Month: February 2003

Six public service announcements from the Ad Council, a public service group, carry the thematic headline “Ready” and advise Americans to prepare a home emergency kit and direct viewers to a new government Web site (UPDATE – I could only get the page to load in IE. Safari and Chimera both loaded blanks…thanks Gov!) for tips on how to put one together. [AdAge]

There is a banner at the top of the lastest Madison+Vine e-newsletter from AdAge stating “If you have recently subscribed, please disregard this notice.”

What do you think recent might be? I find this to be a sad showing from AdAge, the trade journal of advertising… Don’t you think they could have done a simple segmentation and possibly sold an ad to subscribers, vs. wasting a house impression on them – especially such a weak one? Maybe then, this newsletter would not cost $299 (save 100 as a charter subscriber!)…

CheetahMail actually did the blast and I spent 30 seconds and found this wonderful snippet right on their home page:

CheetahMail’s email marketing and customer intelligence technology is designed for companies that want to increase their brand equity through the acquisition and retention of their customer base. By empowering companies to send highly targeted and relevant emails to their permission based subscriber list, companies can leverage the use of the web as a means to cut costs, strengthen relationships and increase ROI.

Not this time.

The networking giant begins a $150 million advertising campaign in hopes of beating back new competition from makers of less-expensive gear. [CNET News.com]

I caught a new ad tonight during 24, and I have to say that it was spot on. Cisco knows how to communicate what they do (not that easy to the lay person) and deliver a global perspective as well.

Purchases make Wi-Fi free for limited time: An interesting approach by a UK chain of sandwich shops — a purchase gives you free Wi-Fi hot spot time.

[802.11b Networking News]

Thinking about the customer can enhance loyalty. This is the opposite of the starbucks/t-mobile approach.

When they make a purchase, customers will be given an access code that allows them to log into the wireless network for up to 30 minutes, letting them check email and surf the Web while they’re away from the office.

Microsoft is targeting the Internet generation with a new product called Three Degrees. Newsweek has the full story. The product is a powerful extension of instant messaging with the ability to create ad-hoc personal communities. Once you establish these groups, there are a variety of tasks that can be shared including pictures, listening to shared playlists and the ability to send animated “winks” to other users.

I think there are some very broad implications to this product but it has some limitations. First, it only runs on Windows XP with Service Pack 1. That alone greatly limits the size of who you can establish communities with. Microsoft needs to take this to at least Windows 98 (and Mac OS) if it wants to get to critical mass. Second, the program is a bit too oriented to a 13-24 demographic. GenNet (as Microsoft likes to call it) is a behavioral demographic not just an age demographic, the UI needs to be tweaked for a slightly more mature audience that might very well grok the features but be turned off by candy colored interface that tries a little too hard to look like it’s cool. That applies even toward the target audience, remember the only thing worse than being someone who’s “not cool” is being someone who’s not cool and trying to act like you are.

[Michael Gartenberg]

Anil had initially pointed this out yesterday as well:

threedegrees is microsoft’s upcoming IM effort

aimed at a teenage and early 20’s market, with features like file sharing, this should be interesting

[anil dash’s daily links]

We’ll see what it is soon enough. I registered last night… see how quickly this thing happens.

Since they are paying to reach us, ala broadcast TV, lower the damn price of the movie ticket! You don’t pay money to watch HBO with commercials for anything other than previews for more HBO features. Movies used to be the same, with only previews. Come on! Faking the recycled contect is advertising as well… I’m sure NBC had nothing to do with replaying the clips, or that the videos are not being promoted by record labels.

PRE-MOVIE SHOWS. America’s largest movie-theater chain — Regal Entertainment Group — is testing the boundaries between advertising and entertainment with a 20-minute pre-movie show that mixes content with commercials, as reported by Brian Steinberg in Dow Jones Newswires. The content claims 13 minutes of the programming, and includes music videos and Tonight Show clips, for example. The commercials consume the 7-minute balance, and the early takers include Colgate Palmolive, Coca-Cola and Cingular Wireless.

Whether audiences will accept the shows is not yet totally clear. Some theater owners say that “patrons want to chat with their friends” and relax before the film (make that the shorts) begin, and not be subjected to anything more intrusive than those hokey slides from local merchants. Regal, however, thinks that if their pre-shows enhance the movie-going experience, they will be a hit. The theater chain cites its own research showing that “80 percent of respondents expected advertising at the movies, and 47 percent even liked it,” while “12 percent disliked the advertising they saw.”

Such rosy numbers could hold — or even improve — provided the pre-shows live up to their potential to entertain, perhaps using the size of the screen “to give rise to spots as engrossing…as those that air during the Oscars and the Super Bowl.” However, notes MediaCom’s John Connolly, the cost “is huge” to make ads exclusively for theater screens, and the effectiveness could be diluted if much of the audience is still in the lobby getting popcorn. Regal, meanwhile, says it “has sold about 75 percent of the available movie-screen space for the year,” and that “three of the nine months between March and December are completely sold out.” The pre-movie shows are currently available “in about 160 theaters and on close to 2,000 screens,” and “the company expects to expand that to nearly 400 theaters and 4,500 screens by the end of 2003.”

[Reveries]