by Next Wave Team | Jul 26, 2006 | Advertising, Change the world, Creativity, Everything You Want to Know About Advertising, Guerrilla Campaigns, Low Budget Advertising, Practical Marketing 101
FREEWAYBLOGGER.com - Free Speech: Use It or Lose It
It’s political speech- and it’s protected- and you may or may not agree with the content- but if you want a primer on how to get your message out without spending big bucks- the video on FreewayBlogger shows you how to use paint, cardboard and a few overpasses to get your message out. Wild posting is common in big cities- but, you have to be careful of local laws and regulations.
Check out the link above.
by Next Wave Team | Jul 26, 2006 | Advertising, Careers in Advertising, Change the world, Creativity, Everything You Want to Know About Advertising, Future of advertising, Future of TV, Guerrilla Campaigns, Low Budget Advertising, Marketing & the Web, Media, Viral Marketing, Web strategy
The Movie Business Challenge - Blog Maverick - www.blogmaverick.com _
Mark Cuban- the guy who owns the Dallas Mavericks and HD Net- uses his blog to make him money. Not that he’s lacking it- he’s got enough to buy half of Dayton- and then some.
While offering jobs seems to be the thing for billionaires to do (Donald Trump and the Apprentice, Richard Branson and “The rebel billionaire” and Mark Cuban with “The benefactor”- c’mon- try to be more original) Cuban poses a very real question: How to market movies for less and drive people to the theaters.
Answer the question- and get a job.
So far- 568 applicants (give or take)- including The Next Wave.
His question is very much related to the topic “thoughts on TV” on this site- and how to get eyeballs in a Video On Demand (VOD) universe. It’s also why Amazon sells more than just books- since over time Nicholas Negroponte’s “Bits not Atoms” axiom will take effect.
Negroponte (head of the MIT Media lab, author of “Being Digital” and former back page writer for Wired magazine) said that converting digital bits to atoms- like newspapers, DVD’s and the like- doesn’t make sense- whatever is digital- should remain digital. So, the only thing movie theaters can do is take a lesson from Bookstores which have transformed themselves into social gathering places to survive. You may be interested in Hollywood Blvd. Cinema, Bar and Eatery in Woodridge IL- which seems to have mastered this (although their website needs a web 2.0 makeover).
We doubt we’ll hear from Cuban- but if you are facing marketing challenges in a changing world- consider giving us a call.
What do you think?
by Next Wave Team | Jul 20, 2006 | Advertising, BMW Advertising, Change the world, Creativity, Crispin Porter + Bogusky, Everything You Want to Know About Advertising, Future of advertising, Great Ad Agencies, Guerrilla Campaigns, Low Budget Advertising, Marketing & the Web, Media, Practical Marketing 101, Retail, Search and Business, Viral Marketing, Web strategy
As many of you know, we run a seminar on using a blog (specifically WordPress) as a content management system for a business website. The news section of The Next Wave site (where you are now) was added in January of 2005 and now accounts for most of the traffic on our site.
Although we got an early start on having a website (our first site went up in 1994) and we soon figured (back while everyone was still on dial-up) that Flash wasn’t the way to build an entire site (later we looked really smart- since search engines and Flash don’t go together very well)- we were pretty slow to realize how important webstats are to providing customer feedback and marketing opportunities.
The reason: when our content didn’t change often, neither did our web stats. That all changed with the news/blog- and analyzing web stats has become one of the most important parts of our seminar. As you add content- people find your site using different search terms- and link to you for different reasons- these are all opportunities to do business or learn about your customers.
It’s how we decided to begin the seminars- and it’s also taught us a lot about how to build websites for our customers- so they can get more customers. Just like there are keywords- or trigger words in print advertising (Free- being the “best” one), search terms can tell you a lot about your customers hot buttons. For us, guerrilla ad campaigns, viral marketing, and non-traditional advertising have been hot topics- as have low-budget ads. In a highly competitive media environment, it’s become obvious that just spending more on traditional media isn’t a cost effective solution. The flip-side is, many of these potential clients aren’t willing to pay for the services to get the “more bang for your marketing buck” to the agency for coming up with the “big idea.”
One of the places we find the big idea for a client- or at least get a start on the idea, is by searching through their well crafted website stats- where the search terms can show what’s on customers minds. Think of a website stats package as a way to eavesdrop on your virtual sales floor- as if you had a way to listen to every single customer that had an interest in your products.
When we land a retail client, we like to do site studies- where we observe customer interactions with our clients staff, the environment, the product, the sales process- and then make suggestions on improvements. We also visit the competition and do the same analysis. We want to discover what drives your most profitable customers to shop with you – and how to find more like them. We can do the same with visiting your sites backend- analyze, review, and build new strategies to connect and close the sale.
To repeat what we’ve said before- it’s imperative for a business to post all marketing materials online, in a place with a unique url link, and in a format that can be shared. Let the customer print your ad, own your TV spot, be able to listen to your radio spot over and over if they so choose. Even better- let them link back to your page, comment on the ad, be able to find out everything they can about it- because it most probably is what brought them to your site in the first place (isn’t that the reason you ran the ad in the first place).
One of our most popular posts was where we scanned and posted a BMW motorcycle ad, and placed the copy in a Google friendly format (remember, search engines can’t read flash- or the text in the contents of a jpg file) – another was where we compared an Apple TV campaign to a Burger King TV spot- which brought us mad traffic for information on the BK spot. For all the creativity Crispin Porter Bogusky showed in the BK spot and the strategy, they made it hard for people to find out where “I am man, hear me roar” came from.
So instead of driving people to Burger Kings site, where they could have been rewarded with a special offer, or discovered additional information about the product- like the exact ingredients in a Texas Double Whopper- they were on our site.
One of the outcomes of the BMW ad- is that when people search for “BMW motorcycles in Dayton” they end up on our site- and are disappointed that we were mentioning that our market has lost it’s closest dealer- partially because BMW hasn’t been successful at driving traffic to the shops- in our opinion, because of lackluster advertising and a poor web strategy.
We are now getting a lot of traffic on our site for people searching out answers to marketing questions- so we’re starting a new category: Practical marketing 101. We will be writing about ways to build successful marketing plans- utilizing well built websites as a basis for formulating sales plans that generate high traffic- especially for smaller businesses- independent businesses and our favorite type of client- the underdog.
We hope this helps you understand what The Next Wave means when we say we aren’t just an “ad agency”- but a source for marketing and innovation.
What do you think?
by Next Wave Team | Jul 17, 2006 | Advertising, Brand Relevancy, Creativity, Crispin Porter + Bogusky, Everything You Want to Know About Advertising, Great Ad Agencies, Guerrilla Campaigns, Low Budget Advertising, Marketing & the Web, Search and Business, Web strategy
We just took a look on Google for Crispin Porter + Bogusky, we are now ranked 7, that’s from not in the first 120+ search results last week. Found this interesting article from the Miami Herald about the growth of CP+B that’s worth a read:
MiamiHerald.com | 02/13/2006 | Crispin Porter + Bogusky’s rise to the top
Our favorite quote from Chuck Porter: ‘When we were small, we learned to use imagination — not money” - well, not that they are big- they sometimes use a lot of money (not always bad) like for the Burger King Manthem spot that we compared to the Apple Campaign in “Is your agency ego in line with your budget”
Crispin Porter + Bogusky is now over 400 employees, and in two offices (Denver and Miami)- and while the quality of their work continues to be spectacular, the question that Guy Day and Jay Chiat once asked may become relevant one day: “How big can we get before we get bad?”
With the demand so high for CP+B’s magic, they have the opportunity to pick and choose their clients, and to dictate what their clients should do. Gateway didn’t like the advice to scale back their offerings to a simplified product matrix- and now Gateway isn’t a client. Compare the Apple store to the Dell store, and you will quickly see that Apple has a far easier site to navigate and sticks to a simple “Good, better, best” type matrix- Crispin was absolutely correct in their advice to Gateway, and it’s this type of advice that clients should be willing to pay more for, instead of bigger ad budgets.
Another quote from this article stands out:
”They’re really vested and interested in our commercial objectives,” says Chris Rossi, vice president of sales and marketing for Virgin Atlantic Airways North America. ‘You don’t just go in and say `give me a print concept.’ I have a conversation with Alex [Bogusky] about sales and market share. You don’t usually have a conversation with the creative director like that.”
Our first meeting with clients almost always includes the question: “what is your most profitable part of your business- and how can we jump start that” - it’s not about doing advertising for advertising’s sake, it’s about building a relationship on mutual growth and profitability. If your agency isn’t asking these kinds of questions, maybe you should be looking for a new advertising agency.
As the old quote goes “it’s not creative, unless it sells.”
And if you can’t get Crispin Porter + Bogusky to talk to you about growing your business, we know a small shop that would love to talk to you.
We can get you to the top of search, create relationships with your clients, and get people talking about your brand- using more imagination, not money.
by Next Wave Team | Jul 16, 2006 | Advertising, Crispin Porter + Bogusky, Everything You Want to Know About Advertising, Future of advertising, Great Ad Agencies, Guerrilla Campaigns, Low Budget Advertising, Marketing & the Web, Search and Business, Web strategy
Think Tank 3 thinks they are brilliant. They bought ads on Google (the ones that show up on the right of a search) for key phrases for searches for other hot shops. Here is their site:
think tank 3 | a modern day think-shop
Note- no RSS feeds, pop-up windows- all the things that Google and blind people really don’t like.
If you look at how Google sees them by typing in site:thinktank3.com you will find they only have 51 results- many with the same headline. The OneShow thinks this idea of buying keywords was an innovative use of media- we say, it’s embarrasing. We can get to the top of search for free. The following is from their site- I can’t link to the exact page- because it’s a pop-up):
THINK TANK 3
This online campaign for and by Think Tank 3 is the first ever idea based campaign to run on Google, using Google’s ad-words program. Search marketing accounts for gazillions of dollars in online advertising and it had never been used to host an idea based campaign. That’s why our series of ads, which appear on Google when you type in searches like “Crispin Porter”, “Alex Bogusky”, “DDB”, “Modernista”, or “Kaplan Thaler,” stand out so much. It’s also the reason they were worthy of a One Show Merit Award for exceptional innovation in media.
We’ve gone from not showing up in search for Crispin Porter Bogusky to number 11 because we understand that content brings real results. Google AdWords is an expensive way to get people to your site. And once people get to your site- wouldn’t it be great if they could comment on it- or point to an exact part of it- so they can send it on to their friends. Sort of like what this site accomplishes? What do you think?
by Next Wave Team | Jul 14, 2006 | Advertising, Careers in Advertising, Creativity, Crispin Porter + Bogusky, Everything You Want to Know About Advertising, Future of advertising, Future of TV, Great Ad Agencies, Guerrilla Campaigns, Low Budget Advertising, Marketing & the Web, Media, Viral Marketing, Web strategy
Animusic - Pipe Dream - Google Video
The idea of the 500 channel world should be long purged from anyone’s vocabulary at this point- there will be content to watch until the world goes into self-cleaning oven mode- or freezes over like a hockey rink- but, there may not be many humans in the actual show. Take a look at Animusic videos of music making machines- or go rent the movie “Final fantasy” or start looking into virtual worlds like “Second life” and you realize- we can do much cooler things in a virtual world. By taking scenes from video games to illustrate stories, Machinima, anyone with a creative bone in their body will be able to create stories with a look equivalent to a Hollywood movie.
The big question will remain- what to watch? This is where the power of crowds and agents of influence will come into play. The best advertising agencies will be the ones who can guide the masses into unwittingly being their agents of mass propaganda. Strike the right nerve- and the reaction is exponential compared to the force of the first strike.
The key to the future will be how will these provocateurs be paid- in the free wheeling virtual world? Agencies have relied on the idiotic media commission system for too long. Will it come down to some kind of pay-per-click (or the 2.0 version- commission on sale)- or some other formula?
Crispin Porter + Bogusky in Miami has started to take equity positions in companies they work with- which should make people in corporate marketing positions start wondering how long they will be able to hang on to their cushy “C” level jobs where they just play General to the mercenary agencies that are hired to do the job or be the scapegoats.
Big changes are coming- all thanks to the shift in power from the ones with the most money- to those with the best ideas- and tools that put the power in everyone’s hands.
What do you think?
