Top links of the month | Nov 2008 (Crisis Marketing + Viral & WOM marketing)

Marketing during recessions

Financial crunch & depression is upon us. How should brands & marketers react?

-       Consumer-spending drops big, 1st GDP Quarterly Decline since 91.

-       Traditional media budgets are going down, online advertising is up. A trend confirmed by Publicis CEO or in the UK.

-       The french AAC latest advertising numbers

-       For some 2009 might even be the year of online brand marketing

-       B2B Marketing budgets showing resilience

-       WSJ says experimental ad budgets are getting cut

-       Search Engines Marketers remind us that SEO & SEA is a recession panacea. So is research advertising. Some others invite you to check if it is not the time to fire your seo agency? But managing paid SEA is not an easy job for many brands.

-       Fullsix launched a blog about marketing during crisis

-       Startup are starting to layoffs (starting with Seesmic). Razorfish fired 40

-       Like far too many companies these days, Zappos.com recently laid off a notable chunk of its workforce. What made Zappos different about its layoff was its level of public transparency about it, Zappos even has used twitter to announce the jobs cut.

-       Marketers increasingly bypass traditional business model and adopt media agencies as their newest ad agencies

-       In some cases as the lines blur, digital agencies are taking lead

-       Not all online media companies will survive the ad recession. Many web 2.0 start-ups which revenues are ad based might die  and bloggers will be affected by the ad crash

Word of mouth & viral marketing

-       Online reviews second only to word-of-mouth in purchase influence

-       Blogs influence consumer purchases more than social etworks

-       Branded content is not always easy as AT&T's iJustine Web Series might be forced to conclude

-       Google is jumping in the branded content wagon

-       Competition wants to imitate Hulu branded content model

-       Will video search ads be youtube's money mint? Google's Video-Sharing Site Is Racking Up as Many Queries as Yahoo

-       Tips for successful media seeding

When advertising can be worse than doing nothing : Baby Laugh-a-Lot Commercial

Is this me, or is this advertising totally... freaky!!!

Booya!!! The Future of Kodak by their CEO

A few years ago, an internal video of Kodak CEO speech leaked out. For the few that have not already watched it and want some examples of original no bul**** management motivation speach, check this out :

In another style, have a look at the video of the new CEO of Chicago Tribune, Sam Zell, that I posted a few month ago. Don't tell me you can't feel the passion ;) :

Sam Zell's Talk at the Chicago Tribune from margaret on Vimeo.

Sex and War : We need to reduce population size to survive as a species

I was surfing on Wired.com on just discovered a really interesting article about a new book called http://www.sex-and-war.com. If you have a few minutes, have a read at the Wired excerpt. The authors offer a really interesting view on human history, showing that most of wars are related to a team fight for ressources (food, land,...). It may be a bit extreme or provocatice (hence the title of this post) but it is even more worrying to see how surexploited the planet is...

Here is a quote : "Power, patriotism, and curiosity can drive even the most intelligent and informed men—and it is virtually always men—to turn new scientific discoveries into weapons of mass destruction. The witness of history seems to be that the predisposition to fight and to defend ourselves against attack is so powerful that human beings, once they perceive themselves to be in a life or death struggle of any kind, will always justify research and development of new weapons, however horrendous their effects. (...) But there is one action that we must take, individually and as a world, if any of the others are to be successful. It directly contradicts some of our deepest evolutionary programming, but if we are to survive as a species, we must stabilize or even reduce population size"

And you? What do you think?