After 5 months of internal debate and strategy sessions, the top branding experts from NBC and News Corp are proud to present their alternative to youtube: Hulu.
“Objectively, Hulu is short, easy to spell, easy to pronounce, and rhymes with itself,” says CEO Jason Kilar.
Personally, I’m not sure this is going to be a huge success, but time will tell.
How Saturn has fallen. Laura Ries has an interesting post about the rise and fall of Saturn from the automobile ranks. Read more about it here.
Heineken is about to soft launch a sparkling cider brew for the women called Charli. It will be released in Amsterdam for a test run. Read more about it here.
I’ve been using sportsline consistently in the past for fantasy leagues and as an alternative to ESPN, and have always wondered why CBS never properly utilized this asset. It is clearly the #2 online sports property (still miles behind ESPN though) and CBS seemed reluctant to take any credit for ownership. That is until now. Read more about how Sportsline.com has been rebranded cbssports.com.
Ford CEO Alan Mulally has stated that he wants to revive the ‘Have you driven a ford lately’ tag line as part of a new branding and marketing campaign. He believes that car names are changing too often and right when consumers begin to connect with a certain type of car they change the name and lose any brand equity that had been established. You can read more about it here.
Intel announced yesterday that they are rebranding a portion of their product offering. As of January 1st, 2008, Core 2 Duo and Core 2 Quad will be no longer. Check out the full story here.
According to Santa Monica, Calif.-based Mediadefender, P2P file sharing networks have been successfully utilitzed for branding purposes. Read more about it here.
Wal-mart marketing to the more affluent population? Samsonite making a play in the high-end luxury goods market? What the heck is going on here?
Jennifer Rice has an interesting post today on her blog asking how far can a brand stretch and still be effective. It will be interesting to see how successful Samsonite competes with the likes of Burberry and Coach. Good luck!
Came across an interesting Powerpoint presentation this afternoon which was a brief history of branding. Oddly enough, the title of the presentation was ‘brief history of branding.’ Plenty of information regarding when branding really took off and some of the first recognizable brands. The wikipedia article also has plenty of quality information about the topic.
Quite a few good posts recently (last week and a half or so) I found worthwhile that I thought I’d mention:
Laura Ries wrote about Tiger Woods and his shrinking endorsement portfolio due to Tiger not being able to relate to brand’s target markets. Poor Tiger. Somebody get that man some food stamps!
Rob Frankel had an interesting post about how CEO’s get paid to fail and it’s happening right now at Chrysler.
Martin Lindstrom over at Branding Strategy Insider had an interesting experience at the supermarket where he was persuaded to buy a certain brand of toothpaste.
John Bell from Digital Influence Mapping Project found it interesting that brands are creating their own social networks.
That’s all folks. We’ll be back Monday with some more news, thoughts, and insights. Have a good weekend.
Fixing Wikipedia entries in your favor? Read this article Diebold, Disney, Many Others Caught Editing Wikipedia Entries In Their Favor
This will probably come as a surprise to absolutely no one, but a new Wikipedia scanner service is matching the IP address of Wikipedia edits to the organizations the IPs are associated with — and it’s turning up some interesting matches. For example, there’s the person coming from a Diebold IP who deleted paragraphs and paragraphs of Wikipedia content that highlighted Diebold’s ongoing security problems. Then there’s the Disney employee who tried to pull a link to Cory Doctorow’s speech on why DRM is bad for business from the DRM entry.
What are the most popular online brands? Check it out here.
In-game advertising is hardly a new phenomenon, but according to a new study commissioned by in-game ad firm Massive Inc. it is becoming one of the most effective branding mediums.
“The study, conducted by Nielsen Entertainment, found that across four prominent ad categories (automotive, consumer packaged goods, fast food and technology) brand familiarity increased by 64 percent among users who had been exposed to ads served into live games by Massive, which is owned by Microsoft.”
Given the untapped potential of the market (2005 spending was $56 million according to Massive, and they predict it could reach $2 billion by 2012), it was no surprise to see major players quickly snap up in-game ad firms. Microsoft struck first in May 2006 when they acquired the aforementioned Massive Inc., and Google followed this past February with the purchase of Adscape Media for $24 million.
In-game ad spend will likely take off once publishers are able to provide advertisers quantifiable data regarding who’s playing the games in which ad inventory is available. This will allow advertisers to target their ads more efficiently and accurately measure the success of their campaigns. Steps are currently being taken to provide this data, as Sony and Nielsen media have recently teamed up to develop standard metrics to better segment the market. You can read more in depth about the process here.
This is another great opportunity for marketers to allow users to interact with their brands. Framing your brand/product as a solution to the in-game characters problem could be one of many creative ways for brands to get positive exposure. Imagine if a Papa Johns box was a power-up, or finding a new pair of Nike’s made you run faster, jump higher, etc.
This is also a chance for brands to alienate potential customers by placing their ads in areas where they are not relevant or interfere with game play. Because gamers spend an average of 47 hours (as of 2006) per title, there’s plenty of opportunity for brands to create evangelists or enemies. Hopefully the industry can police itself and make sure the ads are not obtrusive. If games were available for free, there would be much more tolerance for spammy ads. But as long as most new titles cost in excess of $50, publishers and advertisers need to make sure that in-game ads add (no pun intended) to the game, not make it worse.
Everything you wanted to know about brands but were afraid to ask!! Check out the sixteen things that you must do to create a winning brand in this article from Branding Strategy Insider. They guarantee that if you follow these sixteen concepts your brand will succeed in the marketplace!
Investment information
Investments sites for venture capital includes Berkeley International Capital Corporation.
Product branding rather than taste influences kids eating behavior! This is the finding of new research by researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine and Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital. Thomas Robinson, MD, director of the Center for Healthy Weight at Packard Children’s Hospital and associate professor of pediatrics and of medicine at the School of Medicine stated that the findings show that kids actually believe that a branded product such as McDonald’s chicken nugget tastes better than an identical unbranded one.
Robinson highlighted the fact that manufacturers play on the fact that young children are unable to decipher marketing strategies, and do not have the know-how to understand that advertising, product placement and co-branding with popular toys is designed to get them to choose one product over another.
The research goes on to draw a correlation between affected children and the number of TVs in a home. And although there has been a decrease in TV food advertisements (McDonalds spends $1B per year), these are now being more directly targeted to children’s television programming. However McDonald’s and nine other top food companies announced the ‘Children’s Food and Beverage Advertising Initiative’ where they have pledged their loyalty to devoting half their advertising towards the promotion of healthy foods for kids.
Hmm I read this after reading another interesting article on Jason Calacanis’s blog relating to weight control. He states:
Finally, you have to realize that society has stacked the deck against you. It’s helpful to look at the issue as if you’re at war with the world. Everything in our society is designed to make you fat–that’s the truth. Major companies don’t care about you or your health, they care about your money. When I walk through the airport I look at the stores in the terminal as a bunch of drug dealers trying to get your hooked, because that’s the truth. Fast food companies are trying to screw you, entertainment companies want you sitting in your chair consuming their entertainment for hours while you eat their sponsors food. It’s a war and you are out-gunned–big time. You have to walk like the master in Kung Fu and not let these folks impact you. Our whole society is designed to get you fat and you have to optout of it. You have to leave that world behind and create your own world. You have to bring your own food with you, you have to create your own pace, and you have to get off your fat butt and walk. They want you to take the people mover and the escalator, you have to take the stairs. They want you to supersize you have downsize. They want you watching the Law & Order marathon and ordering PizzaHut, you have to get on the treadmill.
For those of us with kids it looks like we are faced with an ever increasing, uphill battle to help develop healthy eating habits and proper nutrition.
Wikipedia can be a useful online branding tool. From my experience problems can arise when competitors or others with malicious intent change or add to the listing material. If this happens there are steps you can take.
Those who feel they have been the victim of malicious vandalism aren’t helpless, there are numerous ways to go about fixing the problem. The obvious answer is edit the entry yourself, but that can be, potentially, problematic, as it can get you flamed by users or land you in an edit war.
This article gives you 7 steps to manage your Wikipedia reputation.
Whats involved in online branding? How do you create, implement and handle it? Digital Axle discusses this in ‘a lesson in online branding.‘ The key issue is how do you measure it?