Tag: marketing

To everyone who has been delightedly posting about “Snakes On A Plane” for months now

This is the most successful “viral” marketing campaign since The Blair Witch Project. You bought the “internet rumor.” You bought the “they wanted to change it but Samuel L. Jackson insisted on the title.” You made your own media and distributed it. You posted about it on the Internet over and over and over.

Because you’ll enjoy anything with a detached sense of superiority, you made yourselves part of the strategy. Because black people saying “motherfucker” is funny, and because cheesy horror movies that scare people inferior to you are funny, and because you’ve been neotenized by pop culture irony into being perpetually 12 years old, you got trolled into the street team for a midnight movie and made some Chads and Brads and Thads in shiny shirts very, very, rich.

You deserve the decoder ring, the glow-in-the-dark badge, and the build-it-yourself clubhouse now. You ate all four hundred boxes of Froot Loops.

Homage to springheel_jack for the phrase “consumer Stockholm Syndrome,” which describes this phenomenon perfectly.

GONE VIRAL IN THE WILD FRONTIER OF YOUTH ORIENTED ONLINE MARKETING

Here is a paragraph from TechCrunch today:

Sprout Commerce, the company behind MyPickList, has launched a new product today, called FavoriteThingz. A widget for social networking sites like MySpace, FavoriteThingz lets users identify their favorite bands, movies and other branded products and display those brands in a nice looking slideshow. Their readers can click through to purchase the same goods and affiliate revenue is split between FavoriteThingz and widget publishers.

You can’t say that paragraph without your soul leaving your body, so I don’t recommend reading it aloud. I’m sure glad that I will be allowed to display my favorite branded products and split the revenue with someone for displaying my favorite branded products on branded websites with co-branding.

Here is the second paragraph of that article:

After identifying a product category, users select between hundreds of bands, for example, with press photos to display and affiliate revenue percentage listed next to each. Widgets can be customized a bit, which is liable to be appealing. Press photos can also be replaced by any image you chose – which seems like a branding disaster waiting to happen.

Oh it sure does. Wait until the Somethingawful Goons get hold of that. Goatse always wins, and half the Internet is going to end up joining the Lemon Party. I am glad, though, that I’ll be able to choose from musical artists by affiliate revenue percentage just like the big record companies do, instead of just doing something stupid and Web 1.0 like listening to music I like.

I’m going to skip a paragraph here and go right to the end:

Will this type of service take off? Sprout Commerce and many other people think that social commerce is set to be big in the future, not because of the affiliate revenue it generates for users but because of the existential opportunity to associate ourselves with brands. Sounds pretty vapid to me, but if brand association is an important part of being a teenager then FavoriteThingz could be a winner at monetizing it.

This service is easy to use and the widget can look quite nice. Its success will probably come down to marketing. Who can guess what will go viral in the wild frontier of youth oriented online social networking?

I already have a lot of existential opportunities. I can, for example, die. Also I can reinvent myself consciously in every moment in a world without a priori meaning, without God, without others. But in the end, as Kierkegaard and Camus both said, it comes down to marketing.

The last sentence of the article is also, of course, the last sentence in Beckett’s Happy End. Or at least it should be.

Marketing, Part III: Run over by “Cars”

The promoters of the movie Cars have rented the entire automotive journalism establishment for a month. It’s amazing. Every car magazine, tv show, web site, blog-where-people-are-paid, everything is simultaneously doing “stories” relating to that movie.

I realized things were headed this way in publishing some time in the 1980s when I walked by the big newsstand on Cahuenga in Hollywood and saw the same actress’s face literally 15 in a row, 15 different magazines, all the same month, promoting the same star of the same movie.

In artillery, a “time on target” is a technique in which different batteries at different locations and distances from a target time each of their firings so that all of the shells arrive in the same place at the same time, multiplying their effect with terrifying simultaneity from all directions.

The marketers have us bracketed and they are firing for effect. Help!

More Marketing Prose! DNA

This stuff is on the Extinct Beverages page, so I guess it’s gone. It was water, with a little fruit flavoring, and 5% alcohol. Yeah. Its marketing website lives on, and says:

DNA: It’s Water with an Attitude! The world’s one and only alcoholic spring water.

I AM DNA

A refreshing combination of clear spring water, natural fruit flavor, with an alcohol level of 5%.

DRINK THIS

DNA explodes onto the beverage market. The wild child of alcoholic drinks will hijack your imagination. You don’t have to understand it. Just get on the ride.

BIG OPPORTUNITY

DNA launches its asault on North America in Spring of 2000. Alternative alcohol products have been the rage of lifestyle cities around the world. Thrill seekers and tastemakers in your market are eager to try DNA. It’s an “Australian original.” Go for it…with a vengeance!

I AM SERIOUS

The combined strengths of Wet Planet Beverage and Canadaigua Brands, Inc. will lead DNA among market movers and shakers. DNA will be pumpin’ with bar & club sampling programs along with consumer promotions. A mega-cool press campaign is sure to prompt word-of-mouth and great demand!

Please adjust your dogs

According to the Los Angeles Times, chihuahuas are out and pugs are in for the tiny-dog-carrying set.

Those of you who were raising hundreds of chihuahuas in hydroponic tanks in your closets have just found yourselves at the top of the market; sorry about that. If you’re lucky, you can unload the li’l barkers to clueless social climbers in the Inland Empire before they get the message.

Otherwise, it’s chili night!