You’ve Got Something Stuck Between Your Teeth…
Friday, June 27th, 2008
Well, this is certainly an attention-getter. Saatchi & Saatchi New York created this unique guerilla marketing piece for Glide dental floss in New York City. The exact metaphor isn’t clear, but it must be playing off the notion of having something (a piece of ham, in this case?) stuck in your teeth.
Image courtesy Commercial Archive
(via Coudal)
Good Campaign Logo Design
Thursday, January 10th, 2008
Speak Up has an excellent recent post discussing the logo for Barack Obama’s presidential campaign and its exceptional expansion across various sub-brands and other implementations. As derivative as most major campaign logos often are, it’s refreshing to see such a contemporary and well thought-out approach to a candidate’s brand. Check out the piece here.
(via Coudal)
So Exactly What Kind of Tagline Does $250,000 Buy You These Days?
Wednesday, November 28th, 2007
The Times of London reports on the rather mixed reaction to newly revealed official slogan of Scotland. After more than six months, and £125,000 (approx. $250,000), the Scottish National Party revealed the new marketing slogan:
“Welcome to Scotland.”
“It feels governmental, corporate and static,” said Anita Califano a senior consultant with Wolff Olins.
Of course, one has to be wary of criticism leveled by anyone at Wolff Olins. After all, they’re the agency responsible for the mind-numbing branding of the 2012 London Olympics.
Designing Email Marketing for Mobile Users
Thursday, October 25th, 2007
Tamara Gielen of BeRelevant!, a blog focusing on best practices in email marketing, cited a range of statistics on business-to-business (B2B) email in a post this afternoon. The item that really caught my eye was the following stat:”The percentage of business people who regularly read business emails on their mobile devices (keyword “regularly”) was 37%, up from 30% just a year ago.”This is a significant percentage to consider for anyone sending marketing emails to customers, clients, etc.
Much has been made in recent months in garnering across-the-board support for CSS standards in HTML (graphic) emails, but marketers need to pay just as much attention to the mobile user. While some mobile devices fully support and render HTML emails (the iPhone is one such device that does an excellent job of this), others are very spotty in their support for such messages (my last phone, a Blackberry, regularly chewed up HTML emails into an unreadable mess).
What’s the solution? Well, ideally, implementation of HTML and CSS support in mobile email apps. That however, is a bit beyond the control of Joe Businessman. What you can do, however, is make sure you’re covering your bases with not only the graphic/HTML versions of your marketing emails, but pairing those with plain text versions. Email marketing services such as Campaign Monitor support and encourage the practice of sending plain text versions with all HTML campaigns; the idea being that mobile users (and customers who elect, on for perceived security reasons, to block/not enable HTML emails in their mail app) will be able to view the plain text version. Granted, it may not pack the visual punch of your snazzy graphic-based email, but at least the core message is getting through, right?
Here at Bainbridge Studios, we’ve begun pairing plain text versions with clients’ HTML emails in a number of cases, and are in the process of updating our workflow to implement this practice across the board. Our goal is to send both HTML and plain-text versions of all customer marketing emails before the end of the year, and we’re on track to complete that transition.
We feel that’s the best way to offer full value to our clients for their email marketing practices and to insure that their messages are read by the widest audience possible.
Separated at Birth?
Thursday, October 25th, 2007
This isn’t the first time that Sony’s been nabbed for taking inspiration from Apple for its marketing (and Apple’s not immune to criticism here either), but I suppose imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, no? Below is a promo photo for Apple’s second generation iPod nano and a recent promo shot of Sony’s Cyber-Shot digital cameras.
(via Engadget)
It Was Just Inspiration, Right?
Friday, April 27th, 2007
As broadband Internet access, in the form of DSL, Cable, WiMax, etc., continues to proliferate, former 800-pound gorilla AOL is struggling to define itself and its identity in the 21st century Internet. Their solution? Copy Yahoo!
TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington, among others, is reporting on the striking similarities between the new Beta version of AOL’s web portal and Yahoo!’s homepage. For all intents and purposes, the two are one and the same. The new AOL layout, first introduced by AOL Senior Product Manager Frank Gruber, is apparently even referred to by many at AOL as “the Yahoo portal.”
Now, granted, there are only so many ways in which to organize and present essentially the same basic mix of news, entertainment, sports and weather into a single-page portal format, and websites and companies are constantly “borrowing” design elements, features and the like from one another, but there’s a difference between being inspired by another and simply ripping them off.
The 2012 London Olympics Rebrand: What the Hell Happened?
Wednesday, February 7th, 2007
The web has been abuzz this week since the announcement of the newly redesigned logo
and branding campaign for the 2012 London Olympics. Granted, the initial logo design utilized by the London Olympic committee, used during the process of bidding on the games, was a bit conservative and understated, but the new look (see below) goes 180 degrees in the wrong direction.
The Valve has dug up probably the best critique/one-liner of the new design, courtesy of a message board post:
“It looks,” says one of these latter message posters (called ‘NewLogoHater’, which is either a fantastically serendipitous surname or else an alias), “as if the 80s has thrown up into 2012.”
I couldn’t have said it better. Judge for yourself:
Old Logo
New Logo
Does Spam Really Work?
Thursday, January 4th, 2007
Eric Ogren of Computerworld detailed in one of his recent blog entries how stock market spam has exploded over the past two years, making up 15% of all spam messages (as of July 2006), compared to less than one percent of spam back in January 2005.
The reason behind this rapid increase? It works. To the tune of an average return of roughly 5.8% over just two days. Spammers buy up shares of penny stocks, distribute spam touting the particular company, then sell off their shares for a profit.
As hard as it may be to believe, there’s still a fair amount of folks out there willing to act on the investing advice of a complete stranger’s unsolicited email showing up in their inbox.
Pair these stats will Information Week’s recent analysis shows that 87% of all email is spam and you see why the trend continues; there’s still plenty of money to be made.
More Email Marketing Stats Goodness
Wednesday, December 13th, 2006
Tis the season for email marketing research, it seems. MailChimp has posted a breakdown of open rates, click rates, bounces and unsubscribes for more than 30 million emails distributed by their system on behalf of their clients.
The results are broken down by industry (i.e., industry of the company from which the emails were sent). The best of the bunch? Legal services, with an open rate of 42.62%. The worst? The insurance industry, clocking in at an impressively low 14.75%. The only category lower was a catch-all of more obscure senders, aptly labeled “Other” (this group checked in a 9.38% open rate).
Check out the complete statistical goodness here »
Probably Not the Best Way to Distinguish Your Brand
Sunday, December 10th, 2006
…by ripping off/riding on the coattails of another prominent branding campaign. But hey, it’s been a rough year for Sony, so why not give it a shot.
Via TUAW.