ChasNote

In Sean X’s deput guest post at AdRants, he gets to the heart of the biggest problem in marketing today. What I refer to as the schism between East Coast Media and West Coast Media. The East Coasters invented brand advertising, and continue to understand its dynamics best, but they have been slower to view the Internet as a brand-marketing platform. The West Coasters invented the Internet as we know it, but their disdain for the apparent irrationality of brand marketing has left them stuck in a direct-response world.

“For the first time in history the pace of adoption of the newer mediums becoming ubiquitous was faster than the tenured careers of those C level exec’s who understood them and who were supposed to fully grasp their use for marketing purposes. This created the dichotomy we are dealing with now. Technology will drive the future, but without proper application of marketing techniques even the coolest widget is useless.

“Creatives and most people in marketing have been siloed for years. Attempts at integrating the internal fiefdoms within companies, let alone across companies being acquired, have largely been disastrous because of the lack of most new technology marketers understanding the fundamental marketing principles of the old. Ask any digital marketer to tell you what the 4 C’s, or the 5 P’s are and you’ll probably get a blank stare. That’s because most of them rose through the ranks with the understanding of technology and not the consumer.”

Maybe having guys like Sean X here on the West Coast will help us bridge the schism!

For many creators of digital video programming, argues Ellie Parpis in AdWEEK, the lure of a TV deal is still powerful: “Although the Web is becoming as important a distribution vehicle for entertainment as traditional TV, the goal for many is still to end up on the good old boob tube.”

Not so for the gang at Ask A Ninja:

“Kent Nichols, improvisational comedian and co-creator of Askaninja.com, an online comedy series featuring a ninja who answers user e-mails, says there’s no incentive for him and his partner, co-creator Douglas Sarine, to consider taking it to TV. ‘We met with all the major studios about Ask a Ninja. It doesn’t make sense in terms of money,’ he says. ‘We gross about $100,000 a month in revenue. These were early offers, but they were a fraction of what we could make in a year.’”

While FM manages advertising and sponsorships for Ask A Ninja, we still don’t know who’s behind the mask.

iMediaConnection invited me to contribute to the Best & Worst of 2007 round up. My favorite campaign of the year: Ask.com’s sponsorship of Ask A Ninja. The campaign that made best use of user-generated content — if you count editorial posts on Boing Boing or OhGizmo “user generated” — was HP iPaq 510’s sponsorship of “voice posts.” The agency that, to me, went furthest in pushing the envelope was Goodby Silverstein for Sprint’s WaitLess.org concept, HP’s campaign around voice posts (above), and HP’s Blackbird gaming system launch.

My colleague James Gross put together a great program that paired Diggnation with Ask.com. From James:

“Ask.com wanted to engage with the ‘cultural antennas’ that can be found at Digg by driving consideration for their search engine by showing off their new, rich interface. (One of those cultural antennas, Morgan Webb, apparently watches Diggnation.) By working with Diggnation’s rock stars (check out the video, they really are) Ask.com was able to give the Diggnation community bonus video of backstage footage from the Diggnation London launch. The sponsorship video went live on Friday night and within 3 hours it had over 200 diggs [now over 300, ed.] and was on the home page of Digg.com

.

“The only way to see the video was to go to Ask.com and type in Diggnation (here’s the Ask.com results page). This allowed Ask to show off some of the new features of their search engine, including their rich media interface that differentiates their services in many ways from their competitors.

“During the sponsored episode Kevin and Alex show off Ask.com’s new features around blogs, smart search, media, news and more.”

Video of the sponsor steps can be seen here.