Tuesday, September 30, 2008

Brand Embrace: Revisited

In June, I wrote about a trip I had to a local car dealer and the awful experience that I had while I was there trying to work a deal on a shiny new Nissan Maxima. In the post, a cited how businesses should, when possible, embrace a customers' preconceived notion of their industry and leverage it. As an example, I described a car dealer in Philadelphia, PA that did just that; exploited the loud, boisterous, in-your-face advertising that many of us have come to know and love.

In an article yesterday on adage.com, they describe how car dealers are more frequently using viral video as a cost effective tool to reach their customers. In the video below, appropriately titled "The Seven Ways Dealers Screw You," they do just that. They embrace their brand and leverage the image of 'car dealer' to create a very funny, and rather entertaining poke at themselves.

The Seven Ways Dealers Screw You


Clay Corp
Norwood, Massachusetts


Tuesday, September 23, 2008

Blistering Pace of Media II

Earlier this year, I blogged about how the speed in which news and other events are reported (Blistering Pace of Media, May 2008) has gone from reading about it in the newspaper daily, to watching up to the minute cable news, to finding out in a matter of seconds with the onslaught of microblogging services like Twitter paired with cell phones and a hungry digital community.


Now check out a new site that launched in August, called allvoices (www.allvoices.com/), which aggregates news from you and I into one complete site.


From allvoices:

"allvoices is a global community that shares news, videos, images and opinions tied to news events and people. It is the first true people’s media.

It's a place where individuals from all over the world can share what is happening where they are (location) at a particular point in time. allvoices then brings together multiple voices or points of view via news stories, videos, images and blogs from the Internet, to provide context and build momentum. The platform provides the community with the ability to search and navigate a news event by location and category, to share and to have a discussion around it, to emotionally connect with each other’s perspectives and complete the human story.
allvoices is an open and highly relevant social media site "unedited by humans", where anyone can report and add their voice from anywhere."

NOW what do you think of the "Blistering Pace of Media?" Leave us a comment.

Saturday, September 20, 2008

Brilliantly Disruptive

Wildly panned in the media, the round 1 Crispin Porter + Bogusky Microsoft Seinfeld / Gates ads were getting trashed by most as being confusing, complicated, stupid, or as PC Mag's John C. Dvorak wonders, kinky sex.

Seinfeld / Gates # 1



Seinfeld / Gates # 2



These ads proved to be a tipping point of a masterfully-planned word of mouth campaign that really started with the noise they created when they announced they signed Jerry Seinfeld as their spokesperson for $10 million. These disruptive ads were brilliantly designed to take over the conversation and "plow the road" for ads more on brand, and that land more of the vision and view of what Vista, and more broadly, what Microsoft, is attempting to get us to believe about it's image and what it's products can do for our lives. While it's yet to be seen how effective the campaign is at the register, they clearly have a solid plan on how they are going to shape the conversation.

"I'm a PC" Ad




What do you think? Leave a comment.