Brand Noise

Haagen-Dazs Promotes HoneyBee Buzz

Haagen-Dazs demonstrates some interesting and relevant green marketing with with their "Help the Honeybees" campaign.  Haagen-Dazs uses the campaign to warn that decline of the honeybee could become a big problem for the premium ice cream maker's business. According to Haagen-Dazs, one-third of the U.S. food supply - including a variety of fruits, vegetables and even nuts - depends on pollination from bees.

The campaign works well in promoting a real environmental cause, while also emphasizing the premium and natural positioning of the brand.  It is tied well to the value of the brand and plugs the consumer into what goes into quality ice cream.  Pretty basic.  Real flavors need real fruits - and that needs honeybees.  The campaign includes a new flavor launch called "Vanilla Honeybee" to further promote the cause.

Men are Twits

Twitter falls in line with the sentiment that girls blog and guys post video. An engine like Twitter facilitates the quick in and out that guys require--kind of like how old department stores used to be designed with menswear consolidated on the first floor and close to the exit, never making the guys walk through any of the girly stuff.

Because of the limited amount of characters (140) and how sore thumbs can get pushing those little keys, Twitter postings are usually space-efficient and to the point. All that's missing is location-based functionality--ideally GPS.

By following only the users you want to hear from, it limits the amount of unwanted tweets. "I quickly realized that decrying the banality of tweets missed their point," says Jason Pontin, publisher of Technology Review. "The only people in the world who might be interested in my twittering – my family, my close friends – were precisely the ones who would be entertained and comforted by their triviality."

Twitter met its Internet hipster tipping point at least year's SXSWi. This year, it was even more firmly entrenched with most attendees gaining a general awareness of their friends' SXSWi experience by constantly monitoring their Twitter feeds. When some after-show parties began to fill too quickly...frustrated groups would spin off from the long, outdoor lines to collect in impromptu "tweet-up" parties.

At the show's Day 2 keynote with Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, Zuckerberg and the audience grew bored with the interviewer's questions, causing the 23-year-old CEO to clam up and the audience to start heckling—by monitoring other attendees' Twitter feeds.

Read more.

NYC Gets Drive-ins This Summer

“Drive-ins have been disappearing for decades, declining to about 400 today from a peak of more than 4,000 in 1958, largely because of rising property prices and changing movie-going habits. After today, there will be 30 or so scattered across New York State, two in Connecticut, and just one, the Delsea in Vineland, in all of New Jersey, the state where drive-ins were born in 1933.” —The New York Times
                   
                    DRV-IN, a pop-up drive-in at 139 Norfolk that ends this week, will partner this summer with area parking lots, car rental companies, and car manufacturers to produce a spectacular series that will bring back the drive-in: Cars Under the Stars.                    

                   

Customer Feedback Needs to Step It Up

Last week, a Google Android prototype was unveiled at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain, giving the industry its first peek at the software that aims to bring the power of desktop computing to handsets.

Android may finally offer portable rich-media capabilities, allowing brands to integrate online, text and e-mail marketing into a lower-cost smart phone that fits into consumers' pockets. Android has its competitors, but marketers, already familiar with Google's ad-revenue model, are drooling over the software's possibilities for fostering trackable, one-on-one relationships with customers.

Most say they've bought into the idea that consumers increasingly control the conversations surrounding their brands. But how well are they listening to and shaping those discussions, in light of the technological advances that are making that form of communication ever more dominant?

"Most brands do a pathetic job listening to consumers vis-a-vis existing tools, whether it's through 800 numbers, call centers, 'contact us' feedback forms," says Pete Blackshaw, chief marketing officer of Nielsen BuzzMetrics (owned by Adweek parent the Nielsen Co.). "The reason I say 'pathetic' is those listening tools aren't terribly assimilated into the new Web 2.0 culture, where people talk with audios, photos, videos. Most companies assume consumers speak in one language and that language is text, when consumers actually speak in a much more robust language."

Read more.

Tate Gallery Distributes Ltd. Ed. Cains Beer

The man who created the Sgt Pepper album cover has designed a beer bottle label to celebrate Liverpool's Capital of Culture year. The label by artist Sir Peter Blake features a Union Jack with his signature, and is featured on Cains' Best of British lager bottles. Cains Beer, based in Toxteth, Liverpool, plans to produce 250,000 bottles. The specially-labelled beer will be available until December. It is available in the Tate Britain and the Tate Modern galleries as well as supermarkets.

Read the whole story.

Kid Robot Sponsoring Dunny Trading Parties

Some of the most incredible talents in the world have done Dunny over french. The new 3-Inch mini series appears world-wide on February 21 featuring collaborators, Superdeux, Genevieve Gauckler, 123Klan, SupaKitch, Easy Hey, Tilt, Mist, Der, Tizieu, Ajee, Doze X Secretlab, Nasty, Jack Usine, Koralie, Onde X Trbdsgn, Koa, Oktus the Woodboy and Skwak.

Now, they're holding trading parties to swap them, but the parties are not limited just to Dunnys. You can bring beaucoups of items with you to trade with other toy fans during the events.

SIRIUS Indie Talk Engages The Blogosphere

On Wed., Feb. 6, the morning after Super Tuesday, SIRIUS Satellite Radio will launch Indie Talk (channel 110), a talk radio channel that will serve as an uncensored, unfiltered forum for independent thought and opinion. The channel will feature veteran actor and political maverick Ron Silver. Silver, like Indie Talk, represents the intersection of liberal and conservative, and the intersection of entertainment and politics.

Indie Talk will stay on pace with today's frenzied news cycle by airing "blogcast" news updates every 20 minutes -- reporting the freshest headlines and buzz as it unfolds on the blogs. Additionally, Indie Talk will feature "The Blog Bunker," a cutting-edge roundtable featuring a selection of the over 100 million bloggers around the globe.

Influencing Only Looks Easy

Somewhere between Malcolm Gladwell and Duncan Watts lives the truth in what we all hope for as influential marketing, like it or not. Part of their disconnect is in the interpretation by marketers who hope for a quick fix to get people to talk about their stuff. Critics are plenty. Malcolm talks influencers. Duncan talks timing. We see both angles as legit.

The problem? Social media is not a direct line. Just like the kids’ game “telephone,” information gets morphed as it moves from person to person. The product that gets moved through the grapevine has to be a strong one. Without a solid product to begin with—uh, ain’t nothing going nowhere. Essentially, if you have the right product to start with, position it correctly and introduce at the right starting place, then it can trickle and explode through the grapevine. That’s a three-step process, and it’s not easy.

Read more in Fast Company. (Photo: Ishiku)

Adolescent Angst Goes Viral, Are You In?

After success with popular books and stage shows, Mortified now launches its debut web video series, The Mortified Shoebox Show.

Each week, The Mortified Shoebox Show treats viewers to "comic excavations" of the strange and extraordinary things we created as kids-- letters, lyrics, poems, journals, rap songs, home movies and more. Mixing concert clips, animated shorts, interviews and odd archival media, Mortified's debut series offers a snapshot of human history at its most hilarious and harrowing.

By moving online, Mortified is able give its participants -- writers, teachers, designers, actors, soccer moms, execs --  the terrifying chance to suddenly perform before a global audience.

An independently produced collaboration, season one is slated to last about eight or nine episodes... Interested in seeing season two? Contact them if you'd like to help facilitate. We dare you. It's common ground for Gen X and Y.

Kiwee Reaches One Million Members

Just wanted to share something that we were part of:

In just six months, social expression site Kiwee has reached one million members; delivering 500 million IM graphics downloads.

The content is all free and includes postCards, graphics, emoticons, winks, display pictures, widgets and backgrounds for all major online communications platforms including Facebook, MySpace, Piczo, Multiply, Windows Live Messenger, Yahoo! Messenger, and AOL Instant Messenger.

"The teen and twenty-something demographic communicates with friends and family immediately on whatever platform reaches them fastest, and we provide expressive content that isn't available anywhere else on the Internet today," said Rajiv Jain, SVP and General Manager, Kiwee. "We know how people connect with one another based on our 101-year American Greetings heritage and our deep psychographic knowledge of this market, and these exciting growth numbers illustrate how our content resonates with young people all over the world."

Congrats!

Read the release.