PJA Blog: The Complex Brand

Transparency. Everywhere you look, you can see it - well actually, you can see through it. The point is, it is a buzzword that has a lot of traction in any industry that is bounded by trust. It’s especially important to marketers and is the hallmark of various channels of social media. If a company makes a misstep with regard to transparency (see Wal-Mart, Sony, Microsoft) they will be discovered and exposed.

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Here are my favorite items from Fortune Magazine’s “What’s Next?” column:

* Entertainment and advertising will continue to penetrate more media as a cohesive set of marketing offerings. To quote Linda Kaplan Thayer, “We have become an entertainment-centric society, where the path of least resistance is the one that amuses or startles us most.” (more…)

Chris Frame and I spent a couple of days working out of our Union Square office last week. Very productive, and perspective-changing in the ways that the best business travel can be. Small pleasures, like a 60-degree-and-sunny sidewalk lunch at B44 on Belden Street, and a drink at the Top of the Mark, didn’t hurt.

I talked to three candidates for our GM position, and met with some very good creative and account resources that I could imagine contributing immediately to PJA’s left coast presence.

Perhaps the most valuable outcome is (more…)

Early 2007, and The Wall Street Journal finally has noticed that a number of sites out there, including Del.icio.us, Digg, Reddit, StumbleUpon, Newsvine, and the new Netscape, actually have an influential role in helping people satisfy their hunger for the new and cool online. Now if the Journal story from Saturday were picked up by one of The Influencers they profile, and bookmarked for the next week, it could conceivably cause a surge in Journal readers, as people who spend three hours a day online looking for cool stuff online so they can appear to be cool online, check out stories about themselves. But no. The Journal charges nearly $100 a year to subscribe to its online home, so all you will get with a link is a bit of tease copy (more…)

Disclaimer: the following is a bit of a disconnected thought.

I discovered this video on the Viral Video Chart this afternoon. It does a wonderful job of demonstrating why Web 2.0 technologies impact how we will think about ourselves and society.

But it also suggests why it’s challenging to leverage Web 2.0 and Social Media for branding and marketing. The video highlights two important shifts:

1. The separation of content and format (presentation)
2. The ability of people to easily and intuitively create content and give it context

The question of what this means for marketers is discussed and debated in media and blogs…a lot. No one’s mastered branding and marketing in a Web 2.0 world, but there is one thing that everyone can agree upon; consumers have much more control over a brand than they used to. Ask AOL, Kryptonite, and General Motors.

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