Burning questions

(Title used with apologies to Feedburner)

Question: Chris, why didn’t you publish a column reviewing the marketing campaign for Coraline? Seems like a movie you would have enjoyed tackling, especially since your brother-in-law repeatedly sent you emails with links to materials to include. What up with that?

Answer: You’re absolutely right. As a matter of fact I had a column about one-third finished but just couldn’t make it come together. It’s one of those that I just couldn’t fully wrap my head around and fully embrace. It happens sometimes, even with movies I’m excited about. But apparently I had no problem embracing the He’s Just Not That Into You or the Confessions of a Shopaholic campaigns. Go figure.

Question: Does this mean I can slap you repeatedly about the head next time I see you.

Answer: Ummm…no.

Question: Does this mean you’re an un-dedicated slacker who can’t be bothered to muster up enough energy to even try to please your readers? Follow-up question: Can I get my money back?

Answer: Yes. It also means I found it easier to go for cheap laughs at the expense of big, bloated campaigns than to try to analyze a movie with some heart and soul. And no, all transactions are non-refundable.

Question: Well at least there will be a handful of new columns to tide us over during the next couple weeks, right?

Answer: Actually no. If you noticed I haven’t published any columns this week and probably won’t next week either. The movies on the schedule just weren’t that exciting. Plus, I’m already starting to work on the bloated beast that will be my Watchmen column, so you’re just going to have to wait a couple weeks.

Question: Are you serious?

Answer: Ummm…yes.

NO FURTHER QUESTIONS!

Marketing Madness in 60 Seconds: 2/19/09

Tools: Alan Wolk writes an opinion piece for Brandweek that rightly says widgets too often resemble the old way of thinking about advertising, in that the product being marketed gets in the way of the message. The best widgets are those that are fun for the user and actually do something interesting ASIDE FROM marketing the product or brand.

Metrics: When it comes to video marketing efforts it’s a mistake to look to old metrics to define success. While substitutions for those metrics are still being fleshed out, it’s important to look at brand engagement and such to gauge the success of your campaign.

About half of marketers aren’t using analytics at all to measure their online campaigns and many of those that are are using multiple platforms, something that can lead to confusing conclusions.

Social Media: If you’re just beginning with social media Matt Dickman recommends you spend at least two hours a day listening, engaging and discovering and then expand from there as you feel you can or want to.

David Griner shares a slideshow on social media marketing he presented to a trade group recently that’s filled with good nuggets of wisdom, both anecdotal and in the form of hard statistics.

Email, social networking and SEO are the three common themes hit in the MarketingSherpa report outlined here.

The list of companies who are tops in terms of social media executions according to Abrams Research shouldn’t surprise anyone.

Fantastic chart of how many PR agencies who are promoting themselves as being social-media savvy are engaging in social media themselves.

Demographics: Wii is more popular among women and young children but not hard-core gamers. Xbox360 tends to attract those looking for additional features like social interaction and movie downloading. Playstation3 is most likely to be owned by the same people who bought previous versions. All this and more here.

Media: Nielsen has released its report on how the top 15 newspaper websites did as measured by unique visitors in 2008.

Advertising: Yahoo has begun introducing video and image ads in search results. Yahoo has long counted on their image ad abilities to keep them afloat, which makes me wonder why it took this long to get this rolled out.