Cincinnati Internet Marketing Blog

How Would the Mad Men Market today?

So AMC has this TV show Mad Men that depicts the professional and personal lives of people  at a Manhattan ad agency in the 1960s.   A lot of people and TV critics love it and I am sure lots of ad agency types are all over it. 

Anyway, I'm working on a project to help promote the book Brand Digital by Allen Adamson of Landor (Amazon link in my earlier post from a few weeks ago) and in addition to the microsite Landor has created to correspond with the book (www.branddigital.com) they have also created a series of videos that are a take-off of the Mad Men TV show called "Digital Mad Men".  These funny videos depict how the Mad Men would use today's digital and social media tools to promote a line of soup. 

Here's the first video, and a link to the first episode on YouTube.  While you are at YouTube you can rate and comment on the video and check out Episodes #2 and #3.  Look for episodes #4 and #5 coming soon.

I'd love your comments here as well: 

If you had a time machine and could bring the Mad Men to December, 2008, what do you think they would say about the state of branding and advertising today? 

What could we learn form the marketing of the 1960s that would make us better brand managers today?

What successes or failures have you had with digital branding or viral marketing?    

  

MarketingSherpa: Paid Search Tops List of Marketing Tactics for Viral Success

My friend Jane Vandehorst of Vanderhorst Consulting sent me a short article from Marketing Sherpa I found very interesting and want to share.  Marketing Sherpa features marketing case studies and data from recent surveys of professional marketers that are often very informative and have more details than you will find elsewhere, so I suggest you check out the site and consider subscribing to some of their free email newsletters.

This week's "Chart of the Week" showcases data from the Video Marketing Survey Marketing Sherpa conducted last month.  The chart indicates how the 1,083 respondents rated the effectiveness of various tactics in promoting viral videos.  The winner?  Paid search!

   
This doesn't surprise me at all, but I would bet many people who have not promoted a viral video before, if asked "How would you promote a viral video?" probably would answer 'blogs', 'social media sites' or 'traditional PR' but as you can see those don't rate as well in this survey as paid search and paid media.  The article makes the point: "The free methods are the most likely ones to be tried, but the least likely ones to succeed." 

This is good info to keep in mind the next time someone tells you they want to do a viral campaign but not do any advertising at all to support it. 

 

Happy Cyber Monday!

Happy Cyber Monday everyone! 

In case you haven't heard of the term, "Cyber Monday" refers to the Monday after Thanksgiving, which has earned the reputation of being the heaviest online shopping day of the year (the Internet equivalent of "Black Friday" in the brick-and mortar world).

It will be really interesting to see how today's performance and that of the entire holiday season stacks up with last year.  This AP story, "Online Retailers Offer Deals for Cyber Monday" quotes a comScore report from yesterday that online spending this past Thursday and Friday was up only 2% from last year.

Reuters, meanwhile, is quoting a Shop.org survey done over the weekend which concluded 84.6 million consumers intend to shop online today, up from 72 million last year.  That's a pretty healthy increase.

Something that drove me nuts last year was the slew of media reports I saw asserting that holiday sales were way down and it was a lousy Christmas season for retailing while practically ignoring or at least downplaying the huge and steady increases in online shopping.  I kept hearing: "...such and such retailer had a 12% drop in same store sales, blah blah blah..."  Then I'd yell at the TV: "Of course same store sales were down, people WERE BUYING ONLINE!!!"

I doubt we'll see the same huge percentage increases in online shopping we've seen in years past, but it's my hope and expectation online retailing will do just fine and start to get more attention from the mainstream media.  After the tragedies at the Wal-Mart on Long Island and the shooting at a Toys R Us in California, maybe more people will decide to sleep in on Black Friday next year and decide to shop from their home.