Rob and I wish those of you living in America and Americans overseas a very happy Thanksgiving. I hope all of you are able to spend time with your families and take some time to appreciate all that we can be thankful for.
Check out the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade live at Earthcam’s site.

In the words of Sir Francis Drake (and repeated countless times in pop culture since) “knowledge is power”.

As a person that is painfully enthusiastic about the marketing world, I find it very easy to get caught up in some of the more exciting and innovative work that we’re able to produce across so many mediums. It’s very easy to forget the importance of intelligently addressing your message to make sure the right people receive potentially focused and targeted messages.

All of this messaging can only be accomplished through accurate in depth details on people, businesses, places, and things. Building in depth catalogs on places and things is somewhat easy. Building intelligence on businesses is more challenging as they tend to be private by nature and trying to build in depth details of consumers has become easier and more complex at the same time.
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Akamai, the largest CDN with access to more information than you can imagine, announced a new service called Advertising Decision Solutions (ADS), a new division in the company that will work with its clients to apply behavioral-targeting layers to ad campaigns; it has also acquired Acerno, a company that has built itself on the notion of “predictive modeling” for $95 million.

Akamai has access to anonymous traffic from all over the world on all type of sites, and has access to track user paths and determine behavior. For example, they can know that a user has been looking at specific cars across multiple sites and suggest a targeted ad on a totally different publisher. The best of all, is that Akamai has access to this data without requiring any integration from publishers, no pixel images, no scripts, just raw data from their content networks.  Read More »

In this tough economic climate it’s important to strive to be your best at your job. There are layoffs all around and we must all aim to please both our clients and our company superiors.

One quick way to do this is impress your co-workers with a skilled series of dares. We have devised the following point system to help you succeed at office dares. Try these out in whatever order you think works best.

One-Point Dares

1. Ignore the first five people who say ‘good morning’ to you.
2. To signal the end of a conversation, clamp your hands over your ears and grimace.
3. Leave your fly open for one hour. If anyone points it out, say, “Sorry, I really prefer it this way”.
4. Walk sideways to the photocopier.
5. While going in an elevator, gasp dramatically each time the doors open.
6. When in elevator with one other person, tap them on the shoulder and pretend it wasn’t you.
7. Finish all your sentences with “In accordance with the prophecy…”
8. Don’t use any punctuation.
9. Interrupt your conversation with someone by giving a huge dejected sigh.
10. Use your highlighter pen on the computer screen.

Three-Point Dares

1. Say to your boss, “I like your style”, wink, and shoot him with double-barrelled fingers.
2. Kneel in front of the water cooler and drink directly from the nozzle.
3. Shout random numbers while someone is counting.
4. Every time you get an email, shout ”email”.
5. Put decaf in the coffee maker for 3 weeks. Once everyone has got over their caffeine addictions, switch to espresso.
6. Keep hole punching your finger. Each time you do, shout, “dagnamit, it’s happened again!”. Then do it again.
7. Introduce yourself to a new colleague as “the office bicycle”. Then wink and pout.
8. Call I.T. help desk and tell them that you can’t seem to access any pornography web sites.

Five-Point Dares

1. At the end of a meeting, suggest that, for once, it would be nice to conclude with the singing of the national anthem (extra points if you actually launch into it yourself).
2. Walk into a very busy person’s office and while they watch you with growing irritation, turn the light switch on/off 10 times.
3. For an hour, refer to everyone you speak to as “Dave”.
4. Announce to everyone in a meeting that you “really have to go do a number two”.
5. When you’ve picked up a call, before speaking finish off some fake conversation with the words, ”she can abort it for all I care”.
6. After every sentence, say ‘Mon’ in a really bad Jamaican accent. As in: “The report’s on your desk, Mon.” Keep this up for one hour.
7. In a meeting or crowded situation, slap your forehead repeatedly and mutter, “Shut up, damn it, all of you just shut up!”
8. At lunchtime, get down on your knees and announce, “As God is my witness,I’ll never go hungry again!”
9. Repeat the following conversation 10 times to the same person: “Do you hear that?” “What?” “Never mind, it’s gone now.”
10. Present meeting attendees with a cup of coffee and biscuit; smash each biscuit with your fist.
11. During the course of a meeting, slowly edge your chair towards the door.
12. As often as possible, skip rather than walk.
13. Ask people what sex they are. Laugh hysterically after they answer.
14. Sign or p.p. all letters with your initials and a swastika.
15. Dry hump the photocopier. When someone spots you, stop and cough embarrassingly, then lean in to the machine and whisper loudly, “I’ll see you tonight”.

There’s a great summary of the Motrin social media mishap titled “Crashing Motrin-gate: a Social Media Case Study” on AdAge. It does an excellent job of mapping out the starting point for the chatter and then the tipping point at which it explodes on twitter.

I have to questions whether I think this was worth pulling down for the brand though. I’d be interested to see what percentage of the 300 blog posts (301 counting this one) are from marketing or social media blogs/sites. I think this is a hot subject right now in marketing, but was it really that big when you look at it’s impact on pop culture. Only a couple of hundred thousand people viewed this ad on YouTube. I feel like this might be media going nuts again and making a big deal out of a small fire.

Maybe there was a more intelligent way to respond to the community then issuing a very corporate apology, pulling your site down, and pulling this commercial. Based on some very interesting conversations I’ve been having with our own corporate communications department I’ve been thinking about the best ways for businesses/brands to respond to feedback in the social media space.

This could have been used to engage all of the naysayers into a bigger conversation and in the long term turn them into vocal brand advocates. They should personally message each of the people that commented on Twitter and ask them to get involved on their next ad (in terms of early feedback). Imagine the groundswell of buzz they’d be able to create…