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Giant Hydrophobic Duck Peddles Oasis Brand in Japan (New Media Age)
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Posted: 06/19/2009
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Seeking to captivate a young, hip audience, the Coca-Cola-owned Oasis brand is flooding the Japanese market with a giant rubber duck harboring a distinct aversion to water. The multi-channel marketing strategy has plans to deluge the market with internet, television, strategic media relationships and billboard advertising in its continuation of the brand’s “For people who don’t like water” campaign. Literally upstream without a paddle... or water, for that matter, this is one duck that is sure to generate a marketing splash in the wave of competition for alternatives to water.
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Industry:
Marketing, Design, & Interactive Communications,
Retail & Products
Topic:
Content Strategy,
Creative & Design,
Experience & Interaction,
Marketing Communications
Region:
Asia Pacific
Audience:
Business to Consumer
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Study Finds That Mobile Ads Deliver the Goods to One in Three Smartphone Owners (Promo Magazine)
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Posted: 06/19/2009
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Now that nearly one of every seven minutes of digital media consumption takes place over a mobile device, it’s no small wonder that more smartphone users are actively embracing the ‘smart’ technology to enhance their lives. A recent study by Interpublic Group division Universal McCann and sponsored by Platform-A, AOL’s digital ad service, discovered that more than half of all smartphone users have responded to ads, requesting more information from their Web-enabled devices. The study also found that thirty-five percent actively requested to receive a mobile coupon, while 245 made purchases from their high-end handsets. UM director of consumer insights Graeme Hutton said in a statement. “Now mobile is less about ‘wireless online’ and more about being a highly personal, customized medium. Smartphone users are reaching for their devices to help answer unmet needs. Services that don’t have dedicated mobile formats are going to miss out on this huge and continual media consumption shift.”
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Industry:
Marketing, Design, & Interactive Communications,
Retail & Products,
Telecommunications
Topic:
Business Intelligence,
Creative & Design,
E-Commerce,
Experience & Interaction,
Marketing Communications
Region:
Global
Audience:
Business to Business,
Business to Consumer
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Driving the Competition (BrandWeek)
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Posted: 06/19/2009
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With 1.2 million members worldwide and more than 145,904 fans on Facebook, brand behemoth Harley-Davidson is now driving their brand power home online with social media and mobile marketing. Proud of its powerful offline impact, according to Randy Sprenger manager of electronic advertising and direct promotions, online campaigns and mobile marketing are helping the company get in touch with what people are saying outside the walls of Harley. Sprenger claims the brand’s strength can be attributed to the personal connection established between company and rider. “We are actually riders. We participate in events as riders. I think one of the greatest strengths is the passion and enthusiasm here at the motor company for our riders. We always want to be out, talking to them.”
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Industry:
Marketing, Design, & Interactive Communications
Topic:
Business Intelligence,
Content Strategy,
Creative & Design,
Experience & Interaction,
Marketing Communications
Region:
Global
Audience:
Business to Consumer,
Peer Groups & Communities
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Twitter’s New Swan Song (Fast Company)
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Posted: 06/19/2009
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Twitter’s new change may appear to be one small chirp in the Twitter universe, but has the potential to turn up the volume even further on the lifecasting powerhouse’s increasing relevance. Tweeters now have access to “hive-minded” buzz through the new “search” and “trending topics” additions that appear on every homepage, reflecting real-world trends and socially-relevant topics. With its speed and real-time social relevance that even extends beyond Google’s reach, the powerful new tool could help Twitter top the charts with marketers seeking to spread their latest advertisements and become even more relevant to Tweeters looking to connect with the world around them.
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Industry:
Marketing, Design, & Interactive Communications
Topic:
Business Intelligence,
Content Strategy,
Marketing Communications
Region:
Global
Audience:
Business to Business,
Business to Consumer,
Peer Groups & Communities
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Art Meets Internet Commerce, Reality TV, Social Media (Promo Magazine)
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Posted: 06/05/2009
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Continuing the surge of story-based marketing, Coca-Cola brand Sprite is launching a new European campaign that boldly unites art with multi-channeled commerce. A young, unknown British singer headlines the ongoing YouTube series that follows as she hits the New York music scene. With the prequel getting upwards of 60,000 views on YouTube, the show is also linked to Facebook Connect, creating the first interaction of its kind between YouTube and Facebook.
“With this show, Sprite shifts from creating the perfect branded content to content that perfects the brand,” Coca-Cola head of European digital marketing Stafford Green said in a release. “Instead of repeating single messages in traditional media, Sprite supports these new experiences and deep storytelling to communicate our core brand values over time. It’s a fresh advertising model, and everyone wins: the artist, the brands and especially the audience—getting free on-demand, truly interactive content without commercial interruption.”
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Industry:
Marketing, Design, & Interactive Communications,
Retail & Products,
Telecommunications
Topic:
Creative & Design,
Experience & Interaction,
Technology Implementation
Region:
Global,
Europe
Audience:
Business to Consumer,
Peer Groups & Communities
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Connecting with a Hispanic Market (BusinessWeek)
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Posted: 06/05/2009
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The Hispanic population is the fastest growing segment in the United States, meaning some marketers are missing more than 40 million new customers. Savvy companies like Procter and Gamble, Verizon and General Mills are funneling more marketing dollars into the Hispanic market, a segment proven to purchase products and services from brands advertised on TV. "Hispanic consumers appreciate when you speak to them in their own language," says Edward Gold, advertising director at State Farm Insurance. The approach is paying huge dividends for companies like General Mills, which has seen double-digit sales gains. Taking product integration to the next level, Telemundo and Vidal Partnerships (Client include Home Depot, Kraft Foods and Wendy’s) have formed a strategic alliance to promote an online contest in which viewers will choose the ending for one of the networks telenovelas.
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Industry:
Marketing, Design, & Interactive Communications,
Retail & Products
Topic:
Content Strategy,
Creative & Design,
Experience & Interaction,
Marketing Communications
Region:
North America,
South-Central America
Audience:
Business to Consumer
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Finding Common Ground: Insights on Engineering and Design (BusinessWeek)
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Posted: 06/05/2009
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Microsoft Research Principal Scientist Bill Buxton is calling for engineers and user-experience designers to find some common ground. Faced with ongoing questions from well-intentioned engineers regarding design, Buxton acknowledges the answers are more complicated than becoming a designer themselves or simply learning to “do” design as many engineers suggest. First, Buxton counsels that professional competence equal to the task must be added to your team. While the UX and engineering tasks certainly go hand-in-hand, expert proficiency is difficult to come by for each discipline, making it often impossible to jump seamlessly between the two. Buxton advises a four-layered approach: Design awareness, Design literacy, Design thinking, and Design practice to achieve results and solutions worthy of your customers.
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Industry:
Marketing, Design, & Interactive Communications,
Technology, Consulting, & Professional Services,
Telecommunications
Topic:
Creative & Design,
Experience & Interaction,
Technology Implementation
Region:
Global
Audience:
Business to Business,
Business to Consumer,
Peer Groups & Communities
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Microsoft Vine: A New Twist on Social Marketing (CNN Money)
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Posted: 06/05/2009
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In an effort to untangle a new path toward social networking prosperity, Microsoft Vine is branching out into unchartered territory: charging subscription fees. Hailed as the 911 for the 21st Century, the new platform will focus on climbing the social networking ladder into the public safety and emergency information arenas by limiting activity to two actions: alerts and reports. Users can customize profiles and bunch their friends and family into groups, creating a virtual safety net to keep informed about events as major as hurricanes or national crises, or as minor as a snow day. The testing phase offers the opportunity to discover how city emergency management agencies across the country might implement this new communication tool. While the basic service will be free, premium services like smartphone access will come with a price tag.
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Industry:
Marketing, Design, & Interactive Communications,
Technology, Consulting, & Professional Services
Topic:
Content Strategy,
Experience & Interaction,
Technology Implementation
Region:
North America
Audience:
Business to Business,
Business to Consumer,
Peer Groups & Communities
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Online Communities Strengthen Brand Power (Chief Marketer)
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Posted: 05/24/2009
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No matter your product or service, building online brands means building virtual communities that cultivate customer loyalty and provide lasting value. Shaping customer experiences that allows for custom-control, targeted e-mail follow-ups and strategic communications will not only maximize the time your customers spend with your brand, it will also increase your messaging impact and build mindshare, too. It never hurts to make the experience enjoyable, too, through elements like compelling visual design, intuitive navigation and user-generated content. Take for instance, the Pen Collective, by eROI and Wacom. The group now boasts more than 3000 active members, due to the brand’s intuitive mix of tutorials, testimonials, wit and social networking to create an inimitable personal connection to the brand.
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Industry:
Marketing, Design, & Interactive Communications,
Retail & Products
Topic:
Business Intelligence,
Content Strategy,
Experience & Interaction,
Marketing Communications,
Technology Implementation
Region:
Global
Audience:
Business to Business,
Business to Consumer,
Peer Groups & Communities
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World Wise: Navigating a Global Market with an Eye toward China (BtoB Online)
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Posted: 05/24/2009
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Domestic marketers looking to tap into international markets should set their sights on China. The best place to start? “Leveraging search engines, which drive close to 40% of most suppliers' traffic, is the best way to enter a lot of foreign markets at the moment, and for the best price,” said Marisa Edmund, VP-marketing and communications at Edmund Optics America. China’s gross domestic production (GDP) is projected to grow by 8% this year and new research from Accenture reveals ample opportunity exists for customer-focused U.S. companies. An alarming 55% of companies in China switched vendors last year due to a growing international intolerance for poor customer service.
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Industry:
Marketing, Design, & Interactive Communications,
Telecommunications
Topic:
Marketing Communications
Region:
North America,
Asia Pacific
Audience:
Business to Business
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The Plain Truth: Winning Email Tactics (BtoB Online)
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Posted: 05/24/2009
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It’s no surprise that marketers looking for high-impact email solutions take maximum advantage of Web technology to reach their audiences. Simply put, that means incorporating plain text e-mails into the marketing mix. While flashy HTML e-mails are great attention-grabbers and response-trackers, they aren’t always accessible to every user. The first rule of thumb: key content should be viewable without scrolling. Keeping offers, calls to action, brand identity and deadlines/time markers all at-a-glance is likely to increase your impact. While you can legally send unsolicited emails to anyone in the US without asking permission, it’s vital to keep your communications targeted and provide opt-outs. E-mail offers an easy, effective, affordable way to stay connected and build strong, lasting relationships with your customers.
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Industry:
Marketing, Design, & Interactive Communications
Topic:
Marketing Communications
Region:
Global,
North America
Audience:
Business to Business
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Salesforce.com Expands Service Cloud to Include Tweets (CRM Daily)
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Posted: 04/22/2009
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As the popularity of Twitter increases companies are struggling for a way to participate in exchanges on Twitter. To address this, Salesforce.com added Twitter to its Service Cloud as a way for their clients to track, search, and even respond to customer discussions among Twitter’s 8 million users with tweets. The service allows companies to sift through millions of tweets and uncover conversations related to their brand or significant to their industry. They can then monitor all related replies to the original post and even use the Service Cloud to direct the appropriate replies back to the original poster. Since launching the service in January Salesforce.com has experienced impressive uptake of the service verifying that this approach symbolizes where customer feedback and response is headed.
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Industry:
Marketing, Design, & Interactive Communications
Topic:
Business Intelligence,
Content Strategy,
Experience & Interaction,
Marketing Communications
Region:
Global
Audience:
Business to Business,
Business to Consumer,
Peer Groups & Communities
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Facelift for Facebook (Ecommerce Times)
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Posted: 04/22/2009
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Facebook recently underwent a redesign of its user home pages to put a direct spotlight on instant updates to friend posts. This has led many to compare the new look to Twitter but the additional result is a cleaner page based on more traditional web design and focused on information hierarchy. The new approach also generates several opportunities for Facebook to reach people interested in advertising to members of the social networking site. By offering the additional ad space, Facebook is hoping that marketers will embrace the idea of mixing ads with content and take advantage of the abundance of information on consumer behavior at their fingertips.
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Industry:
Marketing, Design, & Interactive Communications
Topic:
Business Intelligence,
Content Strategy,
Marketing Communications
Region:
Global
Audience:
Peer Groups & Communities
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Get Rapid Results with Lightweight Code Review (TechWeb, Dr. Dobbs Portal)
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Posted: 03/31/2009
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Ready to learn everything you need to know about peer code review in the shortest amount of time? With so many code review techniques available, your team can weigh the pros and cons of each method to discover an effective solution that matches the team's existing culture and the goals of your organization. Eliminate the vulnerabilities of your code by implementing these proven, time-saving tips to uncover those tricky little bugs that often escape even the most thorough peer reviews. This simplified, modern approach to code review removes cumbersome steps from traditional review processes to help you achieve measurable results that ultimately improve the integrity of your code.
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Industry:
Marketing, Design, & Interactive Communications,
Retail & Products,
Technology, Consulting, & Professional Services,
Telecommunications
Topic:
Technology Implementation
Region:
Global
Audience:
Business to Business,
Business to Consumer,
Peer Groups & Communities
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B-to-B Outlook 2009: Integrate campaigns to boost performance (BtoB Online)
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Posted: 03/08/2009
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Don’t get caught up in the doom and gloom of today’s challenging economy. “There's a lot of good news out there, in particular in the b-to-b world,” said Bob Felsenthal, BtoB publisher. According to many B-to-B marketing experts, the key is to be creative, of course, but also design multi-channel initiatives to drive prospects to the web—and ultimately to conversion. This means that marketers may need to step out of their typical corporate comfort zones and embrace social media such as forums and blogs in order to gain that coveted brand awareness and preference. So what is the future for B-to-B marketing for 2009? 31% of marketers plan to increase budgets and chances are good they will be stretching them into integrated campaigns for the most effectiveness.
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Industry:
Marketing, Design, & Interactive Communications
Topic:
Content Strategy,
Experience & Interaction,
Marketing Communications
Region:
North America
Audience:
Business to Business
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Expanding the Mobile Web (MIT - Massachusetts Institute of Technology)
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Posted: 03/08/2009
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Microchip maker, ARM, has partnered with Adobe to bring more Adobe software capabilities to more mobile phone users. Until now, many videos that run in Adobe Flash Players could not be viewed on cell phones due to software incompatibility. This new partnership is good news for users as well as programmers who will now have the tools necessary to build content that can work across many devices. In addition, Adobe has teamed with mobile phone manufacturers Nokia, Sony Ericsson, Qualcomm and others to standardize Adobe Flash on mobile devices. Adobe is counting on its removal of licensing fees to encourage integration of its Flash Player. Some industry insiders claim the move is a reaction to Microsoft’s comparable Flash Player, Silverlight. Possible. But, if it gets Flash to more mobile users, that’s enough for us.
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Industry:
Marketing, Design, & Interactive Communications,
Retail & Products,
Telecommunications
Topic:
E-Commerce,
Experience & Interaction,
Marketing Communications,
Technology Implementation
Region:
North America
Audience:
Business to Business,
Business to Consumer,
Peer Groups & Communities
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We cut through the clutter of the web to highlight innovation and forward-thinking. The best stories from leading publications – hand selected and organized to provide you a single point of access.
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