Blog action day

What would happen if every blog published on the same topic on the same day? Blog Action Day aims to find out. On October 15 2007, bloggers around the world unite for one day to change the conversation. To find out more and get involved visit blogactionday.org.

One call Factory

Production company: Bug

If it didn't exist, you'd have to invent it - FIAT panda

Panda 100HP "Colombo"



Agency: Leo Burnett Italy
Director: Sebastian Strasser

Lynx 'Bom Chicka Wah Wah' Teacher TV advert

Bom Chicka Wah Wah



Funny new Lynx (Axe) ad shown on TV.







Agency: BBH

See www.utalkmarketing.com for more like this.

Blog - Think Before You Post

Melbourne International Comedy Festival

Agency: GREY WORLDWIDE MELBOURNE

Sites for video blogging.

Youtube
www.youtube.com
Besides
being one of the most popular video blogging web sites,Youtube is one
of the oldest of its kind.Founded in 2005,this web site provides a free
platform that facilitates the sharing of user-created videos.Once you
are registered with the site you become a member and can upload your
videos in MPEG,AVI or MOV format.You can even upload MPEG4(DivX or
XviD-encoded video clips) for higher video quality.After recording
movies using your camcorder,digital still camera (using the movie mode)
or your video-capable cell phone,you can use one of several free tools
to convert your video to any of the above formats before uploading
them.Members also have access to other facilities including the ability
to edit posts to their videos and remove them later if they wish to.The
web site also lets you tag your videos,which makes it easier to search
and locate videos of specific content and subject.To protect
privacy,uploaded videos can be set to be private or public,thus
restricting viewing access.Another cool feature is the ability to
directly upload videos from mobile devices like PDAs and cell phones
using its nifty Mobile Upload option in conjuction with the MMS
capability of your phone.
For
first-time users,the site includes a comprehensive help section that
describe the web site's capabilities along with answers to
frequently-asked questions regarding posting and managing video
posts.For both members and guests of the site,you can even link its
hosted videos to other web sites by embedded them directly into the web
page.
Metacafe
www.metacafe.com
Another
web site offering similar capabilities to that of Youtube is
Metacafe.It serves as a video sharing platform,allowing users to post
their video clips.Founded in Israel,this site has over 20 million
unique visitors Watching over 400 million video streams each month.Here
too,after a free registration you can proceed to upload your own
videos.The video quality standards used on Metacafe are of a noticeably
higher quality than that used on other video sharing platforms such as
Youtube.To be able to upload videos,a 4.8 MB client application needs
to be downloaded and installed on the client computer,after which you
can upload content,rate clips,post user comments or share the clips
with a friend.The application also allows you to save clips to your
computer for office offline viewing.Besides user-posted video clips,the
web sites also offers movie trailers,games and other fun stuff.
Podcasting
www.apple.com/podcasting
For
all those who use iTunes as their music management and MP3 playback
needs,you've probably already heard of podcasting.This is the term
given to the ability to share user-created audio and video clips on
Apple's iTunes network.Podcasts are "channels" that can be subscribed
to through the online iTunes Music Store interface.While the term
initially applicable to user-created audio streams,podcasts can now be
video-based as they are primarily intended to run on Apple's video
enabled iPods (though they can be downloaded and viewed on any
video-capable computer or handheld device that supports the video
standard).As regard the video standard,podcasts can only be created in
M4V,MP4 or MOV video formats which happens to be native video export
formats in Apple's Quicktime 7 Pro.If you have a Mac,it will be
understandably easier to create a podcast by using a DV camera and the
iSight software used for capturing and saving your video file.This can
be done on a PC using the applicable software to grab video and export
it to the supported format.Unlike the video blogging web sites
described earlier,you cannot actually upload videos to the iTunes Music
Store- to share podcasts,you will need to first host your video as an
enclosure on an existing blogging service such as "Blogger" and then
provide the RSS link on the iTunes Music Store.After this is done,it
shows up on the iTunes Music Store listing in the podcast category.Of
course,this is the best way to share your video clips with iPod users
as they are synchronized with the device through the iTunes
interface.There are numerous detailed tutorials on how to do this on
iTunes Music Store and on other web sites.
Now
that the capablity exists on the device(be it a cell phone,camcorder or
digicam),the ability to share your videos with the world is a powerful
capability for communication.While video blogging is still at an
embryonic stage in the country,there are many examples of surprisingly
popular users who partake of everything from citizen journalism to
kitschy video clips of their daily experiences.Still,there is no
denying the power behind this trend of any-users video sharing.

Quiz Your Advertising Skills

Advertising is the key part of business marketing. If the advertisement succeeds, it can mean big profit. Advertising requires innovative thinking in todays world because the traditional advertising mediums are becoming very expensive. A well thought advertising that is different may create a big impact. But advertising is not being given the attention it deserves. As soon as the profits go down or the market scenario looks bad, advertising expenditures are cut first. How much do you know about advertising in a business? Please quiz yourself about that.

What should be the ideal percentage of advertising in total marketing expenditure?

Should the advertising expenditure increase with growing business or decrease?

Which advertising media should be used for advertising in a very low budget?

Should every business advertise in the beginning?

Are advertising professionals must for getting the best return out of the expenditure?

Is a small market survey about advertising effectiveness always necessary before full-fledged advertising campaign?

Do women add value to advertising? What if you are advertising nuts and bolts?

These are some small questions that I have raised about advertising in business. Please think about the answers. Advertising is tricky, because wrong advertising means total loss. There is no scrap left to recover anything. It is like a bad dream, but it costs. A business succeeds if the advertising succeeds at the right budget. Please try some more quizzes on your personality and career and improve your performance manifold.

Freddy - Human Machine Woman

Agency: 1861 United, Milan
Art Director: Federico Pepe / Micol Talso
Copywriter: Stefania Siani / Luca Beato
Creative Directors: Roberto Battaglia / Pino Rozzi

The Top 10 Things They Never Taught Me in Design School

The Top 10 Things They Never Taught Me in Design School
by Michael McDonough

1. Talent is one-third of the success equation.
Talent is important in any profession, but it is no guarantee of success. Hard work and luck are equally important. Hard work means self-discipline and sacrifice. Luck means, among other things, access to power, whether it is social contacts or money or timing. In fact, if you are not very talented, you can still succeed by emphasizing the other two. If you think I am wrong, just look around.

2. 95 percent of any creative profession is shit work.
Only 5 percent is actually, in some simplistic way, fun. In school that is what you focus on; it is 100 percent fun. Tick-tock. In real life, most of the time there is paper work, drafting boring stuff, fact-checking, negotiating, selling, collecting money, paying taxes, and so forth. If you don’t learn to love the boring, aggravating, and stupid parts of your profession and perform them with diligence and care, you will never succeed.

3. If everything is equally important, then nothing is very important.
You hear a lot about details, from “Don’t sweat the details” to “God is in the details.” Both are true, but with a very important explanation: hierarchy. You must decide what is important, and then attend to it first and foremost. Everything is important, yes. But not everything is equally important. A very successful real estate person taught me this. He told me, “Watch King Rat. You’ll get it.”

4. Don’t over-think a problem.
One time when I was in graduate school, the late, great Steven Izenour said to me, after only a week or so into a ten-week problem, “OK, you solved it. Now draw it up.” Every other critic I ever had always tried to complicate and prolong a problem when, in fact, it had already been solved. Designers are obsessive by nature. This was a revelation. Sometimes you just hit it. The thing is done. Move on.

5. Start with what you know; then remove the unknowns.
In design this means “draw what you know.” Start by putting down what you already know and already understand. If you are designing a chair, for example, you know that humans are of predictable height. The seat height, the angle of repose, and the loading requirements can at least be approximated. So draw them. Most students panic when faced with something they do not know and cannot control. Forget about it. Begin at the beginning. Then work on each unknown, solving and removing them one at a time. It is the most important rule of design. In Zen it is expressed as “Be where you are.” It works.

6. Don’t forget your goal.
Definition of a fanatic: Someone who redoubles his effort after forgetting his goal. Students and young designers often approach a problem with insight and brilliance, and subsequently let it slip away in confusion, fear and wasted effort. They forget their goals, and make up new ones as they go along. Original thought is a kind of gift from the gods. Artists know this. “Hold the moment,” they say. “Honor it.” Get your idea down on a slip of paper and tape it up in front of you.

7. When you throw your weight around, you usually fall off balance.
Overconfidence is as bad as no confidence. Be humble in approaching problems. Realize and accept your ignorance, then work diligently to educate yourself out of it. Ask questions. Power – the power to create things and impose them on the world – is a privilege. Do not abuse it, do not underestimate its difficulty, or it will come around and bite you on the ass. The great Karmic wheel, however slowly, turns.

8. The road to hell is paved with good intentions; or, no good deed goes unpunished.
The world is not set up to facilitate the best any more than it is set up to facilitate the worst. It doesn’t depend on brilliance or innovation because if it did, the system would be unpredictable. It requires averages and predictables. So, good deeds and brilliant ideas go against the grain of the social contract almost by definition. They will be challenged and will require enormous effort to succeed. Most fail. Expect to work hard, expect to fail a few times, and expect to be rejected. Our work is like martial arts or military strategy: Never underestimate your opponent. If you believe in excellence, your opponent will pretty much be everything.

9. It all comes down to output.
No matter how cool your computer rendering is, no matter how brilliant your essay is, no matter how fabulous your whatever is, if you can’t output it, distribute it, and make it known, it basically doesn’t exist. Orient yourself to output. Schedule output. Output, output, output. Show Me The Output.

10. The rest of the world counts.
If you hope to accomplish anything, you will inevitably need all of the people you hated in high school. I once attended a very prestigious design school where the idea was “If you are here, you are so important, the rest of the world doesn’t count.” Not a single person from that school that I know of has ever been really successful outside of school. In fact, most are the kind of mid-level management drones and hacks they so despised as students. A suit does not make you a genius. No matter how good your design is, somebody has to construct or manufacture it. Somebody has to insure it. Somebody has to buy it. Respect those people. You need them. Big time.

From www.designobserver.com

The original author is Michael McDonough (www.michaelmcdonough.com).

Management's Misjudgement Gives JetBlue a Black Eye

In today's 24/7 media world even the best brands are only ever one horrible misstep away from a PR disaster. Just ask JetBlue.

Blow to reputation
The low-cost carrier built its brand not on ads, but on a brand experience that's epitomized by its mission statement: "Our promise: to continue to bring humanity back to air travel." But last week many passengers claimed to have suffered distinctly inhumane treatment, delivering a big blow to the reputation of the airline, which was slammed in headlines such as "Jet Black and Blue."

A lapse in judgment during last week's winter storm on the East Coast has damaged a brand that for the most part has been an industry darling. JetBlue left 10 of its planes on the tarmac at New York's John F. Kennedy Airport, stranding passengers onboard for six hours or longer -- one flight for nearly 11 hours -- with no food, no adequate restrooms and no explanation for what was going on. The airline canceled half of its 571 flights Feb. 14 and compounded the problem by waiting nearly five hours to notify transit officials and request help in getting the passengers off the planes and back to the terminal.

Heavy media coverage
In the days following, the media was all over the debacle, with stories inescapable on TV news, online (with special attention from the Drudge Report) and in print (The New York Post devoted a spread to the tale).

"They blew it," said Steve Danishek, a Seattle travel-industry analyst. "Now it affects their brand. The cost they would have incurred to unload the planes, while high, they could have written off as goodwill. Now they have no goodwill."

JetBlue CEO David Neeleman admitted as much. "It was a horrible situation," he told CNBC. "It's going to certainly impact us, and it's going to be many millions of dollars that we're going to lose from this."

The seven-year-old airline has been immune from criticism for much of its existence, in part because of its low fares and in part for its service-oriented features that include leather seats and seat-back TVs. In fact, the airline was Advertising Age's Marketer of the Year in 2002.

But the bloom started to come off the rose last year when on-time percentages went down and complaints went up. Now this.

Damage control
The airline did its mea culpa, offering refunds and free future flights. A spokesman said JetBlue will assess the situation to make sure it doesn't happen again. But that might not be enough.

"I can't imagine that this is not going to cost them some bookings," said Dean Headley, a professor of marketing and entrepreneurship at Wichita State University in Kansas and co-author of the Airline Quality Review. "JetBlue flies into markets where people have other choices. Anytime you make a big promise on a service base like that and then not deliver, or at least violate that promise rather publicly, the fallout on that is so difficult to completely know. It's difficult from a PR standpoint to even control it."

Jonathan Bernstein, president of Bernstein Crisis Management in Sierra Madre, Calif., said JetBlue has already built up a good enough reputation to survive the fallout.

"If they do any advertising at all about this, it should be in the form of an advertorial, a CEO letter in publications that are well-read by their consumer base," Mr. Bernstein said. "TV ads have worked before, say for restaurants touched by the E. coli scare, for instance. But I believe editorial copy will be better-received than a plain TV ad."

Assessing the fallout
For its part, JetBlue said it has no plans to do any marketing to defuse the situation until it has time to assess the fallout.

This isn't the first time something like this has happened. Northwest Airlines stranded thousands of passengers during a 1999 storm in Detroit; one flight sat on the tarmac for 11 hours. The airline now has a policy that passengers cannot be stuck on a grounded plane for more than three hours. Northwest rebounded and remains the country's fifth-largest airline.

JetBlue wasn't the only airline to suffer problems last week. MSNBC talk-show host Joe Scarborough sat on a Delta Air Lines flight-41E, a center seat-for nine hours trying to get from LaGuardia to Florida through Atlanta.

"Hey, listen, stuff happens, and I try to be very zen about the whole episode," Mr. Scarborough said on his show. "But I've yet to get an apology from Delta, and, instead, I'm getting spin from a company that's refusing to take responsibility for one bad decision after another," he said. "I'm waiting for that apology and my own free round-trip tickets, or I may just find me another airline."

from adage.com

Blog Advertising Earnings - Qumana Survey

Today we'll follow up on the post about the Use of Advertising by Bloggers with a post on how much people earn from their blogs and how satisfied they are with these earnings.

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On a per month basis, 69% of our bloggers (those who previously indicated they participate in advertising programs) earn less than $20 per month from all income sources: advertising & sponsorship. It's rather a pity that so many bloggers, of whom we have identified as being experienced, are not seeing any return for their efforts.

You can see from the graph that there is a real hurdle between $50 a month and anything above. From general experience, I know that blogs tend to go through several earnings ranges. You can be stuck on one range for a long time then jump up to the next without really experiencing a gradual incline in that direction.

We can see, for example, that there is a big barrier between earning $50 per month an anything greater than that - it would appear the next gap starts at $200.

n=31

We asked our users if they were frustrated with what they make. In the open-ended comments, most bloggers indicated they wanted to make more; some didn't know how, and some felt they were just beginning.

All of these are valid points that can be made, but they all point to the fact that people just don't know how to make money from their blogs. I don't know how many blogs there are out there trying to teach bloggers all the tricks and modifications you can do to tweak your ads, get the right context, or so on. It's really an overwhelming amount of information. And can leave some feeling they are "just not there yet" - that you need to be very savvy to start making money.

I disagree. I think everyone has the ability to start making money right away, and think it should be simple. The tools we have right now are for techie geeks - even the integration of AdSense in to Blogger is not a solution - it still puts a lot of pressure on people to understand the nuances of ad programs to be able to get something back in return.

n=79

We asked some more questions of the full set of respondents about making money from blogging. When asked if they want to make more, a clear 59% of people say yes. A surprising 20% don't want to make more - these bloggers fall into the category of those who don't have advertising because they don't like it.

If we take the 20% who don't care as some who just don't think they have a chance at making money, we have an even stronger indication that people really do want to make more money. Who doesn't, after all?

n=67

Since we knew going into the survey that most people were going to want to make more money blogging than what they currently make, we put in a question asking them how much they wanted. Of course, these results have just a bit of bias because 'want' and 'reality' are not necessarily the same thing, even when reality is a good chunk of change.

Looking back, if I had answered this question, I would have said $1000+ too - partially because I do want to make a living from blogging and see myself there eventually, but partially because it would be funny to say.

So, it came as no surprise to see that 22% of our users also want to make more than $1000 per month from blogging. It's not a bad goal. Since most of our users are experienced bloggers, and have shown to stick it out by posting on more than one blog and for an extended period of time, we'll likely see a lot of them reach this goal.


I was surprised to see so many answers of below $20 - these bloggers don't earn much now, being new or not knowing how, so would be happy even with a small return for their efforts. Such a return would likely pay for the blog, and very little more.

I'd like to see more of our bloggers reaching for higher earnings goals. Blogging can be a career - Tris and I have proved that. Advertising is a part of how we make our living, and we think that we have a powerful message to spread about making money blogging. But what we can learn here is that it's just too hard to figure out right now. We need to make blog advertising easier.



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Stay tuned for my next post on people's opinions of advertising in blogs and later for keyword vs. contextual advertising.