by Next Wave Team | Jun 1, 2005 | Advertising, Everything You Want to Know About Advertising, Guerrilla Campaigns, Marketing & the Web
Checking your site stats can tell you things. Lo and behold, our top-referring page for May 05 was from Adrants.com, and that came at the end of the month.
Adrants is an advertising industry site with constantly updated news and opinion. Named the number one advertising blog by Fast Company, and AdAge named it the number one “website you should bookmark” it’s an interesting site to keep you informed on the latest trends in advertising, including guerrilla campaigns by The Next Wave.
Found another article- from an Italian site called www.ninjamarketing.it- the Google translation is entertaining:
Agency makes publicity with techniques from road
“An agency of the Ohio has made publicity using technical of guerrilla marketing to a held seminary gives to the Lautenslager, Co-author of the book “Guerrilla Marketing in 30 days”. The participants to the seminary, clearly professionals interested to the not conventional techniques, have been received from numerous simply written provocative messages with of the gessetti color to you on the walls. In this way agency The Next Wave has intentional to above all demonstrate to the own creativity and the ability to create campaigns of impact to low budget.”
see the whole thing in Googlish- here: ninjamarketing
If you want to know what it really says- my father provided a proper translation from the Italian (he’s fluent in 5 languages)
“Agency uses street marketing to plug itself
An Ohio agency advertised itself by using guerrilla marketing at a seminar held by Al Lautenslager, co-author of “Guerrilla Marketing in 30 days.” Participants at the seminar, clearly professionals interested in unconventional techniques, ran into numerous provocative message simply scribbled on the walls (sic) with chalk. In this way, The Next Wave agency wanted to demonstrate its own creativity and, above all, how to run a campaign at a low budget.”
Note- Google is great for finding things, not so good as a translator.
See, this guerrilla stuff really works. Our ideas have always been too big for Dayton, now we’re proving it.
Yeah, we know what you think on this one…
by Next Wave Team | May 30, 2005 | Advertising, BMW Advertising, Crispin Porter + Bogusky, Everything You Want to Know About Advertising
Yes, you heard it here first. After the amazing success of relaunching a car based on a car that only the British could love, what do you do for an encore? Well, the obvious was the convertible, and then maybe a 4 door version- a mini-wagon, but, the real brilliant next move is for BMW to launch their scooter- which “sips, not guzzles” (to steal the ad line from the campaign by the ad godz at Crispin Porter Bogusky) with the best of them.
In the world of $7 a gallon gas (the rest of the world for those of you who don’t travel much) scooters rule the streets. Just starting to catch on here on the coasts, scooters are a very efficient, fun way to get one person almost anywhere, as long as it’s not raining, snowing, or idiots in cars on cell phones aren’t trying to run you over.
Enter the BMW solution- the BMW C-1, not available in the USA, yet, and you have a scooter with a roll cage, roof… just what the doctor ordered- safe, dry, visible, and another fun vehicle to bring customers into the Mini showroom.
When I was in Europe, I lusted after one of these. Even if Mini didn’t want to bring in the C-1, a Mini branded scooter of the more conventional sort, would fit the brand mystique quite well.
The next Mini?
What do you think?
by Next Wave Team | May 29, 2005 | Everything You Want to Know About Advertising
Five Rivers MetroParks recently selected The Next Wave to develop the brand for a new program set to launch in 2006. The new program will be part of a major push to connect outdoor recreational opportunities to regional economic development efforts. Communities that provide a complete package of cultural and recreational activities are more likely to attract high-growth potential companies in cutting edge industries like high-tech and bioscience. The Next Wave’s understanding of new media and strong brand building capabilities attracted Five Rivers MetroParks officials in their search for a marketing partner. The identity should be released to the public in mid-summer, with the preliminary programming introductions this fall.
by Next Wave Team | May 27, 2005 | Design, Everything You Want to Know About Advertising
They say the cobbler’s kids always need new shoes, well; we needed to update our site. Although people were always impressed with it, we did it 3 years ago, before CSS was fully implemented, and (x)HTML wasn’t quite 1.0 yet.
So we recently, quietly, went under the hood and rebuilt it, faster, stronger, better than it was before (and it didn’t cost 6 million dollars for those of you that got the reference).
Many of you won’t see any difference other than a few pages that no longer require you to continue to another page to finish the story. The site now features (x)HTML 1.0 Strict programming and is compliant according to theW3 Consortium. The site is now; handicapped accessible, works better with all current and future browsers, better optimized for search engines like Google, and of course, work and look just as cool as it did before.
Why should you care? Well, if you are a client who has an outside vendor building your site, lack of compliance can actually hurt your sites effectiveness, and your bottom line. You’re not getting the site you think you paid for. We often hear clients ask for fancy Flash sites thinking they look hip, but when we explain that search engines can’t index the vector images embedded in a Flash site, they trust us to build them something to standards.
As a designer, building a compliant site is just good craft. You wouldn’t ship a print file to a printer with low-rez RGB jpg’s anymore than you should build a site that isn’t compliant.
Our site gets hits from all over the world, and brings us inquiries about employment from as far away as Hong Kong, Finland and Austria. We’re actually embarrassed that it’s taken us this long to tighten it up, but the cobbler’s tale holds true- our customers always came first.
If you are interested in having your site evaluated for compliance, and effectiveness, please give us a call. We’ll rebuild your site to be faster, stronger, better than before too.
by Next Wave Team | May 26, 2005 | Everything You Want to Know About Advertising, Future of TV, Marketing & the Web
All right, quick- this is a test. You want to buy TV spots in Columbus OH on the broadcast stations. So you do a google search on TV Stations, Columbus OH and then start chasing down results- this should be easy, right?
NOT.
You know you want to find ABC, NBC, CBS, FOX, WB and then you want to find an e-mail for the Local Sales Manager. I could find 2 of 5. Even finding the phone number for the WB/UPN affiliate was a pain, because THEY TOOK THEIR WHOLE SITE OFFLINE and put up a holding page- with NO CONTACT information. How lame is that?
Seriously, they want people to buy advertising from them, an electronic media, and that is the best they can do?
You have to wonder where local stations find their General Managers, because none that I’ve met seem to understand the power of integration between the web and TV, just look at their sites. Most stations, especially the big news sites, seem to be buying prepackaged templates in the same way they buy their graphics packages. If you’ve seen one site, you’ve seen them all- branding, format, content, it’s all the same.
Didn’t anyone explain the power of differentiation to these people? Do they understand their unique ability to build community (something radio used to excel at, before they became a conglomerate)?
So, after tracking down the phone number of the affiliate (not easy, because almost all the links I found were back to the worthless site) I asked for the Local Sales manager- and of course got voice mail, for her, for her assistant, so back to the receptionist, who could give me the e-mail address I needed.
If you are making it this hard for people to find the person to buy from you, you’re in trouble- especially if you are supposed to be an expert in helping your customers drive sales in their businesses.
But, don’t worry the TV stations weren’t as bad as the guy from COTA, the bus company in Columbus, who is supposed to sell ads on the side of buses. I found the site easily, but all the pages for advertising were “being updated and not available at this time” and when I called and asked to be connected, his number was disconnected!
That, my friends, is the ultimate disconnection between a media outlet and the buyer.
So, go look at your own site and examine how easy is it to find a way to initiate a business relationship. It should never be more than one click away. And always have a phone number visible.
What do you think?
here is a link to a guy who has a lot to say about the future of broadcasting- Donatacom.com
here is a link to a blog that talks about TV stations outsourcing their sites and it references a really good article on it.
Outsourcing News Sites May Prove Short-Sighted for Local TV Stations
Just remember- it’s not all about news, it’s also about building community, for those stations that don’t have news operations.
Also found this funny link to look alike logos for TV stations- see what 7 looks like across the country- esp. funny, when your call letters, your dial position- mean NOTHING! Who does these brands? Is there any hope?
by Next Wave Team | May 19, 2005 | Advertising, Everything You Want to Know About Advertising, Guerrilla Campaigns
It was supposed to be a seminar, hosted by the Dayton Ad Club and Books and Company, to teach local agencies and marketers about “Guerrilla Marketing.” The speaker, Al Lautenslager, co-author of “Guerrilla Marketing in 30 Days” arrived at the Think TV studio to be greeted with chalk on the sidewalk “You can read a book about “Guerrilla Marketers” or you can hire one- www.thenextwave.biz.”
Then comes the next one, and the next one, with lines like “Big ideas, so little sidewalk” and “it’s only chalk- not like we spent thousands to get your attention. You probably can’t imagine what we’d do with real money” all followed by the agency URL.
Seminar participants saw the same thing. The local ad agency, The Next Wave, reached the people most interested in guerrilla marketing by demonstrating their creativity, without spending big money- or as they put it in one of the sidewalk headlines “It costs big money to put your name here or here (with arrows pointing to the names of Think TV donors engraved in marble along the sidewalk) but chalk is cheap.”
It’s that last tag that didn’t sit well with Think TV, or at least that’s what they said as they started hosing the sidewalk off, 3 hours before the seminar. Not to be daunted, the agency came back and re-chalked the walk in time for the event, and then arrived at the event as the agency logo- a man in a “blues brothers” costume, carrying a briefcase and a surfboard. Vinyl adhesive logos were added to the chalked walk as insurance against a second hose wash.
As a marketing stunt, the quick campaign achieved 2 of its three goals: while the seminar was in progress, a call came in about a piece of new business. It also cemented an internal goal of positioning the agency as the cutting edge creative firm to students from the School of Advertising Art who came to the second seminar session guaranteeing the agency that calls itself The Next Wave getting the pick of the best future talent. The last goal of reaching potential clients who attended the seminar has yet to happen. Maybe after they read the book, they will be more inclined to contact the agency about a guerrilla campaign of their own.
you can click on the pictures for a larger view.
You can read a book about "Guerrilla Marketers" or you can hire one.
Want to know the secrets of great advertising?
Big Ideas- little chalk
So many ideas, so little sidewalk
You can trust this man to come up with the next big ideas marketing.
People don’t read ads, they read what interests them- sometimes it’s an ad- and if it’s by us- they probably will remember it!
ThinkTV needs a sense of humor.
What do you think?
