ChasNote

There was good stuff at yesterday’s Web 2.0 panel, “Marketing: Where Are We Now.” Battelle — wearing his Web 2.0 Program Chair hat, not his FM Founder one — moderated a discussion with Curt Hecht (GM Planworks / SMG), Carla Hendrie (Ogilvy) and Casey Jones (McCann).

• Curt Hecht: Search marketing can & should play a role in brand campaigns in at least two ways. One, always coordinate keyword buys with brand and PR initiatives. For example, make sure you own “Oprah” and “Pontiac” keywords when you have Oprah surprising her studio audience with free cars. Two, use search marketing to drive audiences to content you want them to see, even if you didn’t write it, eg, favorable editorial reviews on credible, 3rd party sites.

• Casey Jones: Forget about keeping anything “off the web.” It just can’t be done anymore. He cited two examples — one, an XBOX 360 video spot that was rejected before it made it out of the marketing dept, the other an internal spoof video (what if Microsoft made the iPod) — that made their way to YouTube faster than an email leaves its outbox.

• Ed Cotton, from Butler Shine, posited from the audience that there’s a lot of talk about innovation, but the fear of screwing up is still much more powerful. How do we get beyond this?

• Carla Hendra’s examples provided interesting paths around those risk potholes. One, Motorola-sponsored silly Back Street Boys-inspired video in China with product placement for a cellphone. Two, Dove’s Evolution video that shows a model’s make-over (both by a stylist and with Photoshop), the transition from ordinary (even plain) mortal to the image we see on an advertising billboard. Three, the seed campaign for Cisco’s Human Network initiative. In all 3 cases, brands took advantage of amateur and viral videos and user-generated, participatory ad creative — yet the creative assets weren’t commercials starring cellphones, soap or routers. The campaigns gave customers some fun or thoughtful content (Motorola and Dove, respectively) to share with friends or an opportunity to converse, in a sense, with a marketing brand (Cisco) without expecting their customers to get excited about, say, soap.