VLG joined forces with Nothing But Nets to put an end to malaria. Nothing But Nets is a global, grassroots campaign to raise awareness and funding to combat malaria, one of the largest killers of children in Africa. Join our team. Share this link. Donate.
While the UN Foundation has been working with the UN to fight malaria for years, it was Rick Reilly’s column about malaria in Sports Illustrated challenging each of his readers to donate at least $10 for the purchase of an anti-malaria bed nets, that led to the creation of the Nothing But Nets campaign in 2006.
It cost $10 to put insecticide-laced mosquito nets into the hands of families in need. We’ve set a modest goal of delivering 250 nets to Africa, but we need your help.
The facts:
Every 30 seconds a child dies from malaria in Africa.
Children and pregnant women are most susceptible to malaria.
An insecticide-treated bed net can protect a family of four for up to four to five years.
Watch a quick video showing net distribution in the Ivory Coast:
What does the government do with all that census data?
Advertising Age’s own Bradley Johnson recently released information about what the census means to marketers. Johnson states, “The 2010 Census is expected to find that 309 million people live in the United States. But one person will be missing: the average American.”
He explains that the ‘average American’ is increasing “multi-dimensional,” making it more and more challenging to adapt to shifting and often difficult to contain consumer wants and needs.
Peter Francese, demographic trends analyst at WPP’s Ogilvy & Mather, predicts three major findings. He suggests only 22% of Americans live in an “iconic American household” consisting of a married couple with children. This slipped behind the now popular Dinks (Double Income; No Kids). Two incomes and no kids makes for a very attractive consumer. The Cleaver’s are even a distant third behind single-person households.
Secondly, he describes, “minorities are the new majority,” emphasizing the expanding diversities of our nation. Finally, Francese describes how “our nation will be older and more diverse, and consumer markets more complex.” So what does all of this mean for marketers? Understanding and adapting to these changes and consumers is necessary when considering where the consumer marketplace is moving and how we must adjust when targeting our growing country.
Google rolled out its new feature, announced last week, that generates default backgrounds on what was once their infamous white homepage. The new option allows users to personalize search, giving you the option to put kids, pets or favorite landscape in the browser. Brilliant, right? Chances are you already use Google, but it’ll be more fun now that it has your cute little kiddos staring back at you. Well done, Google!
More goes into a personalized URL marketing campaign than simply sending a potential client a link that has their name incorporated in the web address. There is no “magic trick” that lets you merely send out the PURLs and let them do your work for you. It should simply be viewed as the key that gets you in the door.
To be successful, just like every other marketing campaign, the thought behind reaching a certain segment must be paired with relevance to those customers and a way to creatively grab their attention. If you pair this with intentional follow-ups with the recipients, you are in the making for what will become a truly personal approach.
Did Dominos need a focus group to find out it’s pizza crust tasted like cardboard, or it’s sauce like acidic canned tomatoes? No, the group just confirmed what they knew to be true. Fix what’s broken, then run a self-deprecating ad campaign to get your back in your customers good graces.
Kudos to Dominos. The personalization used is killer. You may not be able to go one-to-one everywhere, but you need to start building brand evangelists one at a time. Without seeing their revenue numbers I’d bet this latest campaign (and better pizza) should give them a bump.
Should you spend time pulling together a focus group, or fixing what you know to be broken?
We limit all our creative briefs to one page. Period. If you go over you need to cut something out. Yes, you can be too far under. There is an art to a good creative brief.
I stumbled upon (not by using StumbleUpon) this slide deck by Dare, which I assume is a British ad agency. I didn’t do too much digging, but they keep talking about British apples. What I did do was flip through a great instructional manual on what does and does not constitute a good brief. Kudos to Dare.
Please read if you like creative briefs. Please read if you don’t like creative briefs.
Once you get past Hugh’s self-promotion and work your way below “the fold” on this webpage you know that he wrote a book. In the book he wrote down most or some or all of the tips he’s used to be more creative in art and business.
You can read 25% of the book by following the link above. Or this one. You get the first 37 tips. The valuable tips, the last two, you’ll need to read when you buy the book. That’s my assumption. Check it out.
BTW - The guy draws art on the back of business cards, so…
If you take Catherine Toole at her word and believe she’s credible enough to deliver good advice, then you should read a recent post I stumbled upon last week. She’s British. I don’t know why I put that here, but it seemed worth a mention. She’s CEO of Sticky Content, which leans heavily on the color pink.
She put together a top ten list of words we should replace/wipe from our websites. I viewed it as a challenge. Can I use all no-no’s in one VLG overview.
Welcome to VLG. Please visit our website. Click here to read* quotes praising our work. You can check out our library of work by visiting the “Work” section of our website. We also have other stuff there. We don’t carry news on our website. We use Twitter. Please follow us. Our solutions are truly remarkable, because we ask our clients to limit the number of stakeholders involved in copy and design approvals. Cheers. Thanks for your time.
*denotes something mandatory
Next, I truncated the overview into the following.
Hi. Visit our website, because marketing experts think it’s worth your time. Then call 214-299-8688 ext. 16 to buy* a microsite.
For those of you struggling to find ways to extract value from Twitter consider these tools. Twiangulate can be a useful networking tool for those of you whose actually “know” your follows or followers in real life. Use this to triangulate your follows with those of two close friends or colleagues. You’ll find out who you have in common, who they have in common and the app gives you a convenient way to follow others with one sure thing in common. Twiangulate calls them your tweeps, but don’t let the cheesy moniker get in the way of using this tool.
TweetStats gives you, well, stats based on your volume, keywords, and followers. TweetStats keywords are presented in a cloud so it’s easy to spot your most frequently used. It looks like I tweet about VLG, people, marketing and Texas. It also gives you your #hashtags in a cloud. #Marketing is a clear front runner. Twitter volume could help you adjust and schedule your tweets so you aren’t slamming your followers. If you want to stay top-of-mind throughout the day this will help you adjust accordingly. BTW- Su.pr is a handy tool for scheduling tweets and I’ve found more time and attention goes into what you tweet when you schedule for the future.
Give these a try and give us some feedback. Do you have a favorite Twitter app?
How important will be is mobile advertising and mobile marketing? It’s difficult to wrap your brain around that fact that advertising is being disbursed on a one-to-one basis so quickly and into so many emerging markets. As long-time advocates of one-to-one marketing we want to embrace this shift and seek new and better ways to tie mobile into consumer or B2B marketing programs. Researching…
The Economist sheds new light on why we (Americans) are not the center of the universe when it comes to mobile marketing. However, many of our current customers are now reaching out to decision makers in these markets as technical infrastructure, cloud computing and other solutions find ways into India, Africa and Eastern Europe. That happening today.
