I never thought I’d have ‘thank you Palin’ in the title of anything I’d ever write, but I’ve done it. She and Tina Fey have made Saturday Night Live so unbelievably relevant and funny again. SNL absolutely nailed this skit last night - Baldwin said exactly what most guys (at least my guy friends) are thinking and to make this blog post relevant to online marketing, I must tell you that I don’t watch any of this stuff on TV anymore - I race to my computer on a Sunday morning and laugh my head off watching it on Saturday Night Live’s website.
Everyone else - tell me - are you watching SNL skits on their site or YouTube on Sunday or during the workweek, or is this blog post the first time you’ve seen its online video? Comment.
Kate Ertmann, Executive Producer and Owner of Portland-based animation agency, ADi, shared her Commencement Address with Jerry Ketel (owner of Leo Ketel + Partners) and me. I was so inspired, I felt compelled to share it with you. Here goes:
“Thank you very much, Cassandra, and I want to first say congratulations to the women and men who are graduating – after some long days and nights of hard work, your determination has shown through and propelled you to this day. I also want to say congratulations to the families and friends who have been a support system for you – be it monetarily or emotionally or whatever, I’m really glad to see all of you here today too. And I don’t want to leave out the faculty and staff at the Art Institute who were also certainly a part of making this day possible for everyone graduating today.
As Cassandra said when she introduced me, I am the owner of ADi, an animation company here in Portland. When I graduated from Ohio University with a Bachelors of Science in Radio / Television broadcasting, I had no plans at that time to be involved with animation, let alone own an animation company.
I grew up in television. My parents met at CBS in the 1950’s where my mom was a Producer and my dad was Director. I grew up in NY and from the ages of about 8yrs old till I was about 16, I had a pretty successful career as a child actor. I was in commercials, I was on All My Children, I was in a Broadway play.”
Today’s annual iMedia Connection article is (in years past) the most read article of the year because readers (and authors) like me love the joy of discovering unique / beautiful / hilarious / branded / insanely creative websites. In the “10 killer websites worth watching” article, I got a chance to write about 2 of my favorite sites:
What is unusual and effective about this website?
A lot of sites try to personalize the message, but the Pen Collective site is different — the highly personalized stories are the messages. The site offers the opportunity to meet such people as Mark, an illustrator who prefers his pen to his girlfriend, or Alex, who will show you how she uses her pen to remove the cellulite from her sister’s wedding photos. The site also allows other users to share their own story with the world and become part of the Collective. Read the full story >>
What is unusual and effective about this website?
This site connects so completely with the nostalgic high school kid in me. It’s like a Will Ferrell movie where a 16-year-old jock or a 45-year-old creative can find their own experience and sense of humor in the content and the way it’s executed. This site differentiates itself from all others with its full-screen videos, never-ending supply of full-screen background images upon refresh, clever URLs with the implied promise of humor and entertainment in each of the individual video vignettes within the overall campaign website. Content is king and Converse nailed it with this site. The “I’m too hot for you” attitude, voice, mannerisms of the girl in OutofYourLeagueGirl.com reminds me exactly of several girls in my year at Wootton High School in Maryland. Read the full story >>
One last thing, David Friedman of Avenue A | Razorfish introduced me to a hilarious site called www.iliketotallyloveit.com - check out the site, but first read his creative review of it.
I got an email from my sister with a link to this SNL skit w/ Tina Fey playing Sarah Palin and another SNL actress playing Clinton. I thought it was worth blogging because Saturday Night Live was the source of so much of my sister and my shared humor Middle School through High School - Dana Carvey, Chris Farley, Mike Myers - now, that I have 2 kids, I’m in bed by 10:30pm most nights, and I’m now consuming this hilarious content on YouTube and NBC’s site (this is the first time I’ve ever used an NBC widget below - let’s hope it’s as functional as YouTube). BTW - I just Googled “FLIRG” and it’s pretty damn funny. Watch the video.
Check out the video clip if you aren’t one of the 10 million views across the hundreds of copies of the video clip online. Couldn’t get the NBC video widget to work on the blog, so I had to revert to faithful YouTube below.
Apparently, I have a problem. I’m too plugged in. Although, I did unplug w/ yoga on Monday. Check out this brilliant viral site - below is the email I got from a Friend who is concerned about me: www.UnplugYourFriends.com or click on the “click here to read it” button below! Don’t forget to join a meetup with me - I know you have Screen Addiction, too.
Last Thursday, I (@ryanbuch) attended an all-day, online marketing conference in Portland called Inverge (#inverge). I gained a ton of insights from conference speakers from Wieden + Kennedy (@rgleeson), Nokia (@karllong), TechWeb (@TonyUphoff), and Vidoop (@kveton) and from freelance social media freelancers, friends, and business associates alike. I even have 6 pages of handwritten notes (pen + paper, not digital) to prove it. However, I managed to get in over 30 tweets (Twitter posts of 140 characters or less) that day which doubled my usage of Twitter for the past four months. I’ve always been open to admitting that, in the past, I have only used Twitter at long conferences and airports when I tell myself that it’s okay to fuel my often-controlled Attention Deficit Disorder.
I used to think Twitter was primarily a distraction with no practical business purpose, but now my latest Binge Tweeting session has provided some epiphanies from first-hand experience. I tweeted about Zappos as a great case study in creating employee evangelists and within an hour, Tony Hsieh (@zappos), CEO of Zappos, began following me on Twitter (which is a good thing for all you non-tweeters). We struck up a conversation on twitter and now I’m an even bigger fan of Zappos. I also realized that over 60% of our eROI employees use Twitter, which is awesome. We can benefit from knowledge sharing, internal quick communication, and even help in some customer service scenarios. The next step is to create a Group within TweetDeck, a sweet Twitter application, with the Twitter handles of as many of our customer contacts as possible to engage in those daily conversations as well and continue to be a resource to them.
To check out other CEOs who use Twitter, read the rest of the blog post. (more…)
In the same week, I was asked to do 2 different creative reviews after a hiatus of at least 6 months of not writing them. The first one “Can you tell me how to get to SesameStreet.org?” is complete and was really fun to write because I could involve my kids as a focus group. This next one is the one I need your help on. I have to choose 2 sites to write about - the best of the year that eROI designed and developed AND the best of the year that any other brand or agency developed.
Please comment on which of these 2 eROI-developed sites I should review - I have totally different reasons for submitting one versus the other: Zinio blog … or … Wacom’s Pen Collective
Seriously - let me know by a quick note in the comment field below.
My respected co-worker, email expert, and The Email Wars star blogger, Dylan Boyd, has made some excellent points about the Obama camp’s blown opportunity in VP Candidate Joe Biden’s email outreach with the subject line “Hello” in today’s blog post: http://theemailwars.com/2008/08/25/errr-hello-top-subject-line-ever/. However, I challenge Dylan to tell me that he is truly “jaded” by the pure effectiveness of the Obama email program.
I’d love to get Dylan’s response to Michele Obama’s email this evening with the subject line “Behind the scenes in Denver”. The content of the email hit the mark - it was real, genuine, her voice, intelligent. The timing perfect: she delivered a kick ass speech at the Democratic National Convention just 3 hours after her email hit my inbox. The call to action was compelling, obvious, focused, and had intrigue and mystery built into it. I want to see what’s going on behind the scenes in this historic presidential race. Don’t you?
So, before you all get jaded from one mis-step out of 207 emails, get inspired by the good stuff. To me, the Obama campaign displays Email Intelligence. And, unlike his opponent, he can actually use the medium. Tell me what you think in your comments on this post. Subscribe to this Blog in the upper right.
If you want to check out the content of Michelle’s email, read more here >> (more…)
I recently wrote a blog post, Innovation Even Applies to Non-Profits, which talked about fascinating business models surrounding hipster companies like Threadless.com. No sooner had I written that blog post did I receive another several emails from friends and partner companies about a Portland company called RYZwear.com that has a nearly identical business model to Threadless.com and is launching its site this week with a sneaker design contest as the core of its community-based revenue model. Here is the email that I got:
I love the business model and the concept behind RYZwear.com and Threadless.com, but I’m wondering how much room there is for me-too type companies. Is it truly a revolutionary shift where an entire new economy can be built around it or is there significant first-mover advantages to Threadless.com and other community-based business models already up and running?
My buddy who runs the Nike account for U.S region for W+K is very psyched today when he saw the following Ad Age article come into his inbox making it official that Nike is moving its running shoe business away from Crispin and back to the mother-ship agency Wieden+Kennedy. Score one for Global Agency of the Year, W+K - arguably the best creative advertising firm in the world and the largest independent agency of its kind.
NEW YORK (AdAge.com) — Just more than a year after widening its roster to include hotshop Crispin Porter & Bogusky, Nike is shifting its running-shoe and Nike-Plus business back to lead agency Wieden & Kennedy, a spokesman for the marketer said.
Crispin CEO Jeff Hicks confirmed the split in a statement, citing a mutual decision to go different ways: “We will forever be in awe of the company that is Nike and wish them nothing but the best.”
Mahalo is on a role. First, the controversial TechCrunch review of Mahalo’s founder blog entry on expecting employees to work 16 hours a day every day because he does (which I wholeheartedly disagree with). Now, their YouTube retro video is truly good stuff and relevant to the email marketing world. Mahalo, the human search company, is trying to show how pull technology like search doesn’t have the flaw of spam, but the creative is strong enough to get a chuckle out of it.
My friends over at a relatively new Portland, interactive agency, Substance, launched this site a few weeks ago. I asked founder Stephen Landau about his inspiration to do the site. He responded, “We figured if we’ve been talking about beliefs and change for the last 15 months, we should support the candidate who says the same stuff. Plus, it was a fun little project to work on. Not sure why we set the donation goal so high ($5,000) but then again, what’s the point in shooting for a small, attainable goal when you can aim for a bigger, more audacious goal.”
I especially like the way the logo you create can map into Flickr automatically and can be ported at any size into Flickr and a dozen other social networking sites. Nice work.
Here’s my quick, uncreative creation using the site:
At the OMMA Hollywood event, finally, a true creative breathed inspiration into an event dominated by metrics, analytics, and agency and media organizational models.
Chuck Porter talked about the power of a story that are sometimes bigger than life, like Burger King’s Subservient Chicken, which has become a cult following in Spain and Japan (long after the site had its heyday).
Also, it’s not always about a new medium. Porter’s agency took an age-old marketing medium in print magazines and placed ads in Cosmopolitan, Maxim with cheesy 80’s style male models with puppy dogs,and Molson Beer, then placed ads in male-targeted magazines about the psychographic effect of 100,000’s of women having a positive association of the male species due to these ads. The creative implementation of both real and faux ads and even made-up magazine covers placed on the back-cover of real magazines was all done brilliantly with a huge comedic and viral impact.
In Porter’s last anecdotal story about the difficulty of selling a risky idea into a brand, Chuck said that Burger King franchise owners wanted to kill Porter if he implemented an idea about killing their best selling product - The Whopper - with a campaign called the “BK Whopper Freakout.” The agency recommended trying it on Cable TV in a zip code for 1 restaurant in Las Vegas and it turned out to be wildly successful.
Takeaway for MediaPost - get more creatives as speakers and show the work - Porter rocked!
I’m surprised this ad has less than 9,000 views on YouTube. It’s brilliant and has the potentially to be passed around from inbox to inbox because it hits the mark with nearly everyone older than 24 years old who will always view themselves in that 24 year old body. I need some Centrum Silver vitamins. Check it out:
Word Trends to Avoid for 2009January 7, 2009, 7:44 am - Can you guess what words are going to be the “Marketing’ leading words to avoid in 2009?
Wth the current economic crisis
Last Thursday, I (@ryanbuch) attended an all-day, online marketing conference in Portland called 
