Running a campaign is similar to running a business in many ways. Raise some investment capital, meet a need of society and then market the heck out of yourself. Hillary Clinton leads the race for investment capital, having raised over $63 million so far. Barack Obama comes in a close second with over $58 million raised. Republicans are represented too, with Mitt Romney raising over $44 million and Rudy Giuliani topping $35 million. That’s a lot of money for an election that’s over a year away.

Politics blurs the line of meeting society needs and we’ll certainly see lots of changes to their approach as each candidate vies for a lead in the polls.

Despite Romney spending more than any other candidate, over $32 million so far, it’s Hillary Clinton that’s leading the way of marketing herself. On Monday, August 13th, she launched the first television ad in IOWA explaining that too many Americans feel invisible. Is this too early? Was it the right message? Did she target the right demographic? That will be for you to decide. In this business you are the consumer and there is no rich or poor, we all get the same currency, one vote a year from November.

Whether you’re into marketing or business or both this will be interesting to watch!

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Mattel has launched a marketing campaign aimed at undoing the mess they’ve gotten themselves into lately. Suffering from not one but TWO recalls of toys lately the Chairman and CEO, Bob Eckert, is seen pleading for understanding from toy consumers. He attempts to share an understanding of the frustration of lead-based paint and problematic high-powered magnets by starting his speech with “as the father of four children myself”. Bob then goes on to lay out a three step solution to help “change how we work again in the future”. See the full message here.

Lead based paint is not a joking matter, with affects including: severe learning disabilities, vomiting, diarrhea, convulsions, anemia and a lot more. Mattel has identified the maker of the problematic toys to a Chinese manufacturer Lee Der. The head of the company committed suicide earlier this week.

Magnets don’t sound harmful but the ones used in 9 million Mattel toys are “rare-earth magnets” which can be 20 times more powerful than a normal magnet and can be fatal if swallowed. Although China gets a lot of the blame for the toy recalls this may be related to the toy designers who are using a lot more of these magnets as they continue to be cheaper. No toy designers have been reported to commit suicide.

Is this going to be enough to clear the name for Mattel? We’ve seen recalls before (Ford setting the standard there) but not seen the likes of a massive marketing campaign to clear the companies name the way Mattel is doing. Bob Eckert is certainly being straightforward, which is probably the right thing to do. Whether it will work in the eyes of toy consumers remains to be seen.

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Nielsen Media Research has launched a new measurement of gameplay on consoles and PC’s. Similar to TV ratings these statistics show what is the most popular, how much is being used and specific games that are getting the most play time. With the heated sales environment between Xbox 360, Playstation 3 and Wii it’s important to know which one is actually being used the most.

Drumroll please… “Announcing the first ever Most Used Console Award, and it goes to… Playstation 2″. No, that’s not a typo, the Playstation 2 accounts for 42% of all console gameplay. And for all the splash that the Wii has made it’s actually only making up 4% of gameplay, half of what the Xbox 360.

So just how does this relate to Marketing? Glad you asked, Xbox 360 users averaged 61 minutes per session of gameplay and Playstation 3 a whopping 83 minutes. In a separate report, Nielsen found that brand awareness increased 64% from in-game advertisements and purchase intent increased 41%. If your company is thinking marketing, think games.

Finding the right game can be just as important and there is a CLEAR leader in the individual games. No more drumrolls, just a lot of WoW. World of Warcraft (WoW) users spend more than 17 hours PER WEEK, more than twice the next most popular game, Halo: Combat Evolved (8.5 hours a week).

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Well known for revolutionizing the online advertising market Google is going back to the basics, newspaper ads. What started out as a test with 50 newspapers has exploded into 225, reaching 50% of circulation. It’s a win-win situation for Google and the newspapers, Google expands its reach and newspapers get a lot more hungry advertisers.

The secret sauce lies in the ability to target your advertising, even for those with a small budget. It’s what made Google successful online and that’s what makes this move brilliant with offline. Using the same interface online, users now have a tab that allows them to choose “print advertising”. The long-tail approach allows the smaller players to compete in a space that has traditionally been dominated by major corporations.

And who is that scurrying through Google’s dust, Yahoo! of course. Soon after the release of Google’s news came the release from Yahoo! saying they were boosting newspaper deals too. Their program is slightly different because it’s helping newspapers sell ads on their online sites mostly.

How long will it be before Google TV ads are available to the public?

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Levi’s has done something brand new to appeal to the gay community, created a commercial with alternate endings. The commercial starts with a man putting on his jeans and a new world bursts through the floor. In one ending a woman enters the scene looking seductively at the man and his jeans. In the end they both walk off together in this new world. The alternative version has the exact same beginning but instead of a woman entering the scene it’s a man and they both walk off together.

Advertising Age reports that the gay commercial will air on Logo, an MTV channel that is specifically geared towards the gay community.

Why is this newsworthy? Because it doesn’t happen very often. That’s strange considering the enormous buying power of the gay community, estimated at $641 billion in 2006 (Gay Press Report 2006). Is it a conscious decision to ignore such a huge market or are companies just slow? In fact, the same report declares that ad spending is up 205% since 1996 and over 183 Fortune 500 brands are active in the gay consumer market.

It’s a bold move by Levi’s but definitely a smart business decision. Ad Age even reports that cost wasn’t an issue, just insight. So for all the companies ignoring this market it’s time to get a little insight!

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Vodafone is one of the world’s largest mobile telecommunication companies. In the last couple of years it has re-branded several times, and I was involved in the last three, being an art director for their online campaigns for almost three years.

They entered in my country by buying one of the biggest mobile provider Connex, and started a battle with Orange, another big company in this industry, which at that time was already in the market, offering great products. So, their battles at that time were:

1. making aware all the customers that Vodafone was their new service provider
2. fighting with Orange, that has taken a lot of costumers from Connex by offering better services and price plans.

A brutal change was not good, creating confusion among the Connex users, so they decided to use a “smooth” transition. Their first step in the re-branding process was to combine both logos in one, and to use Connex layouts in their online and offline campaigns. After about 4 or 5 months, they started to use their own logo, their own colors and fonts. This entrance coincided with Vodafone’s global re-branding, that contained a new 3D logo, and a new style-guide that allowed gradients, rounded corners and other visual elements. So, the new website was designed after the new style-guide and was, i am almost sure about this, the first website in the world after the new stylguide.

In their campaigns Vodafone used a pretty interesting strategy, creating some different banners than those people were used with, for a mobile phone company. For example a banner used a single basketball image, cropped in right angles, repeating itself random on the banner. It was something new for everybody, and that caught the eye. During Christmas they used a huge smily face, that was all over the web and cities. I was personally impressed by their Christmas online game, and I can say that was quite a success.

Now, Vodafone is a really powerful company, everybody knows them, and offers some competing products and price plans.

Being involved in this process, I was constantly in search of new things done by Vodafone, worldwide. I was impressed about many projects but one of them impressed me the most. It is their online corporate presentation that I would like to share, and you can find it here at http://www.vodafonejourney.com/. Is a great interactive video that makes you feel comfortable watching, it’s so cleverly branded, and uses some subtle effects, but the main thing is that their products and company policy are promoted very well.

I wish I could work in a project like that, but I didn’t have any luck. The presentation is done by a great Swedish agency, which I respect a lot, called North Kingdom. You can browse through their work and see what i mean.

P.S. I am a bit short with pictures about the co-branded logo and campaigns, but i promise to come back with more visual elements.

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Buy.com has created an application that will allow Facebook users to easily sell their items right through their profile. It’s still in the Beta stage but in theory it should make selling your old stuff much easier. If it sells Buy.com takes 5% off the purchase price and if it doesn’t there is no cost to the seller.

There’s an interesting article on TechCrunch (read it here) that discusses whether the “Garage Sale” will be a legitimate competitor to eBay or not. It is an interesting point that will be worth watching. Is the convenience of completing a transaction right through Facebook tempting enough to lure shoppers away from eBay? Probably not.

If you’re looking to swap crap with your friends perhaps this might be a cool feature, especially if they live in another country. However, if you’re looking for an item that you just can’t wait to get I bet the temptation of finding something on eBay will outweigh the desire to stay within a site. Besides, your friends are just as likely to sell you junk as someone on eBay. At least eBay sellers have a detailed history of crap selling, AKA seller rating.

Buy.com gets a big “Sink” rating from hookorsink.com.

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$350 Million!
That’s the value that Disney sees in the preteen social networking genre.

According to an LATimes article, dated Aug. 2, 2007, Disney is planning to buy the widely popular tot-site Club Penguin. This is actually a very unique way to enable kids to have a safe online experience.

“Club Penguin is a virtual world where children can play games, have fun and interact with each other.” – Club Penguin

Create your penguin, dress up your penguin, decorate your igloo, be the first to discover new areas, play games with others or alone. Launched in October 2005, Club Penguin has more than 700,000 paid subscribers and 12 million registered users, most of them in the United States and Canada.

What I find interesting is that they have already delved into the social networking genre with their highly publicized ToonTown Online. ToonTown Online, in their own words, is defined as:

“Disney’s Toontown Online, the first massively multiplayer online game designed specifically for kids and families, is an award-winning, kid-safe, endlessly evolving, and immersive 3-D online world.” – ToonTown Online

It will be interesting to watch how Disney positions each site. Club Penguin is clearly situated to serve the preteen market, while ToonTown Online seems to have turned their focus on the teen market.

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Bath & Body Works recently looked at optimizing their website and turned to Coremetrics for help. In a self-started efficiency audit B&BW wanted to look at how they compared with retailers in their niche along with retailers that experience their same level of traffic, in the same field or not. What they found was that compared to their competitors they actually did a good job of converting.

Being good enough wasn’t good enough. By digging into some of their own information, like keywords used within their site, B&BW was able to identify several things that could be changed. Most notably, the website navigation went from 9 options to 7 and trimmed down to make it simpler for consumers to find what they want. For example, changing “Hair Care” to “Hair” helped simplify the message and removing the clutter without loss of intuition.

They also changed their subcategories, onsite keywords and moved the “Add to Cart” button to the top of the page. All of these changes helped increase the average order size by “double digits”. To read more detail read the great case study by Marketing Sherpa.

Worth noting is the season vulnerabilities of the site. Despite it’s success, Bath & Body Works is still susceptible to the popularity of the holiday season and suffers a huge dip throughout the rest of the year (check out the Alexa traffic details). Perhaps optimizations like this will help change the scale of the dip to a higher number!

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Surfing through YouTube.com, I believe, I stumbled on some … interesting banners. After staring at this one banner for a while I realized it was probably a banner created by a Chamber of Commerce. “Visit the D” wasn’t the only thing that stuck out, with three out of the four animations being a little racier than I was used to. So, as the URL at the bottom suggested I checked out visitdetroit.com. And the site/banners weren’t created by a Chamber of Commerce, rather the Detroit Metro Convention & Visitors Bureau (sounds to me like the same thing).

What do you think? Are these banners too racy? Are they the images that show off Detroit the best? Does it make you want to visit Detroit?

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