Oasis NYC Street Performer Promotion

To promote their new album “Dig Out Your Soul”, Oasis taught New York City street musicians unreleased tracks off the album, seeding it across the city.

I like this idea for several reasons:

1) It creates a win-win between the performers who get attention and income and the band that gets people excited about their new music.

2) It taps into something that no “free-download” promotion can do: people love live music, and people love when other musicians interpret music giving it their own feel and spin. It adds an appealing dimension to the story.

3) It has transparency. If Oasis had chosen to hide the fact that they were behind it and the musicians lied and said they did this on their own love of the new album – fans and consumers would have felt duped and upset about it. Instead – there is a clear intention which keeps the story honest.

4) It has great viral capabilities. The video we posted documents the process, but if you go to youtube, there are lots of videos of full performances of individual songs start to finish. This increases the rate at which this spreads awareness and interest.

Bands and Brands – The Kruger Agency

For those who aspire to have such powerful brands that people can’t help but sing their praise in pop-music, there may be a short-cut. Since 2006, The Kluger Agency has been coordinating “brand-dropping” in music and other forms of pop entertainment.

“Led by Industry Specialists in Research, Branding, Entertainment Marketing, Label Relations, and PR, The Kluger Agency specializes in getting brand names and products in front of large targeted markets by means of relevant yet discreet placement in Chart Topping Songs, Music Videos, and Industry events.”

Would you use this service for your brand? Could it work for any brand?

Retail Marketing – Video Game Experiment

Click on this link to a informal yet insightful piece of retail marketing analytics.

The author posed as the uncle of a 15 year old and quizzed 100 video game retailers on their recommended gaming system for that age group and the pros and cons of each of the 3 major systems (xbox 360, PS3 and Nintendo Wii).

For me, the results are only half the story. The important take away for companies like these video-game console makers that sell through retail channels is the the influence and importance of the employees’ opinion and knowledge. Now this same insight may not carry forward for CPG’s where the purchaser is often the consumer (eg. moms) – but there are many products where this isn’t the case and thus there is a lot of responsibility on the employee to fill the knowledge gap. As a manufacturer – do you step in and train your distribution partner’s staff? As a retailer – do you volunteer to increase the quality of workers by more pay or other incentives? It is a tricky problem that more retailers are having to face as the demand for service goes up.

Historical Advertising Database

For anyone that wants to take a look at some historic ads from the US & Canada – Duke University has a free, online image database of over 7,000 print ads from 1911-1955. It is interesting to see how far we’ve come – and how some things never change.

Scarlet TV’s from LG – The value of talk?

There is a campaign that recently came from LG to hype up the release of their new line of TV sets. It revolves around the promotion of a new TV show called Scarlet. That is what has been promoted including tag lines that include “New Series” and “from the director of Smallville and Supernatural”.

According to Trend Hunter – there was even a launch party for the fake show complete with a red carpet, celebrities and catering by Wolfgang puck. Only there was it revealed that the show was fake and the tag line “Things aren’t always what they seam” is an hint to the fact that it was not a show but a line of new TV’s.

We think this is significant from a marketing perspective because it breaks with the traditional way that new technology is usually marketed. This type of communication is saying that technical features are not as important as entertainment. So why not personify the the actual TV as a new action star? It also was affective at getting people to talk online prior to knowing it was fake and then after.

This raises an interesting challenge for Word of Mouth marketers. How exactly to you evaluate and measure WOM? Conversation can be positive, negative, shallow or deep. If you have a shallow positive comment – is it worse than a deep negative comment that can tell you a lot about why your consumer might not be happy with what you are doing?

From some of the online discussions that I could find regarding this TV – people were talking about the campaign, but not if they thought the TV was worth purchasing. Is that considered success out the WOM component of a larger campaign that cost a significant amount and came with high levels of risk?

Contrary to Popular Belief

I was riding the bus to York earlier this week when we passed a billboard Ad for Canada’s National Newspaper: The Globe and Mail. Here is what it looked like:

There is a picture of a chicken in the middle, and three thought bubbles each indicating what it means to a different columnist.

I then overheard someone on the bus say how similar it was to a certain university’s marketing campaign. I did some digging in my magazine collection and found the following print ad for York university. Note: this was in a magazine published in December 2007.

It shows a gift bag of wine and what it can mean to….wait for it…3 different areas of study. What a fine bit of Deja vu?

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In class this week, we had a guest speaker from Taxi speak to us about the history of the Telus “Future is Friendly” campaign, which, if you are keeping count, has been around now for 10 years. Starting with Clearnet and then carrying on through the acquisition by Telus, “Future is Friendly” was revolutionary because it positioned a cell phone company in a completely different area that the major players in the Canadian market.

Its success cannot be denied. From being a late entrant in a market dominated by national players, Telus has exponentially grown marketshare, brand equity and continues to still be in the “most liked” campaigns according to Marketing Magazine [citation needed]. To the credit of both Taxi (Telus’s Lead Agency) and Telus, the company has been very disciplined in staying with a consistent message for a time period much longer that most other campaigns in the telco. industry.

Simple. Consistent. Different. Effective. To paraphrase a page from Marty Neumeirer’s book “Zag” – When everyone else is zigging, you should look to zag.

So why so often do competitors who have the resources to take their brand in any direction work so hard at imitating another brand’s success? Apparently in marketing, imitating is not flattering for anyone involved.

Hello all SMA members…and Beyond!

Welcome to the inaugural post of the new SMA marketing blog! While our current website has a lot of great resources for our members, the SMA exec realized that a vital way that we can add value is by letting our members create content and provide insight for the marketing community as a whole.

So here is your opportunity to show us what you got! Change is the one thing that has remained constant with any marketer in any industry – so why not use this medium to talk about the most current topics of discussion?

We’ll try to bring in topics of discussion on a regular weekly basis. If there is ever something that you want to write about, feel free to start a discussion string of your own. See the following page of best practices.

In time, we hope that this site itself turns into a substantial marketing resource. Please take the time to check out what this blog is about and the code of conduct that we want to uphold.