Category: Advertising

When You’ve Got a Kitten Wearing a Tiny Hat…

… it may be appropriate to suspend the normal rules of effective advertising. But ultimately, some heartless, cruel advertising blogger will risk the anger of an entire nation to point out that this Lake Street Creamery ad would have been a better selling tool with an offer at the end.

There, I said it.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AMnpWYaCKB0]

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Google Adwords as Job-Hunting Tool

With a son about to graduate from college, I find myself reading articles on job-hunting that I might have otherwise skipped. CNN.com reports on  copywriter Alec Brownstein, who tapped into the power of Google Adwords:

While Googling some of his favorite creative directors, he came up with a brilliant self-marketing campaign.After noticing there were no sponsored links attached to their names, he purchased ads from Google AdWords. Then he designed a personalized ad for each executive with a link back to Brownstein’s own site.

Whenever anyone Googled one of the five names, his ad would pop up as the top result. He was counting on them doing what we all do from time to time: Googling ourselves. And guess what? That’s exactly what happened.

Advertising, Claude Hopkins once wrote, is selling in print. Brownstein, who had copywriting talents to sell, identified his target and figured out a way to cut through the clutter of resumes and human resources departments — delivering  his sales message directly to his prospects. Did it work?

Within a couple of months, Brownstein was interviewed by all but one. Two of the four offered him a job. The total cost of the entire campaign at 15 cents a click –a mere $6 to make a dream come true.

The full CNN article also profiles a woman who used Twitter to land a PR gig, and a guy who found a job at Amazon via Second Life.

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“P” is for “Pantene”. And for “Pointless”.

An absolute trainwreck of a live commercial on “The Biggest Loser”.

I honestly don’t have any idea what they were hoping to accomplish with this. If the object was to sell product, or create interest in said product, they have failed miserably.

Thank you (I guess) to Kailee Kinney of 1190 KEX Radio for bringing this to my attention.

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The Keyword — The Gift That Keeps On Giving

I’m no longer selling radio advertising in Portland — I moved into a new role as a nationwide advertising and marketing consultant with Jim Doyle & Associates about six months ago.

So it was with a bit of surprise that the term “KXL list of advertisers” appeared in my blog’s keyword list today. From that list, I knew that someone had entered the term “KXL list of advertisers” into a search engine, and wound up on Portland’s Finest Advertising Blog.

So I duplicated the exercise in Google to see what the reader may have found. Turns out that I had mentioned 750 KXL — a news/talk competitor of my former employer 1190 KEX — in a couple of posts.

In 2008.

Two years later, those posts are still bringing me a little bit of traffic.

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Social Media as Time Suck: Godin and Pastis Nail It

Pearls Before Swine

For about a year — from mid-2008 through about mid-2009 — I made a concerted effort to use social media to boost my online presence. I tended to my profile on LinkedIn, and participated in its “Answers” forum. I added a Facebook Fan Page. Put up a profile on Biznik. Tweeted regularly. And, of course, blogged several times a week.

My hope was that with a more robust online presence, potential clients would find me, learn about me, enter into a dialog with me, and spend money with me.

What I didn’t count on was all the easy time-wasting that went along with it — checking my blog stats, following links on Twitter, answering tweets. It was fun, but it was also a great way to feel like I was working when I was doing anything but.

Also, as near as I could tell, I didn’t make a dime on any of it.

In the past couple of weeks, I’ve encountered a couple of interesting takes on the phenomenon. Stephan Pastis’ “Pearls Before Swine” (above) and the passage below from Seth Godin‘s new book, Linchpin.

If you sat at work watching Hawaii 5-o reruns, you’d probably lose your job. But it’s apparently fine to tweak and update your Facebook status account for an hour. That’s “connecting to your social graph.”

Don’t even get me started on Twitter. There are certainly people who are using it effectively and productively. Some people (a few) are finding that it helps them do the work. But the rest? It’s perfect resistance, because it’s never done. There’s always another tweet to be read and responded to. Which, of course, keeps you from doing the work.

At the beginning of the year, I dropped just about all of it.

I’m now slowly dipping my toe back in the water, for one simple reason:  on some gut level, I believe Bill Gates would write me a large check if only he knew who Phil Bernstein was, and I need to give him an opportunity to find me.

I’m still going to ignore Twitter (this blog goes there automatically), but the blog is now back two or three times a week, I’ll answer the occasional question on LinkedIn, post an occasional link on my Facebook Fan Page, and declare victory.

What say you? Is social media really generating a measurable return for you? Or is it just a giant time suck?

Post your comments below.

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Got a question? Wanna argue? Email Phil Bernstein here.

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