The Big Fat Marketing Blog

“Aw, how nice!” I thought upon receiving the latest e-mail from Harry & David. Apparently today is Random Acts of Kindness Day (who knew, eh?), so the food gifts merchant sent out an e-mail with the subject line “Today ONLY: FREE Delivery Sitewide - our Random Act of Kindness.” The message suggested that we “delight someone ‘just because’” by sending him or her a tasty treat.

But something about the promotion proceeded to rub me the wrong way.

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I’m probably in the minority when I say I’m a fan (or was a fan) of Burger King’s coffee, BK Joe. I wouldn;t seek it out, per se, but if given the option of having coffee at a fast-food restaurant, I’d get a cup at McDonald’s or BK.

But the five-year-old brand is dead. And it will be replaced by Seattle’s Best. Bleah! I grabbed a cup of coffee yesterday at the Internet Retailer Wed Design and Usability Conference at the Hyatt Regency Grand Cypress in Orlando and remembered how awful that coffee actually is.

It’s owned by Starbucks, and tastes even more like Starbucks (think “dirt”) than ever. But it’s a deal that makes sense for both parties. more

So the biggest surprise I heard today: The majority of the attendees at the Internet Retailer Web Design and Usability show have not heard of the online retailer Threadless.

Speaking during a session called “Designing your web site to create social marketing success,” Fry director of creative strategy Bridget Fahrland asked for a show of hands - who in the room had heard of Threadless. Only a few hands went up.

Those hands must have belonged to subscribers of Chief Marketer, and read Brian Quinton’s profile of Threadless. more

“Please come and see us?” I was asked by a vendor whose booth was tucked away in a black hole of the exhibit hall of the Internet Retailer Web Design Show, here at the Hyatt Regency Grand Cypress in Orlando.

The exhibit hall, actually, is hopping, and they do have it set up so you can check out the sessions by going through the exhibit hall. But this one vendor is kind of stuck away from all the action. I feel bad, and I should stop by and visit later instead of smiling and ignoring them. more

Just a heads-up, I’m going to tweet from the Internet Retailer Web Design & Usability Conference today and tomorrow. Out feed: http://twitter.com/mcmerchant. Will people care? Who knows.

What do you think about live tweets from tradeshows? Good, bad or ugly? Are 140 characters worth the keystrokes if there’s no line to an article, post or example?

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