Eco-Friendly Digital Marketing Internship

We’ve all been pestered by flies. Annoying critters.

I’m sure some of us, amusingly, have thought about tying a string to them and carrying them around as pets.

However, a Germon book company, Eichborn, dediced to think beyond flies merely as annoyances or pets. They looked at them as advertising media.

“Eichborn’s “smallest commercial gimmick in the world” was simple: attach physical banner ads to actual flies.” You’re kidding? See for yourself @Mashable

I’m no environmentalist, but consider a thought process I developed the other day while reading for my advertising class.  I was studying for ADV475  “Advertising and Society,” when I discovered an interesting point in my text.  The section I was reading dealt with the history of the advertising industry and was discussing the emergence of branding.

What struck me as interesting is that it wasn’t until the late 20th century that manufacturers began to put brand names on various consumer products like soap, oats, and etc..  This opened up huge opportunities because it allowed advertisers to build brand awareness, loyalty, and eventually equity.  This opportunity to put brand names anywhere and everywhere is witnessed tenfold in today’s society.  I started to wonder then: what if brands were never put on product packaging?  It almost seems today that brands and manufacturers use as much packaging as possible just so they can have excess material with their name on it.  Why can’t companies only put their brand name on in-store displays?  In the very least, brands should use the minimal amount of packaging and only put their name on it once.  If someone really cares about which kind of soap they use, then they will most likely consider this at the time of purchase.  The only thing that should really matter to brands then is that their potential consumers know exactly which brand they are selecting at the time of purchase:  in the store!

Since this internship focuses on being eco-friendly, I thought this concept was relevant.  This leads me to my next point:  the development of our consumerist society and branding mentality has gotten so out of control that is pretty much the norm to buy bottled water.  What should be a commodity, water that actually already comes from a tap pretty clean, is branded and marketed under hundreds if not thousands of different brand names.  If you were to try to sell someone from the 50’s a bottle of water what do you think they would say?  I bet they would think you are crazy.  An argument my Grandpa has is “Why would you want to buy in in a bottle?  You already pay bills to make it come out of a tap?”

Even worse than the consumerism and branding of bottled water is the environmental impacts that bottled water has as a social norm.  According to The Container Recycling Institute “Plastic water bottles produced for U.S. consumption take 1.5 million barrels of oil per year, according to a 2007 resolution passed by the U.S. Conference of Mayors. That much energy could power 250,000 homes or fuel 100,000 cars for a year, according to the resolution.”  The sheer oil that is used to create and transport millions of plastic bottles is insane, not to mention most of these bottles are not being recycled.  The Container Recycling Institute also states “Around 636 thousand tons of PET plastic beverage bottles were recycled nationwide in 2006, but more than three times as much PET was wasted: 2 million tons.  Something isn’t right here.

I think we need to make a change.  If our society is so good at branding maybe we should focus on PUR water filters and Brita for our sources of filtered water.  Who knows, their filtered water could be cleaner anyway.

I started noticing the new Re-Connect feature on Facebook, that prompts users to reconnect with a friend that they haven’t spoken to in a while. Since Facebook doesn’t really “announce” new features, the recent addition didn’t strike me as a recent addition until after a couple days. Truthfully, I haven’t reconnected with anyone that has popped up, and none of my friends have ever mentioned doing it either. I’m curious to see how successful it has been?

Pete Cashmore recently posted some less than desirable scenarios that have been occurring because of the new application: “It’s recommending they reconnect with their (current) husband or wife. It’s even advising people to reconnect with friends who have died, causing obvious distress.”

Whether Mark Zuckerberg will correct the mishap is to be determined, but for now, I think we will all wait and see where this new accessory will venture to.

Having studied advertising and marketing for four years now, I’ve learned more theory then you could shake a stick at.  However, there is no substitute for real world experience. Some of you may be already familiar with the Bateman Competition, a national case study competition held by PRSSA every year. Each university has a team who acts as an “agency” to develop a public relations campaign for the selected client of the year. This gives students a chance to rack up real campaign experience for actual clients and receive some feedback on their efforts as well outside of a professional setting. The Spartan International Advertising Association over at Michigan State University is pioneering a brand new program, the first of its kind in the country, very similar to the Bateman Competition.

Partnering up with internationally renowned media mogul Mark Carassi, the SIAA is forming a “virtual international agency” to work with real clients on a global scale. Using contacts established by Carassi, the SIAA will work with big name players such as LG, Samsung, and Sony providing advertising consulting services in return for educational grants for MSU. Carassi got the idea from a similar program overseas and saw MSU’s student IAA chapter as the perfect fit. The SIAA is the first student chapter of the IAA in the country and for those of you interested in participating in this virtual agency can attend an informational meeting next Thursday, October 15th at 5:30 in room C213 in Wells Hall.

Google Wave launched a week ago. Yes, you might be upset because you didn’t get an invite, but that’s no reason to boycott it. Courtesy of Mashable, I’ve summarized some of the most important aspects of this redefining Web tool:

According to Mashable, “Google Wave is a real-time communication platform.” It’s real-time, so you can witness what other people are typing, character-by-character. Waves can be added to any blog or Web site and be edited by anyone else (wiki). Developers can build apps. in Google Wave; users can playback what’s been said in the past and can drag-and-drop files for sharing. These are just some features associated with Google Wave.

So, what exactly is a wave? “A wave, specifically, refers to a specific threaded conversation. It can include just one person, or it can include a group of users or even robots…Anything you’ve ever discussed in a single chat or conversation is a wave.” Within waves are wavelets, threaded conversations that contain blips, which are the single, individual messages. Blips are like lines in a IM conversation. It is also possible to post documents, extensions, gadgets…pretty much anything that can be shared.

Inside waves, you can share gadgets. For instance, any application already created in iGoogle or OpenSocial can be run within Google Wave. What’s nice is that applications are specific to waves, not individual users. In Facebook, you have to register for that specific app. to use it; in Google Wave, it belongs to everyone in that wave.

Robots are the other wave extensions. However, they’re more robust than the past annoying robots. “They can talk with users and interact with waves. They can provide information from outside sources (i.e. Twitter) or they can check content within a wave and perform actions based on them (i.e. provide you a stock quote if a stock name is mentioned).”

You can even embed a Google Wave conversation and use it as chat room, as a way for visitors to contact you, or something more.

Google Wave is still in its early phases, but soon it will be avaliable for all of us to enjoy and connect with.

Without a doubt, one of Twitter’s most defining features is the @Reply, which allows you to in a sense “notify” another user within a tweet for the purpose of sharing information or just communicating a message. Just this past week, Facebook introduced a copycat feature by allowing you to “tag” other users in wall posts, links, statuses and even private messages. At first glance, one might say what is the use of this feature; I can already post directly on peoples walls. The biggest advantage of Facebook’s new @reply feature is the ability to share information more efficiently. You can in a sense now do mass wall posts in one status update by tagging multiple people and the recipients will all receive notification updates. The heart of social networking is the ability to establish networks and share information and Facebook really hit the mark with this latest update. Already in the week that this feature has been available, my friends and I have jumped on it. Not only is it a great way to share media with a multitude of people, its a fun way to to interact with people on wall posts and status updates. The only real difference between the reply feature in Facebook and Twitter is that Facebook actually posts the reply the tagged person’s wall, whereas Twitter merely notifies the user that they were mentioned in a tweet. Facebook has really stepped its game up in the past 6 months, shifting from being a site focused on finding people, events, and pictures to a real time source of relevant media and information.