I have been co-hosting a weekly podcast called The Bella Buzz with the CEO of Bella Web Design, Desiree Scales.  We have good conversations about topics related to online marketing.  Thought it would be a good time to start replicating the programs here for the Overflow audience.  This is episode 39.

It is a Super Bowl commercial postmortem on this week’s Bella Buzz podcast.  Desiree and Joe break down the effectiveness of the advertising dollars that the big brands spent during Super Bowl XLIV, or should we say lack of effectiveness.

Last year, the expectation was more and more of the big brands would find creative ways to incorporate social networks into their traditional campaigns.  The rating for social media usage by this year’s advertisers is once again a big #FAIL.

We know we tend to see things from within our bubble of online marketing and social media practitioners, but it’s time for the big brands (and more specifically the big brand agencies) to start leveraging the dollars they spend on broadcast advertising by driving customers to interact via social networks.  The opportunity exists right now to engage a customer, capture some of their key contact data and then continue to interact with that customer so that they become a true brand evangelist.  Why are they wasting this media buy!?!

On the podcast, we did dig into a couple of the ads directly to discuss our reactions to them and the first one we reviewed was the Google Ad:

We had both heard that a spot was a possibility, so we were on the lookout for it to appear on the broadcast.  It was a very well done spot which subtly displayed how search is completely embedded in our lives. Google just needs to be careful about how well they present information for web searchers.  They could be accused of “scraping” so much content from web site owners and content producers that the traffic no longer actually clicks to the original site.

Throughout the night’s broadcast there was a considerable amount of conversation taking place on Twitter using the hashtag #BrandBowl you can still see some activity there by following that link to the Search.Twitter service.  These large brands HAVE to be aware that there is a large, receptive audience ready to interact with them if the creative is done correctly.  That hashtag was different from the #SB44 which was mostly game specific conversations.  Brands should be able to manage the variety of conversations effectively by understanding the difference.

At the very least consider what we call the Offline Ask.  At every opportunity in front of a potential customer you must make the ask.  Ask them to become a part of your community whether it be to follow you on Twitter, join a Facebook Fan Page or submit an email address.

What specific actions should a business owner take when participating in the Live Web?  Get involved in the conversation around a particular event.  If you come with relevant, interesting, eloquent insights that make someone take notice and check out your profile .. which in turn, drives someone back to your business web site, you just might gain a customer.

How did the Super Bowl ads work for you? Were you expecting anything in the social media space that didn’t appear, or maybe you did see some things that we might have missed?  Let us know in the comments, we would love to know what you thought.

Theme music for The Bella Buzz is Fallen by Digital Chemistry, available for download at the Podsafe Music Network. 

You can subscribe to The Bella Buzz directly from ITunes by following this link, and we would be happy to receive listener feedback and ratings at The ITunes Store.

During this episode of the Overflow Podcast, Cameron needed to respond to the article that was published on the Advertising Age web site titled “Is Creativity Relevant Online?”.

The author Marc Brownstein with that provocative title actually turns on the question itself and admits that most of the conceptual thinking, art direction and execution that he has seen has been lacking lately, and postulates that it might be due to a current emphasis on navigation and architecture skills.

Although the skills may be lacking in creatives he has encountered, it is most definitely still relevant. It is important to study and learn the basic concepts of what defines great creative, and then adapt those concepts to the medium in which they will be executed.

It is possible to believe that there was not a whole lot of late nights spent over the graphic presentation of sites such as Craigslist, Ebay or Google .. and the entire effort was placed on the user interface functionality.  However, each of these sites are the market leaders in their space. Does this reflect the fact that creativity is no longer relevant?

On the contrary, it is our belief that there needs to be a re-definition of what it means to be creative, and that there is as much a level of creativity in lines of code as there is in a graphics standards manual defining proper use of fonts, colors and logo treatments.

The creative foundation needs to be established in order to build upon it with great UI, interactive elements, applications and other technologies which will raise the creative to another level.

So to address the article, let’s look to have the creative artists today learn the basics of the skill set so that they do not erode in this new environment, and then apply them to further areas of creativity such as coding and development.  Future applications will continue to reflect relevant creative output.

Good friend Frank Singleton, Senior Vice President at Ogilvy Communications World Wide joins us on this episode of Overflow. There are times when we have a good time on Overflow, talking about music and other fun social endeavors, but today we get a bit serious discussing the future of advertising.

The conversation was instigated by a blog post on TechCrunch by Eric Clemons, Professor of Operations and Information Management at The Wharton School. The article contained the link bait worthy headline of “Why Advertising is Failing on the Internet”.

The premise is that advertising in general is not effective when it is an intrusive interruption to whatever is attempting to be accomplished while browsing on line. This is something that Doc Searls was saying in The Cluetrain Manifesto 10 years ago.

Frank’s great line is that “advertising is not failing on the internet, as much as advertising is failing the internet” .. he means that advertising needs to stop trying to shoehorn former ways of communicating into this medium and become more creative with the technology that is available.

Clients will be looking to new ways to spend dollars in the future, where a traditional buy might be to spread dollars through broadcast to print and public relations .. now that spend might be technology investment such as mobile applications or rich media content development such as podcasts and video.

A future application for direct brand communication is the intersection between mobile and location based advertising.  Frank is working with a client looking to build targeting technology where moments after crossing through the security gates at the airport, a text message discount for a coffee will be delivered to the consumer… Powerful if not overused.

We also needed to hit Frank up for his thoughts as a Crisis Communications expert about the AIG rebranding to AIU in the face of the bailout bonuses that have been the rage of Capitol Hill.

“It ain’t rocket surgery, you have to tear the bandaid off to heal the wound”.