Brian Feener

Rat Cat

Here’s a short list of the stuff this cat could choose to eat

• M&Ms
• dry cat food
• wet cat food
• bananas
• trash
• the junk at the bottom of the garbage disposal
• the corner of the chair
• a plastic bag

Sometimes the most wrong choice is the choice that people make.

I’m not sure which lesson applies here:

1. You don’t always know what your customers want.  Sometimes they don’t either.

or

2. The most remarkable products are the most accidental.

The video is P Diddy and Mase performing on the Rosie O’Donnell show.

This is the real-life execution of advertising for the sake of advertising.

I’m not a fan.

If you’re going to put your product out there for an audience, why bother spending time and effort trying to convert the un-convertible? Why speak to people who don’t want to listen?

Why Twitter when your #1 goal is to be on Twitter?

Frank at Comcast (of all companies) does it right.

“Thirty-three million Chevy owners are NASCAR fans – it’s huge. That’s a very important base of customers that we need to continue to appeal to” – General Motors North America VP/Chevrolet Ed Peper, on hoping to continue having a strong presence in NASCAR [SceneDaily.com, via Sports Business Daily]

…or maybe you can just make better cars.

Apple doesn’t do brand placement in television shows - the set designers simply have a loyalty to the product works for them.

Google didn’t take out ads in order to make their search engine become a verb - it just kept working and people started putting into the vernacular.

Asics barely has a presence in television, but I know that I will buy their running shoes forever because they have given me customer service that was respectful and honest, and then delivered on their promise of a great sneaker.

If you have the chance to yell at in a room of people in which every other company has the same opportunity to yell, don’t. It’ll make your voice hoarse and may or may not make an impression on people.

Putting a pretty girl in front of a car makes me notice the pretty girl.

Unless there’s a content-sharing, or link-sharing agreement, I don’t see the point behind the Blogroll.

I do understand that it’s important for your site to be linked from other sites, but I’d rather see my content on a single blog post rather than on the site’s blogroll.

Why?

Because it means that I’ve done something signficant enough that I deserve commentary.  It means that I’ve gotten enough steam behind an idea to keep other people thinking about it.

When I’m on your blogroll under a site that gets 10mm hits a year, I’m literally buried underneath the weight of traffic going to that site and not mine. It does not say anything about why you should go to my site instead.  In fact, if I weren’t me, I wouldn’t go to my site either if it came down to me or Seth Godin’s page.

And what’s it mean to you to be in my blogroll if I’m not getting paid to put you there?  Are Larry and Sergey going to thank me for putting Google in my brianfeener.com blogroll? Probably not (though they seem like pretty grateful individuals).

I’d rather be successful for the fact that I do a good job than be successful on the basis of association.  Those are the movies that tout the “writers of hit comedy X” and the rap albums that have all the “Featuring Lil’ ____” after the song titles.  Maybe it’s a way to build a business, but it’s not a way to build a career.

I think we’re all trying to figure out if Twitter is working. It seems to be by these stats (Jul 1 Through Aug 22) that the the social networking is as effective as any other type of marketing when looking at the quality of traffic. So if you were hesitant to join Facebook or MySpace or Twitter… now you have a reason to.

Those Channing Frye people need to stop and smell the roses!

Having the right answer is great, but having the right question is better.

For the people in the back row….

Having the right answer is great, but having the right question is better.

If I have a e-newsletter, what am I trying to achieve with it?  Is that goal even worth achieving?

How many of my customers am I reaching with my television advertisement?

Is it worthwhile to take resources away from our core competency in order to do this side project?

Why am I bothering with a full page ad in this magazine?

What value does this extra feature ad?  What’s the point of adding an extra button if it takes away from the overall look of the machine?

What aspect of this product speaks to its success?

What questions do you ask of your projects/campaigns?  Do they help you get measurable answers?  (Don’t play if you can’t keep score.)

Good post about the difference between getting a pitchman and making an advertisement.