Brand Noise

Air Force Reaching Out Through Xbox

The US Air Force is partnering with Microsoft to promote the Xbox LIVE "Horror Meets Comedy" original short film series premiering this November 19th. The series features eight well-known horror directors who will bring their comedic visions to life. Directors include James Wan & Leigh Whannell creators of the "Saw" franchise, James Gunn ("Slither", "Dawn of the Dead") Andrew Douglas ("The Amityville Horror"), David Slade ("30 Days of Night") and Lucky McKee ("May").

Air Force will create custom intro billboards that will run with each pilot and interactive media placements that will live across the Xbox LIVE online entertainment network and the Xbox.com website. Users can click on these custom units and engage directly with the Air Force Brand Destination which offers users the opportunity to learn more about the Air Force through video downloads, gamer pictures and theme packages.

Seems to me there’s a bigger picture to explore…

The Kids are Alright

In fact they're so alright, they're the key to grown-up marketing.

Early reports on the ill health of the kids upfront have been greatly exaggerated, according to network ad sales executives, who hope to swap out Chicken Little projections of a flat to down market in favor of a more blustery Foghorn Leghorn outlook.

"Synergies between TV and digital are very strong," says Brad Davis, vp, ad sales for Disney Online. "The buyer culture is really starting to change from a planning perspective. And at the client level, most decisions are now being made from a 360-degree standpoint."

Like Disney Channel, Nickelodeon has aggressively gone after clients looking to reach parents who watch along with their kids. Since 2006, when Nick did some $50 million in nonendemic business, categories like insurance, automotive, travel, financial services, consumer electronics and wireless have become a sizable part of the network's business model. Who knew?

Read the whole story.

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)

Funneling is Not Sustainable Branding

Mekanism recently announced the launch of the Rockband.com social network. We first heard about the plans for the network back in October. We were hoping for a bit of evolution in that time. Rock Band is a great game. Rock Band as a social network is not. Not to say there is anything wrong in its execution, but the premise of a destination channeling people is not the direction to head in. Conde Nast came to that realization with Flip.com, which is now available as a widget on Facebook. And American Greetings approached its Kiwee brand from the get-go as one to work in tandem with existing, fabulous properties. Even Second Life only becomes something interesting when it becomes part of things outside of itself. Hmmm...maybe Guitar Hero is getting a handle on that now that it has launched Guitar Hero 3. Sustainable branding means working with resources that exist and function well among their users.

(Photo: 'Rock Band' set-up with 110" screen from a Panasonic PT-AX100 Projector. Onkyo 605 feeds the sound from the Xbox 360.)

Kid Robot, Secret to “Yo Gabba Gabba!” Success?

“Yo Gabba Gabba!” began appearing on Nickelodeon in August, and with remarkable speed it has acquired fans who are preschoolers and fans who are old enough to be their parents...Charles Rivkin, the president and chief executive of Wildbrain, which produces the show, says, “I challenge you to find another preschool show that four months after going on the air is actually selling adult apparel at Barneys.”

While plenty of shows for children have also appealed to adults — “Pee-wee’s Playhouse,” “H. R. Pufnstuf,” even “Sesame Street” — “Yo Gabba Gabba!” updates this idea for a generation that, it has been argued, is ambivalent about letting go of its own youth.

The real deal came when the original creators hooked up with Wildbrain. Back in 2006, Wildbrain acquired a majority interest in Kidrobot, which makes and sells high-end “designer toys” and apparel that appeal to fashionable young adults (who may or may not be parents). Thus “Gabba”-related products arrived in exclusive retail settings much faster than usual, demonstrating consumer demand to other merchandise partners.

You couldn’t ask for more perfect serendipity in partners, which goes to prove that authenticity starts at the drawing board. Had “Yo Gabba Gabba!” been conceived under other premises, it wouldn’t have been strong enough to bring into the Kid Robot world. On the other hand, if “Yo Gabba Gabba!” merchandise went straight to big box retailers you would’ve had a watered down product. The Kid Robot connection offers the brand longevity, with more staying power than it would have had on its own.

(Image: T-shirt recrafted into dress by JinJur.)
Read the article.

Scrabble Pirates Back Its Game

Scrabulous, clearly a knockoff of the board game Scrabble, was developed by two brothers in India. Its popularity is a major driver of traffic to Facebook, where a reported 500,000 members log on to Scrabulous each day.

Dozens of Facebook groups have been created to “save Scrabulous.” The biggest had more than 23,000 members late this week, days after the letter from Hasbro and Mattel was made public. Most group members seem to understand that the companies are merely protecting their rights, and many think that the game makers will reach some sort of understanding with the developers of Scrabulous, allowing the game to stay. A Hasbro spokesman said as much in a statement, asserting that the companies are seeking an “amicable solution.”

Josh Quittner of Fortune magazine’s Techland blog thinks that is just what should happen. “If I were an evil genius running a board games company,” he wrote, “I might do this: Wait until someone comes up with an excellent implementation of my games and does the hard work of coding and debugging the thing and signing up the masses. Then, once it got to scale, I’d sweep in and take it over. Let the best pirate site win!”

There's defending your intellectual property, and then there's admitting that you dropped the ball. What we have here are two companies focusing on the negative, annoying their consumers, and ignoring an opportunity.

Read more.

Conde Nast Gets in Step with Facebook

Why fight what’s already working? It’s more important to be the one who is empowering consumers. Conde Nast is beginning to catch on:

Flip.com launched in February as CondeNet's effort to target teen girls with an ambitious social media site. Less than a year later, the digital arm of Conde Nast is reversing course to embrace a distributed media strategy and converting the destination site into a series of applications that will live on social networks, starting with Facebook.

"It's hard to carve out enough time from those girls [because of] Facebook," said Sarah Chubb, president of CondeNet. "Why fight it and try to build your own social network when there is one that is open to things being built on top of it?"

By abandoning a destination strategy, CondeNet hopes to draw an expanded audience from the peak of 300,000 users the site attracted.

Flip already has a series of applications on Facebook that have proven moderately popular.

Read the whole story.

HyperLink My World, Please

The Green Holiday catalog from Barney's arrived in the mail yesterday filled with everything from Lanvin shopper bags to organic Levi's. But no sign of what color that fabulous lipstick is on the cover...
In my perfect little world even the Barney's billboard at Mulry Square would have a teeny Semapedia tag that would give me all the info I need--provided all colors were perfectly matched.

Facebook Members Not Opting for Total Disclosure

Facebook plans to make the sites that work with Beacon more visible and provide more information about how Beacon works...The promise follows a Nov. 27 tweak to the system designed to ensure that users were clearly notified, both on Facebook and on partner sites, that news of an off-Facebook activity would be sent to friends, unless the member explicitly declined to send that information. Those earlier assurances did little, however, to appease upset users, many of whom don't want Facebook to share information on their Web activity for advertising purposes—even if it's shared with people they’ve identified as friends. "I feel duped," says Frank Kruller, a Facebook member for seven months. "If I wanted to share something with my friends I'm pretty sure I could tell them myself."

Any move that weakens Beacon's appeal to advertisers leaves Facebook under pressure to find other ways to lure marketers...Users of social networks are typically less responsive to standard ad formats, such as the posterlike banner ads commonly seen on the Web, than to newer, more interactive or personalized advertisements. Some marketers say that when they place banner ads on Facebook, the so-called click-through rate, a measure of user responsiveness, is one-fifth the rate for the larger Web.

Now, why would you think total disclosure would be a good thing? It's antithetical to human nature. In the wake of technology, we tend to look at what we CAN do vs. what we SHOULD do. Back to the drawing board for everybody!

Branded Utility Surfaces at Cars.com

Cars.com launched a new site feature that allows consumers to send a car listing from the website to their mobile phone.

The new Send to Phone feature works in conjunction with Cars.com's new mobile site, launched in June of this year. Cars.com was the first automotive site to offer vehicle listings alongside research tools and buying advice in a mobile application, giving car shoppers on-the-go access to the information they need to make informed buying decisions.