January 2009

Thumbnail image for Video: Cindy Crawford’s 1997 Pepsi Superbowl Ad

Video: Cindy Crawford’s 1997 Pepsi Superbowl Ad

Remember Cindy Crawford’s Pepsi commercial? Crawford pulls up to a gas station in a red Ferrari and 2 boys lean on a fence, mouths agape, while she pumps quarters into a vending machine. She pops open the can, tips it back, and chugs it while the boys stare. And what do they say? “Is that a great new Pepsi can or what?” Instant Classic…

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Thumbnail image for Microsoft Layoffs: 5,000 Jobs to be Cut Over Next 18 Months

Microsoft Layoffs: 5,000 Jobs to be Cut Over Next 18 Months

This morning Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer sent an email to all Microsoft employees announcing plans to layoff 5,000 employees over the next 18 months. Most news sources are saying “an internal email was leaked to the press,” which makes this sound like the email was intended to be kept private. However…

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Thumbnail image for Product Review: SalesView by InsideView

Product Review: SalesView by InsideView

This week I’m reviewing another tool that aims to help Sales and Marketing professionals get smart about their customers and prospects. By automating micro-level account research, SalesView by InsideView has taken some of the pressure and busywork off of CRM users.

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Thumbnail image for Small Business Owners: Back Up Your Data!

Small Business Owners: Back Up Your Data!

Perhaps you remember the episode of “Sex in the City” where Carrie Bradshaw turns on her Mac laptop, only to see the “Sad Mac”, indicating a serious hardware failure. This means that she cannot access any of her files. Her beau chastises her for not backing up her computer. She conjectures that backing up is a ritual for some strange secret society – because she has never done it and never heard about it…

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Thumbnail image for Video: Stop-Motion Lego Trailer for Batman Dark Knight

Video: Stop-Motion Lego Trailer for Batman Dark Knight

In short, this is a trailer for Batman Dark Knight that was made by shooting stop-motion video of legos. This was consumer-made, which begs the question: if ‘organic’ videos like this can generate a lot of buzz just because of their format (stop-motion… legos…), shouldn’t Hollywood capitalize on this?

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Thumbnail image for CNN and Facebook Inauguration Coverage: A Mashup Made in Social Media Heaven

CNN and Facebook Inauguration Coverage: A Mashup Made in Social Media Heaven

Kudos to CNN and Facebook for a tight integration and revolutionary live-media experience. They had the Y Generation / Millennials eating from their hand yesterday, and to anyone who knows how hard it is to tap into that market, this was a huge success on so many levels. Here’s a quick recap by the numbers and a dose of my subjective user-experience…

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Ogilvy Launches Website to Help Marketers Manage Through the Recession

Less than a week after laying off 10% of its workforce, Ogilvy has launched a website aimed at providing marketers (clients) with resources to help them identify where and how to cut budgets, how to optimize whats left and how to improve effectiveness and efficiency. Here’s a first glance of what Ogilvy did right and what they did wrong…

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Thumbnail image for Online Advertising Enters into a Recession

Online Advertising Enters into a Recession

PubMatic has released their Q4 2008 Ad Price Index and its clear that online advertising has entered into a recession. All sizes of website sizes were down dramatically from Q4 2007 by an average of 43%. All sizes of websites were also down from Q3 2008 to Q4 2008, but the drops were…

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Thumbnail image for Ad of the Day: In-Flight Advertising

Ad of the Day: In-Flight Advertising

Love this ad. Check it. To the best of my knowledge this ad didn’t actually run in airplanes, but was made to look like it did. This got me thinking, why don’t see ad placement in planes? I’ve never seen a single one myself. It’s a pretty great scenario: you have a captive and sedentary audience, they’re pre-qualified…

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Video: President Obama’s Inauguration Speech

If you weren’t glued to your TV or the CNN.com live feed to watch the Presidential Inauguration yesterday morning then you better have a damn good excuse. I’ll be writing about the genius CNN/Facebook co-branded marketing promotion later on today, but in the meantime here’s Obama’s inauguration speech… not because I think you missed it, but because its worth listening to again.

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Thumbnail image for Video: Perfect Example of How to Interrupt the Elusive Millennial Generation

Video: Perfect Example of How to Interrupt the Elusive Millennial Generation

Marketers: I am immune to your tactics. I am smack in between the elusive X and Y Generations and I fast forward through TV commercials (I love DVR), I never listen to radio, I rarely read magazines and when I do I never notice the ads, and I don’t think I’ve ever clicked on an online banner ad in my life (well, maybe once in 1992.) I make my purchasing decisions based almost solely on brand loyalty, word-of-mouth reviews, and whim…

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Thumbnail image for The Professional Confessional: Getting Ahead of Yourself

The Professional Confessional: Getting Ahead of Yourself

Every Tuesday Mike offers up the biggest mistakes, oversights, blunders and bonehead moves he commits in the fast-paced world of software-as-a-service, where he’s a Marketing Manager moonlighting as a Sales Account Executive… “This is extremely embarrassing, and unfortunately completely true. However, in the spirit of this column, I must come clean. Last Friday, I stayed at work beyond 5 PM to help…”

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Thumbnail image for Burger King Cancels Facebook Ad Campaign

Burger King Cancels Facebook Ad Campaign

Since January 5, Burger King has been running their “Whopper Sacrifice” ad campaign on Facebook, in which members of the social networking site can get a free whopper if they “de-friend” 10 of the people on their friend list. Just 10 days after the campaign began, though, Burger King has canceled the campaign in response to pushback from Facebook, which said..

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Thumbnail image for Tax Implications of Leaving Your Job – Some Good, Some Bad

Tax Implications of Leaving Your Job – Some Good, Some Bad

If you lose your job, you could be in for some tax surprises – some nice, some nasty. If you receive unemployment benefits or severance pay, cash in a retirement account or have a big change in income, your tax bill could be much more – or less – than you expect. To avoid surprises, here are some tips…

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Thumbnail image for California: State Needs to Honor Committment to UC

California: State Needs to Honor Committment to UC

The UC Regents voted Wednesday to curtail undergraduate enrollment growth for Fall 2009. To many of us who knew then-UC President Clark Kerr and then-Gov. Pat Brown, developers of the 1960 master plan for higher education in California, this is a sad day. However, as a former UC regent, I cannot lay fault with either the UC Regents or UC President Mark Yudof…

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Thumbnail image for Marketing to Millennials: A Lesson Learned from the Obama Campaign

Marketing to Millennials: A Lesson Learned from the Obama Campaign

In the spirit of Barack Obama’s Inauguration, I want to focus on the one group that helped push him into the White House, the Millennial generation. Millennials don’t pay much attention, if any, to marketing despite the fact (or perhaps because) theirs is the generation most marketed to in history, so how are you going to penetrate this hot group of “know-it-alls?”

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JPMorgan Conference: A Stream of Consciousness Report

The JPMorgan biomedical conference met at the Westin St. Francis in San Francisco the week of 12 January. The opening event of the funding year, this conference serves as a bellwether of funding for biomedical firms for 2009. Even without name tags and the registration canvas totes, it’s easy to spot these “masters of the Universe” (thank you Tom Wolfe.) They are mostly Caucasian men dressed in suits, heads bowed in reading their Blackberry screens as they walk around Union Square with a paper coffee cup clad in its corrugated protector and plastic top…

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Twitter: Still Deciding if I Should Join

I have yet to take the leap to Twitter; I’ve heard some great things but am skeptical about involving myself in one more thing to maintain – email, a blog, a day job, facebook. Every day, though, I hear something new about why I should take the leap. If you’re in the same boat as me and are still on the fence about whether or not to join, I suggest you give these articles a quick read, so that at least you can make an informed decision…

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Video: Allstate TV Ad = The Right Way to Advertise in a Recession

Last week contributing editor Rebecca Novack wrote a great article about why you need to maintain your advertising during a recession, in which she said, “your goal for the next year is to alter your marketing messages to show sensitivity to rising anxiety and fear of the unknown. Ads should instill a sense of control, value, and positive emotions to the consumer.” An Allstate TV ad provides a perfect example of how to do just that…

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