Market This!

This giant orb hovering in the trees above Middle Earth may look precarious, but never was a marketing stunt more grounded. Yellow New Zealand (the equivalent of the Yellow Pages) takes a solid concept and executes it seamlessly. That concept:

Step 1: Find a pretty girl with a dream. In this case the girl is Tracey Collins (below), and the dream is to build a restaurant 12 metres off the ground in a grove of giant redwood trees.

Step 2: Fund her idea, telling her she can only use contractors she finds in Yellow. (To prove that “You can get anything done with Yellow.”)

Step 3: Film and otherwise document everything. Build an online community around the project.

Step 4: Sit back and let the PR (and the reservations) roll in.

******

Yes, it’s a unique, cool idea to build a restaurant in a tree. But what’s truly brilliant is the way Yellow was able to leverage the project fully, with a robust website (try the slider at the bottom, it’s fun), a blog, video diaries, commercials and more.

*****

Now New Zealand has its very first treehouse restaurant, and it’s a wildly popular beacon of Yellow’s brand for all who interact with it.

High tea, anyone?

Via Culture Buzz.

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This pretty much jams every conflicting emotion we’ve ever had into a single 3-minute clip.

Craig Ferguson delivers an amusing, well-written tirade with some important points. Yes: youth is unfairly celebrated. Yes: it’s because of consumerism. Yes: Madison Avenue was responsible for this perverse development – at least in part.

But cultures can change, can’t they? Aren’t we on the brink of a major shift? Isn’t there an increase happening in our mass consciousness level? Aren’t there fewer people celebrating the meaningless things in life, and more people seeking real connections?

If you have a conscience, chances are you wrestle with your own hypocrisy every day – whether you’re a lawyer, marketer, mechanic or bartender. We all strive to help others, but also to survive. To be honest with everyone, but also to self-promote. No successful American business exists outside of the capitalist system.

Despite everything, we are eternal optimists here at A&B. We believe:

• Marketing need not be the evil that fuels the ugly, self-destructive beast known as the American consumerist economy.
• Marketing, if properly executed, can help to encourage and promote new, more conscientious forms of doing business.
• These new forms of business can benefit more people, and harm fewer.
• If marketing could create a major culture shift in the 50s, it stands to reason it can do it again.

Maybe that’s a tall order. We’d have to start putting other things before our own profits, which we Americans have never been good at. But it doesn’t need to happen overnight. It may be difficult for us to adopt a “first do no harm” philosophy in advertising, but can’t we at least strive for a “first do as little harm as possible” scenario?

What do you think? Is it inevitable that society will go completely down the toilet (and did the marketing industry flush the lever back in 1952)? Or is conscience becoming cool enough now that marketing can take a leadership role in shifting society’s focus toward a new capitalism – one that isn’t so self-destructive?

Via Agency Spy.

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People go ballistic over changes to Facebook, it seems, on a pretty regular basis.

First it was the outing of everyone’s personal activity with the advent of the News Feed.

Then it was Facebook’s censoring of photos depicting new mothers nursing their babies.

An annual redesign (most recently, one that smacks of direct competition with Twitter) typically has tends of thousands of users proclaiming, “Give us back our old design!”

And most recently, changes to terms & conditions seemed to give Facebook too much ownership over users’ content, sparking anger that caused Facebook, in an uncharacteristic move, to backtrack on the changes.

Some of the outrage seems warranted, while an equal amount seems like noisy users resistant to any change in the usability of the service (a fitting punishment for something that has convinced 200 million people that they are all the most important people in the world).

The latest outrage is over third-party advertisers using people’s personal photos in ads. When one man was served with an ad informing him, “Hot singles are waiting for you!” with a photo of his own wife, people went nuts trying to find out how it could have happened – immediately settling on a little-known privacy setting on Facebook that seems to allow this sort of thing (even though it appears Facebook shares the blame with a third-party quiz app with some dicey fine print).

The good news is, as is often the case on Facebook, if you know it’s there and how to change it, you can disable the setting that allows your photo to be used in these sorts of ads. The bad news is that Facebook’s default setting allows this feature – meaning if you don’t know it’s there, your friends could be seeing you in a dating service ad on their pages without you even knowing about it.

"May we use your likeness for our personal gain?"

At some point, we expect Facebook to crack down on apps that allow third-party advertising (and delete the option from its own privacy settings), especially if the current groundswell of opposition becomes large enough. Either that or they will at the least change the setting from “opt-out” to “opt-in.”

Then again, Facebook has a history of telling angry users “tough titties” (no breastfeeding pun intended) – so it remains to be seen how this latest development will play out.

And the company’s tendency to keep quietly changing privacy settings, combined with many predicting that its “walled garden” concept will become all but obsolete in the coming years, is adding to users’ already growing concerns about privacy.

So what do you think? Is Facebook doing the best they can to protect your privacy, or are they being sneaky in adding new, permissive defaults and doing shady deals with third-party advertisers? Are you outraged by where Facebook is heading, or nonplussed?

Let us know…

For more info on how to increase your privacy on Facebook, read this blog.
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Don't get bullied into social media too early.

Peer pressure can get you to do almost anything, can’t it?

Let’s say you’re a small business owner. Your friends keep talking about this social media craze. “It’s great for small business,” they opine. “With Twitter and blogging and Facebook, I’ve increased profits without spending money on marketing.” Maybe they even sent you this article from the New York Times about small businesses using social media to their advantage.

So you dive into the waters headlong. Let’s assume for the moment that you even do it the “right” way – slowly, carefully – building a growing following by engaging personally with people, rather than simply shouting about your company. You mix in some affiliate partnerships, start blogging, commenting, engaging – and when you track the results, it appears it’s working – you’re generating more buzz and traffic around your business.

But the question you may never have asked yourself is, “Where am I driving this traffic?”

Are you racing to the edge of a cliff?

Too often when someone’s trying to sell us on the social media craze, it’s presented as a replacement for traditional marketing. The shining examples of social media success we hear about (including most of the ones in the NYT article) are micro-businesses – a single person with a street side hot dog stand, for instance. Websites, brochures, print campaigns and TV commercials may be overkill for a hot dog vendor, but taking orders via Twitter could increase his business dramatically. It may make sense for social media to be his only marketing effort.

But what if you’re an upscale coffee shop? A local bookstore? An organic farm? You may begin building a loyal following through social media and affiliate efforts, and then what? They’ll check out your website. They’ll notice your print ad. They’ll become more aware of your brand.

And you can lose them right there.

Ask yourself this: If 10,000 new customers looked at your marketing materials tomorrow (website, brochures, ads, everything you’ve got), would they see a strong brand you could be proud of? Or would you feel like you’d walked onto the field in a crowded football stadium in your underwear?

"Whaddaya mean you're not on Twitter? Chicken?!"

The fact is, if your brand identity is not strong, consistent and attractive, your potential customers will get turned off. Oh, they may still think you’re worth a “follow” on Twitter, but they’ll never spend a dime in your store.

So is knowing how to use social media important for your small business? Absolutely. Will social media efforts increase leads and decrease your marketing budget? Quite possibly. Is social media a suitable replacement for all other marketing efforts? Probably not.

Yes – by using social media as your only marketing tool, you can save a lot of money in the short run. But if the rest of your brand is weak, the question you’ll have to ask is: what is the true cost of this sacrifice?

"Poor guy. Without a brand, he never stood a chance."

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Isn’t it nice when you’re dependent on an industry for your success, yet still far enough removed from it that you can get away with crapping on it too?

Lending Tree’s new superhero ads such as the one above (two more here and here) paint banks as the villains we’ve come to discover them as of late, while at the same time suggesting that holding them accountable for their dastardly deeds is as simple as getting a loan through LendingTree.com. Which in turn gets the loan from the evil banks. Don’t middlemen alleviate guilt nicely?

We’ll see if the stunt works or not. Rich Nadworny has a good post this morning on how a new message and some cute ads are nice, but nothing substantial has changed about their lack of engagement with customers. (Pay attention to the other videos YouTube serves up in the “Related” section on the right – it’s mostly people complaining about how much Lending Tree blows.)

Of course, we like the ads anyway. There’s nothing quite as simultaneously comforting, dramatic and hilarious as Adam West narrating something, which we always wonder how he is able to do with his tongue lodged so firmly in his cheek.

Go be heroes, people. Put on some tights and a green mask and kick a few asses down on Wall Street. When they arrest you, tell them you were sent by Lending Tree – to ensure these “corporate mischief-makers meet their match.”

Holy Ponzi Scheme, Batman!

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Nathan Fielder of CBC’s This Hour Has 22 Minutes distills the most ubiquitous tenet of advertising – the effectiveness of sex as a sales tool – into a single, overarching thesis: Jennifer Aniston is hotter than your wife.

Perhaps it is of no consequence, but we found it interesting that Nathan’s interview subject has a Star Trek calendar featuring Bill Shatner hanging up in his office. Perhaps Jennifer Aniston isn’t the only celebrity whose “attractiveness” he finds arousing.

Enjoy.

Via Brand Flakes.

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