The Most Effective Advertising Medium Since the Invention of the Television.
I sometimes miss the traditional ad agency meetings, between new stealth technology company and traditional ad agency execs, acting hip. (most professional services companies, lawyers too, try and "dress/act for the client" which sees some really funny interepretations over time) I did start in an adagency after all. (my title was "new media development" : at 21yrs they didn't want to append it with "manager", "executive", "nobody"; New Media Development Nobody. That's Me, still hehe.)
So Seek is worth over $2b now because they stuck the vertical course of building brand. By spending the VC dough on acquiring customers and creating positive brand associations. Seek and ye shall find I now associate with a job website.
Fast fwd to Web 2.0 funding, they dont give you money to spend tens of millions to build brand. "We learnt our lesson last time, etc... blogs are so viral yadayada.." So I had to laugh when the global peer of seek - Careerbuilder, who spent and executed their way to number 1/top 2 job board has put their $50m ad account up for review, because their superbowl ad didnt get a good enough response in a newspaper poll. Classic.
AdRants : "CareerBuilder has placed its ($50m) account in review because its ads did not make a top ten appearance in USA Today's Super Bowl ad poll, a tiny survey based on just a few hundred people with absolutely nothing to do with whether or not an ad affected sales. Cramer-Krasselt President Peter Krikovich is pissed. Livid. Dumfounded. And steaming mad and tells Advertising Age he responded to CareeBuilder's opening a review based on the poll by asking, "You have to be fucking kidding me, right?" The agency has resigned the account and will not participate in the review. In an internal memo to agency staff, Krivkovich wrote, "To our amazement, to our total astonishment, all that astounding business success was less important than one poll. C-Kers, we have to tell you - in our entire history, hell in the history of this crazy thing called advertising, I'm not sure there has ever been any thing as baseless or as unbelievable as that. It's so ludicrous and they are so serious about that poll it's almost funny."
I don't know why the agency is so shocked. That is advertising - When you can't measure it, be ready for clients to love you one day, shaft you the next. Accounts have moved for far less quantifiable reasons. The ads in question are here.
While on advertising, Scott Karp writes an interesting piece on whether brands can be content-creators : "Now that every brand is jumping on the bandwagon to be a content creator to compete in the intensifying war over consumer attention, you have to wonder whether brands can really compete as content creators, lodged between traditional “professional” content creators and the newly empowered army of “users” generating content."
Scott mentions a Washington Post article re : how Lexus sponsored the creation of a book "Black Sapphire Pearl" from a Grey's Anatomy writer (Smith) about a stolen Lexus. "So Smith, who also writes for television and film, shaped his novel "to be really cool and different and literary." He says, "It doesn't read like an ad." More like this:
TimeMagazine : "So who will be the YouTube of video résumés? Jobster, an online job board, is teaming up with social-networking site Facebook to launch a career site featuring video résumés in March."
So Seek is worth over $2b now because they stuck the vertical course of building brand. By spending the VC dough on acquiring customers and creating positive brand associations. Seek and ye shall find I now associate with a job website.
Fast fwd to Web 2.0 funding, they dont give you money to spend tens of millions to build brand. "We learnt our lesson last time, etc... blogs are so viral yadayada.." So I had to laugh when the global peer of seek - Careerbuilder, who spent and executed their way to number 1/top 2 job board has put their $50m ad account up for review, because their superbowl ad didnt get a good enough response in a newspaper poll. Classic.
AdRants : "CareerBuilder has placed its ($50m) account in review because its ads did not make a top ten appearance in USA Today's Super Bowl ad poll, a tiny survey based on just a few hundred people with absolutely nothing to do with whether or not an ad affected sales. Cramer-Krasselt President Peter Krikovich is pissed. Livid. Dumfounded. And steaming mad and tells Advertising Age he responded to CareeBuilder's opening a review based on the poll by asking, "You have to be fucking kidding me, right?" The agency has resigned the account and will not participate in the review. In an internal memo to agency staff, Krivkovich wrote, "To our amazement, to our total astonishment, all that astounding business success was less important than one poll. C-Kers, we have to tell you - in our entire history, hell in the history of this crazy thing called advertising, I'm not sure there has ever been any thing as baseless or as unbelievable as that. It's so ludicrous and they are so serious about that poll it's almost funny."
I don't know why the agency is so shocked. That is advertising - When you can't measure it, be ready for clients to love you one day, shaft you the next. Accounts have moved for far less quantifiable reasons. The ads in question are here.
While on advertising, Scott Karp writes an interesting piece on whether brands can be content-creators : "Now that every brand is jumping on the bandwagon to be a content creator to compete in the intensifying war over consumer attention, you have to wonder whether brands can really compete as content creators, lodged between traditional “professional” content creators and the newly empowered army of “users” generating content."
Scott mentions a Washington Post article re : how Lexus sponsored the creation of a book "Black Sapphire Pearl" from a Grey's Anatomy writer (Smith) about a stolen Lexus. "So Smith, who also writes for television and film, shaped his novel "to be really cool and different and literary." He says, "It doesn't read like an ad." More like this:
The Lexus loaner turned out to be a GS Hybrid. To say it was an upgrade from the battered Crown Vic I'd driven with the LAPD would be an understatement. For one, you don't need a key. You keep the remote control thing in your pocket and to start the car you just push a button on the dash. Like on a computer. In fact the car's more like a super-powered laptop on wheels than anything else."
TimeMagazine : "So who will be the YouTube of video résumés? Jobster, an online job board, is teaming up with social-networking site Facebook to launch a career site featuring video résumés in March."
posted by redbarren at 4:16 PM
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