ChasNote

From Ad Age:

“Facebook’s plans for hyper-targeting paid ads based on user interest and activities were received as, well, kind of obvious. MySpace is sorting its users into interest and activity categories marketers can buy. Both sites introduced self-serve ad systems last week that could greatly expand advertising to smaller, more local businesses.”

But as Facebook gives marketers opportunities to accelerate what’s already happening among friend networks within the service, there’s a big, important opportunity for marketers:

“Smart marketers are already starting to recognize the frequency with which people report their affinities for brands on social nets, blogs and personal web pages — and they understand that consumer reviews and trusted recommendations are increasingly important marketing factors.”

Find ways to join the conversations that already exist.

Brand advertising is coming to Facebook apps. Sprint’s “Addicted to Heroes” app tie-in campaign to their sponsorship of NBC’s Heroes (the TV show) is one example.

FM’s John Schneider, Bernie Albers, Stephanie Loleng and Liam Boylan — as well as Kevin and Wayne at Watercooler, the makers of the “Addicted to” apps — helped put this together.

I can’t tell if this is good news or bad news. If you think of an album as a long-form audio ad designed to promote your real business model — live performances — than it’s great news for Radiohead that 38% of their fans opted to pay an average of $6 to download the album (see PaidContent), especially considering the band offered the album for free to those who didn’t want to pay. On the other hand, it’s kind of a bummer that 62% of fans decided not to support the band with any sort of financial tribute.

That’s the headline for a post by Darren Herman, author of marketing blog Herman’s Head, on Dell’s recent RSS ad campaign promoting the IT Room. To my knowledge, this campaign is the first time readers have been given the option to play an advertiser’s video clip from within their readers. Horrifying to some old-school RSS-ers who loved the format for its uncluttered text-only orgins, perhaps, but I welcome it as a step in the direction of getting advertiser support for publishers who provide their content available as an RSS feed.

My colleagues James Gross, Jonathan Schreiber and Ivan Kanevski figured out how to make this happen.

Battelle articulates what more and more marketers are coming to realize, that brand advertising investments aren’t just driving perception shift in a vacuum that must be measured by pre and post research; those dollars are informing search behavior. Nor should search-engine marketing be the express domain of direct-response advertising, since search-engine results pages are, after all, where most of our customers first experience our brands online (see Searchblog).

The two are linked, and the links are becoming more obvious. Here, for example, is the results page on Google for a trademarked phrase owned by Mitsubishi, “lancer evolution.” Battelle marked with red arrows the two links (one paid, one organic) that point to Mitsubishi; the rest of this Lancer Evolution “brand experience” falls outside of Mitsubishi’s control.

Here’s what Battelle’s hearing from marketers of late:

“First, they are noticing that when they run brand advertising both online and off, searches for their brands increase. Second, they are noticing that when searches for their brands increase, sales (or at least valuable, measureable leads) follow. And they certainly want searches for their brands to increase. But they have noticed something else as well: There’s a lot of stuff that comes up when folks search for their brands that they don’t control. In particular, there’s a ton of messaging out there — the equivalent of brand advertising, in a sense — that reflects the world’s view of their brand….

“In short, there are a lot of conversations out there that marketers can’t ‘control,’ but that are vital to the brand’s perception, consideration, and performance.”

Here are Google results for American Express-owned trademark “plum card” from September 18, not long after they launched the new card by that name.

My friend Alex Frankel is out with his second book, Punching In. (His first, Word Craft, is also worth a read, if you’re interested in how products get named.)

In Punching In, Frankel joins on with the “brand armies” — the platoons of rank and file front-end staffers — at UPS, Starbucks, Gap and Apple Stores to better understand how brands express themselves through the uniforms, trained behaviors and scripted speech of their entry-level employees. From the introduction:

“The new ‘retail environments’ and ’store experiences’ that increasingly surround us and draw us into daily interactions demand more of workers than the mechanical work that [19th Century industrial theorist Frederick Winslow] Taylor studied to develop theories on work efficiency…. Beyond studying workers’ movements, some companies had come to study their minds, to find better ways to win them over, to make them believers.”

For brands like Starbucks to capture the premiums they charge, they need their retail employees to convince us that the premium is worth it; service brands need to start their brand marketing efforts right there in the HR department.

According to Nielsen (see NY Times), banner ads for Mitt Romney’s presidential candidate ran 515,000 times on Gay.com. AOL’s Advertising.com, the ad network that accidentally put ads for the anti-gay candidate on the pro-gay (and anti-Romney) site, says the number of impressions was only 32,000.

Romney’s ads also ran alongside pornographic scenes of Harry Potter and Hermione Granger on fiction site FanFiction.net. McCain ads ran on liberal-leaning Huffington Post, Guliani ads ran on progressive DailyKos, Obama ads ran on Amazon alongside a book deemed by Jewish groups to be anti-Semitic.

“Part of the issue seems to be that political strategists came into the campaign season unschooled in the challenges of Internet advertising, and Web advertising sales outlets are not necessarily aware of the unique sensitivities of each presidential campaign.”

I believe the first part — political strategists may not know how online ad networks work. But the second? Oh come on. The problem isn’t that the people at “Web advertising sales outlets” like Advertising.com aren’t politically savvy enough to understand the “unique sensitives” of their advertisers. It’s that they don’t have those people on staff; the ads are targeted and served by computer algorithms that don’t know how to worry about sensitivities.

Boing Boing’s David Pescovitz thanks HP “for supporting the development of all our new community features.” That doesn’t happen every day: Hundreds of advertisers have run on Boing Boing over the past 3 years, and this is the first time I’ve ever seen the Boing Boing editors thank one by name. Perhaps it’s because HP didn’t just write Boing Boing a check and send them ad tags — they helped the Boingers improve the site by financially supporting the roll out of new features. Intel had a similar experience when they sponsored the launch of Digg Arc, and found themselves getting thanked by Digg staff and the Digg community.

Microsoft’s Windows Mobile group is sponsoring FM’s 2007 Holiday Gadget Guide, a wish-list of geek gear from a dozen leading tech authors and bloggers. Right now the site comes up in the #1 position on Google among the natural, unpaid results for the phrase “holiday gadgets,” ahead of sites from CNET and CNN Money. Nice!