Smart marketing

Some excellent material on the marketing & advertising blogs recently: Adrants argues for a new marketing role, that of “director of customer/consumer conversation/dialog.” Rick E. Bruner of Business Blog Consulting offers tips for driving traffic to your blog, giving ideas that would apply not only to corporate/business blogs but to blogs in general.

But what does it have to do with the album?

The Wrapped Up in Books gameis surprisingly diverting, given its low-tech style. I like the idea of using a game to promote a music single, as Belle & Sebastian are doing. But couldn’t they have come up with a game that ties into the music better? Actually, I’m not a B&S fan, so maybe I’m …

What’s in a name

From brandchannel.com, a nice overview of issues in naming and branding, especially managing corporate brands alongside product brands. Most brand consultants agree that the common factor to successful nomenclature is clarity.

News flash: People would watch your TV spot if it were interesting

Recent surveys indicate that, despite advertisers fears of having their TV spots skipped over, users of digital video recorders (DVRs, like TiVo) pay attention to ads they are fast-forwarding past. More than twice as many survey respondents said they always notice commercials while fast-forwarding than those who say they never notice (15 percent compared to …

And now a word from our sponsor

As you will have noticed, I have added advertisements to My Brilliant Mistakes. It’s an experiment: I’m curious whether any revenue will result. But I find I’m now more interested to see what ads Google selects to display. As they describe the service: Google uses search-based technologies to match advertisements to the content and context …

You have less than two months to come up with something amazing

Aspiring advertisers and those with creativity to burn, take note: Maisonneuve Magazine has announced the Digital Curiosity competition, a chance to win fame (if not fortune). WHAT: The sweetest commercial competition around WHO: Americans and Canadians WHERE: Maisonneuve Magazine WHEN: Deadline for entry July 5, 2004 HOW: Visit the quick registration page and download your …

Trademarking for the other four senses

brandchannel.com looks at the history of trademarks and highlights the difficulties of “Trademarking Sounds, Sights, Smells and Touch”: The representation of nontraditional marks remains a problem to this day. According to Allan Poulter, a partner in the British law firm of Field Fisher Waterhouse, “There have been a number of decisions of the European Court …