ChasNote

Intel’s sponsorship of PopURLs Blue Edition for Enterprise IT is winning fans. Marshall Kirkpatrick at ReadWriteWeb says:

“Now [PopURLs founder] Marban has partnered with Intel to create one of the most interesting ad campaigns I’ve seen in awhile, Blue.PopURLs.com. The site is a single page aggregator about hot enterprise IT news. Calm down, I know enterprise IT is boring — but the site is cool…..”

“The Intel partnership in particular is remarkable as a simple way for advertisers to deliver value to audiences in exchange for a little bit of mindshare. Next to the top enterprise software stories from around the web, you’ll find links to Intel white papers and blogs.”

I also love the disclosure attached to the post. FM manages advertising for ReadWriteWeb and Intel’s ads have been running on the site, but Marshall says he notices the campaign only after seeing Intel’s ads on another FM site, Boing Boing.

“Disclosure: The Blue ad campaign is being run through FM publishing, who also sells ads here on RWW. I just found the site through an FM ad on BoingBoing and thought it was worth writing up.”

Advertising works in mysterious ways.

Credits: The people behind this project include Thomas Marban at PopURLs; David Veneski at Intel; Josh Mattison and Jason Ratner at FM.

Marketing has two functions, when you boil it down. One, to remind you to buy stuff you need (voice-over-IP phone service) or could imagine needing (Ginsu knives). This is direct-response marketing, and it often features a limited-time special price to lend urgency to that reminder.

The other purpose is to convince you to buy something you don’t really need but your desire for it somehow gets the better of you. This is brand marketing.

When it works — when a company creates a compelling brand associated with its wares — you begin to want stuff because to buy, wear, drink, drive, eat or smoke the variety that carries a particular logo makes you feel more complete. Taller, smarter, more compassionate, sexier and the rest.

Rob Walker, who writes the Consumed column for NY Times Magazine and the Murketing blog, calls this the Desire Code. His new book “Buying In” explores how and why it works — and it works, apparently, on just about all of us. “The fundamental tension of modern life,” he says on page 22, is this: “We all want to feel like individuals. [Yet simultaneously] We all want to feel like a part of something bigger than ourselves.” Ramones t-shirts and Viking stoves, it turns out, help us bridge that divide. And it’s often the symbols (brands, logos and ideas) rather than the products themselves that perform the magic:

“Sales of skateboarding ‘hard goods’ — helmets and wheels and actual skate decks — totaled around $809 million. But sales for T-shirts and shoes and other ’soft goods’ brought in much more, around $4.4 billion…. It has become possible to participate in the idea of skateboarding without actually skateboarding.”

The book publishes in early summer, but chapters are available online at Random House.

Including Cars.com’s KickingTires blog:

From Times Online UK:

“What’s surprising, though, is that the pure-play internet media companies that might have been expected to benefit from the tectonic shifts in the industry have done badly too. Yahoo!, CNET Networks and Interactive Corp all seemed to be in a great position three or four years ago, and yet all three look like they’ll soon cease to exist in their current form as investors express their displeasure with poor stock performance.”

“Part of the explanation for this is simple enough. Yahoo! and CNET could be considered new media versions of old media models; they aim to drive large numbers of people to their pages with expensive investments in content, and monetise that traffic via display advertising. But low-cost blogs — especially in the technology news space that CNET once led — have scooped up a lot of the audience.”

FM, Huffington Post, PaidContent, TechCrunch and others are called out as alternative models.

Your customers are 3 times more likely to trust opinions from their peers than advertising messages from you, according to Jupiter data published at eMarketer. This isn’t new, of course. Peers have always been our most trusted resource for buying information. Only now — in this conversational media world — we can track all those watercooler conversations about our brands.

American Express’s partnership with top business and tech website authors to create the OPEN Forum Blog creates an opportunity for American Express to deliver banner ads that do more than promote credit-card offers; AMEX ad banners running on other business sites are promoting content instead — which, of course, stand a better chance of being noticed. One ad, running on tech business site Mashable, caught the attention of a Mashable editor, who posted this comment at the OPEN Forum Blog:

Stuart Elliott, the advertising and media columnist for the New York Times, makes BMW’s Graffiti contest in Facebook the topic of today’s column:

“Almost half the spending for the campaign, estimated at $15 million to $25 million, is being devoted to online media. By comparison, executives at BMW of North America say, Internet ad spending for other models ranges from 1 percent to 15 percent of the total ad budgets. The online elements of the 1-Series campaign include letting members of Facebook, the social-networking Web site, design virtual cars and send them to Facebook friends….”

“The goal has become ‘to give people a reason to engage with or participate in your advertising,’ said Patrick McKenna, manager for marketing communications at BMW of North America in Woodcliff Lake, N.J…. ‘We’re trying to let our hair down a bit and have some fun’ with the campaign, he added. That is evident in the offbeat ads being created for Facebook, which include the chance to design virtual cars.”

BMW’s Graffiti contest that invites Facebook users to color in outlines of 1-Series cars has done a few things very well.

One, ad units on Graffiti app pages within Facebook as well as websites outside of Facebook (eg, Boing Boing) are performing better because the campaign invites participation.

Two, it enlists a core group of active social-network participants (more than 9000 submissions in the first 7 days) into a fun, transparent evangelism effort: Participants spend, in many cases, hours personalizing images of BMWs that they then share with friends.

Three, it takes advantage of the friend-to-friend newsfeed mechanism at Facebook to spread word of the campaign beyond the paid media program.

Four, the concept and the images themselves are capturing the attention of bloggers, columnists and Twitterers, such as Facebook’s Dave Morin. Ben Barren’s headline captures it best: “i found a blog post about a twitter about bmw’s facebook campaign.” UPDATE 4/7: Stuart Elliott at NT Times dedicates a column to the campaign. Others pick-ups below.

I also love that BMW’s advertising in other areas of Facebook (through Facebook, not FM) integrates a single message across multiple media plans. With the Graffiti contest BMW built a killer idea that resonates especially with existing Facebook members, so why not show the Facebook audience that you’re hip to the applications they all enjoy? Here are some banners BMW ran elsewhere on Facebook:

Credits: The team that made this happen includes Brendan Starr at GSD&M; Jon Lor at DotGlu; Mark Kantor, Tim Suzman and Ted Suzman at Graffiti Wall; Jean Aw at NOTCOT; and FM’s Jen Tamez, Marcia Simmons, Liam Boylan, Matt Jessell and Lester Lee.

A small sampling of other coverage:

Auto site Top Speed:

Autoblog:

Han D Work blog:

Blog post and Twitter from Inusual Network:

I’m seeing a rising tide of Slide spam, some not appropriate for family-friendly sites like ChasNote. Below is a SFW one that came today. The FunWall says “Press forward to see what happens,” and comes with all my Facebook friends pre-checked so that virus passes along if I make the mistake of hitting Forward.