When will Tiger be out of the woods?

Tiger Woods’ image is in trouble. If you have a tv, radio, Internet connection, or a friend or two then you know this. Tiger Woods is also a big time endorser of some big time products and brands: Nike, Gatorade, Gillette, etc. You probably knew that already, too.

So what do we know about athlete/celebrity endorsement deals after their images get tarnished? Ads get pulled.

According to media tracker Nielsen, the last time a commercial aired on tv featuring Woods was on November 29. That’s two calendar days after his car accident. Remember, the tales of infidelity and the long list of supposed mistresses did not start to leak out until after a few days after the accident. That’ll be the last time you see a commercial featuring Woods for some time.

Not forever though. If you asked the average non-golf-watching American to name three golfers, almost everyone would respond with Tiger Woods. After that, you’d get more blanks than anything else. Maybe Phil Mickelson would show up a few times. Woods is such an interesting figure because he stars in a sport that, if not for him, far fewer people would follow. How Tiger became such a mega sports celebrity in a sport like golf is baffling, but it’s also the reason why his sponsors won’t stay away forever.

Some time will have to pass. The mess he’s in now is going to take some time to blow over, for sure. I recently read this espn.com article that describes some actions Woods needs to take to help it blow over (even though the article has a joking tone, Woods would be wise to follow the advice). If you don’t click on the link, just know that Woods has to make a lot of apologies, consider some charitable donations, and most importantly appear on Oprah to expedite the healing process.

The American people are a forgiving people. Also, we love our athletes and celebrities. We love when they fail, but we also love when they admit they are wrong and we especially love when they try to rebuild their image. We support people who are flawed but trying, mostly because we too are flawed but trying.

I remember watching a basketball game between the NBA’s Denver Nuggets and Phoenix Suns. A player on the Nuggets, Chris Andersen, was suspended from the NBA several years ago after testing positive for some pretty serious drug(s). The commentators devoted five minutes to singing his praises and the recovery he’s made while turning his life around. A player on the Suns, Grant Hill, is known for being an all-around great guy who devotes time and money to charities. He’s never been in trouble with the law and is widely considered a positive role model. The commentators had nothing to say about Hill.

You see, it is human nature in this country to offer our support to those who we think need it most. For every person who is and will be vilifying Tiger Woods now and in the near future, there will be just as many if not more applauding the “strides he’s made in his personal life” a year from now. And that’s when the commercials will return.

The biggest sports star to go through what Tiger Woods is about to go through is Kobe Bryant. Kobe allegedly raped a woman in Colorado several years ago. While the charges of rape against him were dropped, he did cheat on his wife. His image took a hit, the endorsements slowed to a halt and he was booed in every stadium in which he played for the next year. But then he bought his wife a big diamond, apologized to his fans and continued being arguably the best basketball player on the planet during that time span.

Now he has a puppet, a children’s toy.

People are pretty worked up about Tiger Woods now, but it’s only a matter of time before we the public forgive and forget. As for his wife? Well, best of luck, Tiger.

————————————————————————————————————————- The Dream Factory Blog is managed by Matt Ruecker. To ask Matt any questions about what you’ve read here, please send him an email at media@dreamfactoryproductions.com.

Gadget Alert

Jack Dorsey, the guy who created Twitter, recently introduced a new gadget to the world. It’s a device that allows credit card payments by cell phone, and it’s called “Square.”

Square is a cube about in an inch in length that plugs into the headphone jack of most cell phones. It contains a magnetic strip reader that allows users to swipe and read credit cards. Users sign their name on their phone’s touch screen using their finger. Square should launch in March 2010 for iPhones and iPods.

That’s cool, but is their a practical use for it? At first I didn’t think so, but now I can see how some people could benefit from Square. While I have no need to carry around a little cube in my pocket to complete credit card transactions, a whole lot of other people do.

Think about folks who give private instrument lessons. They are pretty much dependent on cash transactions in a world that has become credit card/debit card dependent. In the cnn.com article about Square, Dorsey mentions how his co-founder can benefit from the new technology.

“My co-founder is a glass artist. He sells things that people don’t need — $2,000 glass faucets. They’re beautiful. If he could not take credit cards, he wouldn’t make the sale because no one carries around $2,000 in the cash.”

So maybe you’re like me and this Square thing doesn’t really appeal to you, but there are clearly people who can benefit from it. It’ll be interesting to see how well it does and to see how Dorsey pays for it. He will be giving it away from free apparently, and is considering charging a small per-transaction fee.

————————————————————————————————————————- The Dream Factory Blog is managed by Matt Ruecker. To ask Matt any questions about what you’ve read here, please send him an email at media@dreamfactoryproductions.com.

What happens in Vegas…

We’re a little bare here at Dream Factory this week; in fact we’re down by three Dream Teamers. Andres, Jim and Paulo are out of town on business attending the Power-Gen Conference. Oh, also the conference is in Las Vegas.

The guys are going to check out the booths of clients Turbine Technology Solutions and Gas Turbine Efficiency, and also to take in whatever else the gas turbine industry has to offer.

Here’s what the Power-Gen Conference website has to say about Power-Gen:

“Join over 18,000 attendees in Las Vegas for the industry’s fastest-paced, three-day information exchange designed to share practical experiences, knowledge and ideas on the latest power industry trends and challenges. Featuring insightful discussions, educational conference sessions and networking exchanges with the power sector’s leading companies, you’ll have the opportunity to network and learn from thousands of experts about the technologies and trends on the forefront of the power industry’s future.”

What we can be sure of: Andres, Jim and Paulo will return with additional knowledge and understanding of the turbine industry.

What we can’t be sure of: whether or not we will have some interesting, only-in-Vegas type stories to share on the blog next week.

Stay tuned.

————————————————————————————————————————- The Dream Factory Blog is managed by Matt Ruecker. To ask Matt any questions about what you’ve read here, please send him an email at media@dreamfactoryproductions.com.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Thanksgiving is tomorrow, folks. That means family, football, full bellies and traffic. It also means that Black Friday is coming, too – for those of us not passed out in a turkey-induced coma at least. Black Friday is the day after Thanksgiving which signifies the official beginning of the holiday shopping season. People line up in front of stores early in the morning and storm in at 5AM to take advantage of “door buster” deals that are only offered this time of year. It’s a significant day for marketers and advertisers to a certain degree. There’s certainly some strategy involved in keeping deals a secret up until a few days prior to Friday.

What’s neat to me, though, is how Black Friday is like a brand in and of itself upheld by all the major retailers in the country. For our economy in some ways, too. We at DFP have tomorrow and Friday off, as I’m sure many of you do. So have a happy Thanksgiving and a safe Black Friday if you participate (it can be scary, watch this video).

I leave you with a brief history of Black Friday:

The term “Black Friday” historically has ties to some not-so-great events. In 1939 Australia experienced a day of severely damaging fires on what has become known there as Black Friday. In September 1869 here in the U.S., we underwent a financial crisis that has become known as Black Friday. For the Black Friday that follows Thanksgiving, however, most sources say that “Black” refers to the accounting phrase “in the black” which is when a company becomes profitable. Lots of sales = increased profits.

Interesting tidbits:

• Black Friday is the busiest shopping day in terms of shoppers, but not sales. The Saturday before Christmas and Christmas Eve typically make more money for stores than Black Friday.
• In 1939, Franklin D. Roosevelt moved Thanksgiving from November 30 to the last Thursday in November to appease the Retail Dry Goods Association who warned FDR that if the holiday shopping season didn’t start before the 30^th, retail sales would be dismal.
• Congress officially changed that date of Thanksgiving in 1941. The two years in between were a little confusing, especially for state governments who had a hard time deciding whether to recognize the original Thanksgiving date, or “Franksgiving.”
• “Cyber Monday” is celebrated the Monday after Thanksgiving when online retailers offer their own special discounts for online shoppers.
• Online retailers also make more money during the weeks leading up to Christmas than on Cyber Monday, but not on Christmas Eve because online shoppers have to factor in shipping time.
• I’m going to have a good Thanksgiving, and I hope you do too.

————————————————————————————————————————- The Dream Factory Blog is managed by Matt Ruecker. To ask Matt any questions about what you’ve read here, please send him an email at media@dreamfactoryproductions.com.

Tweet at Your Own Risk

I stumbled upon an interesting news story at cnn.com recently. Courtney Love is being sued for libel by a fashion designer for allegedly posting derogatory and false comments about her on Twitter. Among Love’s comments was one that claimed the designer had a “history of dealing cocaine.” Love has since discontinued her Twitter feed.

It’ll be interesting to find out the result of this case, especially since there really is not much precedent for it. Twitter hasn’t even been around for five years, and that brings us to the major point of the article and what I want to talk about: technology evolves faster than the laws that govern it. Andrea Matwyshyn is a professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School and tracks the intersection of law and technology. She had this to about the topic, “Generally, [the law] is at least five years behind technology as it is developing.”

The reason is simple. Lawmakers cannot predict what new technology is going to develop and become the next big thing any better than we can. Even if you were a developer for Twitter or Facebook, there’s no way you could have predicted the success of those websites to the extent that they have been successful. They keep changing too. Facebook did not originally have their News Feed which tracks the posts and activities of your friends. Now it does, and that’s something that even the folks at Facebook probably didn’t foresee happening until after Twitter also struck it big.

The CNN article raises a very important question regarding the difficulty of applying law to Internet-based cases: Is the Web a unique, separate space, or is it actually an extension of real space? While I’m sure Courtney Love is hoping her judge sees it as a separate space, I can’t help but think that as we move forward the Web will eventually be seen as an extension of real space. I know I spend hours every day on the Internet, and I don’t even access it with my phone. There are probably people who spend more of their time consumed by the Web than they do in “real life.” When does that separate space become an extension of the real space? I think soon.

How soon? Well, that’s why we have to pay attention to cases like this one involving Courtney Love. The courts will ultimately decide how soon. This is just one kind of headache for the courts created by the Internet and its ubiquity. To read about some of the other challenges including who gets jurisdiction in cases that involve two different continents, give the CNN article a read.

In the meantime, I suggest sticking to the facts, very clearly identifying your opinions as opinions, and playing nice when it comes to social media. If you don’t have something nice to say, maybe it really is best to say nothing at all.

 

 

————————————————————————————————————————- The Dream Factory Blog is managed by Matt Ruecker. To ask Matt any questions about what you’ve read here, please send him an email at media@dreamfactoryproductions.com.

Special Cargo

The Rhino Rolling Advertising Awards are handed out each year in Germany in celebration of truck side advertising. The awards have only been around since 2005, but submissions have quickly gotten very creative.

What is truck side advertising? It’s what it sounds like. On the cargo part of a semi-truck, vehicle wraps are applied that bear the image or message of the advertising. So if a semi is shipping crates of Pepsi across the country, the outside of the truck might have a Pepsi can or logo on the outside.

The Rhino Rally Awards are given to the best of such advertisements, and it’s incredible what can be done with vehicle wraps these days. Have a look.

To check out some more Rhino Rolling Advertising Awards submissions, head over to their website. You may have to do some clicking around as the site is in German, but a good way to start is by clicking on “Sieger 2007/08″ on the left hand side.

————————————————————————————————————————- The Dream Factory Blog is managed by Matt Ruecker. To ask Matt any questions about what you’ve read here, please send him an email at media@dreamfactoryproductions.com.

Instituto Jatobas

When your CEO calls Brazil his first home, you sometimes end up working on some pretty interesting (read: Portuguese) projects. The project we recently worked on came from Duailibi Petit Zaragoza Propaganda (DPZ) in Sao Paulo, Brazil.

Dream Factory was tasked with not just translating, but migrating the message of a video from Portuguese to English. This resulted in several sessions in the edit bay between Paulo, Jim and Matt going through the video in five second intervals to get the direct translation of what was being said and then deciding exactly what was meant by the translation.

The video was for a program called Instituto Jatobas which visited Pardinho, a town in Sao Paulo, and helped influence the city to be self-sustaining. In the video, the changes made in Pardinho are highlighted and used as an example for what Instituto Jatobas hopes to do in the future for different towns.

A fun and interesting project for sure. If you need help migrating your brand message across different cultures, that is something DFP is certainly experienced in handling. Contact us to talk more about it!

————————————————————————————————————————- The Dream Factory Blog is managed by Matt Ruecker. To ask Matt any questions about what you’ve read here, please send him an email at media@dreamfactoryproductions.com.

AT&T vs. Verizon

AT&T and Verizon are not friends right now. The reason why? This commercial:

As you can tell from the commercial, Verizon has taken a shot at AT&T’s spotty 3G coverage by playing off of the iPhone’s ubiquitous phrase, “There’s an app for that.” The iPhone is of course only available to AT&T subscribers.

So that hurts. The holiday season is fast approaching, and nobody wants to lose market share now. The commercial highlighted a significant problem for iPhone users though, and it’s a problem that hasn’t exactly been a complete mystery in the past. If you don’t live in a major city, your 3G coverage is probably going to be spotty if you are an AT&T/iPhone user.

How should AT&T have responded? Well, they probably should have just waited it out and continued to highlight in their advertising what makes the iPhone the most desirable smart phone available. That’s not what they decided to do, and it’s a decision that could haunt them.

AT&T decided instead to sue Verizon claiming that the commercial misleads consumers into thinking that they won’t get AT&T wireless service in large parts of the country.

Why is this probably a mistake? There’s a number of reasons. First of all, filing a lawsuit tends to bring more attention to the issue. A lot of people are looking at smart phones as holiday gifts, and if they do a little bit of research they’ll likely stumble upon this issue. It’s even more likely now that a lawsuit is involved. Do a Google search for “at&t coverage” and see what comes up. About half of the results are about the AT&T and Verizon dispute.

Another reason to avoid filing a lawsuit is that you could lose and suffer the consequences. In this case, the consequence of losing is belittling your brand image. AT&T claims that the ads mislead consumers into thinking they won’t get AT&T wireless service in large parts of the country, and that might be true. However, the ad makes it very clear that the map comparisons are for 3G coverage. Some people may not understand that there are levels of service beneath 3G available in those areas of the country, so perhaps they are the ones AT&T believes are being mislead. Even if the ads are ruled to be misleading, they definitely do not lie.

This brings to light a third reason to avoid lawsuits (at least in this situation). Perhaps you win the lawsuit. Punishment for false advertising often is to run corrective advertising. Can you imagine what the corrective advertising might say? Here’s my shot at it:

Verizon recently ran a series of ads that may have been misleading to the public. We claimed in these ads that Verizon’s 3G network had better national coverage than AT&T’s. While this is true, it may have lead you to believe that AT&T does not have coverage in large areas of the country. AT&T does have better national coverage than our ads might have let you to believe. It’s just not all 3G coverage, like ours.

Even if AT&T wins the lawsuit, it doesn’t change the fact that their 3G coverage is inferior to Verizon’s. The added attention brought on by the lawsuit also doesn’t help the growing perception that maybe something is wrong with AT&T’s service or coverage that needs to be inspected by the consumer before purchasing a smart phone.

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While writing this blog post I crossed an adage.com article about the same topic. Here’s what they had to say about when is the right time to go for the lawsuit:

When should you sue on a competitive claim?

There really are just two instances that call for the courts, according to Marc Hausman, CEO of Strategic Communications Group. One occurs when a larger player faces a serious competitive threat from an innovative but smaller, less well-financed rival. A suit can stop the latter fast in its track because it doesn’t have the deep pockets to defend itself. Legal action is also warranted when a company wants to call attention to an issue so important that litigation is the only venue that can attract any real mind share.

Legal recourse could also be an option when a brand has to defend its reputation, and wants to make a statement that sends a message not only to customers, but vendors, regulators, and the government, said Scott Sobel, president of Media and Communications Strategies. But avoid suing on an issue that could potentially call attention to your weakness, as AT&T did.

Also be careful not to file a frivolous suit, Mr. Sobel said. “Suing for the sake of suing is a bad idea; it sends a message that you’re litigious, petty and you don’t have the consumers’ interests in mind.”

————————————————————————————————————————- The Dream Factory Blog is managed by Matt Ruecker. To ask Matt any questions about what you’ve read here, please send him an email at media@dreamfactoryproductions.com.

SMART Ideas: eBay in the Sky

Online monster eBay is partnering with Delta Air Lines in a promotion that will provide free WiFi to passengers on nearly 300 planes for seven days starting on November 24. Passengers on these domestic flights will be given a promotional code that will direct them straight to eBay’s holiday homepage. Of course the plane passengers will be able to browse to other websites and use the WiFi to their hearts’ content, but the first page that everyone will see is eBay’s.

Here are some quick bullet points about why it’s  a smart idea:

• The seven days that the promotion will run coincide with one of the busiest flying weeks of the year (no doubt due to Thanksgiving travel).
• Thanksgiving is, at least in my mind, the official beginning of the holiday season. People will be starting to think about buying gifts for family and friends, and then realize they have the next 3 hours to either get ideas for presents using eBay, or make their purchases in the air.
• Because eBay’s page is the first to come up visibility is ensured for everyone using the free service, including people who may not have ever considered using eBay.
• Cell phones with Internet capability are so ubiquitous now, and they’re the perfect tools for bored passengers looking to kill some time. People don’t need to have a laptop to be on the Internet while flying anymore, so eBay’s promotion will be used by a ton of people.

This promotion by eBay is being done in order to generate new customers.  Involving the passengers rather than just putting an advertisement in the airport terminal was definitely a smooth move, so this promotion gets the SMART stamp of approval.

Plus, I think it would be super cool to say you bought something off eBay while flying in an airplane.

————————————————————————————————————————- The Dream Factory Blog is managed by Matt Ruecker. To ask Matt any questions about what you’ve read here, please send him an email at media@dreamfactoryproductions.com.

Sky Mall

Dream Factory CEO Paulo Cigagna recently returned from a brief trip to Canada. While flying all over the place,  Paulo got sucked into the same routine we all do. Board the plane, sit down, fidget into a semi-comfortable position, get bored, flip through the Sky Mall.

This was no ordinary Sky Mall, however. This Holiday 2009 edition Sky Mall is different because within its pages is an advertisement created by Dream Factory Productions for Bolt projector phone from client Logic Wireless. Paulo brought a copy back with him to DFP (they’re free to take, I swear) and I chatted with Danielle Fleming who designed the ad. Here’s a link to the ad followed by some of Danielle’s thoughts regarding it:

Sky Mall ad

Thoughts from Danielle:

• The ad needed to communicate the phone’s usability and simulate the use of its primary differentiator, that being the phone’s ability to project images and videos onto walls.
• We decided that the ad needed to be straight to the point and list the phone’s benefits and features. That’s the best way to get the message across in Sky Mall where attention spans are limited.
• When creating the logo for Logic Wireless, I went through a number of different images, but always came back to the owl. This is because owls are a symbol of intelligence, and by extension, logic.
• I used blue as the color for the owl and the Bolt name to give the phone a business-like feel. This phone is not just for gadget geeks, but also for businesspeople, so the logo had to reflect that