I came across an article about creative traditional advertising in AdWeek over the weekend that I thought was great. Author Katy Bachman shed light some much needed light on the groundbreaking advertising the L.A. Times debuted last Friday, in which they took the “homepage takeover” concept from web and adapted it to print.

Created to coincide with the launch of  Disney’s Alice in Wonderland, the front page of the L.A. Time’s Friday’s edition was dominated by Johnny Depp’s Mad Hatter character in 3-D.

According to Katy, this is the first time a major newspaper has run this type of ad unit. Executive Vice President and Chief Revenue Officer of the L.A. Times, John O’Loughlin, explains the move as an ‘unusual opportunity to stretch traditional boundaries and deliver innovative ad unit designed to create buzz and further extend the film’s brilliant marketing campaign’.

Though this is the first time we’ve seen a newspaper take this direction, it’s certainly will not be the last. What makes this so cool, is that for a while now, Ad agenceis have been adapting traditional advertising concepts to the online world. Now, for the first time, we are seeing the reverse take place. With the LA Times “homepage takeover” they applied the online concept of re-skinning a page and made it work in print. This is a bold step for the print advertising world that will allow them to stay relevant in these changing times. Kudos the the LA times for getting creative.

What do you think? Will we be seeing more of this in the near future?

Remember when the Academy was against social media and forced YouTube to pull thousands of clips from the awards show in 2007? Well, guess what? The Academy is finally getting with the times and embracing social media for the Oscars.

In 2008, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences created its own YouTube Channel offering behind the scenes footage, interviews, highlights and more. So, did this help? Well according to an article in AdAge, last year’s Oscars was the among the lowest-rated broadcast in its televised history. Ouch.

One reason this might have failed is because social media is about  strategy, and not just the tools.  Anyone can throw up a Facebook Page, YoubTube Channel or Twitter handle, but without a strategy tying these to a traditional marketing campaign, you’re likely set up for failure.

Third time’s a charm, right? The Academy is back with a new social media strategy for the 2010 Oscars. A Facebook Page for the Oscars was created with shiny features like a live stream and a chat on which they streamed the nominees. Taking note of the fact that people love to guess who will take home golden statues that evening, the Academy released an iPhone app allowing fans to make their own predictions to compare against other fans.

Is this a recipe for success? We’ll find out soon enough.

If you turned on a television, radio, or computer this morning you probably noticed that Tiger Woods was making  his highly anticipated first public statement since, well, all chaos broke out in his personal life and his reputation was tarnished – majorly.  This very public first appearance was calculated, thought out, and had specific goals, but was Tiger successful?

His thorough apology to just about everyone was expected, but the task for him was to do more than just read an apology. He needed to start winning fans back. While, yes, his family is more important and he did talk about them, they weren’t who he was speaking to today and he doesn’t need a live CNN feed to reach them. Given the severity of his actions and the length of time that has elapsed since Thanksgiving, he wasn’t going to convince everyone that he is really, truly sorry and that he’s definitely on the road to recovery in 14 minutes. Very similar to regaining trust, today needed to be the start to a long road of recovery. In order for Tiger to successfully start winning people back he needed to:

- Not say anything anyone could question

- Show emotion that people could sympathize with

- Give enough information about the past so people can start forgetting about it

- Make concrete statements about the future

Was Tiger successful in beginning to regain some respectability? I think so. He touched on and apologized to every group of people that would care: fans, his foundation, children, etc. He spoke emotionally about his family and gave concrete examples of how this has impacted their lives. He took complete

responsibility for his actions and provided insight into why they happened. He also talked about the future and what he thinks will lead to change.

Was Tiger sincere? Is he really going to “regain his balance and be centered?” Only time will tell.

The past few years, we’ve seen an increase in companies that haven’t necessarily been known for their eco-friendly ways jumping on the green bandwagon.  While some may call this greenwashing, is it really such a bad thing?

During the Super Bowl, Audi released their new “eco-themed” commercial featuring their latest car (and winner of Green Car Journal’s “Green Car of the Year”), A3 TDI.  The ad follows a squad of “Green Police” that obsessively seek out and arrest regular Joes for their environmental ignorance.  My personal fave is the scantily-clad gentleman running away from a SWAT team-sized crew of green police chasing him down for having the hot tub temperature too high.  The commercial is timely, humorous, and informative in its own way.  However, there are mixed feelings about the ad, as seen in the comments of this popular green blog, Ecorazzi.  So, what are the issues?

1)  Is it greenwashing?  While A3 TDI sets itself apart from other Audi vehicles by being more eco-friendly, Audi is not adjusting its branding to fit this one product.  It can be a step in the right direction for the luxury car industry, raising the bar when it comes to responsibility, and raising awareness about simple changes that can be made in daily life.

2)  Is it demeaning to green-enthusiasts?  While this is an extreme case of environmentalism and it may seem to poke fun at die-hard eco-savers, the ad also offers comic relief when a lot of other brands may take a more “shame-on-you” approach to environmental education.

3)  Is this A3 TDI REALLY green?  As consumers, we all want options.  Whether or not a Hybrid car is the greener alternative, Audi is opening the door to competitors, which means companies will begin working harder to decrease their carbon footprints.  And marketers will get a lesson in sustainable marketing.

So, do we applaud this large-name brand that’s spreading the eco-friendly message or do we disregard them because we would have chosen an alternative way to get the message across?  Please share your thoughts/feelings on greenwashing in the comments.

Last February, two unemployed brothers from Illinois made an amateur Doritos TV commercial and scored the top spot in USA Today’s Super Bowl 2009 Ad Meter.

Last Sunday, as the culmination of their Crash the Super Bowl contest, Doritos aired four more consumer-generated spots. “Casket”, which features a man pretending to be dead so that he could be buried with a casket full of chips. “House Rules”, where a little boy puts the smack down on his mother’s date. “Snack Attack Samurai”, that shows what happens when you steal a bag from a Doritos’ fanatic. And “Underdog”, the spot below, where a dog has its proverbial day at the expense of a man who refuses to share his bounty.

After the results of this year’s Super Bowl Ad Meter were tallied, the Betty White Snickers spot came in first. “Underdog” second. However, Joshua Svoboda, was awarded a $600,000 prize for his efforts (per contest rules). Not bad considering his commercial only took $200 to make.

Predictably, articles were written saying that ad agencies should be afraid. There were those who suggested that the everyday Joe (or Jane) with a camcorder, computer and idea could produce a TV spot that’s just as effective as one made by the traditional Madison Avenue agency. Along with that argument is that brands would be able to save marketing dollars if they choose to run with amateur productions.

But here’s the truth about consumer-generated ads- those amateurs aren’t always amateurs. Turns out Joshua is actually a creative director of sorts. And in an article looking back at past winners of consumer-generated advertising contests, it appears that a fair number have ties to the industry. Apparently, creative professionals are consumers too. (Heck, two of us here at B.G. put together a :12 TV spot for Mountain Dew.)

A few years ago, the New York Times reported that free ads still come with a high price tag. Agencies and brand marketers spend months planning their consumer-generated contests- hiring lawyers to vet them and designing advertisements to promote them. People then have to spend countless hours wading through entries.

Whether or not they are truly effective may still be up for debate. But one thing that can be said in favor of consumer-generated ads is that agencies and brands get sent a ton of new ideas. And as long as those ideas may potentially be made real, we’ll keep our camcorders ready… and the idea fountain flowing.

There has been huge craziness in the San Diego radio industry lately, and I continue to be asked by our advertising clients and others exactly what this means in the marketing landscape. To each I answer, “I wish I knew.” But in reality, I can make a few predictions.

First of all, what the hell happened?

• It began in August, when San Diego beloved radio icons Jeff & Jer were suddenly off the air due to contract disputes with Clear Channel Radio, their station’s owner.  Clear Channel had been on a hell-bent buying frenzy, snapping up radio stations across the country and many in the San Diego market – all with investment capital they had over-leveraged.  (You know, those silly banks were lending tons of money to just about anybody with a business plan a few short years ago.)  When markets started tightening, so did Clear Channel, and they no longer wanted to pay for higher salary morning teams – regardless of their success or following.  Jeff & Jer were out, and Clear Channel shifted a less expensive, less experienced morning team to their former station and time slot. Thus, AJ in the Morning is the winner of that game of musical chairs.

• Around the same time, Monique & The Man on Jack FM was cut down to just the lovely and talented Monique Marvez. Evidently having The Man involved was too expensive for ownership at KFMB.  Then in a very odd move, station management decided to reduce Monique’s live on-air time slot to just 5 – 5:30 am, playing music the rest of the time.  And just recently, she is off the air altogether and her contract is not being renewed.  Ratings at Jack FM continue to plummet in her absence.

• In another Clear Channel debacle, radio icons Dave, Shelly & Chainsaw on KGB suddenly got the ax as well.  Again, those pesky contract negotiations were listed as the culprit, and once again it was really because Clear Channel could not swallow the show’s high salaries. DSC fans staged protests they were so upset and angered.

• Then The Mikey Show on Rock 105.3 was suddenly absent (again Clear Channel  – seeing a pattern?) and fans lamented yet another loss of morning show talent.  Mikey is the only one to have cut a new deal, showing up for mornings now at FM 94.9.

This whole mess has left audiences reeling, radio dials spinning, and listeners not clear on where to listen – or why.  What’s more, it’s left the advertising industry in a bit of a quandry.  Rating points that were already a bit sketchy (see my previous blog spot on Arbitron ratings) are now completely unproven and unreliable.  Advertisers that have been buying radio based purely on ratings points can no longer trust that process.  Long time advertisers that were buying ad libs from proven on-air talent – these are spots recorded or spoken live by the deejay to endorse a particular product – can no longer have access to those familiar voices.  These were enormously popular – when Monique Marvez spoke about her personal experience in buying a Sleep Train mattress, her listeners would take that endorsement to heart.

Advertisers are left trying to figure out how to spend their radio budgets, or if they even should. So then, what now?

Truth is, radio has been – and will continue to be – an important part of the advertising mix.  Its immediacy and frequency allow an advertiser to reach their audiences with a message aimed at getting consumers to take action – right now.  With most radio listening taking place in the car, the assumption is that people are captive audiences.  And in the case of morning shows, audiences are accustomed to being entertained by personalities beyond just playing music.

Sure, the face of radio advertising has changed. It’s not as lucrative as it once was, and there is competition from digital radio like Pandora, iTunes, satellite radio like Sirius and many other sources.  Yet, none of those provide the familiarity, the down-home comfort and the city-centric knowledge and access that local radio can provide.

This too shall pass.  These radio personalities will find new homes where they can broadcast their morning shticks.  Radio stations will find new owners that will invest what they can in perhaps a new model for radio that is both profitable AND entertaining.  And consumers will play spin the dial until they land on a few new choices, perhaps hearing some familiar old friends.

There will always be a need for the Jeff & Jers of the world, because we want to be entertained.  Even more important than that, these iconic morning teams have provided a common thread for our greater community that few other outlets can even come close to.  The familiarity of their voices, their jokes and their laser-sharp knowledge of San Diego represent a shared touchpoint for our city.

And that is worth money.  The question is, how much?

This week AdAge published a story announcing that CBS interactive is dumping ad networks. In the article, AdAge recaps the longstanding debate on whether or not Advertising networks are good for publishers.

What I’ve come to understand is that it’s a fair-weather situation. When publishers have large media buyers knocking down their doors, publishers don’t need ad networks to fill the rest of the space.

A good example of this from my recent experience has been with national military sites. Because the military receives full rate card for run of site from the Government, I can’t purchase ad space in just the San Diego market. In fact, on one phone call to a military site I won’t name, I spent half an hour describing what I wanted and when the rep finally understood, I heard a chuckle on the other end.

The same thing applies for large publishers. If big advertisers are buying out their space, why deal with the headache, and paperwork of ad networks who slice up their inventory into a million different pieces, all for less money?

So, now that the economy is turning the corner, CBS and other sites with the power of over 60 million unique visitors per month can go back to their old ways when things were simple and advertisers paid big money for the space.

As a boutique agency with smaller clients, we rely on ad networks on a number of levels. Using an ad network allows us to:

• Be very targeted by using the ad network’s established filters (i.e. I want to reach females over the age of 35 with annual household income > $100,000).
• Appear on large, credible sites, which allows our brands to appear larger by association.
• Deal with one contact, one contract and deliver one suite of creative to appear on thousands of sites in front of our target market.

In short, it’s incredibly smart and efficient for us.

So, if CBS has set a tone that will carry through to other large publishers, I’m worried about my ability to get my clients optimal exposure without spending profuse amounts of time (and money) strategizing, coordinating and adapting creative.

With that said, I see one positive result of publishers taking their interactive ad programs in house. This time around, they have mined their own site(s) for information on their users to offer more sophisticated ad programs. They act as their own mini-network. So for those advertisers who have the time and money, you can look forward to a more effective spend.

As a Board Member and Treasurer of the San Diego AdClub, I’m proud when our industry gathers together to give back and do something good in the community.  Sometimes us folks in marketing and advertising get a bad rap for being brown-nosing yes men and women; shills for any product willing to pay us; shameless whores of creativity.  But not us at Bailey Gardiner — and not the fine folks at the San Diego AdClub.

The AdClub’s new Reach2 Program is a Media Assistance Program for San Diego non-profits, designed to help organizations achieve more from their advertising programs than they could have gotten on their own.  Simply put, AdClub will adopt a few select non-profit groups as partners, helping them to expand their media presence exponentially by using our resources on their behalf.

Using the selected non-profit’s media budget, AdClub will work with major media companies in San Diego to gather donated media space in the form of print, television, radio, online and other forms of advertising.  AdClub’s commitment is that they will deliver substantially more — double or perhaps triple the value in media exposure.  It’s a pretty innovative partnership opportunity, and a win/win for all involved.

For more details or to receive an RFP as a qualifying non-profit, contact San Diego AdClub at 619.255.2281 or view the specifics on the Reach2 Program here.

So who says ad people are just a bunch of mercenaries, anyway?

It is safe to say that when we saw the Google Wave Developer Preview last June, our jaws were on the floor. So when I received my invite on October 5th, there is no doubt that I was biting at the bit to start Waving with my internet marketing buddies. I do not have to tell you that Google Wave is in its most infantile of stages, but here is my first review, as it will be nice to look back with our grandkids and say, “Ahh young lad, I remember when Wave didn’t even have email federation!”

As an introduction, it might be beneficial to know what Google Wave actually is, if that is possible. If we look into the echo chamber blogosphere, we could gather that ‘Google Wave is the future of communication’ and that ‘It is real-time web fully realized.’ However, I think it would be best to point you to a definitive source, Google’s What is Wave page for the answers.

With that said, here’s my impressions on Google Wave and its effect on the future of internet marketing.

There is definitely a learning curve. It is not by chance that my first Wave was titled “Okay, how do we do this?”  It doesn’t seem to be a particularly intuitive program, especially in regards to search functionality. Users must type in cryptic notations to search through waves, such as “onlywith:name” or “is:unfiled.” Luckily, they have provided us with this cheat sheet of all the possible search terms.

Secondly, dependability seems to be a large issue. In the age of Twitter and MySpace, it is expected that our favorite web-apps will have peaks and valleys in terms of reliability. Google Wave is no exception. There were a number of times in which Wave seemed to fall off of a cliff with no warning or error message. I cannot imagine the load that real time chat puts on a server but if anyone can handle it, it has to be Google.

Despite it’s bugs, Google Wave is clearly a step towards the future in  real-time technology. This leads to the burning question on everyone’s mind, ‘How will this advance internet marketing?’ It may be too early to tell the full ramifications of Google Wave on social media, but at this point, I would say that it isn’t a game changer. Google Wave is advanced email and collaboration, not advanced social networking. It will make communicating with clients and co-workers easier but can still exist in parallel with Facebook and Twitter as they are all separate services with separate uses. In fact, I strongly believe that Wave is the biggest threat to the software collaboration company, 37signals. Google also seems to be in competition with themself, as Wave takes a direct aim at Gmail, Gchat and Gdocs all at once.

Whatever the future of Google Wave may be, it has to first grow (and scale, for that matter).  Key features that I hold out hope for are email integration, product integration, revision control and a more stable experience all around.  I also believe that we will see the same trend we saw with Twitter, in that many uses will come from third-party application developers, via the Google Wave Federation Protocol and the easily embeddable Google Wave plugins.

To judge Google Wave in it’s current state would be like judging a new Radiohead CD by it’s live recordings; it is just too young to be so critical.
What do you think of the future of Wave holds? How will it effect internet marketing? and more importantly, what would you like to see the future of Wave hold?

Oh and real time chat really is as cool as it sounds.

Many of you may have read the post I did on Friday about the #Beatcancer social media experiment that was aiming to set the world record for most widespread social network message. For all of you who read, and then tweeted, updated your facebook status, or sent information to friends – thank you. You were part of the 209,771 mentions of #beatcancer in a 24 hour period – setting a new world record.

The over 200,000 mentions originated from just a small number of blog world attendees who then shared with their networks and watched as the message spread. In the end, it is estimated that the phrase #beatcancer had over 100 million impressions, especially after being tweeted by celebrities including:  P. Diddy, Jermaine Dupri, MC Hammer, Kim Kardashian, Alyssa Milano, and Alicia Keyes.

The best part is that the social experiment raised more than $70,000 for cancer charities. On behalf of Bailey Gardiner, I’d like to thank all our readers for getting involved and being a part of proving, once and for all, the power of social media for social good.