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Can’t Buy Me Like: The Secret Secret
Secret is no secret. It’s been around since 1956, the first deodorant marketed exclusively to women. Through most of its history, the advertising themes have focused on product attributes, most...
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The Power and Danger of Newsjacking
During the 2013 Super Bowl the lights went out unexpectedly at the Superdome. Oreo devised and tweeted this ad in response. That night it was retweeted over 14,500 times. You’ve most likely heard of...
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The Myth of the Homepage
Image by Filip Malinowski via The Noun Project. Many brands centre their online strategy on the assumption that the majority of visitors arrive at their website through their homepage. As a...
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The Multiplatform Marketing Campaigns Behind This Summer’s Record-Breaking...
Man of Steel is one of the summer’s biggest hits so far. You may have noticed that movie theatres are more crowded than usual this summer. In an attempt to boost box office sales, Hollywood packed...
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Reinventing You: Google+ Hangout with Dorie Clark
Image via Harvard Business Review’s Facebook Page. Dorie Clark has literally written the book on personal brand reinvention, and she knows what she’s talking about. In a past life she was a...
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Writer’s Block: Best of the Web – Vol. 12
Media + Magazines Design buffs are abuzz about the new Writer app for the iPad (we’re loving the product brief as much as the app). Living up to the hype: the US eBook market expected to reach $500...
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King Linchpin: Q&A with Seth Godin
Photo by Joi via Flickr You recently made a splash by announcing that Linchpin would be your final book with a conventional publisher. Is cutting out the middleman a luxury reserved for bestselling...
View ArticleThe Future of Branded Entertainment is Social
With the world of online video advertising driving towards $2 billion annually, marketers are exploring new ways to get viewers excited about watching their ads. As more buyers enter the market,...
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Airlines on Twitter: Engagement Checkup
Over the course of the last year, incidents such as Southwest Airlines’ Kevin Smith fiasco, and the ominous Icelandic ash cloud have elevated branded tweeting from a viable marketing helping hand to...
View ArticleTravel Gets Touchy: Best of the Web – Vol. 16
We’re big airline geeks here at Sparksheet and the TSA debacle has been on our radar all week. The media are abuzz over the new X-Ray scanners, speculating on what some travellers claim is an invasion...
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Open Book Branding: Truth, Transparency and Trust in Marketing
Photo by ChernobylBob via flickr This is my fifth decade in the marketing communications business and I can say without any hesitation that right now is the absolute best time to be a consumer marketer...
View ArticleThe Future of Branded Storytelling: Video Q&As with Tim Washer, Michael...
Comedian-turned “Cisco social media guy” Tim Washer on the connection between comedy writing and corporate communications: Branded storytelling expert Michael Margolis on the power of narrative:...
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What Kind of Person is Your Brand?
In Kafka’s Metamorphosis, a man wakes up one morning and discovers that he has become a bug. What if your brand woke up one morning and discovered it had become a human? And let’s say the human came to...
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Let’s Call it a Year: Best of the Web – 2010
As you all know, we’re high on air travel around here and 2010 was a huge year for airline news. These past 12 months saw many a mid-air scandal, myriad mega-mergers and a deluge of tweeting. And with...
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The Business of Irrationality: Q&A with Dan Ariely
Dan Ariely by poptech via flickr You talk a lot in the book about the need to design better products and systems that take into account human limitations. Are you generally positive about the role of...
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The Tablet Wars: Best of the Web – Vol. 21
Photo by Robert Scoble via flickr Another week means another battle in the tablets wars. The release of Apple’s iPad 2 dominated this week’s headlines. Even before Wednesday’s launch, an alleged...
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Branded Entertainment vs. Viral Videos
There’s a lot of confusion among brands and content creators about the difference between branded entertainment and viral video. Most brands want their videos to go viral, but these are two distinct...
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Content Everywhere: Q&A with JWT’s Paul Banham
Do you think story can really play a role on a screen that’s meant to be engaged with in terms of seconds? I think it depends on the concept and on the story you are trying to convey. If you attempt to...
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Branding Emotion: Video Q&A with Cirque du Soleil’s Jean Guibert
Photo by Eva Blue via Flickr Magic. Mystery. Emotion. These are words that come to mind when I think of Cirque du Soleil’s gravity-defying shows. But they have very little to do with conventional...
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Getting Brand Advocates By Giving Stuff Away
Everyone loves a freebie, which is why giving products away is an excellent tactic for anyone in marketing who wants to create brand advocates. Whether you want to improve the number of online...
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Drawing the Brand: Q&A with Marketoonist Tom Fishburne
So what exactly is a marketoonist? Marketoonist is a business I’ve been slowly incubating over the last ten years before I even knew what the business idea was. I started out working in marketing and...
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This Week in Cannes
I’ve just spent the past hour reviewing the 58th annual Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity schedule. Aside from lamenting my lost invitation to Yahoo’s networking yacht party (attended by Martha...
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Brazil Goes Social: The Rise of the Brazilian Digital Middle Class
More than half of the population in Brazil now belongs to “class C”, which became the largest slice of Brazil’s classic “social pyramid” for the first time this past year. Known as the digital middle...
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Marketing in Tongues: Creating a Multilingual Brand
International marketing isn’t easy, and one of the world’s biggest brands learned that the hard way. When Pepsi launched in China, according to legend, the brand made the mistake of translating its...
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Big Agency, Small Agency: Making the Right Choice
Customers have changed, marketing channels have changed, and so have the marketing agencies that serve brand marketers. Digital agencies dot the landscape with a broad selection of services, from...
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Five Lessons from Content Marketing World
This is the year of Content. For sure. It’s used so much and by so many people, it must be, right? But I hate the word. I really do. Because it has been boxed into a kind of limitation that is...
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When Luxury Brands Go Digital
Burberry Acoustic It’s February 21, 2011 and Burberry’s Autumn/Winter womenswear collection has just been revealed to 1,000 attendees at Kensington Gardens in London. Simultaneously, it’s streamed live...
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How Clothing Brands Are Getting Personal
When it comes to clothing, branding is big: People love advertising their fashion-forward choices by wearing brand name T-shirts, jeans and jackets. But there are also plenty of people who deride...
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Digital De-Siloed: Five Lessons from Dx3 Canada 2012
On its surface, last week’s inaugural Dx3 event was a coming-out-party for Canada’s thriving internet-based industries. But it turned out to be more of a fond farewell to digital itself. Yes, you read...
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Women for the Win: International Women’s Day Roundup
As you might have gleaned from today’s Google Doodle, March 8 marks International Women’s Day. Since 1908, IWD has been used as a platform to build awareness around women’s issues like pay equity, fair...
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Five Lessons From SXSW 2012
The Frost Bank Tower (aka "The Owl") lights up the Austin skyline As we noted last year, SXSW is huge. At any given moment there are dozens of panels, meet-ups, keynotes, showcases, “core...
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Building a Social Business
Image via blog.spoongraphics.co.uk Something that has stuck with me is an idea from one of Amber Naslund’s webinars that I attended last year. Why are many big brands so uncomfortable with letting...
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Kony 2012: Cause Marketing Lessons
When it comes to viral marketing, writes AlphaBird’s Alex Rowland, “success is hard to predict and even harder to replicate.” While hindsight is always 20/20, it’s difficult to know in advance which...
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Instant Classic: The Rise of Nostalgia Branding
Remember when movies were silent, mobile phones were giant and photos took two weeks to process? No? Well, that doesn’t mean you can’t long for their return. Retailers aren’t just tapping into the past...
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Marketing Lessons from The Hunger Games
It seems like everyone loves The Hunger Games. According to MTV News, the film broke box office records, earning an astounding $155 million on opening weekend in North America alone. This surpasses...
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Going Local: The Real Winners in China’s Online Space
A Starbucks in Lao Ximen, Shanghai. Image by bitslice cipher, via Flickr. History suggests that foreign brands lack the local understanding to effectively target Chinese consumers online. Companies...
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Marketing Lessons From Marvel’s The Avengers
Five years, $100 million in global marketing and Samuel L. Jackson. That’s what it took for Marvel’s The Avengers to earn over $700 million its opening weekend – a box office record. For perspective,...
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Marketing in the Round: Weapons of Choice
When carpenters build an addition to a house, they create a plan, get the materials, and gather their tools – from saws and sandpaper to hammers and screwdrivers. The carpenters carefully sequence...
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More Older Americans Online Than Ever
For the first time, more than half of Americans age 65 and older are using the internet, reports Pew Research Center, which conducted a survey of more than 2,000 American seniors. The survey found that...
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Good Ideas: The Sparksheet Podcast – “Brand Brazil”
At Sparksheet we’re proud to call ourselves a multiplatform magazine and today we’re adding yet another platform to our content arsenal – a podcast! We’re big believers in the power and intimacy of...
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Olympic Flag Carrier: Q&A with British Airways
British Airways has been a longstanding partner with the Olympic Games in the U.K. British Airways’ involvement with the Olympic Games goes back a long time. What does this assocation mean to the...
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Newsjacking: How Brands Can Own the Story
Newsjacking lets brands leverage news by inserting themselves into the story. Image by Steve Harwood via Flickr. As journalists scramble to cover breaking news, the basic facts of a story –...
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Five Lessons from Digital Book World – Discoverability and Marketing
Book publishers, marketers, authors and a whole lot of data experts gathered in New York City this week for the inaugural Digital Book World – Discoverability and Marketing conference (#DBWDM). Digital...
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Four Mobile Marketing Stats That Will Blow Your Mind
Image by Mark Mathosian via Flickr. One of the stunning things about mobile marketing is the degree to which people respond to it. Simply put, mobile marketing produces higher response rates and...
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Why Simple Works
Every organism right down to the amoeba is naturally inclined to seek the simplest solution to any problem, the simplest path from point A to point B. A Harvard University student conducted an...
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Moving from Data to Insights
Data collection is no longer a “nice to have” capability. In a modern world filled with smartphones, tablets and other gadgets, reams of data are being collected every second. Retailers,...
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The Delicate Art of Oscar Campaigns
Harvey Weinstein is generally considered an Oscar marketing genius. The Hollywood producer’s aggressive campaign helped push Shakespeare in Love to a surprise Best Picture victory over Saving Private...
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The Importance of Exclusivity
A lineup outside of the famous 1970s club Studio 54. Image via biography.com People want what they can’t have; it’s the great paradox of marketing. We want to push our products and services, but we...
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Marketing to Millennials
Above, a fan records a Girl Talk concert. Below, a crowd takes in the music at Woodstock, 1969. Top image by Sam Klein via Flickr. Bottom image by Terry Weddleton via Flickr. When talking about...
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Marketing Lessons from Jimmy Kimmel
Late-night talk show host Jimmy Kimmel may have duped the internet last week with his twerking-gone-wrong YouTube video, but he also taught us all a few lessons about how to create a viral online...
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