This afternoon one of our designers came across an interesting thread dealing with Google’s amazingly cool “Street View” feature within Google Maps and the photos of billboards that are part of the Street View cache. Rarely does Gizmodo.com have anything marketing related on it, but this time they have brought up an interesting point.

We, as marketers, love new ways of reaching our audiences and we can’t wait to be the first to do the “new thing”. Here’s the new thing. Ready?

Go to Google Maps. Search for a major landmark. Now go to Street View. Some little car drove all those roads taking 360 degree photos from the perspective of the driver. Now, if you chose a landmark that has billboards near it, you should be able to spot a few in the street view mode and depending on the distance from the camera, you should be able to read these ads with no problem. Someone at Google had the idea of finding billboards in the photo collections of the street view locations and decided that these photos could easily be manipulated to hold new advertisements, more specifically AdWords.

Here is the problem, someone is paying for that billboard to host an ad with the hopes that it would not only be seen in plain sight, but that it would also be photographed (stadiums, major city centers like Time Square) or possibly appear in the background of a field reporters footage on the six o’clock news. There’s a conflict here. Can Google sell that space in its photos, cover up the existing ads and replace them with different ones? Some would say that this is perfectly acceptable since any common person can take a photo of public place and Photoshop it to oblivion. There is still the difference of money. A photographer is more likely to completely remove an unpleasant billboard rather than replace the ad with something else and then publish it while collecting a check from a client, but if the most popular search engine (and the largest online media company) is doing this on a mass level, the answer probably isn’t as cut and dry.

It’s an interesting thought which can stem to all kinds of ideas and arguements. Just an interesting bit for you to think over.

Read the Gizmodo article via this link.

Hello and happy 2010! Yes, we finally made it out of what many of us believe was the worst of the worst. I’ll spare us all the list of horrible things that happened in the marketing world in 2009 and jump right into the goodness that is already brewing in 2010.

First, it’s good see that the financial markets are responding well to upbeat manufacturing outlooks, low jobless claims, and some nice retail numbers.

The LA Times had a good piece on retail just a few days after Christmas in which they reported that retailers are saw increases in many sectors including electronics, jewelry, footwear, and men’s apparel. We are not talking about a huge spending boom, I do not think anyone was expecting there would be one, but what Kamalesh Rao, Director of Economic Research at SpendingPulse, calls “cautious spending” was obviously noticeable. Consumers did not splurge this season, but they certainly showed that they were not too afraid to spend. “The consumer traditionally has been the mechanism in driving recoveries. We have seen a bit of a rise in spending in the last six months, but not nearly as robust as in past recoveries.” says Carl Steidtmann, chief economist at Deloitte LLP. So while we are seeing an increase, the “v” recovery many bullish analysis have predicted may not actually occur. Major creditors, MasterCard and American Express did not see the spending they were hoping for, but reported an increase in consumer activity. It is believe many consumers opted to shop with cash this year instead of piling up the credit charges.

Major retailers will be releasing their December numbers later this week, so stay tuned for the news!

Now that the holidays are over, what should we be expecting to see Americans spend their money on? Well it might be worth your while to take a look at Lee Eisenberg’s new book, Shoptimism. A recent article in MediaPost echos the idea that America is “on balance” with what it buys.

Americans have four good reasons for buying products (that don’t put them into debt), Eisenberg writes and Kerry Hannon reports: Products make    them happy (e.g., ticket to a play or a trip to Paris); they transform them (e.g., a new hairdo); self-extension (e.g., Nike Air Max sneakers), and “everlastingness” (e.g., goods that in time will become an heirloom).

Maybe that is an oversimplification of the environment, nevertheless, Eisenberg makes a valid point. Consumers have identified with brands for decades, and the American consumer isn’t going to have a major paradigm shift in its brand love affair anytime soon. Building a quality brand, especially in retail, is extremely important, and that value will be made even more clear as we come out of this recession. The strong brands will be stronger, and the weak brands will go away.

It looks as though 2010 is off to a good start!

Have a safe, healthy, and prosperous 2010! We are looking forward to bringing you more ideas that build business this year!

Here is the latest installment of the Fan Cam - See it Live! campaign for the Los Angeles Clippers.

Enjoy!

Today an interesting survey was published by American Express that looks at consumer holiday spending and saving data.

We might have thought that the best of the holiday spending would have started and ended with Black Friday, but maybe there is still some hope for the remainder of the year. One of the best parts of this survey is how current the data is which gives a slightly different indication on market performance than other metrics.

Take a look at this article, I think you’ll find it interesting.

Here is our latest Clippers commercial!

The idea behind this spot revolves around the game experience. There are few experiences like going to an NBA game in downtown Los Angeles. The excitement that surrounds the Clippers, the Staples Center, and the city of Los Angeles can be felt at every home game. We wanted to capture the experience from a spectators perspective. The energy felt at these games is truly awesome.

Links:

Don’t Mention the Lousy Economy

Shoppers Looking for Discounts

Holiday Shopping Budgets

What’s for dinner this Thanksgiving? A big pile of social media, that’s what!

This week NextBee Media released the findings from its annual holiday media survey and should we be surprised that social media spending is increasing? No, probably not, but what may surprise you is that 70% of the businesses surveyed said they are increasing their social media budgets by 18% while at the same time pulling back 8% from their traditional efforts. This is big for more than one reason.

First, social media spending is positioned to see its largest media buy ever. Call it the recession, call it going green, call it saving on postage, call it better targeting, call it whatever you’d like, the reality is that social media going to take on an incredibly important role this season for retailers. It’s believed that most consumers think they will find better deals or amazing coupons online, to respond to this companies are shifting their media strategies over to the more contextualized and highly indexed areas of social networks the single place where internet users are spending nearly 20% of their online time. Retailers hope to target these frugal shoppers with discounts, last minute promotions, and gift ideas.

Second, the fact that retailers are pulling back 8% of their traditional budgets is even more staggering. We are not talking about half a percent or even one percent, we’re talking nearly 1/10 of traditional budgets getting pulled during one of the most important advertising seasons of the year. It’s also believed that the majority of shoppers will have all their gifts purchased by December 7th this year which means shoppers are looking for discounts now.

This might be the big push social media marketing has been waiting for. The landscape of social media will change dramatically after this holiday season if retailers get the ROI they are looking for, but there is also fear among social networks that this new push will make social communities feel crowded by advertisments. We saw this happen with Myspace a few years ago when it was overrun by advertisers. Users jumped ship to Facebook and Twitter to escape the unchecked and unregulated spam that Myspace openly allowed at that time.

I’ll retouch on this topic once the dust settles in mid-January, but for now, all we can do is get our appetites, email accounts, and status updates ready for the sea of advertisments coming by way of our favorite social networks this Thanksgiving.

Is your brand fun? Do your consumers love being associated with your brand? Do they have a sense of pride when they talk about your product or service? If so, congratulations! If not, this post is for you.

I recently had a conversation with a friend who works for Apple Inc. I inquired to why he likes to talk about his job so frequently, to which he had an obvious answer, “Everyone knows about the iPod, and if you have one, you are cool, but if you can say you work for the company who invented the iPod, that’s a whole new level of cool.” Our conversation took an interesting turn as he continued, “No one really likes to say they work for a brand no one likes, and people certainly don’t go around telling their friends about a less than amazing product they’ve just bought. It’s like you’re not cool if you openly associate with those brands.” I realized that what he was saying was incredibly simple, but entirely true.

It’s true what they say, high school never ends. When I was in high school, the most important thing a person could do to be cool was associate with cool people. Brands aren’t much different. If you are seen with the latest custom Nike’s - you’re cool. If your Facebook profile proclaims to the world that you are a fan of USC, George Clooney, Kashi, iPods, and SmartWater, you just gained cool points. If you associate with top financial companies and have an account with one of Wall Street’s best brokers, people will notice that. Within the social media landscape, others will judge you in the same way that they did in high school, by who you choose to associate with.

Niche brands won’t have a hard time accomplishing this, but what about more generic brands? While there is no one-size-fits-all solution, comprehensive cross-media content and integrated delivery platforms are a good place to start. In the past, it was possible to build an effective TV or print campaign that could stand on its own. But that’s not the case anymore. While TV, radio, print, and direct pieces still hold an important role, these efforts can be optimized if they are full integrated into interactive mediums. It’s not just about getting a magazine reader to go visit your website either, it’s about getting web users to seek out your TV spot, or find the ad in the newspaper. The more interactive and connected all the pieces are, the more interesting the campaign and the more captivated your targets will become.

Maybe you don’t make iPods, but that doesn’t mean that you can’t be part of the cool culture that people right now are talking about. Try investigating the recent campaign done by the California Milk Processor Board. It’s milk, not iPods, but the cool factor is there - one that I am tempted to become a fan of on Facebook.

We are a species made up of storytellers. Each one of us are storytellers. We tell stories to our friends, family, co-workers, strangers, pets, and ourselves. At the end of the work day a question I often ask my friends is, “What did you do today?” I am asking them to tell me a story.

Storytelling might be the most important characteristic that sets us apart from all other beings, which is why we take storytelling so seriously here at HEILBrice.

Think about the stories you tell that are the most enjoyable. We all love to tell stories that include exotic locations, interesting characters, and unique circumstances. We don’t like to tell stories or listen to ones about the normal and mundane. We like stories that have an element to them that is different than the expected.

Before we begin work on a new campaign or positioning a brand, we often spend a serious amount of time talking about the story. What’s the story to be told? We look closely at the company, the brand, the products, the targets, and the marketplace to identify the most compelling story.

Each brand has a story to tell. It might be a story that takes place long ago, one that is comical, exciting, dramatic, or heartwarming. A story that is captivating will generate long-term interest with your target and will give you the opportunity to speak more frequently and more effectively to them. A flashy campaign without a good story might work for the short-term, but without substance, your brand is going to get lost in the mix of all the other short-lived flashy campaigns.

Think for a minute about some of the most well known brands: Disney, Gatorade, Levi’s, Coca-Cola, Ford - All have a great story to tell and while they may not all be actively telling that story daily, it does not take much digging to find it.

What is your story? What do you personally say when others ask you what your company does? Do you simple reply that you sell things? Maybe you haven’t thought about this before, but if you’re interested in bulding brand equity, a story is a great place to start. A good story with lend itself to all sorts of marketing tactics and will inspire creative executions that will reflect well on your company. Focus the plot around what makes your brand different from others. Don’t forget that conflict always helps. Identify the hero, and introduce the villian. Now you have the beginnings of a story - Who knows, maybe it will be the next one to be told over and over, generation after generation.