Categories
likeability low cost marketing surprise

Capturing attention

Googling for information on the (apparently fabulous) Bold Tendencies III exhibition in Peckham, I stumbled on the Londonist’s website.

All routine stuff, but note the polite, likeable way they sniffed that I’d arrived from search and tailored a friendly message inviting me to subscribe to or bookmark their site.

Nicely done with exactly the right balance of call-to-action v pushiness.

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Categories
advertising branding likeability

True Blood poster – truly bloody awful?

The task when launching media products is clear: get noticed, generate trial.

In True Blood, the FX channel have got an awesome property. Now in its second season on HBO, the vampire series is dark, sexy, supernatural and sophisticated.

Sadly, I fear this poster does not convey any of that; it’s aiming too low and simply lacks, umm, bite.

Do watch the programme though – it’s excellent.

Categories
advertising likeability surprise

Timely marketing

The 2012 motif will be much used in London over the next few years. This is a nice, noticeable flip on the idea

Categories
advertising likeability

Tetris ad – beautifully done

tetris2

via ads of the world

Categories
advertising

How to do a website takeover

Nice post by Jason Calacanis on how to get impact without interruption

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I heartily agree with his view:

The future of advertising is making and featuring compelling content with modest, and integrated, calls to action

Categories
pr strategy talkability

PR as fireworks

It’s easier than ever to get a PR announcement out there. And easier than ever to cock it up.

A year or two ago, I had a chunky piece of product news to announce, but no budget. No problem I thought, I’ve got all these modern comms assets to play with.

So announce it I did – big bang style – sending the news simultaneously to the website, news wires, the forum, facebook, the press office blog, Twitter etc.

I thought I’d been terribly modern and efficient, but the story got nowhere. It was summed up when the blogger relations guy called me, pretty out of sorts.

I just called up one of our key targets saying ‘I’ve got something for you’ and he told me ‘yeah, I know, I just saw it in my facebook  inbox’. It’s old news isn’t it?’

Big lesson. Just because you have multiple comms routes to market doesn’t mean you should use them all at once.

Sequence matters. Think of PR as a fireworks display. You don’t set them all off at once. The impact is much greater if you build up to a crescendo.

Start with this release order and adapt from there:

  1. Inform internal stakeholders
    Key staff and shareholders should know first – especially customer service people
  2. Leak to bloggers
    Bloggers won’t write positive stuff if they don’t get to break it, so leak news to them and give them exclusive details/pictures.
  3. Tell passionate customers first
    Anyone following your brand on Twitter, contributing to your forum, being a fan on facebook or subscribing to your email should be the first to officially know. These people care about your brand. Critically, you should give them material they can share – eg, embeddable videos, pictures they can link to or exclusive offers.
  4. Mass anounce to journalists, visitors and previous customers
    This is when it’s actually public. Such is the pace of the web that this phase can follow just hours later.
  5. Post-launch management
    Reputation/news management in the days following the announcement is an intrinsic part of the launch task. Use social tools to monitor the conversation and respond to as many positive/negative comments as you can. In the first 24 hours, the prevailing opinion on your announcement will coalesce and you want it to settle down in your favour.