The Five and Dime

George Tenne, a good friend and former co-worker, always has an interesting story to tell. George has been in the advertising business for a long time and shares a story here about his work with Budweiser. George is a recruiter and runs a virtual agency.

I originally saw this article from George in Pam Witzig‘s newsletter, first in a series of articles on a series of “Mad Men” that she is running, articles featuring real life stories from advertising men back when there were only three TV networks to advertise on. (George recruits for Pam’s employment agency.)

August Busch III had just told the agency that we needed to come up with the next major Budweiser ad campaign. The agency was hopping and we even cut back on our three Budweiser lunches.  When you worked on Bud you didn’t have martini lunches. Some of the creatives even came in before 10AM. The word was out, if we didn’t nail it then it would be up for review. And when Mr. Busch said “jump!” …well, you know the saying.

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Today the Federal Trade Commission is adopting revised Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising.

The new guidelines talk about celebrity endorsements, blogging endorsements, use of testimonials in general (including non-celebrities), and sponsored testing.

On the FTC website is a pdf document that you can read about it (81 pages), see the link at the bottom of this article. I’ve pulled out and summarized some components here that I think are of interest to advertisers and ad creators.

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This post is about two things, persistence and persistence.

I got an email from one of our clients which made my day. Let’s call him Steve (because that’s his name.) We had just talked the day before about how he was having a hard time getting to talk to one of his prospects.

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Women Entrepreneur interviewed Cindy and myself for an article on their website. With the only problem in the article is they occasionally misspell the last name (we always tell people to get the “h” out of there), we otherwise thought it was a good article.

Read the article at Women Entrepreneur

This is a commercial we created for the Ad Diner. It uses Motion software, where we can take photos and manipulate them in a 3-D space, and then add video on top of that.

This particular commercial is a “spec” piece, (the jewelry store in the ad is not real.) It can be sold to any business and is designed to be flexible enough to work for anyone from insurance agents to car dealers. If you are thinking of doing holiday advertising, check out the Ad Diner for other holiday spots from their “menu” section. (We also created some fun radio called Santa’s Workshop where the store owner talks to elves.)

Visit the Ad Diner

When I talk to people, I hear all the time about how they don’t watch commercials. Then I ask them which Geico commercial they like best, “the money you could be saving”, the “cavemen”, or the “gecko”? Funny, they know exactly what I am talking about and have an opinion. They can name a lot of different versions of those commercials. How is that possible if they never watch TV?

Brian Banks, the owner of the upscale Lifestyles Furniture store based in Moline, Illinois, has seen a substantial increase in sales even during this down economy. He attributes it to an increase in advertising. His advice to other retailers?

“There’s a party going on, you’ve got to invite the guests.”

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The sun is shining and the birds are singing this morning. The daffodils are poking out of the ground. Soon the grass will be growing, which is why I was working on my lawnmower last night getting it ready. All in all, spring is here.

Nature doesn’t know we are in a recession.

It just keeps doing what it always does. No matter how much we worry about money, the news, and everything else in the world, nature just keeps coming back.

Now I’m not saying we shouldn’t address money concerns, the news, and everything else. (Especially how we treat mother earth, we can’t expect nature to keep coming back if we abuse it.) What I am saying is that all the worry about money is man made.

Yes, recession is a man-made invention.

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What is the Ad Diner? It is a new way for small businesses to acquire creative advertising, including TV, radio, print, direct mail, billboards.

The business goes to the site, picks their industry category, reviews the ads on the site, and if they like an ad or campaign, they make the purchase. The Ad Diner will then take their logo and their information and customize the ads to work in their market.

The idea is simple: an ad that works in Peoria would probably work just as well for a similar business in Jacksonville, or Chattanooga, or San Jose. The ads are sold to non-competing businesses in different markets, and licensed for one year.

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Direct Mail Piece for Charter Business

We believe in testimonials. (If you download our brochure from our website, you can see we have incorporated some testimonials from some important people.) Recently, we’ve been using testimonials for a couple of our clients.

The first is Charter Business, this direct mail program incorporates real Charter Business customers telling how they’ve saved money using Charter’s bundled packages and how they appreciate the quality of the service. We recently learned from our contact at Charter that the first direct mail piece we did for them received their best response of any direct mail they’ve done since he’s been on board.

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Want a good way to check traffic counts on your website? Check out Google Analytics, a free service from Google. Look it up under the business section of the Google website.

By putting a few lines of code on your website, you can call up web statistics about your site at any time. It will break down traffic patterns, where people are coming from, and general numbers of people visiting. Not bad for free. (If you need help setting it up, give us a call.)