Cooking With My Kid makes a return appearance on Craft this week. And not only that, when we met with some new Chicago contacts this week, several people knew the blog unprompted. Does this mean our Founder’s mommy blog is becoming a household name? Well, maybe not quite but the traffic sure is impressive. Here’s the latest from Craft …
Cooking With My Kid has quickly become one of my very favorite blogs. The recipes are simple, but still interesting, and even if you don’t have a kid you’ll want to try them. This latest recipe is no exception. How brilliant are these bite-sized Greek salads? They would be a great way to get your child to eat some healthy veggies (and being able to assemble them on their own scores big bonus points) and they’d work great for party snacks. Love it!
We’ve had an excellent time watching Rebecca’s mommy blog Cooking With My Kid take off. Rebecca has used her social media savvy to score all kinds of exciting mentions. Her most recent coup is a placement on Ohdeedoh.com, part of the extremely popular ApartmentTherapy network. Apartment Therapy Media reaches over 4.3M unique visitors per month. That’s no small audience and quite a testament to Rebecca that her content made the cut. Rebecca’s audience is growing by the week and now reaches over 50,000 uniques. From Ohdeedoh …
There’s not much that would prompt us to turn on the stove in this heat, but we’ll make a notable exception for these baked apple donuts. Donuts have always been a favorite, but we found the notion of frying them to be intimidating. Rebecca of Cooking With My Kid discovered that you can bake them – with delicious results. This information may just revolutionize our weekends.
Read the rest of Ohdeedoh’s post here … and go Rebecca go!
Our talented Creative Director, Jon Setzen, made the move from Brooklyn to Los Angeles over the holiday weekend. It was a bitter sweet move for Jon, leaving the Brooklyn that he loves for a new bright future in LA. Our Los Angeles team is already very busy making sure he falls in love with the other coast pronto. Check out his post and visit his blog:
This is the first photograph, in its 2 megapixel glory, I took when I moved to NYC. I moved here, like many do, with a suitcase, an open mind and a desire to build a business, meet a girl, and order steak frites for delivery at 4am. Thankfully, I leave here knowing I managed to do all that.
New York is the greatest city in the World. There’s no comparison. I love London, I love Barcelona, I love LA, I love SF, I love Stockholm, I love Venice, I love Cape Town and so on, but nothing compares to NYC. It’s a city where on a good day you feel like you’re on top of the World as the people, the cabs, the lights, the noise and the energy seem to lift you up and whisk you around town. On a bad day, all of these things seem to hammer you down to the point of feeling worthless.
The Beer Institute reported in 2008 that Americans drink more beer on the 4th of July than any other day of the year. Seems like a good time to kick off a series of blog posts about digital marketing and beer! My colleagues and I know a thing or two about the sauce. Not because we like to tie one on (although we’ve done that maybe just once or twice) but because we spent several years as the primary digital agency (DNA Studio) over at the King of Beers, Anheuser-Busch. So I’m going to devote a couple of summer posts to beer marketing and digital marketing’s role in it.
According to the Beer Institute, beer is the #1 most popular alcoholic beverage in America and accounts for roughly 85% of the total alcoholic beverages sold each year. That seems like great news if you are in the business of selling beer. But the trouble is not the volume, it’s the trend. Industry shipments were down 4% last year, including the craft sector. In a recent article from AdAge, Harry Schuhmacher, the publisher of Beer Business Daily said this about beer sales at food, convenience and drug stores:
“I’ve never seen so much red ink on a spreadsheet in all my years in this business. It’s really disconcerting.”
Ouch. In fact, craft breweries and cheaper brands are the only areas that are seeing any sort of growth. This is putting remarkable pressure on Anheuser-Busch and MillerCoors whose top brands Bud Light, Coors Light and Miller Light, have typically led their sales.
The beer companies are quick to blame the economy. But call me crazy (and I’m not basing this in any kind of data here) but when you are out of a job, aren’t you maybe a little MORE apt to grab a 6-pack at the convenience store to while away the hours? Regardless of that particular insight, I think there’s something else going on here.
These large brands as mass brands. They were designed to appeal to a wide audience. But “mass audiences” are a thing of the past. I can remember learning about using aspirational tactics to drive marketing appeal when I was in college. Nowadays, the trick is realizing that many people aspire to be a little bit unique. Or at least to have an “in” that makes them more interesting to or differentiated from their peers or a taste that is a little more defined and specific. I think that’s partly why the remaining beer drinkers are bringing those craft brews to the party rather than being the guy who shows up with a 12-pack of Bud Light.
That’s probably why the new products divisions of A-B and MillerCoors are working overtime, developing brand extensions and craft-like brands and flavors. But are they not using the same mass techniques to market the stuff? Take Bud Light Lime and Bud Light Golden Wheat. Sort of different but sort of the same too, right?
We spent a lot of time helping A-B bring new products to the market in the mid-2000′s. And although every single product didn’t explode, we helped with some of the most successful new product launches at the time including Bacardi Silver and Michelob Ultra. Sort of ironically, one of our tactics was something we called webmaster relations. We’d reach out to webmasters running sites that pertained to the niche audience of would-be believers in a given product or service and get them interested in checking out the product and our site. Sounds a lot like social influence marketing, doesn’t it? Then we ran rich media ads to appeal to those same niche audiences once the brand started to pick up some steam. And what happened? Traffic flowed in.
So what do you do if you are working in the new products division at one of the big breweries? Let people feel like they discovered the brand (don’t slap the name Bud Light on it) and put a serious social ecosystem behind it to start generating buzz. Give the brand an edge, some quirkiness, some history or a sense of mystery. Give the product the attributes that research shows it needs and then target it at a niche that has enough mass to drive your business. And then just keep working at it. Everything that advises how social influence marketing works best says to stay away from corporate speak. Stay away from mass appeal. Have a conversation. Plenty of people are have conversations about beer. Why aren’t the big beer companies participating? We’ll look at some cool examples from some of the smaller guys in future posts.
In 1982 I was living in Toronto, Canada and my dad and I watched just about every match of that World Cup together. Italy’s goal-scoring hero, Paolo Rossi, became my idol for a year or so before my allegiance moved to Manchester United’s Frank Stapleton. Regardless, I remember sitting in front of a tiny tv watching a poor picture transmitted from Spain. It was enjoyable an enjoyable and engrossing tournament and one that changed my life forever. I was more obsessed with the game than anything else. I also loved the Italian team (think “Breaking Away”) and my dad looked everywhere for a photo of the team for me. Eventually, he found one at an Italian restaurant in Toronto’s Little Italy – this was months after the tournament and the picture appeared on a box of biscotti. Needless to say, it was tough to find information, photos and no chance finding videos of the players or matches.
In 2010 everything in different. There is so much chatter and information online that if you don’t want to know the result of a match you literally need to cease all communication to the outside World – no cell phones, no landlines, no twitter, no facebook, nothing online. However, if you do want to stay connected and you can’t get to a TV it’s never been easier and more thorough.
Twitter issued a statement saying they would be expecting outages in their service as people were tweeting non-stop during the matches. During the USA v England match more than 1 billion tweets were sent in 90 minutes. You can join Twitter’s World Cup conversation (and make a little soccer ball appear in your tweet) by using “#worldcup” in your post. If you use the right three letter hashtag, such as #usa or #rsa you can make a flag show up. So, when you’re quickly browsing tweets you see tons of little flags and instantly see just how many people are talking about this tournament.
There are about 20 ways to watch the matches online (the link was supplied by one of our Italian Twitter followers) and apparently only one of them is legal – ESPN3.com. However, you have to have Verizon as your ISP, so we make due and use sites like iraqgoals.net, justin.tv and others. If you do have ESPN3 access you can watch matches on your phone. This sort of thing still astounds me. Even if you can’t watch the actual matches you can listen on ESPN radio, follow along with the live stats and watch video replays of goals moments after they’ve happened.
Google has a World Cup calendar which syncs with regular Google Calendar and let’s people know you’re in a meeting when a match is on although we surely wouldn’t condone that sort behavior. Speaking of calendars, there are literally thousands of calendars and brackets out there, but none as beautiful as the one put out by Spain’s La Marca.
For those of you who actually want to venture out of the house just about every establishment with televisions will be showing these matches. The NYTimes.com, who constantly kills it when it comes to interactive features, has various ways of visualizing stats from the matches and for those in the five boroughs and interactive map showing where to go to watch your team.
Finally, there are so many videos online of the goals that the real challenge is trying to watch them before they’re removed because of copyright issues. With that said, here’s a video of the first goal of the tournament and arguably the best so far by Siphiwe Tshabalala of South Africa.
Also highly recommended are The Guardian UK’s Daily World Cup Podcast and US Soccer Fan Doug Zimmerman’s Photoblog from South Africa. However, not highly recommended is the irritating vuvuzella iphone app which seems (if walking around my neighborhood is any indication) to be getting downloaded way too often. Enjoy The Cup!
