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Sunday Musings w/ Shore Branding – 3-31-13

March 31, 2013 By 6 Comments

Sunday Musings 3

Here are this week’s ‘Sunday Musings w/ Shore Branding’ – the top five stories in branding and digital marketing from the past seven days.  As always, you can find the archives of this weekly write-up under the Blog-Sunday Musings tab at the top of the page.

#1 – “Twitter Forecast Up After Strong Mobile Showing” – eMarketer.com 

Premise: eMarketer adjusts their estimates on the amount of ad revenue Twitter will generate in 2013 and 2014.  They now believe Twitter will raise almost $600 million in 2013 and just short of $1 billion in 2014.  They suggest that more than half of their ad revenue will come from mobile advertising, which is incredible given that amount was $0 in 2011.  The vast majority of Twitter’s ad revenue comes from the US.  However, this percentage is decreasing over time; 90% in 2012, ~83% in 2013 and projects lower in the future.

Thoughts: If you haven’t noticed by now, I believe Twitter is the most powerful mechanism on the web.  Micro-blogging is incredibly powerful.  While Facebook seems to be struggling to get their mobile strategy deployed, you consistently see stories like this from eMarketer on Twitter and its projected growth areas in the future.

#2 – “Brand Positioning: The Art & Science” – Brad VanAuken via BrandingStrategyInsider.com 

Premise: What is the importance of brand positioning and how do you do it?  This write-up is a great starting point for you if you are looking to (re-)position your brand or company.  The author takes you through a number of steps/recommendations on how to appropriately position your brand, starting with conducting research, delivering and defining several key components, and finally, explaining what a good brand position would be / stand for.

Thoughts: After reading this article, I started to click around on the site and found a lot of great, branding-related material.  In fact, I’ve already gone ahead and added the site to the Recommended Reading column on the home page.  This is a great summary on/for brand positioning.  If you can’t answer these questions or aren’t sure how you would respond to defining the key components they have laid out here, take a timeout and make sure you do that first before taking any more steps forward with your brand or company.  

#3 – “Klout Users Can Now Add Bing To Their Account And Include Instagram In Their Score” – TechCrunch.com

Premise: Earlier this week, Klout announced that it will further integrate users’ Instagram and Bing accounts in their influence scoring.  This is the first time that Klout is being integrated with a search engine.  While Instagram users were able to add their account to their Klout score already, their activities and usage will now be part of the equation.

Thoughts: If you aren’t aware of what Klout is or does, it is simply a web site that measures one’s overall influence via the reaction, feedback, and/or interaction one has across a number of social media platforms.  Users can sync their accounts through Klout and they will calculate their influence score on a scale of 0-100, with the higher the score being stronger/better.

It is a little surprising to see Instagram just now taking this step with Klout, as I would have assumed that process would have been transitioned quickly after Facebook purchased the photo sharing site.

#4 – “Twitter’s Vine Bears Fruitful Branding Opportunities” – BrandingMagazine.com 

Premise: As Vine continues its growth, it is providing marketers with new options in how to better brand themselves or their companies, build stronger engagement with consumers, and drive loyalty.  There is also a link here for the site “Brands on Vine” which is capturing some of the best work being done by companies right now through Vine.

Thoughts: I continue to be fascinated by the way companies and everyday people are leveraging Vine, while continuing to implore Twitter to release a version in Google Play!  The article takes a branding angle on how companies are beginning to leverage the site.  Definitely take a look at BrandsOnVine.com when you get a chance – a lot of good video on there from a wide array of companies.

#5 – “LinkedIn Is Getting Smarter With Enhanced Search Features & Improved Query Results” – SearchEngineLand.com

Premise: LinkedIn started off the week with an announcement that it was making a number of enhancements to its site, including their search features.  The “unified search” will list out people, companies, etc. all in one page after a user’s search.  The algorithm has been upgraded, but so has the look and feel of the page.

Thoughts: It is pretty safe to say that LinkedIn is the gold star in tech IPO’s since going public in May of 2011.  They continue to rollout improvements for users, but they are also improving their own positioning for building future revenue through the data and information they are collecting.

What caught your eye in branding and digital marketing news this week?

For those celebrating today, Happy Easter!

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Super Bowl Ad Review

February 6, 2013 By Leave a Comment

 

You may have already heard that the Super Bowl was this past weekend, which brings on the annual tradition of dissecting the advertisements and putting together our own rankings from “tremendous” down to “hideous”. Well, I’m no better. Here are a handful that I thought were well done for our first Super Bowl Ad Review. This list will not include this year’s one colossal failure – which, likely to no one’s surprise, is GoDaddy’s mess. Here are my personal favorites:

#5 – Doritos, “Goat for Sale”

This Doritos ad had strong branding right from the very beginning all the way through to the end. The bags are highly visible throughout much of the ad. At the same time, I thought it was pretty comical. I giggled when the goat screeches at the empty kitchen the next day and again when he closes the door behind him at the very end. Well played!

#4 – Oreo, “Whisper Fight”

Again, the ad quickly tells you who the ad is for if you are paying any attention to the words. The “Creme” vs. “Cookie” has the potential to go a long way. It immediately brings back memories of the Miller Lite “Tastes great, Less filling” ads that ran … well, almost forever. I thought there was a decent amount of humor in this one as well, but the end really stuck with me. The link/directive to go to Oreo’s Instagram page caught my attention right away; I don’t recall another brand pointing consumers to Instagram, so that was certainly unique to me.

(One other ‘win’ for Oreo was from their Twitter feed during the blackout at the Super Bowl. This is fantastic, on the spot / in the moment engagement with consumers – see the tweet below. Wired had a very nice write-up about this as well.)

#3 – Budweiser, “Coronation”

Budweiser is releasing a new variant into the family (Black Crown) and I thought the first ad that they aired, ‘Coronation’, had slightly stronger branding in it vs. the second ad, ‘Celebration’. To me, ‘Coronation’ built a stronger “prestigious” image to it in both the ad content and with the music selected for the background. Showing the people around the table and having the guy make a proclamation made me think that this was more of an up-scale product vs. the ‘Celebration’ ad which was a bunch of people dancing around like you see in two-thirds of the ads for beer.

#2 – M&M’s, “Love Ballad”

M&M’s has made it easy for themselves. The M&M characters are an obvious way to break through the clutter of advertising, build recognition and have people correctly associate the appropriate brand to the ad. Not bad at all, huh? The ad uses a very memorable song (good ole Meatloaf is back!) and while I wasn’t aware of this at the time, also stars actress Naya Rivera from the TV show Glee. Sorry, I don’t watch Glee. Excellent use of sponsorship and an actress that will resonate with a younger audience, plus the added bonus of Meatloaf’s “I will do anything for love (but I won’t do that)” song for the background that might appeal to a slightly older audience. (I may or may not have slid in the word “slightly” there after realizing I was falling into this category…)

#1 – Taco Bell, “Viva Young”

Admittedly, there is some bias here. Fun’s “We are young” has become one of my favorite songs released and is perfect for advertising to a younger audience (or those that want to believe they are still young). Taco Bell’s slight twist to sing the words in Spanish was brilliant. For those that want to complain that the translations don’t match up, I can only say … that was the point! My first thought was that this was a good way to appeal to the growing Hispanic market, but I could be wrong there as some people are apparently offended at the translated version. Again, that was the point, it was tongue-in-cheek.

Nevertheless, this was my favorite commercial from Super Bowl Sunday. I thought it was hysterical and included my favorite song from the past handful of years. Could it use a little more branding? Sure. Was it still the funniest commercial released? Absolutely. You have a man doing the robot, another man flashing his “upper body” to customers in a restaurant, and the silence when the cops drive past them. Phenomenal.

What did you think of this year’s ads? What were some of your favorites?

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