ChasNote

Hey, thanks, ValleyWag!

If it makes you uncomfortable to read mention of FM on ValleyWag without middle-fingers raised in the Battelle Salute, here you go.

FM’s Bill Brazell demonstrating Battelle Salute.

More on the BMW 1-Series Graffiti contest in Facebook here.

Patricia Hursh at SearchEngineLand reminds marketers that neglecting or attempting to avoid prospects early in the buying cycle — those kicking tires but not yet ready for the salesperson’s pitch — are “short-sighted and [this approach] ultimately leaves a lot of money on the table.” Amen.

(Thanks, Pete!)

From the New Yorker:

“I felt that in the name of individuality I should find my own brand, something separate. Something me. Carltons, Kents, Alpines: it was like choosing a religion, for weren’t Vantage people fundamentally different from those who’d taken to Larks or Newports? What I didn’t realize was that you could convert, that you were allowed to. The Kent person could, with very little effort, become a Vantage person, though it was harder to go from menthol to regular, or from regular-sized to ultra-long. All rules had their exceptions, but the way I came to see things they generally went like this: Kools and Newports were for black people and lower-class whites. Camels were for procrastinators, those who wrote bad poetry, and those who put off writing bad poetry. Merits were for sex addicts, Salems for alcoholics, and Mores for people who considered themselves to be outrageous but really weren’t. One should never lend money to a Marlboro-menthol smoker, though you could usually count on a regular-Marlboro person to pay you back. The eventual subclasses of milds, lights, and ultra-lights not only threw a wrench in the works but made it nearly impossible for anyone to keep your brand straight. All that, however, came later, along with warning labels and American Spirits.

“The cigarettes I bought that day in Vancouver were Viceroys. I’d often noticed them in the shirt pockets of gas-station attendants and, no doubt, thought that they’d make me appear masculine, or at least as masculine as one could look in a beret and a pair of gabardine pants that buttoned at the ankle. Throw in Ronnie’s white silk scarf and I needed all the Viceroy I could get, especially in the neighborhood where this residence hotel was.”

I took a look at interaction rates and other early data on Dell’s embed-able, subscribe-able, share-able video ad (it launched about two weeks ago), and saw something obvious, but something our industry too often forgets. It’s inevitably a teeny tiny fraction of people exposed to your ad who will click on it — we are thrilled with 0.2% — yet that’s the group we spend most of our energy thinking about, optimizing for, zooming in on.

In this campaign Dell opened the aperture; it built a creative unit — a brand asset — intended to provide value to more than that tenth or two-tenths of one percent of an audience inclined to click on banner. The ad pushed content to Dell’s audience (and let audience members interact with the content right there), rather than attempting to pull that audience back to Dell’s site for some kind of pay-off.

I can’t give away trade secrets or actual performance data. But I will say that some average and tiny percentage of people clicked on the ad. Eighteen TIMES more people took advantage of the opportunity to interact with Dell’s brand and content right there in the ad itself. Imagine the lost opportunity had Dell built an ad that only worked for that tiny click-happy group.

The printing and imaging group at HP has launched a new section of its wiki, Branding Bootcamp.

We — HP and this Community — will work to provide the answers, guidance, resources and camaraderie to help you develop the marketing materials you and your business need to succeed – without breaking the bank?

My first thought, What self-respecting control-freak business owner or brand manager would let an anonymous community crowd-source his or her brand materials? And then, I thought, genius. Intuit founder Scott Cook once said a brand is what a friend tells a friend about it, so why not let them — friends, partners and random people who care enough to provide input — build your brand materials from the get-go?

Cory Doctorow is out with his new book too, Little Brother. What a week for readers who want to take their favorite online authors (like these) into the battery-free zone!

Heather Armstrong, author of Dooce, has published her first book, a collection of essays (two contributed by Heather) called Things I Learned About My Dad. Congrats, Heather. I look forward to digging in to what, I’m guessing, will be the first of many books of yours I will read in the years to come.

The collection includes essays from some of my other favorites (and, full disclosure, FM partners) as well: James Griffioen from Sweet Juniper, Doug French from Laid-Off Dad, Alice Bradley from Finslippy and Maggie Mason from Mighty Goods.