I enjoy drinking High Life (bottles only). These ads, which I have most definitely been guilty of on occasion, hit a bit too close to home this morning. But I love them. There seems to be quite a trend in advertising of being “manly”.
When I read an interview like this one with Matt Haughey, I get excited. It’s rather obvious to say “he gets it”, but it’s the truth. Metafilter is an amazing community and as I study how to best build communities, I imagine I will be using MF as a case study. I never realized how MF setup its revenue model (combine it with the bit about ‘exclusivity’).
Me: Do you have streams of revenue besides the signup-fee and advertising?
Matt: That’s pretty much it…The $5 signup fee isn’t subscription revenue [since it's a one-time thing]. It’s mostly just putting a huge hurdle in front of having to deal with new users. ‘Cause it’s such a pain. The last ten years have shown that any time there’s press, like the New York Times writes something about us, 300 people sign up and then wreak havoc for a while, and then go away. [Without barriers to entry] it would just be a nightmare.So it’s really ad-based. It’s not something I ever set out to establish. I lucked into it, being in the right place at the right time.
Me: So what does your ad revenue look like?
Matt: It’s been really successful. I’m really lucky with the way Ask Metafilter works. Every question’s about a topic that’s easy to match ads to.The other weird thing is, ads aren’t even shown to members. Members asking about what kind of digital cameras they should get want honest answers. But non-members searching for digital cameras online get [to Ask Metafilter] in that search.
Perfect definition/application of what branded utility is.
Creating something that people need, not aping existing applications because you can, is key, says Palmer. “For the same budget and energy as we expend on current forms of advertising, we could be making something more tangible, useful and reusable that plays a more integral part in the consumer’s life. This is ‘interactive,’ which is not synonymous with ‘online,’ by the way.”
I LOVE Salt 101. Highly educational, interactive, non-preachy and it provides credibility with Alton Brown (loving the bow tie and tweed suit too, ps). It takes some searching to realize that it’s been presented by Diamond Crystal Salt. Smart move and I’d love to know who set this up for them. This is the sort of content I love.
As a side note, I am very curious about the different types of salt and the best uses for them. I’ve heard that regular table salt isn’t the best option for salting food.
Fleur de sel – Or Malden’s or whatever your preference is. Regular table salt isn’t ideal for salting food after it’s served. Malden comes in nice flakes that melt nicely on the food. Meg prefers fleur de sel but I find it too crunchy. A 4 oz. container will cost you $11 — 3 times as much as 3 pounds of table salt — but it’ll last for months or even years.
I love the view the Tyler Brule has taken with Monocle and sponsors.
Everything we do always has a sponsor attached, we took the view very early on that we were not going to expose ourselves by developing a ton of things online and then having this massive sink hole.
Slate gives the Dos Equis ads a B+. I think they deserve an A not because I think I could EASILY replace the main character as The Most Interesting Man in the World, but because it works. For brands, I think it’s (more) important to build a lifestyle, culture and feeling around your brand, not constantly shouting the brand’s name. In the adds, the gentleman simply states, “I don’t always drink beer, but when I do, I drink Dos Equis”. That’s not a typical statement for a brand to approve, but the subtlety with the reference combined with the other elements of the commercials (bench-pressing Asian women, splashing down in a space capsule, performing trick billiards shots for turbaned companions) create an aura around Dos Equis.
To tie to that, this morning I read this article that shows the power of some of the social media tools brands can play with to help build this aura.
At first blush, Tumblr, described as a “blogging platform,” which aggregates online content on a particular theme (like, say, skateboarding), doesn’t seem to have an obvious marketing application. But IBM, EMI and Universal Music have all discovered that creating a tumbleblog (a term that preceded the two-year-old Tumblr’s existence) is a good way to help control the message online, reward fans and, in IBM’s case, position oneself as a thought leader on a given topic.
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Marketers can provide such links via blogs, but Tumblr makes it easier to aggregate content like news articles and video. Like Twitter, you can also “follow” a tumbleblog you like. Users can also hit a “like” button or reblog the post onto their own Tumblr page, making the blog items more viral. Adam Christensen, social media manager for IBM, said the idea is to drive online conversation. “It certainly raises awareness for the kinds of things that IBM is working on,” he said. “We don’t want it to be just about IBM, and Tumblr gives us a holistic view.”
Here’s a nice blurb on the difference between advertising and sponsorship. The post is based on the Reed Pages magazine.
An advertisement is clearly delineated from the medium in which it exists. Within this container, the advertiser is free to deliver a message over which they have complete control.
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Sponsorship, on the other hand, places greater emphasis on the medium. The sponsored property is a distinct entity with which the sponsor is trying to align their brand.
Charlie O’Donnell says it better than I can/could.
Advertising and PR is becoming much more integrated. Messaging is going cross medium. You can’t really survive at the strategy level if you don’t understand all of the aspects of both traditional and interactive advertising–direct marketing, SEO/SEM, sponsorships, event marketing, etc. That raises the bar for what it takes to be an advertising expert of any kind–let alone just in social media. And thank God for that… seriously. There are too many people going around with social media on their business cards where you say, “I don’t get what that person does for a living–what do they actually do again?”
I’ve been thinking a lot about online relationships/friendships and how useful they can be for businesses (see my Sponsor my Status post and the subsequent domain registration). Coincidentally, I stumbled into this BusinessWeek article, Learning and Profiting from Online Friendships. Loads of great information here. It’s likely I’ll file this away to continually reference (as with my Monocle post). Here are the blurbs that caught my attention in the first read.
