Thank you Susan

I just wanted to thank Susan for her dedication, enthusiasm and overall great classroom experience. She was a wonderful instructor who really helped me get a grasp on many marketing concepts that were missing for me.

Thank you very much,

AJ

Recovery Phase

It has taken the better part of Wednesday for me to digest everything we covered in our final class, appreciating the talent, enjoying the entertainment, and obsessing about different ways I might have delivered content to make the "integration" piece more meaningful. One thing that I know for sure is that your contributions to our blog have been insightful as well as fun, and I hope they are something I can continue to look forward to (hint).





Our time passed too quickly last evening for me to share the latest version of the MSL billboard for Buffalo.

There is still a LOT of info for outdoor advertising, but it needs to be there, and your suggestions helped present it more succinctly. Thanks to Christy for a draft that helped me visualize an improved creative. Take a ride to Buffalo after September 1!

If you ever need an outstanding IMC/product planning case study, take an investigative look at Procter & Gamble. Here is a link to an article about their latest directions: http://adage.com/article?article_id=130553 By the way, the AdAge website is outstanding.

Thanks for an educational (for me) five weeks and for the pleasure of getting to know you. Please stay in [cyber] touch (hint hint).

Online team collaboration & project management

A coworker sent this link to me and I thought I'd pass it on:
http://www.teamness.com/
It's to an online team collaboration and project management site that might be useful for our upcoming team projects, which look to be pretty extensive.

Speaking of team projects, everyone did such a great job last night. I especially loved all of the humorous elements and the Intel group's cool Powerpoint. And thanks to Ron, Rachel and Shonda, I went to sleep with visions of citrus fruit dancing through my head...

Ron's PSA for Gardenburger

So here is the PSA with Ron for Gardenburger that we showed in class last night.

We really had a lot of fun with it, shooting from multiple angles. In editing, the "campiest" parts were specifically chosen. I could probably re-edit and have a nice, clean PSA, but we were going for a more comedic approach that people would want to watch more than once to bridge between the mainstream and alternative target markets.

Little things like Ron snapping for the box to be handed to him and him pausing right before the music crescendo were actually made by editing it in out of context.  By the way, the sound in the background are script cards that Rachel is holding being dropped. I was going to edit them out, but I thought it was funnier to look more contrived.

Anyway, we had a lot of fun, so we hope you enjoyed it!

Current events from BusinessWeek

I was reading two articles in BusinessWeek magazine today. One article was about Ford's fight for a brighter future in car sales (a shift from SUV and truck) and the other was about a fictional author who writes about underage vampires and werewolves.

 

James Farley(Chris Farley's cousin) is Ford's marketing czar and came up with a successful campaign idea by (for the first time ever) including Ford car dealers during the creative process. Instead of consumers being a part of focus groups it was the car dealers because they knew more than anyone about their customers and what Ford does right and wrong. No relationship is more important that the one between the company making the product and the people selling them.  Farley also had Ford's creative chief that worked for another agency outsource for forward-thinking and creative talent around the state of Michigan (Ford Headquarters).

No one knows if the campaign will actually work because it hasn't come out yet,  so far I think it is headed for success because Farley used the best players. It was a really interesting article!

The second article was about author, Stephanie Meyer, who engages with her fans over social networking sites, websites, and her personal email. What better way to connect and build relationships with your audience than virtually!? With today's advancements in technology it is much easier to gain feedback and keep up with trends by reading blogs, reviews, and browsing social networking sites to CONNECT with people that have the same interests. It's all about connections!

All and all the two articles were really fascinating to me. Both people used resources that are available to us and are effective.

Processes can seem to get in the way but.......

Are you within branding guidelines? Are you engaging the right vendor/s? Have you identified your stakeholders? Has your manager approved your campaign budget? I could keep going on and on but the bottom line to ask yourself is, "are you following the process?" The reason I bring this up is that managing an integrated marketing campaign can cause many different forks in the road than a simple advertising only campaign and a lot of it has to do with process. Let me give you an example.
A product marketing manager came to me last week all excited about a new idea to promote his product. Objective: Create awareness and buzz with the end goal being to generate sales. He came to me with a theme already decided upon and some marketing tactics thought through. I started asking him things like, "have you gotten this approved by branding?" "Have you gotten senior management (stakeholders) buy in?" "What vendor are you using for the DM portion?" "Who will be developing your online banners?" "Who is your target audience?" "Where are you getting your database?" Blah Blah Blah. You get the picture. At the end of the conversation this person's head was spinning and all because of processes that he was not familiar with. Engaging the right people at the right time is critical. Had this marketing manager engaged the Mar Com team earlier he would have understood some of the processes and not felt so overwhelmed. After all, dealing with over five vendors for an integrated marketing campaign might seem unmanageable to some but when you have the right processes in place it makes all the difference in the world. I am not one to follow process (at times) but there is a reason that we have them so don't let them get in your way.

APA

Now that I actually figured out how to do a post on the main page...I can start my post.

I had an experience today with APA formatting that I thought I would share with everyone. I was having some trouble figuring out how to cite a couple of references that my group used in our paper. So I asked my boss if he was familiar with APA style and he said he was. He started going into a whole schpeal (sp?) about how he uses it for new releases etc. So then I reworded my question to ask him if he was familiar with citing references in APA format. He then referred me to out PR person because she wrote more in APA format then he did. So I set out to ask her. Again, she wasn't familiar with how to cite references using APA format...BUT....she did pull out this book from one of her cabinets that was 10 years old! She said I could use that because she doesn't think much of the information has changed. I had to laugh inside! I thumbed through it real quick and it was more geared towards actually writing in APA style versus what are little black and green book is for. Can anybody say Christmas present?!?!

So I just thought it was weird that even though some of the people I work with do use the APA style, but they don't know how to cite references. I mean it is a little bit understandable because they right more along the lines of news releases versus academic papers.

I'm so glad there is spell check on this type of posting!