I like ads.

I do — and I’m not ashamed to admit it.

(How much do I like ads? I briefly considered opening this post with “Hi. My name is Josh, and I’m an adaholic,” but then decided to avoid the stigma of addiction. Denial, right?)

Sure, during the Super Bowl, I prefer the ads to the game — who doesn’t? (Admittedly, live-blogging the Super Bowl ads did draw some odd stares from the folks I was “watching the game” with. It’s now become something of a running gag whenever I’m over at a friend’s place.)

But here’s the real measure: I own a TiVo, and sometimes I don’t hit the Easter-egged “Skip 30 Seconds” button when an ad comes on. In fact, every now and then I even rewind to watch one again.

And I’ve been perfectly OK with the agreement Google and I made long ago: Yes, Google Gods, you may scan the megabytes of information stored in my free Gmail account and target the adjacent ads accordingly. Sometimes, I even click on those — a few of them actually do match my interests — and no doubt I do so more often than I would if the ads were randomized.

But, in general, behavioral targeting and (especially) the mining of my social graph kinda skeeves me out. (Yes, Facebook, I mean you. I don’t care if we named you a Rising Star last year. Star or not, you’re going supernova all over my civil liberties, and I’m this close to canceling my account and leaving you and all your 450 million members behind.)

With all this in mind, you can imagine my reaction to a banner ad I spied on The New York Times’ Web site this morning. “Advertising Is Creepy,” indeed.

More after the jump.

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So, really now:

I know American Apparel founder Dov Charney’s in no position to get pissed (let alone struggle to locate the moral high ground) over an apparel company’s ad campaign — just ask Woody Allen — but I think he might actually be justified if he’s got his skimpy knickers in a twist over the style and format of Gap Inc.’s new “Born to Fit” campaign:

Now compare that to a typical American Apparel ad:

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Now, I know Helvetica is the world’s workhorse when it comes to typefaces, but am I really the only one who thinks this is over the line?

[More after the jump...]

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In keeping with the times, electronics retailer RadioShack has taken on a new identity, or rather a new nickname. Now marketing itself as “The Shack,” the retail chain is ditching its corporate title in new advertisements and social media efforts.

Monday’s press release reveals that the branding and campaign will run in conjunction with a three-day launch event taking place in New York and San Francisco called “The Shack Summer Netogether.”

In the press release, Lee Applbaum, RadioShack’s chief marketing officer states:  ”Trust is a critical attribute of any successful retailer, and the reality is that most people trust friends, not corporations. When a brand becomes a friend, it often gets a nickname — take FedEx or Coke, for example. Our customers, associates and even the investor community have long referred to RadioShack as ‘THE SHACK,’ so we decided to embrace that fact and share it with the world.”

Whether or not “The Shack” branding will stick is yet to be known. However, it’s apparent that RadioShack is investing a lot of time and money in promoting the message and in connecting with consumers. To illustrate, yesterday I twittered a link to RadioShack’s branding effort. Within seconds, I was being followed by a Twitter Handle, @The_Shack. Here’s what the Twitterer replied to me:

laurenmizzou: Radio Shack alters branding — Now its just the “Shack.” Sounds like a beach bar

The_Shack: @laurenmizzou Yeah, like THE BEST BEACH BAR EVER!

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When the market made a giant transition to digital photography, Kodak had some major rebranding to do. At the Aberdeen Group CMO Summit last year, Jeffrey Hayzlett, now chief marketing officer and vice president of Eastman Kodak, talked about how the company had to change its image. Consumers viewed Kodak as a traditional photo company and not, as the market demanded, a company up-to-date with the digital revolution. At the time, Kodak was second to competitor Sony in the digital-camera market. The company had to go where the market was going and on January 13, 2004, USA Today reported that “Eastman Kodak (EK)…will stop selling traditional film cameras in the USA, Canada and Western Europe.”

In an effort to amp up its digital initiative, Kodak aired what I thought was an awesome television commercial where a charismatic elderly gentleman is standing on a stage giving a very passionate speech about how Kodak is changing with the times. I’ve been searching – to no avail – for this clip ever since I saw the commercial at the Aberdeen conference last year. If anyone knows where to find it, please share!

[UPDATE, 5/19, 12.20aET: Guess what? We found the video. It's called "Winds of Change," and you can see it after the break.]

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According to a blog post on The New York Times’ Bits, YouTube and Universal Music Group have come to an agreement about how to provide online access to music videos.

This is a follow-up to a post I wrote earlier this year about how UMG was muting all of its music videos on YouTube (see: The Day The Music Died). Since then, videos have been removed from YouTube.

The brainchild of this dispute is a new music site called Vevo, which will bring better content, and hopefully, more revenue from advertising.

Universal Music Group explains its plan for Vevo:

“VEVO will be a premium online music video hub built for consumers, advertisers and content owners that will blend UMG’s broad catalog of top artists and content with YouTube’s leading edge video technology and user community. YouTube will provide the technology infrastructure that will power VEVO and host UMG’s extensive library of professionally-created music videos on the new site. On YouTube, this content will be exclusively available through VEVO.com and a new VEVO channel through a special VEVO branded embedded player.”

Read the official press release here.

In addition to what music labels hope to be a better advertising model, there are also plans to eventually offer merchandise and concert tickets on Vevo.

Two weeks ago, I blogged about Infusionsoft’s (the marketing automation software provider for small businesses) announcement to double the sales within a 3-month time span for any new customers that sign on.

I linked to a the trial run of Infusionsoft’s “Double Your Sales” guarantee in which the vendor more than doubled the sales for the company All About Spelling within 72 days. It’s an inspiring case study that I encourage you to read. All About Spelling Saw a 149 percent increase in sales at the end of three months and its purchases jumped from 599 to 1,232 purchases. The ROI stats are staggering.

After the success of All About Spelling, Infusionsoft decided to roll out the guarantee to a few more all of its new customers.  The Wall Street Journal included Infusionsoft in a story today about companies granting freebies for new customers. The article reports that in the promotion’s first month (December), Infusionsoft signed up 223 new customers.

I reached out to Dave Lee, vice president of marketing for Infusionsoft, to see how the 223 number stacked up to months prior to the promotion. According to Lee, the company’s record month was in October with 186 new customers. Not only has the promotion proved record breaking for Infusionsoft, but it has boosted its total subscriber count to more than 12,000.

“We anticipated it would do good things for sales… but didn’t expect to end up with a record month (especially in December) because of it,” Lee says.

This goes to show that in these times, customers are not only looking for deals and promotions, but they are looking for results and guarantees. To clarify, if customers aren’t able their sales within three months of using Infusionsoft, they can request a refund for upfront costs, which can run up to $4,000 (per the WSJ).

Oh, what will those luxury car makers think of next?

According to a story found in USA Today, later this year Lexus vehicles, produced by Toyota, will be delivered with a system including the capability for voice messages sent directly from the automaker to its drivers — affectionately known as Lexus Insider.

The service will reportedly enable Lexus to send audio messages to owners willing to participate on whatever subject they choose, including the top tips on how to best utilize your dream car’s features or even suggestions for a scenic drive since the system will be able to hone its messages depending on vehicle type and even zip code.

In the USA Today article, Jon Bucci, vice president of Toyota’s U.S. advanced technology unit, reportedly said, “We’re not going to barrage customers with marketing messages.”

Well, we’ll see about that.

Consumers are already engulfed with marketing messages on all fronts, including traditional advertising, telemarketing calls, and even cross-sell/upsell opportunities in which individuals reach out to a contact center with a product or service-related issue.

A car — seen as one of the last vestiges of escape for many — seems like the last place most would want to randomly hear messages about the latest and greatest Lexus has to offer.

Since Lexus Insider has not been installed into any new cars as of yet, we must give it some time before we pass final judgment. For starters, an important plus to this program is that it is reportedly only for those who authorize it. That’s a great first step, allowing the customer — well, the driver — the choice of how he would like to be serviced.

The trouble may begin for those who do elect to have this feature in several ways:

• a “talking car” seems cool … let’s add the feature in even if we don’t know what it truly entails;
• it can help you pick out the best scenic routes to impress your significant other;
• it can enable you to best utilize your hazard lights and other safety features after you lose control and find yourself in a ditch after swerving to avoid a squirrel … to impress your significant other; and
• you may have only wanted Lexus Insider for one specific purpose but then never utilize it again.

Undoubtedly Lexus will have some work to do in fine-tuning just how often it will send unsolicited messages to its drivers. Time will tell if this feature may hit critical mass and eventually trickle down to non-luxury cars.

What do you think about this? Is it another sneaky ploy to cram in some marketing messages, or is it the next avenue — pun slightly intended — of marketing?

I’ve never been a “friender” on Facebook. Call me pretentious, but I think it really just comes down to laziness. Yet, despite my “selectivity,” I can definitely afford to lose some…for a tasty reward.

Burger King, and its agency Crispin Porter + Bogusky, unveiled a new Facebook application called the “Whopper Sacrifice.” By de-friending 10 people, you get a free Whopper — the tagline? “You like your friends, but you love the Whopper.”

Unfortunately, sacrificing a million friends won’t get you 100,000 Whoppers. Consumers are limited to “one coupon for a free sandwich per person.”

At first thought, you’d think to de-friend all those people you haven’t spoken to in years. However, your deed doesn’t go without notice as Burger King so diligently announces that you’ve sacrificed a “friend” for a Whopper.

An article in AdWeek suggests that this is the perfect solution to those people you friended but can’t remember why. But imagine finding yourself among the sacrificed from someone you were never really friends with…are ties officially broken once you’ve been sacrificed for a juicy, artery-clogging meal? At least with a real friend you can joke about it and discuss possible re-friending over a free burger. But quick, you can’t de-friend someone who’s already defriended you!

It’s interesting that Burger King actually encourages you to clean up your friend list and as a result, decrease the amount of information available on your account for the company to tap into. Perhaps that’s the “sacrifice” Burger King is willing to make in order to get its application on the profile of every hungry, meat-eating teenager college student user. What happens when, coupon redeemed, people start cleaning up their profile page and in effect, deleting the “Whopper Sacrifice” application?

Burger King has certainly had its share of interesting campaigns (my favorite, despite its relatively lesser buzzworthiness, is still the Whopper Jr. commercials – “You can’t sell yourself for a dollar, Junior!”). With the “Whopper Sacrifice,” they’re certainly creating hype.

McDonald’s is running commercials announcing that the double cheeseburger is back on the dollar menu. The commercial’s cute — all the dollar menu items are voting for it to be back on. The only naysayer is the regular cheeseburger, saying something like, “What! He’s twice my size!” Timing seems impeccable.

At the beginning of this post, 7100 users had been sacrificed, now it’s at 11530…I wonder how many Whoppers have been redeemed. I wonder, too, whether this campaign is an attempt at, ironically, making nice for the “Whopper Virgins” campaign, which sparked controversy and criticism.

Update: “Whopper Sacrifice Has Been Sacrificed.” (January 14th) Facebook shut down the Burger King application citing problems privacy issues — normally, users are unaware they’ve been unfriended, but the Whopper Sacrifice makes this “de-friending” public. Sounds odd coming from a company that didn’t/doesn’t have a problem making public everything you’ve purchased, when you leave a group, or, best of all, when you’re no longer in a relationship.

On Wednesday, Google and Yahoo! announced that they are not going through with the advertising deal they had proposed earlier in June. With little support from the advertising community the deal was intended to benefit, as well as legal concerns around monopolization, the failed proposition wasn’t faced with too much disappointment.

Robert Liodice, president and chief executive office of the Association of National Advertisers, shares his thoughts on the announcement with CRM magazine:

So what’s the general feeling at the ANA?
We are pleased. There are a couple of things at play here and the most important is that we got a meeting of the minds. What I mean by that is when propositions like this are of consequence, it’s important to get full participation and full integration on the implications to the marketing community. The opportunity to be able to weigh in on the proposed deal that Google and Yahoo! provided was an appropriate way to go. They saw that there could have been some risks to their initial proposition and they gave many parties the opportunity to weigh in, including the Department of Justice, which was the original reason for the delay because it at least had the appearance of potentially being monopolistic or certainly [having] a level of concentrated of power. So we welcomed that opportunity, and we weighed in against the proposition because we felt that it was not beneficial to advertisers from a variety of standpoints. In the end, the Department of Justice seemed to agree with our posture as well as the postures of other organizations around the world, including the World Federation of Advertisers and the Association of Canadian Advertisers.

So yes, that’s a long-winded way of saying we’re happy.

Was nobody really buying into the idea that it was actually going to be a “competitive auction,” or a successful one at that?

First of all, nobody of consequence that I’m aware of on the advertising side bought into the proposition, period. That was what was the most intriguing thing out of this whole situation. There were no major advertisers that looked me square in the eye and said, ‘Yea, this is a good thing, we can’t wait!’

That really was, I think, the stark reality that both Google and Yahoo! faced. There were no real takers, no believers that this was going to be beneficial to the industry. It was a situation where if the community wasn’t going to stand up and rally behind it, then how could Google and Yahoo! proceed forward? So the belief, or at least the rational, that these organizations were saying, that this would lead to a higher return on investment for marketers, was, at best, a conceptual one and not one that was demonstrated in fact, data, or reality. There’s no way you could go into something of this consequence with the potential marketplace implications of bringing the two largest guys together and think this could be beneficial to everybody in the long run.

The other thing is…this is not a staid and stale market. As we look at both competitors, they’ve done a lot for the industry, and we’ve been very grateful that search advertising has been as well-developed and well-defined as it is. But when these situations develop, we have to respect the fact that technology is going to continue to bring the level of innovation and creativity to make the marketplace even more beneficial and more productive for advertisers and marketers. We had some ongoing discussions with Yahoo! about this to say, ‘Yes, we recognize that there are reasons you may want this deal. Obviously, we don’t concur.’ The reality is that there is a natural momentum that’s taking place by innovation and innovative people, and the ability for technology to evolve,that’s going to make this a win-win for everyone.

Even without this partnership, does the advertising industry fear what industry pundits have called “Googzilla”?
I applaud Google for their competitive victory. They’ve done a magnificent job with taking this marketplace and winning, and consistently winning, and beating out some pretty good competitors. Anytime you can get to the 70 percent-range of any market, you’re obviously doing a lot right.

Is Googzilla just a myth?
The question is, what happens from here? Obviously one would never like to see someone control 98 percent of the marketplace because your options become limited. But on the flip side, the beauty of where we are from a technology-based media and marketing marketplace is that things will evolve and things will change and you may be the big gun now but you may not be 3 to 5 years from now. If this were a stale market I’d think it’d be tough for someone to knock them off or challenge them. [But] the future is always in doubt, some young upstart will come up with something better. [We'll] continue to have that happen as technology filters its way through all aspects of the broad media spectrum.

On Tuesday, we ran a news story about how marketers/businesses who have invested in online marketing and Web analytics are going to continue doing so. This, according to Jim Sterne, author of the report and founder of the eMetrics Marketing Optimization Summit (eMOS), is a testament to the fact that those who are using these tools are seeing results and standing by them.

The Association of National Advertisers concluded its “Masters of Marketing” conference two weeks ago (Oct. 16-19) and it, too, launched a survey to its attendees. Though this one captured a much wider audience (approx. 1,400 attendees comprised of marketers, analysts, and agencies), results still point to a similar conclusion — marketing budgets, in general, aren’t plummeting as much as everyone had feared, as long as they’re showing the numbers (and the money). In fact, BtoB magazine will be hosting a Webcast tomorrow where Stefan Tournquist, Research Director at MarketingSherpa, “explains why cutting budgets in a tight economy may be a shortsighted approach.”

Check out the survey and results after the jump, as well as a few words from Barbara Bacci Mirque, executive vice president at the ANA.

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