On Broadcast Advertising

I won't pretend to be an expert in Broadcast Advertising. I've never worked with the medium, and to be honest, TV is really starting to bore me. Therefore, I don't get into commercials in the same way I used to get into them. But as someone who works primarily on automotive accounts, I do tend to pay some attention to the auto industry ads. I'm also a big, big fan of vintage auto ads, like this little gem below.



What I love about vintage ads is that they always seem to pack in music in a very fun way. I look at the commercials they're producing today and they just don't have the same kitsch value. Auto advertising is really an art, because it doesn't do anything anymore. If you look at the research that's out there, a lot of consumers don't even pay attention to broadcast car commercials anymore. What primarily influences their choices are Internet sites and word of mouth from friends. Sure styling plays into it, and there is a lot of weight based on name recognition etc. But to be perfectly honest, I'm VERY glad I don't have to market cars using broadcast.

Check out Jalopnik's votes for the Top 10 Best Car Commercials of the 1960s. They're great.

On Online Persona Managment

What happens when you Google yourself? If you click that link, you'll see what came up when I did it. Thankfully, my personal Web page hits the top of the organic listings. I chalk it up to proper meta tags, title tags and clean code. I've also gone out of my way to try to properly manage my online persona.

Admittedly, as a young twenty-something in the Internet age, not everything that you'll find my name attached to is necessarily something I'd want everyone, let alone potential clients, vendors or employers to see. Now that I'm a late twenty-something, with a considerable amount of material that I either wrote in my newspaper days or that I was responsible for coding in my Web editing days, I have a nice body of work with my name attached to it.

So, when prospective employers Google my name, mostly the good stuff shows up. Sure, my foodie profiles pop close to the top, but I don't necessarily see them as detrimental to my reputation.

Lifehacker, recently posted a feature on managing your online reputation. While I think it misses out on a few social network identities that are an absolute must to grab, I think the post is informative and has a lot of good suggestions.

As a side note, I was an early adopter of Twitter, abandoned it, and have since come back. After I left, someone who I won't name, assumed my identity and did some pretty good damage. A lesson learned. I've since grabbed it back, if only to manage it. I'm still not sold on Twitter yet.

On staying relevant in a "Free" economy

This week's Advertising Age features an interesting interview with Chris Anderson, who is probably best known for his work with Wired, but is also known for his book The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More.

I was particularly drawn to some of Anderson's classifications of different kinds of free. Here's an excerpt from the interview:

When you think about it, there really are three kinds of free. There's the free we've known forever, which is the King Gillette razor-and-blade model, which is a form of cross-subsidy. A spin-off of that model is the media model, where the product is free because it's subsidized by the advertiser. That's called a three-party market -- the publisher, the advertiser and the consumer who gets everything for free.

The second kind of free is this weird kind of the free that's never existed before, simply because cost goes to nothing. Moore's Law said processing would get cheaper every year, but there are corollaries for bandwidth and storage. As the price gets closer and closer to zero, you can eventually just treat it as free.

Hotmail started with a tiny amount of storage for free and then you had to pay for the rest. By 2000 to 2002, you were getting more. Then Gmail said, "We're going to give away one gigabyte for free," and revolutionized the market. Yahoo said, "We'll give them infinite storage. We'll use that to reinforce people's connection with Yahoo and make the money somewhere else, maybe banner ads on Yahoo News, maybe just the information you get from people's user behavior that allows you to charge more for ads."

The third model of free is the gift economy. This is what used to be called freaky, Berkeley, hippy-commune stuff and now is the basis for Wikipedia, the blogosphere, Craigslist. There is a real economy out there that is motivated by nonmonentary consideration such as reputation, attention, expression -- all the social incentives that are turning out to be incredibly effective in getting people to do things for free. Before we didn't have a platform on which they could work.

Interestingly enough, Wired is also free to the first 10,000 on an e-mail list and is dedicated to how the future is "free" as well.

The Long Tail is something that's consistently brought up in presentations to our digital clients at work. One of our EVPs of Planning recently blogged about how he believes Barak Obama to be the first successful "Long Tail Candidate," by hitting on a massive niche area of campaign donors. This targeting has allowed Obama to continue to flourish while other candidates war chests have become a bit tapped out.

All interesting discussions really, and it presents a big challenge for marketers and traditional ad people alike. How can we really gain traction when more and more people want things for free? In my opinion, a lot of it comes back to content. People are willing to pay for something if they believe it to be a quality product. Just look at Radiohead and the success it had with allowing its fans to purchase "In Rainbows" digitally for any price they chose. It was an interesting exercise, and while it wasn't the first band to try it, Radiohead was by far the most successful.

Radiohead's success doesn't necessarily come from the fact they make good records (I believe a lot of their stuff between "OK Computer" and "In Rainbows" was absolute crap). The band is successful as well because they have people waiving their flag and attesting to their quality despite critical bashing from time to time.

I'll blog more on "The Long Tail" and freeconomy later. I'm just getting going on my initial research into this realm. What do you think of the Free Economy? I'm curious.

As a side note: thanks to all of you for the well wishes and great feedback on the redesign. You're great friends and colleagues.

xo - Eizans