The Big Fat Marketing Blog

If I look back at articles I wrote in 2009, “Twitter Better for Nonsense than Business Sense” may have to be my favorite. It wasn’t just because it was a hot topic - one that may define the year in marketing - but because of the comments it received.

Simply put, everyone seemed to be an expert on social media (and you could sense that in some of the comments), and at the same time have no clue how to use social media. Twitter, like many other social media channels that because household names in 2009, was treated like the great unknown. And as a result many so-called gurus threw the fundamental elements of marketing out the window and overtweeted to death. more

Long before Catalog Choice, long before the DMA’s initiative to cut mailbox clutter, comedian Andrew Kennedy’s father had this whole whole junk mail removal thing all figured out.

Here’s a clip from Kennedy’s Comedy Central special (scroll down, the coding is a little funky!). Not sure if this worked, but the idea was brilliant, and I’m sure the postman in New Canaan, CT was a little confused.

By the way, Kennedy in in Comedy Central’s Stand-up Showdown. You can vote for his video here and see his entire special on Jan. 31.

It used to be that your local radio station would make an announcement on Christmas Eve that Santa Claus was spotted in the area that used to send children into delirium. more

Talk show host David Letterman took one of Neiman Marcus’s $25,000 cupcake cars for a spin around his set last week. And Dave put that cupcake through its paces, too—well, about as much as you can push a vehicle with a 24-volt electric motor that tops out at 7 mph.

The buyers at the high-end cataloger/retailer probably didn’t envision the drivers of the sweet little cupcake cars ramming into desks and toppling Christmas trees. But naturally, that’s what Dave did. more

It’s tough to be a marketer in the U.S. during the, uh, holiday season in December these days. Why?

You can’t right come out promote Christmas for fear of excluding other religions, yet there’s been a growing backlash against merchants that try to hedge on the holiday. (Remember the uproar over the Lowes’ “family trees” a few years ago?)

Even my 88-year-old father—not at all a religious man—has been complaining this year because he can’t find greeting cards to send that say “Merry Christmas.” Guess he’s just not interested in wishing people “Happy Holidays” or “Joy to the World.” more

Are you ready to be recognized? It’s time to enter your catalogs and Websites in the MCM Awards!

In honor of the 25th Anniversary of the competition, we’ve made significant improvements to the program, including a new digital entry process, revamped categories to level the playing field, enhanced evaluation feedback from the judges, and much more. more