Jeremy's Spotlight

When Vitamin Water first hit the shelves the buz was everywhere. People were talking everywhere about this new flavoured water that 50 Cent endorsed. It has been a very successful product reaching markets globally.

Interesting enough, during the time when 50 was hitting it big with G-Unit, he was offered an endorsement deal from the original owners, Glacéau. He accepted the deal and obtained 10% of the companies shares. In the process the distribution of the “Formula 50” flavour was established. Then in 2007 when Coca-Cola decided to buy out the company, Curtis Jackson (aka 50 Cent) supposedly made over 100 million dollars through his endorsement deal. Sick deal, eh!

Unfortunately, now that Coca-Cola owns the “healthy beverage” it has had to deal with the undesirable attention for its claimed “mis-promotion.”  The initial hype about the delicious drink has recently been overshadowed by lawsuits on its misrepresentation on how healthy it really is. Vitamin water does have both water and vitamins as it’s title and brand name might suggest. However, there is more to it than that.

When you take a closer look at the ingredients the sugar levels are higher than would be expected, a whopping 33 grams. I wont get into the nitty-gritty aspects of the lawsuit, but feel free to check out more on it here at http://cspinet.org/new/201007231.html.

So be sure to promote your brand and product without deceiving your consumers, and get some lawyers to check it out too!

If you are interested in learning more about Vitamin Water’s Marketing strategies, you should check out Andrea’s blog. She discusses Vitamin Water’s strategic advertising through its packaging. Mentioning how on each bottle there is a paragraph with a description of what that exact drink is doing for you. But not only does it describe it, it breaks it down in a relaxed colloquial language that is appealing to the youth and young adult segments.

Path is one of the new up and coming apps for the iPhone (and soon to be available for all phones). The idea behind Path is that everyone today carries their phone with them everywhere they go, and take pictures and videos along their journey’s.

Here is an explanation taken from Path’s website:

So, what is Path?

Path is the personal network.  A place to be yourself and share life with close friends and family. The personal network doesn’t replace your existing social networks – it augments them.

Path allows you to capture your life’s most personal moments and share them with the 50 close friends and family in your life who matter most.

Because your personal network is limited to your 50 closest friends and family, you can always trust that you can post any moment, no matter how personal. Path is a place where you can be yourself.

Capturing

Capturing a moment on Path is simple and contextual. Simply take a photo with your camera on iPhone and add context around that moment in the form of tags for people, places and things.  These tags provide 3 types of context which we think help capture a moment.

Think of it as a place for the memories along your path through life.

Sharing

On Path, you always control who you are sharing your personal moments with. We know that if you are sharing with a single person you do not trust, you will not feel comfortable sharing. So we’ve build the personal network model to keep you in control, always.

We chose 50 based on the research of Oxford Professor of Evolutionary Psychology Robin Dunbar, who has long suggested that 150 is the maximum number of social relationships that the human brain can sustain at any given time.  Dunbar’s research also shows that personal relationships tend to expand in factors of roughly 3. So while we may have 5 people whom we consider to be our closest friends, and 20 whom we maintain regular contact with, 50 is roughly the outer boundary of our personal networks. These are the people we trust, whom we are building trust with, and whom we consider to be the most important and valued people in our lives.

We’ll help you find those close friends on Path, and we’ll help you share with those who aren’t yet on Path.

No following, no friending…just sharing with the people who matter most.

Seeing

Because Path is a personal network, we will always seek to build features which increase meaning and understanding between close friends.

To this tune, we’ve built an innovative new feedback feature we call “See”.

For each moment that you capture and add to your Path, you will see which of your friends have seen the moment in real-time. The idea is that understanding enables trust and storytelling amongst close friends and family.

We hope you feel like more of your close friends are seeing life through your eyes than ever before.

Exploring

Because of the amount of context included in each moment on Path, we want to help you explore and understand both your memories and those of your close friends’ in unique and interesting ways. We have started by helping you see moments on a map of the world.  Expect more neat visualizations in the future from us.

How do you start your Path?

Path is available from the App Store on iPhone or in the App Store here.

If you do not have an iPhone, but want to register your username and check out Path on the web, sign up here.

According to consumer reviews, Path has the potential to be top seller on iTunes. But unfortunately it just isn’t there right now. Many reviews complained about how they can not use camera roll pictures, which means that they can not use old pictures and videos they have taken. The other complaints are that consumers can not comment on pictures other than the caption and that the original resolution of the images can’t be restored.

How long will it take before Path makes a new version that meets all the customer needs? How long will it remain a test product only available to iPhone users?

It is crazy how making home videos can make you so famous!

Lately there has been a lot of hype revolving around a young freshman down in the Suburbs of Chicago; his name, Keenan Cahill. His name has been everywhere, especially with in the last week when he released his latest YouTube sensation “Down on Me” with 50 Cent.

Keenan has been known for his YouTube lip-syncing videos of top 40 songs over the past few months. His talent has been seen by all. Not too long ago Keenan started to get recognized by the press all over when Katy Perry gave a shout out to his performance of “teenage dream”.

His name is now every where and everyone is watching. Perez Hilton even blogged about him!  He has a steady fan base following his twitter page. I’m sure his facebook is being creeped by millions each day as well.

Countless news articles and blogs are talking about this famous 15 year old on the daily. Just type his name into Google or any search engine.

Here is part of an interview from AOL.News that was recorded:

What’s the best thing about the Internet?
You can do anything on the Internet. Even for a young singer or actor, you can get so much exposure from it.

What’s the worst thing about the Internet?
Probably the negative comments you get if you post videos. Just people who think you’re really bad. They don’t need to see your videos, but they leave mean comments anyways.

Other than check your e-mail, what’s the first thing you do on the Internet each day?
I check my YouTube and my Facebook page.

If you could take a road trip with any three people, living or dead, who would you take, where would you go, and what car would you drive?
I would take a Mustang because that’s the car I really want. I would probably take Michael Jackson because he’s like the most inspiring person for music; I’d probably take John Lennon from the Beatles because he’s one of my favorite old musicians; I’d also take Katy Perry because she has put my name out there and made it famous. And I’d drive to LA because it’s where I really want to live and start being in TV shows and movies.

If you had to enter a competitive eating contest, what would you want the food to be?
White Castle cheeseburgers.

How do you draw the line on who gets to be your “friend” on Facebook, and who gets ignored?
I let all my fans be my friend. But if they’re people that are just haters, if they leave mean comments, then I’ll just delete them.

What would I be surprised to find on your iPod?
That I only have like one Justin Bieber song.

Here are some of his videos too! Including his newest duet with 50 Cent:

Keenan was even so fortunate to get to do a live performace for a morning news station:

I can’t wait to see what Mr. Cahill has in store for us next, and what his bright future brings him.

Have you heard of Common Craft?

It’s pretty neat, they explain a how things work through hand crafted videos. The four main topics the discuss are: green, money, society, and technology.

What Common Craft does, is takes everyday things and break them down into “plain English.” They make everything fun and interesting to watch because of the cool art they use.

check it out!

Common Craft only produces serious informational videos

Common Craft is a company based out of Seattle, Washington. Their goal is to create a series of light-hearted videos using cut-outs to communicate an explanation of a topic “in Plain English.” As they are still a young company, they are focusing on a sales orientation approach. They are looking to establish their consumer base rather than maximize profit.

Check out their website to find out more.

http://www.commoncraft.com/

Ps… I found this from “Starting with Wiki” in the UBC Blog System

Did you happen to catch a glimpse of the Toyota Logo on the rally car? It was put in there pretty slyly, no more than a second or two of air time. However because it is the Intro for the show, it gets played every episode for that season. That particular scene of the intro was kept on for more than just the first season too.

Who do you think paid for that to be in there? Toyota or Chuck?

Write a comment and let me Know what you think.

In browsing through a few of my classmates blogs I came across some posts on beer advertisements. In Josh’s Marketing Blog he comments on a Guinness advertisement about sharing with a friend or two.

As Josh points out, this commercial is “INAPPROPRIOT to say the least.” He then comes to realize how this commercial is effective through analyzing the Four Ps of the Marketing Mix.

With some research i found some more beer commercials that were interesting from a marketing standpoint.

My personal favourite beer commercial isn’t one where women are portrayed as sex symbols and profanity isn’t used as an excuse to by beer. The beer commercial that appeals to me the most has to be:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5aQkrV3ppAw

Every Time I watch this commercial I get a chill run up and down my spine. There is something that just gets to me, even if I just hear the background music I feel proud to be Canadian. Not knowing exactly what it is that appeals to other than the awesomeness of Canada, I decided to look at the segmentation strategies used.

This ad uses mass marketing using a undifferentiated segmentation strategy within the Canadian market. This ad shows how Molson Canadian is gives everyone an scene of national pride and by drinking their beer you will supporting Canadian farmers and taste what Canada is all about.

It is Geographically segmenting Canada and dwelling on the self-concept that many Canadians are proud to be from Canada. Diving into the lifestyle of Canadian adults, exploring our country and living in “our backyard”.

Molson does an outstanding job segmenting to their consumers and communicating to them that their product is strictly Canadian.

Today, everyone has a presence online. Almost everyone has a facebook account, the numbers of Twitter followers are rapidly increasing and Blogs are popping up everywhere it seems. People know their presence is there, but does anyone know what kind of information they are releasing to the world about themselves?

Every time someone adds to a blog, tweets about their day, or posts something on their facebook wall they are building their online ‘mine’ of information. This mine is then there for anyone who wishes to enter.

A neat thing to conduct on your own would be to figure out what your ‘mine’ has to say about you.  In Mim’s Bits blog about technology, he blogged about how to conduct your own research on your image. He also provides the tool on how to make a word cloud with the new information you find out.

Check it out:

How To Use Twitter For Personal Data Mining

Here is a quick sample of what you can do with the information you unearth:

At the beginning of September I was confronted by a pop-up window on my desktop asking me to download the newest version of iTunes. As an avid iTunes user I just jumped through all the hoops without hesitation to get the latest version, not thinking that much would really change.

But by the time the whole process was over and I had restarted my computer I quickly noticed that my iTunes logo was no longer there. It had disappeared. It was then that I realized that my iTunes icon had not vanished from my desktop; rather it had morphed into some new Mickey Mouse cartoon logo. Despite the huge change in looks, I honestly didn’t think much about it at the time. Once I made the correlation of music note to iTunes, I just went on with my day.

Looking back on it now, this was a colossal and very bold move on iTunes part. The act of changing a globally know symbol is quite a risk to take. Looking into the redesign of the logo, I unearthed the reason behind the change. As the technological advances of society are quickly moving forward, Apple felt compelled to update their music stores image. The old iTunes image used a picture of a CD in the background. But as CDs slowly losing their relevance, it was time for a change.

Every UBC student walking around campus has seen the bright coloured T-shirts with the huge writing that reads “UBC Ski & Board Club”. They are everywhere!

The UBC Ski & Board Club have made themselves known across campus with their bright and colourful advertising campaign. If not for their neon shirts, the club would not be as large and successful as it is today. Their T-shirts have almost created an epidemic… or maybe that’s just in my mind. After seeing these awesome colourful shirts all last year I made it my mission to get my hands on one this year. I couldn’t pass up the opportunity, so I joined the club and paid the extra $15 for the T-Shirt (which I didn’t know was an extra cost beforehand).

Club perks aside, the UBC Ski & Board Club has done an outstanding job in targeting to the student population with social trends at their focus of the T-shirt campaign.

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