Jaffe Juice

Devil's Advocate: Fake Blogs - Evil, Pathetic or Harmless?

Just read on Adrants about a new double dose of fake blogs, this time for McDonalds. As one reader points out, Edelman should be fired for this (even though they had nothing to do with this particular "campaign"....or did they?)

Even though there was a press release, it appears that there was still insufficient disclosure on the blog, 4Railroads.

To be sure, 4Railroads is quite harmless. It's not like it is being faked by a 10 year old 200-pound girl who insists that her childhood obesity is completely genetic and not influenced by the Big Macs she gorges down every day.

In fact, from a narrative standpoint it is actually quite cute...the "online journal/diary" of a possessed consumer, intent on winning McDonalds Monopoly Game. I get it.

So what's the problem?

The problem is less the lack of transparency (I am torn between jumping on a holier-than-though puritanical binge, which more often than not leads straight to the gates of hypocrisy...can you say Edelman?...and demanding equal low or high standards for all media on the disclosure stakes before I go nutso on a nascent one e.g. product placement on television) and more plain pathos.

It's just kind of harmless really. And by harmless I mean sad and pathetic.

There are no comments. No life. No nothing.

I guess the real questions from my perspective are two-fold:

1) Surely McDonalds could be investing better in blogs and really reaping the full power of conversation, dialogue, consumer generated content and networking? Is the best they can do...and if so, perhaps they should be handing over the reigns to people that know what they're doing?

2) Going back to the first-person narrative account, surely long form content in some kind of episodic form would have been a better execution of this idea (for example)

This is one of those cases where "social media" and "new marketing" are not necessarily one and the same. The former is dominated by PR people and the latter by more advertising/marketing-oriented folk. I find myself somewhere inbetween, longing for the days of good old fashioned storytelling, with a sprinkle of authenticity and a drizzle of ROI to boot.

How about you?

Priceless Headlines

It's headlines like these that make my job easy: Better ROI From YouTube Video Than Super Bowl Spot.

Via Ad Age

Buying Red

I blogged about this 6 months ago. The other day I saw an "ad" for the iPod Nano "Red" edition on iTunes and within 5 minutes I had purchased it. No questions asked.

This is real. This is what it's all about.

When the American Express RED card is available in the US, I will gladly give up my Platinum card for the RED card.

I love it.

A learning from Second Life

Coming through the launch process, I'm learned a pretty important lesson. Opening up a storefront/presence in Second Life is not dissimilar to a Wal-Mart opening up in a small town.

Let's leave it at that.

Should Wendy's be charged 99c per YouTube View?

MediaPost runs a piece today talking about a threesome of Wendy's videos running on YouTube. The most popular of which is "Molly Grows Up"...

Vital Stats: (as of 6.48am on Friday 10/27)

• Length: 2m28 (or 4.93 30-second spots)
• 584,000 views
• 2 stars from 3,094 ratings
• 311 comments
• Favorited 271 times

I must admit, after reading the MediaPost article, I came expecting to hate this, but I didn't. It's hokey...but it's meant to me. Not particularly original, but brings a smile to your face nonetheless.

More importantly, it's actually not about the long-form content piece anymore and arguably it's not about Wendy's anymore...it has jumped on the viral bandwagon and now will be making its way across the blogosphere and the like.

The other 2 spots in the thread are not proving to be as popular, which suggests a concern about "scale" - iow, once is witting, twice is shitting.

Ultimately the YouTube phenomenon - with marketers scrambling to get free media and viral activation like lemmings - raises a bunch of important questions:

1. Should marketers be paying based on certain thresholds being reached (in terms of popularity)?
2. Is this scaleable? Wendy's Better Value Bureau is just another advertsing campaign...in today's day and age, the wearout factor amongst fickle consumers is incredibly short-lived
3. Will this sell bacon-cheese-bacon-cheese-bacon-cheese-whopper-mac-99c-burgers?

We've launched!!!!

How and where do I start? What a surreal experience. We pulled it off and are now officially...real (and virtual)

We've launched simultaneously in the real and virtual worlds. At precisely 12noon EST...our traditional and social media press releases hit the wires, our site and press room went live and our event began in Second Life on our Island, crayonville (same name as our dot com site)

I am so happy and relieved, but most importantly energized by the possibilities that lie ahead and by the future.

A big thank you to the amazing folks at MillionsOfUs (Reuben, Versu and the rest of the team) for EVERYTHING today - including juggling a waiting list and 57 avatars at the same time. The audio track/synching was fantastic...and save the teensiest of white noise (which CC covered for), it went off without a hitch. We have audio and hopefully video and will also most likely release a transcript as well.

I'll update this post regularly today with other posts...from other crayon members, attendees (including this from Ewan Spence) and press (including this from Adrants)

In the interim, here are a few notable links from today:

- our Flickr site (expanding as we speak)

- our press room with links to crayonCast - our collaborative weekly podcast - and Matthew Ebel's Every Color (YOU ROCK!)

- our new blog: www.crayonville.com/blog

Coke strikes back

I love this response from Coke the Diet-Coke Mentos meme which raises a few interesting talking points:

1) A late response is better than no response at all

2) Large corporations absolutely can "fight back" (and I say this completely light-heartedly) and join the conversation...as long as they talk with (as opposed to at or down to) the comunity

Not sure how the challenge will work out, but moreover it makes for great storytelling and humanizes the brand in new and bold ways.

PS An anal reminder that The Coca-Cola Company is a client (of which I am very proud)

Catching up on ATS (the iTunes conspiracy)

The past 5 episodes of Across the Sound are stuck in RSS Limbo right now. If you're subscribed through iTunes or any podcatcher, you'd be fine...but for some reason, iTunes isn't displaying the 5 most recent episodes for ala carte download/listening.

I'm wondering whether this is Apple's way of unleashing revenge on me as these 5 episodes are coincidentally the same ones which replaced PodCast with a bunch of other names...if I promise to go back to Podcast, will you guys back off?

I've had numerous chats with Feedburner and RadioTail, but we've come up empty handed. This leaves the fine folk at Apple who for some reason choose to ignore all customer service requests as part of their image MO. I've sent 3+ e-mails to Apple to ask them to help and I haven't as much as received a 24-hour autoresponder.

I'm fed up and I'm going to keep a running tally now of my attempts to get this matter resolved. Every day, I'll send another inquiry/request to iTunes and report back on my progress.

From what I understand, the problem might be with Apple's caching system, although I am getting an error message from Feed Validator to the effect of: length attribute of enclosure must be a positive integer

<enclosure url="http://ripple.radiotail.com/102/ats_60_the_new_marketing_crayoncast.mp3" type="text/html" length="unknown" />

Anyway, for those wondering where they went or wanting to catch up, here are the direct links:

ATS #56 - The New Marketing ZuneCast

ATS #57 - The New Marketing KaraokeCast

ATS #58 - The New MarketingCast

ATS #59 - The New Marketing SEPCast

ATS #60 - The New Marketing CrayonCast

Gearing up to launch

We are a day away from official launch. Last night I dropped by crayonville Island with Cleon Goff (CC Chapman) to meet with our events management team from Millions of Us for a sound check and some preliminary testing.

We are pretty much at capacity right now, but for those of you who are planning on attending, please IM Rodica MillionsofUs or email rodica AT millionsofus.com (please include your SL name in the email)

Update: The launch is at 12noon EST (that's 9am Linden) on Thursday, 10/26

So far I have the following avatars on my list:

• Ariel Spoonhammer
• Deelo Ohtobide
• Sheva Weeks
• EZ Rawley
• Pete Bossy
• Kumar Kotobide
• Joker Nephilim
• Quay Lime

Had to enjoy this post

The outpouring of support and warm wishes for crayon has been overwhelming. Thank you to everyone.

I had to enjoy this post from Luke Armour at the Observations of Public Relations Blog:

• Holtz says to me a fuzzy wuzzy brown
• Hobson is nothing less than a burnt sienna
• CC Chapman couldn’t be anything other than atomic tangerine
• Jaffe is a toss-up between razzmatazz and purple pizzazz

Are some of those colors even legal?

PS As you know, we launch on Thursday and the crayon:new marketing ratio will inevitably drop for anyone concerned. I'm just rather excited right now...