dear-photograph/

It’s a seeming unique concept, except that the blog Dear Photograph has been featuring this type of unique creativity for some time. Not only does the blog get site traffic of over 10M, it’s been covered by some rather large, mainstream outlets (Hello, ABC News). So, it’s fair to say that Chevy’s advertising agency, Goodby Silverstein & Partners) did not have the same creative epiphany.

The interwebs are getting riled up, similar to how consumers reacted when Urban Outfitters stole a design from an Etsy blogger and with good reason. In that case, Urban was literally profiting from the Etsy blogger, though.

Wait,  you say, advertising (and PR) are in the businesses of ideas?? Ruh-Ro.

Any good marketer is inspired by the world around us, both online and off. But, there is a difference between producing a campaign that is inspired by, for instance, a blog – and a campaign that lifts the blog’s content without any additional thinking/creativity.

Had it been me, I would have contacted the blog owner prior to the campaign – and tried to arrange a partnership.  Given that Dear Photograph has such a huge fanbase – I would have also tried to crowdsource portions of the ad, leading to greater (positive) awareness. People know the ad now – for all the wrong reasons.

Based on Mashable’s story coverage, it appears that Dear Photograph was never contacted about the Chevy campaign before it ran, though its owner is being incredibly gracious afterwards, sharing that he is “flattered” by the imitation.

I’m sure there are legal issues and potential repercussions should Chevy/their agency admit to their creative copying, but to me it’s still the best, most ethical solution.  What are your thoughts?

P.S. Fun Fact – As a blogger, I’ve often had whole articles copied  – once word-for-word by an intern at a major “research” university.

The importance of campaigns with holistic strategies that includes mobile continues to increase – but how can marketers take advantage? Unilever recently hosted a Mobile Shift Summit, where insightful best practices and case studies were discussed.Two rising mobile platforms were shared that offer a range of consumer loyalty and content features. Shopkick asks users to scan their products before purchase and rewards them for their participation. Brands benefit from understanding their consumer better – and the consumer is rewarded for their data. How successful has Shopkick been? Over 1m products have been scanned thus far.

Meanwhile, Z**ve is all about easy content delivery. Consumers can text a SMS message to a star star code – and receive a range of content, including content that normally require QR codes, effectively making all phones “smart.” This could be an especially useful tool for global marketers, reaching consumers in developing markets.

Mobile couponing is also on the rise: Target launched their first in-store mobile coupons earlier this year and expects to reach an incredible 1M subscribers by year’s end.

Interestingly, mobile video has been slow in terms of adoption – likely because of slow mobile connections and spotty service. However, that said, mobile YouTube viewers are only moderately behind PC YouTube – so there’s definitely keen interest.

Amidst all the new platforms and advancements in mobile, a few old constants continue to hold true — particularly the importance of utility, entertaining, and functional content.  Newer tips include: making offline more clickable, creating a content map between platforms, and capitalizing on multi-screen engagement.

How have you been incorporating mobile into your campaigns? Any additional tips to share?

Mom Central’s recent Momnibus survey digs deeper into maternal smartphone usage, particularly, moms’ relationships with apps and how involved their children are in their purchase.

Beyond the 51% who have downloaded 16+ apps, 14% of moms have downloaded 11-15 apps while 19% have downloaded 6-10 apps.  Only 1 in 10 (13%) have downloaded 1-5 apps.

Where do moms find out about apps? Mainly, online. While 22% rely on word of mouth, even more rely on review blogs (33%) and their favorite app stores (29%). This makes landing placements on popular app blogs even more important.

Mom Central also looked into which app categories were downloaded most frequently, finding that social networking (82%), games (80%), and entertainment (78%) were quite popular.  Equally important in addition to app theme was app price – more than half of moms surveyed spend $.99 or less per app.

While the above stats all sound very promising – marketers should keep in mind that their apps need to grab moms soon after download. Whereas nearly 50% report using their favorite app at least once per day – 20% reported deleting apps after only one use.

As smartphone usage continues to increase in the U.S., reaching mom on her mobile will continue to become more important. To read the full Momnibus report, please visit Mom Central.

This time last year, we learned that the average social gamer was a 43-year old woman. Considering that the average traditional gamer is 34 and male, the insight was particularly notable and led the way for marketers looking to engage with women via social games.

Now that we’re firmly entrenched in 2011, a new gaming stat is sure to delight brands looking to skew younger: the average mobile gamer is 28 and female, according to mobile analytics firm Flurry.

Put differently, while mom is busy playing Farmville on Facebook, her niece is maxing out her mobile data plan on Angry Birds.

The younger age for mobile isn’t too surprising, considering that the heaviest mobile users reside in younger demographics. However knowing that female gamers(53%) outnumber men(47%) further supports the growing trend first shared in 2010 – that of women are amongst the fastest growing segments using mobile web.   In 2010, Opera reported a 575 per cent increase in the number of women browsing the internet on their mobiles, compared with a 223 per cent growth measured amongst men.

Flurry’s recent report also showed that the mobile gaming audience is incredibly large – and growing. If the traditional console audience is estimated at 180 million (not too shabby), mobile gaming is estimated at 200 million. To put those numbers into perspective, the average primetime audience is 20 million.

The report also estimated that 250 million unique mobile devices are currently in use, with over 750,000 new devices coming online daily.

Judging from the above, it’s clear that there a significant mobile gamer audience exists and hungry for content. The challenge for brands will be breaking through the already crowded space to reach them.

Depending on your budget, consider whether it’s worth creating an entirely new app (which you will then need to have budget to promote). Alternatively, you could reap the same awareness by integrating your products within an already popular app via an ad buy or mobile promotion.

Only recently, however, have smarter media begun covering what should have been obvious along: social media is just a channel for communication.  It can be an extremely powerful channel – but in these cases, the medium is not the message.

Jon Stewart’s analysis of the “Egypt Twitter Revolution” has been talked about in several circles, as it’s quite adept.  On one of last week’s shows, he said, “If two speeches and a social media site is all we needed to spread democracy then why did we invade Iraq — why didn’t we just, I don’t know, poke them.”

Mocking? Yes.  But, also true.

Of course, in both Tunisia and Egypt, a great many other factors are/were in play, such as economic turmoil and societal unrest for starters. Each provided the necessary spark for riots and protest.  Social media channels just connected users with similar sentiments and helped them organized quickly and directly. The government can own television and radio stations, but no government will ever own all social media channels.

If the internet is on, these channels with present an authentic voice of the people, providing the people are not sharing false messages out of fear of being watched (as the New York Times noted in an article this weekend, K.G.B. agents in Belarus now routinely quote activists’ Facebook posts during investigations).

The Egyptian government, as many are likely aware, choose to flip the switch on the internet and mobile phone networks last week, in hopes it will also shut off the current revolution at the same time. It won’t work, but it will likely create a detour for organizations used to distributing messages via email, SMS, forums, or Twitter etc.

It’s a move that many in the U.S. found shocking, but this type of government mandated control won’t surprise those in the Middle East. Last year, the government in Saudi Arabia temporarily banned Blackberry’s because they wanted supreme control over the content being shared within their borders.  It’s not that different, actually, than governmental demands in Egypt, sans protesting, if you think about it.

But, blacking out the internet won’t destroy content or societal rage at governmental regimes.  It will only stop the flow of information momentarily, forcing modern day protesters to gather in more antiquated ways.

Social media’s power to disseminate information and the power of the information being shared are two very different entities. The sooner the two concepts are separated from one another, the better.