About a year and a half ago, Mini Cooper instituted an interesting promotional campaign using RFID technology. Cooper owners were given RFID-enabled key fobs which interacted with special billboards in EZPass regions. When the driver approached the billboard in his or her Mini, a talking car would appear, along with the person’s name who registered the key fob. So now the question must be asked, why isn’t there more marketing like this? Did […]
In iMedia Connection‘s leading e-newsletter story today, “5 New Ways Brands Can Go Beyond the Browser,” Max Zabramny of Organic writes about the new applications on the near horizon which will allow for work to be conducted offline after the a connection is terminated or is that is automatically executed once an online connection is re-established. We are familiar with this, but the twist is that now marketers are taking […]
The cover story of the May 12, 2008 issue of Fortune magazine is “The Best Advice I Ever Got.” All of the stories cover a very diverse set of leaders and are both a quick reading and interesting. The one that stuck out most in The Marketing Consigliere’s mind was that of Craig Newmark of Craigslist. In particular, his statement that he “was working within a marketing division, […]
The Marketing Consigliere received many emails regarding last week’s blog, “Sounds Like REALLY Targeted Advertising to Me.” Several people, while liking his adaption of the Munch’s The Scream, wanted to know where ultrasound advertising was really being used. He found an example on YouTube – the A&E Channel was promoting it’s Paranormal State show. The picture above is a still of the billboard on the side of a building near Mulberry Street and Mott […]
The Scream, by Edvard Munch (1863-1944), National Gallery, Oslo In the April 2008 Wired in “It’s All in Your Head,” Clive Thompson recently wrote about technology beaming to our heads and the inevitable civil rights battle over the act of doing so. While it is reminiscent of my February blog entitled “EmSense – Common Sense or Nonsense?,” it’s not about mind reading but about mind influencing – through advertising. […]
Across the pond there has been a storm brewing over privacy and advertising. The largest Internet Service Providers in the United Kingdom – BT, Virgin Media and Carphone Warehouse’s TalkTalk, recently teamed up with Phorm, an ad serving company. In this unusual move, ISPs, which have been traditionally “neutral” to end users web surfing habits, now have an opportunity to cash in by “knowing” what their customers do. So by providing […]
Back in December, The Marketing Consigliere blogged about the “Do Not Track” movement and how it was not good for B2C business (Do Not Resuscitate “Do Not Track” Part I & Part II). While he was critical of the privacy interest groups, he does have a sense of humor and admires their depiction of privacy intrusion in a Flash video he stumbled on the at the ACLU website. It portrays […]
This is a headset which is being developed by EmSense, a Monterey, California based company that is pioneering physiological neuro-scientific sensing for business decision making. Their patent-pending device has embedded sensors that combine EEG technology used to measure brain-wave activity and other biometrics like eye motion, breathing, cardio activity, body temperature in an individual viewer. Another company, Sands Research, also is helping firms conduct market research by measuring […]
Last week in the February 18, 2008 issue of Advertising Age,the headline article by Bradley Johnson was entitled “Media Work Force Sinks to 15-Year Low.” So jobs were bad in the last recession of the early 1990s and they’re bad again. OK… The article’s graph clearly shows media jobs peaking during the dotcom bubble, rapidly shrinking, but finally leveling off for the past few years and […]
The Marketing Consigliere recently attended a luncheon hosted by the DC Ad Club. The two speakers, Brian Reich and Dan Solomon, were presenting their new book, Media Rules! – Mastering Today’s Technology to Connect With and Keep Your Audience. He bought the book, had the authors autograph inside the cover, and proceeded to read it. Here are his thoughts: The byline “Mastering Today’s Technology…” raised his hopes but it is […]