ChasNote

Chiquita Bananas isn’t going to let the crowdsourced advertising-and-label design trend leave it behind. From Rob Walker’s column in the NY Times Sunday Magazine:

“Chiquita set up a Web tool for people to whip up their own sticker drag-and-drop mixes, and an obliging public created more than 25,000 of them in less than five months, according to the company. This enthusiasm has led to a competition — 1,355 entries were submitted over several months, and online voting starts tomorrow at eatachiquita.com to pick 18 designs that will be stuck onto actual bananas.”

Chiquita introduced the blue stickers in 1963 in a stroke Walker calls “a brilliant way to solve the problem of how to apply some version of branded packaging to an item that literally grows on trees.”

I like the new contest, too. Not that it’s especially cutting edge (see Jones Soda’s label contest or HP’s laptop skin contest, both in 2008), but it’s never a bad thing to pull your customers closer to your brand, to let them touch and feel your logo.

The best part about Walker’s column, though, is the quotes he extracts out of the team behind the campaign. Such as:

“The great thing about looking hard at something the brand already owns, no matter how small, is that there is usually a cultural recognition there already. With some application of this value to an idea you have, it creates a familiar association with an unfamiliar dynamic, therefore creating intrigue in the viewer — much like pop art does.”

Exactly!

My favorite entry in the contest so far is this one, the banana as hammock.

I’ll admit it. On Monday, while giving some agency friends a tour of the new Digg, I came across an article on Jersey Shore star Snooki and had to ask who she was. But now that she’s the central figure in suspected plot by luxury brands to get their purses out of her hands, I can’t get enough.

From the NY Observer:

“Here’s the deal: Remember how Snooki, drunk or sober, was never seen without that Coach bag dangling from the crook of her arm? Snooki and her Coach were as synonymous as The Situation and his six-pack. But then the winds of change started blowing on Jersey Shore. Every photograph of Guido-huntin’ Snooki showed her toting a new designer purse. Why the sudden disloyalty? Was she trading up? Was she vomiting into her purses and then randomly replacing them? The answer is much more intriguing.

“Allegedly, the anxious folks at these various luxury houses are all aggressively gifting our gal Snookums with free bags. No surprise, right? But here’s the shocker: They are not sending her their own bags. They are sending her each other’s bags! Competitors’ bags!

“Call it what you will — ‘preemptive product placement’? ‘unbranding’? — either way, it’s brilliant, and it makes total sense. As much as one might adore Miss Snickerdoodle, her ability to inspire dress-alikes among her fans is questionable. The bottom line? Nobody in fashion wants to co-brand with Snooki.”

(Thanks for the tip, NOTCOT!)

Any ChasNote readers members of Russian dating site Mamba?

I asked a friend last week if he knew of any ad marketplaces that accept virtual currency in addition to real money, and he said that Mamba does. Apparently new members start out with some advertising credits in their accounts — to promote themselves — and they can buy more credits with rubles. Any of you know more about how this works?

(Translation by Yahoo’s Babelfish.)

Full collection, including a link to a site that sells them as posters, at Laughing Squid.

Boing Boing suggests the faux vintage ads must be the work of Mad Men’s Pete Campbell. “These are too cheesy to be the work or Don or Peggy. Let’s be honest here.”

I came across some eMarketer data this week that initially struck me as obvious: Social media users are more likely to trust blog posts, Tweets and Facebook updates authored by friends than those posted by brands. In the “trust completely” column, friends are considered two to three TIMES more trustworthy.

Makes sense: human friendships are built around trust, and while we sometimes trust brands, brands aren’t friends or humans.

Of course brands aren’t people, but they’ve long understood that humanizing themselves (itselves?) — by hiring likable pitchmen and pitchwomen or creating cute animated characters, for example — makes us more likely to think of them as friends. When they act like humans (or tree elves or fun-loving tigers), we often forget they are corporations trying to sell us stuff. We start considering them pals and trusting them.

In social media, though, brands aren’t doing a good job of acting like our human friends. A recent report by digital agency 360i (see Forbes) shows that consumers use Twitter to converse with their online friends — @Replies, in Twitterspeak — while brands predominantly use social media to talk about themselves.

“When marketers use Twitter, 360i says that 75% of the time they are using it to disseminate news or information about the brand, as opposed to actively engaging Twitter users. Consumers are only engaged by the brand approximately 16% of the time. Putting that in perspective, consumers engaged in conversation with each other 43% of the time.”

And it turns out that behaving like a human in social media — listening and conversing rather than spouting from a soapbox — isn’t just an academic exercise or a contest to rack up follower counts. Charlene Li at the Altimeter Group recently ranked brands into a leaderboard of what she calls the Social Media Mavens, the brands that most actively engage with their followers, and cross-checked her data with financial performance of those companies. It turns out that acting more human in social media is good business.

“These Mavens on average grew 18% in revenues over the last 12 months, compared to the least engaged companies who on average saw a decline of 6% in revenue during the same period. The same holds true for two other financial metrics, gross margin and net profit.

“Note that we are not claiming a causal relationship — but there is clearly a correlation and connection. For example, a company mindset that allows a company to be broadly engage with customers on the whole probably performs better because the company is more focused on [customers] than the competition.”

One thing that’s made me a fan of Apple’s iAds approach is its focus on building a mobile advertising experience for brands wanting *create* demand in mobile environments, rather than a platform that allows retailers and direct-response marketers harvest demand that was created elsewhere (the Google approach). As mobile advertising matures, brand advertising and DR advertising will both be elements of the winning model. But in these early days, as the the big players — namely Apple and Google — are establishing their ad products and their reputations, I’m wondering if it’s a good move for Apple to open the floodgates to mobile banners from app developers pitching you on their $0.99 downloadable products. When advertisers optimize for click-through and conversion-to-immediate-sale, the banners tend to favor jarring colors and annoying tactics to fool us into clicking — not beautiful ads that enhance the experience, like Superbowl commercials that are more fun to watch than the game. According to the Business Insider,

“the new iAd for Developers program is Apple’s way of getting more (albeit cheaper) ads in its system to fill its inventory glut, while also moving more app downloads through its App Store, and helping the developers who run its ads in their apps make a little more money. A potential win-win-win, if it works out.”

Cheaper ads to fill an inventory glut? That doesn’t sound like the formula that’s made Apple successful elsewhere.

We just launched a feature that allows alpha testers of the new Digg (version 4) to invite friends. I’ve got a few left. Want one? Drop me a note at chas [at] digg [dot] com.

My favorite thing about the new Digg is My News, the default start page that ranks content items not by their overall Digg count (that’s still there, called Top News) — but by the Digg count among people (or publishers or brands) I’ve opted to follow. That’s the number in the green box below. (By “opted to follow,” I mean I clicked the button that pulls in my Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter pals, but you can also add new tastemakers by clicking on Find Profiles.)

Once you’re on the new Digg, you can follow me at http://new.digg.com/chasedwards.

Double-digit growth has returned to global online ad spending. Full coverage at Adweek.

When I saw yesterday that Conde Nast plans to increase the rates it charges readers of its magazines and websites because, according to CEO Charles Townsend,

“We have been so overtly dependent on advertising as the turbine that runs this place, and that is a very, very risky model as we emerge from the recession,”

my first thought was: Oh come on. There have been plenty of recessions and one Great Depression since Conde Nast began a publishing empire built around ad-supported magazines, starting with Vogue and Vanity Fair (which in 1915 ran more ad pages than any other US magazine). I thought here’s another traditional publisher that’s preparing its audience for a post-Internet iPad paradise where readers will pay for their digital content.

My second thought was: Maybe, but so what. Conde Nast should have raised subscription and newsstand rates ages ago. When Henry Luce launched Fortune Magazine in 1930, he charged $1 per issue at a time when the Sunday New York Times cost $0.05. The whole point (according to Alan Brinkley’s telling in his Luce biography The Publisher) was to weed out the riff-raff who couldn’t or wouldn’t pay such an insanely high price for a copy of magazine, and then to make a mint selling advertising against such an upscale audience.

Whether or not the content-is-free culture of the Internet gives way to an I’ll-pay-for-the-premium-stuff future, Conde Nast should raise rates for their magazines. Vogue, Vanity Fair, Glamour and GQ readers aren’t highly price sensitive. And besides, the advertising pitch gets better when your readership is limited only to those with lots of disposable income.

Here’s a print ad for Boot Dermocare created by McCann Bankok, ostensibly designed for audiences in Asia, and presumably too racy for American magazine readers. (Censorship courtesy of the ChasNote design team; full version below.)

Predictably, a wide range of US and UK advertising sites republished the ad. Is that the intent? Give North American and European brands and agencies plausible deniability (”Oh dear! That wasn’t us! That smut was created by a distant subsidiary when we weren’t looking!”), while at the same time providing them, through the magic of social media, a global audience for their more eye-catching if controversial creative? (BK is king of this practice.) Sneaky but smart.

Meanwhile, here’s the full version. You thought what?! Those are her toes!

(Hat tip to Nicole Williams, who as far as I can gather is the world’s leading authority on NSFW advertising creative.)