In the early 90’s, so-called place- and retail-based media was all the rage, based on introducing advertiser-supported video and TV-style programming into environments rich with “captive” consumers.  

Active still today, the most prominent success from that era is the pioneering CNN Airport Network. Launched in 1992 by Turner Private Networks, the network currently broadcasts news and entertainment features to some 46 airports across North America.  

Up until the mid-80’s, the German herbal alcoholic drink Jägermeister was an obscure specialty brand in the U.S. relatively unknown to the mainstream market. Then the late Sidney Frank promoted Jäger as a party drink to the college crowd, and sales shot through the roof. In the mid-90’s, he went one better by marketing Grey Goose vodka—a concept he created and named from thin air—at a price point nearly double that of the leading brand of the time, Absolut.  

How did Frank, dubbed the Cocktail Creationist by New York magazine goose up such super-premium success, eventually selling the French-made vodka for a giddy $2 billion in 2004?  

Quite simply, Frank spun one helluva brand story. But did he fake out consumers with a story created from scratch?  

When I was roused out of a morning snooze the other day by a commercial claiming that the Chevy Volt would “save you a crap load of money” …

 … I thought of my father’s best friend, Carl Ally.

He would have dismissed that giggly thing as just another form of vapid corporate prudishness. But he might also have thought to himself: There’s a client just desperate enough to be worth working for.

Need a ready-made reminder of the pitfalls that accompany putting advertising before your overall marketing strategy? Look no further.  

Up until this month’s Super Bowl XLVI, Budweiser.com was a content graveyard. I’d closely watched Bud’s homepage for weeks to see how long it would take them to do an update after a coworker told me she’d been on the site and was surprised at the lack of relevant content leading up to the big game. In fact, not just a dearth of content but no content.  

In talking to a prospective client recently, she made a comment that I agreed with but also made me cringe. "Content is the new black," is what she said and, as a marketer, it made me cringe because of how trendy it makes content marketing sound. Truth is, the term "content" is all the rage right now, but I started asking myself, ‘what were we doing before?’  

Every year around this time, I write a couple of short pieces previewing the annual conference of the Custom Content Council for Content, the group’s own custom publication.  The beauty of this assignment is two-fold: I learn about new developments from the forefront of content marketing, and I am privileged to interview interesting and influential people. This year was exceptional on both counts, highlighted by conversations with famed editor-in-chief Knight Kiplinger and Rob Tait, a former ad agency creative director who now pioneers the content strategy of “branded entertainment” in the Canadian market.   

Here’s a basic, but all too common Achilles Heel for marketers that will smother great strategyor creative work every time. Check out the picture below, it’s of the marketing content accompanying a fairly high-end piece of music equipment that caught my eye in a store recently.

How many logos do you count?  

So you say social media is not for you?  In fact, that is exactly what the majority of the more than 1,700 respondents surveyed in IBM’s inaugural Global Chief Marketing Officer study said.

Published in October 2011, From Stretched to Strengthened finds that “the advent of social media is challenging older, mass-marketing assumptions, skill sets and approaches.” That’s putting things mildly: More than half of the respondents indicated that they feel “underprepared” to manage the impact of all but two (regulatory considerations and corporate transparency) of 13 key market factors. “Alarmingly” as the report states, topping the list are data explosion (71%), social media (68%) and growth of channel and device choices (65%).  

We’ve all heard that good content is supposed to be engaging. And now there are plenty of tools to measure engagement.

But that leaves a big gap: What kind of content is engaging, and how do we create content that engages our audience?  

Content marketers that focus on platforms and metrics can lose sight of these questions. And the answers you read about don’t tend to be very useful. Good content is supposed to be credible, authentic, relevant, compelling, “high-quality” (I’m guilty of using that last one), and so on. Most of these terms are just different plays on the word “useful.” But what is useful?  

China’s answer to Carrie Bradshaw is sexy, doe-eyed and smart enough to dig a guy who drives a Chevrolet Cruze.

“Miss Puff,” an animated online series about a tech-happy single woman in Beijing, is co-produced by Chevrolet-maker GM and the video website Youku. As of July the first episodes had attracted 20 million views, according to one media-watching China blog, ChinaSmack.