The Beancast – Talking about branding, marketing and gas station tacos

Posted on | August 8, 2011 | No Comments

Spent some time last night with the ace crew appearing on this week’s Beancast. It was a blast talking about gas station tacos, the new reality of online advertising, porn and bitches. This week the group assembled was:

Bob Knorpp (The Beancast)
Cindy Gallop (If We Ran The World)
Rupal Parekh (AdAge)
Christopher Baccus (AT&T)
…and me…

The Beancast is a marketing podcast recorded each Sunday evening by industry vet Bob Knorpp. Bob has a revolving cast of characters each week, so the discussions, as you can see, cover a wide range of topics and are always entertaining. Bob’s pre-show prep notes can give you an idea of what the topics were this week:

Is Facebook The New Nielsen Family?: Once again Facebook is trying to leverage the wealth of information it has on us for the sake of profit. They’ve announced a new partnership with Nielsen that could bring demographic accuracy to the online ad space. Now is this partnership between Facebook and Nielsen really as important as it seems? They claim that this tracking of ads will be as, if not more, effective than their TV model of tracking family viewership — are there holes in this claim? Isn’t this opening another pandora’s box over privacy — can Facebook really afford another privacy battle with competition heating up from Google? Another study out last week showed that most Facebook fans of local businesses aren’t local to that business. The concern was that businesses need to target locally better, but does it also reveal that we still don’t know how to assign relevance to relationships with brands — will this tracking be able to get to intangibles like the person travels a lot or orders online?

The Plan For Foursquare Pages: Not to be outdone by the bigger players, Foursquare announced it will be expanding it’s branded pages offering. Up til now only companies could apply for these pages, but soon any of us could throw up a check in page. BeanCast page here we come! This is obviously a good growth move for the company, but could it also hurt the the service with a glut of irrelevant content? Do users really desire more content than check-ins, tips and the game? What about the rumor in the NY Post this past week that Foursquare plans to start charging brands for their official pages — can Foursquare do what even Facebook hasn’t been able to achieve?

Product Placement As A Regulation End-Run: Advertising to kids has become a hot button issue and a wave of regulations are thwarting marketers from promoting products like fast food to young people. But these marketers seem to have a found a loop hole by exploiting more and more product placements as their means of keeping their products in front of their audiences. Ethics aside for a second, is it wise for marketers to be doing this or is this just a desperate move that will draw additional outrage and regulation? What options do marketers have when their products aimed at kids are under fire? When does a brand have to come to terms with the fact that their problem is not a marketing one, but a product one?

Mobile’s Need For Simplicity: A great article by Kunur Patel over at AdAge.com this week highlights some of the major obstacle to the growth of mobile advertising in the US. I (Bob) read this article and am I right in distilling the problem down to a need for simplicity? Is the problem really the complexity of different platforms and multiple ad creation or are marketers just being too resistant to the new way of things where you can’t just shoot a commercial in one format and send copies to all the stations? Would standardization really fix things in the end — isn’t the real problem results? Would advertisers take on even the most complex system if it proved itself to be more effective than the old system?

The Problems With Promoted Tweets: Finally, some trouble is brewing in the Twitter ad offerings. Brands are once again questioning the ethical problems of having their promoted tweets appearing right alongside uncurated topics that can be anything from Hitler discussions to pornography. Does Twitter need to do a better job of policing trends or do brands need to get a better understanding of advertising in the social spaces?

And here are all the link you’ll need to hear us chatter about those topics:

Subscribe to The BeanCast Marketing Podcast

Show notes for Episode 163 of The BeanCast Marketing Podcast

The direct file link to the mp3 so you can Listen to Episode 163 of The BeanCast Marketing Podcast

The iTunes link for The BeanCast.

The iTunes link for Fast Takes.

The Fast Takes RSS feed.

The BeanCast AudioBoo Page.

The Beancast Zune Link.

The iTunes link for Ad Age Outlook.

Hit the link if you’re interested in learning about the gas station tacos, the reference to “bitches” ewas because Cindy noted many younger Facebook users are creatively tagging friends with the “spouse” flag. I noted I would request a “bitch” option be instituted by Facebook, because I wanted to make Bob my bitch. And that reference to porn? Well… Cindy will explain that shortly over here…