by Jonathan Marshall

I will carry your lip balm. I will listen to your opinion of my friends. I will listen to your friends’ opinions of my friends. I will watch your vampire TV shows with you. And because I do this, I will drive the car I want to drive.

Women don’t buy Dodge Chargers, and whether you knew that or not, after watching this commercial, you quickly realize that international advertising agency Wieden and Kennedy had that in mind when they were deciding who to target in this ad.

The spot opens with the narrator listing things that men all over the world are “putting-up with” in relationships, while simultaneously showing images of annoyed and even angered men. Most of the things they list are both comical and currently relevant – watching “Vampire TV shows.”

By listing several things that countless frustrated men are “putting-up with,” the creative agency attempts to point out a situation that the Dodge brand has in common with the viewer- like they understand what they are going through… and they wanna help them stand up for themselves… “As a man, you’ve sacrificed a lot, but surely there is a limit to your chivalry.”

Judging from the 1,000,000+ views on YouTube, and the 1000s of comments that go with those views, not surprisingly most men love the commercial, and most women HATE IT. So, after all of that- does this ad work? It was targeted to men, and as a viral video, it got great feedback from that targeted audience… But will it SELL CHARGERS? What do you think?

By Les Kollegian

When I visited the approximate 480 employee staff of Weiden & Kennedy in Portland Oregon last year, I was beyond amazed and in awe of my surroundings there. I mean… they have stadium seating for their meetings. Really?!?! I have 11 people in my small Web design firm. All I could do was think of what their monthly overhead is and I needed aspirin before I left the building.

This Super Bowl commercial written by two talented dudes over there deserves a hand shake and maybe a golf clap. This video below shows the making (it’s 20 min…but totally worth it if you’re into this stuff) and the Director and Actor just did an amazing job. What’s real and what’s CGI? I never would have guessed. See below.

Except for this ONE time. Okay…I’m 40 now and I have a 6 year old son (Jacob Tyler). Anyway…I am constantly astounded by my sons inability to not be occupied by some form of electronic game (portable or other). Okay… so I get this email and I realize how true it is and I decide to share it with my friends and clients on my blog. Mistake? Maybe. But it’s so true and frankly I could probably add some notes that make it even funnier. For example… when they mention car seats… I remember I used to love how my dad would drive because it was a great game for me. I would FLY from one side of the back seat to the other when he made a fast turn. I could go on…but this new politically correct and safe world sometimes makes me laugh. One day I will make my son read this and understand how different he had it than me. See the email I was sent below:

if you are 30, or older, you might think this is hilarious!

When I was a kid, adults used to bore me to tears with their tedious diatribes about how hard things were. When they were growing up; what with walking twenty-five miles to school every morning…. Uphill… Barefoot… BOTH ways… yadda, yadda, yadda

And I remember promising myself that when I grew up, there was no way in hell I was going to lay a bunch of crap like that on my kids about how hard I had it and how easy they’ve got it!

But now that I’m over the ripe old age of thirty, I can’t help but look around and notice the youth of today. You’ve got it so easy! I mean, compared to my childhood, you live in a damn Utopia!
And I hate to say it, but you kids today, you don’t know how good you’ve got it!

I mean, when I was a kid we didn’t have the Internet. If we wanted to know something, we had to go to the damn library and look it up ourselves, in the card catalog!!

There was no email!! We had to actually write somebody a letter – with a pen! Then you had to walk all the way across the street and put it in the mailbox, and it would take like a week to get there! Stamps were 10 cents!

Child Protective Services didn’t care if our parents beat us. As a matter of fact, the parents of all my friends also had permission to kick our ass! Nowhere was safe!

There were no MP3’s or Napsters or iTunes! If you wanted to steal music, you had to hitchhike to the record store and shoplift it yourself!

Or you had to wait around all day to tape it off the radio, and the DJ would usually talk over the beginning and @#*% it all up! There were no CD players! We had tape decks in our car. We’d play our favorite tape and “eject” it when finished, and then the tape would come undone rendering it useless. Cause, hey, that’s how we rolled, Baby! Dig?

We didn’t have fancy crap like Call Waiting! If you were on the phone and somebody else called, they got a busy signal, that’s it!

There weren’t any freakin’ cell phones either. If you left the house, you just didn’t make a damn call or receive one. You actually had to be out of touch with your “friends”. OH MY GOD !!! Think of the horror… not being in touch with someone 24/7!!! And then there’s TEXTING. Yeah, right. Please! You kids have no idea how annoying you are.

And we didn’t have fancy Caller ID either! When the phone rang, you had no idea who it was! It could be your school, your parents, your boss, your bookie, your drug dealer, the collection agent… you just didn’t know!!! You had to pick it up and take your chances, mister!

We didn’t have any fancy PlayStation or Xbox video games with high-resolution 3-D graphics! We had the Atari 2600! With games like ‘Space Invaders’ and ‘Asteroids’. Your screen guy was a little square! You actually had to use your imagination!!! And there were no multiple levels or screens, it was just one screen… Forever! And you could never win. The game just kept getting harder and harder and faster and faster until you died! Just like LIFE!

You had to use a little book called a TV Guide to find out what was on! You were screwed when it came to channel surfing! You had to get off your ass and walk over to the TV to change the channel!!! NO REMOTES!!! Oh, no, what’s the world coming to?!?!

There was no Cartoon Network either! You could only get cartoons on Saturday Morning. Do you hear what I’m saying? We had to wait ALL WEEK for cartoons, you spoiled little rat-finks!

And we didn’t have microwaves. If we wanted to heat something up, we had to use the stove! Imagine that!

And our parents told us to stay outside and play… all day long. Oh, no, no electronics to soothe and comfort. And if you came back inside… you were doing chores!

And car seats – oh, please! Mom threw you in the back seat and you hung on. If you were luckily, you got the “safety arm” across the chest at the last moment if she had to stop suddenly, and if your head hit the dashboard, well that was your fault for calling “shot gun” in the first place!

See! That’s exactly what I’m talking about! You kids today have got it too easy. You’re spoiled rotten! You guys wouldn’t have lasted five minutes back in 1980 or any time before!

by Les Kollegian

Chris Crum reported for Web Pro News that Google is finally getting the biggest missing piece in real-time search. At Jacob Tyler, we are doing our best daily to make our clients aware of the importance of Social Networking (Social Media) as a part of their marketing mix. This is even more proof that developing “Fan Pages” in Facebook wil increase the possibility of first page placement for your Web site or business organic search results as explained below.

Google announced via Twitter this week, that public status updates from Facebook are now included in the search engine’s real-time search feature. That means the largest social network in the world is getting play in Google’s real-time search alongside Twitter, MySpace, and others, and these real-time results are often featured prominently on the first page of search results for the hottest queries.

Apparently only updates from Facebook PAGES are indexed. This includes links, status updates, photos, videos shared by page owners (not comments made by the fans). Any Facebook update (from regular user profiles) can be shared publicly, so I wonder why these aren’t being pulled. Results from Twitter and other places aren’t only from branded sources.

This seems to indicate that brands should be getting a good amount of play for Facebook appearances in Google’s real-time search results, and possibly in the real-time search results in general (due to Facebook’s huge user-base). Right now, Facebook isn’t dominating the results, but that is bound to change with it being the largest (by far) social network on the web.

by Jonathan Marshall

This video came out a year ago, but we missed it, so we’re bringing it back. It’s a fake TV spot done by British animatronics master John Nolan (the man who worked on Where the Wild Things Are, among other films).

It shows a mouse having a predictably nasty run-in with a trap – but that’s just the beginning of the story. It’s worth pushing through to the end, even for the squeamish. Nolan used a live mouse for the opening shots and animatronics for the rest.

Even though this commercial never made it to production, it turned into an extremely popular viral video. With almost 1,000,000 views, the creative agency that re-purposed the Nolan’s Cheese video into their social media strategy would consider this a viral success. The YouTube sensation spread quickly through 1000s of social media outlets, and most Social Media professionals would say this fake spot just goes to show – sometimes a questionable/risky TV spot can become a successful viral video…

by Les Kollegian

I attended an AIGA event today with speaker Arthur Schwartz from Techno Power Marketing entitled “How to Design and Implement a Successful Social Media Strategy“. Very good presentation with some great concepts. I wanted to point out a video he used to open the discussion which I will show the next client that asks me “How would using social media create ROI for my business?” For those of you interested in social media, this video is great and frankly the numbers are staggering.

by Les Kollegian

We work hard to educate our clients about SEO and when Jacob Tyler handles Web site design, we always do our best to handle all aspects of proper on-site SEO during the initial development. This includes Meta and Title tags, as well as appropriate page and image naming based on our clients keywords that work best for their business. Many Web Designers overlook this important stage of the process and frankly out of sheer laziness, don’t name images appropriately to enhance organic search engine optimization. Sage Lewis from Click Z wrote an excellent article called “The Four Keys to Image SEO Success“. Below he gives some of the important aspects of developing proper SEO on image tags. If you are interested in this topic, please follow him as he seems to always have the right idea. Below is a sample line of code that is on the Jacob Tyler Web site that shows how we name pages, images, alt, and title tags.

Anyway, this is what he said:

I have this nasty habit of making, what I think are, casual remarks that lead to a bit of controversy. In my last column, I wrote: “Putting key phrases in image ALT tags or comment tags does little good.”

A couple people thought that wasn’t right. For example, IslandsT wrote:
I like the rest of your ideas and they are great except this one:- ‘Putting key phrases in image ALT tags does little good’. Only little good? Do you know that this is one of the most important factors in SEO nowadays? Image search is so important and can always helps us to get extra traffic to our online blog. My point of reference is so often connected to the concept that search engine optimization primarily refers to the blue text links in the search engines. That is an outdated perspective.

SEO (define) takes so many shapes these days. That doesn’t make this conversation as clear and straightforward as one might like, however.

SEO refers to many things:

* Video optimization

* Local optimization

* Real-time optimization

* And most definitely, image optimization

This fact came home to me this past week when a new client discussed all the traffic they were getting from image search.

I’m not talking about some hip hop music site. These people fabricate a niche, industrial product. Only people that knew about this industry would do searches for these kinds of products.

Image search is becoming a significant driver of traffic. This is amusing because, not long ago, clients were asking me how to stop search engines from indexing their images. They didn’t want all that pesky server traffic. If that line of thinking makes sense to you, the easiest way of stopping search engines from indexing your images is adding something like this to your robots.txt file.
User-agent: *
Disallow: /images/

If your images are all located in a single directory such as “images,” this little bit of code will pretty much stop all those nosy search spiders from finding all your juicy images.

You can also specifically designate the Google image spider to stop accessing any of your site using this code in your robots.txt file:
User-agent: Googlebot-Image
Disallow: /

Just don’t somehow mash those two pieces of code together. I highly discourage something like this:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /

That will save you a ton of server traffic by telling all search spiders to not bother spidering or indexing anything in your site.

All that said, you would have to make a pretty strong case to me as to why in the world you wouldn’t want image search traffic. The point of your Web site is to market your business. While image search takes a bit of “out-of-the-box” thinking, it doesn’t take a mental giant to arrive at the conclusion: traffic is traffic.

So, how do you go about scooping up all this image search traffic?

Fortunately for us, Google has done a nice job laying out all the general tips and tricks.

Here are the highlights, which culminates as the four keys to image search optimization success:

* Create detailed, informative file names. If you upload images from your camera, they are often named things like: img00234.JPG. This doesn’t tell anything about the image. A better option would be something like: hp-95-ink-cartridge.jpg.

* Create detailed, informative image alt tags. With our ink cartridge example, you might say something like: .

But you also don’t want to go overboard with something like this:

You run the risk of looking like you’re stuffing key words in the alt tag. This could throw up a spam flag.

* Create detailed, informative anchor text. Anchor text (the text pages use to link to your site) gives the search engines a clear understanding of where they’re about to go. So, if our HP Ink Cartridge page had a link to it from another page on your site, you might link to it like this: HP 95 Tri-color Ink Cartridge.

* Create clear context for your image. Google says it best: Wherever possible, it’s a good idea to make sure that images are placed near the relevant text. In addition, we recommend providing good, descriptive titles and captions for your images.

People rarely make use of the title attribute for images. The w3schools.com describes its use like this:
The alt attribute is meant to be used as an alternative text if the image is not available, not as a mouse-over text. To show a mouse-over text on images or image-maps, use the title attribute, like this: .

Google is clearly stating that the title attribute plays a role in optimization, so I strongly encourage you to consider using it.

According to w3.org, there is no HTML element for a caption. So, you might do something like this:

COMPATIBLE HP 95 Tri-color Ink Cartridge. This is a Remanufactured HP 95 (C8766WN) Color Inkjet cartridge. For HP Deskjet, OfficeJet, PSC, Photosmart printers.

Taking time to do these things could significantly help you get a bunch more image search traffic.

by Jonathan Marshall

A determined man sets up an elaborate ruse in a bar to get a woman that he would not normally be able to get if it weren’t for this unforeseen, end-of-the-world circumstance they conveniently find themselves in.

French Advertising and Web Design Agency CLM BBDO Paris recently created this spot for Pepsi. I guess this guy took it literally when girls turned him down in the past by saying, “maybe if you were the last man on earth…”

by Jonathan Marshall

The fragrance of hops and the lightness of froth, for the first time in a gloss. On Valentine’s Day – the gift for her that makes you happy too.

Advertising Agency JWT nailed this concept – “Shining lips, golden highlights and an irresistible taste. For a long-lasting effect- repeat application.

“In this advertising campaign, JWT uses the simple yet comical differences between men and women as the foundation concept for Heineken’s creative advertising. Another good example of this would be their “Walk-in Fridge” spot they made about a year ago, also included below.

Bottomline – according to Heineken, men and women have completely different priorities, and at their most basic of levels, they want different things – a walk-in fridge of Heineken instead of a walk-in closet, and a lip gloss (for their gf) that tastes like Heineken instead of a lip gloss like Pink Whisper or Midnight Mocha Boom…

by Les Kollegian

We often try to explain to clients the importance of creating interactive advertising campaigns that will be “viral” so they can get the benefit of potentially thousands of users spreading the word of their products and services. Many times, great campaigns can be done quite cost effectively and with low budgets. The example below (while obviously having a decent production budget thanks to the addition of actress Jaime Presley) is not only funny, but super effective. Axe, a subrand of Unilever, always follows through with their core purpose in advertising. Simply put, they make guys think they are gonna get girls by purchasing their product. Anyway, congrats to them for another great ad campaign. Enjoy.

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