The world around us

Growing up I felt that having my own business card was quite the ultimate in being a career person. It showed that you were someone in the business world, although lots of people other than businesspeople have business cards. In fact my grandmother used to have one, just with the name and address on it, and it was a really stylish card. The cost of business card printing have dropped quite dramatically, so now you can get 100 cards for as low as $3.95 at many printing shops, who have lots of design templates to chose from. I decided to investigate further and see if I could find a card that I would like to have and found some really great ones that I would love to use. There are a lot of profession specific cards for carpenters, beauticians, architects, which is a good way to enhance and make your business more memorable. I know I would definitely remember whose card it was if there was a picture or graphic on it. I have cards from several local merchants and they are just names and numbers to me after a while, so a graphic really adds to making a card memorable.

Starbucks Coffee released its first ever TV commercial in an effort to get more customers and increase transactions. Weiden & Kennedy has created two campaigns, The Red Cup and Pass the Cheer for Starbucks to reach out to a wider audience. According to Starbucks CEO Jim Donald, the strains on the economy are causing a dampener for their products. The company has seen a decline of 1% in average transactions per store in the US and with the cut in its forecast for its financial year, saw its shares go down by 6 percent.

“I wouldn’t read into the advertising initiatives to much,” Founder Howard Schultz said in response to the question in a conference call. “I think it’s a natural evolution of the maturity of the brand and the experience. And the fact that we think we can get enormous leverage gaining the national footprint we have in major markets as a result of a TV campaign.”

For any small business, having a good and eye-catching logo is essential to getting started and competing with the big guns. It is the stepping stone to bigger and brighter things, so every new business owner must invest some thought to having just the right kind of logo. Thanks to the internet, it is now possible to be able to do a lot of these things oneself, which is a really great idea, since one can get very personal in creating a specific logo with just your business in mind. LogoYes is one such company that provides do-it-yourself logos as well as other design products such as notepads and letter heads. Take a look at their sample business logos to get an idea of how it works. The process is so streamlined and successful that the company has a patent pending! The site has fast become one of the most popular design sites on the internet, and has some really great ideas on creating logos that will fit your company.

There are lots of reasons to love blogging. I love to be able to express myself and my feelings to the world, to share my knowledge and ask for others opinions and one of the latest is the be able to make money while blogging. Smorty is a relatively new blog for money service where you bloggers are connected to advertisers and can write reviews of products and services for them. Blog advertising is growing huge day by day and there’s no better time to get involved in it than now.

If you have a good style of writing, can be objective about your opinions and have some free time at hand then, you must try out Smorty and get paid to blog. Money is always a great incentive to start something new, but keep in mind that unless you do a good job at doing reviews and following the advertisers instructions, you’re not going to have very many offers. As with any other job, if you do it well, you will be rewarded and if you are blase about it, you might be in trouble. Paid blogging has been gaining momentum since last year and is now becoming quite mainstream, so it’s a good time to start off with it.

J.C. Penney is experimenting with a new marketing initiative that integrates online, print, broadcast and mobile advertising and combines it with digital marketing, promotion and sponsorships, in an effort to encourage kids to explore J.C. Penney’s fashionable clothes. The company is listed as the #12 retailer in the Internet Retail Top 500 Guide and while it has always maintained its popularity with the older generation, it is now trying to connect with kids and teens.

According to Mike Boylson, chief marketing officer for J.C. Penney, “While traditional marketing remains an important part of our approach, we are focused on incorporating new components into this year’s back-to-school campaign that will truly reach youth in an authentic way. Using this unique approach, we’re able to break through the marketing clutter and sameness to attract kids and teens – whether it’s at the movies, in the mall, on the phone or on the web.”

An estimated 132 million US consumers or 75% of all Internet users in the US watched streaming video online in the month of May, according to a report by comScore. Most users spend about 158 minutes watching videos in May. The highest ranked sites were Google Video and YouTube which is also owned by Google since its October 2006 acquisition. Google sites streamed a total of 1.8 billion videos and account for 21.5% of all online videos seen in May. Other sites where US consumers watched streaming video’s were Fox Interactive Media and Yahoo.

Your personal identity is important information online but marketers are more keen to learn your browsing habits and what you were searching for online instead. Monitoring technologies that are able to track and predict future shopping behavior are becoming increasingly popular with advertisers. These behavioral targeting methods are the key to getting better results in marketing campaigns. In the US alone, marketers are likely to increase their spending on behavioral campaigns from $575 million in 2007 to $1 billion in 2008.

“As long as I’m seeing relevant advertising and as long as I am receiving free content, I am a pretty happy person,” said Bill Gossman, chief executive of behavioral targeting firm Revenue Science. The company’s clients have included media outlets from Reuters Group Plc to Walt Disney Co.’s ABC News and Gannett Co. Inc.’s USA Today.

Beijing’s Mayor Wand Qishan is against the use of billboards to luxury products, saying that they will increase the hostility between the rich and the poor. Most common luxury products displayed in billboard ads are apartments, villas, automobiles and other luxury goods. There is a wide gap between the rich and the poor in Beijing, with the average income coming to 5,900 yuan or USD765 in this years first quarter. Rural residents make less than this amount.

Marketers are coming up with innovative ways to get to consumers who are put off my ads, by making the entire show an ad. In a novel approach, Gillette is producing a reality show called Young Guns on ABC which follows a group of NASCAR drivers. The same drivers are featured in the company’s ads on TV and on the Internet. The campaign has been designed by BBDO New York and is using professional drivers to teach celebrities how to drive race cars and compete in a show called Fast Cars and Superstars: Gillette Young Guns Celebrity Race. The show will be starting on June 7th this year.

"We’re seeing a blurring between advertising and entertainment," says Steve Fund, Gillette marketing director. "It’s a new business model."  Gillette paid ABC for the air time and pulled in TV production experts and a talent agency to create the show. The unit of Procter & Gamble (PG) won’t say what the time cost or what it’s paying the drivers or celebrities. Marketers already have been moving to weave their brand names into programming through exclusive sponsorship deals and product placement, such as Coca-Cola (KO) with American Idol. Companies realize that they need more than just a 30-second TV ad to interest viewers, says Jon Kamen, CEO of production company @radical.media, which worked with Gillette on Fast Cars.

They’ve always been lots of billboard haters, but I wonder how they will respond to this campaign? Agenda has an article on how DDB New Zealand has come up up an intriguing campaign against banning billboards called the "Say No to No Billboards". The series highlights several buildings that are ugly and boring in their own right and that adding billboards does nothing but improve their looks actually.

Bruce Hucker, in an article for the New Zealand Herald, asks “Should we have a city in which large billboards and a plethora of signs dominate every shopping strip, every street corner and every road intersection? Or should we create a city in which signs and billboards have their place, but do not overwhelm our heritage buildings, our quality architecture, and our public spaces?”