Altyrian View

I’m a habitual early adopter. I had a CD player when you could only find about a dozen different CDs in a record store (remember those?). I had a DVR before the general public in my area could get them because I knew someone at the cable company. I was in Second Life before there were 250,000 people there. I got my iPhone on iDay (it rocks!).

But I’m way behind on this Twitter thing. The idea of microblogging sounds cool, I just haven’t jumped in.

I’m going to rectify that. I ran across B.L. Ochman’s blog, and she was talking about how much fun it is. She convinced me it was time.

I’ve signed up. You can find me at http://twitter.com/johnmims. Now it’s off to find an iPhone twitter app…

What do you call advertising that doesn’t work? Award winning.

That’s my beef with most advertising / PR awards. The judges look at the beauty and not the effectiveness. Fortunately, that’s not the case with the Effie Awards. From the release: “The Effie Awards honor the most significant achievement in the business of marketing communications: ideas that work.”

This year Apple won with their “Get a Mac” campaign (”Hi, I’m a Mac.” “And I’m a PC”). Not only was the concept cool, but it really worked. Again from the release: “Results from the “Get a Mac” campaign included market share growth of 42%, record sales and cultural influence.”

In honor of their victory, I’m going to camp outside of the local AT&T / Cingular store on July 28 to purchase an iPhone.

Forgive the interruption from my normal marking / PR / advertising blog content for this job announcement.

Altyris is looking for an account assistant. We are looking for someone (probably 3 years of experience or less) who is detail oriented and very competent with project management. A degree in PR / marketing / advertising is preferred. In a perfect world, this person would work directly with clients, do a little writing and be involved in meeting people in our community. Send resumes to john.mims@altyris.com.

If you caught last night’s episode of The Office on NBC, you saw that Michael used Wikipedia to learn some negotiation tactics. Although he used them incorrectly, most of the tactics mentioned on the show were indeed on the Wikipedia entry. For kicks, I surfed over to the Wikipedia entry on negotiation to see how “accurate” the Office was in its Wikipedia information. I was also curious to see if someone had updated the entry to cite the Office. The bigger question: What happens when millions of people are “pointed” to a social media tool where they theoretically have the ability to change the information there. Would Office “vandals” come to change the entry to pay homage to their favorite TV show? Would those with less than pure agendas use the tool to change the entry at a time when they knew that lots of people were sure to be visiting?

As a side note, I’m a huge advocate for Wikipedia. It’s a great way to find information about nearly any topic imaginable. It’s rare that I find information that is completely false, and according to studies, my experience is the norm. Back to my point…

So I go over to the entry on negotiation and find that it’s been locked down. No one who is a new user or unregistered user can update the entry for a few days. So, for now, the entry is “safe.”

Not really, but if the price is right, I could buy an ad on the bottom corner of the front page. I work at an ad agency, and it’s important for us to have places to advertise, but the cover? This AdAge article (free registration required) points to the pressures to raise revenue as the reason for the move to 1A advertising.

I understand the need for newspapers to survive in our new digital world, but I don’t think that placing ads on the cover is the way to go. Frankly, I think that it diminishes the brand of any paper that choses to place on the cover. We all know that a paper is filled with ads, but to place on the cover, that sends the message that a paper is overflowing with paid placements.

Locally, a university purchased cover wraps from a local magazine and a local business paper. I call them wraps, but it was really a second cover and back cover for the newspaper and the magazine. Great for the publications. I’m sure that they were able to charge a premium for their entire cover and back cover. In then end, I almost threw each of them away because I thought that the university had sent me a Summer catalog.

I think that newspapers need to be cautious when allowing ads to creep into sections traditionally held for news. What happens when CNN starts running ads on the crawl at the bottom of the screen? News outlets lose credibility when they are viewed as merely advertising vehicles by their viewers and readers. Hopefully, other newspapers will choose not to follow the Journal’s lead, but I fully expect our media buyer to hear from ad reps tomorrow with a new opportunity for our clients.

Welcome to Altyrian View! Since last November we have been producing the “Marketing Watch” podcast. Much to our surprise it was successful and very popular. Unfortunately, the format didn’t lend itself to commentary or comments from the most important person in the podcast equation – you. The whole point of social media is the open communication between podcasters / bloggers and listeners. Hence, the new format and the new blog.

We’ve added the “old” podcasts and shownotes from each to earlier posting of our blogs (special thanks to Intern Matt for listening to hours of podcasts for show notes). We hope that you’ll give us your comments and feedback. Starting this week, we are going to record our first “Altyrian View” with the new format.

We look forward to sharing this space and communication with you.