The Wax Blog

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With as much emphasis as we marketers make on the appeal of youth and beauty to promote products, I thought it was interesting that the best moments came at the 2011 Academy Awards came not from the young, gorgeous hosts there to pull in the elusive 18-34….the best Oscar moments came from the older crowd.  There are some lessons we can learn from last night’s broadcast.

First, let’s talk about James Franco and Anne Hathaway. I thought he was a rather odd choice given all of the really funny younger comedians available. (more…)

There’s a new wave of journalism being funded by various non-profits and academic institutions and one of the most interesting is Spot.us The site has gotten a flurry of big media hits lately and social media marketers are scrambling to figure out how to incorporate Spot.us into their outreach strategies.

Here’s what Spot.us says is their mission: (more…)

I could be a masochist but I truly love engagements where I have to work on turning around the image of a company in the eyes of the media. Yet at times it is so hard to get reporters to change their tone, despite the news. Once I  had a journalist tell me they wanted to find a “veterinarian who will say that the number of heat-related illnesses in pets is increasing this summer.” Another asked me to find the “boat manufacturers who thought they might go out of business”. And I just got off the phone where during an interview the writer said “hey negativity is what sells papers.”

Interestingly enough, I found a really old (1942) article about a Harvard study that proclaimed the opposite -  “Rosy headlines sell papers” or at least this is what they proved in wartime America. (here’s the PDF if you want to see it…it’s a fun read) On the flip side, Searchenginejournal.com gave a great overview of how to use negative headlines to generate more interest.

I’m wondering…are we all that agog to get the bad news? Do we all love reading stories of businesses failing and people getting murdered and all the other bad stuff people lead with?  I think that traditional media, or at least some of it, is so desperate for readers that they’re attempting to sensationalize the news as a last ditch effort to get back readers and attract more viewers.  They’re literally cutting off their nose to spite their face. And I also think the majority of the public is fairly tired of this approach.

What about you? Are you tired of media sensationalism? Or am I blowing this out of proportion?

My first reaction when I saw the Groupon Elizabeth Hurley/rainforest ad was, like a lot of people, YUCK. Then I saw the ad with Timothy Hutton and wondered what the Dalai Lama would think? Would he say, as my  friend Dan Buettner told me long ago, that “bad press is like bad breath – it’s better than no breath at all”? Or would His Holiness be offended? Seems as the folks at the Miami New Times think we should all be aghast at these ads.

I think differently. I think the Dalai Lama (and all the other causes involved struggling to get their points communicated in a clutter of non-profit messaging) are  thrilled today. Does it trivialize the problem? Perhaps it does but it also got their most important talking points across to millions of people who probably did not know the extent of the problem. And I imagine those ads (and those messages) will get played millions of times over as people like me debate whether or not these ads were offensive. That is brilliant. And that’s how marketing works.  What do you think?

Miss the ads? Here’s the Timothy Hutton/Tibet ad for Groupon

These days it seems like you need to have a bumpit to create new words. Sarah Palin might refudiate that remark but I think Snooki and her guidos feel it’s high time to get some Jersey Shore lingo into the Oxford English Dictionary. Personally, I told someone I had spent considerable time catharterizing this weekend – not to be confused with being catheterized or jazzercizing – after getting dumped unceremoniously by a friend. (Note to readers – at this point I do not have a bumpit)

Snooki has a future as an English teacher

It made me wonder how words evolved in the first place. How did certain words become accepted into normal use and eventually accepted in the main dictionaries we all use?  Like humongous. Or ginormous, or a zillion. For example, Humongous is in the Random House Dictionary as (more…)