Carl Baldassarre

, ,

Now advertising can change the product.

In Interactive marketing on October 29, 2010 at 11:36 am

Dominos pizza was so bad they had to do something. So they decided to be honest. They made commercials, and a “Pizza Turnaround” documentary for YouTube featuring their harshest critics — folks who tried the pizza and didn’t like it. At the same time, they featured their chefs, and showed how they were making big changes. So they were able to answer the critics with better pizza. The tag line “Oh yes we did” was perfect. So was the pay off — the same folks who hated the pizza before liked the new pies.

Domino’s also included a “Show Us Your Pizza” campaign, which invited customers to send in their own photos of Domino’s pies to be used in the ads. No more fake beauty shots of perfect pizza. This reality-based advertising is a lot more real than most reality TV shows. And like reality TV, it relies on conflict to create drama. Domino’s gets to curate and narrate. But the drama comes from the fact that they’re not suppressing the truth — they’re changing it by making better pizza.

 

An interview with the Dominos CMO:

http://adage.com/article?article_id=146782

Comment »

, , , , , , ,

Will advertising be the third rail for Facebook?

In Interactive marketing on October 27, 2010 at 3:48 pm

The right hand rail is where the ads are on Facebook. The middle is where your friends are, in your newsfeed and on your wall. But if you “like” companies, the middle becomes prime advertising space, too. Walmart recently created a Facebook App called CrowdSaver that lets users give a thumbs up to deals — like a 42″ Plasma TV for $398. If enough people like the deal, everyone gets it.

It’s a good idea, and a good reason to give WalMart a place in your newsfeed. “You should be able to connect to a business in the same way that you connect to a friend, or a person on the site,” Mark Zuckerberg said in a Wired magazine interview in 2009. “And then that business should be able to publish things in the same way that that happens for people you care about.” It’s a logical thought,  but in practice it can lead to an avalanche of junk. Ultimately, a “Like” list is not that different from a mailing list. So could Facebook become the digital version of junk mail? Nah. For one thing, it’s easy to un-like over-zealous companies. But if Facebook leaves the social advertising boom to manage itself, they could turn into the next MySpace — or just a less satisfying version of itself.

 

Full Zuckerberg Interview:

http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2009/06/mark-zuckerberg-speaks/#ixzz13aakDVt5

Comment »

, , ,

Sharing the wealth isn’t socialism, it’s just social.

In Getting, Spending, Saving on October 27, 2010 at 3:01 pm

Henry Ford saw nearly doubling the minimum wage for his assembly line workers as “the finest cost-cutting move we ever made”. He believed it helped him attract and retain better workers and improve productivity. He also came to realize that paying his workers better enabled them to afford to buy the cars they made, which increased sales. Basically, sharing the wealth created more wealth.

The same type of thinking was behind TARP, the widely denounced bailout of financial institutions. First, spending the TARP money helped keep the economy from shrinking, so it actually made money for society immediately. Second, it enabled banks to survive and eventually pay back the TARP loans, so the long-term cost of the program was small or non-existent. While talking about business and economic decisions in Darwinian terms makes a good story, it’s probably not a good way to understand them. Unlike natural selection, capitalism isn’t a natural force, it’s a social thing.

Comment »
Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.