Jaffe Juice

Unpolitco linkety-link

It's linkety-link for the independents within us all:

• Osama Bin Twitter? And you thought Barack had problems. So apparently the proof of concept that a technology has gone mainstream is now 3-fold: the appearance of porn, gambling and alleged terrorism! Sheesh!
• When I went to college in South Africa, I studied Marketing from a textbook authored by Philip Kotler. Now I get to present on the same bill as my Marketing idol.
• Social Media Marketing Advertising Branding Communications Conversation defined by Peter Kim (click the link and you'll get a better understanding)
• The Guidance Economy - lead on my brother, lead on....
• How brands thrived during the Great Depression by Dave Chase (hint: it involved alcohol. Lots of it!)
• Tim Bray from Sun Microsystems is the latest rogue to steal my trademark on the word "conversation"
• The first Twinterview between myself and Jason Baer
• Creativity isn't a destination; it's a meeting place. The launch of Meet is worth its pound of flesh.
• Need more juice for your iPhone. Click here
• Every year, 12.9 million people turn 31 on a Saturday. Celebrate this unique community here. I have no clue where this goes but they had me at "every"
• Armano gives me a migraine with this post on unconventional marketing. I hate how he makes me think. Here's another one on the 4 kinds of free. Looks like someone is trying to write themselves into a new book being written....
• Tim Collins from Wells Fargo reads Jaffe Juice. If only the folks over at Lehman Brothers, Bear Sterns and AIG had done the same...
• The A-Z of better blog engagement
• Microsoft gets nailed from both sides - first from stereotyping stereotypes in their PC vs Mac ad and then from the latest Mac vs PC ad which exposes the ultimate disconnect of modern day marketing: instead of focusing on fixing a bad product, we invest our money into advertising instead

• NYU's Jay Rosen gives a very thoughtful presentation titled, "If Bloggers Had No Ethics Blogging Would Have Failed, But it Didn't. So Let's Get a Clue." Check it out here.
• Unrelated, how do bloggers make money...

Politico Linkety-Link

Here goes my one-sided political linkety-link:

• The original Wassup guys reunite for a very succinct summary of the issues and which candidate they believe will do a better job at solving the conerns that matter. Note the A-B disclaimer at the end....ya think? PS: Try and watch both original and new renditions at the same time if possible

• Apparently I'm the reason why Obama lost the election because I didn't get out and vote. Check out this offensive piece of propaganda from that has-been network, CNNBC. It's not exactly the most original piece of attempted "viral" marketing, but it is done fairly smartly. The video makes some pretty ballsy insinuations, however fictitious and I wonder if this may backfire in some cases.

• Obama is a BMW and McCain is a Ford, according to research by Landor & Associates. Funny, I would never have thought of Senator Obama as arrogant, yuppy and overpriced, and McCain as fuel efficient, young and trendy. Perhaps I was thinking of Models (Z3 and Focus) instead of makes? 

Jaffe Juice #115 - An interview with author of "The Brand Bubble", John Gerzema

In this episode, I chat with John Gerzema, Chief Insights Officer at Young & Rubicam Group, who authored and just released a very interesting book titled, "The Brand Bubble: The looming crisis in brand value and how to avoid it." Audio comments to +1 206 203-3255. Join the Jaffe Juice Facebook Group or just follow me on Facebook or Twitter.

Direct download here
iTunes subscription here

Brand bubble website/blog here
Purchase the book on Amazon.com by clicking on the following link

Don't hate the Twit, Hate the Tweet

Thanks to my @ricksanchezcnn Join the Conversation reference, I stumbled upon 2 new services: NowPublic (crowd-powered media) and Qwitter (catching Twitter quitters)

Both have common threads of accountability, transparency and CNN.

How about some love, CNN's Rick Sanchez?

Hey Rick Sanchez, I've Twitted my hat to you in the past and now you're using the phrase of my book....so how about some love back in return?

Terry Tate makes a late charge for President (at Reebok's expense)

Remember Terry Tate, Office Linebacker? In a series of some of the earliest and best examples of "long form content" / digital webisodes, Terry burst onto the scene on behalf of Reebok. It was a really great example of how 4 minute "ads" could compete for attention on a level playing field.

Fast forward to a brief moment in time (we're probably talking 4 years ago) where Terry decided to run for President. I don't recall if Reebok was still in on the sponsorship act.

And now we have this:

With pearls such as "How's that for Drill Baby Drill! You just subscribed to Terry's Journal of Pain!! And the first issue is free, baby! Whoo!! ... Hey Katie!" the Tate charm is still in tact, but this time he may have overstayed his welcome.

Whether you find this funny (no Governors were hurt in the filming of this...) or offensive, I wonder how much damage this does for Reebok. Marc Fireman, any comment on this?

What do you think? Patently funny or blatantly offensive? And if the latter, how different is this to the SNL parodies.

Either way - in my opinion - "comedy" in some way, shame or form (including of course Stewart and Colbert) will, without question have a major influence and say on the outcome of this election.

Slip-sliding away

From Jack Myers, a report which states that advertising's share of marketing budget has declined 12% within the past decade.

In 1998, advertising represented 34.9% of marketing budgets, direct marketing 10.1% and sales promotion (including events and PR....why I don't know) at 55%. This, compared to 2008's data of 30.6%, 22.8% and 46.6% respectively.

What's interesting is that during this time, total marketing budgets have increased by 94% (advertising for example has increased in absolute terms from $136.8bn to $232.50)

2 insights/takeaways worth noting:

1. As media continues to become more digital, transparent and accountable, advertising will likely see a fairly noticeable "correction" in terms of its total spend within the next 10 years.
2. Currently, advertising represents just 30% of the total pie. And shrinking. No doubt we'll see exponential spend on emerging media and conversational marketing to take on increasingly significant proportions.

Joe the Plumber

Hey, if you can't beat 'em, join 'em. So apparently "Joe the Plumber" was one of the most Googled terms during Thursday's Presidential Debate. Looks like Obama's team got on the search bandwagon to determine how Joe will actually be affected (turns out most plumbers are doing just fine during these challenging economic times)

As an side, gotta love the REAL Joe the Plumber who must be benefiting like crazy from all the increased traffic from his URL: www.joetheplumber.com - hell, he's even thinking about making a run for the Presidency, butt-crack and all.

Join the Political Conversation - part 4

Could this "ad" be titled, "silent but violent"? In a very interesting twist, KFC will reach out to the Presidential candidates on Monday night in Nashville (during Dancing with the Stars no less) with the following challenge: "if anyone mentions "world hunger" during Tuesday's debate, KFC will donate $20,000 to World Hunger Relief".

While I get the spirit of this (at the end of the day, $20K is $20K whichever way you slice it...and surely an organization can choose how it wants to spend its money), I can't help but feel a little uneasy about this. It just feels like a greasy piece of fried chicken to me to be honest.

In addition, I wonder how much the commercial itself will cost (to produce and to air) and why KFC couldn't or wouldn't have just donated this to World Hunger Relief instead.

Either way, I will be impressed if either (or both - would KFC give $40,000 then?) candidate takes the bait although I won't hold my breath.

Join the Political Conversation - part 3

Want to know how the election is going to turn out? Don't turn to Gallup, Rasmussen, CNN or any of the me-too news networks. Just do some quality listening and tap into the power of conversation to predict the election outcome.

In this case, it's MotiveQuest's Brand Advocacy 2008 initiative, which currently has Obama leading McCain by 54% to 46% based on their Online Promoter Score(tm) methodology.

What's also interesting is to note the terms most associated with each candidate. For example, Obama has McCain, Palin, Biden, Debate, Truth, Experience, Change, Bush and Black, whereas McCain's tagcloud includes Obama, Palin, Economy, Rove, Bush, Liar, Gambling, God and Old.

Hmmm.

You can find out more about the methodology here, but for starters here's a topline blurb: Every day MotiveQuest pulls data from popular online, groups, forums, blogs and other social media. For BrandAdvocacy08, we’re looking at 30 top non-political forums and the 10 top political forums. This gives us a broad sample of conversations to measure advocacy for Barack Obama and John McCain. Each day we’re analyzing about 30,000 messages from 6,000 people.