So many dumb moments in business, so little time. But Business 2.0 mag has their picks for the 101 dumbest of 2006.
Wal-Mart is #1, for hiring a big firm to create their "Candidate Wal-Mart" campaign. #2 is Northwest Airlines, for giving their employees a "How To Save Money" booklet after laying them off. #3 is the contest McDonald's held in Japan, with the winners getting free mp3 players with a virus on them. The rest of the top 10 are GM, Kazakhstan, Steve Wynn, The New York Times, Spirit Air, Porter County, and Comcast.
There are 101 in all, so grab a hot beverage and get comfortable. You can't see the entire list on one page, which is a little annoying, but there is a handy scroll function at the bottom.
The potential merger that's been floated between XM and Sirius has, unsurprisingly, been given a thumbs-down by FCC chairman Kevin Martin. I can't imagine why he would think that the only two companies in a particular marketplace merging would create a monopoly. Oh, that's right, because it does.
Online video is very cool and there's some awesome content being created for it. But it's still running into problems as an advertising medium because marketers don't quite get it yet and also because of some unintentional contextual missteps.
Mary Minnick is leaving Coca-Cola just a month after being passed over for the number two position within the company. Minnick has been with Coke for 23 years and will leave at the end of February.
Food giant Kellogs has just launched a campaign that seeks to get people's attention by addressing their urge to snack during peak snacking hours. In addition to that, the ads are created to reference the exact time it's running so that it sounds even more like you're mother who's always nagging you to put down that bite of chocolately goodness because you really could stand to lose a few pounds because you'll never get a man if you look like that and that means she'll never have the grandchildren she's always wanted and which your sister certainly isn't going to give her after announcing her new lifestyle.
I may have wandered off-topic.
Starcom, the agency behind the campaign, created about 30 TV spots and a mess of radio ads as well as web ads, which after pestering you about your snacking then offer a more healthy (and Kelloggs created) alternative). The agency then specified to the media running the ads the time they were to run since that's obviously an important part of the campaign.
Deutsch has landed the media planning duties for Johnson & Johnson's Tylenol brand. Deutsch currently handles creative duties for Tylenol and had previously done the planning work before briefly, you know, not.
If it's Friday it must be time for a new round of speculation regarding the potential merger between Sirius and XM. While it might be good for shareholders, am I the only one who thinks that a merger of the only two players in a particular market might raise some anti-trust concerns? It's not like they're lowering the number of competitors - they're eliminating competition outright.
The New York City Commission on Human Rights has published the minority hiring goals submitted by the agencies to try and make up for the inequality they've been accused of.
For some time now, we've been hearing rumors that "the new at&t" would be changing the name of its wireless carrier, which is currently Cingular, but contains part of the old debacle AT&T Wireless, to at&t. Whether or not they are going to make it lower case or not isn't the issue here, it's the fact that they're changing Cingular's name at all. The amount of money that was spent to not only build the infrastructure and the customer base that it currently has, and have it be a "new" company (I've been a customer almost a decade, from when it was Cellular One in New Jersey) rather than an old world one that just happens to have bought its way into the future has to be staggering, but they for some reason feel the need to, now that the megaconglomerate with a lot less employees than it had before the Telecommunications Act of 1996 and the divestiture of Ma Bell has sort of reformed itself.
I'm not really sure what the point of it is, unless you really think that people are going to harken back to the olden days of yore (ten plus years ago) when good old AT&T was providing them with phone service at home, or maybe back to the 70s and 80s when you had a nice rotary phone that weighed a ton and you rented from the phone company. What, rented a phone? Wow, and we think that today's terms and conditions are out of control.
On Wednesday, Engadget's Ryan Block mentioned that the company was looking to have the rebranding in place by the time that the Apple iPhone was released, so we're talking June-time here. Aside from the fact that a rebrand may leave Jeff Burton's #31 Chevrolet without a sponsor, potentially, why are they just flipping the switch over to a name that isn't relevant to the younger generation in this company, except for when they are reading about technology? Kids these days don't have at&t products, unless they're (now) Cingular customers or happen to have DSL at home that's brought together by them. The only reason that the next generation is going to "know" at&t is because they bought their way into their lives and changed the names (back and forth) from a ton of companies that they sort of owned in the first place, but willingly changed the names of when the companies split up. I understand the value of speaking in "one voice" to your customers, and maybe that works with bringing in new ones, but what about your existing ones who actually like what Cingular is about, think the jack is a cool logo, like the orange and black colors, and so on and so forth? If investments such as that are waste-able (which is what is going on here) then why bother being creative at all? Why don't we just go back and call everything what it originally was, just so we can make a connection with people who aren't going to be your core customers for the next two decades? I think if A&P will change it's name back to The Great Atlantic and Pacific Tea Company, I'd definitely shop there more often. Not. Bell Atlantic changing its name to Verizon (say what you want about the name) actually made sense because the company wasn't just Bell Atlantic anymore. Cingular changing its name "back" to at&t is pure vanity.
Package delivery company UPS is launching a new campaign, its biggest since 2002 when it released the "What can Brown do for you?" campaign. This is not tied, though, to the company's centennial anniversary which is this year, this is strictly a business play. The campaign launches today with TV, online and print executions and is titled "Whiteboard" and is still an extension of the "Brown" campaign. It shows a guy at a whiteboard showing how UPS can perform as an integrated business partner for a company. The budget for the campaign is pegged at about $35 million, or the price of sending 5,347,268 lamps to your Aunt Mabel who's retired to the Virgin Islands.
It wasn't until about the second time that I heard the radio spot for American Express' "One" small business card that I was able to place the music they were using. It is, as Matthew Simantov points out, the song "Gimme Some Money" from This is Spinal Tap. The campaign has been running on both TV and radio. Using a Tap song in an ad, much less one of the ones from the band's early career, might violate several of my religious doctrines, but that's for theologians to discuss. Here's the video, thanks to Simantov, of the full song from the movie.
While Google makes headlines with every move, either real or imagined, a company called SoftWave Media Exchange is making money selling radio and TV time via an online sales platform. The company did about three-quarters of a million dollars in business transactions in the third quarter of 2006, three times what it did in the first quarter of the year. Right now the selling of cable TV time is still in the testing phase but radio sales are solid enough and the company seems to have the infrastructure in place to make this work.
Seems Google could hit a significant snag in their plan to sell radio commercial air time: Inventory. The company, according to reports, simply doesn't have enough time for the program to have any real revenue impact or to allow for a thorough trial by advertisers. That's at least part of the reason it is reported to be pursuing a business relationship with CBS that would give it access to the network's radio inventory. That would allow Google to pretty much set its own terms. Without the CBS deal, or another similar one with a large networker, coming to fruition Google is not expected to see any real profits from their Audio Ads program until the middle of 2007. Google sales reps have apparently begun selling advertisers on the idea of integrated radio/online campaigns.
Peter Hershberg and Joshua Stylman lay out for marketers exactly what changes are coming from Yahoo! as the search giant builds toward the roll-out of its revamped search advertising platform, dubbed Panama. The overall redesign will bring it much closer to the functionality campaign managers now have through Google and other such platforms.
Clear Channel is launching two new niche-appeal radio stations, one targeting NASCAR fans and the other members of the gay and lesbian community. I'm not going to touch the 7,846 jokes that could be made about the intersection of those two groups. I'm just not.
The FTC has decided it will not investigate how some marketers are engaging in word-of-mouth practices, a decision that could result in some previously hesitant marketers jumping into the field. The call for such an investigation had come from watchdog group Commercial Alert.
The first is a relatively minor thing, unless of course you're an AdWords advertiser without a web presence of your own. Google will now let AdWords partners create what they're calling Hosted Business Pages. It's not much, just sort of a simple landing page that allows a small business that might not have invested in their own site to have somewhere online to point those ads. Advertisers can build a page with some basic business information such as hours and location.
The second is kind of huge and has been circulating online for a while. Google Audio Ads, their long-awaited radio advertising product, has officially launched in beta. Right now the ads are being produced for just a handful of radio stations and include only a select group of advertisers but it's a start. The launch comes as Google has finally fully integrated DMarc Broadcasting's platform into their own, allowing for the creation of an audio campaign from within the AdWords framework. This kind of system could allow for radio stations to significantly increase their inventory. There's not even a speculative date as to when Audio Ads will become available to more advertisers but I'm guessing it's not going to be too long. Probably as soon as a critical mass of broadcasters open up to it.
Like the title says, I'm confused. I keep hearing a mix of stories that alternately say the radio industry is doing just fine in attracting ad revenue followed by stories like this one that are predicting doom. While radio still gets a higher percentage of dollars than online, online is growing at a far greater rate than radio. The study also says that the print industry is doomed. Oh, and so is TV. So basically everyone is screwed except online.
Here's an interesting take a situation. As newspapers rely more on their websites - which don't necessarily have as local an audience as the print editions - for ad revenue, they're more likely to accept nationally-targeted ads. That leaves less inventory available for local advertisers. So what media is positioned to pick up some of those dollars? Radio. Even if this isn't shift isn't being driven by the advertisers, it's an interesting hook for radio time sellers to use when approaching local clients.
Here's a revolutionary thought for owners of TV and radio stations. Sell your online assets in a similar manner as you do your core platform. There's a lot of good stuff in this article, which is based on a report from GroupM but it comes down to each media, whether it be TV, radio or newspapers, leveraging their strengths in order to be successful in online ad sales. That means playing up - not ignoring - the local base that makes up a good portion of the audience. It also means selling more package deals and figuring out how to use blogs, podcasts and other new media thingamajigs to their advantage when it comes to getting advertisers interested.
So many dumb moments in business, so little time. But Business 2.0 mag has their picks for the 101 dumbest of 2006.
The potential merger that's been floated between XM and Sirius has, unsurprisingly, been given a 
Food giant Kellogs has 
For some time now, we've been hearing rumors that "the new at&t" would be changing the name of its wireless carrier, which is currently Cingular, but contains part of the old debacle AT&T Wireless, to at&t. Whether or not they are going to make it lower case or not isn't the issue here, it's the fact that they're changing Cingular's name at all. The amount of money that was spent to not only build the infrastructure and the customer base that it currently has, and have it be a "new" company (I've been a customer almost a decade, from when it was Cellular One in New Jersey) rather than an old world one that just happens to have bought its way into the future has to be staggering, but they for some reason feel the need to, now that the megaconglomerate with a lot less employees than it had before the Telecommunications Act of 1996 and the divestiture of Ma Bell has sort of reformed itself. 
Package delivery company UPS is launching a new campaign, its biggest since 2002 when it released the "What can Brown do for you?" campaign. This is not tied, though, to the company's centennial anniversary which is this year, this is strictly a business play. The campaign launches today with TV, online and print executions and is titled "Whiteboard" and is still an extension of the "Brown" campaign. It shows a guy at a whiteboard showing how UPS can perform as an integrated business partner for a company. The budget for the campaign is pegged at about $35 million, or the price of sending 5,347,268 lamps to your Aunt Mabel who's retired to the Virgin Islands.
While Google makes headlines with every move, either real or imagined, a company called SoftWave Media Exchange is 
Seems Google could hit a significant snag in their plan to sell radio commercial air time: 
Shorter version of the 
Peter Hershberg and Joshua Stylman 
Like the title says, I'm confused. I keep hearing a 
Here's a revolutionary thought for owners of TV and radio stations. Sell your online assets in a similar manner as you do your core platform. There's a lot of good stuff in this article, which is based on a report from GroupM but it comes down to each media, whether it be TV, radio or newspapers, leveraging their strengths in order to be successful in online ad sales. That means playing up - not ignoring - the local base that makes up a good portion of the audience. It also means selling more package deals and figuring out how to use blogs, podcasts and other new media thingamajigs to their advantage when it comes to getting advertisers interested.
