Jon Lowder

OfficeMax's Penny Campaign

OfficeMax has an interesting ad campaign online.  It's a video  (see below) showing a guy paying for a steak dinner with pennies.  The proprietors of the restaurant aren't too happy with him and argue with him about why they should accept pennies.  The video may or may not be staged, but it doesn't matter because it's funny.  At the end of the video OfficeMax has a little "Power of the Penny" graphic promoting all the back-to-school items you can buy for a penny and the end screen has the www.officemax.com/penny URL.

glumbert - Paying For Steak In Pennies

I like this because although the video isn't specifically about back to school items it's a humorous look at the ongoing debate about the value of pennies.  Lots of people think the penny should go the way of all flesh, but OfficeMax has found a way to use the debate to their advantage.

BTW, I found the video on video humor site Glumbert.com.

Cross-posted on LowderEnterprises.com

The Flinstones, Sponsored by Winston

I just stumbled across this Winston-sponsored Flinstones episode.  It begins with Fred and Barney sneaking a "Winston break" while Betty and Wilma do chores, and then later you see a piece where the announcer says the show is sponsored by Winston and then Fred sings a jingle.  Here it is:

glumbert - Flinstones Cigarette Commerical

Can't Do Much Better Than Free Advertising

If you'd like to advertise for free then head over to React Media. Looks like there's an offer for free ad hosting until August 1, 2008.  If you can put together a 150 x 200 pixel JPG then all you have to do is send it to him and you're gonna be an online advertiser.  It looks like they're even offering to help create the ad if you aren't up to it. 

Normally this ad space would cost you $100/month so don't hesitate. Once I figure out what I have that's worth selling I'll be on this in a flash.

Clean is Happy

I came across the ad you see to the left on BuzzMachine.  To me this is further evidence that I should have gone into advertising.  Also, I'm wondering if there's an endorsement opportunity here for The Turd Man of Alcatraz?

PAVE Creative

The Winston-Salem Journal ran a piece on PAVE Creative on the front page of yesterday's business section. I met co-founder Chris Patti when we played against each other in a tennis ladder last year and we've stayed in touch since.  It's good to see that they're doing so well. Now if I could just get him to start blogging...

FYI, here's a link to the PAVE Creative site.

Winston-Salem Journal Needs to Edit Email a Bit More Carefully

Long ago I signed up for the Winston-Salem Journal's email alert service.  I don't know if I also signed up for their advertisers' messages or if it's part of the package when you sign up for the alerts, but a few months ago I also started receiving those alerts.  Well, a couple of minutes ago I received one of their advertising messages for Harris Teeter and there's a slight problem.  They apparently forgot to change the "From" field of the message because instead of saying something like "JournalNow.com Special Harris Teeter Prize Offer" it says "JournalNow.com Breaking News: WFU coach Skip Prosser dies".  (Click on the image to the left to see a screen shot of the email).

The death of Skip Prosser was a big and tragic story here last week and it's unfortunate for the folks at Harris Teeter that their ad message is being associated with a mistake that I think everyone will find tacky at best.  More likely Journal readers will find it highly insensitive and the kind of mistake that just shouldn't happen.

Update: I just received another email from JournalNow apologizing for the first.  Here's the text:

Moments ago, you received a very unfortunate e-mail from JournalNow.com.

The e-mail was supposed to contain an advertising message sent by JournalNow for Harris Teeter.

While the message did contain the Harris Teeter information, it also came to you using a “From” line that had been used last week on a Breaking News message: the death of Wake Forest coach Skip Prosser.

This juxtaposition was completely inappropriate and inexcusable, and I’d like to personally apologize for the mistake. No disrespect was meant to Skip Prosser or his family.

JournalNow, not Harris Teeter, takes full responsibility for the error. I will assure you that every effort will be made not to have anything like it happen again.

Mark C. Anderson
General Manager
JournalNow.com

I received the first email at 12:39 and the apology at 1:08.  That's some good response time, which leads me to believe that they probably caught their mistake even before the first complaint hit their email server.

Oh, and Esbee points out in the comments that the contest ends December 26, 2006.  That means that either the Journal ran the wrong ad art or the ad rep for Harris Teeter is in seriously deep doo-doo.

Product Placement

The big news story in North Carolina last week was the 40-year old teacher who resigned his position and married a 16 year old girl who he'd coached on the school's cross country team.  I was pointed to the story on WXII 12's site and at the bottom of the story I found the following under their "Links We Like" section: Tips on FInding Love at Work. (Click on the picture to the left to see a full-size screenshot).  How's that for positioning; that teacher certainly found love at work.

On Friday Ken Otterbourg wrote in his blog about a newspaper in Florida that ran a story on the growing trend of people using houses in cities and suburbs to grow pot.  He noticed that the Google ads running at the bottom of the story (see image to the left) were for grow lights and hydroponics, indoor growing systems, etc., and he wrote the following:

They have some sort of partnership or arrangement with Google in terms of advertising, in that the stories and keywords in the story (my guess) help generate the footnote ads at the bottom of the story. For example, a short on an elderly person being bilked was followed by four little teaser ads for background checks and the like. Or a piece on a surfboard had links to tsunami and hurricane relief. You get the idea. The logic isn’t always crystal clear.

So at the bottom of this article about an entrepreneurial dope grower who got 10 years for building a suburban agri(evil)empire, the Google computers ended up with four ads for companies selling hydroponic supplies, closet systems, grow-lamps, etc. All the stuff you would need to grow marijuana in your house.

Ken's right that Google's AdSense system can serve some interesting ads on a site based on keywords, titles and other factors.  I run them on my site and it's kind of fun to see what gets served on each post.  For instance on my home page just now was an ad for worker's compensation information, and on the page for my post about the 40-year old teacher marrying the student there's an ad for computer repair (huh?), and then on a post in which I review a book about the Duke lacrosse case there's an ad for Christian City Church in Greensboro (double huh?).

So yes, online publishers should be prepared for the fact that some strange ads will appear on their site if they do search-based or behavior-based advertising, a la Google or other providers.  On the other hand WXII shows that even when they control the content on their pages some, uh, ironic placements can occur.

Small Biz in Greensboro Highlights What's Happening in Advertising

Greensboro blogger Fec is married to a woman who owns two clothing stores that cater to plus sized women.  In this post he writes about her first experience in online advertising and in the process highlights what's happening in the advertising world.  'Lo and behold, online advertising operations are beginning to employ outbound sales reps, and traditional offline sales reps are beginning to bundle their own online offerings with their traditional print products.  Fec also points to some information about the budding mobile advertising business which is being built around phones' global positioning capabilities:

Check out the future:

GPShopper, which has more than 100,000 users through its mobile application, lets consumers search for products at local stores and compare prices and promotions. NearbyNow, another local search-based application, gathers local inventory feeds from mall-based stores; when users search for specific products, the application sends back an SMS detailing which stores carry the product and whether it is in stock.

Mobile-based product search threatens to turn brick-and-mortar stores into showrooms for Web-tailers such as Amazon.com and other lower-priced online pure plays as consumers compare prices while in-store. So not only do retailers have to compete with low-priced online pure plays in the Web channel, now they have to do so within their stores.

This is something that I saw happening at b-to-b industrial directory publisher Thomas Publishing a few years ago.  They asked review some research findings on the changing behavior of industrial product buyers and present the results at their national sales conference for the Thomas Register Directory. What the research showed is that rather than wait for a sales call the buyers were doing their own research online and then initiating a call to the two or three companies that they had identified as best candidates.  What that meant to Thomas, and their stable of independent sales reps, was that they needed to shift their sales focus from their print product to their online product.  Fec is pointing out that this trend is reaching all industries, including the micro-business retail sector.

Cross posted on LowderEnterprises.com

Tiger Ad

I'm not sure how late to the party I am on this, but I just saw Nike's online ad featuring Tiger Woods' swing.  They took a very high-end camera that can shoot 4,000 frames a second and shot Tiger's swing with a driver.  It's a thing of beauty, as is the commercial, and that being typed by a guy who struggles to break 110 on a good day.

I'd love to see something similar with Roger Federer's swings, particularly his backhand. He's tennis' answer to Tiger.

NASCAR Looking to Slip You Their Sausage

What, you thought I was being vulgar?  NASCAR is launching their own line of meats, which is just begging for lots of Jeff Gordon and Tony Stewart jokes.

Found via Boing Boing.

Craigslist Ran More Classifieds Than All US Newspapers Combined

According to this article Craigslist sites are generating 3 billion page views every month and running more classified ads than all US newspapers combined.  According to Craigslist CEO Jim Buckmaster the biggest problem they have is keeping up:

"We struggle to keep up. Last year overall growth was 200 per cent, both in terms of page views and listings - and if it pools to 100 per cent, we would be happy with that."

I can think of a few newspaper people who would LOVE to have that problem.

Apparently Diamonds Weren't Always a Girls Best Friend

Boing Boing is linking to an old (1982) Atlantic Monthly article that details "how the De Beers cartel pumped up the value of a relatively common gemstone, the diamond, by conducting a global psychological manipulation campaign."

Those bastards have cost me a mint over the years.

Side note: getting a mention from sites like Boing Boing and Fark can be a mixed blessing; great traffic, crashed server.  When I checked Atlantic's site was down, and I'm guessing they can thank the Boingers.

One More Reason the World Hates Advertisers

According to this piece on Business 2.0 there's a company in Seattle called Brain Fingerprinting Laboratories that claims "By hooking humans up to machines that measure cerebral activity, the company believes it can determine whether specific information is stored in a person's memory. Now, Brain Fingerprinting believes it's found the ideal first business application: advertising. (Source Puget Sound Business Journal, full article here).

So the company plans on spinning off an ad agency based on it's technology.  Now let me get this straight; after serving us misleading information, horrid jingles and banal copy that has sucked our brains dry now the advertisers want to read our withered and overwhelmed cerebra?  Good luck