PJA Blog: The Complex Brand

It’s summer, I’m told, and this year we packed up the dogs as well as my sister and her son (my brother-in-law was in waiting for my niece’s arrival back from doing the Silk Road thing in China), and headed for Inverness, Nova Scotia. The beach there is pretty swell, but you have to be willing to drive 14 hours from Boston to get to it.

I was determined to do a bit of beach reading, and after finding even a pop psychology book on happiness too demanding to compete with the waves and sun, I turned to the latest Vanity Fair. After the first 168 pages of ads, the editorial lurched into view. There was a wonderful story on Rudy’s new wife called “Terror Alert,” and then, right at the opening of a big puff piece on Brazil, a short essay from A.A. Gill. Only 500 words or so, but some of the best non-fiction I’ve read all year. Right there, in the middle of Gisele Bündchen’s cleavage, was a brilliant distillation of the BRIC countries: (more…)

One of the fine folks from Avenue A/Razorfish dropped this bon mot in a recent presentation to a client we share, and it got me thinking that a disconnect still exists between many BtoB companies and how much they should be devoting to search. As a client put it to her own eMarketing team, “We still get people saying they want to do a Web project or a microsite and that they have a $100,000 budget. Well, they don’t have a $100,000 budget, because I know they haven’t thought for a second about the ratio of what it will cost versus what it will cost to promote. I’m sorry, but ‘If you build it, they will click’ does not work as a promotional strategy.” (more…)

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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