Found in the tubes

Brand Tags in reverse

Cool. A feature of Brand Tags I hadn't noticed before. You can search a tag to get a list of brands sorted in order of the frequency of that tag. Here's a search for "comfortable." Birkenstock, for example, is 23rd out of 100 or so brands listed. Who "owns" comfortable? Hanes. Those specific results are debatable, of course. It's a relatively small data set and the proportion of a tag for a given brand might be a more instructive sort than quantity overall (or maybe that's what he's doing?). It's a very cool extension of the data either way. And closer to the truth of how those brands are perceived than you can find anywhere else that I know of. It's exactly the kind of insight that Google, Twitter Search, Facebook Lexicon and others will continue to make more robust, manipulable and routine. I.e., inescapable.

Madness

From Ad Age (March 20): “Unwitting E-mail Reveals What Agencies Shell Out for Awards.”
Yesterday an employee of the One Show inadvertently e-mailed a spreadsheet to several ad execs that contained a list of the agencies that have entered the One Show’s 2009 ad awards… In all, there were 9,795 entries for the [One Show] awards, at a total cost to the agencies of $3,507,860… BBDO offices account for more than 750 of the entries, and the network spent a total of more than $250,000, according to the spreadsheet.
Such a racket.

The difference is sustainability

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Interesting Adweek article comparing flashy marketing microsites – eg: Coca-Cola’s Happiness Factory – with more-modular, theoretically lower-cost, bloggier sites – eg: Barbarian Group’s GE Adventure. (Those sites don’t work as a head-to-head comparison, but they are pretty good examples of the two categories.) Ultimately, they’re just different techniques with different strengths and weaknesses. Entertainment vs content, exchange and sustainability. Or something. And they’re not mutually exclusive, obviously. Those soft drink and candy microsites do generally bum me out. Seems they could find something more constructive to do with the money. Even them.