Possibly the Greatest Brand Story Ever Told

Posted by Jon Thomas, 13 Mar 2013

The most effective mass media is the stories we tell and conversations we have with each other. If you don’t believe me, let me prove it to you.

We've all seen an endless number of ads for cars, car dealerships, and the like. If I think really hard, I may be able to remember a few of them. Let’s see… I remember the Volkswagen ad with Kid Vader (but mostly because it was so talked-about, not because I thought it was so effective). I remember the Toyota Celica ads in which the senior citizen sees a parked Celica and yells, “Slow down. This is a neighborhood!” If you gave me 10 more minutes, I could probably think of another three to five, but not much more. Considering how many car ads I’ve seen in my lifetime, that’s a pretty low recall rate, and I can assure you that none of them influenced my purchase decisions.  

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BuzzFeed’s Native Advertising is OMG WIN!

Posted by Jon Thomas, 13 Dec 2012

OMG. This may have been my hardest assignment yet. 

BuzzFeed is killing it on the interwebs lately (WIN), and not just because it creates some of the most shareable content around. It’s “killing it softly,” so to speak, monetizing its wildly successful site by partnering with brands to create branded content that people actually consume, enjoy and share with their audiences.

But why was this a difficult assignment? To write about BuzzFeed means one has to peruse BuzzFeed. And when one peruses BuzzFeed, time is sucked into a vortex while one reads journalistic masterpieces like “40 Reasons Honey Boo Boo Became a National Treasure in 2012” and “12 Days of Grumpy Cat Christmas.” Minutes quickly become hours, and deadlines come and go. But Grumpy Cat doesn’t care.

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Dish Network’s Hopper Fights the Future of Traditional Advertising

Posted by Jon Thomas, 30 May 2012

The commercials for Dish Network’s ad-skipping DVR, the Hopper, are quite memorable and humorous to a native of Massachusetts, like me. The actors have thick Boston accents, and they repeatedly pronounce the name of the device the way any good Red Sox fan would: “Hop-ah.”

It’s ironic, though, that the Hopper’s commercials are so memorable. The device’s primary function is to eliminate commercials altogether. The Hopper automatically records the entire prime-time lineups for ABC, CBS, Fox and NBC. With a little user programming, however, many digital video recorders (DVRs) can do that. What sets the Hopper apart is that it enables playback completely sans commercials (versus fast-forwarding over them). Score another point for ad-slaying technology in the post-advertising age.

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Facebook’s New Premium Ads: A Huge Mistake?

Posted by Luke Dringoli, 07 Mar 2012

At last week’s first-ever Facebook Marketing Conference (fMC for short), Facebook officially announced the integration of four new products into their advertising model. These additions represent the most invasive placements on the social networking site yet. For the first time, they’ve placed ads within the previously untainted News Feed (on both desktop and mobile sites)—a move that speaks volumes of Facebook’s new trajectory.

Facebook users don’t often warmly embrace shifts in their social media routine, so it’s only natural to wonder how Facebook’s 845 million users will react to these game-changing announcements. What will it take to make sure these new ad formats don’t backfire on branders?

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