INFLUENTIAL MARKETING BLOG — You might have seen a randomly bare chested and very good looking guy doing a bunch of short videos that look suspiciously like a funny commercial that has been on TV for months for Old Spice. Starting from a series of ads, over the last 48 hours the advertising team for Old Spice has created more than 200 short ads which are essentially video responses from the actor in the ads to comments and questions posted on Twitter. The real time nature of these videos has become huge online, driving millions of views of essentially what are branded ads and spreading the creative of the TV spots to a much wider audience online. It is a good idea and the creative is funny, but there are several things that make this campaign stand out as a way to refresh the tired and sagging Old Spice brand....

INFLUENTIAL MARKETING BLOG — Over the past several years, consumer generated marketing campaigns have become more and more popular. After all, what brand wouldn't want tons of users to create content on their behalf and share it online with their entire social networks. And by the way, create it all for free. It was often heralded as a dream come true kind of situation for brands and even a way to supplant their marketing agencies and get their advertising created for free. As time went on, though, brands realized the downside of consumer generated media could be a lack of control and potential risk for their brand if the content isn't great...

INFLUENTIAL MARKETING BLOG — In life we expect outgoing people to be better at tasks like networking or sales. We use terms like "extrovert" and "Type-A personality" to describe what many of us believe to be true about many of the people we work with...that seemingly natural parts of their personality make them ideal candidates to do certain types of jobs. Chances are as you have built your own small business, a part of any success you have had has come from your own natural abilities and skills...

INFLUENTIAL MARKETING BLOG — This week Twitter finally shared a business model that introduces the idea of promoted tweets as a way for organizations to pay for branded tweets to appear in search results much as paid results appear on any Google search. It's a simple and relatively conservative first step and though some people may have cried foul or accused Twitter of "selling out" - my sense is that the fallout will not lead to any significant drop in usage for Twitter. The bigger question is what does this mean for where Twitter is heading?...

INFLUENTIAL MARKETING BLOG — I used to dream of a good marketing TV show. Not one that makes the world of marketing into a scripted drama, like Mad Men. Or one that pretends to be about business but actually ends up being about relationships and emotional conflict like The Apprentice quickly became. The Shark Tank on ABC comes close, as up-and-coming entrepreneurs try to sell their ideas for funding to a group of ruthless investors...but even that format is a bit abstract when it comes to more of the day to day reality of marketing...