Cheetos & Other Visual URLs

One of the recent Cheetos commercials ends with an interesting way of representing its URL. Here is a screenshot from the end of the commercial:



What impressed me the most is that I've hardly ever seen URLs represented in this way. I started trying to imagine what other companies could get away with using an image of their products and a .com to represent their URL.

Last week, I saw a different representation of a visual URL. This time, instead of typing out facebook.com/sokaglam, I noticed this on the Soka Glam website:

It makes me wonder if this is the future of visually representing URLs. 

Generic Trademarks

Does it ever catch your attention when you talk about qtips, band-aids or Kleenex? I think about it a lot when I use these words. They're brand names of items that we have started using for mainstream items. We not only use these words for Kleenex brand products, but we also use them for off-brand tissues.

It's an interesting phenomenon that has evolved over time. Descriptive terms like jell-o, saran wrap and xerox are used to describe both brand name and off-brand items. It's difficult for the companies that paid to have these items trademarked.

Can you think of any other examples of generic trademarks?

The Islands

Every night for the past few weeks, when I've gotten home, I've noticed our neighbor's colorful Christmas lights. They're both from different Caribbean islands, so the bright colors always make me think of the marketing campaign from the Bahamas.

What I love about the marketing campaign is that it takes the map of the Islands of the Bahamas and morphs them into a colorful graphic. I have always been fond of flags and maps representing countries and people. They are both very powerful things for people to identify with.

It's represented in the last 10 seconds of the following video:

I can't think of any other marketing campaigns where the maps of the destinations are represented so well in the marketing campaigns. I will keep an eye out for them in the future. 

Dallas Digital Summit

My colleague and I spent Tuesday and Wednesday of this week at the Dallas Digital Summit. It is one of several digital conferences around the nation put on by TechMedia.

The conference included speakers from many areas of the digital world. I heard presentations about how influential Twitter is, how tablets and social media were utilized by voters in the run-up to the 2012 elections, and many other topics.

One of my favorite parts was listening to Ben Huh, CEO and Founder of Cheezburger. If you've ever gone to FailBlog, then I hope (dare I say expect) that you've had a really good belly laugh. This man made all of the adorable attitude-ified kitties and intense failures possible. And for that, I thank him heartily.

The Dallas Digital Summit was an incredible way to meet with other marketing and digital professionals and to learn from their experiences. 

512 Brewing (from Austin, of course)

A couple of months ago, we went to the Ginger Man Pub to meet up with some friends. It had been a few years since my last Ginger Man visit, and we went during the off-hours, so it wasn't too busy.

The Ginger Man Pubs always have a wide selection of beer on tap. I noticed one of the taps, and instantly knew (or thought I knew) where the brewery was from. This is what the taps looked like:

Image courtesy of thethreadaustin.com

The genius of naming their brewery "(512) Brewing" is that people instantly recognize "512" as an Austin-area area code. My favorite part of their branding process is the parentheses around the area code, to show that it's an area code.

Excellent Video about Melanoma

I recently spoke to someone whose mom is suffering from melanoma, a type of skin cancer. This made me think of one of my good friends, who lost her best friend to this disease over a year ago. I don't think that Laura even made it to her 30th birthday.

This video was created by the David Cornfield Melanoma Fund in Canada and it's quite powerful. Please take a few moments to watch this video called "Dear 16-year-old Me." It reminds me of another powerful video about Sex Trafficking.

Oreos for the Chinese Market

I found an article via NPR (National Public Radio) about the Oreo cookie and how they marketed it in China. If companies and businesses plan to bring their products to different markets or countries, they must do research.

People all over the world are driven by different goals and motivators. It's amazing when companies just assume that the American way will be the "right" way, no matter where they sell their products.

This article is a great example of how Oreo's marketing team listened to the Chinese public regarding their tastes and preferences:

http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2012/01/27/145918343/rethinking-the-oreo-for-chinese-consumers