Kimon Lycos, who runs the B2B Marketer group on LinkedIn, discusses the news and events in B2B marketing around the world that have caught his attention this month.

Honk if you suck

US – We can’t say too much about this one without giving away the ending. But the TVC is part of a national integrated campaign, which has the theme ‘moving forward’, with print, online and social media. Online videos appear on ESPN.com around coverage of the NCAA ‘March madness’ men’s basketball tournament.

For having a crack at humour, pulling it off nicely and for being bold enough to be human, good luck Penske Truck Leasing and well done to the agency, The Martin Agency, hope you sell a heap!

A real tear jerker

US – I don’t know, was I caught in a weak moment when I saw this? The piano, the endearing voices, the inspirational business people doing weird and wonderful, business things? Or am I just pure marshmallow, a sucker for people doing cool stuff?

I really like this advert. For some reason it connected with me, and I literally don’t do any of the things in the film. United Problem Solvers was made by Ogilvy & Mather Worldwide.

Forget ‘make it wonderful’. Make it real.

Global – I was on a real roll, but here’s one from a 104 year old Swiss company, supplying commercial grade kitchens. I’ll let the creative guy, Mike Shackle from Gyro London explain the idea: “During conversations with Franke executives and customers, the theme of bringing ‘magic’ to everyday experiences and ‘making everything wonderful’ kept coming up”.

Hum, well some things are better left down. Although, the campaign did keep eight international artists busy, so good for them. Wonder how good it was for the client?

LinkedIn jumps for the ‘off-platform’ movement

Global – You can now reach your LinkedIn audiences away from LinkedIn. A new product will allow marketers to pick out segments of LinkedIn’s audience. For example, the VP of sales in the financial service industry in New York, and serve them ads across the web. You can do this to as few as 1,000 people.

This gets pretty precise, allowing marketers to pick and choose exactly the type of professionals they want to target out of its 347-million-strong network, and then show them ads across the web.

The company has a deal with a number of publishers and the ad exchange AppNexus, giving it access to essentially unlimited inventory upon which it can layer its data.

Hotdog!