In most areas, zoning and sign restrictions have become so severe that there are fewer and fewer ways to get the word out. Enter this contraption, which sells for about $500. There is no franchise fee; you just buy the thing and go out and sell some ads.

Sarasota, Florida entrepreneur and limo owner Bob Nickla of Boss Limousine got the concept together, built a prototype,  put up a website and started selling them on the internet at the website ipedalads.com. We heard about it, and thought of some uses other than as a mobile billboard company:

1. Pharmaceutical promotions: In many hospitals, pharma reps are banned from giving out gifts. It can easily be used in a medical campus to promote certain drugs.
2. Universities: Companies could take it to university settings to hand out freebies or promote books, food and the like.
3. Door-to-door delivery: With the addition of a carrying area in the trailer, it would be a perfect regular promotion for a restaurant, drugstore or pizza delivery service; restaurants would just buy one, and leave their banner up as they took food around.
4. Restaurant promotions: Restaurants and food shops can give away free samples and menus in busy pedestrian areas.
5. Malls: This would be an excellent addition for a mall; the mall management could license the I Pedal Ads to one person, who could then set up a schedule of promotions for tenants. For instance, the Macy’s chick who gives away perfume samples or the Asian eatery owner giving away chicken samples could travel up and down the mall, livening up the mall scene. Or alternately, the mall management could buy one for the mall, and allow store owners to use it for one hour each week, with prime shopping hours raffled off to tenants.
6. Theme Parks and Resorts: One issue when guests get to a destination is to get visitors to spend. How about a mobile promotion to hand out freebies and coupons for shops and restaurants in the park.
7. Visitor Bureaus and Chamber of Commerce: Very often, visitor bureau and chamber of commerce staff in a resort area sits behind a counter. Getting out on an I Pedal Ads with coupons, menus and visitor information just might be the ticket to selling tourists on staying an extra night, or just eating dinner out.

See Ipedalads.com

PHILADELPHIA - The edgy  ad agency Gyro Worldwide is now Quaker City Mercantile. They have a bold goal, namely to “recapture Philadelphia’s mighty industrial past and weave a new version of this greatness into its future.” The company will still do advertising, but will also begin making products, hence the”Mercantile” name.

In a press release, the agency said that the change from Gyro to QCM reflects changes in American popular culture. Says Gyro’s founder, Steve Grasse. “The go-go excesses of the millennium is over,” Grasse said.

Now that the limitless appetite of the American consumer has ruined the global economy, there is nothing left for Gyro to do. It is time to move forwards (and also backwards) to a new epoch, one of where America creates real wealth through simple living and hard work. The party was a blast, but now the party is over. The work, meanwhile, goes on.

They’ve launched Sailor Jerry, a rum brand, and acquired a major stake in Narragansett Brewery. Grasse has also purchased a 72-acre farm in the White Mountains of New Hampshire that he plans to use it as a lab for a “new culture of agrarian traditionalism.”

QCM will operate out of the old offices of Gyro Worldwide. It will offer clients the same array of branding, identity, promotion, and new product development services. But in addition to creating work for other companies, QCM will be developing its own line of artisanal products, many developed on Grasse’s farm. “I aspire to be a true Renaissance man,” Grasse says, “a pre-robber baron capitalist in the tradition of Franklin, Jefferson and Washington.”

See http://www.quakercitymercantile.com

Wiley, Start With the Answer: And other Wisdom for Aspiring Leaders, by Bob Seelert, John Wiley & Sons, Hoboken. $24.95

CEO autobiographies and the like are often out of touch, filled with overly obvious advice that would only be useful if you are the CEO. After reading one, you just feel inadequate.

I approached Start With the Answer the same way. Seelert is Chairman of Saatchi & Saatchi, and his income and his book is filled with sections like “The Importance of a Great Executive Assistant” and lines like:

“I was called by an executive recruiter from Spencer Stuart, the leading privately held global executive search firm who, lo and behold, wanted to talk with me about my potential interest in taking the job…”

Would that it were so for anyone these days?

Reading it carefully, however, it seems that Seelert might the last of the old school breed. Coming up through Harvard Business School and then General Foods, his perspective is slightly antique, and that is good.

For instance, he says you should never use the words “never” or “always.” That needs no explanation. And he also reminds that your clothes speak about you, and advises to dress on the side of formality. He also says that with email, that you should set aside only two small periods a day to answer them. And in a new consumer product, he says that companies that are first out, often do best. His prescription for success includes accepting failure, something he put into practice at the Birds Eye division of General Foods. He spoke of the RASCI management technique used at Saatchi. It means that every team has someone who is Responsible, and others who Approve, Support, Consult and Inform.

My favorite? He also puts forth the idea of “Breakfast with Bob,” an idea where he took everyone at the headquarters of his company, Kayser-Roth, to breakfast seven at a time. Simple conversation broke down boundaries.

Payne on New Ad Formats

I heard Payne speak this February at the Interactive Advertising Bureau’s annual meeting in Orlando; just this month his firm has come out with a new ad unit, the D30, that puts a commercial on web pages. Payne, who worked at Turner Broadcasting and Turner Sports, makes one of the more important points in the Internet advertising industry. Clicks are destructive.

“Despite all the possibilities,” said Payne, “we are still using clicks as a measure of value.”

Clicks are not only destructive of the brand, all they do is help advertisers to beat down the price of advertising. In addition, it causes content to go for the lowest common denominator. “We are telling advertisers,” he said, “the worse content, the more you should pay.”

He believes advertisers need to look to simplification of advertising formats to make it easier to buy. However, he asserts, simplification should not turn the ads into commodities. Instead, brand advertising might be helped by limiting the number of ads, or developing smarter ad pricing strategies that sell demographics, not eyeballs.

To solve the issue, he says that the industry needs to look backward to the beginning of television, and look at the “history of what works.” His model? Sylvester “Pat” Weaver, founder of the Today and Tonight shows on NBC. Weaver pushed forward the idea of the 30 and 60 second commercial, wresting television programming away from the ad agencies who brokered large blocks of time on the networks. His big question for the Internet advertising industry? “Where is our Pat Weaver when you need him?”

I found myself agreeing with him, not only because he mentioned Pat Weaver, who is my hero, but because he understood clicks. In print and in television, the “per inquiry” ad is the lowest form of advertising, and only reserved for remnant space. Part of the problem online is that because barriers to entry are so low, advertisers have had a wide variety of options. Not only is ad inventory theoretically infinite, the ease of placing it is easy too.

Back to the Soap Opera

Meanwhile, Yves Darbouze of pLot Multimedia has a slightly different, but complementary idea of the future of advertising on the internet. It needs to stop putting “ads” on the internet. Darbouze, who advised Obama’s campaign on social media, runs an interactive agency that plans, develops, hosts and maintains their own social networks and social media applications. The company then markets them to the brands.

I interviewed Darbouze this spring by phone. His idea is to look at what network television and radio did in its early days for models to see what companies should do. Companies are all talking social media, but they are faced with a series of fads (MySpace, Facebook, Twitter) and the knowledge that some of the social media efforts don’t have exact payoffs. His answer? To look backward to the early days of the networks when agencies created their own programs for advertisers like Proctor & Gamble. The idea? “To create new soap operas, maybe functionality.”

He says that brand advertising, while traditionally focused on advertisements, should instead focus online on being “people aggregators.” While brands are doing this, he says they are doing this within their own brands, and not stepping out into neutral territory. For instance, he mentions NikePlus. First, and strategically, he says he would have called it something not about Nike (Runners Plus?) in order to not alienate the Adidas, Puma and Converse crowd. Then, you would own potential customers that you don’t already have.

He’s got a point. For instance, before MySpace was the rage, he talked to Universal about a music concept called My People, where artists could promote themselves. But Universal was not ready to talk and sell directly to the consumer, and others had the same idea. “They could have built this site,” he said. “They had all of the artists.”

Major brand advertisers want to promote their brands, and rightfully so. But many online “hit” internet sites are really just commercials, and that’s not quite the right direction. They get a flood of hits, and then there is nothing to come back to.

Both agree on clicks. Darbouze cites his seven-year-old daughter, who likes to Tivo and is careful what she clicks on. Just putting some click-able ads is not going to work for that generation, says Darbouze. “It’s going to take you off the site,” she says to him.

Said Darbouze, “If there is a way to make the product be a part of the activity, you’ve won.”

The company has a big market in college sports, as well as consumer products. But you don’t have to have a corporate mascot; you can just come up with something crazy and blow it up by the side of the road!

Inflatable Images
The Scherba Building
2880 Interstate Parkway
Brunswick, Ohio 44212

800-783-5717
330-273-3200
See www.inflatableimages.com

NEW YORK – I have been involved in turnaround situations at Topco Associates, Kayser-Roth Corporation, and Cordiant. The similarities between these situations were greater than the differences.

In each case, they were companies that had fallen on hard times, but there was a belief that they could rise again like a phoenix from the ashes. Additionally, the fact that the companies were not doing well was by no means a secret to the employees, who were always eager to have the leadership that could bring it all back together and get things moving again.

Here are my ten rules for a successful turnaround:

Rule 1. When formulating goals, start with the answer and work your way back to the solution. Do not get bogged down in the morass of yesterday. Get going toward where you need to be in the immediate future. At Cordiant, we developed a five-year financial forecast within three months of arrival that we used as the basis for refinancing the company. Subsequently, we exceeded every benchmark of that forecast.

Rule 2. Get out in front of people immediately and position yourself as the new leader in the company. Tell them who you are, what you believe in, why you are there, your perspective on the situation, and how you intend to proceed. At Cordiant, I visited all the principal people and major locations in London and New York in my first two days.

Rule 3. Bring an extraordinarily high sense of urgency to what you are doing, but also look before you leap. People are anxious for results, but this is no time for dead ends. Think carefully about everything you do, but keep moving. At Topco, we immediately commenced development of a line of environmentally-friendly products because there was an obvious niche and need in the market for them.

Rule 4. Do not sit around headquarters! Get out to where the work is done — plants and field offices. You need this input, and you need to be a motivating force for people. At Cordiant, I got around to offices accounting for 60% of our revenues in the first six months.

Rule 5. Go out and listen to customers and clients. At Kayser-Roth, one of my first visits was to Wal-Mart. They told me, “Mr. Seelert, we are concerned about the viability of your company as a supplier.” Two years later, we were named their vendor partner of the quarter. If I had not personally gone there to listen and learn, I doubt that this would have happened.

Rule 6. Listen to everybody in the organization who offers an opinion about the business — don’t just hang around with the people who report to you. There are two sides to all coins and stories. You need to understand both. If you can, meet with your competitors or the heads of similar organizations. When I went to Cordiant, I met with the heads of other holding companies, agency networks, consultancies, and service organizations.

Rule 7. Recognize that you cannot get the job done alone. Open communications and clearly assigned accountabilities are essential. Your visits to locations provide the forums for rallying and directing the teams, as well as quickly identifying the true talents across the organization.

Rule 8. Lay out your vision, purpose, values, beliefs, objectives, strategies, and plans for accomplishment as quickly as possible. People cannot really get going until you set the right direction. At Cordiant, I laid out my initial vision on day one. to be the “World’s Best Creative Communications Resource.” I indicated that I would be a good listener and that together, we would drive the vision forward from there.

Rule 9. If you do not have the internal resources to get the jobs at hand done, do not be afraid to use outside resources. At Cordiant, we employed Price Waterhouse Business Turnaround Services, At Kayser-Roth and Topco, we hired Luther & Company.

Rule 10. Develop the short list of critical priorities and stick to it. At Cordiant, it was two things: stabilize clients and staff, and refinance the company. Accomplishing these two goals set the stage for everything else.

BOB’S WISDOM: Turnarounds are intensely difficult 24/7 situations. Follow the ten rules and you will prosper.

Author Bio: Bob Seelert, author of the Wiley book Start with the Answer: And Other Wisdom for Aspiring Leaders, is Chairman of Saatchi & Saatchi, a leading global ideas and advertising company. A graduate of Harvard College and Harvard Business School, he has been CEO of five companies, has built brands and businesses, been a party to two mega-mergers, and enacted numerous turnarounds. He has served on boards of directors of companies in the United States, the United Kingdom and France. He lives in New Canaan, Connecticut. See www.StartwiththeAnswer.com

SAVANNAH- Winning entries for the BrandlandUSA and Savannah College of Art & Design Phoenix Contest are out.

In the contest, students from Prof. Sean Trapani’s class at the Savannah College of Art & Design took a list of 30 or so brands from BrandlandUSA.com and decided which ones of the group they would like to try and revive. The students from a spring 2009 branding theory class then picked favorite old, dying or dead brands from the list, and came up with a new positioning statement for each.

The original list of brands surveyed by the SCAD students included such dead brands as Charles of the Ritz and older brands like Sears Roebuck; click here to see the first brands considered. The students then picked brands; click here to meet the teams, see which brands they selected and download hi-res pdfs of the entries.

The brands on the final revival list are Great Atlantic & Pacific Tea Co., Climax Ginger Ale, F. W. Woolworth, RadioShack, Mr. Donut, Hai Karate, El Marko and International Harvester Scout. Judges were BrandlandUSA editor Garland Pollard, CoreBrand CEO James R. Gregory and retired New York creative director Ruth Hartman. Prof. Trapani kept the students on track. The judges looked at the brands with a judging system that included first impression, brand solution, matching strategy to concept and originality. Here are the winning entries:

First place, USFL Home Team by Yuta Matthew Salzman

Brand Idea: Return of the USFL

Brand Problem: A dead brand that is only known to few people. The brand lacked the credentials of being a jester, which was their was their original brand strategy. The USFL was lost to its glitzier cousin, the NFL.

Brand Solution: Positioning the archetype of USFL from jester to innocent. Focusing the games more on teamwork and cooperating with each other to achieve their goal. We looked at the affinity of college teams as the model of this – and extended this idea to keep the entire team roster as graduates from in-state colleges. Also, the teamwork of each teams are stronger than ever because many of the players in the USFL team may be from the same college.

Tagline: “Imagine if everyone on your favorite pro team went to college in your state. We did. The “New” USFL. A new kind of league. A new kind of team.”

Judges Comments: Judge Gregory thought it a fascinating solution and interesting visual, but would also want to know more about how the campaign would work. Judge Garland Pollard thought the geographic idea for the league was a great throwback, and would also help keep player salaries in check, though realistically would wonder how to enforce it. Hartman felt that the biggest challenge of the USFL was the advertising budget; going against the NFL would be expensive and you would have to time a campaign carefully and execute perfectly to get maximum punch.

Second place: Climax Ginger Ale by Callie Vinson

Brand Problem: Climax was a Richmond, Virginia-based ginger ale discontinued due to low sales. Modern primary research revealed that Climax had no perception in the mind of the consumers aged between 30-45. People who had never heard of Climax, however, liked the name.

Brand Solution: Utilize the name of the brand as their primary marketing strategy having Climax ginger ale as an edgy soda brand. Today’s younger market would not be offended by the risqué brand name.

Judges Comments: All reacted strongly to the approach, though judge Ruth Hartman did not like it at all and thought the name would still not be a good one, because many consumers of soft drinks are pre-teens. Pollard, who grew up with the brand in Virginia, thought it catchy. Gregory thought that while the ad had a spoof quality, the claim of aphrodisiac would have to be changed, and instead would have to indicate that it was a joke.

Third Place:  Mister Donut, Chef Inspired Donuts, by Nick Brower

Brand problem: Mister Donut was the largest competitor to Dunkin’ Donuts, which was founded in 1950, before being acquired by Dunkin’ Donuts’ parent company, Allied-Lyons, in February 1990. The Brand no longer exists in the United States.

Brand solution: Create the perception that Mister Donut is “The Chef Inspired Pastry.” Focus on being the gourmet doughnut that is inspired by chefs and made with fresh ingredients and rich taste, like the Kiwi and other whole ingredients.

Judges Comments: Our judges all liked the marketing of donuts by taste. This was a favorite of judge Jim Gregory, though he did think the kiwi taste might be a bit odd. Judge Ruth Hartman felt, however, that the students missed the central great selling point of reintroducing Mister Donut. Her thought would be to push the fact that Mister Donut had come back to America. Nevertheless, she did think that stressing different flavors was a winning approach for the brand, which she said still held up even after years of disuse.

The runner up was Radio Shack, and the team of Rodrigo Mitma and Josh Finkelstein. Both Pollard and Gregory liked the RadioShack concept, though judge Ruth Hartman felt that RadioShack’s “We’ve Got Answers” was an excellent campaign, and the problems that RadioShack faced were not ones that advertising could fix. Gregory felt he would push the creative team to further develop the concept and position.

A bit about the judges

James R. Gregory, founder and CEO of CoreBrand, a global brand strategy and communications firm based in New York, New York, with offices in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and Los Angeles, California. With 30 years of experience in advertising and branding, Jim is a leading expert on brand management and is credited with developing strategies for measuring the power of brands and their impact on a corporation’s potential financial performance. Most notable of the tools that Jim has developed is the Corporate Branding Index, a quantitative research vehicle that has continuously tracked since 1990 the reputations and financial performances of over 1,200 publicly traded companies in 49 industries. Jim is a brand council member for Bristol-Myers Squibb and is a frequent speaker on the topic of the financial benefits of communications and brand management. Jim has written four books on creating value with brands: Marketing Corporate Image, Leveraging the Corporate Brand, Branding Across Borders, and The Best of Branding. His latest white paper, Driving Brand Equity and Accountability, was sponsored by Barron’s and published by the Association of National Advertisers.

Ruth Hartman is the former president and creative director of The Center for Marketing in Sarasota, which she owned and ran from 1967 to 1984. Hartman was the rare executive woman in the Mad Men era of advertising and worked beginning in 1950 at New York’s Lennen & Newell, where she was a vice president and worked with clients including Colgate Palmolive and Lehn & Fink, the then-maker of Lysol. In 1956 she then moved onto Dancer Fitzgerald Sample, where she worked on accounts like P&G’s White Cloud and Nestle and Carter Products (Arrid Roll On). She also held vice president positions at Kenyon  & Eckhardt and Clairol, where she was director of advertising and publicity from 1964-65. At Cunningham & Walsh, she worked on developing the “Mountain Grown” idea for Folger’s and product plans for Jergens.

The IAM 250 is the result of Intellectual Asset Management’s extensive research process, which included five months of face-to-face and telephone interviews, as well as e-mail exchanges, with several hundreds of international intellectual property professionals. Honorees had to be nominated by at least three people who work in organizations unrelated to their company, as well as whom further research showed to have exceptional skill sets and profound insight into development, creation and management of IP value.

Grounded in creating an enhanced market perception of a brand, G+G’s brand management and licensing process positions companies in the marketplace by considering the best way to grow businesses on an individual basis. These approaches include: category extension and new channels of distribution through brand licensing, sub branding, Intellectual Property sharing and brand asset maximization.

G+G has developed brands and created retail and online projects for Sears, Timberland, Carpet One, Saks Fifth Avenue, Levi’s and Target. G+G was most recently hired by HGTV to develop a brand extension and product licensing platform.

About Intellectual Asset Management magazine

Intellectual Asset Management magazine is a publication that reports on intellectual property as a business asset. The magazine’s primary focus is on looking at how IP can be best managed and exploited in order to increase company profit, drive shareholder value and obtain increased leverage in the capital markets. Its core readership primarily comprises senior executives in IP-owning companies, corporate counsel, private practice lawyers and attorneys, licensing and technology transfer managers, and investors and analysts. IAM magazine is part of the IP Media Group.

Great ads have one thing in common. They sell things. Things like products, services, ideas or lifestyles. If they don’t do this directly, they are memorable enough to influence a consumer at the time he or she makes a purchase.Bad ads are brand poison. If you go public with a half-baked concept, a forgettable headline, or a me-too message, chances are the ad will have the opposite effect you intended. It will drive consumers away. Even worse, it will drive them to the competition.

Below are 10 principles to keep in mind when creating an ad. Read them before, during, and after you have created your ad. Make them your checklist. And remember, every ad represents not just a product or feature or price, but what your brand promises.

1. No one cares about your company. You might be intimately familiar with your product or service. You might even love it. But your audience doesn’t. Your ad has to give them a reason to care. Consumers don’t think in terms of features and benefits. Those are marketing terms. Consumers want something that will make their lives easier or bring them success. How will your product or service do this? More importantly, how will your ad convince them it will?
2. Don’t let fear motivate you. One of the biggest mistakes you can make is to second-guess your audience’s ability to understand. Think of Goodby, Silverstein & Partners’ “Got Milk?” campaign. The entire message is based on the absence of milk. Without picturing milk in a variety of scenarios, the agency created a world without milk. If somewhere along the line, the California Fluid Milk Processor Advisory Board (the client) had rejected the no-milk concept because it didn’t adequately promote the product or make milk “the hero,” the resulting campaign would have been very different. And probably far less memorable.
3. If it works on you, it will work on them. You are a consumer. You read ads and buy things. If your ad doesn’t convince you, chances are it won’t convince your audience.
4. Talk about one thing. Volkswagen once ran an ad whose headline read: “It makes your house look bigger.” The message was simple: VW Beetles are small. The headline didn’t mention the car’s gas mileage, price, or engineering. It didn’t even mention VW. It got people to think small is good.
5. Say it differently. Take the one thing you want to communicate and come up with different ways to say it. In the VW example above, the headline didn’t say “VW Beetles are small.” Think of ways to state an ordinary message in an unusual way so that it gets attention.
6. Let your audience draw their own conclusions. When Steven Spielberg first screened Jaws, the audience laughed at the shark. His solution? Remove the shark. In the end, you see the entire shark in only a few scenes. But the movie is still terrifying. The same principle applies to advertising. Don’t be afraid to let consumers draw their own conclusion about your company or product. The conclusions we make for ourselves are usually the most powerful.
7. Make design and copy work together. The headline and image tell the story. Don’t let the visual design overpower the message. And don’t rely on copy alone to convey the entire idea. A headline should never tell you what is in the picture. And graphic design should never be used merely to fill space.
8. Create an emotion. The worst thing an ad can do is be boring. A series of physiological events occurs when we’re happy, sad, entertained, or angered. Use this to your advantage. Make sure you generate a response in the person looking at your ad. Any response is better than no response.
9. Sell something, don’t just talk. Imagine this: You’re looking for a new car. You have one in mind. You arrive at the dealership, see the perfect car on the lot, and go inside to inquire about it. Instead of answering your questions, the salesperson launches into a history of the car dealership. Do you care? In advertising, always stay focused on what you’re selling and anticipate the consumer’s needs.
10. Make them respond. The best ads demand a response. They make consumers want to act. Always give your audience a reason to act and the means for doing so, whether that’s a phone number, fax number, or web address.

Tom Parrette is Director of Verbal Branding for the Berkeley, California advertising agency Addis Creson.

Addis Creson, 2515 Ninth Street, Berkeley California 94710

This list deliberately does not include human mascots for brands, including Mr. Whipple, the Maytag Man, Burger King and the Marlboro Man. They are human characters; we were looking for mascots.

Our list is below. It’s in a sort of order.

1. Charlie the Tuna. Tuna is better with him on the label. He’s a smart ass but kids love that.
2. Alka Seltzer’s Speedy. Why did Speedy go bye-bye?
3. Ronald McDonald and the Hamburglar. Actually, of the bunch, our fave was the Hamburglar.
4. Count Chocula and Franken Berry. Their ads were cool. Way cool. Go General Mills.
5. Kool Aid Kid. Who didn’t want him to bust through a fence at a boring crap birthday party.
6. Pets.com Sock Puppet. Sometimes, don’t you wish you could just be that smart-assed?
7. Punchy, Hawaiian Punch. Party surfer guy. I want to be that dude. PUNCH!
8. Tony the Tiger. Tony has a simple message. They’re GREEAT! And you are too Tony.
9. Pillsbury Dough Boy. I always wished he would sometime pop out of that tube. Why doesn’t Pillsbury sell one to cook?
10. Elsie the Cow. She might have been made into glue and cheese, but both tasted good to kindergardeners.
11. Buster Brown. Don’t remember the shoes being that interesting in the 1970s, but Buster was sort of interesting.
12. Joe Camel. We wish health Nazis and ambulance chasers hadn’t killed him off.
13. Kool Penguin. Ditto for the Kool Penguin. Kids still want to smoke today even if they don’t have cute penguins smoking menthol cigs.
14. Mr. Clean. He’s getting a workout lately.
15. Quisp kid. That rotor on the beanie is way cool.
16. Tropic-Ana. Pepsico should have never ditched her.
17. Reddy Kilowatt. Our old electric co-op promoted him. I almost wanted to stick a fork into a socket to see if he would come out.
18. Snoopy. Liked the cartoon (who doesn’t), but he’s also interesting as a life insurance salesman. Everyone fears life insurance salesmen, and Snoopy humanizes the genre. We just wish Snoopy would grace the top of the Pan Am building in New York, which is now the Met Life building.
19. Mr. Peanut. He was born in Suffolk, Virginia, and that’s good enough but he is WAY cool
20. Burger Chef’s Jeff. We wish he would come back. We always liked Burger Chef better than the others. Don’t know why.

Mendenhall, speaking Monday, Feb. 23 at the Interactive Advertising Bureau’s Annual Meeting entitled Ecosystem 2.0: Brands Battle Back, said the definition of who is a publisher has even changed as barriers to entry have been quashed. “How would I define a publisher?” said Mendenhall? “Anyone who wants to be one.”

Yikes. What does the competition for traditional publishers look like?

He mentioned specifically the case of one Ashley Qualls, a self-publishing 17-year-old millionaire. Her site whateverlife.com has more uniques than CosmoGirl.com, about 785,000 a month. On her site you can find basic html and css lessons, MySpace skins, all manner of glitter and all of it set to raucous music. I don’t get the whole look and didn’t want to stay on the site long enough to find out, but perhaps that’s the point. Mendenhall also mentioned Nabbr, which enables Gen Y to customize their social network pages. These represent the publishers of today, and Mendenhall says his mission is to build relationships with the many versions of Ashley Qualls.

The U.S. is not the center of this change. Mendenhall said that in Brazil, 57 percent of people update their social network pages and 50 percent have blogs. There are 42 million bloggers in China. “This conversation is just getting started,” Mendenhall said.

To talk to the new digital media, HP is aggressively positioning itself at the creative end of the computer; one of the more interesting places for HP is with MySpace, where the company offers a one-button print function.

H-P also has offerings that could interest some publishers. He cited Maria Bartiromo’s use of MagCloud, a Hewlett-Packard service that allows anyone to make their own magazine. During the recent Davos gathering, the CNBC anchor published her own magazine Davos Diary that was printed before the conference ended.

MagCloud is in beta; it uses Hewlett-Packard’s Indigo presses.

The site is not just for cottage industry new magazines; HP envisions that readers could customize current content. “You can have your own Time and Fortune that is aggregated to you,” says Mendenhall.

Because it is print on demand, there is no waste. For traditional publishers, that could be an advantage as the pre-press process and the distribution model are costly and unpredictable (think Anderson News).

One missed opportunity for traditional legacy publishers is their archives; only the largest publishing companies have tapped into them. Big mistake. “Many publishers tend to discount their library,” said Mendenhall. “There is an opportunity for current publishers to value their library.”

While it won’t replace traditional web printing (MagCloud is 20 cents a page) and won’t solve the mess that magazines are in, we think HP is onto something more interesting than its overpriced print cartridges. We could think of many uses for MagCloud for traditional publishers. They include:

• Automating the selling of reprints.
• Allowing publishers to sell  individual compediums of particular subjects featured in their magazines.
• Lowering the cost of those wretched and low circulation college “literary” magazines produced through university activity fees.
• Collating writer and photographer anthologies.
• Creating short form educational booklets for use in classrooms.
• Selling back issues of magazines that have run out.
• Creating quick indexes to library archives.
• Archiving blogs and web content for easy perusal and perhaps legal reasons.
• Creating one-off test magazines and advertiser promotions.
• Using MagCloud as a simpler approval process for scholarly and custom publishing magazines that need peer review or corporate approval. Those who need to approve journals could simply get the MagCloud version, and scribble on it.

Amusing that Kaine is in the governor’s office now as his father-in-law, Gov. Linwood Holton, helped push the campaign through. Holton is the politician most associated with it, though it came from the Martin & Woltz agency.

The genius of the campaign was that it was racy for its time. Virginia Tourism’s Alisa Bailey says on their Youtube video that the slogan is “often misunderstood” and that it was initially for lovers of different things. That may well be true, but the reason why folks loved it was because it was modern, and not really about history. It hinted at free sex. Nah, it promised it. Yes, it was smart. But mostly, it indicated that if you came to Virginia, you could get some, and Virginia was in the 1960s thought of as being a state where you were least likely to get action.

I think I recall some bosom in the television commercials, but I could be confusing it with that 1970s Sheraton commercial with the hot woman coming out of the water in a tight shot of a tightly fitted wet bathing suit. On this page, one of the first print ads from the Adweek Adfreak blog.

A bit from the official history:

The idea came from a creative team headed by George Woltz of Martin & Woltz Inc., a Richmond-based advertising agency. According to Martin, a $100-a-week copywriter named Robin McLaughlin came up with an advertising concept that read, “Virginia is for history lovers.” For a beach-oriented ad, the headline would have read, “Virginia is for beach lovers,” for a mountains ad, “Virginia is for mountain lovers,” and so on.

Martin thought the approach might be too limiting. Woltz agreed, and the agency dropped the modifier and made it simply “Virginia is for Lovers.” The idea was that whatever people love most in a vacation, whatever they are most passionate about, Virginia was the ideal destination.

Virginia is for Lovers was considered bold and provocative, but it was also just plain smart from a marketing perspective. It planted a seed – a new image of a more exciting Virginia.

In Bailey’s YouTube interview, she mentions that they are really targeting Baby Boomers with the new campaign. Nothing wrong with nostalgia, but we do think that the state might be best to sell the state first to 20 year olds; as we have learned with Facebook, Boomers slavishly follow youth. And we are not ones to want so much sex in everything (and we hate “edgy”), but if you are going to do Virginia is for Lovers as a slogan, it needs to have some breast!

Another thing we don’t understand. We know that you have to bid out your advertising, but we wonder why Dave Martin’s Brandsync and/or his former agency The Martin Agency are not working on the campaign. It would be as if you hired out Mickey Mouse’s 50th anniversary to Warner Brothers.

Most people don’t remember that the state ditched the campaign in the 1980s, and then brought it back. I wish I could recall what the interim slogan was, but Virginia Is For Lovers was totally de-emphasized, only to be brought back with a new version of the song by Robbin Thompson.

Today, the slogan functions much like Maxwell House’s “Good to the Last Drop” where it is a master slogan with a secondary slogan attached to it. The new second slogan is “Live Passionately” and we don’t think of Virginia as a passionate brand; that’s like Venice or Paris.

We wish they would make the original commercials easily available online.

If you want a Virginia is for Lovers T-shirt, please don’t be too disappointed by the horrid looking Virginia is For Lovers licensed merchandise store. It’s an ugly website, wretched and uninteresting. Virginia Tourism did an RFP fairly recently on it, and I was hoping they would do better in licensing the brand. It looks more like an unlicensed site. And we wonder what good it is that the state of Virginia is charging $1 for bumperstickers? The old idea was that they gave them away like crazy, by the thousands, at visitor centers so kids would put them on the back of parents’ cars and do some free advertising. I know Virginia has a $2 billion deficit but they really ought to give them away.

Oh, and please do visit Virginia and their website Virginia.org. We have it on some good authority that you CAN actually get some action there.

As if you won’t be talking about Super Bowl ads enough at work the next day, the magazine Adweek is launching an online Super Bowl micro-site with live chat, so readers can talk to industry experts about stuff like the E-Trade talking baby.

It’s at www.adweek.com/SuperBowl and it also has overall advertising news, videos of the all-time best and worst ad spots and exclusive Nielsen data with Super Bowl ad ratings and game information from 1967—2008.

That’s sort of a saucy way to describe the message-board search engine Twing.com. While Google and the rest search up vast amounts of news, web pages and the like, Twing is all about allowing users to search the Internet’s fragmented online communities, user groups, bulletin boards and message boards.

“People have not been paying attention to this,” says Scott Germaise, Twing’ s director of product management, as he talks about the way that information is spread across user forums. Twing, based in Jersey City, N.J., launched in January 2008, specifically to help its users make sense of this explosion of content.

Message boards are an unglamorous area that has sometimes been forgotten by search engines, yet about 28 percent of Internet users regularly read online forums and participate, more than blogs, according to stats from Forrester’s North American Social Technographics Online Survey, Q2, 2007.

Forums pre-dated web

Bulletin board systems, or BBSs, were popular in the era of 300-baud Hayes modems. They catered to niche communities, and as they moved online (and new ones were created) they became easy and cheap ways for like-minded folk to share information.

Today, certain items from major message boards like the foodie-oriented Chowhound show up in web searches, but mostly, the sort of information that is posted on message boards is really insider, and typically mixed in with repetitive data. This means that it is not the sort of page that is practical to mainstream Google readers. In fact, if some of the pages showed up on searches, they might not make a lot of sense. Twing takes a methodical approach to ferreting it out.

“There is some serious architecture to this,” says Germaise, who says the algorithms are “optimized for understanding consumers who use forums.”

In the old days, when companies wanted to monitor brands, they would hire clipping services. Today, many p.r. agencies and brand managers rely on simple Google news searches. If they do just that, they are missing a second level of information out there in niche online communities. These consumers are useful not just because they buy, but because they influence others.

Twing is not just useful to see if there are mentions of your brand name. Instead, Twing’s Buzz Graphs allow you to save and graph the trends, themes and subjects, and compare them to other brands. On Twing, you can actually plot the usage of a keyword, and then match it against other keywords over a particular period of time.

We tried a few Buzz Graphs:

• At right, Florida (in the green) compared to Las Vegas, over the last year. We are not sure what the search results mean, but looking at the graph helps us begin to ask the right questions if we are thinking about how each is marketed.
• As a test, we compared Hummer and Jeep for the last 3 months. What do we know about the two brands? We know that the Hummer brand (green) has been under consideration of being sold or dropped by General Motors because of its low sales and gas guzzling ways. Jeep (the brown line), however, is in the lead-up to its fall selling season. The graphs match reality perfectly. Hummer is stagnant, and Jeep is getting some mentions.
• We also compared Holiday Inn and Hilton. Hilton (green line) is obviously a more valuable word, though we guess the fame of a certain publicity friendly heiress confuses the search term a bit.

The site does not show whether the mentions are positive or not, and we guess that in these days, except if you are a Wall Street Brokerage, bad press is better than no press. Germaise hopes brand marketers can figure out new ways to use the data. The big question everyone should ask?

“What are the things that are not obvious?” says Germaise.