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Friday, October 24, 2008

Google "Vietnam Advertising Association" & watch what happens!

Nothing. For sure, what you don't get is any website for the Vietnam Advertising Association. You get a few mentions in business publications and a four year old story on the formation of the entity. And that's it. Zip, zero, nada. A failure for whatever it was they thought they were doing. Because in these days, if you're not on the web, you don't exist - as opposed to the old brick and mortar days when you needed a building and a brass address plaque to be real, which they don't really have either. The screen shot to the left is what came in my mail, a day after the post, in response to my standing Google news search for the term "Vietnam Advertising".

Conversely, Google Wild Wild East and you get this blog in the number four spot behind a cookbook from Amazon and some press mentions using the term. Google Wild Wild East Dailies and you get this blog in the first 7 positions on page one. Voi la!

So what do I know that the biggest agencies in country don't?

And the answer is, not much, but apparently a lot more than they do. When I started this blog just nine months ago I knew absolutely nothing and so I dedicated myself to study the best, become educated, participate in communities and continually rethink the content, presentation and promotion of the thing. And it has worked, probably to the chagrin of a lot of the SEO carpetbaggers currently plying the trade. And I did it mostly on my own with no direct help from anyone. Now the Wild Wild East Dailies is in the top 1/2% of all blogs tracked by Technorati and represented on Blogged, Expat Blogs, Yahoo's MyBlogLog and Instablogs just to name a few. We get tons of Facebook hits, are active on Twitter and have a good share of Digg and Mixx hits. Even Mark Earls, author of "Welcome to the Creative Age" and "Herd" has become a follower on Twitter. Our largest block of readers stay for over an hour and we've a respectable return audience with a good lot on feeds and email. The Wild Wild East Dailies is now a living breathing brand!

David Armano, from AdAge, nailed the difference between the way a big company approaches brand promotion and the way we bloggers do. Take a look at the following chart and story from David:

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From AdAge Magazine:

Unconventional Times Call for Unconventional Marketing

And That Requires New Processes, Lessons From a Blog

Posted by David Armano on 10.13.08 @ 05:19 PM

As an individual, my blog is one of the most effective manifestations of "marketing" I could have produced for myself. I have a respectable audience that comes back as opposed to visiting it once, never to return again. People participate through comments and the content is distributable. But imagine if I started it the same way many large organizations launch conventional marketing initiatives. What would that have looked like?

If I were a corporate campaign

First I would have had to do several hundred pages of strategy documentation, including target audiences, marketing segments, competitive analysis -- you name it. Then I would put some concepts together and test them in focus groups to see if representatives in a lab like A, B or C better. Next, I would take that feedback, make a few adjustments and plan a multichannel campaign, launching the blog with all sorts of advertising pointing to it. And since I painstakingly outlined the ROI in the in-depth strategy, I'd go about measuring the effectiveness against the ROI that was outlined prior to launch.

Of course, my blog, like millions of other forms of "social media," followed a path that looked nothing like that. In fact, it looked less linear and more cyclical. Sure, I put some initial thought into it before ever touching a pixel, but once I launched the blog it became a never-ending cycle of content development, template design tweaks and learning curves based off of what was going on each time I did something. (To read the entire story, click here)

And that, in a nutshell, is the difference between old-school branding and Branding 2.0. So many of the branding pundits are running around talking about consumer involvement and experiential parameters but few marketers have the fortitude to actually involve themselves in the brand, daily, and be able to act and capitalize on trends and flutters in a moment's notice. Today a brand must be more than 360 degrees - it must have the 3rd and 4th dimensions of depth and breadth, starting deep inside the organization itself.

Here in Vietnam, I'm sorry to say that the universities and even newly founded Advertising Institutes are still embroiled and enraptured by communist Ph.Ds with only a photocopied and translated textbook understanding of some fairly outdated concepts and the agencies still operate in a largely Flinstonian environment, more concerned with why the multinational companies have 80% of the market share instead of trying to turn that around by understanding and interacting with the consumer more on a personal/cultural level. Studying blogs and personal branding would certainly be a good start.

If anyone finds the Vietnam Advertising Association's website, possibly you could let them know.

Tuesday, February 12, 2008

America Overseas? CitizenMekong to the rescue!

For all those worried about America's image overseas, I send CitizenMekong to the rescue – America's champion in the communist world!

Going to the War Remnants Museum here is a fairly sobering experience. Certainly one-sided but a side Americans have never seen – and as valuable as any museum could be. For starters, it's called the American War here – understandably so.

Gone now are the agent orange fetuses they had in glass jars, now replaced by photographs. Gone also, the photos of Jane Fonda and John Kerry. These exhibits existed until George Bush's visit in late 2006. Still here though are examples of some of our war hardware with plaques that say how many tanks and how many planes were used. They number in the tens of thousands of all sorts of killing equipment. The number of bombs dropped is singularly staggering.

And a Vietnamese man smiles, serves you a Coke and a bag of prawn chips as you rest under the wing of a plane to take a break.

The equipment in the video is not in the War Remnants Museum. It is stuff found all around town at different locations and part of anyone's daily walk.