Promo Interactive

We’ve all seen TV-to-text cross-platform campaigns, but seldom with such show-biz glitz. When the eco-conscious documentary “The Cove” won an Academy award in last Sunday’s ceremonies and the team responsible went on stage to deliver their short and sweet acceptance speech, one of the producers, Ric O’Barry, held up a sign asking viewers to “text DOLPHIN to 44144”. more

You can think of the Super Bowl as just about our last grand-scale regularly scheduled national mass-media event. Now that the nightly network news has been supplanted by blogs and RSS feeds, the late-night talk shows have given up the ghost, and substantial portions of the prime-time audience have time-shifted themselves out of the real-time reach of advertisers, the Super Bowl is marketers’ best chance to reach audiences with traditional broadcast creative messaging.

Forget about appointment TV: Even the water cooler has been moved on these marketers. Once, the branding aim of marketing messages during these big broadcast events was to win the buzz competition the day after and dominate the Monday-morning conversations. But no one waits for Monday anymore.

Interestingly, the same digital media that are posing a threat to the mass audience for big TV events may offer a tool for measuring the ROI on ads placed in those broadcast spectacles—or at least an index of the buzz they’ve gathered. more

You’d think that the big news from a recent survey of 1,000 marketers by digital marketing firm Econsultancy and services provider ExactTarget would be that companies say they’ll spend more on digital media this year and they did in 2009—17% more on average, to be precise. It’s been the kind of year where a substantial investment in online campaigns should make a respectable splash.

Still, that hike is no big surprise, you say: Digital is measurable, and metrics lead to benchmarks and assurances of return on spending. These companies are simply migrating their money to channels that can produce the best provable performance at the least cost.

Not so fast. It turns out, the study reveals, that one of the online channels likely to get the biggest increase in marketing budget this year is the one that the large majority of respondents say is the hardest to measure, with the worst-understood ROI: social media. more

About two months after Pepsi’s Amp Energy brand began offering a free iPhone app that promised to teach men how to find social success with 24 different female stereotypes, the app has been pulled from iTunes because of an apparent flood of protests in blogs, in Twitter and on 24-hour cable business shows.

But the most interesting thing to me is that, having been damned because it did let one of its brands roll out this fairly cheesy app, Pepsi was then soundly damned because it didn’t—that is, didn’t insulate the parent company from this controversy but instead issued an online apology in a way that took it broader than just the Amp product line. more

Retailer Sears is showing its “softer side” in more than its ad slogans: It’s getting into social marketing in a big way, first with two back-to-school initiatives designed to get high schoolers and incoming freshmen engaged with each other as much as with the brand, and now with a new community site for home and appliance repairs called ManageMyHome.com.

Sears Holdings (parent to the Sears retail chain) launched the site in August as a central stop for all home projects. But the site was for several years in what Jim Hilt, vice president of divisional holdings for Sears, calls a “public beta”, open and being used by selected groups of consumers. “We were learning the nuances of what people wanted to do online relating to taking care of their homes,” he says. “It was a way for us to experiment live in the marketplace.” more

A new social media campaign for Sara Lee brand’s Fresh ideas pre-sliced deli meats is bringing a bit of humor into the lives of busy, harried moms with satirical “video confessions” courtesy of players from Chicago’s Second City improve troupe.

The content actually comes via Second City Communications, the company’s business-services division, which worked with Sara lee to generate copy for three fictional-but-very-real-sounding “Mama Sagas” that poke fun at life’s mothering problems and manage to work in a pitch for Sara Lee’s Fresh ideas deli line to boot. more