Well that’s Adomatica, a staple in the Austin (and national ad scene). He’s never ripped us before, but I felt obliged to stand up for our fellow ad men and women and give him a bit of the business.

Or he’s a good friend and super-smart online marketer who writes a snarky and helpful blog in his spare time. Grab the Adomatica RSS feed, it’s worth your attention. Unlike the GSD&M / McGarrah Jesse Austin Addy Awards.

Special image thanks to The Foto Booth – a great group to hire for your events.

“Wait, this slider isn’t working. I’m grabbing the art off the page. WTH?”

It would have been the bee’s knees to manipulate that sliding chart on the homepage, after all I was just there to get into our checking account. This was a nice distraction.

Except, I don’t want to click through, especially after you made me grab a slider that wasn’t. And I feel well within our right to think that, after all your button is all the way right and here in the English speaking world we always start in the upper left. Maybe I’m just dumb.

Next time I’ll click through.

Maybe.

If you live in the live music capital of the world, you may have seen these OOH and Banner ads:

A couple people we polled wondered if the Dallas Stars were moving to the ATX – keeping the same name as the NHL team will lead to that confusion. But this is an all new AHL team – the “farm” system for the big boys.

We immediately wondered about the campaign – who are they trying to attract – the rock concert crowd?  They do mix with true hockey fans – after all, we’re fans of both.

But would it be better to appeal to the people who love hockey, first? Generate a buzz with die hard fans of the sport by showing players scoring or blocking shots? Or even have the stick blade point in the same direction for the ads? (hockey fans/players notice these things)

Either way, glad The Texas Stars are coming to town. We might have to get some corporate seats (and maybe even make an appeal to the marketing director).

Joe: “Kurt, check this out, someone dropped a wallet.”

Kurt: “No way, is there an ID?”

Sure enough, there was an ID. And money. And a gift card. Not to mention a dry cleaning receipt, a business card and a map. All of which pointed straight to Burger King.

See the wallet was a guerilla tactic for the new Reverse Pickpocket Campaign. We actually found The King’s wallet.

We laughed and looked for a camera (like the Whopper Freakout campaign), then tucked the wallet in our pockets to show the clients. It was a very apropos find.

Kudos to you, Crispin Porter + Bogusky for turning the dial a little farther. And if you were one of the 5,000 wallet-finders in Chicago, be happy that you got to be part of a great experiment. Spend that cash and gift cards, so more marketers will take advantage of alternative media.

Some iPhone images:

One of our favorite partners frowarded this video to our attention. It was created by Geert Desager, a Marketing Manager with Microsoft.

All too often we only know our consumers as statistics on a spreadsheet. When, in fact, the new idealism found in pace-setting companies is all about communication.

When you think about advertising and direct marketing and even website building, every facet of your company could provoke comments and communication from your consumers. Choose to listen and adjust, and you set the pace.

Public perception might not matter to a super established brand like IBM – wait, no, they really want people to like their products and services too.

Mid-sized companies, they need it.
Same with the SMBs.

So how can you improve perception? How can you show yourself as a company that cares, a business that has a human side that makes prospects and competitors say out loud “you know what, I really like them.”

Try social media.

It can be tricky – there are a lot of rules to it. Your presence has to be fun and upfront, caring, compassionate and you’ll need to contribute to your community. Your product or service must be up-to-par and able to withstand criticism (sounds like a general rule to me).

But the end results far outweigh the budget – social media is cheap and should be apart of your marketing plan. Especially if you’d like to find brand advocates who tell their friends why they enjoy what you bring to the table.

It’s almost like FREE advertising.

Here are some additional tips:

• Track your campaigns. All major blogging software can provide results on FREE Google Analytics pages. Plus sites like LinkedIN, Facebook, YouTube and Twitter also have tracking or search available. You can even create links that people can share with others, and you can track the usage.

• Let people comment and talk about you. Think about cultivating, not controlling. Encourage discussions on this two-way street.

• Watch the goodwill spread. It will take some time – you won’t see immediate gains. But like any part of a campaign, it needs to blossom to help build your name and your brand.

Here’s one example using something we love, the bicycle. The companies involved are MASH, an innovative cycling products company, and Mellow Johnny’s, a bike shop in Austin owned by Lance Armstrong.

Yeah, that Lance.

We’re not sure who started this conversation, but somehow these two places got together and before you know it Lance is riding a fixed-geared bike all over the city of Austin with guys from MASH. The only real sign about the shop is his hat, but it’s in there.

And once the video was up, it spread like gangbusters. Blogs. Forums. Twitter. 25,000 people saw it on YouTube. Eventually people all ended up at MASH and probably said, “what is this company?”

Now they know. And they think it’s once cool place, that’s for sure. Who knows, they probably even bought an innovative new product or signed up for email alerts.

While attempting to park in a garage sixth street, we couldn’t help but talk about poor signage design. Probably because the Stalelife-mobile (hybrid, naturally) was all over the place.

“Why must we search for tiny signs that don’t appear until the last minute?”
“Why are they all the same color?”

Seems like the folks running Eureka Tower in Melbourne, Australia thought the same thing, because they hired actual artists to create their signage. True, trained professionals who put together the most incredible design of parking garage signage known to man. They look distorted now, but when driving and approaching them they are completely legible. The design even won an award, and I like to think that’s because the design is founded in smart.

Can you think of other places that could benefit from smart environmental design? The Chicago “EL” system is one…

A custom wine cellar startup recently jumped on with Stalelife, so we’re having fun with marketing messaging and logo creation. Part of their business model includes filling your cellar with product from the vine – there’s plenty of angles for success.

This weekend I caught a post by Hugh MacLeod. He’s a Marketing Strategist and Web 2.0 evangelist who doubled sales (in less than twelve months) for a South African Winery called Stormhoek. We first met him at SXSW this year.

Hugh’s post is relevant to us, given the wine industry angle. But his message is really for everyone:

What’s true in life is also true in marketing: If you want to be boring, talk about yourself. If you want to be interesting, talk about other people.

Re-affirmation of our core beliefs (albeit indirect) never gets old. Take the “we” out of your marketing, and use the “you”.

If you stand out from the competition with the only true item that matters – complete customer satisfaction – yours will come at the end. And if you toe the line on that belief, you’ll get yours time and again for many years to come.

© Hugh Macleod | GapingVoid.com

Twitter’s saturation isn’t huge compared to other social media, like Facebook and Myspace, but it’s not the same format, either.

It’s a microblogging platform where people share their notes, news, reviews… anything they want – even contests. We know people who’ve found new business by following the right feeds on Twitter. You can even use Twitter to find a job.

Anyone can Tweet (the name for an entry on Twitter), but it turns out that most people using it skew to a younger audience – 18 to 34.

You’re held to 140 characters per Tweet, making haiku-type messages a necessity. So every entry becomes an exercise in terse copywriting.

As a CD I often worked with my writers to “shore up” their copy to make one point instead of several, or to fit into space. The same holds true with Twitter – I often find myself thinking like a copywriter again:

What should I write about this conference I’m at?
How do I make it interesting and worthwhile?
Or should it just be fun
Do people really want to know what I’m eating? Maybe if I include the recipe.

It can be tougher than it sounds, just like writing a banner ad. It’s simple, short and requires a skill that most writers still need to develop.

One book we reference often in the Stalelife office is Strunk & White’s Elements of Style. In it, William Strunk tells us:

“Make every word tell,”
and
“Omit needless words!”

It’s harder than you think. In fact, just keeping your marketing copy in the present tense is tough (but that’s an entry for another date).

One day this week I wrote a Tweet:

But afterwards I couldn’t help believe that it could be more fun, shorter and use a better tense, like:

Dear Joe, Call Mike T. Love, Twitter

Still, a good portion of people who use Twitter are still trying to figure it out. It’s like Open Source Code – anyone and everyone can contribute and use it how they want. It’s almost like everyday life.

And if you’re a writer by trade, Twitter should be part of yours.

The Stalelife Twitter feed is Stalelife.
Joe can be found as joeyTWOwheels.
Kurt is KurtyP.

Like this one that came to Stalelife Austin:

It’s a news clipping in an OE with a Post-it note – not exactly new tactics.

Combined, however, is a different story. Especially when you add no sign of a return address, a unique handwriting font, a full-priced stamp and no printed barcode – suddenly this resembles the articles that Aunt Suzie mails.

We passed this one around, trying to figure out who sent it. “Who calls me Joseph? And lives in Santa Clara? What is this all about?”

In all, we held onto the package for a good three or four minutes – beating the pants off the known DM readership of two seconds.

Right out of the gate, a win. Sure the match mailing will cost a little more, but something tells us that the cost is recovered in new accounts for Grande.

Think fresh while looking through your samples – there’s a new idea in there somewhere.

Speaking of ideas generators, our friend Robert at Adomatica recently received the same mail and blogged about it, too. Great minds… His blog is a good source for industry news and quips.

But you always wondered “what can we do with all this?”

Enter 2008, and Social Media and Networking is rounding the second base. An ideal time for the Sociologists to come to the forefront and practice their skills.

This speech / blog post (by author Clay Shirky) got us thinking about the social interwebs, and how we all relate to one another.

In particular, the key takeaway has us thinking about the next big thing. The possibilities seem endless, and Clay’s speech sort of helps to feed that fire:

“We’re going to look at every place that a reader or a listener or a viewer or a user has been locked out, has been served up passive or a fixed or a canned experience, and ask ourselves, “If we carve out a little bit of the cognitive surplus and deploy it here, could we make a good thing happen?”

The speech is a great read, so much so that we’ve ordered Clay’s book and are passing it around the Stalelife offices. Maybe we should compare it to our old “Soc” texts?

Regardless, this one thing is certain, the sociological aspect of how we interact with each other (and our favorite brands) is all based our prior teachings and beliefs. And it’s up to us to mold it for the future.

It’s no real mystery – broadband is in 86% of the homes in the US. Nobody has to wait for video or flash to load, it just happens. And as a result, online advertising is up 27%.

According to the International Data Corporation (IDC), Internet ad spending totaled $7.3 billion for the fourth-quarter of 2007 – up 28% from the same period in 2006. For all of 2007, $25.5 billion was spent.

We’re all for a nice integrated approach – know your audience and spend your budget wisely. But the online numbers don’t lie, and they are definitely something to keep in mind come planning time.

1.) Social Bookmarking – Users save links to web pages that they want to remember and/or share. To get your site into the pool, add simple 3rd party widgets to your site like Add This. It’s FREE and you get analytics so you can learn more about your users.

2.) Blogs – You’re reading ours. A blog is an extension on your main site – a place for relevant and timely content, events, video and images. People subscribe to your “feed” because they like what you have to say. Again, it’s FREE and doesn’t require much technology knowledge to update.

3.) Twitter.com – A micro-blogging service that allows users to send “updates” (or “tweets” – simple 140-character entries) to the people who subscribe to their feed. If you have valuable daily information you could extend your reach with people who find value in your information.

4.) Facebook, MySpace and Bebo – Most social networks have built-in calendars for you to post events, bulletin boards, blogs, photo and video sharing and comment sections for people to share their love for you. But don’t think your page will run itself. You’ll need to share the love and give thanks.

5.) Email newsletter lists – It’s not new, but the systems are now more accessible. Services like Constant Contact, Campaign Monitor and Emma offer an easy-to-use interface for entry fields, database controls, message composition and data transfer to Excel.

Traditional advertising still has value. But the most successful companies are the ones that integrate social media into their marketing strategies.

For more information on how these services (and others) can improve your site, drop us a line. We love talking strategy.

That wasn’t the tagline, but that was the sentiment at Stalelife when we became Internet famous on Adomatica. The blog covers the advertising market with a focus on Austin, home to our south office.

You’re daily distraction from client satisfaction is Robert’s chosen winner for April’s tag.

Let it be known, however, that we don’t Live the High Life all the time.
We just really enjoy alliteration.

The Sweetspot >> What I learned at SXSW iF (Part 2)…
from Kurt Pennypacker on Vimeo.

The creator was a conscientious objector from WW2, a designer by the name of Gerald Holtom. His logo has been replicated millions of times, and it’s use even reached commercial proportions. As a true symbol of freedom, he never registered it as a trademark, so it could remain free for all.

We design logos all the time. Most inspiration comes the actual company or service that we’re depicting through the logo. But true passion from personal experiences is the key, and if you want something to stand the test of time, you have to believe in it.

Peace.

Look for a couple handsome fellas with a video camera in one hand and a beverage in the other.

On a serious note, we plan to interview our favorite session leaders and some industry insiders. When we see something we think will interest you, our clients and readers, we’ll be posting it.

More to come – the Fest starts Saturday.

Here at Stalelife, we prefer to keep it real. We acknowledge the buzzwords and define them with simple strategy.

But nobody beats the job that Nokia did to explain Web 2.0. Click away, you’ll be happy you did.

It may seem like fun and games but we’ll be attending seminars, panel discussions and meeting with the brightest minds online. This year, we will be binging you daily posts from the festival and video interviews with speakers and attendees to share with you the latest findings and trends of the online world.

For this special Friday Factoid post, we’d like so show you a little tidbit that we found in this months issue of Fast Company about the SXSW festival through the years.

If you or someone you know will be attending the festival, we’d love to meet up. Please drop us a line so that we can set a date and time.