rehumanize

All of us at BD'M are very proud of our new work for Compellent. Compellent is one of the country's fastest growing network storage companies.  Their "secret sauce" is a unique technology that is extremely dynamic, scalable and efficient.  The company enlisted BD'M in 2009 to dissect the brand and develop a new plaftform to help fuel Compellent's next phase of growth. The result?  "Fluid Data", a big brand idea that marries the essential truth of Compellent's technology with a clear point of view on what the future of data storage should be. This brand video is the tip of the iceberg.  There's more cool stuff in the pipeline.  Stay tuned, because the future is fluid.

I really like this Coke video that's sweeping YouTube.  It nails the brand idea (happiness).  It's also and interesting blend of event marketing and viral marketing. The basis of event marketing used to be to stage something provocative to get customers to in a specific location to experience the brand in a new and engaging manner.  The event would be seen by the 500 or 5,000 people at the event, whether on a street, a campus or at a sporting event. Social media changes everything.  Now we need to think about event marketing as a form of mass media.  Stage an interesting event that can be documented and seen by the 500,000 people who will view it and share it on Twitter, Facebook or YouTube.  At last count Coke has racked up over 784,000 views so far.  I would imagine that is slightly more than the number of folks on the campus where they staged the event.

The Red Cross text message campaign to raise donations for Haiti is brilliant.  It's simple and immediate, two things that tend to resonate in America. It's also been hugely effective, raising about $22 million in donations as of this past Sunday, or nearly one in every five dollars raised so far by the Red Cross for Haiti. (By the way, if you haven't done so already, please text "Haiti" to 9099 and and $10 donation to the Red Cross relief effort for Haiti will be added to your phone bill.) This makes me wonder about the future applications of this idea.  Why couldn't I do the same thing to buy a product?  Why can't AT&T or Verizon step forward to become the new PayPal for mobile commerce?

Culture Club By David Gee “Do you want to start an agency?” said Fallon vet Stuart D’Rozario to his former and current colleague, Bob Barrie, over cocktails late one afternoon several years ago. The reply, “Can I tell you in the morning?” As you might imagine since you are reading this story, the answer did indeed come back in the affirmative and thus began a new agency called Barrie D’Rozario. Astute readers, however, will no doubt note there is a Murphy missing from the BDM triumvirate. “We agreed that we needed a third partner on the strategy side,” continues D’Rozario, “and I told Bob I had once met this cool ad guy, David Murphy, several years earlier and that he might be a fit. At that time, Murphy was president of the combined offices of Young Rubicam and Wunderman in Southern California. I looked him up and found he had moved on and was running the 300-person Saatchi & Saatchi LA office. So we both said to ourselves, ‘Good luck with that.’ called David anyway and s

I believe the new decade will be defined in marketing circles as the analytics decade. Over the past ten years marketers have become adept at using ones and zeros to market to customers.  We now must use these same digital tools to learn more about satisfying our customers. Traditional forms of market research have long revealed the chasm between what customers say versus what they actually do .  What people say in focus groups is often quite different than how they actually spend their time and money.  We often find clearer insights when we observe real behavior.  We used to rely solely on field work to see consumer-erectus in its natural environs.  Now we can use their actual online shopping behavior to get a real-time fix on their behaviors, wants and needs. A recent NY Times article ( "A Data Explosion Is Remaking Retail" ) illustrates this point in action. I particularly like the example of Wet Seal, the teen fashion retailer, which bases its merchandising and i