Anyone who lives in or around the Greater Toronto Area, even in Canada, will likely have heard about or experienced the Highway of Heroes phenomenon which occurs whenever a fallen soldier is returned from the field of battle for a medical autopsy in Toronto. Whenever this happens, there is a spontaneous lining of the 401 by Canadians who show their support for the soldier and the troops in general.

My esteemed colleague, Bob Reid (he of Touchdowns and Fumbles fame) was so moved by this that he wrote and a song about this outpouring of support. After its debut on the Bill Carroll show, Bob spent the last year recording the song and this last Tuesday it was finally released!

The song is embedded below and if you like it, please mozy on over to HMV or CD Baby where you can buy the song – proceeds from which will go to the military charity, Wounded Warriors. If you love the song, there are a whole bunch more people who do as well and you can connect with them on the official Facebook fan page.

Not your typical ad.

I’d like to see the American Copywriter guys come up with better American copywriting than this:

A bouncer in Birmingham hit me in the face with a wrench five times and my wife’s boyfriend broke my jaw with a fence post. So if you don’t buy a home from me, it ain’t going to hurt my feelings.

Closely followed by:

Come on down to Cullman Liquidation and buy a home. Or don’t. I don’t care.

via @gapingvoid

Two guys who travel the US making free and awesome commercials for small businesses – Boing Boing.

Four habits of highly effective listeners:

1. The listener thinks ahead of the talker, trying to anticipate what the oral discourse is leading to and what conclusions will be drawn from the words spoken at the moment.

Although, I hate it when people vocalise this. It is distracting when someone constantly interrupts you and tells you either what you are about to tell them or, worse, what they think you are about to tell them.

2. The listener weighs the evidence used by the talker to support the points that he makes. “Is this evidence valid?” the listener asks himself. “Is it the complete evidence?”

3. Periodically the listener reviews and mentally summarizes the points of the talk completed thus far.

4. Throughout the talk, the listener “listens between the lines” in search of meaning that is not necessarily put into spoken words. He pays attention to nonverbal communication (facial expressions, gestures, tone of voice) to see if it adds meaning to the spoken words. He asks himself, “Is the talker purposely skirting some area of the subject? Why is he doing so?”

Very interesting stuff and something we can all work on.

via Is Listening an Endangered Skill? – HBR Editors’ Blog – Harvard Business Review.

Not so interesting but also kind of cool: this was posted using the funky WordPress “Press This” bookmarklet.

Great video from Martin Lindstrom, the author of Buyology. (free chapter here)

Some interesting tips:

• Bigger actual shopping baskets leads to bigger metaphorical shopping baskets
• Peer pressure increases the purchase of premium items
• Some 2-for-1 deals are actually deals for the merchant (e.g. 0.8-for-1 deals which mean you lose out)
• Create demand with the illusion of scarcity
• We buy with our noses as well as our eyes
• Always take your magazine/newspaper from the top!

Not mentioned:

• Marketing
• Social media

Ultimately, all the work we do needs to be backed up at the point of sale – and our work needs to support the point of sale experience.

via Guy Kawasaki’s Holy Kaw site.

Here’s what Google Canada suggests when you type in each letter of the alphabet.

A – Air Canada (example below)

B – Best Buy

C – Canadian Tire

D – dictionary.com (guess the Canucks can’t spell, eh!)

E – ebay

F – Facebook

G – Gmail

H – Hotmail

I – Ikea

J – Job bank

K – Kijiji

L – Lotto 649

M – Mapquest

N – NHL (of course)

O – OSAP

P – Plenty of Fish

Q – quotes

R – Rogers

S – Scotiabank

T – TD Canada Trust (honestly, i thought this would be the ubiquitous Tim Hortons – disclosure, com.motion and Veritas work with Timothy’s Coffees of the World)

U – UFC

V – Via Rail

W – Weather Network

X – XE (the currency exchange Web site)

Y – YouTube

Z – Zellers

I find this interesting on a couple of fronts.

First there is a bunch of “cancon” in there (Canadian specific sites or queries) which gives me confidence Google is customizing my experience.

Secondly, while as a snapshot this is exercise is fun but ultimately useless, if we can start to track these over time it will be a fascinating anthropological ethnographical study to see what search queries drop in and out of the suggestions.

Finally, the search results for the letter is not the same as the suggestion. Make of that what you will.

…and brands which embody them.

Regular trends include worrying about the H1N1 flu and/or vaccine, Twitter being considered mainstream and going “green”.

Five megatrends to watch are:

Mass collaboration is powering the new economy

• The brand that gets it: Apple (app store and developer community)

Constant connectivity in an on-demand world

• The brand that gets it: Sprint (the “now network”)

Globalization: Making the world a smaller place

• The brand that gets it: Aliababa.com

Pervasive distrust in big corporations

• The brand that gets it: Ally Bank (“straightforward” is its tagline and some ad copy is: “That means talking straight, doing right and being obviously better for our customers”)

A global sense of urgency to fix the problems of a modern world

• The brand that gets it: IBM (“A smarter planet”)

Five Marketing Megatrends You Can’t Ignore by Adam Kleinberg (blog | twitter)

For discussion: is mass collaboration the answer for pervasive distrust in big corporations? It is interesting that big corporations are deliberately using social media to both seem smaller and encourage that collaboration.

We use the following formula when explaining this stuff to clients:

Engagement = Transparency + Co-Creation

What do you think?

Nothing is more important or more of a differentiator between businesses than their corporate culture. Jason Calacanis is writing Mahalo’s own corporate culture document and posted three great examples.

NetFlix corporate culture document

Meetup.com Corporate Culture Document

The Zappos culture document

Read the full article here: http://clivemaclean.wordpress.com/2009/09/23/forrester-research-identifies-significant-challenges-for-integrated-agencies/

I found it fascinating that according to the Forrester report (most) brand marketers:

A) aportion budget based on historical spending patterns

B) do not apply media modelling to predict how media choices and spending will impact their brand

C) find it hard to credit the correct marketing medium for a sale

On point C, I saw on Twitter that @fififofum said:

RT @spikejones: Just talked to a person in a Fortune 200 that said, “Sometimes WOM is not about ROI.” Amen, brother. Preach it.

Yes marketers have experimental budgets to experiment with on new and emerging mediums like word of mouth. But if you can’t even notionally assign any sales to your experiments, guess what? They get cut.

The purpose of a business is to make money. The purpose of the marketing department is to convince consumers they need to buy from the business.

Clearly measuring ROI is tough and, truth be told, many organizations don’t set their marketing up for success in this field. But it doesn’t mean we should stop trying to measure and apportion sales to activities like WOM.

From Kevin Hillstrom’s Mine That Data blog:

The reality is that we don’t have a good understanding of our "target customer".

If your target customer is a 57 year old woman, do you honestly believe that you will have a robust mobile marketing program?

Let’s say that your target customer is a 27 year old woman. Do you really think this customer wants to receive 27 catalogs in the mail every year?

A thorough understanding of the target customer goes a long way toward executing a successful marketing program.

This Week In Business: The Target Customer

Saw this last night and loved it…but I wonder how they got the rights to use the Snuggies clip? “Fair” use?

Love the audience insight.

Video clip care of @ashleycurran.

Update: Hollie Shaw of the National Post has a great piece on this which reveals Snuggies signed off on the use of their commercial. For a direct response advertiser, all eyeballs are good eyeballs. Good for them!