so much is impacted

by

a key skill

set

couched in core

values

dovetailed with action

items.  

The mainstream media hasn’t paid much attention to date to the “content revolution,” but some great content-related stories have been coming out recently from two major outlets in particular.

In the movie Moneyball Brad Pitt's character, Oakland A's general manager Billy Beane, found himself handicapped by the lowest salary constraint in baseball but still holding onto dreams of winning the World Series. What was his angle into the “field of dreams?” Brad/Billy had to look at things differently than every other team in baseball – he had to find a competitive advantage.

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.  

Is your company missing out on fairly easy ways to get on your customers’ radar screens? Many companies have pumped out “tips” articles that may be perfectly useful on their own. But the “5 Ways to Build a Better Mousetrap” formula is getting stale, and it’s not “sticky,” either: Customers might assume that the article summarizes everything you have to say about mousetraps, so they’ve no reason to return (or subscribe).  

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?  

On Wednesday, February 29th, Facebook announced several exciting changes to the Pages platform and the rollout of Timeline for Pages that will dramatically impact how users interact with brand/business pages on both desktops and mobile devices. I tuned into the Livestream of the event in New York City to get all the details for my own clients and thought others – clients or not – could benefit from the low down.  

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.  

One key measure of a successful branding campaign is in how it creates positive consumer sentiment about a given company and its offerings. Officially, the concept of “consumer sentiment” arose around the 1950’s as a statistical measurement of the economy’s health as determined by consumer confidence—or lack thereof--in both their own financial situation and the overall economy.  

Broadly defined, “sentiment” is an attitude that evolves into a behavior. After all, you have to like something or someone before you show them love, right? Like a brand or company and its people, product, service, philosophy or other attribute, and you are naturally inclined to be more of an influencer, a recommender, a repeat customer, an ambassador, even an acolyte.