USA Today reports on retailers that have adopted blogs as a marketing tool. The online retail industry is seeing opportunity in the blog boom. Retailers are creating blogs -- a term derived from Web logs, or online musings -- to promote brand awareness and sales. For instance Bluefly.com, an online retailer of designer clothes, updates customers on fashion-related news through its blog Flypaper. The blog "encourages …
Notable
Ad Age: The iPod is the latest media outlet Kraft Foods is using to lure people to buy its products. Late last month the package goods behemoth began offering consumers the chance to download 100 of its summer recipe "hits" into the little-used Notes area of Apple's mobile digital music players. Promoted via its own recipe website, kraftfoods.com, as well as in weekly Food & Family e-mails to roughly 3.3 million …
When A.D.D. Adds Up To Crapola
Is it a wise move for clients to "expand their agency roster" and spread their work out among a bunch of shops that don't communicate with each other? For better or for worse, we all think short-term now. To do project work for a client means the advertising needs to cause a quick, sudden splash, even if it's completely forgotten in a month or so in favor of some other campaign. Results? Effectiveness? No one in the …
Customer Evangelists Cover Your Eyes
David Wolfe says enough with all this customer centric rhetoric already. It has become fashionable to single out customers as the most important stakeholder. Customer centricity is a flawed concept. It pays patronizing homage to one category of stakeholders at the potential expense of other stakeholders. There is nothing neither noble nor pragmatic about being customer centric. Rather than holding out one stakeholder …
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French, Without All The France
It's rare that I find French bashing humorous. But this French restaurant in Park City pulls it off. The restaurant's tag line is, "French, without all the France." The introductory copy on their site reads, "You'll find no poodles. No bidets. No bloody Jerry Lewis. Just one rapturous meal after another, served up in the coziest corner this side of the Seine." My friends at BOWG, Salt Lake City, are responsible for …
Make Them Stop
USA Today: America Online, the world's largest Internet service provider, will pay $1.25 million in penalties and change some customer-service practices to settle an investigation by New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer. About 300 consumers had filed complaints with Spitzer's office accusing AOL, a wholly owned subsidiary of Time Warner (TWX), of ignoring their requests to cancel service and stop billing. The …
It’s A Put On
According to Adweek, a new print ad by independent McClain Finlon depicts Breckenridge Ski Resort snowboarders as members of an exclusive gentlemen's society. Breaking in the October Snowboarder and Transworld Snowboarding magazines--as well as 20 x 24-inch posters--the full-page ad stars the Colorado resort's sponsored snowboarders, all of whom live and snowboard in the Breckenridge area. Instead of their usual …
The Best Anti-Turtle Egg Ad Ever
Who needs Cialis or Viagra when you've got turtle eggs? From The Seattle Times: A campaign aimed at halting the illegal consumption of endangered sea turtles' eggs has run into trouble before it starts, with a women's group asking officials to block public-service announcements featuring a scantily clad model. "My man does not need turtle eggs. Because he knows they don't make him more potent," Argentine model …