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Author Rick Mathieson Talks Creative Trends in Digital Marketing at AICP Conference

Aicp association of independent commercial producers Even Taylor Swift couldn't top this.

I'm just back from the AICP Conference in NYC, where I followed Jeff Goodby's discussion on digital transformation at GSP with my own talk on creative trends in mobile advertising, and how some of today's most innovative marketers are using mobile to activate traditional advertising - making TV, radio, print, outdoor and direct mail advertising fully interactive - while creating a level of consumer engagement previously unimaginable.

After that, I led a panel discussion with an all-star line up that included Derek Handley, founder and CEO of The Hyperfactory; Michal Shapira, executive director of creative servicesand CND Studio, Condé Nast; Colin Nagy, executive director of earned media, The Barbarian Group; and Erin Wilson, sales executive, Microsoft Mobile Advertising.

It was an outstanding event, and I have many thanks to Matt Miller; Rich Carter, Kristin Wilcha and many others for making it all possible. Bonus points to Dustin Callif of Tool North America for recommending me for the event.

It was also a lot of fun - and even topped Taylor Swift's live concert in the Jetblue terminal at JKF on the way home.

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>>> IN STORES NOW - LEARN MORE (AND ORDER YOUR COPY) - HERE <<<

OD_cover "... EXCELLENT ..."

“Through persuasive arguments and Q&A's with the major players in advertising, Mathieson makes an excellent case for greater creativity and outside-the-box thinking backed up with solid ideas."

Publisher's Weekly

 >>> IN STORES NOW - LEARN MORE (AND ORDER YOUR COPY) - HERE <<<


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Author Rick Mathieson Leads Panel on Advertising Innovation at Digital Hollywood Today

Digital hollywood fall I've been invited to a return visit as moderator for a panel on advertising innovation at Digital Hollywood Fall.

As the session description puts it: "Advertising is finally discovering and finding its way into the next generation of technology media and entertainment industries. Broadband, mobile, IPTV, cable and interactive TV and of course in games, ads and branded information are being delivered in many forms. The technologies behind ad-insertion, ad serving, on-demand technologies and a full host of back-end management technologies are enabling greater creativity and enhanced options in the relationship between technology and advertising. In this session, we will open an ongoing conversation of how technologies are evolving, where they are heading and how the advertising and branding industries will gain further technology traction."

My all-star list of panelists will include:

• Richard Jalichandra, CEO, Technorati

• Greg Philpott, President, mDialog

• Paul Drew, Technology Director and Resident Gaming Expert, IMC

• Caleb Hill, Senior Vice President, Products, Unicast

• Sean Whitely, TigerText

Should be a lot of fun. Get complete details here.

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>>> IN STORES NOW - LEARN MORE (AND ORDER YOUR COPY) - HERE <<<

OD_cover "... EXCELLENT ..."

“Through persuasive arguments and Q&A's with the major players in advertising, Mathieson makes an excellent case for greater creativity and outside-the-box thinking backed up with solid ideas."

Publisher's Weekly

 >>> IN STORES NOW - LEARN MORE (AND ORDER YOUR COPY) - HERE <<<


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Christopher Locke: 'Cluetrain Manifesto' For The Mobile Age (Part 2)

 

Cluetrain for the mobile age More from a source interview with Christopher Locke, coauthor of "The Cluetrain Manifesto," on what that work means in the mobile era.

This time out, a look at how social networks are moving from the old school net to the mobile

Rick Mathieson: You contend that online audiences are self-segmenting into micromarkets, where, as a marketer, you can't really approach them on your own agenda anymore. You have to talk to them about theirs.

Christopher Locke: Yes. Used to be, to start a television station, or a radio station, you had to sign up these big sponsors with high-ticket items - car dealers, car companies, and so on. It worked in that medium. Here, the market is fragmented.

But what's happened is that the big companies just repeat the same stuff online as they do everywhere else. You have NBC, ABC, CBS, all hawking the same homogenized crap.

But that's the beauty of the Internet. It's just not one place, it's scattered all over. And audiences dig around and turn each other on to places that they like: "Well, have you heard what this guy is saying, or that woman is blogging," and so on.

The community that you volitionally participate in is always more true than a segment a marketer places you in. And that's the power of these micromarkets. They're not demographic abstractions. They're actual communities of discourse. Communities that are really talking to each other, and are not based just on interest, but passionate interest in how to make clothes for your kid, or how to powerboat, or snowboard, or write Java code, or thousands and millions of obsessions. If you approach those kinds of communities saying, "Hey, buy our new tires for your SUV," it's like, "Huh? Where the f---k did you come from?" It's like a guy walking into a party where people are in little groups around the room, talking about stuff that they're interested in, and here comes the used car salesman who wants to tell you, "Hey, I'm with Joe's Pontiac, and boy, we've got some great specials this week." How long woud that guy last at a party? They would throw him out the damn door.

RM: So what's the alternative? How can brands effectively communicate with, and capitalize on, these social micromarkets?

CL: Start by looking inside your own company at interests that your employees have - at passions. Not about your product. Not about the 9 to 5 work. But what are your people really interested in? What do they care about? What do they do with their spare time?

Find those interests, because they are intellectual capital that has been left laying in the dirt, unrecognized. It's what they want to get the next paycheck for, so that they can go buy the motorboat, or the snowboard, or the trip to Vail to go skiing. Find those interests among your people. Figure out which ones would map into your market in general.

Then, go out on the Web and find similar passions and interests represented by Web sites that are doing a good job, that have a demonstrable ability to be engaging - funny, well-written, graphically adept - and form relationships with those sites. Give them money. Give them technical resources.

It's almost like third world development, where you grow them and ink legal relationships with these Web sites, so that you can intersect the people inside your company with that outside network, so when people hook up together, they're not talking to shills from Ford or Motorola or whoever. They're talking to people that are talking the same language about stuff they're interested in, and by the way, they're also meeting actual real people in those companies that they begin to have a feel for.

At some point, people say, "Hey, I need help with this or that," and a conversation starts that can end in a big sale. Along the way, you'll probably earn the kind of brand equity you've always wanted, in a way you never expected.

There are people who are highly, highly motivated and enthusiastic about certain aspects of the world, and there are usually products or services relating to those people in some way or another. Take fly fishing. Advertising fly fishing stuff on television probably doesn't make a lot of sense. But online, a company can sponsor or underwrite a fly-fishing contest, seminars, or an excursion, or tips on the best fishing sports this week. That can be very powerful.

But trying to get a bunch of sites to adhere to your notion of what you want the customer to hear is trying to drive the square peg into the round hole with a bigger hammer. And if we're not careful, that's what will happen here. It used to be that really intelligent people saw what was going on and were attracted to the Internet because it was different. Now, you turn it on and it's not different at all. It's like turning on the television. Yeah, I can get my flight information faster, and I can get my news without having to get those wet newspapers off the front porch. But the really radical stuff that's possible in this medium is in danger of falling by the wayside.

It's so much more powerful to go to these sites that are out there, give them some money to help them make their trip. And in each case, the money is a tiny fraction of what it would cost to do traditional advertising. It's about going out there to build goodwill, to build relationships, to build, ultimately, not just a place to advertise, but a place to participate in those communities, and bring new ideas into your company - real intellectual capital - and to get people really understanding what the company is doing, rather than just saying, "Buy my product."

RM: How will the mobile Internet give this trend pervasiveness?

As the connection gets more ubiquitous, as you're freed from the desktop, as you have the ability to be more constantly connected, you can tap into your network anytime.

It's getting easier to go to your blogger, and say, "Hey, I'm at the corner of Walk and Don's Walk in New York City, and I'm looking for a good Chinese restaurant." It's fast enough that six people could come back and say, "Oh, you've got to go to Hop Sing's."

That's getting closer to real time, and guess what. It's more fun. Because somebody else that you trust can say, "Oh, you know, Charlie's telling you to go to Hop Sing's, but actually, that sucks. What you really want to do is walk three more blocks and take a left, and go to this other place that nobody knows about, but it's fantastic."

It's like an instant, always-on community giving you information that you trust because you've trusted them in other areas.

RM: A reputation system built on some kind of 21st century version of the Old Boy's Club?

CL: Yes, that's a good analogy. Or the Alumni Association. You go to a new city, and you say, "Charles, where do you think we can get a good cigar?" You're going to trust Charles because he's from your class. You've got more tie-in to him than if he's some guy wearing a bowtie talking to you too loud.

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>>> IN STORES NOW - LEARN MORE (AND ORDER YOUR COPY) - HERE <<<

OD_cover "... EXCELLENT ..."

“Through persuasive arguments and Q&A's with the major players in advertising, Mathieson makes an excellent case for greater creativity and outside-the-box thinking backed up with solid ideas."

Publisher's Weekly

 >>> IN STORES NOW - LEARN MORE (AND ORDER YOUR COPY) - HERE <<<


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Christopher Locke: 'Cluetrain Manifesto' for The Mobile Age (Pt 1)

Cluetrain for the mobile age Got to thinking over the weekend about an interview featured in my first book, BRANDING UNBOUND, featuring renegade marketing strategist and dyspeptic malcontent Christopher Locke, coauthor of The Cluetrain Manifesto: The End of Business as Usual, as well as so many other great books.

As my new book, THE ON-DEMAND BRAND kicks into high gear - and as I prep for this week's Digital Hollywood, where I'll be moderating a panel on advertising innovation (including mobile) - I thought it'd be fun to revisit Locke, who has always been clear about his disbelief that mass-market advertising translates to the mobile era.

The problem, says Locke, is that in an increasingly interconnected world of the wireline - and nw wireless - Internet, new communities of consumers are growing immune to corporate pitches and officially sanctioned marketing-speak.

As a result, "the artist formally known as advertising must do a 180," contends Locke. The goal is market advocacy - tapping into, listening to, and even forming allliances with emerging mobile markets, and transforming advertising from clever ways of saying, "I want your money" to "We share your interests."

Rick Mathieson: What does 'Cluetrain Manifesto' mean in a mobile age when our Internet-based communities travel with us?

Christopher Locke: The big shift here is away from one-way communications from large organizations or big companies or the government, telling people, "This is the way it is." We've moved from broadcast to point-to-point, peer-to-peer, group-to-group, where it isn't just a question about beaming out advertising. It's people who can go where they want, buy what is attractive to them.

You had a little of this with the remote control and TV, which bothered the hell out of broadcasters at first - "What if they switch away from the ads?" Well, this is orders of magnitude beyond that.

Now people are talking to each other about your statements, creating online networks about a particular topic they're passionate about, and saying, "Yeah, well, we don't buy it," or, "We have a different view," which you never had before the Internet.

The fact that people can communciate with each other, that they can deconstruct and analyze and comment on the official channels of communication, is shifting power away from companies and the media, and more to masses that are self-selecting into micromarkets.

Look at blogging. With the [mobile] Internet, you're starting to see a lot more real-time commentary and analysis that's flying by so fast that if you're outside of it, and you're just reading the newspaper, you're just getting the news, while another couple of million people have already compared it to 96 other events and cross-indexed them, whether it's the Middle East or whatever these folks are interested in.

RM: How does this shift hamper or help the objectives of marketers?

CL: Marketers are largely wedded to ideas that are intrinsic to the broadcast paradigm. They've never known anything else. From the perspective of gathering an audience in broadcast, you want the biggest possible audience. You want the highest Nielsen ratings. And from the perspective of advertisers, you want the easy jingle. You want the vanilla message that can be delivered many, many, many times, and goes into your limbic system, so you go out like an android and buy Downey Fabric Softener.

Marketers have made the mistake of thinking the Internet is like TV, when there are fundamental differences of interconnection and intercommentary and conversation. This is a technology that enables person-to-person and many-to-many coversations, and those conversations really define and characterize the medium in a way that just doesn't bear a lot of resemblance to broadcast or television at all.

Marketers - television is what they knew, so they employed the same sort of techniques, the same sort of shotgun, get-the-message-out-there, get the key points, get them to click the animated banner with the monkey who's running back and forth, or whatever.

In the first blush, some of the techniques had a certain appeal because they were novelties. But the novelty wore off after the third time you'd clicked th monkey, and it was like, "Oh, I get it. This is just the same old crap," even with all this "permission marketing" stuff.

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>>> IN STORES NOW - LEARN MORE (AND ORDER YOUR COPY) - HERE <<<

OD_cover "... EXCELLENT ..."

“Through persuasive arguments and Q&A's with the major players in advertising, Mathieson makes an excellent case for greater creativity and outside-the-box thinking backed up with solid ideas."

Publisher's Weekly

 >>> IN STORES NOW - LEARN MORE (AND ORDER YOUR COPY) - HERE <<<


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'Mad Men' Theme Song - With A Vocal Twist

This doesn't have to do with anything other than the fact I thought this was an excellent mashup of "A Beautiful Mine" (the theme song from "Mad Men") and the lyrics from Nat King Cole's "Nature Boy." Oh, and ... wow.

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>>> IN STORES NOW - LEARN MORE (AND ORDER YOUR COPY) - HERE <<<

OD_cover "... EXCELLENT ..."

“Through persuasive arguments and Q&A's with the major players in advertising, Mathieson makes an excellent case for greater creativity and outside-the-box thinking backed up with solid ideas."

Publisher's Weekly

 >>> IN STORES NOW - LEARN MORE (AND ORDER YOUR COPY) - HERE <<<


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Toyota Auris Hybrid: 'Get Your Energy Back' 3D Projection Mapping Coolness

Hell, I'm not into hybrids (yet). But the ongoing campaign for Auris (see the augmented reality test drive) could put the category into the, um, fast lane. Thankyouverymuch. I'm here all week.

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>>> IN STORES NOW - LEARN MORE (AND ORDER YOUR COPY) - HERE <<<

OD_cover "... EXCELLENT ..."

“Through persuasive arguments and Q&A's with the major players in advertising, Mathieson makes an excellent case for greater creativity and outside-the-box thinking backed up with solid ideas."

Publisher's Weekly

 >>> IN STORES NOW - LEARN MORE (AND ORDER YOUR COPY) - HERE <<<


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Tom Nicholson (Conclusion) - Social Retailing Advice for Marketers

OD_Tom_Nicholson In Part 1 and Part 2 of we learned about social retailing pilots for Nanette Lepore and Bloomingdales that resulted in a 3x increase in sales.

In Part 3 we learned about how social media can get shoppers into stores - and keep them there.

And in the conclusion of this exclusive source interview for the new book, THE ON-DEMAND BRAND, we get advice on how to start implementing social retailing ourselves.

Part 4: Social Retailing: Advice for Marketers 

 

(Approx 2:34)

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>>> IN STORES NOW - LEARN MORE (AND ORDER YOUR COPY) - HERE <<<

OD_cover "... EXCELLENT ..."

“Through persuasive arguments and Q&A's with the major players in advertising, Mathieson makes an excellent case for greater creativity and outside-the-box thinking backed up with solid ideas."

Publisher's Weekly

 >>> IN STORES NOW - LEARN MORE (AND ORDER YOUR COPY) - HERE <<<


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Interview: Tom Nicholson (Pt 3) - On Social Retailing in the Age of The Empowered Consumer

OD_Tom_Nicholson In Part 1 and Part 2 of we learned about social retailing pilots for Nanette Lepore and Bloomingdales that resulted in a 3x increase in sales.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

In part three of this exclusive source interview for the new book, THE ON-DEMAND BRAND, Tom Nicholson - the father of social retailing - talks about the dynamic of using social media to lure shoppers into stores, and then keeping them there - longer and more profitably.

Part 3: Social Retailing in the Age of the Empowered Consumer

(Approx 4:34)

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>>> IN STORES NOW - LEARN MORE (AND ORDER YOUR COPY) - HERE <<<

OD_cover "... EXCELLENT ..."

“Through persuasive arguments and Q&A's with the major players in advertising, Mathieson makes an excellent case for greater creativity and outside-the-box thinking backed up with solid ideas."

Publisher's Weekly

 >>> IN STORES NOW - LEARN MORE (AND ORDER YOUR COPY) - HERE <<<


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Interview: Tom Nicholson Pt 2: ROI from Augmented Reality & Social Retailing

OD_Tom_Nicholson In part one of my interview with Tom Nicholson, we learned about an amazing augmented reality-cum-social media initiative designed to supercharge the in-store shopping experience.

In part two of this exclusive source interview for the new book, THE ON-DEMAND BRAND, I ask Nicholson - founder of Icon Nicholson and more recently, Nicholson NY - what kind of results this initiative has generated so far.

Part 2: Social Retailing ROI

(Approx 3:54)

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>>> IN STORES NOW - LEARN MORE (AND ORDER YOUR COPY) - HERE <<<

OD_cover "... EXCELLENT ..."

“Through persuasive arguments and Q&A's with the major players in advertising, Mathieson makes an excellent case for greater creativity and outside-the-box thinking backed up with solid ideas."

Publisher's Weekly

 >>> IN STORES NOW - LEARN MORE (AND ORDER YOUR COPY) - HERE <<<


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Author Rick Mathieson Talks Digital's Impact on Radio Broadcasting Industry on 'The Mark Ramsey Show'

Mark ramsey show on-demand brand radio digital Had a great time on the Mark Ramsey Show the other day, discussing digital's impact on the radio broadcasting industry.

Ramsey's show is geared to radio broadcasters, and it was interesting to talk about the promise and peril of digital - the web, mobile, etc. - on radio.

My primary message: Contrary to popular perception, digital is not about displacing traditional media - it's about empowering it as never before.

(Approx 12:13)

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>>> IN STORES NOW - LEARN MORE (AND ORDER YOUR COPY) - HERE <<<

OD_cover "... EXCELLENT ..."

“Through persuasive arguments and Q&A's with the major players in advertising, Mathieson makes an excellent case for greater creativity and outside-the-box thinking backed up with solid ideas."

Publisher's Weekly

 >>> IN STORES NOW - LEARN MORE (AND ORDER YOUR COPY) - HERE <<<


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