Sex saves the environment

This is one of my favourite marketing stories of the year and it comes out of the Fast Company blog. Everybody knows that marketing with a green twist is a great way to show your business is socially responsible and get brownie points from consumers. You may have thought in the past "I don't know if my company can take advantage of this marketing fad to help us engage customers."

......and then this story came along

"You know Thomas, this economic downturn has really affected our brothel. Not nearly as many people these days are paying for sex! It's like they realized it was an unnecessary cost, so they are now going to the bars and trying to pick up girls with the rest of the male population."

"I know. But don't worry I have a way to get press, make our brothel appear environmentally concious, and get more guys in the door. We'll offer a $7 discount for anyone who bike or take the train to their chikka chikka bow wow."

"Next step..........carpool discount!"

What is Bing bringing to the table?

The search engine wars have heated up recently with Microsoft's Bing joining the game. Make no mistake, Microsoft is trying to take Google down and is putting some major money and resources behind it, ie. the creative team that basically stole the Google "concept" of using a distinct sounding, simple name for a search engine. Can you imagine if they named it Supercalifragilisticexpealidocious? Anyways, Microsoft seems to be pleased with the early results and are calling it a success so far.

As we all know, humans are creatures of habit and the habit for most humans the past number of years has been to log onto Google when needing to find anything online. How is Bing going to change people's habits? One way would be to make their search engine different, and I know that Microsoft probably has different bots that run behind the scenes and filter results, etc., etc. But 90% of people don't really know how a search engine works, or really care to find out. They want something that that provides value to them that they can see/use. Now in their latest advertisements (which are actually pretty good) Bing makes itself seem like it is different, calling itself a decision engine and adding an airplane, shopping cart, buildings, and medical symbol next to its logo........ohhhhkay. Don't really understand the significance of those but i'll let you run with it. Here's one of the commercials


What does a decision engine get me? Let's go to Bing to check it out. Okay i'll type in Hawaii Tickets as per their commercial. Bing! Make my decision for me decision engine.......oh. The results are pretty typical of Google's. Hmmm. Thats not really following through on your promise, or maybe you just haven't explained well enough what makes your search engine a "Decision" engine. Might want to think about that, or at least explain it somewhere on your page. Just a thought.

I wonder what "Decision Engine" even means, I think i'll Google it.

Twitter Update

Earlier this week I wrote about Twitter and whether it would become too much for a lot of people in the near future.

While scanning my google reader today I came across this FastCompany, The Week that Twitter Tipped, talking about how there has been a huge boom in the notoriety of Twitter in recent months and especially this current week.

The one thing in the article I really found interesting was one company's attempt to create an ad format that will allow Twitterers to put advertising in their tweets

Web advertising company Adjix has announced that it's creating a new ad format that will allow individual Twitter users to embed ads in their tweets and monetize their popularity on the service.

Overall, it seems like advertising through these social networks has not been hugely beneficial for most companies or the network itself. Things such as display ads on Facebook have not been announced to pull huge numbers or huge revenues, and MySpace does well in terms of ad revenue but the effectiveness of it has never blown anyones socks off.

The real question is, will advertising in people's messages end up hurting Twitter in the long run? Twitter obviously needs some revenue because as the article points out they have had $55 million in venture capital invested and don't have much revenue to speak of. But at what cost? Will tweets with advertising included end up angering a large portion of the users and therefore pushing them to a newer and greater Twitter clone that has just risen?

I personally think that companies will get more value from using Twitter like they would a Facebook application, give the consumers something to do with it. In the article it mentioned Skittles and what they are doing with Twitter, but instead of them paying someone to include a skittles logo in their tweet, create a Twitter feed that allows people to "Tell us what your doing as you eat your skittles" or something along those lines. I'm sure consumers will get a kick out of some of the crazy shenanigans going on as people taste the rainbow.

Hope floats

Reading through the various FastCompany postings and came across Barack Obama doing some more marketing work. Check out the new logo that will be floating around the U.S. and stamped on anything that is part of their stimulus package.

As strong as marketing is, apparently the new logo leant no help to the financial markets which dipped lower again today. Damn those financial people and their numbers! Come on! They've got a new logo, what more do you want?

Writer's Block...or just Lazy Brain

Why can I not think of a new blog posting? It's just the same old thoughts that keep coming up in my head. Writer's block? I have no imagination? No creativity????.........

Nope, my brain is just lazy according to an article from Fast Company Magazine.

"The brain is fundamentally a lazy piece of meat. It doesn't want to waste energy. That's why there is a striking lack of imagination in most people's visualization of a beach sunset. It's an iconic image, so your brain simply takes the path of least resistance and reactivates neurons that have been optimized to process this sort of scene."

So thats great. Now I have to work out to stay in shape and somehow find the time to work out my brain also! Sheesh it is never ending. But according to the article the more you experiment and enjoy new experiences the more workout your brain undergoes because it has to process all this crazy, out of place stuff. So that is why social networks, and reading blogs, and heck even travelling and experiencing new things is so important for marketers and other creative types. It allows you to exercise your brain. Now I think i've stumbled onto a way to expense a trip to Thailand.