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Great article from Mahesh Murthy for the Journal (click for original article)

By MAHESH MURTHY

From the WSJ’s India Chief Mentor blog, produced by a panel of Indian entrepreneurs and investors, at wsj.com/mentor:

One thing I learned from my days in traditional advertising is that a brand doesn’t exist on shelves—it exists in the hearts and minds of people. Your brand is the sum total of perceptions about your product in the heads of your relevant audience.

If that’s true, then online media are the most important place for your brand image to be established, defended and grown. This is where your offering comes face-to-face with your audience and where its responses can be measured, shaped and—if need be—countered in real time. This is where perceptions can be built, person by person.

This brand building is more effective that the mode we’ve employed until now: TV commercials with 30 seconds of well-produced fiction that try to sell a brand image. It is more credible and much less expensive. In fact, it can cost you nothing, if you have the knack and can do it right. Not too many TV campaigns can match that.

Zero-budget advertising is a phrase no traditional advertising firm wants to hear. The old ad business is predicated on your spending lots of money buying space and time in media vehicles such as this one. But if you look at recent times, it’s a model that is dying.

Look at some of the world’s biggest brands. Google, Amazon, Ferrari, Starbucks, Ikea, eBay, Zara, Yahoo, Apple, Harley Davidson, Reuters and Goldman Sachs are a dozen among the 100 top brands in the world per a recent study by brand management firm Interbrand, each with a “brand value” that averages $10 billion. Word of mouth played a major role in building those brands. We await the Apple iPad with no ads released yet, we talk of Google Buzz without having ever seen a Google ad, and we throng to a Zara outlet without seeing its commercials on TV.

Today, the best way to establish your brand among big-hitter rivals is to make it remark-worthy and generate conversations free of charge. See how Red Bull took on big-ad-buying Coke and Pepsi with a product that sold at a higher price for a smaller pack size and built it to a billion-dollar brand with little advertising? The new axiom, call it Mahesh’s Law, is this: your marketing IQ is inversely proportional to your marketing budget. (Read Rest of Article from WSJ)

From Garrick Schmitt for Advertising Age -

The teams playing in this year’s Super Bowl have already been decided, but the Super Bowl shuffle for advertisers began in earnest last month when marketing mainstays like FedEx, General Motors and Pepsi made news by announcing they were opting out of this year’s ad extravaganza.

But for those looking to gauge the health of the ad industry, Super Bowl advertising is a bit of red herring. CBS is charging about $2.5 million for 30 seconds of commercial time — and rightly so. Rarely do you get so many Americans watching one event and actually enjoying the advertising. It’s a tremendous opportunity for most brand marketers and we’d be foolish to look at this year’s Super Bowl as proof of either the rejuvenation of the 30-second spot or the rejection of it.

That doesn’t mean some won’t try. After all, last year Hulu saw a 50% increase in site traffic after running ads during the Super Bowl and Denny’s traffic to its website soared nearly 1,700% as consumers sought information about its free breakfast promotion.

There certainly will be advertising winners (and losers) on Super Bowl Sunday but let’s hope that the Monday morning quarterback chatter doesn’t obscure the larger shift at hand for marketers this year. 2010 will be the year of the “platform” for advertisers. Read Rest of Article

Reporting by Yinka Adegoke for Reuters

YouTube, which is owned by Internet search giant Google, is already known to have held talks with several major movie studios about renting movies.

Google’s vice president of content partnerships, David Eun, said in an interview that some full-length shows would not be available to YouTube under its current advertising model.

“We’re making some interesting bets on long-form content; not all content is accessible to us with the advertising model,” Eun told Reuters, who said content partners will be able to choose what works best for them.

YouTube is keen to bulk up its licensing of full-length programs alongside the popular short clips uploaded by users that currently dominate the site.

But Hollywood studios and TV companies are reluctant to cannibalize revenue streams, such as from cable TV and DVD sales, by offering premium programs for free viewing on the Web — even under an advertising revenue-share model.

Some of the options being considered by YouTube include variations of monthly subscription models such as those seen with cable TV providers.

Another option is a movie rental model similar to Apple Inc’s iTunes or Amazon.com. YouTube has held talks about rentals with Lions Gate Entertainment, Sony Pictures, and Warner Bros,

Though YouTube is easily the most visited video site in the United States with more than 125 million users a month, many analysts see rival Hulu, which carries full length shows, as the future of the Web video business.

Hulu, owned by NBC Universal, News Corp, and Walt Disney, has rapidly become the No. 2 video site in the United States and has sold out on key ad inventory.

Eun insisted that advertising revenue would continue to be YouTube’s mainstay and said that its content partners would start earning meaningful ad dollars in 2010. “If we just continued to focus on our advertising model that would be enough opportunity to create meaningful revenue,” said Eun.

“The biggest opportunity today is advertising and we’ve just begun to scratch the surface,” he said ahead of a presentation to analysts on Tuesday.

YouTube has short-form videos from a range of partners including CNN and TNT, ESPN and ABC; and full length-programs from partners including the UK’s Channel 4 and Channel 5.

VEVO

YouTube is also backing an advertising-driven business in partnership with the music industry for a new site called Vevo which launched earlier this month.

Late last year the Warner Music Group and YouTube fell out over fees, leading to videos from artists like Madonna and Red Hot Chili Peppers being yanked from the site. The two sides came to an agreement in September. However Warner Music has yet to join Vevo, which is backed by Vivendi’s Universal Music Group, Sony Music and music from EMI.

YouTube had previously been required to pay upfront licensing fees in the tens of millions of dollars to secure rights to carry the videos, according to people familiar with the talks. The new Vevo partnership is purely an advertising revenue share, according to Eun.

He said of the previous YouTube relationship with the music business: “Our interests weren’t aligned. There wasn’t as much downside for the labels but there also wasn’t as much upside for them.”

By Emma Hall for AdAge

LONDON (AdAge.com) — Call it the Subservient Shower Girl.

Burger King U.K. is inviting young men to watch and interact with a bikini-clad girl as she takes her daily shower, in a new “glorious mornings” promotion which urges consumers to “seize the day your way.”

The www.singingintheshower.co.uk website is billed as “the world’s first guilt-free shower-cam,” where visitors can ask a 20-year-old woman to wear a different bikini and sing a different song as she takes her morning shower each day.

Burger King invites customers to “watch the shower babe shake her bits to the hits at 9:30 a.m. every morning.” And it doesn’t end there — you can also win a date with the “sizzling shower babe” by filling out a form saying why you deserve to be chosen.

A Burger King spokesman explained the blatantly male bias of the campaign. He said, “Our research showed that breakfast is a male-centric audience for Burger King; it doesn’t resonate as well with women — we are targeting the people who are buying breakfast.”

The website, which is aimed at men 18 and older (the site is age-restricted), also hosts offers, competitions and viral videos. It will continue throughout the month of December.

Male-targeted ads are also appearing on music-streaming site Spotify, with four different executions timed for broadcast at various times of the day. As well as spoken ads, there will be banners, a scroll bar and album art replacement, all driving traffic to the website.

Sarah Power, marketing director U.K. and Eire for Burger King, said in a statement: “Our shower-cam gives hungry Brits the chance to watch the BK Shower Girl singing in the shower every day to help them work up an appetite for our fantastic new breakfast range.”

Pancentric Digital developed the Singing in the Shower site, and Cow PR devised the campaign.

Read original article in AdAge

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AdAge Video Interview:

NEW YORK (AdAge.com) — Nielsen executive, book author and Ad Age columnist Pete Blackshaw is astounded by the number of brand managers who still have no coherent strategy for dealing with negative blog posts. The customer service guru was keynote speaker at the Children’s Advertising Review Unit Conference. But during the Q&A, audience members seemed more interested in tips about how to deal with negative blog posts — than children’s advertising issues.

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Great Video Work from Hibi no Neiro on the song “Sour”

WOW!