Hasta La Creative!

Image: Suck.com

Can’t believe I missed this great Brandweek piece about agencies bringing in hypnotists to focus groups; and it’s a practice with decades of history, too: “A former Grey exec, Solovay has been hosting such groups for a decade. Her clients include about dozen brands including blue-chip beer, soda and telecom companies as well as 20 different agencies.”

Has anyone tried administering thiopental sodium — the truth serum — on focus groups yet? Gotta be cheaper than running the groups (“Four sessions cost about the same as a typical round of focus groups ($50,000-75,000).”)

Salon.com, back in 1999: “It’s an intriguing thought — the fate of America’s consumer brands resting on the dubious musings of a bunch of soporific focus group respondents.”

Anyway, here’s everything you need to bring the magic to your office:

Brandvisioning, the company mentioned in the article. The pitch: “BrandVisioning Whole Mind Ideation brings focus groups to a whole new level. BrandVisioning focus groups use the power of hypnosis to allow consumers to better access and report their feelings about a product, a service, or a piece of communication. We uncover the core insights and truths that encourage deeper connections to your brand.”

Keith O’Neill, a hypnotherapist also mentioned in the article. From his website: “Hypnosis acts like a time machine. Through the process of “age regression”, hypnosis enables us to take respondents back to their earliest product and brand memories and the emotions connected to them.”

Hal Goldberg (above) is a former Leo planner who’s been doing hypno-groups for 35 years. Call 800-646-4041 for a free DVD of a hypnotized group in action. He’s in both the Salon’s and Brandweek’s articles.

There’s a blog full of marketing tips for hypnotherapy professionals (doesn’t the idea that hypnotists need marketing tips feel kind of funny?)

F0r the DIYers among you, I went through Amazon looking for a few books that wouldn’t be a waste of money. Judging by their reviews, these two seem to stand out as both professionally and accessibly written:

• Handbook of Hypnotic Suggestions and Metaphors
• Conversational Hypnosis: A Manual of Indirect Suggestion

Check out this one on a different but related subject:

• Covert Persuasion: Psychological Tactics and Tricks to Win the Game

Click image to view full size.

“This week’s post is the last in our series on Balihoo – the only on-demand media buying and planning platform that provides intelligent software-PLUS-services to media professionals across all mediums.

We’ve walked through:

– How Balihoo helps create better media plans by making it easier to find and evaluate advertising opportunities across all mediums;
– How Balihoo streamlines the RFI/RFP process, allowing media professionals to increase return on invested time and effort; and
– How Balihoo reduces costs and creates more effective media plans, by centralizing knowledge and providing easy access to historical data.

The bottom line: Balihoo exists to make the lives of media professionals easier. With a passion for solving real problems for our customers, we offer software and services that do just that.

If you’ve followed our posts (whether the entire series or not), we hope we’ve piqued your interest in what we’re doing here at Balihoo. If you’d like to learn more about our solution hit our site. If you’d like to learn more about who we are (and have a dialogue with us!) check out our blog. “

Balihoo fosters knowledge sharing by archiving your company’s activity history with specific media properties.

This is the fourth post in the Balihoo series, in which Shane Vaughan explains how the product suite helps counter brain drain in media organizations through information sharing.

“Our last post focused on how Balihoo can bring efficiencies to the RFI/RFP step in the media buying and planning process. Now let’s see how Balihoo benefits media organizations by countering the knowledge drain of employee turnover and the knowledge compartmentalization that occurs when information isn’t shared.

Let’s face it, media buyers don’t stay put for very long and when they leave for greener pastures or a higher rung on the ladder essential knowledge leaves with them. That knowledge includes details on past and current campaigns that are critical to the organization’s success… both present and future.

A less obvious intellectual capital issue is simply the lack of data sharing within and across offices. Ironically enough in this age of ubiquitous communication channels, it can still be difficult to disseminate critical information throughout a company in the form, and at the speed, it’s most needed.

Balihoo offers users centralized knowledge via two features: campaign dashboards and company activity histories. Campaign dashboards allow all users within your company to view details including that campaign’s consideration set, uploaded documents, RFIs/RFPs created or released, worksheets, and internal notes; all critical data for campaign management and analysis. Company activity histories allow users to save (and share) internal notes/tips about interactions or processes for any given property in our comprehensive media database. Additionally, these histories automatically list RFPs related to the property as well as any Quick Requests (a request of owners to update their listing in Balihoo’s database).

This functionality yields shared critical knowledge and institutional memory. Both of which are essential for developing a wiser, more agile organization. That translates into reduced costs by mitigating the training burden and impact of employee turnover; and more effective media plans resulting from easy access to historical data.”

Users throughout your organization can view all campaign details (including uploaded docs & any internal notes) via Balihoo’s Campaign Dashboards.

Balihoo’s Shane Vaughan writes:

“This week we’re going to depart from our usual posts to reach out to media planners & buyers for feedback on their workflow processes. At Balihoo we think these processes could use a little help. The administrative burden is heavy and inefficiencies abound.

That’s our take, but we’d like to hear from you. So if you are a media planner or buyer please take a few minutes to give us your thoughts via this very short survey.

A completed survey from you equals a $10 Amazon gift certificate from us!

Click here to access the survey.

Next week we’ll return to our series of posts on Balihoo’s suite of media planning software and service tools.

Thanks for your feedback. We are definitely listening.”

[This is a post by AdLab’s advertiser]

Balihoo’s vertical search engine helps you find relevant advertising opportunities faster.

Product details in Balihoo help you choose your consideration set.

Balihoo provides campaign details in one easy-to-access location.

This is the second post in the series where Shane Vaughan explains how to use Balihoo’s tool to build a consideration set:

“My last post introduced Balihoo as the only on-demand media buying and planning platform that provides intelligent software-PLUS-services to media professionals across all mediums.

I mentioned how Balihoo allows media professionals to build a consideration set, execute more efficiently, and centralize knowledge. Today we’re going to dive into building a consideration set with Balihoo.

Media buyers know building a consideration set can be a hair-pulling experience – ever-increasing choices for advertising opportunities accompanied by heightened scrutiny of targeting precision. Buyers need to efficiently find opportunities which meet their campaign criteria. Balihoo streamlines media research and selection and aggregates that information into one easy-to-use location that’s sharable across your organization.

Media sellers also face the challenge of cutting through the clutter so buyers gain visibility to their unique offerings. Balihoo offers sellers exactly that, one interface to communicate property details to all buyers at once and enhanced visibility through promotional opportunities.

Balihoo offers the largest collection of cross-medium advertising opportunities that’s searchable via geography, keyword, or medium. Whether you want to use your “go-to” properties or find unique opportunities previously too difficult to find, Balihoo can help. Our database is constantly fed by a variety of data sources (see attached graphic). This comprehensive database allows buyers to cut steps and time out of the process and ultimately make better media plans with increased return on invested time and effort.

For our next post we’ll examine how Balihoo takes users from a consideration set to powerful RFI / RFP modules where even greater efficiencies are gained.”

Anderson Analytics mines large amounts of text — consumer surveys, call center logs — and fishes out insights: “We use state of the art natural language processing software which combines linguistics, statistics, and machine learning to code and classify text data. We can then apply data mining and other analytical techniques to uncover the hidden value of this information or link it with other sources.

These techniques can be used for call center customer files, customer suggestions and complaints, survey open ends, focus group or discussion board conversations, blogs, or it can be combined with projective techniques for exponential learning.”

Ad Age just wrote about them: “Starwood hired Anderson Analytics for several projects, including the one that culled through the more than 1 million customer-feedback surveys — 250,000 with comments in 20 different languages — to find that “good” vs. “outstanding” insight.”

If you are on your way to become The Agency of the Future (Forrester’s version) and are looking to hire people to manage brand or customer communities, there’s a job board run by the former long-time community manager at Lego, Jake McKee. If you don’t know what he did at Lego, there was a widely referenced cover story in Wired about how Lego fans helped the company to come up with the Mindstorms robot constructor.

We’ve seen brands taking over web sites and pasting their visuals on backgrounds, but AdCamo is an entire network that embeds CPC and CPM ad tiles embedded into backgrounds. I think the per-click part comes from the accompanying banner unit displayed on the same page.

From the mail that AdLab readers and PR people have sent in over the past couple of weeks:

Prudent People Brag: “According to a recent study conducted by the Mindset Media, people who report that they always pay their credit card balances in full each month, […] to be far less modest than the rest of the population at large — “Modesty 1’s,” who are, perhaps, unable to resist bragging about their highly responsible credit habits.

JunkieAd.com creator would like to let the world know about another blog collecting creative advertising.

USA Today’s Media Lounge accepts submissions from ad bloggers.

If I understand the terminology correctly, WebCollage.com lets downstream sales partners reuse the rich interactive functionality of the mothership site with less friction.

Spot Runner (one of the ad automation companies) has acquired GlobeShooter, a network of 1,200 independent filmmakers, videographers, producers and production companies across the U.S.

Flow automatically tracks the design process from idea to end result and manages assets and applications for the most complex workflows.

Hammerhead agency promotes itself with this video.

Luke Sullivan’s legendary “Mr.Whipple” guide to great ads is out in its second edition.

For dessert, some spam: “The NOKIA Electronic Email Promo,was established 1970 by the Multi-Million groups and now supported by the Economic Community for West African States (ECOWAS), United Nations Organization(UNO), United Kingdom(UK) and the European Union (EU) was conceived with the objective of human growth, educational, and community development.”

Paperspine runs on a model similar to Netflix’s, but for books. For a monthly cost of $9.95 and up + postage, you can get two or more books out at a time. Their collection isn’t huge — 150,000 books — but they do have a few books on advertising that I’ve been meaning to read forever, like the Confessions of the Advertising Man, and more good fiction than I’ll ever have time for. Don’t know if they have this entire social recommendation thing figured out, but it’s a great idea for anyone who moves a lot and hates accumulating stuff. There’s also Booksfree.com, a competing service with similar plans.