I gave Ad Age a hard time this morning on Twitter for outsourcing so much of their content to industry pros, instead of relying on journalists (inside and outside their organization) to report news. Clearly some industry pros are better than others and their opinions carry more weight. Pete Blackshaw from Nielsen, for instance, is one person in the Ad Age stable that I consistently want to hear from. Here's a quick …
Men’s Wearhouse Turns Social Kids Into Sales Reps
"Turn your friends into cash!" Damn, let's get right to business, why don't we? According to Clickz, Houston-based Men's Wearhouse is using social media marketing to boost its referral program and encourage tux rentals for the prom. Last year "prom rep" participants had to visit a local store to enroll. This year, the entire program can be executed at a dedicated Web site, MWTuxonline.com. The site gives registrants …
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Time For A Raise
Talking about how much money you make has been taboo for as long as I can remember. But we live in a different time today. A time of radical transparency. I don't know if that's what led social media consultants Mack Collier and Chris Brogan to post their rates, but what drove them to do so isn't as interesting to me as the rates themselves. Brogran's day rate is $22,000. Can you get $22,000 a day? I don't know. I …
When You Feed The Machine, It May Try To Return The Favor
According to Financial Times, Sir Martin Sorrell, chief executive of WPP, warned on Tuesday that social media sites are "less commercial phenomena, they are more personal phenomena", more similar to "writing letters to our mothers" than watching television. "Invading these [social] media with commercial messages might not be the right thing," Sir Martin told delegates at the Financial Times Digital Media and …
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Social Media ROI Is Meat For Ad World Sharks
Shel Israel, author of Twitterville and social media advisor to brands is proposing to write a new book. One of the things he hopes to tackle in the new book is the question of social media ROI, which is a bruised and bloody topic today. I am not absolutely certain that I will show a direct correlation between social media and the bottom line. But I have a decent amount of evidence that shows big companies like IBM, …
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Get Real
Yesterday, I read an article in the Wall Street Journal about the tanking market for Swiss watches, and how the manufacturer of one luxury brand is sending their ace consultant around to instruct retailers in the art of selling "pure fantasy," which is something we know a lot about in advertising. Yet, many of us are tired of this particular game. Some have even left the field of play for good. Robbin Phillips of …
We’re Low On Trust. Period.
Edelman put out a new study about trust and it has residents of Adlandia hopping. Big Orange Slide says, "Just as many marketers are getting comfortable with shifting dollars to social media, Edelman's latest 'Trust Barometer' presents something of a wrinkle in the plan: the number of people who view their friends and peers as credible sources of information about a company dropped by almost half since 2008, from 45% …
To Me, “Does Social Sell?” Is The Same Question As “Does Advertising Sell?”
It may be a national holiday, but that's not stopping Adweek's Brian Morrissey from asking the hard questions in his piece published today, Does Social Sell? While digital channels and online interactions offer a plethora of data points, they don't come with a set playbook for assigning value. Marketers have grown comfortable with formulas like gross ratings points and frequency, time-tested formulas for building …
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