Nice Going, Ad Age

Someone tell me how Ad Age gets away with this...

And recent data from word-of-mouth research group Keller Fay indicate 92% of brand conversations were taking place offline

...when their source is a company that's a member of the Word Of Mouth Marketing Association (WOMMA) with its CEO serving on the WOMMA Board of Directors.

OF COURSE they're going to say a high percentage of brand conversations are taking place offline. They have a vested interest. It's as self-serving as when Skip Pile claimed the average agency/client relationship lasted 2.5 years. (This, too, was a load of crap.)

My experience with the entrenched marketing publications is that when they run "reality check" stories, they're really pieces of target journalism designed to take popular ideas down a notch or two.

Tomorrow's Spin

Tomorrow, my column discusses what went wrong with Snakes on a Plane. That is, we explore how the most-hyped movie of the year opened with a mere $15 million for the weekend. Catharine Taylor at Adfreak says it bombed because snakes are scary. Tomorrow, I'll argue that marketers got it wrong because they didn't understand the difference between people getting excited about attending a movie and people getting excited about a meme.

The school of "any publicity is good publicity" is dealt yet another blow...

Job Board Coming

Josh Messinger from iMedia has been developing a widget for this site that will provide links to open marketing positions. We're working out the kinks on getting it live, so bear with us if you notice any template flakiness in the short term. From what I see so far, Josh has done a great job of integrating the new widget's look and feel into that of the existing site. Cool beans.

Big Rocks

This morning when my alarm went off, I heard a commercial for Great Rock Golf Club, right around the corner from my house in Wading River. It made me think about the rock after which it is named and what it meant to my childhood. When I was a little kid, Great Rock was known as "Big Rock," and it was the stuff of local legend. Long Island is peppered with glacial erratics (boulders left by the retreat of the glaciers), some of which are utterly huge.

I was probably eight or nine when I first heard about Big Rock. I heard about it from the older kids living around the block. They claimed it was as big as a house and was somewhere in the woods behind our development. At the time, it seemed no one remembered quite how to get to it. It was another two or three years before a kid in my neighborhood who was in the know took me there.

From my house in Wading River, a hike to Big Rock on kiddie legs was a big deal and took most of an afternoon. I'll never forget the first time I saw it - indeed, the kids in the neighborhood who were fond of exaggerating things weren't exaggerating when they talked about Big Rock. It WAS as big as a house, and it looked even bigger to my 11-year-old eyes.

These days, Big Rock is now called Great Rock. (I guess "Big Rock" isn't a good enough name when you're trying to attract rich people to a country club atmosphere.) I might even join the club if they changed its name back to Big Rock

The glacial erratics in Wading River seem to serve as landmarks for young people. Big Rock was the one I was first introduced to. Sometime in my teens, I was introduced to Split Rock, which is a 15-minute walk toward the Shoreham Plant from Shoreham-Wading River High School. Off in the woods, where adult eyes weren't likely to see, is a huge glacial erratic split in half. All the kids used to congregate around it, Lord of the Flies-style, before high school parties and dances. Teens start campfires at its base and sit around sharing pilfered beers and whatnot. It's a rite of passage in SWR.

Maybe one day when I buy a house on Long Island I'll have a big boulder on the property somewhere. People seem fond of building rock walls and putting ornamental boulders out in front of the house in my old neighborhood. Big Rocks rock.