Experience the Message

EXPERIENTIAL ALBUM LAUNCH

According to Adrants:

For its album Dig Out Your Soul, international super-band Oasis gathered 15 street bands and taught them the lyrics and sheet music for four of its new songs.

Last week, the bands were then deployed all over the city -- mostly to subways -- to perform the music with their own flavor. Each performance featured a little sign that said, "You are the first to hear this new Oasis song" -- bringing a little bit of magic to busy commuters, and some eclectic street charm to Oasis's new oeuvre.

Here's the video:

Find more videos like this on AdGabber

Great execution and idea. Kudos to BBH/New York.

EXPERIENTIAL MARKETING EN ESPANOL

Oh yeah, I forgot to mention that Experience the Message is available in Spanish. Here is the link to the book. If anyone is fluent in Spanish, could you let me know what it says. Thanks!

The Break Up

This is mildly brilliant....a great way to talk about the deteriorating relationship between advertiser and consumer (should we even use that word anymore?).

Here's the kicker...it was made by Microsoft!!!! Yes. Microsoft. Who would've thunk it.

WHERE'S GEORGE?

On the heels of the Bubble Project or Yellow Arrow, I've discovered Where's George.

The site, and social movement to mark up dollar bills, allows people to track currency (not like traders, but like anthropologists) and give a story to the money.

It's another example of a rising tide in place-based people-generated content. It is a new form of social proclivity to add information and/or interactivity to the physical world around us.

It is a movement for people to annotate our existence. By connecting the real world with information from the Internet, users can explore geographical spaces with the eye of an insider.

By using the web, SMS and mobile photo applications, people in effect appropriate the ambient spaces for their own, and opening them up for dialogue and exchange....without any damn permission. And that is freakin' awesome.

There is a lot of chatter about consumer-generated content right now. But ambient annotation is the next big thing.

IS THIS A HOAX?

From MIT Advertising Lab:

Is this another one of those multi-layered hoaxes? Another marketing Potemkin village? If it is, my hats off to whatever agency du jour has been one of the first to play with Google Earth and "rooftop advertising" in a very good way.

If it's not, God bless you Apple. The notion that Steve Jobs won eight acres of Australian outback in a poker game is too damn ridiculous, and therefore, plausibly true. Rumors about that this is the build-up to Apple's 30-year anniversary, and a subsequent iPod launch.

More to the story here.

BACK TO BUSINESS

Thank you all for your heartfelt and kind wishes on the new arrival. It's a beautiful thing.

Now check out this story, from MediaPost.

A survey called "Marketing 2006: 2006's Timid Start" from Blackfriars Communications, posits that "execs' dissatisfaction with existing marketing returns" has been cited as "a major cause for their reallocating budgets away from 'traditional' marketing techniques like advertising to 'non-traditional' approaches including 'word of mouth, buzz marketing, and viral marketing.'"

According to the same report, those "non-traditional" approaches are expected to see a further increase in their share of overall marketing budgets over previous years. "At the end of fourth quarter 2004, non-traditional spending was 8 percent of the overall budget," Howe recalled. "At the end of fourth quarter 2005 it was 14.5 percent--so it almost doubled in a year."

Blackfriars projects a 13 percent increase in overall marketing spending in 2006; this absolute increase might mitigate the large percentage fall in traditional ad budgets somewhat, but the shift from traditional to non-traditional approaches is still ominous for old-school advertisers.

Hello, out there? Are we starting to write on the wall?

MORE SELF-REGS FOR BUZZ

Adrants reports that buzz marketing paragon (or pariah, depending on your POV) BzzAgent "has strengthened its stance on transparency."

While the agency has always asked its bzzagents to disclose their involvement with BzzAgent, the agency now requires all new BzzAgent community registrants to verify that they have read and accepted the company's Code of Conduct which requires campaign participants to make certain others are aware they have volunteered to be involved in a word-of-mouth campaign.

So that existing bzzagents are also adhering to full disclosure, BzzAgent has added a check box to its reporting template, a section where members describe their interactions as they buzz products, which must be checked off to participate as a member of BzzAgent. BzzAgent is also saying it will require members who do not properly disclose their BzzAgent status to those they interact with to complete an online training course before participating in the company's future campaigns."

Well, that's just great. I commend the company on these important steps. Better than nothing, certainly. There's a code of conduct. A check box. An online tutorial. What else do you need to get the consumer's trust back? ;-)

Anyone who has managed and deployed street teams (event marketing campaigns, for instance) will tell you that with all the training in the world, people will do that which is easier to do. A couple of training sessions is not going to change habits, perceptions or the preferred ways of approaching consumers. For those agents who find that non-disclosure works best (they don't get a big fat "buzz off" from intruded consumers), is it realistic that they will now all of a sudden start disclosing their marketing intentions? Habits are hard to break, folks. And I'm not sure how a check box is going to break them.

They probably won't. That's why the FCC and Commercial Alert are investigating "large scale deception" on the part of buzz marketers like BzzAgent and others. A JWT analysts estimates that about 85% of the US's top 1,000 marketing companies are using some sort of buzz marketing.

So I get even more irate when I read articles like this one from Saturday's Indianapolis Star. In it, Andy Sernovitz, the CEO of the Word of Mouth Marketing Association (WOMMA), says that the FCC is making a common mistake, lumping reputable buzz marketing (where commercial ties are revealed) with undisclosed marketing which WOMMA calls "stealth" or "guerrilla" marketing.

C'mon Andy! You've been to this blog before. You know how I feel about good guerrilla marketing. How can you possibly lump deceptive marketing with guerrilla marketing? Stealth I can understand. But guerrilla? Explain that one to me. Explain how a team of uniformed street samplers are deceiving people the way a paid buzz agent pushes product on people at work, at the gym or on the subway. How does a PR stunt compare with agents coaxing their friends to buy certian brands at a barbecue or cocktail party? I don't get it. I apologize. Can someone at WOMMA clarify this for me?

Maybe I can learn at WOMMA's "Word of Mouth Basic Training" conference in January. Care to invite me to speak?

(In all fairness, please read Andy Sernovitz's presentation on WOM ethics from the 2005 WOMMA Summit:Download womma_summit_sernovitz_ethics.pdf)

Still Buzzing

Well, that Ad Age article about the illegality of buzz marketing has certainly caused a lot of chatter among new marketing professionals. The CEO of the Word of Mouth Marketing Association (WOMMA) -- Andy Sernovitz -- had commented astutely on this site last week, noting that a few bad apples shouldn't make apple juice any less tasty and refreshing (much like word-of-mouth marketing).

He continues his defense of buzz in an Ad Age letter-to-the-editor, with some good insights to get hysterical marketers to calm down a bit. Kudos to Andy for taking the bull by horns and getting out there with the WOMMA code of ethics and the ROI on Honesty. I recommend a visit to the WOMMA site to get the full story on how Andy and his cohorts are putting out the buzz on buzz.

BUZZ WILL GET YOU ARRESTED

If you mess with the buzz, you'll get a visit from the fuzz. Marketing blogs are buzzing about this Ad Age article, which throws a suspicious eye on buzz marketing while reporting that it may even prove to be illegal.

“If the motivation for [an endorser] is to profit from his or her endorsement, that connection probably needs to be disclosed,” said Douglas Wood, chairman of advertising and marketing law at Reed Smith. “But since disclosure undermines the value of buzz marketing, advertisers are in a Catch-22.”

An FTC official said while word-of-mouth isn’t something that the agency is looking at, disclosing commercial relationships is crucial to avoid violating the law. “The real question is whether consumers are being misled someway,” said Rich Cleland, an assistant director of advertising practices for the FTC."

Of course they are! This is deceptive marketing. C'mon folks! Why does the freakin' FCC have to be involved when discussing a marketing tactic like buzz marketing. A bad and disingenous tactic, one that paradoxically becomes less and less effective as it is being deployed more and more. What has the consumer to look forward to? Should she be thankful that the FCC may get involved in regulating her conversations? Should she cast doubt on all her informal conversations and brand choices?

And doesn't a marketing tactic that has the potential to be illegal naturally harm the industry as a whole? The proliferation of buzz marketing is certainly a result of the consumer tuning-out and disbelieving marketing messages. And now the consumer has something more to tune out and disbelieve.

So to all of us out there, let's remember one thing: BUZZ -- OR INAUTHENTIC WORD-OF-MOUTH -- IS NOT MARKETING. So stay off the buzz, kids. I know it's addictive. I know it feels good and is cheap to get. But, take my word for it, it will get you busted and you will go to jail.

GOLDEN PALACE STRIKES AGAIN

I hate to love the guys at GoldenPalace.com, a $10-million a day online gambling site, and not just because I stink at Texas Hold 'Em. I hate to love them more as an experiential marketer, which (ahem) I think I'm pretty good at. I hate them because they have cornered the market on stupid marketing gimmicks, and in doing so, have become some of the best guerrilla marketers in the world.

I’m not alone in my panegyric to GoldenPalace.com and their form of guerrilla marketing. The press in North America, and to an even larger extent in Europe, is increasingly giving coverage to guerrilla campaigns conducted by both large multinationals and nimble boutiques like them.

The company first garnered attention when the site slathered their URL on a B-list porn star and paid her to streak topless across the 11th hole in the final round of the US Open. The resulting PR was impressive, as sports hacks repeatedly wrote of golfer (and tourney winner) Jim Furyk’s surprise at finding himself in the lascivious embrace of mammary marketing.

This is the company that spent $28,000 on eBay for a grilled cheese sandwich the looks like the Virgin Mary, and in doing so, got millions of dollars worth of buzz. The casino doubled-up when a guy in a purple tutu and GoldenPalace.com painted on his chest jumped into the Olympic pool in Athens. They've paid people $10,000 to tattoo their URL on their heads.

Again, lots of buzz, lots of press calling their form of guerrilla marketing as "breakthrough" and "daring." Now, the company has taken Seth Godin's "purple cow" philosophy to its ultimate conclusion: they have painted cows purple. Real cows. A whole herd of them. In Florida. Then they painted the URL on them for good measure.

What really impresses me, and what gets me to hate to love GoldenPalace.com, is the fact that the guys behind the stunt convinced PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) to support the campaign. That's right. The organization that throws red paint on celebrities wearing fur or leather acquiesced to an off-shore casino to throw purple paint on the real thing -- namely, a cow! PETA's docility was ensured after GP agreed to write "Go Veg!" on some cows, in a grand gesture to PETA's stance on vegetarianism. Better to paint the cows than eat the cows, the thinking goes.

If you want to check out the cows, you can take exit 210 off I-75 going south from Tampa. The cows are located 2.3 miles east of I-75 on Fruitville Rd. in Sarasota, FL. They will be on display for several weeks.

But if you want to pursue guerrilla marketing tactics and strategies, I suggest you look elsewhere. This is not guerrilla marketing. This is terrorist marketing, folks. Terrorist marketing seeks air-time. It is parasitic and base. It is indiscriminate, impersonal and ineffective. If there’s a lack of audacity to terrorism, there’s usually plenty of shock-value.

After a few such assaults make the front pages -- and after enough pundits decry the moral decrepitude of our social fabric while an equal-strength of marketing execs dictate the need to be "edgy" -- terrorist campaigns will calcify the consumer into a mistrustful and even negative reactionary force to creative marketing.