All marketers are liars

This week two new media properties I have been developing go to air.

The first is IN2IT, an infomerical along the lines of Family Health Diary and Eating Well, both concepts I developed for brandWorld - the company I co-founded in 1996 and sold in 2000. I continue to work with the company helping develop these innovative media solutions. It's not high art, but it is my art.

The second is TXT2TASTE, which I didn't conceive, but have been consulting with the agency, Publicis Mojo to help steer the project. I like the innovation of the Mojo idea. I'm looking forward to seeing how it plays to consumers - teaching them to behave in new ways.

I have also been working on some truly weird permutations of the infomercial concept - I'll share more with you later. But for now I'm just playing with some ideas that should be very different in this category. I'm beginning to wonder how many of the genre can run before consumers become immune or resistant.

Time will tell.

I'm reading Seth Godin's book (remember Permission marketing?) Free Prize Inside. It is thought provoking. I like his concept of EdgeCraft - taking ideas away from the boring centre. Not such an innovative thought, but he practices what he preaches by making something fairly mundane seem fresh. The first pressings of this book were despatched in Cereal Boxes.

But the one I'm really looking forward to is the provocatively titled All Marketers Are Liars. What I like is the subtitle: The Power of Telling Authentic Stories in a Low-trust world. Seems to gel with my own thinking. I am being struck by the synchronicity of some of the ideas I am stumbling across.

Comments

Why billboards must go.

The problem with billboards and advertising in public places is they are an invasion of privacy. Unlike magazine, tv, radio (etc) advertising you cannot choose to turn it off or avoid it. Nor does it offer anything in return. It is a medium that offers no benefit or advantage to the person it is inflicted on. At least television ads subsidise the programming. Without doubt some billboards are entertaining - I thought the anti GE poster for short lived MADGE activist group was particularly good. But most are rubbish. Literally. Badly executed. Nothing important to say. The debate has led to a great deal of hysteria - mostly from people with a vested interest in perpetuating the deployment of hoardings. Perhaps the idea that the issue at stake is 'property rights' is the creepiest. If you own a building you have every right to plaster anything you like on its external surfaces. Is that an antisocial point of view? I think so. In the UK you could have an ASBO slapped on you for si...

Ze Frank thinks so you don't have to

Ze Frank appeared on my radar when I saw his presentation among the excellent TED Talks videos . This morning I was reading Russell Davies planning blog in which he referred to a clip by Ze Frank - Where do ideas come from. Here's the transcript: "...Hungry Hippo licks Aunt JEmima [sic] writes, "Are you ever gonna break into song again? Are you running out of ideas?" Hungry Hippo licks Aunt JEmima, that's a good question. I run out of ideas every day! Each day I live in mortal fear that I've used up the last idea that'll ever come to me. If you don't wanna run out of ideas the best thing to do is not to execute them. You can tell yourself that you don't have the time or resources to do 'em right. Then they stay around in your head like brain crack. No matter how bad things get, at least you have those good ideas that you'll get to later. Some people get addicted to that brain crack. And the longer they wait, the more they convince themse...

Johnny Bunko competiton

The Great Johnny Bunko Challenge from DHP on Vimeo . There's a young chap in Indiana, one Alec Quig , who has written to me about creating a career based on a polymathic degree, from which he has recently graduated. He's an interesting young man and his concerns about going forward in life are the anxieties we all face at crossroads in our lives when we are forced to make choices. Dan Pink's latest book The Adventures of Johnny Bunko: The Last Career Guide You'll Ever Need might help: "From a New York Times, BusinessWeek, and Washington Post bestselling author comes a first-of-its- kind career guide for a new generation of job seekers.There's never been a career guide like it.the fully illustrated story (ingeniously told in Manga form) of a young Everyman just out of college who lands his first job. Johnny Bunko is new to parachute company Boggs Corp., and he stumbles through his early days as a working stiff until a crisis prompts him to find a new job. St...

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