Meet Zack, the star of the most disturbing online campaign EVER created.

The premise is that Zack went to bed one night with “guy parts” and woke up with “girl parts,” although he remains a guy in every other aspect. Throughout the videos Zack only expresses mild confusion, never close to FREAKING out like most guys would be.

On his site, Zack16.com,  you can read his diary and watch the very professionally produced videos of this transformation.  Check out his diary entry from Day 9 where a copywriter had the time of his life crafting these beautiful and touching words -

It happened so fast. C’mon, I just was just dealing with my newly acquired girl parts. And I had no choice. They just showed up. I didn’t even get a 30-day money back guarantee. Then BAM! I get hit by the menstrual express. I didn’t even have time to give my new girl parts a pet name like “Fifi” or “Alexandra.” No, we had to rush right into menstruation.

In the Day 9 video you’ll see the Tampax vending machine – voila after 9 freaking days of girl parts, vagina, PMS and menstruation talk we finally get a product placement that lets up know who to thank for this this “viral” series.

So thank you, I am now scarred for life. Is this as contagious as swine flu? Can I wake up one morning with “guy parts” or is this a guy to girl only type of thing? Why doesn’t Zack seem more concerned? Is this some sort of super strength STD that I need to be on the look out for?  Or does this prove that you can “lose it” if you don’t “use it”? Why hell isn’t he freaking out?? If I think Zack is cute, am I a lesbian? Ugh, you may have made me feel better about “Menstruation Island” but now I’m questioning my sexuality. Gee thanks Tampax!

Didn’t viral used to mean it was low budget and at least attempted to look like it was consumer produced? I wonder what the bill was for this because I see a part two where Zack wakes up with robot parts! Or his Fifi meets another Fifi and we learn about transsexuals. Or we follow around a girl who wakes up with “guy parts” and dribbles out apologizes to for every stereotypical guy cliche and then shaves her new balls, sponsored by Gillette.

You can read more about it on AdAge or if you’re like me, you can curl up into a ball and cry over the state of advertising.

81% of consumers read online reviews before purhcasing duringtheir holiday shopping according to MarketingCharts.com and Neilsen Online. While only a fraction of consumers will post reviews or submit complaints a whole lot more will read what those people are saying. If there are consistenly bad posts and no response from you, consumers will seriosuly consider buying from you.  

Do you know what your consumers are saying about you? Are you checking review sites such as Yelp.com as well as the niche review sites (like DealerRater.com for local dealerships)? Do you have a Google alert set to your brand or industry? Do you regularly check to see if Facebook/MySpace groups have formed for or against your brand? Do you monitor Twitter, Brightkite, Friendfeed and Blogs to listen to what your consumers are saying about you, your competitors and your industry?

While social media is fun, display ads easy and search is cheap, online reputation management is a bit more time consuming and harder to grasp. Unfortunately, that leaves a lot of brands unwilling to take the lead and spend their time seeking out reviews and taking control.  

So if you’re not doing at least everything mentioned above then start today, right now. Take 30 minutes and do all of the above and put it in your schedule to checkat least twice a week. It feels a bit like trying to read whats been scratched onto the bathroom stall about you. But once you know what people are saying (good or bad) then you can actually do something about it. And bitch-slapping the person who called you cheap is not an option.  

Start by listening to what your consumers are saying. Nice or not, reviews can help you improve your own businessand let you see where your competitors are lacking. If there are multiple reviews regarding your competitors poor service, integrate that into your marketing. Create a campaign or add message to your current campaign regarding your exceptional customer service, no need to call out your competitor the reviewers have done it for you (don’t forget to actually provide that exceptional service). Also listen for your faults, if customers complain that you’re not meeting their needs, then make changes. 

After you’ve spent some time listening, interact with the reviewers. Maybe your customers are lashing out at your online because they feel that they were not heard inperson/over the phone. Respond to their review with a comment expressing your concern over their bad experience/disappointment and provide them with the contact information of a manager or someone with authority. Provide the name and direct way to contact them, not a sales@blahblah email or general voicemail box. Tell them you will make it better. Not only will this soothe the reviewer it will show anyone reading the reviews that you care, you provide high quality service and a bad experience or faulty product are an exception to your brand. 

Do not get mad. The ability to be anonymous can bring out the worst in people. Yes, calling your sales team incompetent assholes is not all that nice. Responding back that they are an idiot will not solve the problem. Take the high road. Don’t seek to take down every negative post (unless it is incredibly wrong/vicious). Most sites do not remove reviews unless you can prove that the post was dishonestly or maliciously written (hard to do when most are anonymous). Your company is bound to have some bad customer experiences, no one is perfect. But if you deal with them quickly, honestly and nicely you’ll stand out amongst your competitors.

If you need more help getting started check out Mashable’s Top 10 Reputation Monitoring Tools and the Online Marketing Blog’s 6 Social Search Engines to Start 2009.

But don’t worry is isn’t some haughty predictions list, but merely a top 10 list of my hopes for marketing and technology in 2009. 

1. MySpace will die. Enough of the glitter backgrounds, 10 mintue page downloads and endless random friend requests from half naked teenagers. Most of the cool kids have left anyways. 

2. Everyone will stop hating on Twitter. You know you want to, like that one time in college. Get drunk and blame your experimental tweets on the booze. In four years if you’re not into it anymore you can just say you were going through a phase. Then you can follow me here. 

3. Spammers will learn correct grammar and proper English. Maybe more people would respond if they could read your spam emails or they contained plausable stories. Really I won the lottery in Nigeria, I didn’t even buy a lottery ticket?!

4. Mobile marketing will finally take off. The last few years have been predicted as The Year for mobile, please finally get big so the masses will figure out what the next big thing will be.

5. People will realize that it is not necessary to sign their names to posts on Facebook becasue FB shows your name and picture next to the comment. You are not drafting a letter when you post on someone’s wall so you really don’t need to sign it. 

6. Companies will realize that traditional marketing needs to be combined with new media and technologies just to stay relevant. Society is shifting and if you don’t change your business practices starting with how you interact with your consumer you will die out.  

7. Education Connection will hire a new agency. I can’t take their commercials any more. They are the absolute worst thing to have come out in 2008. And you will finally learn to integrate your TV spots with your online activites. Please stop using a different vanity URL in each spot and then  fail to buy any related keywords to those URLs (try buying class in PJS for ClassInMyPjs.com). Only bidding on “Education Connection” when it’s only mentioned once in each spot, is foolish. 

8. Online media distribution hubs will really take off. Rev3, Hulu and the like have grown in popularity this year and 2009 will be their year. Really I’d just love to save money on my monthly cable/internet bill.  

9. Music companies will have an epiphany and realize if their artists put out good music and put on a good show, they’ll make more money on concerts and shwag then they ever did on album sales. I hate the regret after you purchased an album, listen to it once and realize that  besides the one catchy single all the other tracks totally blow. Follow the consumers, stop suing your target audience and do something great again.  

10. Online advertisers will create a uniform system to buy and sell online placements. Start by creating a trusted leader in analytics for buyers to plan and buy off of and then websites should create creative standards for ads to be displayed (lower the clutter and make sure all creative is not going to annoy the hell out of your visitors). I don’t trust a good percentage of my online vendors stats, no one provides me with the same type of information and too many sites are concerned with quanity rather than quality. I want to spend my clients money, but you’re not making it easy.

Whats on your marketing/technology/media wish list for 2009? 

Oh and I want a robot and a time card that can fill in itself. Or maybe a robot to fill in my time card. And a helper monkey, I’ve always wanted a helper moneky, with a little green hat…. 

Happy New Year!

First up, Google’s SearchWiki has killed off SEO.

Google has made the SearchWiki function a permananet fixture on Google Search. So now you can organize and make comments on your search results. Your organized results will populate and influence future searches while your comments are made visible to other users who search on the same terms. Read more about how it works from The Telegraph.

SEO is thus ended as consumers have the power to rank and comment on results. No longer can back end tweaks, text edits and SEO the heck out of webpage. Or so some people think. I really don’t think it will have a negative effect on SEO, just force folks to stay relevant, informative and honest. Web 2.0 is all about being social and interactive, so embrace the change and SEO will live on. 

Banner ads have also been pronounced dead (yes, again)

Silicon Valley Insider thinks Banner ads are on their way out of digital media buys and I agree (sort of). As the billboards of online, its hard to measure their effectiveness (even with click throughs and impressions), they tend to only be effective for brand awareness and direct response. There are a bazillion articles and studies that discuss the types of people who click on banners. Lower income, serial clickers, people who know those lips belong to.

So few brands really can utilize banners for much good. I don’t think they’re going away, but there will be a lot more inventory available.  

The End of the Ad World 

I’ve seen a post or two about that. But I’m hoping to keep my job so I will not be promoting that one

Here are some of my favorite bits of information- you’ll have to read the book to learn more!

• Local products and services claim 27% of all searches
• Standard online media consumption – 40% of visitors claim 95% of the pages and ads, with the remaining 60% only taking 5% of the ads
• From homepage to 1 page deep, CTR drops to 60%; by the fifth page CTR declines to 50% and then steadily disappeared
• The presence of a human face in display ads increases the consumers desire to learn more about the advertised product or service
  
• Eye—tracking visualizations shows  users read web pages in a an F-shaped patter
  
• 36% of internet users will immediately leave a site if its too cluttered
  
• 90% of people find or leach websites through search, even when they know the URL
  

In a study posted on the Future Lab Blog, 70% of ads on Ads of the World posted in the last 4 months, did not include a URL. The article continues to rant about how ads should contain a URL by default in todays advertising world; I totally disagree. 

Most people use search engines by default when trying to find a website, even when the URL is knows, its entered as a search term rather than as a URL. 

Additonally, if you really need a URL posted in your ad then you’ve done a poor job of buying a URL thats in sync with your brand. Don’t be cute or tricky when buying selecting your domain, pick something obvious and easy or else you’ll HAVE to put your URL on everything. Really, only some local and niche companies should HAVE to list their URL.  

Instead of cluttering up your print ads with a URL, make your site incredibly easy to find utilizing SEO and paid search. If someone can’t Google your name, product or service and find you immediately, then you need a lot more web work then adding a URL to your ads. 

ClassInMyPJs.com has a spot that runs constantly on every morning on most of the MTV channels. While these media buyers got it right in traditional media, they are incredibly lacking with their online integration and the creative is insanely annoying.

The spot features a girl walking around the screen talking about how great it is to go to class in her pjs. Apparently she never went to high school or college, where people go into brick and mortar class rooms in their pjs.

If you’re trying to appeal to someone attempting to get a degree online, their motivation is most likely ease of use and time. Most of those seeking online degrees work full time or have other obligations (like a family), they don’t go to school online to stay at home all day. I highly doubt their target is so easily swayed or so lazy to pick their school based on which ones they can do in their “pink, fluffy slippers.” 

After seeing the spot multiple times every morning for a couple of weeks I jumped online to find it so I could rant about it here. I couldn’t quite remember the school or site the girl was pushing so I typed in a couple of variations on what she emphasized- class in my pjs, online school directory, college in my pjs, pj college. I exhausted every term and phrase I remembered from the spot but had no luck locating the site. 

I actually had to wait until the spot ran again so I could jot down the name of site – classinpjs.com – which redirected me to educationconnection.com after going just one page deep. Ugh, that kind of sloppy inconsistency is why so many companies fail to find success in their advertising. 

One of the first rules of online is to integrate key phrases from your ads into your PPC and SEO. Now for most companies I can excuse this oversight, however, this is an online directory of online schools. And while I don’t often spend much on PPC for your own company name, when the URL you’re directing people to is a phrase not a traditional company name, you definitely should buy that term and every variation you can think up!

If anyone from the company is reading this here is what you need to do:

- rethink your messaging and creative direction

- get a better website name

- buy up the search terms for phrases you repeat in your spot

- put a money towards your own URL

- optimize your site for your spot keywords

- as you have a highly competitive industry, find your niche and invest heavily in that for PPC

- or you can just hire my agency

Dammit I always thought I was so skilled with guessing celebrity lips….everyone ALWAYS wins??

Sheesh I feel so cheated….

Man Vs Banner Ad

I love your microsites.

You motivate me.

And you make me feel better.