Great Mashable story about a travel porn campaign by Jetsetter on Pinterest; as the story says, this is a perfect combination of high-end photographs and Pinterest and i'm not surprised it worked well; regardless, it's very hard to execute such campaigns well and thus congrats are in order to the Jetsetter team. Strong prizing, explanations and use of the right platform make a successful campaign.
It’s the holy grail of digital marketing: the viral ad, a pitch that large numbers of viewers decide to share with family and friends.
Several techniques derived from new technology can help advertisers attain this. In our research, http://www.tilburguniversity.edu/webwijs/show/?uid=f.g.m.pieters">two colleagues and I use infrared eye-tracking scanners to determine exactly what people are looking at when they watch video ads. We also use a system that analyzes facial expressions to reveal what viewers are feeling. These technologies make it possible to isolate elements that cause people to stop watching and to find ones that keep them engaged. In addition, they make it possible to determine what kinds of ads are most likely to be shared and what types of people are most likely to share them. Here are five big problems online advertisers face, along with solutions that have emerged from our research.
Problem 1: Prominent Branding Puts Off ViewersWhen people watch ads, they focus on a few things, such as the actors’ mouths and eyes. They also focus on logos. This isn’t the boon it might seem: The more prominent or intrusive the logo, the more likely viewers are to stop watching—even if they know and like the brand. Why? People seem to have an unconscious aversion to being persuaded, so when they see a logo, they resist.
The solution: Utilize “brand pulsing.” Smart advertisers unobtrusively weave the brand image throughout the ad. Experiments have shown that this can increase viewership by as much as 20%. One of the best examples of the technique is Coca-Cola’s animated “Happiness Factory” ad. (Like all the other videos referenced in this article, it’s available on YouTube.) It depicts a fantasy version of what happens inside a Coke machine when someone inserts money. A Coke bottle is shown repeatedly, but each appearance is quick; you can almost imagine that the story would work without the bottle. In fact, a good question to ask when conceiving an ad is: If I removed the brand image, would the content still be intrinsically interesting? If the answer is yes, viewers are more likely to keep watching.
Problem 2: People Get Bored Right AwayAfter recording viewers’ expressions with video cameras, we use automated technology that measures the distances between various parts of the face to identify smiles, frowns, and other expressions that correlate closely with emotions. (Previous research relied on human coders; automating the process improves accuracy and allows for a much larger sampling.) After analyzing thousands of reactions to many ads, second by second, and tracking exactly when people stop watching, we found that keeping viewers involved depends in large part on two emotions: joy and surprise. To maximize viewership, it’s important to generate at least one of these responses early on. Traditionally, though, advertisers have constructed narratives that escalate toward a dramatic climax or a surprise ending. Such commercials may have worked on TV decades ago, but today’s online viewers need to be hooked in the opening seconds.
The solution: Create joy or surprise right away. Two videos stand out for eliciting these emotions at the start. In one, the familiar Apple spokesman is joined by Mr. Bean, who dances crazily for the remainder of the spot. (The video, it turns out, is not an official Apple ad but a well-crafted parody of Apple’s “Get a Mac” series.) Bud Light’s “Swear Jar” ad opens with a surprise: When an office sets up a jar that workers must pay into as a penalty for profanity, one employee immediately curses because he knows the money will be used to buy Bud Light. Both videos hook people instantly.
Problem 3: People Watch for a While but Then StopAlthough the Mr. Bean video initially succeeds in attracting viewers, it doesn’t keep them watching. That’s because the joy the video creates is delivered at a fairly constant level. We’ve found that ads that produce stable emotional states generally aren’t effective at engaging viewers for very long.
Videos that deliver constant levels of joy or surprise don’t engage viewers for very long. Advertisers need to build an emotional roller coaster.The solution: Build an emotional roller coaster. Viewers are most likely to continue watching a video ad if they experience emotional ups and downs. This fits with psychological-research findings about human adaptability. When we come into a warm home on a cold winter day, or when we receive a pay raise, we experience pleasure, but the feeling is transitory; the novelty soon wears off. So advertisers need to briefly terminate viewers’ feelings of joy or surprise and then quickly restore them, creating an emotional roller coaster—much the way a movie generates suspense by alternating tension and relief.
Great to finally see some research on what drives "engagement" and willingness to share in video ads. Key conclusions: make'em interesting, no blatant branding and try to trigger emotional responses to the ads - as easy as 1-2-3!
Facebook appears ready to launch a new set of premium ad units, and, based on a review of documents which purport to describe them, the social network would seem to be doubling down on two core principles that mark fundamental departures from traditional advertising.
First, Facebook is making the new ads social by default, meaning they will automatically show users when their friends have already Liked the advertiser. And the new formats will draw their content exclusively from posts to brands' Facebook Pages, rather from advertising copy written independently.
Combined, these features make two statements about where Facebook believes the future of online advertising lies--at least in its particular universe. It is saying that ads based on content, rather than messaging, have a better chance of hitting home, and that ads involving tacit endorsements from the people you know have a better chance of capturing your attention.
"When people hear about you from friends, they listen," the Facebook materials say. "We'll expand your ad with stories from friends who have already connected." ("Stories" is Facebook's shorthand for a wide varitey of interactions on the site. In the case of ads, it seems to refer to the fact that the ads will display which of a viewer's friends have Liked the brand.)
Facebook has not commented publicly on the new ads (presumably they will discuss them at a marketing launch event in New York next week). But the materials describing the new units were posted to Scribd earlier this week. The news was first reported on GigaOm. The documents are below.
Facebook Premium Ads Guide Facebook Premium Ads OverviewIn the documents, Facebook says it is scrapping most of the display ad units it has offered until now, replacing them with the new formats. The previous ad units incorporated some of the social and interactive elements, but the new ones are implementing those features in a more comprehensive way.
Each of the new units will include Like buttons and places for viewers to comment on the ads. When viewers click the Like button or enter a comment, those activities will be posted to the user's friends' News Feeds. They will also be posted to the brand's Page.
Similarly, each ad will include pictures of friends who have already Liked the brand. The Facebook documents say this will happen automatically, instead of as an add-on.
While Facebook had already been moving in these directions with its previous ad units, the decision to draw ad content from Page posts is the most significant new feature--and a potentially radical departure from conventional notions of advertising.
The ads don't simply repurpose content from brands' Pages. By giving users the ability to respond to the content inside the ad, just as if they had seen the content on the brand Page itself, and then by posting those responses to the user's friends' News Feeds, as well as on the brand's Page itself, the ads are acting less like traditional broadcast advertisements and more like viral mechanisms to expand and perpetuate the conversation off into the far corners of the social network, effectively giving the brand visibility in places it might not otherwise have reached and in a much more organic way than if it had simply plastered the site with a bunch of banner ads.
"Everything starts with great content from the Page," says one of the Facebook documents. "Paid, owned, and earned work seamlessly together."
Facebook believes that this ultimately will pay greater dividends for brands than conventional advertising. According to tests the company said it performed internally, the new ads produce 40 percent more engagement (usually meaning they get more Likes, comments, and clicks) and are 80 percent more likely to be remembered.
The company documents also claim the ads produce "signficant increases" in purchase intent, and it claims that viewers of an ad are four times more likely to purchase when they "see friends interact with a brand."
If the ads truly do deliver the results Facebook claims, that could mean the social network is slowly but surely finding the marketing holy grail of "word of mouth"--at scale. And if that's the case, it could have profound implications for the advertising industry as a whole.
The six new units are based on the type of content a brand would post to their Page. The Facebook documents label them as Status (a text comment), Photo, Video, Question (which replaces the old "Poll" ad format and which allows viewers to answer the question right in the ad), Event (ad viewers will similarly be able to sign up for the event right in the ad itself), and Link (which points viewers to content outside of Facebook).
The Facebook documents say that brands will continue to be able to target their ads as they do today, choosing to place their ads in front of any of Facebook's 845 million users who fit demographic and interest criteria selected by the advertiser.
E.B. Boyd is FastCompany.com's Silicon Valley reporter. Twitter | Google | Email
Facebook is upgrading social ads significantly: they will be using brand content from the somewhat neglected pages to create shareable stories that are enhanced with user actions (e.g. likes/ comments) - will be interesting to see engagement on these and whether they will clutter the feed even more than current brand content.
Geek-alert: this article is pretty quant but heavenly for math/ marketing geeks. Pinterest is truly on fire and it's not losing steam/ attention. Very sticky, Twitter - watch out!
By ANN ZIMMERMAN
Target Corp. is tired of being used.
In one of the starkest signs yet that chain stores fear a new twist in shopping, Target is asking suppliers for help in thwarting "showrooming"—that is, when shoppers come into a store to see a product in person, only to buy it from a rival online, frequently at a lower price.
Last week, in an urgent letter to vendors, the Minneapolis-based chain suggested that suppliers create special products that would set it apart from competitors and shield it from the price comparisons that have become so easy for shoppers to perform on their computers and smartphones. Where special products aren't possible, Target asked the suppliers to help it match rivals' prices. It also said it might create a subscription service that would give shoppers a discount on regularly purchased merchandise.
ReutersVendors are likely to have little choice but to play ball with Target because of its clout as the second-largest discount chain.
"What we aren't willing to do is let online-only retailers use our brick-and-mortar stores as a showroom for their products and undercut our prices without making investments, as we do, to proudly display your brands," according to the letter, which was signed by Target Chief Executive Gregg Steinhafel and Kathee Tesija, Target's executive vice president of merchandising.
Showrooming is an increasing problem for chains ranging from Best Buy Co. to Barnes & Noble Inc., at the same time that it's a boon for Amazon.com Inc. and other online retailers. This year store sales overall edged up 4.1% during the holiday shopping season, while online sales jumped 15%. And while online sales represent only 8% of total sales, that is up from just 2% in 2000.
Other retailers also are likely to take steps similar to Target's plan, according to Deborah Weinswig, Citigroup retail analyst, who mentioned the letter in a research note Friday and said it was likely to have gone to suppliers of consumer electronics, health and beauty products and food.
Vendors are likely to have little choice but to play ball with Target because of its clout as the second-largest discount chain. Major suppliers, including Kraft Inc., TV maker Vizio and Procter & Gamble Inc., either wouldn't confirm they received the letter or didn't return calls seeking comment.
Target declined to comment other than to issue a statement saying that it "has long prided itself on having truly collaborative vendor partnerships and we continually work with our vendors to remain competitive in the ever-evolving retail environment."
Some analysts said Target's new tactics are unlikely to reverse the showrooming trend, because they fail to address the root problems traditional retailers face. Online-only retailers have significantly lower labor costs and, at least, for the time being don't collect sales tax in most states.
More important, the growing competition from Amazon is based on a different business model entirely: Amazon can sell products so cheaply because it uses its other profitable units—such as cloud data storage and fees it charges others to sell on its website — to subsidize the rest of its business.
"The traditional retailers are still doing business the old way while Amazon has reinvented the model," says Sucharita Mulpuru, retail analyst at Forrester Research. "Wal-Mart and Target are willing to sell a few things at a loss. Amazon's whole business is a loss leader."
Consumer preferences are also moving to online. "That is where we're heading," said Adrianne Shapira, retail analyst at Goldman Sachs. "You can try and dance around it, but it's a fact."
Retailers like Target and industry giant Wal-Mart Stores Inc. have a lot of catching up to do, as analysts estimate their websites account for only 1% to 2% of their annual sales.
Target had a tough Christmas season, with sales at stores open at least a year rising just 1.7%, about half of what the company expected. As a result, Target recently lowered its fourth-quarter earnings per share range to between $1.35 and $1.43 from $1.43 to $1.53.
The company said sales were particularly disappointing in electronics, movies, books and music—products whose sales have migrated most significantly to the Internet. Those products accounted for 20% of Target's annual sales of $65 billion in 2010, down from 22% in the prior year.
This fall Target relaunched and upgraded its website, which had been operated by Amazon for the last decade. But the site crashed several times, most notably when shoppers rushed to buy a special line of items made by Italian fashion house Missoni.
Target has a long tradition of getting suppliers to provide exclusive products. It has teamed up for years with fashion designers to offer time-limited discount clothing collections, and it recently announced it will open a series of temporary boutiques featuring clothes, food and home furnishings from popular regional stores.
These programs set Target apart from less fashionable rivals such as Wal-Mart, but "they are completely immaterial" to the company's bottom line, said Colin McGranahan, retail analyst at Sanford C. Bernstein.
—Hannah Karp contributed to this article.Write to Ann Zimmerman at ann.zimmerman@wsj.com
I hardly believe that Target et al can stop consumers from comparing prices on their phone by using one of the many apps to do so. The idea of giving discounts to "members" (aka Sam's club, costco) is definitely a better one as it adds a real differentiation - people will always take the lowest price online, esp. with free shipping/ Amazon prime.
Great example of a youtube promotion with FreddieW for the new movie Cowboys vs Aliens. The product placement is very well done and the video has already attracted more than 3MM views over the first few days - that's probably more people than have watched the movie so far.
Nice graphic from Adage.com: Americans drink more soft drinks than water (bottled water) but Europeans drink a lot more beer (45 gallons last time i checked) than the new world.
Very interesting post about who Facebook has been avoiding mobile ads so far; enjoy!
You asked for it Arnold and 84 others (so far). So I'm gonna talk about marketing.
I believe that marketing is what you do when your product or service sucks or when you make so much profit on every marginal customer that it would be crazy to not spend a bit of that profit acquiring more of them (coke, zynga, bud, viagra).
A very experienced and successful entrepreneur came into our office a week ago to pitch his latest company. At the end of his pitch he showed us some numbers. Normally for a raw startup we see almost all product and engineering expenses (headcount). But his plan had a monthly budget for customer acquisition. After he left, we talked about his plan and my partners focused on the customer acquisition number. It bugged us. It felt wrong.
So a few days later, I called him. We talked about what we liked about his plan and pitch and what we didn't like. I brought up the customer acquisition line item at one point in that call. He said "every company needs a marketing budget." It seemed like a strong reply but in truth not one of our top performing companies had a marketing budget in their initial business plan.
Zynga has spent millions on customer acquisition and continues to do so. But in the beginning, when Zynga was three or four people and they launched Texas Hold'em on the brand new Facebook Platform, they didn't spend any marketing dollars. That was the beauty of that time and that plan. The Facebook Platform was free distribution. Zynga rode that free distribution to millions of users, profits, and additional games. Only then did they start marketing.
In my talk at Harvard Business School, I said "Early in a startup, product decisions should be hunch driven. Later on, product decisions should be data driven". I've seen that line tweeted a thousand times since then. Clearly people like that rule. Here's another.
Early in a startup you need to acquire your customers for free. Later on, you can spend on customer acquisition.
So if you need to acquire customers for free early in a startup, how do you do that? There is no one right answer, it depends a lot on who your customer is and how hard the sell will be (consumer/enterprise and free/paid). I'm not an expert on enteprise focused SAAS businesses. I am not going to address that part of the market here.
For the consumer/free part of the web, there are some obvious things you will want to do:
1) Twitter - so many entrepreneurs have asked me "how did you start a company before Twitter?" Twitter is that free distribution that Zynga got on the Facebook Platform. You can and should get the word out about your product/service on Twitter and Facebook. You should encourage your friends to post about it, retweet about it, and encourage people to try it out. The digerati hangs out on Twitter and will see the tweets and RTs and many of them will try it out.
2) Social hoooks - Your product/service must be social. It must encourage your users to invite others to try it out. Hooks into Facebook and Twitter are obvious. Email invites are another obvious feature. The product should allow people to express themselves in it. Profiles, personalization, etc will allow the users to feel ownership of the product and tell others about it. Foursquare's adoption of a game dynamic when it launched is a particularly clever implementation of a social hook. Games are the most social of all things on the web.
3) Find entry points - MySpace launched in the holywood crowd that were friends of Tom and Chris. Twitter launched in the SF tech community that were friends of Ev and Biz and Jack. Tumblr launched in the "roll your own blog" avant garde community that David was part of. Quora launched in the Facebook alumni community. Facebook launched on Ivy League campuses. You get the idea. Find an obvious group of like minded people who know each other and launch into that community. If they like it, it will spread throughout that community and eventually beyond.
4) Events - Find live events to launch at. SXSW is famous for breakouts. Twitter and Foursquare are the two most talked about examples. I worry that SXSW has become so big and so many companies are planning to breakout there now, that it can't happen anymore. We will see. But there are many live events that you can attend and galvanize users at. GroupMe did a version of that at the Austin City Limits music festival. I've heard of companies breaking out at Burning Man, The Democratic National Convention (Airbnb), and the Sundance Film Festival.
5) PR - Do not hire a PR firm to do your free marketing for you. This is a core capability you must own. You can and may want to hire a PR firm to supplement your efforts, but that's a different story. The best companies know how to become the story and work it. Being in NYC helps a lot. Foursquare is a great example of this. You can laugh at Dennis and Naveen doing fashion shoots but think about how many new users they got for doing that. It was a stunt like any other stunt they've done. And they have done hundreds of them. The media eats it up as they always need something to write about. Twitter is another example of a company that owned its PR. Biz is a master. At the same time Biz and Jack were iterating on the product, Biz was thinking about the brand, the story, the bird, the logo, the meaning of Twitter in the world. And he got out there and started telling the story. He is an evangelist and he did it so well. Twitter would not be Twitter without that effort. If you don't have a Biz or Dennis on the founding team, find someone who can do this for you. But I will say that the best PR centric startups have the "media DNA" in the founding team.
6) Search - It is not first on the list for a reason. I don't think search driven businesses are interesting. Live by SEO, die by SEO. Don't be a google bitch. But you will notice that many of the top consumer web brands are higly SEO'd. Try searching on a person's name who is active on Twitter. I bet their Twitter feed will be one of the first five results. It is for my name (if you take out dups). Flickr did this very well. So does LinkedIn and Crunchbase. SEO is something that takes time to pay dividends. But you should build your product day one to be search friendly and keep at it. You can break your SEO with product changes and be careful not to do that.
7) Developers - I've said many times that developers are the new power users. Twitter is the iconic example. By launching with an almost totally open plaform and a dead simple API, Twitter got thousands of developers to build products that had "Twitter inside." Those developers and their products pulled Twitter into the market. Soundcloud is another great example. There are a ton of apps that people use to create music and other audio experiences that have "soundcoud inside." Each and every one of those apps is a distribution channel for soundcloud. They are pulling Soundcloud into the market. So build your product as platform from day one. And once you get traction on your product, do things that will cause it to become a platform, Foursquare is doing this well. They first got millions of users and now they are developing a vibrant ecosystem of third party developers. They did a hackday this past weekend that was very successful.
8) Build a great product - I'll end with a return to where I started. Marketing is for companies who have sucky products. If you build something that is amazing (think Flipboard or Instagram or Instapaper) people will adopt it because it is amazing. And you won't have to do much marketing, at least at the start.
So that's what I got on marketing Arnold. What do you think?
Interesting post by Union Square Ventures Partner Fred Wilson - he lists 8 ways to promote a business - that he doesn't considers marketing but that according to the very interesting comment stream (and my own humble opinion) would most definitely fall under Marketing in most companies. He states that he's not a fan of paid customer acquisition unless the monetization model is completely worked out (i.e. LTV>CPA), but that's common sense for most companies. Interesting post with good follow-ups here http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2011/02/marketing-and-the-bubble.html, http://www.seomoz.org/blog/i-disagree-with-fred-marketing-is-for-companies-th... and http://www.aonetwork.com/node/67411
Great overview by Darren Herman on the ecosystem. Highly recommended.
Facebook, MediaMind Enable 'Like' Button In Ads Across Web by Laurie Sullivan, Monday, October 18, 2010, 9:00 AM
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The Facebook "Like" button inserted in ad units began running across display networks and publisher sites on Saturday could become a new metric for advertisers to measure the success of advertising campaigns. Mountain Dew became one of the first to stick the social signal in ads. Facebook provides the pipeline, and MediaMind the technology to make it happen, supporting the trend by brands to bring social media to consumers across the Web.
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MOST READ The ads are not limited to the approximate 300-by-250 Mountain Dew display ads running across a variety of publisher sites, explains a source close to the agreement. Through Facebook's API, it only took one week to design the integration and get the tool up and running in the ad.
Consumers clicking on the "Like" button in the ad are not redirected from the publisher's site, but rather asked to sign into their Facebook account and provide permission to connect the ad with their Facebook page. The action of the click on the like button triggers a "like" on the consumer's Facebook wall through an API data feed.
The first integration of the "Like" button in online ads signals the continuation of Facebook Co-Founder Mark Zuckerberg's mission to make the Web and advertising social, but the start of a new metric to measure ad conversions on the Web. Not only do advertisers gain impressions and click-throughs for display ads, but some will gain new Facebook Fans to their community.
As more advertisers build in the Facebook "like" button into ads, videos and other online through Google TV and Apple TV, as well as offline content such as billboards and print ads connected through QR codes or Google Goggles, the social signal will increase in value, driving up the valuation of Facebook and the demand for the tool.
Brand marketers began shifting ad budgets to Facebook earlier this year to try and earn "Like" against brands, which would give them a measurement tool to determine demand and loyalty. Inserting the "Like" function in expandable ad units or video ads gives consumers a new experience and will likely become another reason for advertisers to shift ad dollars from television to online by repurposing TV ads.
For example, eMarketer points to research released in September by Dynamic Logic that found online ad awareness got a bigger lift from repurposed video ads than made-for-Web video. Purchase intent became higher for made-for-Web ads among those ages 18 to 34 but flat among the older age groups. Adding the Facebook "Like" button to ads could contribute another metric to support allocation of advertising budgets.
Gotta love it when everyone promotes your product for you - and i'm sure it'll actually work fairly well for advertisers - the Facebook like adds credibility to their ad units and helps their cause of building their opt-in list on Facebook. This all reminds me so much of email marketing and direct mail - brands building up audiences to talk to - the question will be: can they engage those audiences and will it lead to purchases?
A two-bedroom apartment. Two cars. Enough wedding china to serve two dozen people.
Yet Tammy Strobel wasn’t happy. Working as a project manager with an investment management firm in Davis, Calif., and making about $40,000 a year, she was, as she put it, caught in the “work-spend treadmill.”
So one day she stepped off.
Inspired by books and blog entries about living simply, Ms. Strobel and her husband, Logan Smith, both 31, began donating some of their belongings to charity. As the months passed, out went stacks of sweaters, shoes, books, pots and pans, even the television after a trial separation during which it was relegated to a closet. Eventually, they got rid of their cars, too. Emboldened by a Web site that challenges consumers to live with just 100 personal items, Ms. Strobel winnowed down her wardrobe and toiletries to precisely that number.
Her mother called her crazy.
Today, three years after Ms. Strobel and Mr. Smith began downsizing, they live in Portland, Ore., in a spare, 400-square-foot studio with a nice-sized kitchen. Mr. Smith is completing a doctorate in physiology; Ms. Strobel happily works from home as a Web designer and freelance writer. She owns four plates, three pairs of shoes and two pots. With Mr. Smith in his final weeks of school, Ms. Strobel’s income of about $24,000 a year covers their bills. They are still car-free but have bikes. One other thing they no longer have: $30,000 of debt.
Ms. Strobel’s mother is impressed. Now the couple have money to travel and to contribute to the education funds of nieces and nephews. And because their debt is paid off, Ms. Strobel works fewer hours, giving her time to be outdoors, and to volunteer, which she does about four hours a week for a nonprofit outreach program called Living Yoga.
“The idea that you need to go bigger to be happy is false,” she says. “I really believe that the acquisition of material goods doesn’t bring about happiness.”
While Ms. Strobel and her husband overhauled their spending habits before the recession, legions of other consumers have since had to reconsider their own lifestyles, bringing a major shift in the nation’s consumption patterns.
“We’re moving from a conspicuous consumption — which is ‘buy without regard’ — to a calculated consumption,” says Marshal Cohen, an analyst at the NPD Group, the retailing research and consulting firm.
Amid weak job and housing markets, consumers are saving more and spending less than they have in decades, and industry professionals expect that trend to continue. Consumers saved 6.4 percent of their after-tax income in June, according to a new government report. Before the recession, the rate was 1 to 2 percent for many years. In June, consumer spending and personal incomes were essentially flat compared with May, suggesting that the American economy, as dependent as it is on shoppers opening their wallets and purses, isn’t likely to rebound anytime soon.
On the bright side, the practices that consumers have adopted in response to the economic crisis ultimately could — as a raft of new research suggests — make them happier. New studies of consumption and happiness show, for instance, that people are happier when they spend money on experiences instead of material objects, when they relish what they plan to buy long before they buy it, and when they stop trying to outdo the Joneses.
If consumers end up sticking with their newfound spending habits, some tactics that retailers and marketers began deploying during the recession could become lasting business strategies. Among those strategies are proffering merchandise that makes being at home more entertaining and trying to make consumers feel special by giving them access to exclusive events and more personal customer service.
While the current round of stinginess may simply be a response to the economic downturn, some analysts say consumers may also be permanently adjusting their spending based on what they’ve discovered about what truly makes them happy or fulfilled.
“This actually is a topic that hasn’t been researched very much until recently,” says Elizabeth W. Dunn, an associate professor in the psychology department at the University of British Columbia, who is at the forefront of research on consumption and happiness. “There’s massive literature on income and happiness. It’s amazing how little there is on how to spend your money.”
CONSPICUOUS consumption has been an object of fascination going back at least as far as 1899, when the economist Thorstein Veblen published “The Theory of the Leisure Class,” a book that analyzed, in part, how people spent their money in order to demonstrate their social status.
Good article about the shift towards experiences as opposed to buying goods and how we enjoy experiences more than goods. The example of reducing your belongings to 100 seems a bit extreme but the overall idea is sound.
Interesting acquisition by Google - another way for them to quickly access even more organized content. The descriptive video is fantastic, simple, well done and highly intuitive. Congrats to Epipheo studios and of course the Metaweb team.
I remember a few years ago when I started getting bombarded with Twitter requests and Facebook requests. Now is the time for Foursquare. I've been getting about 2-5 requests a day and reject 80% of them; Facebook and Twitter are open tools, but Foursquare, at least to me has a more private aspect. I do not want to tell acquaintances where I am at all times, and likewise I don't want my foursquare feed to be spammed by people. So congrats to foursquare on hitting a tipping point, and keep evolving the product, it's getting a bit boring not to win new trophies anymore...
This is the best of the 6 mini webisodes that HBO released for the upcoming season of True Blood. Together with Snoop Dogg's Oh Snookie song, this is another great marketing season by the folks at HBO - congrats on the high-quality production and wit.
Great custom song by Snoop Dogg for the folks from HBO - wonder how much they paid him for this; True Blood has done some exceptional marketing over the last years and this combined with the mini series is a strong continuation.
Starbucks is one of the savviest social media marketers - interesting interview with Alex Wheeler, their Director of Digital Strategy
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