Confessions of an eBiz Junkie

Creative Marketing at Work

I came across an interesting post from Chris Brogan that led me down an intriguing path of exploration. The end result, an impressive marketing campaign that's likely reaching tremendous eyeballs at relatively low cost.

I'm likely missing bits to this story still as Facebook connect is giving me a hard time making the final leap to the end game.

Anyways, check out this video from Chris sharing the contents of a mystery package he'd received :

<Spoiler Alert>

Thankfully, Chris is still with us despite the media reports but this sure peaked my interest. I did a blog search for Frenzied Waters and learned that several other prominent bloggers had received similar packages. Naturally, many of them have blogged about the unique package - wouldn't you?

These things aren't cheap, either. After all, this isn't your typical paper-weight like giveaway... But getting an interesting piece into the hands of folks with such an established audience is a powerful way to get your message across an enormous audience at far lower cost than traditional advertising.

The clues end up bringing you to Discovery.com and the return of Shark Week. As noted above, my 'discovery' ended when Facebook connect wouldn't cooperate from the interactive piece on Discovery.com... A glitch that I'm sure will be worked out in short order. An interesting aside - Long John Silver's bought the most prominent ad space on the Shark Week site promoting their new Fish Tacos... Still not sure how I feel about this but I'm definitely not hungry now.

I wanted to share as it reminded me of the power of creative advertising. Kudos to the folks who pulled this campaign together. It seems to be spreading rather successfully - as designed.

What Do Your Customers Think of You?

Ahhhh, nice to be back... Happy New Year to all - Hope you managed to get some time to unwind. I managed to completely unplug for a week and a half to clear my head and prepare for the exciting year ahead. To help make the most of the break, we opted for a road trip down to San Diego to check out the sights.

How's Lens road trip to SD relevant to your customers, you may ask? It's rather easy. Let me share some of the logistics of the trip.

Facebook ads and brand loyalty

There's been much written about Facebooks ad announcement. Erick Schonfeld did a nice job livebloging from the event. It will be interesting to watch how this plays out... The obvious risk is that users are driven away by in-your-face advertising with the inevitable 60pt blinking text, auto-play audio clips, etc.

More likely though, I see legions of brand loyal consumers propagating the message to their finely targeted prospects, err, I mean friends. I spent some time with Greg Selkoe, creator of Karmaloop.com some time back. These folks had built a small army of brand supporters - a team of people who would promote through email, IM, MySpace, etc;. In return, Karmaloop offered certain percs - be it featured designs, discounts, visibility through the eCom storefront, etc;. It was masterful... By far the most effective social advertising I'd seen to date.

I believe similar will play out on Facebook. Look at some of the partners who have already signed up - Coca-Cola, Verizon, Sony, Blockbuster, CBS... I see Coke (as example) offering percs to consumers who rally around their brand. Perhaps product discounts, special 'insider' widgets, cool 'members only' avatars, etc; - And all the user has to do to take advantage is acknowledge their support of the Coca-Cola brand. It's word of mouth / peer pressure advertising at it's best. Equally as interesting will be watching how far  companies are willing to e-recruit their legions of free advertisers.

The game changes, yet again.