Catvertising the king of the jungle
At long last, somebody has finally decided to tap into the rich seam of gold that is ‘cat videos’. No longer are these being wrongly seen as merely the vice of house wives and children. The cat video is now recognised industry-wide as a, if not the, driving force behind the internet itself.
The great apostrophe atrocity
Greengrocers are famed for their flippant use of apostrophes. But in light of the current fashion for major companies to do away with the possessive apostrophe in their brand names, perhaps Greengrocers will cease to be seen as linguistic oafs and instead be known as marketing trendsetters.
In the world of branding, seemingly anything goes when it comes to using possessive apostrophes in company names. There are two main camps in terms of usage. Those who do – such as McDonald’s, Levi’s and Sainsbury’s. Those who don’t – such as Barclays, Ladbrokes and Harrods. And then the odd company, such as Waterstone’s, who have decided to straddle the fence, using apostrophes in their text but leaving them out of their brand.
As the term ‘greengrocer’s apostrophegreengrocer’s apostrophe’ suggests, people have a long history of battling with this awkward piece of punctuation. When Barclays was asked about the lack of one in their brand, they said “Barclays is no longer associated with the family name,” and that the apostrophe had “just disappeared over the years.” This seems to suggest that they consider the sound of their brand to have more value than the layout.
Contemporary language is forever being shortened and simplified. Emails, texts and social media have been lobbying for people to dissect their language into ever more manageable chunks since they began. Also, now that so many companies see their futures being reliant on online business, if they wish their brand name to resemble their URL, they must first remove all punctuation.
There is no single reason why many companies have decided to ignore the strict rules of the possessive apostrophe. I suspect that it usually comes down to a combination of things, from brand independence and contemporary usage to the stylistic bias of designers and the pressures they face when tasked with bringing freshness to tired old brands. Personally though, we tend to recommend keeping them in to help communicate a brand’s personality. But then, being writers, we would say that, wouldn’t we?
Tell it to the whole world
“If the product is good enough, it shouldn’t need marketing”.
This theory troubles me. It is a quote from Douglas Edwards, ex-marketing executive and the 59th employee to be hired at Google. He worked there between 1999 and 2005, through the period of its greatest growth. The theory seems to me to be something that only people who are caught up in the midst of a media storm are able to spout.
The fascination with the dot-com boom had leading players celebrated as if they were sports stars – their companies competing like championship chasing teams. For every successful company that has followed this radical anti-marketing approach, I’d guess there were thousands that sank rapidly without a trace. Not that I can prove it, of course, as they failed to get their name and product out there, missing the opportunity to enter the dot-com world as a verb of their own.
Personally, I challenge that Google didn’t market themselves. Perhaps they originally avoided traditional means, but then the market they were operating in was at the time far from a traditional battleground. But today, Google have bitten the bullet and conceeded defeat, on this at least. The Google purchase YouTube, has had billboard ads for sometime. And now, most recently, has come the onslaught of their massive Google Chrome push. This is one of the most visable campaigns of the moment - even featuring in its own primetime tv commercial! Should all this marketing exposure in fact have the reverse affect on us then, and lead us to wonder whether it is ‘good enough’? I’m confused.
After having cashed in on his enviable cache of Google shares, Douglas Edwards is now cashing in on the experiences he had while working at the online search behemoth. His new book, I’m Feeling Lucky: The Confessions of Google Employee Number 59 has recently been released. Whether you agree with him or not, as the author of ubiquitous terms such as ‘AdWords’, Edwards has played an instrumental role in forging the voice of Google – one that we all know implicitly, whether we like it or not.
Jesus vs. Bieber: Who’s more popular?
Hidden beneath the benign face of Facebook is a battleground of biblical proportions. Egged on by AllFacebook.com, a Facebook gossip site and handy analytics tool, popular pages are being pitched against each other. Gone are the days when we kept ourselves up all night worrying about which personality could claim the most fans. Now there’s a new stat on the block, an authentic way to gauge popularity. Whose page can boast the most interactions?
Interactions are calculated from the amount of likes, shares and comments associated with a page. If only John Lennon had such a tool to back him up when he rather ham-fistedly let slip his views on The Beatles being “more popular than Jesus.” Well, it seems this time around Jesus has got the jump on those pompous wannabes. Although there are numerous Facebook pages dedicated to the Lord Jesus Christ, one called ‘Jesus Daily’ has a particularly fervent following. Jesus Daily’s faithful, amounting to a paltry 7.5m fans, have more than double the interactions of Justin Bieber’s 33m plus Beliebers. Take that, upstart.
Tuition fees will make you happy, signed Honest Guv’!
If you’re lucky or extremely good at your job, a marketer occasionally gets to make a visible impression on the world. There can be few marketing jobs that have the same potential to create social change as working for political parties and in support of government initiatives. At the same time, they present formidable and exciting challenges to the teams that win the contracts.
The Conservative government’s wish to sanitise the astronomical rise in tuition fees is certainly going to demand sourcing a team of the most inventive minds the industry has to offer.
Do you fancy explaining away a future of crippling personal debt to the country’s future generations? Aware that public opinion is riddled with doubt and apprehension over the seismic changes that are being fast-tracked through the English higher education sector, the Conservative government is looking for an agency with enough white wash to disguise a war zone. Something about this one makes me think the powers that be are going to rely less on marketing agencies and more on PR mud-slingers throughout this particular saga.
