Nope. I still won’t upload a video to your campaign site.

September 7th, 2010 • View Comments We like
Tags: Advertising, Cool, Diagram, Fans, Funny, Ideas, Incentives, Strategy, Trends, Truth, visual, We like, World

Here we go again with a chart. But a good one.

You know the rules – you are sitting in a meeting with a bunch of other marketing blokes (and possibly the client) and all of you pretend the pork meat/washing powder/light bulb/whatever thay you are trying to sell is interesting in regards to the campaign/viral superhit/Facebook page you want to come up with. Bad news, it almost never is.

Just in case any of your colleagues starts to promote his fantastic idea to engage urban hipsters to record this video and upload it to your light bulb website using an Augmented Reality app, simply point to the chart below. It actually says one thing – few people are really interested in marketing. Well…almost no one. Some of your target group might really be deep into sneakers. But honestly…almost no one will become a fan of the sausage you are trying to sell – except if you have a really great idea or bribe them. Your choice.

This simple truth is closely related to this ‘letter to all of advertising and marketing.’ Genius that is. And as I just found out, it both comes from a London-based agency called SellSell. I like them.

Problems. A Simple Flowchart to solve all of them.

September 6th, 2010 • View Comments Strategy, Tools
Tags: diagrams, flowchart, Funny, problems, Strategy, Truth, visual, World

Life can be so easy sometimes. As a quick intro to this week I would like to remind you of this simple flowchart that basically makes you get rid of all your problems at once (via Flowingdata).

Survey. How much can you actually earn as a Planner?

August 18th, 2010 • View Comments Work
Tags: Agencies, Jobs, Money, Planning, Report, Salary, Strategy, Study, Survey, Truth, World

Finally! An interesting analytical paper about the status quo of planning salaries in planning. My colleague Heather LeFevre from the colleagues at Strawberry Frog here in Amsterdam has just published her Planner Survey 2010. It tries to compare salaries of strategists worldwide to bring some light into the dark. The data was collected via an online survey with 1570+ participants from all over the world.

The effort definitely was worth it. You get a pretty good understanding about what you can expect to earn in NYC in comparison to London. But as usual – salaries don’t say much as long as you don’t integrate real costs of living. Earning and spending 100$ in Frankfurt is a very different thing to earning and spending 100$ in Amsterdam or London.

Anyway, great work, Heather. Thanks a lot.

OMFG. Brands and Social Media in China.

August 11th, 2010 • View Comments Brands, Social, Underway
Tags: Brands, Business, China, Prediction, Presentation, Report, Social, Social Influence Marketing, Strategy, Trends, Truth, We like, World

Sometimes when you do research on tech adaption worldwide you get the impression it is completely enough to look at figures from the U.S. Take for example the excellent ‘State of the Blogosphere 2009‘ report by technorati. It presents all the charts and diagrams you need if you research statistics on blog usage….but if you dig a little bit deeper you find out that it’s actually nothing but a study about the American blogosphere.

This is particularly interesting if you take a serious look at the figures. China for example has surpassed the U.S. in social media usage last year. According to Netpop almost every Chinese online user is part of a social network. There are three times more bloggers per online user in China compared to the U.S. No major study will explain an average European or American strategist what these people do, what they talk about and how to engage them. By the way, we are talking about 1.6 billion Chinese and billions of Asians that I did not even consider in this calculation.

Check out this deck by Ogilvy One Shanghai (via Giles) about the connected Chinese digital landscape which is absolutely stunning. And afterwards do me a favor and answer one question: Is it actually possible to understand and lead the complexity of this world from a desk in Frankfurt, Paris, Amsterdam or London and to make the right decisions? How can we build cross cultural knowledge which is so important to get away from our subjective western perspective?

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Creative Briefs. Two Decks on making them evolve.

August 11th, 2010 • View Comments Jobs, Strategy
Tags: Agencies, Cool, Creative, creative briefs, Ideas, Jobs, Prediction, Presentation, Process, Strategy, Tools, World

As a strategist it is kind of a fixation to think about creative briefs. Creative brief? Yes, a piece paper which traditionally is created by a strategist/client directore to serve as a guideline for the creative process. There are literally hundreds of these templates out there. Some are good and some are bad.

In fact, most creative briefs circulating in agencies nowadays are pretty old school. That’s not surprising. Most agencies are pretty old school in the first place, secondly all too often the briefing context is the key problem and not the template. Finally, the ownership over the document is frequently not shared among the different stakeholders. Stupid process that is.

Jasmin Cheng has pulled together quite a nice deck that collects a lot of thoughts about this problem.

The presentation. When Function follows Form.

August 6th, 2010 • View Comments Social, Tools
Tags: Funny, Presentation, Social Business Design, Strategy, Truth

The greatest sin in marketing is when function follows form. In fact this is more the rule than the exception – also in social. Like the comic. Thanks to Conversation Agent.

Great Tools. What the Fuck is my Social Media Strategy?

August 2nd, 2010 • View Comments Tools
Tags: Business, Buzzwords, Diy, Funny, Presentation, Social Media, Strategy, Tools, Truth, World

Thanks Sean. My colleague pointed me to the wonderful What-the-fuck-is-my-social-media-strategy-generator that generates pretty realistic buzzword creations ready to be used in your next deck. It’s like the web bullshit generator…only closer to what we call reality. I think I can go home now, can I?

Study. The 8 success Criteria for Facebook Page Marketing.

Juli 28th, 2010 • View Comments Reports, Social, Strategy
Tags: Altimeter, Best Practice, Brands, Cases, Facebook, Reports, Social Influence Marketing, Strategy

Altimeter Group has just staged a new report that wants to define ‘The 8 success Criteria for Facebook Page Marketing‘. Seriously – the report is not a revolution. Nevertheless it works with quite an interesting empirical model. And I like the conclusion and case studies in the end.

The report ‘gleaned input from 34 vendors, agencies, and experts, to determine success criteria and develop a roadmap for Facebook page best practices‘. And about half of the reviewed brands did not do too well in activating full scale Word of Mouth. Take a look at Altimeter’s report. I am happy to hear what you pull out of it.

Brew Dog. The World’s Strongest Beers now also served in Dead Squirrels.

Juli 26th, 2010 • View Comments Brands, Business, Experimental, Social Business
Tags: Beer, Brew Dog, Cool, Creativity, ecommerce, Experimental, Funny, Ideas, Long Tail, Strategy, visual, We like, World

If there is one thing that I like about e-commerce it is the beauty of the long tail. You know what I am talking about – bizarre niche products and, sometimes, even more bizarre ways to market them.

Talking about bizarre…

Get to know Brew Dog, a brewery from North-East scotland. What the scots do is simply to c

reate some of the strongest beers on earth. Being sold under names such as ‘Tactical Nuclear Penguin‘ or ‘Sink the Bismarck‘ we are talking about beer with 32% – 50% ABV!!! That’s more than most vodkas have.

And long tail is what Brew Dog is all about

Beer was never meant to be bland, tasteless and apathetic. (…) We are proud to be an intrepid David in a desperate ocean of insipid Goliaths.

As a German I particularly like their little personal war with my Fatherland. I think not one product was named ‘Sink the Bismarck‘ since 1941. But hey, in Brew Dog’s case it’s absolutely alright. I mean they serve their beer in squirrels. That’s just genius!

Check out Brew Dog’s products, read their blog and buy their dead squirrel beer. They deserved it.

And here is the brilliant new video of the guys, announcing the strongest beer on earth, called ‘The End of history‘ which weighs about 55% ABV (OMFG)!!!

I am a fan. And here is the clip…

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google Me. Or: How I stopped worrying and learned to love Privacy.

Juli 12th, 2010 • View Comments Business, Social, Strategy
Tags: Business, Facebook, google, google me, Prediction, Presentation, privacy, Reports, Social Networks, Strategy, World

Most of you may have heard about the so called Facebook killer ‘Google Me‘ that supposedly binds half of google’s resources currently. And as most of you know, google has not exactly been successful with social networking by now. Especially after google Buzz also failed as a platform that is able to compete with Facebook. google knows they need to get their hands on social. Why? Steve Rubel explains it quite well…

google will ‘continue to dominate “pull.” But Facebook will aggregate content, make it social and rule “push.” Using our social circle it will surface content that we care about just when we want it – and allow us to comment on it all. As more people use Facebook to connect, share and create, a network effect takes over – and the system get even smarter.’ And that is exactly what google needs to do to stay alive in the long term.

No matter how successful Facebook is with its social strategy – they need to conquer Planet Push asap or become Facebook’s junior partner. In the middle of all the buzz about google Me we have to read the deck embedded below as a first rationale for google’s new platform – not as the ‘designing social networks’ deck that it wants to be. It was created by one of google’s lead User Experience architects Paul Adams and it criticizes Facebook existing social networks and the way they make people interact with a clear focus on privacy. What a surprise!

Even beyond the google Me hype – definitely a deck worth to take a look at (even though it is looooong).

Big question: Do you think google might make it this time? Do you believe privacy will be an USP strong enough to differentiate google Me from Facebook? Leave a reply.

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