ChasNote

A Rube Goldberg machine in a commercial certainly isn’t a novel idea (see Honda’s), but I give Cadbury credit for delivering one that fails.

Yesterday Digg announced that Matt Williams, currently an executive at Amazon, will be joining at CEO in September. From Kevin’s post:

“Matt has spent the past 11 years in a variety of roles at Amazon, most recently as GM for Consumer Payments, and earlier in his career he led Amazon’s community efforts. He was the Founder and CEO of LiveBid.com, which was acquired by Amazon in May of 1999. Matt brings seasoned management experience and has a reputation for delivering innovative products and excellent results.”

Welcome, Matt!

From horse poop to carbon dioxide, Mercedes’s new spot positions the automaker as a long-time leader in emissions reduction.

(Via BrandFreak.)

The JFK Library has enlisted the Martin Agency to create a Twitter account for JFK, as if he was tweeting from the campaign trail in 1960. Follow it here.

Great marketing for the JFK Library and a novel approach to teaching history.

Viewer discretion advised: No nudity, but obscene language and creepy demonic behavior inside a webcam.

More at Gizmodo.

There was much excitement last week over AdAge’s piece on brands that have built bigger Facebook fan bases than monthly visitors to their websites. Most observers applaud the brands who have taken early initiative to follow their customers into Facebook. If your customers spend their digital time reading, commenting and liking stuff that flows through their Facebook newsfeeds, get yourself into the newsfeed, right?

“For many marketers, their Facebook fan bases have become their largest web presence, outstripping brand sites or e-mail programs either because a brand’s traditional web-based ‘owned media’ is atrophying or because more consumers are migrating to social media.”

James Gross (Federated Media) and Scott Rafer (Feedster, MyBlogLog, Lookery), however, both argue that the race to rack up Facebook fans brings with it a new danger for brands: Namely, the race to sign up fans comes at the expense of creating compelling content assets to distribute to and engage with those fans. First Rafer:

“It’s tough to take brands and their agencies seriously when they complain about their dependence on Google SEM. When they have new options, they make the same old mistake: underinvestment in their own Internet assets. It’s easier for marketing managers and agency account messengers to become dependent on dominant third parties than to fix their own accounting practices and IT organizations.”

Here’s the root problem according to Gross:

“Short term marketing goals along with agency and publisher relationships that create a scooby snack world around results like FB [fan counts].”

In other words, because buying ads to drive up fan counts is easier than executing a content strategy, marketers and their agencies are prioritizing the former. Boosting quantity is easier than delivering quality.

There’s also the issue of the black-box logic that Facebook uses to determine how many of your fans will in fact see your updates — your brand’s story packaged up into Facebook-sized nuggets — in their newsfeeds. Facebook, like any rational company, will put growth of its own businesses ahead of the growth of partners’ projects. What happens, for instance, when Facebook needs to promote a major new product initiative like Places? They might just bump your status updates from your followers’ feeds to make room location updates using Places. From Inside Facebook:

“Reports from Page administrators and data from our PageData service indicate that the launch of Places has decreased the prominence of official Page updates in the news feed. Significant decreases in impressions-per-post and new Likes per day for Pages coincide with the introduction of Places stories. This suggest an alteration has been made to Facebook’s algorithm that determines what users users see in their news feed. We suspect that the weight of Page updates has been decreased while Places stories have been temporarily given a relatively high weight.”

Here’s the impact on Nutella’s fan page:

Starbucks may have nearly 13 million fans of its official Page in Facebook, but those 13 million fans are apparently seeing more updates these days from friends checking in on Facebook Places than status updates from Starbucks.

Fans of Mad Men likely caught the episode last season in which London Fog worked its brand into a plot line — a product placement arrangement of the standard variety. Now Christina Hendricks, the actress who plays Joan Holloway, has been hired by London Fog to appear in ads outside the show.

From Fast Company:

“this is the first time a Mad Men actor has appeared in an ad for a product previously hyped on the show, making for a novel kind of symbiosis. In fact, London Fog was actually first approached by Mad Men last season to work the brand into the show, says Dari Marder, Chief Marketing Officer of the Iconix Brand Group. ‘They went through archive ads, materials and product,’ she says. ‘We were thrilled with how it turned out, the integration was seamless.’ One could say the same thing about the London Fog ads.”

Here’s the Relaunch War Room at 8am Pacific today:

From Mashable:

“The majority of Digg’s userbase will likely find the new design refreshing and it very well may gain some traction among users that feel overwhelmed with the real-time news stream or the pontifications in their news feed. Better yet, Digg may attract a whole new audience looking for a place to discover news through curated sources.”

Other reviews:

TechCrunch.
All Things D.
Read/Write Web.
The Next Web.
Telegraph.
VentureBeat.
New York Observer.
CNET.
PC Mag.

A member of the ChasNote research department challenged my claim earlier today that the concept of a workplace “coffee break” was launched by an ad campaign in the 1950s. The nerve!

Further investigation, however, suggests that we are both partly right. According to NPR, a couple of Buffalo-based factories offered their workers mid-morning and mid-afternoon breaks for coffee (in one case it was bring-your-own) in the early 1900s. But it took a TV commercial in the 1950s to give it a name:

“Wherever the coffee break originated, Stamberg says, it may not actually have been called a coffee break until 1952. That year, a Pan-American Coffee Bureau ad campaign urged consumers, ‘Give yourself a Coffee-Break — and Get What Coffee Gives to You.’”

I can’t find the spot from Pan-American Coffee, but this one pretty much gets what coffee gave you back in the 1950s.

With the new Digg rumored to be launching this week, and further rumors that it will allow users to import their social graphs from Facebook, Twitter and others in order to create a personalized My News experience, I’m hoping next year’s Social Media Map won’t represent Digg as that lonely island just north of the United Territories of Wikimedia.