Marketing Pilgrim

Branding is a sometimes-elusive concept in marketing. We all know we want to build consumers’ like, trust and respect for our brands, but there isn’t a set way to do that. It’s hard to quantify progress in branding (unless you’ve got the moolah to spend on large, brand-specific surveys). But a new Harris Poll may help us avoid negative branding tactics—to an extent. The bottom line: be careful who you choose as your spokesman.

Case in point: me and Local Company. I’m not sure what brand message LC is trying to portray in their commercials, screaming “WE LOVE YOU!!!” at the end of poorly made, increasingly obnoxious, obviously local spots. Probably that they may be clinically insane. (If you really loved me, you’d never make another commercial.) When I came across their ad on Facebook this week, I hit the little gray X in the corner of the ad, and gave FB the reason of “This company is so freakin’ annoying.” The Harris poll shows I’m not the only one who would do the same thing.

As heavily rumored, Apple’s Steve Jobs just announced an advertising platform for iPhone applications.

Dubbed “iAd” the new ads are designed to integrate with iPhone/iPad apps, meaning the user is exposed to the ads within the app–they’re not taken to some web page to view the content.

Apple plans to host and sell the ads, and will give the developer 60% of the collected revenues.

The ads will be interactive, take advantage of video, and allow developers to create free apps and monetize them with the ads.

iAds are not live yet, but Jobs showed-off one they created as a demo for Disney’s Toy Story:

No news yet on who creates the ads or how they are purchased. We’ll update as we learn more.

Last month, Google announced a new “remarketing” feature, allowing advertisers to later target people who’d visited their sites or YouTube channels. Retargeting like this is a popular marketing topic: an Advertise.com/SEMPO survey (via) found that slightly under 70% of marketers had never used it, but 46.3% of marketers thought retargeting was the “most underutilized marketing strategy.”

With Google just getting in on the market, obviously the time is ripe for established companies to make bigger moves as well. However, as with all behaviorally targeted marketing, protecting consumer privacy is a big concern—especially for consumer privacy watchdogs. The Center for Digital Democracy has filed with the FTC asking for a probe into behavioral targeting by Google, Yahoo and Microsoft, among others. This is just the most recent volley in that battle.

A lot of concern circulates about just how much information a company like Google has on individuals and virtually everything else. While it makes me queasy at times as well, I don’t get the same Orwellian feeling about Google as I do about the government and the data they collect. That’s why the White House’s new policies on social media interaction with the public are both interesting and a bit troubling all at once.

The Washington Post reports

Soon it will be much easier to interact with government through tweets, blogs and wikis without forcing federal agencies to jump through the procedural hoops set up by the Paperwork Reduction Act.

Google Voice has become a fan favorite for its ability to handle voicemail and have it follow you wherever you need it to. Very handy. You can receive and manage voicemails through Google voice from various numbers and have separate messages for certain callers etc etc etc. The one thing it has not provided, however, is an endpoint for calls so while a good tool, it has been limited.

In November 2009 Google purchased Gizmo5 and the rumor mill started humming about what Google had up its sleeve with regard to the use of their newly acquired VOIP tool box.

Since that purchase was all of 5 months ago that seems like several Internet lifetimes to not move the needle on that rumor. Well, TechCrunch is reporting that there is something to talk about.

You’ve probably noticed a trend over the past couple of years of sites allowing you to login using your an existing credentials from Google, Facebook, Twitter, etc.

According to a survey of 170,000 web sites, JanRain says that Google is–surprise, surprise–the login of choice for many web users:

While it may look like another area of total dominance by Google, the login of choice changes when you look at those logging-in to media or technology platforms:

So what can we take from this data? Not much actually. Who knows why we prefer to use Facebook when logging into technology sites, but prefer Google overall? I suspect that technology and media sites may have more of an aversion to letting users login with big-brother Google, hence more occurrences of Facebook, Twitter, and other sites deemed to be less of a threat.