Stephen wrote an extremely interesting blog post about the ethics of marketing file-sharing websites here – in particular, the recent launch of Kim Dotcom’s new venture, the Mega cloud-based file-sharing website.

For the most part, I do agree with Stephen. However, this marketing campaign doesn’t seem so much like a marketing campaign for Mega than a public exoneration campaign for Kim Dotcom. I would wager that most of the new sign-ups for this service were previous heavy users of MegaUpload, Dotcom’s former domain, or tech-savvy users who were already aware of the situation and sympathetic to Dotcom’s situation. I would like to see an analysis of Mega’s growth and where it is coming from – what percentage of these users had accounts with MegaUpload? How many of them are heavily involved in the file-sharing community?

Granted, the first time most people heard of Kim Dotcom was because of his arrest in association with MegaUpload, as he was the website’s founder and figurehead. However, this campaign seems like a big ‘you can’t touch this’ to the authorities who arrested him – the focus isn’t on the product here, it’s on the person. I don’t think the owners of these websites did very much marketing of them before Dotcom’s arrest, and I don’t think they’re doing very much of it now – this seems like a relatively isolated ‘incident’, if you will.

Internet piracy isn’t going to go away any time soon – it’s here to stay. I see the parallels between the current file-sharing situation and Kim Dotcom’s situation, but as to the ethics of it? The reason that people don’t see very many ads for file-sharing is the same reason as not seeing very many ads for marijuana – it’s illegal, plain and simple. I don’t know if that’s more of a legal or ethical issue, but I would hesitate to call this a marketing campaign for Mega. To me, it’s a publicity stunt in Kim Dotcom’s favour, and really not much more than that.

Sorry, I couldn’t help myself.

I think the most useful thing that I got out of all these assignments was really just applying the concepts that we learned in class. Having to combine our knowledge with actual industry practice and then critically analyzing the result is an important skill to have both for academics and real life. I really appreciated having the opportunity to do the analysis and then get constructive feedback on our work as well.

Doing these assignments also gave me an in-depth look into the world of marketing. As consumers, you only really ever see the end result of all of the work that a marketing department does, and sometimes that’s part of the magic of it all. It was eye-opening to see how much work goes into a marketing campaign, and that was just for the relatively simple analysis we did for Lululemon. It’s easy to look in from the outside and point fingers and say ‘this was a success’ or ‘this was a failure’, but to actually construct a campaign from start to finish and not conclusively knowing whether or not it will be successful sounds like a scary, scary thing. I have major respect for marketers.

If I’ve learned anything from all of these team assignments that I’ve had so far at Sauder, it’s that your teammates can make or break your project. Fortunately, I had a really great, supportive, and hardworking group of teammates to work with, which is probably why I had such a good experience for these assignments. I learned a lot!

To celebrate Oreo’s 100th anniversary, Kraft-Nabisco kicked off the Daily Twist – a one-hundred day campaign that aimed to provide a new piece of culturally-relevant social content every day, in real time.

From TV ads,

http://youtu.be/6kMWLYYcAYw

To Twitter content,

To Pinterest, Facebook, Tumblr, and their own dedicated Daily Twist site, there was no social media stone left unturned. There was even a piece in the The New York Times about the Daily Twist’s finale, where they took consumer submissions for ad ideas and produced the ads for an actual competition.

It garnered tons of accolades, and for good reason. Oreo saw a “280 percent increase in Facebook shares and 510 percent increase in re-tweets on Twitter”, with at least 10,000 likes per post on Facebook and over 80,000 followers on Twitter. And you can’t put a price on breathing cultural relevancy and new life into an old brand.

Personally, I loved it. There’s just something so fantastic about the Daily Twist – not only is the content refreshing and funny, but it’s so relatable and accessible. The Daily Twist covered everything from Gay Pride to Gangnam Style and the Superbowl Blackout. And, besides, who doesn’t love Oreos? This is a great example of social media done right. Not only was Oreo connecting to its target base through all kinds of media, they were listening, connecting, and incorporating peoples’ thoughts and ideas into the campaign. Now, Oreo isn’t just the chocolate cookie you ate as a kid – it’s the cool, hip cookie of a new generation.

If someone asks you, ‘Why is print media dying?’, you would probably get an answer like ‘people don’t read newspapers or magazines anymore.’ That may be true, but this blog post from Kit Garrett points to an entirely different reason. According to Kit, print media companies make it ridiculously difficult to place ads into newspapers and the like. It’s not going to be declining readership that will be the death of print media, it’ll be the slow-moving companies that will speed their own demise.

I find this extremely interesting, because you don’t hear of companies inserting more and more middlemen – it’s usually the opposite.

So, why keep using print media when nobody reads newspapers anymore and it’s such a huge hassle to set up?

Creative Swiffer advertising in a free Metro newspaper.

I use transit every day, to commute to school, work, and play. Whenever I see a free newspaper box, I usually take a copy and thumb through it while waiting for the bus. I find that I pay a lot more attention to what’s on a newspaper page than, say, a Facebook page – there’s a lot of advertising packed into these two different types of pages, but what’s the difference?

Would you actually click through to any of these links?

For some reason, a company running a print campaign in a national magazine gains much more legitimacy in my eyes than a company running an online campaign. I am inherently distrustful of online ads, because it often feels like I’m being bombarded left and right with ads by extremely sketchy-looking companies. Advertising in print carries much more weight to it – do you remember any one of the thousands of online ads you’ve seen today?  For that reason, I don’t think print is going to go away any time soon.

What is ‘authentic marketing’? Is it engaging consumers through social media? Is it giving people an unadulterated behind-the-scenes-look at your products a la McDonalds?

Authentic is arguably the biggest trend in marketing today. Companies are trying to be more ‘real’ in their advertising, more ‘true’ to their image, and more ‘transparent’ in their dealings to their consumers.

For me, it all boils down to the entire purpose of marketing. The thing is, marketing isn’t ‘real’. The purpose of marketing is to showcase your brand in the best light so consumers see value in your product or service and are willing to pay the price for it. Maybe it’s just me, but I find it harder to believe a brand once they use the word ‘authentic’. It just makes me think they’re working harder to put the blinders on.

The gist I get from reading this article is that brand executives are pushing their marketing in a more casual, less corporate direction than before. This means being more active on social media, and more in-tune with what their customers want. To me, this is the entire purpose of marketing: know what your consumers want, and fine-tune your message so that it fits that image. ‘Authenticity’ just seems like another gimmick to me.

Reddit is a social media aggregator website that has exploded in popularity in recent years. It provides an easily accessible platform for users to post content that is upvoted or downvoted for ‘karma’ based on other users’ interest in the content. The more karma a post gets, the higher it appears on the front page of its subreddit, and the more attention it gets.

This user-generated content stream, as well as the increased attention Reddit has been receiving from major news outlets, has become extremely attractive to company marketers. It garners the brand a lot of goodwill, encourages existing consumers to increase their brand loyalty, and it’s an easy way to get your brand out without spending millions of dollars in advertising to do it.

As a regular Redditor myself, I don’t put much thought into my browsing. If I think it’s funny, it gets a chuckle and an upvote. If I find it interesting, I’ll click on the link. It’s not rocket science. There are a lot of things I don’t enjoy about Reddit, but in terms of fast, painless entertainment on the Internet it can’t be beat.

I’ve noticed that there are a lot of companies that seem to be universally approved of, like Costco and Taco Bell. I have a hard time believing that all of this goodwill is manufactured by these companies, but I don’t doubt that some of it has been planted on the site for marketing purposes. Is it ethical? Most people, like myself, don’t have their usual smokescreens up when browsing Reddit because we believe that it’s all been user-generated. It’s easier to get us to internalize brand messages than, say, through television or print ads. I can see why it’s so attractive, but it puts a bad taste in my mouth.

Illamasqua is a UK-based makeup brand that markets itself as an edgy and ‘theatrical’ alternative to classic makeup brands like Chanel and Dior.

It recently released an ad as part of its campaign in Australia, which depicted a model in whiteface and blackface captioned with the phrase ‘Not Dreaming of a White Christmas’.

This ad immediately generated backlash from users on Illamasqua’s Facebook page, who criticized the picture for its use of blackface, which was racist theatrical makeup used to negatively stereotype black people in minstrel shows.

Illamasqua released a statement apologizing for the ad, and added that they are committed to respecting people of all colours and continue to use different ethnicities of models in their advertising.

This statement raises a few questions. If Illamasqua was committed to using different ethnicities of models in its advertising, why not hire a black model and a white model? What is the point of using blackface? And, if it exists, where do you draw the line between ‘edgy’ and ‘offensive’?

Marketing has always been a field where innovation and new ideas are key for survival. Perhaps Illamasqua’s marketing department was trying to toe the line and push its campaign in a new direction by releasing this ad.

However, by framing the issue as one of artistic expression and not racism, Illamasqua is doing a disservice to its brand and society by essentially suggesting that because they didn’t mean for it to be offensive, the ad was not offensive. Racism, even if it is unintentional, is still racism no matter which way it is painted.

Illamasqua’s ignorance points to a disconnection between their internal culture and their audience. They should have taken down the ad, apologized, and taken the appropriate steps to reaffirm their commitment to diversity.

A new study has found that people with ‘foreign-sounding names’ are passed over more often than people with English-sounding names by recruiters, even if both candidates have the same level of job experience and same degree. The reason for this may be subconscious discrimination. When recruiters see a foreign name, they may worry that the candidate may not have the social and lingual skills required for the job.

What's in a name? Perhaps another name would sound sweeter

The study found that resumes with English-sounding names were forty percent more likely to get callbacks, compared to resumes with Chinese, Indian, or Greek names, even though all prospective ‘candidates’ had the same level of education and experience, over a range of professional fields.

In Canada, we advertise our ‘multicultural society’ as a benefit to skilled immigrants in search of a better life and job, that they will be accepted and treated like an average Canadian citizen no matter what ethnicity. However, if skilled immigrants cannot find jobs because of their name, that is an inherent contradiction of that belief and raises interesting questions about bias and prejudice in the recruiting process and HR hiring practices.

Alice Cheung writes that Google has decided to challenge Facebook in its social network dominance, releasing its new social sharing platform, Google+.

Google+...

Google+ has all the features of Facebook, but tweaked so they’re a little shinier and more user-friendly. It also has the advantage of having a ‘new video-calling feature in tandem with Skype’, and has incorporated elements of other social media sites, like Twitter, into its interface. Alice writes that Google’s decision to limit Google+ invitations to a ‘select few’ piqued interest in the project, and perhaps once Google+ gets all its kinks ironed out, it might be able to surpass Facebook.

...or Facebook?

I signed up for a Google+ account in order to video-call my friends in other provinces and had to wrangle an invitation from a friend of a friend. Google+ definitely has more features than Facebook. However, I find Facebook more accessible, and it’s easier to find people on Facebook. Everyone I know only uses Google+ for its video-call function. They use Facebook for their other social sharing needs. From my point of view, Google+ is nowhere near overtaking Facebook, but in the future perhaps we’ll all be in ‘hangouts’ with each other, rather than Facebooking everyone.

In The Small Business Blog, Adrian Swinscoe writes that inbound marketing is now the way to go.  What is inbound marketing, you ask? How is it different from ‘old’ marketing? Inbound marketing is finding ways of ‘earning people’s trust instead of buying it‘. Old marketing, or outbound marketing, is ‘any marketing that pushes products or services onto customers‘, i.e. all those annoying tactics listed above. Take a look at this cool info-graphic at Mashable that illustrates these concepts.

Case in point: those awesome Old Spice commercials. We all watched them because they were hilarious and frankly, Old Spice Guy has nice abs. ‘Aha!’ you say. ‘But they’re television ads, so aren’t they outbound marketing?’

No. The smart folks at Old Spice figured out they could use social media to their advantage, and asked its followers to send questions for Old Spice Guy to respond to. Old Spice kept its audience entertained and involved. These commercials were interesting and interested in its audience, and they worked, with total of more than 70 million views. I know I’d watch Old Spice Guy over a boring TV advertorial any day.