Idiot box gets smarter

Targeted ads are all set to hit the television. Not in India, not just yet, but in the US.

Six of the largest cable operators in the US have jointly launched a startup that will use customer data to beam targeted ads.

“The vision is to put dog food ads only in front of customers who have dogs and to give people the ability to push a button on their remotes and order a coupon or a brochure, or buy a product,” says the CEO of the new venture.

Red Herring has the details.

Hip, Innovative, Madonna, Airline, Atlantic...

Apparently these are some of the words that are most associated with the brand Virgin.

An online project by Noah Brier tries to capture brand perception by having people like you and me tag brands with words/phrases that pop up in our heads when we hear the brandname.

Some of the things you can do on the site are:

• View the words/phrases that people have associated with popular brands


• Tag brands with your word/phrase association


• Guess the brand by looking at its tags
  

Go, have some fun at Brand Tags.

Make big promises; overdeliver

"If you can define great marketing in fewer words than that, you win," says Seth Godin.

This is something we Marcom professionals struggle with almost every day. If there is some obvious promise in a product/service, we shout it out from the rooftops. We often end up highlighting the shiny parts of the promise, cleverly 'hiding' the jagged edges using asterisks, fineprint or some such. The result is dangerous--trusting customers turn into cynics, love turns into mistrust and topline turns southward.

Marketeers often think of their roles as getting the customers to the purchase point and nothing beyond. "Our job is to get the horse to the water but we cannot make it drink." The fact is if the horse doesn't drink, everybody will perish.

Real marketing is all about telling believable but remarkable stories and then delivering an experience that takes the story to a new realm of believability. Easier said than done, or as Seth Godin puts it, "Just because it's only four words doesn't mean it's easy!"

Packaging with a twist

Can you guess what these are? Find out here.

[Pic source: TheDieline.com]

Hitting the nail on the headline

My last post was about headlines gone awry. This one is about a headline that hits the nail on the head.

Full-bodied headlines

Headlines like this are proof that we often know what to say but don't know how to say it. "How do you always know when I'll need the supplies?" would have been much easier to process.

Here's a grab from the homepage of the same company. Three font colours, two font sizes and two pairs of quote-marks in the headline just to make the immensely complex sentence at least look processable!!!

Tom Peters doesn't click

...on banner ads.