Author: Simon Dell
Image and video hosting website Photobucket made an update to its business model last week that enraged users. Simon Dell asks whether the bad publicity and anger will be enough to bury the brand. Until last week, you might have never heard of Photobucket. But in one single action, the photo storage website with 100 million […]
Simon Dell found a curious piece of advertising on page 12 of the Courier Mail this morning and wonders if word of mouth can ever breed with paid media. Word-of-mouth marketing is, as every marketer everywhere in the world knows, the best form of marketing. If a friend, a work colleague, a stranger in the street, […]
Last weekend saw soft drink giant Mountain Dew take their animated 5-second Vine videos away from social media platforms and into ‘normal’ TV broadcasts for the very first time. They aren’t the first global brand to experiment with the Vine-format – Dunkin Donuts and Virgin Mobile have both had a crack recently. The adverts were […]
There’s the famous scene from Minority Report in which Tom Cruise’s character walks past a billboard and is targeted by name by a specific brand: “John Anderton. You could use a Guinness right about now.” If you were like me, you probably chuckled at that and thought ‘how cool would that be?’ After all, this […]
You’ve heard the expression. Everyone has heard the expression. It’s the mantra that you think big, successful companies live by. We have to change our business, or the way we do business, to stay ahead of our competitors and, more importantly, keep the demand up from increasingly-fickle consumers who are being bombarded with thousands of […]
It’s not very often we walk away from a client, unable to render any assistance to them and their marketing strategy, but a month or so ago I sent the reluctant email to a director saying we were withdrawing from helping them as we felt we couldn’t add any value to their business. There were […]
Build engagement. That’s what social media is about, isn’t it? Engaging with the people who’ve chosen to like your page in order to build a relationship and hopefully nurture a purchase or recommendation from them. Build a community and talk to them frequently about your brand to create an army of adorers. I, for one, […]
Whether it’s fact or urban myth, there were rumours that a guy in New York in the late 1990s used to stand outside stores that sold Windows-based PCs and convince people that were about to enter that they really should buy an Apple instead. He didn’t work for Apple but that was simply how he […]
BMW have taken the unprecedented step this week of executing a direct mail piece to potential new customers explaining that they are in fact, not shit. Further to that communication, when questioned, Piers Scott, a spokesman for the company, even made the bold statement that he was going to leave it to the industry to […]
“So they’re just shutting it down?” a marketing expert colleague asked me the other day. The answer was in the affirmative. They are, indeed, just shutting it down. With the loss of the jobs, locations, branding and all trade. For those outside Queensland who don’t know WOW Sight and Sound, they were a competitor to JB […]
Simon Sinek makes a great point about those of us ‘stuck’ in Gen X – how inconsequential the ‘X’ is for our generation. A non-descript place-marker. Sure, it might mark the treasure trove on our fantasy pirate map but just as frequently it’s a warning. Don’t trust these people. Danger. Gen Y didn’t fare much […]
Forget QR codes, the utterly pointless piece of faux-3D trickery. They’ve popped up in places we don’t want them, need them or will ever use them and we should think about taking them off the marketing pitch and sending them in for an early bath. Radical the opinion might be, but radical a QR code […]
