Sony.
It was the brand that everyone wanted to beat in electronics.
They were the innovators.
They were the leader.
Now they are playing catch up.
A gaijiun is in charge, and they are playing shuffleboard on the Titanic re-arranging their agency rosters.

Instead of being smart- like when IBM stopped using 50 agencies and gave it all to Ogilvy, Sony is still “spreading the wealth.”
If you need any further clue that they don’t have a clue- look at the roster shop Bagby and Company website. Not only is the site about as fascinating as a rock in a stream, it’s technically a failure- not showing up for shit in google:
Web Results 1 – 4 of about 7 from bagbyco.com for . (0.28 seconds)
Meetings and Events Video 3
A full service marketing communications firm that develops and executes strategic
branding initiatives – delivering the right message to the right audience at the …
www.bagbyco.com/content/me3-quicktime.html – 4k – Supplemental Result – Cached – Similar pages
Bagby and Company Inc.
who we are.
www.bagbyco.com/content/opportunities.html – 3k – Supplemental Result – Cached – Similar pages

[FLASH] bagbyco.com/bagbyco_tempSite.swf
File Format: Shockwave Flash
Similar pages

Bagby and Company Inc. Brand Expressionism.
www.bagbyco.com/ – 2k – Cached – Similar pages

In order to show you the most relevant results, we have omitted some entries very similar to the 4 already displayed.
If you like, you can repeat the search with the omitted results included.

This is the best that Sony can find?
No wonder, they are no longer like no other.

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Posted in: Advertising, Everything you want to know about advertising

If there is one industry that believes in advertising- but doesn’t understand it- it’s car dealers.
Formulaic, stupid, boring, and inept. If I have to hear “drive a little, save a lot” or “home of the low priced cars” one more time, I think I’m going to puke. Face it, they all sell the same thing as everyone else- a car- made in some factory far away- that’s exactly the same as the car their competitor has on their lot.
So, price and product are not the way to go. But, they still do.
Big egos also are hard at work in this business- so the owner of the dealership thinks that they need to be in the ad, on the marquee, and even stick their name on the back of your brand new car with some cheap sticker.
So, when I found these “Trunk monkey” ads at first I thought it was a production company poking fun at car dealers- but low and behold- it’s for real. Suburban Auto Group in Sandy Oregon is the home of the “Trunk Monkey”- a chimp who lives in your trunk and can do everything from buy off a cop to deliver your baby- I’m not kidding.
Entertaining- yes, enjoyable- yes, makes you want to visit the site- yes, makes you feel good about Suburban Auto Group- yes- and they even have a hip logo.
If only the car dealers in Dayton- especially our nearby neighbor, Frank Z Auto Group, who spends crazy money in the Dayton Daily News, would wake up to the power of good advertising.
Enjoy!

A little more research- and of course I find more to the story: The ads were created by R-west.com in Portland OR (their site sucks btw- all Flash- practically kills Firefox on the Mac) and then syndicated to other dealers. In Canada- they were banned for violence, and then PETA complained. For more than you can stand to know about Trunk Monkeys- see of course: trunkmonkey.com

Still wouldn’t hurt for Frank Z to take a look.

What do you think?

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Posted in: Advertising, Everything you want to know about advertising, Guerrilla campaigns, Marketing & the Web

You’ve never heard of Ruder- Finn- but, you will.
Sooner or later- someone is going to e-mail you a Mr. Piccassohead- and then you will want to do one too.
What is a Mr. Piccassohead you ask? Well, it’s a Mr. Potato head in 2D online- with Picasso inspired parts to assemble. When you are done- you send it to someone- and they go to the site- and admire your work. While you are at Mr. Picassohead you see the Ruder-Finn logo- and you can click to their site- and read about how their creativity delivers- which it did- it delivered you to their site.
This is an example of viral marketing- where each person you contact, then contacts someone else- and it spreads- just like a virus. There have been other examples of viral marketing- subservientchicken.com for Burger King by Crispin Porter Bogusky helped up the sales of the new BK tender crisp chicken sandwich jump over 270%, Carl’s Jr. is scoring points with a naughty Paris Hilton video that is “too hot for TV” to hawk their latest belly buster. If CKE Restaurants had run the spot on TV it would have cost them millions, by producing a spot that was controversial, they got millions in free media exposure. This is what viral marketing/ PR ploy’s are all about.
The difference between Mr. Picassohead and Spicy Paris- is the difference between art and porn. But, considering the audience for fast food is hormonally charged young men- they are both effective.
Viral is here to stay. The original online viral campaign was for free e-mail, with a message on the bottom of every hotmail delivered e-mail asking you to sign up for hotmail. It’s come a long way since then. We’ve only just seen the beginning.

“I love you too, but…. (ode to Roy Lichtenstien)
a Mr. Picassohead drawing by Atalie Gagnet

What do you think?

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Posted in: Advertising, Crispin Porter + Bogusky, Everything you want to know about advertising, Guerrilla campaigns, Marketing & the Web

Really Simple Syndication, RSS, is another reason a blog is a great addition to any website.
The biggest problem for our clients is that they think they have to write about everything themselves- and they hate to write. Not so-
you can fill your blog up with links to what others write-
like this really insigntful piece by Kevin Hale of Particletree.com on the importance of RSS- I suggest you take a read- “The importance of RSS”
I wrote earlier about people acting as guides to content- filters- Kevin calls them “Salesmen/Connector/Maven” – I’m sure there are other terms out there, if you hear of them- let me know.
RSS is the mechanism for portals that will do what portals are supposed to do- but, the other part of it is that they can replace sending out opt-in e-mail. Apple has integrated RSS into OS X 10.4 “Tiger” and there are lots of other reader options. I use the extension “Sage” for Firefox and track about 40 feeds. When browsing in Firefox, it you arrive at a page that has a feed, a small orange RSS icon appears in the bottom right of the window next to the window resize handle, click on it and it will bookmark the feed- which you save to a feed folder in Firefox. Before long, RSS will be as ubiquitous as a browser.

What do you think?

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Posted in: Everything you want to know about advertising, Marketing & the Web, Web strategy

The great thing about hosting your blog as part of your site, is it vastly increases the number of search terms your potential customers could be looking for. Especially if you use your web stats to see what people are searching for.
Since so many of our competitors build sites that search engines either can’t find, or will give lousy results for (every page has the same description- or they use frames or .asp to build the site- and nothing useful shows up in the results) we decided to make it easy for our potential customers to comparison shop- we listed all of our peers on our site. So, the potential client will find a link to their site, after they’ve come to ours. We believe when they compare, they’ll see, we do good work. (more…)

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Posted in: BMW Advertising, Crispin Porter + Bogusky, Everything you want to know about advertising, Marketing & the Web, Search and Business, Web strategy

I ride a BMW motorcycle. I think they may make one of the finest touring motorcycles in the world. Smooth, quiet, responsive, reliable and a joy to ride, that’s my bike. (mine is an 1996 R1100RS)
They’ve been making BMW motorcycles since 1923. Not quite as long as Harley Davidson, but long enough. So, invariably, I’m out riding, meet someone, and they say “I didn’t know BMW made motorcycles.”
Which says to me, someone in advertising dropped the ball.
That’s the sentiments of the people I know who work at BMW motorcycle dealerships- the ads suck. I’ve seen a few, and frankly, I agree. But, what’s even more amazing is that a few years ago, someone caught on to the “universal truth” about BMW motorcycles, and crafted a line for a t-shirt that worked: “I didn’t know BMW made cars until I passed one” BMW motorcycles.
Yeah, every BMW rider who didn’t own a BMW car (and there are quite a few) wanted one. Unfortunately, someone at BMW marketing in the car division thought that this campaign concept was blasphemous. No more t-shirts.
Way to kill a great idea. So, even if I ride the ultimate riding machine, I can’t proudly proclaim my love of my bike in an entertaining way, that solves one of their major marketing problems, because some brand manager just doesn’t get what makes this advertising stuff work.
If anyone at BMW motorrad in Woodcliff Lake NJ is interested in talking to an agency that might be able to explain how to make BMW motorcycle advertising work, give us a call.

What do you think?

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Posted in: Advertising, BMW Advertising, Brand relevancy, Everything you want to know about advertising

Checking your site stats can tell you things. Lo and behold, our top-referring page for May 05 was from Adrants.com, and that came at the end of the month.
Adrants is an advertising industry site with constantly updated news and opinion. Named the number one advertising blog by Fast Company, and AdAge named it the number one “website you should bookmark” it’s an interesting site to keep you informed on the latest trends in advertising, including guerrilla campaigns by The Next Wave.

Found another article- from an Italian site called www.ninjamarketing.it- the Google translation is entertaining:
Agency makes publicity with techniques from road
“An agency of the Ohio has made publicity using technical of guerrilla marketing to a held seminary gives to the Lautenslager, Co-author of the book “Guerrilla Marketing in 30 days”. The participants to the seminary, clearly professionals interested to the not conventional techniques, have been received from numerous simply written provocative messages with of the gessetti color to you on the walls. In this way agency The Next Wave has intentional to above all demonstrate to the own creativity and the ability to create campaigns of impact to low budget.”
see the whole thing in Googlish- here: ninjamarketing

If you want to know what it really says- my father provided a proper translation from the Italian (he’s fluent in 5 languages)
“Agency uses street marketing to plug itself
An Ohio agency advertised itself by using guerrilla marketing at a seminar held by Al Lautenslager, co-author of “Guerrilla Marketing in 30 days.” Participants at the seminar, clearly professionals interested in unconventional techniques, ran into numerous provocative message simply scribbled on the walls (sic) with chalk. In this way, The Next Wave agency wanted to demonstrate its own creativity and, above all, how to run a campaign at a low budget.”
Note- Google is great for finding things, not so good as a translator.

See, this guerrilla stuff really works. Our ideas have always been too big for Dayton, now we’re proving it.

Yeah, we know what you think on this one…

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Posted in: Advertising, Everything you want to know about advertising, Guerrilla campaigns, Marketing & the Web