The Big Fat Marketing Blog

Sears has unveiled the social media campaign that will promote its back-to-college sales this season, a package of three integrated Facebook tools grouped under the heading “Campus Ready”.

The tools, available on the Sears main Web site at http://www.Sears.com/campus or on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/campusready, are intended to help first-time college students and their families prepare for the experience by helping them to identify and then pay for the furniture and furnishings they’ll need for dorm life. more

Airport music usually gets delivered in one of two ways: through speakers hidden in planters, or via ear buds. But JetBlue is hoping to make some noise with “Live from T5,” an online contest that will choose indie music artists to fill the last five slots in its “Live from T5” series of concerts held on selected Friday nights through the rest of the year in its T5 terminal at JFK Airport in New York. more

Premium soda brand Jones Soda, which styles itself “the Official Soda of the Roadtrip,” wants to see where people are going on their own driving vacations this summer and will put the finalists of a North American travel photo contest on an international run of its product bottles. more

Spending on search engine marketing (SEM) may be nearing the bottom of the decline that has plagued the channel for several quarters now, according to a new quarterly analysis by SEM agency Efficient Frontier of a fixed basket of the accounts it manages.

The Sunnyvale CA-based firm found that spending on pay-per-click advertising “stabilized” in the second quarter of 2009 at only 3% less than the spend in Q1 2009, adjusted for seasonal variances. While year-to-year spending levels for the quarter were down 21%, that was a “mild improvement” over the 23% year-to-year drop of Q1 2009. more

YouTube giveth, and YouTube taketh away. And one irate musician has used it to do both, taking a few inches of skin off United Airlines for its baggage-handling practices and poor customer relations, but giving a California guitar maker a chance to win some major brand awareness and some points for attending to its users’ needs. more

Another brand has been caught trying to fake online consumer reviews of its product. Earlier this week the office of New York State Attorney General Andrew Cuomo announced that it had reached a settlement with plastic surgery outfit Lifestyle Lift over the publication of numerous Web reviews of the service—purportedly by satisfied customers, but in fact by employees of the company. more