Daylight Time Switch As Special Marketing Occasion
"As most Americans prepare to push their clocks ahead this weekend when daylight saving time arrives, Madison Avenue is falling back - on one of the most popular ploys in the marketing handbook, capitalizing on the calendar.
Well-known brands like Olay, Old Navy and Swatch hope to add daylight saving time, which this year takes effect at 2 a.m. Sunday, to the lengthy list of unofficial, fanciful marketing holidays. The goal is to take advantage of the attention consumers pay to such days, even if slight, and transfer that interest to the brands being peddled."
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New York Times
BigMac to Buy Its Way Into Hip Hop Tunes
"McDonald’s Corp. has hired entertainment marketing firm
Maven Strategies to help the fast-food giant encourage hip-hop artists to integrate the Big Mac sandwich into their upcoming songs. The goal is to have several tracks hit the radio airwaves by the summer. Maven, based in Lanham, Md., has already approached record labels, producers and individual artists with the Big Mac proposal -- which emphasizes writing lyrics around the sandwich’s name alone, and not necessarily including McDonald’s or the Golden Arches."
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AdAge (free reg required)
Earlier:
Report: Brands in Songs
Starbucks Quotes Stir Controversy
"The Seattle coffee chain has raised some eyebrows over its "The Way I See It" campaign, which prints quotes from thinkers, authors, athletes and entertainers on the side of your morning machiatto. The goal, according to the company, is to foster philosophical debate in its 9,000-plus coffeehouses.
The problem, critics say, is the company's list of overwhelmingly liberal contributors, including Al Franken, Melissa Etheridge, Quincy Jones, Chuck D. Of the 31 contributors listed on Starbucks' Web site, only one, National Review editor Jonah Goldberg, offers a conservative viewpoint.
Considering Starbucks sells millions of cups of coffee each day - some specialty drinks at $4 and up - it's no surprise some customers have complained to Starbucks' Web site, labeling the campaign "offensive" and the company a proponent of "the destruction of family values and virtues."
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St.Petersburg Times
Third of Marketers Not Using Branded Entertainment
"More than a third of national marketers are not actively involved in branded entertainment initiatives, according to results of a member survey released Wednesday by the Association of National Advertisers."
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MediaPost
Church Marketing Blog
"Church marketing efforts and communication in general suck. We've got the greatest story ever told, but no one's listening. The church has a problem communicating, and it's time to change."
ChurchMarketingSucks.com
Retail Alphabet Game
Match letters with their corporate owners in this wonderful
Retail Alphabet Game. Now in its fourth edition.
iDopt a Subway
"Thousands of commuters to London's Leicester Square Underground subway station don't know it, but they are now part of the zone. The 'iPod Zone'.
Having begun last week, visitors are now seeing dark, drab white ceramic tile walls transformed into green posters on ceiling arches, escalator walls and ticket booths, all promoting Apple's newest flash-based digital media device, the iPod shuffle."
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MacObserver
Re:Branding Splash Page
"In order to help online organizations bridge the gap between themselves and their markets,
Deep/Young Anodyne Laboratories was commissioned to REbrand several web sites. The first step in this campaign was to add a welcome page (also known as a "splash" page) to each site. Each splash page attempts to more honestly represent the true nature of the site."
Many more here.
Top Five Product Placements of the Week
Media Daily News and iTVX bring you
weekly compilations of the best product placements, complete with a very impressive looking tool for measuring the effectiveness of the said placements.
Forbes Lists Top Nine Corporate Hate Sites
"While your average disgruntled consumer simply vents their bile by bellowing at a bewildered service rep, a few go farther. Much farther. These perennially peeved people build--and obsessively maintain--sites devoted exclusively to complaining about their least favorite corporations."
Forbes brings out the angriest of them.
TCM Flashback: Product Placement in Classic Movies
Turner Classic Movies will show eleven film classics during its March festival titled "Product Placement in the Movies." It demonstrates that the "casting" of consumer products in on-screen roles didn't start with the conspicuous brand preferences of Austin Powers or James Bond, nor even with Steven Spielberg demonstrating the power of Reese's Pieces to attract a friendly extraterrestrial in 1982's "E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial."
Piece of trivia: the Lumiere brothers, those famous French film pioneers of the 1890s, had an associate who also worked as a publicist for Lever Bros., now the international heavyweight known as Unilever. It was not by accident that Lever's Sunlight Soap can be seen in several widely distributed Lumiere features as early as 1896. (JSOnline.com)
The schedule and a wealth of behind-the-scenes information about each featured brand is on TCM's site.
