Is it just me or is anyone else sick of the lemming-like flash mob behavior marketers display every time some "really cool" new thing comes along? It's like a shiny new object syndrome. We can't keep our hands off the new toys.
The industry's latest fascination is Facebook. That followed quick blips from Twitter (which actually a good thing) and Second Life (not so much a good thing...for marketers, at least). I joined Facebook almost a year ago or some time after it opened to non-students. Why? For the same reason I joined MySpace. It was there. People were using it and I figured I ought to check it out. For months, Facebook was a ghost town for me. After all, I'm not in college any more. Then, like the unleashing of a pent up orgasm, people spewed forth from every known corner of the ad industry friending me.
I graciously accepted the friend requests because, like a free drink at an ad conference, who am I to say no? And, besides, I know these people. Soon, when it became the rage, my profile page filled up with all sorts of applications, most of which I never use. Some of which I do. In fact, I created two of my own to publish video and photos from the AdGabber site.
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It's not easy to officially launch anything when you don't even have a logo. Now that we do, we are pleased to announce the official launch of AdGabber, a social network for individuals in advertising, marketing and media. AdGabber, which soft launched in May, has just over 1,600 members with about 40 new members joining each day. An offshoot of Adrants, we couldn't be happier with the growth and the activity we've seen to date on the network.
AdGabber offers all the usual social networking stuff like member profiles, forums, topical groups which member can create on their own, a video section that serves as the ad industry's YouTube, a photo section, a calendar section where industry events are listed, a music player, and chat feature, blogs for individual members and an RSS feed providing news from Adrants. In fact, the thing is so flexible, that anything at all can be added to the network such as daily or weekly survey, ad industry job listings and creative portfolios.
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- Aquent is hosting a webcast on September 27th entitled "Getting it all Together: Best Practices in Planning for Coordinated Print and Web Initiatives." which will examine how to make print and online work together better.
- The recently formed Association for Downloadable Media (ADM) will hold its first in-person meeting at the Podcasting & New Media Expo in Ontario, CA. The meeting will be held at 7:30 a.m. PDT on Friday, September 28, 2007 in Ballroom A.
- A new eMarketer report examines the value of social media and whether or not the hype meets with the reality.
- Website uptime monitoring company has gotten cute with its homepage turning it into a modified 404 page.
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If you like farms with pigs, cows, fish, farting farmers, aliens and atomic bombs that launch out of grain silos, you're gonna love this new site for Butternuts Beer & Ale from Woods Witt Dealy & Sons. just click around and have fun. Don't forget to click on the tractor in the back.
Along with the website, the campaign also includes print ads, table tents, packaging, posters and a MySpace page, all of which can be seen here. In one of the print ads, the cans are celebrated with the write-itself headline, Nice Cans. The ad is also carries a blue ribbon honoring the breweries position as best brewery in Garrattsville, New York. Not that there's any other brewers there which , of course, is the entire point of the ribbon.
Dubbed "farmhouse ale" (whatever that is) the beer's got great names like Porkslap, Heinnieweisse and Moo Thunder. If a microbrewer has to set itself apart from the pack, aligning the brand with farm nomenclature is certainly one way to do it.
- Yahoo grabs ad network BlueLithium for a $300 million.
- It outlasted every other dot com magazine but Business 2.0 has finally succumbed to the tightening economics of magazine publishing and will cease to publish on its own, becoming part of Fortune.
- Make sure your Facebook profile doesn't include any salaciously incriminating information. The site has just made profiles publicly searchable.
- JupiterResearch reports just 15 percent of viral campaigns achieved success in the last year. Good. Maybe we'll see a lot less crap from marketers now.
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Late last week, we received an invite from Hugh MacLeod to join a new social network called Quechup. While we love Hugh, we need another social network like we need another MediaPost email newsletter. Like many other invites we receive, we ignored it hoping Hugh wouldn't be too angry. He wasn't. Mostly because he had no idea he sent the invite in the first place.
While it's standard practice for a social network to ask you if you want to invite friends from your address book, it's far from acceptable to do it automatically, behind the scenes without the member having any knowledge the invites have been sent. That's what Quechup did. That was bad.
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- Simba reports worldwide yellow pages revenue increased 2.8 percent to $31,62 billion in 2006. While a slight decline is anticipated for 2007, 2008 is predicted to see another increase. Who knew people still used yellow pages?
- As if you hadn't heard, DDB Chicago President Dana Anderson has left the building citing the need to spend more time with her daughter before she heads to college next year.
- That forward thinking company, Nielsen has gone all social networking on out asses with its Hey! Nielsen.
- Sometime you want to appreciate a commercial simply for what it is. Other times, you want to analyze to death all aspects of it and all the work that went into creating it. If you're interested in the latter, Sony's got a behind the scenes video covering the making of its recent Blu-Ray commercial.
- David Pitlyuk has a nice summary of the history of online video advertising and where he thinks it's going.
- Glossed Over live blogs the reading of Vogue's 840 page September issue.
- Apple catches wrath from popular YouTubers misfortune with the company's bad customer service.
- Christina Ricci is the new face of Samsonite's Fashionaire accessory line.
- This is how they sell Volvos in Korea.
- Yup. MySpace is over. Now, it's all about creating Facebook applications as Hyper Happen and W3Haus just did to promote the movie Knocked Up in the UK.
- Darren Stevens is dead. Oh wait, he was never alive. Oh wait, it's a new blog to promote a new marketing book. Oh wait, and even another YouTube book video.
- OMG! It's another book! But this one's not about marketing. It's about ghosts, monsters and UFOs. But it counts because a former creative director wrote and took the photos.
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Brentter has the full story on Coke's Weiden + Kennedy-created Happiness Factory film which made its "global premiere" in Second Life yesterday. The three and a half minute film (oops, sorry. we're drinking the Kool-Aid here)...um...commercial follows the travails of a Coke factory worker who travels across Happiness Land in a quest to get the factory working again.
We passed on the story yesterday since anything remotely related to Second Life makes us laugh...uh...sorry. We should have said "take less seriously." After dumping millions into Second Life six to 12 months ago, didn't marketers conclude it was a waste of money? Call us callous but YouTube has greater reach than SL by far. Oh but, oops. The vid is on YouTube also...with a whopping 434 views. Hmm.
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- The Denver Egoist hopes to "promote creative growth in Denver" while at the same time admitting Denver is "conceptually stunted."
- Muchmor Media, an independent Canadian web publisher, has launched mymuchmor.com a social network for naturalized Canadians and the 270,000 newcomers who arrive in Canada every year.
- Cynopsis reports Merv Griffin, creator and producer of game show hits Jeopardy! and Wheel of Fortune, died yesterday. He was 82.
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