.
For those out of th eknow, ShareThis enables users to share portions of an email or website across their social networks.
Call it user-generated annoyance or even Web 2 points forward 3 steps back.
In fact, I'm not clear whether "Share This" is a call to action, or the likely reaction.
Could be great. Could be a nightmare.
So let's be careful how we use it.
Share that.
Read more, here.
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Say goodbye to Bud.TV.
Anheuser-Busch announced today that it would shut down its ambitious entertainment portal, which debuted to much fanfare after the Super Bowl a few years back.
The portal, which featured original content from top tier production companies like LivePlanet (run by Ben Affleck and Matt Damon), TriggerStreet.com (Kevin Spacey), and Wild West Picture Show Productions (Vince Vaughn), was designed specifically to burnish the brand's cred with 21- to 34-year-olds by embedding the brand in an online destination built around quirky, slightly edgy diversions.
As Mark Vegas, co-founder of ad agency-cum-content company Omelet recently put it to me, his firm’s work developing content for Bud.TV was strictly entertainment: “It’s not about profiling Budweiser. The reason it’s exciting to work with Anheuser-Busch, one of the most powerful marketing communications brands in the world, is that they are definitely on the bleeding edge. They get it. They’re a million years away from product placement, and two million miles from product integration.
“The philosophy they’re really keyed in on is our belief that the way entertainment will be created in the future, starting now, is that the strands of DNA of the brand itself will be matched and will be made a part of the entertainment programming. But it's at the DNA level, it’s at the molecular level. You don’t have to have product placement. You don’t have to hit people over the head with ‘Brought to you by XYZ Corporation.’ You don’t need that anymore.
“The programming you see on Bud.TV is entertaining, fun, robust entertainment and it’s all destined to be consumed by, and appreciated by, the large audience in the demographic audience that also appreciates and loves the AB family of products.”
And it was a great strategy - but as I said at the time of its launch, it was a tall order.
While Bud has made viral hits out of many of its TV spots, there's a big difference between tracking down a great 30-second commercial and spending hours on a branded entertainment network.
Ultimately, people watch shows (and commercials), not networks - they don't give a twit about Fox, they care about “24" (or insert your own show and network here) – a lesson AB found out first hand.
And let's face it, making good television is hard.
As AB VP of marketing Keith Levy tells today's Ad Age: "If the [broadcast] networks can't continuously produce that [volume of content], how can a beer company?"
Other branded entertainment portals, like Scion Broadband, have flourished, at least so far, because in Scion's case, anyway, the company doesn't really spend that much money on it. It leverages sponsorships of musicians and filmmakers it already has in place and gives them a venue to showcase their work. Listen to my recent interview with Adrian Si, head of interactive at Scion, for more.
All of this said, major props go to AB for being so bodacious in the digital space. This was a worthy effort that could have paid major dividends - and may still. The company will no doubt take what it learned here to create new branded content that is distributed through other channels, such as YouTube, Yahoo and whatnot.
The men and women behind Bud.TV are to be commended for their pioneering spirit and innovation.
AB, this Bud's for you.
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True North bet big that its snack fans weren't just a bunch of nuts. On Oscar Sunday, we'll see if they were right.
In December, I blogged about the Frito's-owned nut snack brand's new user-generated content contest.
In a nutshell (sorry), True North wants you to share your true north for the chance to win $25,000 and the chance to see your story told in a commercial directed by Helen Hunt and aired during the Academy Awards.
Now, at TrueNorthSnacks com, you can see many of the inspiring stories consumers have shared about what they're passionate about, and how it inspires, empowers or just makes the world a more interesting place to live.
You'll learn about Gary Greff, who creates towering scrap metal sculptures in an effort to bring tourism and commerce to his downtrodden North Dakota town. Teddy Gross, who launched Penny Harvest - a program that mobilizes kids to bring pennies to school to be distributed to homeless people. Marjora Carter, who launched Sustainable South Bronx to build parks and enable public access to once littered waterfronts. And there are many more.
On Sunday, we'll see which of these and many others will be turned into an ad by Helen Hunt.
Call me nuts, but I think they're onto something.
Check it all out yourself, here.
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You'll have to wait a year or so to see Scarlett Johansson play Black Widow in Iron Man 2, but you can see Captain America and Spider Man attend the Gettysburg Address today, in a digital comic book tied to Lincoln's 200th birthday.
Marvel Comics has launched the digital comic - titled "Gettysburg Distress" – as what I'm assuming is some kind of freaky time travel story crossed with the sales rocket fuel Marvel's gotten out of tie-ins with uber comic book geek Barack Obama (or "President Fanboy," as he's known in comics circles).
Check it all out, here.
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Ready for the perfect you?
The Bruce Willis sci-fi thriller "Surrogates" doesn't open until fall, but a new site from the film's fictional company, VSI (Virtual Self Industries), is live now - and lets you see what you'd look like if you were "perfected."
According to Variety, the film, based on a graphic novel, is about a near future in which people live in isolation and interact vicariously through surrogate robots who are better-looking versions of themselves. Willis is a copy whose surrogate investigates the murders of others' surrogates.
At the site, which is made out to be the site people in the film go to to customize their avatars ("You can achieve the perfect you - anything you can dream, you can achieve"), you can change the appearance of your surrogate, even by race - or any mix of Caucasian, black, Asian or Indian.
You can also adjust age, mouth, eyes, nose, hair and even apply makeup.
Here I took a picture of a Caucasian colleague and made him Asian.
The technology comes from Oddcast, and is a hoot - and even lets you post your images to your MySpace page.
If the site is any indication, this could be one very cool movie.
Read more about the movie here, and visit the site here.
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File these under unintentionally funny names for iPhone apps.
Then again, with a campaign called The Happiness Factory, maybe these double entrendes are on purpose.
Coca-Cola's got a new iPhone app called 'Spin The Coke', which is dubbed as a way to "break the ice or to give that someone special a not so subtle hint." It joins "The Magic Coke Bottle," which is a kind of magic eight ball for the iPhone era.
Totally fun and in keeping with the Coke brand. But with a name like Coke, I guess you need to watch out for what you call your apps. I guess if this second screen shot featured noses, it'd really be out of control.
(As a side note: What the hell are those things anyway? Furry mouths? Somebody's having a bad trip in Atlanta!)
Or maybe I'm naive, and they did made these apps sound a little subversive on purpose.
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No, you're not getting punk'd.
The popular actor and husband of Demi Moore (the bastard) has his production company Katalyst Media cooking up a new behind-the-scenes video series called "KatalystHQ."
AD AGE is reporting that the semi-scripted show will follow Kutcher in his everyday life as a production company executive.
If it sounds a little been-there-done-that, it's the delivery mechanism that differentiates this from most online-only series. This one will be sponsored by Frito-Lay's Cheetos brand and will be distributed via a Facebook app called FunSpace created by video-sharing app maker Slide. The first episode goes live today.
"Our target demo for this is 18 to 34, just out of high school or college and getting into the world world," Kutcher tells AD AGE. "The traditional thing of eyeballs for dollars changes when you enter into a social fabric where people are engaging with each other."
Hell, if Kutcher really wanted to kick things off well, he could start with the videos he made about yelling at - and then apologizing to - construction workers in his neighbor's backyard.
Kidding aside - Kutcher's the rare Hollywood figure that seems to get digital in general, social media in particular, and is willing to take risks.
And kudos to Cheetos for going along for the ride.
Read more, here.
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By my count, the NFL & Monster.com were this year's only Super Bowl advertisers to take advantage of the most measurable, personal and direct link to consumers ever created. And they were doing it in the same spot.
The commercial, for the NFL Director of Fandemonium Contest, pointed users to respond either by going to nfl.monster.com or to text "Fan" to 24421.
In case you're wondering, the job description sounds pretty fun.
You get to join the coin toss ceremony at Super Bowl XLIV, act as a backstage talent wrangler at the 2009 NFL kick off, participate in on-field player introductions at the 2009 international series game and get a $100,000 "signing bonus."
Why so few mobile calls-to-action at this year's Super Bowl, even given the opportunity to add the capability for free through Blumo?
Alas, mobile remains a mysterious new component of the marketing mix for far too many marketers.
As Chuck Porter, co-founder of Crispin, Porter + Bogusky tells me in BRANDING UNBOUND the book, "There are a lot of people who have gotten really good at making television commercials and very, very good at buying traditional media...When they look at this changing media space, there's a reluctance to say, "holy shit, we have to change everything.' But marketers had better start embracing other media - including wireless - or they're going to discover their customers have hit the snooze button."
A risk the NFL and Monster are not willing to take.
Kudos to both marketers for the simple, yet powerful integration of mobile into their Super Bowl ad buy.
Read more here about how the NFL and others are capitalizing on the power of mobile, click here.
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Joe Herbert not only won this year's 'Crash The Super Bowl' user generated ad contest from Doritos - he topped the USA Today Ad Meter. What many may not realize is, Doritos said it'd pay $1 million to the winner if his or her spot tops USA Today's annual rankings for favorite Super Bowl ads.
Herbert's hilarious "Free Doritos" spot did indeed top the Ad Meter.
As USA Today puts it, "a commercial made by amateurs beat the pros in USA Today's Ad Meter." It even calls the winning entry from "two unemployed brothers from Batesville, Ind."
But with all due respect, it's really not that simple.
As I recently told National Public Radio, the winners of these contests aren't quite amateurs - in fact, they're often either professional filmmakers and videographers, or people who can and sometimes do make a living in advertising.
In this case, Joe Herbert's entry appears to actually come from Dave and Joe Herbert, who have been past finalists in the 'Crash The Super Bowl' contest.
And they appear to be professionals, with their own production company, called "Hebert Brothers Entertainment," (there are lot of Herbert Brothers, actually) with an independent film division called Transit Films, as well as animation services, advertising services and even a game studio, with a game that launches later this year.
Of course, they also offer wedding videography, so they're clearly grassroots.
And to be fair, they haven't done anything wrong. It's just that the contest sponsors themselves (or maybe the media) shouldn't frame these spots as if some kid with a video camera and a dream came out and beat the professionals.
Either way, something tells me the national exposure and $1 million payday means more advertisers will be calling the brothers Herbert.
And that their days of videotaping weddings are over.
They're pros, after all.
Read the USA Today Ad Meter story here.
And check out Herbert Brothers Entertainment, here.
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