The
Battle For Coca-Cola
Rages On.
Ain't
Nothing Like
The Real Thing, Maybe.
I
Don't Mean To Say
I Told You So, But...
Are
Consumers Smarter
Then We Are?.
The
Four Great Myths
Of Global Branding.
Mr
Bevis Butts Heads
At Mitsubishi
The
Best Laid Plans
Of Mice And Men.
Dare
to Be Great:
The Mad Genius of "The Matrix""
Mitsubishi's
New Marketing Boss
Out Of The Frying Pan.
Concept Is Stronger Than Fact.
Value
Perception In A World
Gone Mad With "Cool"
The
Future of Advertising
The Brand
The
Future of Advertising
The Targets
The
Future of Advertising
The Grid
The
Future of Advertising
The Swarm
Technology
Making The Message
Meaningful
The Only Business That Matters Is The One You're In.
What
Ever Happened To The
Big Idea?
The Post-Advertising Era Is Here
Confessions Of A" Liar For Hire"
Good, Bad and Ugly At the Moment of Truth
A Post-Advertising "Big Idea".
The Value Of A Paying Pustomer.
Emergence Of the "Empire of One".
All customers Are Created Equal
Playing God An Other Atrocities
the
City That Spawned
The Age Of Advertising..
Fear And Self Loathing In Advertising.
The Greatest Success Metric Is Sales.
Foot In (Word Of) Mouth Disease
In the Begining, There Was The End.
The Rise And Fall
Of The Creative Class
What's Love Got To Do With It?
Champagne Brand
Beer Marketing Budget
Amtrak: Third World Nation On Wheels.
New Music Means
New Marketing.
Automotive Advertising Hits A Dead End.
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The Power Of A Simple Idea. In an age where companies like Schweppes/Cadbury are O.K. with taking a $9 million write down for a Dr. Pepper TV campaign that will never see the light of day, a "simple idea" is a radical concept. At the last Square Table discussion in the Red Room, a group of Post-Advertising zealots took up the challenge of trying to create, build, launch and distribute a product for 1 dollar a unit or less. One bean, all in. Impossible, you say? Impractical! claims common wisdom. But do-able nonetheless, says I. And we got quite a bit down the road with it. |
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After a round of shaken but not stirreds, the low-budget ideas began to flow. "Boobvertising" was the first idea to surface. Needless to say, we killed that one first off when it was discovered that none of the ladies present were even slightly interested in helping with the prototype. |
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YOU SUCK. YOUR OPINIONS SUCK. EVERYTHING ABOUT YOU SUCKS. NO WONDER YOU DON'T PUT YOUR FULL FACE ON THIS RAG. YOUR LOOKS PROBABLY SUCK TOO!!!- Anon, Pittsburgh One more happy reader added |
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The next idea tossed on the square table was to take this publication and sell certain words that would be linked to sponsoring websites. (Personally, I could not see the value in anyone paying $500 a month for use of the word "the" on these pages. But never let it be said that Harry Webber passed up an opportunity to self-promote.) We even had someone track down the proper section of eBay where such a media buy could be posted. Finally, Angela put her foot down and we were urged to move on to something more practical. Of course, by now you might be wondering why some of the sharpest minds in the Post-Advertising Era are sitting around the Square Table in the Red Room at GASP on a Friday night trying to come up with impossibly cheap ideas. Our objective was to see if the concept of bootstrap economics was actually workable. Bootstrap Economics was started in Japan last year when Daiwa Securities Group Inc. and Waseda University started a program for undergraduates in April. Professor Hideo Namiki, who supervises the course, stated the university's goal is to launch 100 start-ups, or 10 percent of the government target, in the Japanese business publication Asahi. (I don't think Professor Hideo would approve of a business plan for "boobvertising".) The ideation on a shoestring continued. (Ever notice how bootstrap and shoestring both mean the same thing in economics...and that nobody wears shoes that lace up any more?) But I digress. Within the first hour we had several simple ideas that held potential. But nothing that blew the doors off. Then somebody mentioned the idea of teaching a course in Post-Advertising Marketing Theory. The cost involved would be no more than an e-mail blast to our mailing list and a series of flyers posted around the local campuses. Now that was something we could build on. But not in the next few weeks. Back to work. Another person mentioned an article in the current issue of Wired that gushed on about Allen Morgan, a Venture Capitalist at the Mayfield Fund who spends most of his time digging up the business plans of failed dot coms. His mission is to identify companies who were "ahead-of-their-time" and as a result, subsequently crashed and burned. I doubted whether Allen Morgan will find any companies that he can ressucitate for less than a buck. But it did send us searching through a couple of back issues of Fast Company to come up with some useless concepts we could repackage and raise a few million dollars with. All and all, the "simple Idea" topic was responsible for firing up one of our more heated weekly discussions. What it served to prove was that when you are used to being paid top dollar for your creativity, the introduction of economic boundries can severely hamper your style. The Japanese may be on to something with their Bootstrap Economics program, now making its way through their universities. Time will tell. Stay tuned.
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