Century 21 Real Estate has named MRM Worldwide its agency of record for national and digital marketing and Mullen as its agency of record for social media and PR. Both are Interpublic Group agencies. Mullen is the real estate company's first social media AOR.
Italian fashion brand Diesel has hired Iced Media, an integrated agency that specializes in online and social media, as its agency of record. Iced won the business after an RFP process that included more than five other agencies.
Christopher & Banks, a women's clothing specialty retailer, has launched its "Friendship Rewards" multichannel loyalty program. The initiative, announced March 9, will span the company's more than 800 retail locations and two e-commerce sites.
Unilever's Ragu line of pasta sauces is conducting a contest targeting moms, as well as a digital campaign to promote it. The promotion, launched March 1, runs through August.
Stratmark launched "My Reader Rewards," a program that allows newspaper subscribers to accumulate points with a periodical's advertisers, on March 9. The company is in negotiations with 14 media outlets to implement the program.
Wunderman has named Mark Russell president of Wunderman Toronto and managing director of Blast Radius' Detroit, Chicago and Toronto offices, effective March 8. Russell reports to Trish Wheaton, global CMO of Wunderman and chair of Wunderman Canada, and Gurval Caer, CEO of Blast Radius.
Retailer Men's Wearhouse is conducting a viral campaign to promote tuxedo rentals during prom season. The effort encourages teenagers to sign up to be a "prom rep" for the chance to win a free tuxedo or a Chevrolet Camaro. The effort, launched at the end of last month, runs through July.
24/7 Real Media has partnered with Omniture to update its Open AdStream Web ad management platform, and integrate it with Omniture's SiteCatalyst tool. The goal of the integration, effective March 9, is to make ad buying more targeted for publishers and advertisers by combining analytics and ad serving.
Here?s a few of my favorite quotes from Heavy Hitter Sales Psychology: How to Penetrate the C-Level Executive Suite and Convince Company Leaders to Buy: A smart person knows how something works, a clever person knows how to get something...More
January is one of my busiest times of the year and since the beginning of the year I have had privilege of speaking to over 15,000 salespeople at annual sales kickoffs around the world. In order to prepare for these...More
Here?s one of my favorite year end sales stories? READ BRIAN'S STORY BELOW ?? Brian was presenting his forecast in front of his teammates and explaining why a deal that he had originally forecasted to close in the quarter came...More
The old saying that time is money is actually wrong. Time is actually far more important than money. Time is your most valuable possession. It?s also finite. You only have so many days in a month or quarter. That?s why...More
In my new book Heavy Hitter Sales Psychology: How to Penetrate the C-Level Executive Suite and Convince C-Level Executives to Buy, I help salespeople learn how to winover senior executives using Sales Linguistics. But what exactly is Sales Linguistics? Every...More
I was recently interview by Mathew Schwartz for ?Follow the Lead: Zoominfo?s B2B Sales and Marketing Blog? Here?s the interview: BEST ASSET FOR SALES EXECUTIVES DOESN?T COST A THING The terms have seeped into the sales lexicon: Sales 2.0, Sales...More
I?d like to invite you to join me as I review key C-level sales strategy concepts from my new book Heavy Hitter Sales Psychology: How to Penetrate the C-Level Executive Suite and Convince Company Leaders to Buy. Based upon more...More
I was very excited to learn that my just released book Heavy Hitter Sales Psychology: How to Penetrate the C-Level Executive Suite and Convince Company Leaders to Buy and its prequel, Heavy Hitter Selling: How Successful Salespeople Use Language and...More
My new book Heavy Hitter Sales Psychology: How to Penetrate the C-Level Executive Suite and Convince Company Leaders to Buy is based upon Based upon more than 500 interviews with C-Level executives. The book provides psychological strategies and linguistic tactics...More
There?s a very important lesson for both salespeople and marketeers to learn from the healthcare debate and these charts below are at the center of it. On the left is the Republican chart of healthcare reform and on the right...More
Channel: MarketingVOX - The Voice of Online Marketing
Repo Men, which opens March 19, is using barcode technology in its promotion - the latest example of a growing number of ad creatives and technology to do so.
Plot and Promotion Meet
The movie is...More
Smart Momma, a baby gear and gifts retailer, started tracking visitors to its site when it did a redesign in 2008 - which was also around the same time that it started using an online reputation...More
Twitter, Foursquare and Facebook have all stepped up their location-based services. The most comprehensive - just by its size and presence - is Facebook. The social networking site will be...More
As newspaper publishers attempt to understand how their products fit into the new digital world, they are experimenting with different ways of offering content via handheld devices like mobile phones...More
The global mobile retail market is expected to top $12 billion by 2014, according to [pdf] a new study by Juniper Research.
?Mobile Marketing & Retail Strategies: Advertising, Coupons & Smart Posters...More
Measurement & Analytics:
24/7 Real Media integrates with Omniture Data.
Ad Technologies & Vendors:
MediaForge ads only charge when people interact and buy.
Major Account Moves:
Walmart places a...More
From TheNextWeb.com
Doctors have the Hippocratic Oath. It is an ethical framework on which they can fall back when they have doubts about the right course of action. I think it must be comforting to have some kind of guidelines to fall back to when the shit hits the fan.
As far as I?m aware there is [...]More
Scott Sheaffer of ‘Sales Tips Blog‘ recently wrote a post about not always being the nice guy. In the past I have found myself falling into this rut and then being walked over by my clients. With time I realized that people respect someone with a backbone not a yes man.
Always Being Nice Is Not [...]More
I don’t always buy into what Seth Godin is telling me, which is true with this video… however I like how he looks at things differently and encourages creative thought.
More
My Dad worked over 30 years in high-rise construction and was telling me a story last week about a guy he hired years ago named Flop. Flop was in his 4th year apprenticeship and was looking for a new job. Flop should have known most of his trade however in the job interview with my [...]More
My sinuses are a problem for me and have been my whole life. I had surgery on them a few years back and it really helped me breathe and sleep better. I still have some trouble in the mornings and now use a Netty Pot for nasal irrigation. Having clear sinuses allows me to speak [...]More
Here is a post from Kenrick Chatman of Live Life At Home that has some great insite for someone new to Professional Sales;
Sales is the foundation of a successful business. Like Red Motley once stated, ?Nothing happens until a sale is made?. Currently, consumers and businesses are reluctant to spend. Likewise, it?s of utmost importance that [...]More
I gave Ad Age a hard timethis morning on Twitter for outsourcing so much of their content to industry pros, instead of relying on journalists (inside and outside their organization) to report news.
Clearly some industry pros are better than others and their opinions carry more weight. Pete Blackshaw from Nielsen, for instance, is one person in the Ad Age stable that I consistently want to hear from. Here's a quick look at why that is:
Amid all the social-media banter, I'm just not hearing the word "trust" enough. Trust is the currency for all advertising, whether marketer-generated or consumer-generated. Lose it and we might as well close shop.
Social media and digital marketing will only succeed -- and sell through the organizational layers -- if we ground it in deeper, more established marketing truths, not ephemeral campaigns, one-trick pony moments, or hypocritical oaths or proclamations.
There's more actionable thought in the above pull quote than you're going to find in volumes of books and articles on this business.
Too many people in this ad biz are invested in making it complicated, either as a way to justify their rates, or as a way to make themselves appear smarter than they really are. But it's not a complicated business, it's simply a difficult one.
BTW, Blackshaw has a book for sale, Satisfied Customers Tell Three Friends, Angry Customers Tell 3,000. Here he is promoting it:
RedLever, a leading producer of premium branded content across all genres and distribution platforms, announced today it has partnered with Digitas, a leading digital marketing agency, to create "In The Kitchen," a 10-part webisode series for Jenn-Air, makers of high-end kitchen appliances. The web series kicks off in mid-March.
The series will be hosted by cookbook author and TV personality Tori Ritchie, host of Fine Living's "Ultimate Kitchens" and regular contributor to the CBS Early Show.
"Branded entertainment campaigns have proven to be very effective in communicating the brand's essence to a very targeted audience," said Richard Shore, COO, RedLever. "Our team is providing Jenn-Air with a web series that will reach the right audience at impression levels that guarantee boosted awareness of its super premium line of kitchen appliances."
Digitas selected RedLever to execute the web series based on its ability to drive guaranteed unique web visitors and its experience in producing and delivering high-quality branded entertainment content. RedLever has created campaigns for clients that include the U.S. Army, TRESemme, Grey Goose, and Nissan.
According to The Wall Street Journal, Facebook will introduce its Open Graph API next month at a major developer conference in San Francisco next month.
The API will help independent Web sites adopt elements of Facebook's Fan pages. For instance, a visitor to one's site could with one click become a "Fan".
By getting sites to adopt the technology, Facebook hopes to make it even easier for users to share information from the Web on Facebook and to have that information associated with their Facebook identity.
Silicon Alley Insider helps make sense of this development bu giving it some background.
In the year since Facebook Connect launched, more and more major brands have begun driving traffic not to their own domains, but to their branded Facebook Pages. These pages are attractive brands because once Facebook users become fans of a page, that page is free to update that friend regularly. It has been the return of email marketing. The Open Graph API, which will take Facebook fan pages out of Facebook without sacrificing these marketing tools is the next logical step.
The Insider also suggests Facebook has designs on building an ad network and on providing one-click e-commerce solutions. Bottom line, Facebook wants to own the largest possible slice of your daily Web experience.
Buick's new interactive campaign, The New Class of World Class, created by MacLaren MRM in partnership with Motion Theory and interactive studio Jam 3, aims to introduce Buick's new design philosophy to a young, sophisticated audience.
Unbelievably, the project was completed in just over three weeks. Adrian Belina, Creative Director, Jam 3 says, "To create the site, we had access to GM's still photographs and no time to model, so we proposed a solution to MacLaren MRM - to turn those photos into video using some interesting motion graphics trickery. We dubbed it Fauxto 3D, because it makes use of real photographs and not actually a 3D model. It's a basic car's shape that is then wrapped with a real photograph which allows us to move the 'camera' about 20 degrees creating a movable image and significantly upping the ante from what could have been just a photo slideshow."
Clients From Hell, a collection of anonymously contributed client horror stories from designers, is excellent.
Here's one of today's offering:
Client: "I googled my name and there is some nasty stuff about me on the Internet. There is this guy saying in his blog that I am an idiot. I want you to remove that blog and block the Internet if they write shit about me."
Us: "We cannot do that."
Client: "Well, get someone else to do it then. I want every nasty stuff about me removed from the Internet today, and make sure nobody can write bad things about me. I want you to control the Internet."
Us: "We can't control it and neither can you."
Client: "Right, if you won't do it I'll find someone who will."
Us: "Good luck, let us know if you succeed."
Wow, I love stories like this. It really puts whatever struggles I might be having with a client into perspective.
The agency formerly known as Plaid has been acquired by Source Marketing (an MDC Partners company) and is now known as Humongo.
Naturally, those formerly known as Plaid are very excited about the development, maybe a bit too excited:
Living proof that small is the new big, and that Humongo is the new ginormous. We built the greatest agency in the land to be nimble, smart and filled with awesomeness. And then we backed it up with the strongest marketing agency on the planet and the coolest network of agencies in the creative industry. No matter how gigantic your challenge, Humongo is here to save the day.
Friend of AdPulp, Bill Green, works with Humongo, so I want to be kind. But when I read copy like that, I have to ask, is Humongo an agency or a Super Hero? Of course, there are plenty of people who think confident copy is good copy.
UPDATE: Let's hear from the Humongoids themselves...
"Turn your friends into cash!" Damn, let's get right to business, why don't we?
According to Clickz, Houston-based Men's Wearhouse is using social media marketing to boost its referral program and encourage tux rentals for the prom.
Last year "prom rep" participants had to visit a local store to enroll. This year, the entire program can be executed at a dedicated Web site, MWTuxonline.com. The site gives registrants a prom rep ID number to distribute to their friends via more than 200 social media channels, most notably Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, and SMS messaging. Successful referrals then lead to free tux rentals, cash and the chance to win a car.
"We saw some of the kids promoting themselves on Craig's List [last year], or as part of their blogs," Matt Schow, VP of online marketing and e-commerce at Men's Wearhouse said. "There was a lot of activity as we monitored the social space. It led us to believe that if we enabled it [more], it would really take off."
New York-based agency 360i created the materials and is coordinating outreach to teen-focused blogs.
Why is the band Devo doing a color study? That's sort of like asking why they play music with flower pots on their head. To promote their first album in 20 years. Duh.
Bob Garfield of Ad Age tries to explain:
Ahh, but of course. The agency here is Mother, whose Swedish principals pioneered Devo-ish ultra-postmodernism at Paradiset back in the mid-'90s, for Diesel and roboticothers. If ever a client and an agency were better suited, we'd be hard-pressed to recall it. The campaign is the perfect product of the perfect marriage ... unless ...
Unless it is all too clever by half.
Is it possible to satirize market research, corporate-speak, focus-group-speak and most of all consumer manipulation when you are actually trying to manipulate the consumer? Is the cult of Devo so hip that it will actually resent being played like the clueless research subjects, for schmucks?
But wait, there's more thumbs in the ribs of corporate culture where that came from:
The idea that a punk band would hire an ad agency that would in turn ridicule advertising is part of the weirdness of it all and its own statement about the times we live in. But when you've gone 20 years without releasing an album, it does seem like a decent way to build some buzz.
Voting for Incentive's 18th annual Platinum Partners awards program has opened. This year, Incentive has simplified the evaluation process by having it exclusively online.
OneSource has announced the launch of its LiveContent platform, an offering that combines traditional compiled data, editorial content, Web mining, and social media into a unified information service.
TeamSupport.com, a provider of SaaS-based customer service and help desk tools, has released a Live Chat enhancement to its flagship customer support application.
To dramatically increase your marketing results and ROI, I'd suggest a change of scenery. My recommendation: Move from an open market to a closed market, especially with your best customers. The climate is very different.
Touchpoint Technologies, a provider of relationship marketing software solutions, has signed an agreement with Chigaboom Media to market and sell its offerings to the SMB market.
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