The Reindeer Company

Twitter Is The Online Marketing World’s “Bachelorette”

Twitter is our latest “American Idol” in the online marketing world.

Handbook To Stay Alive In Online Marketing Today: Yo, listen up. Hear me now. If you aint sayin it, you are not down with the “in” online cool marketing crowd. As it seems you don’t have to “get it” or even “use it” or understand reasons why it could actually affect your business, you just need to be doin it man.

The main reason why small companies can jump up and grab market share these days is because they have foresight where big companies seem to react.

Just a thought

TB

Mobile Video: AT&T and Bold.. Talk

Been playing around with the “Cellular Video” or CV as they call it on my Blackberry Bold this morning. 

Its really getting there. When you combine something like the brilliance of Wall Street Mobile Reader - if you dont have it you should and every media company should use it, dissect it and make it - you start to get somewhere really fun. 

The one thing/issue we are going to face on mobile video is that for some reason, the mobile networks have seen this as a “walled garden” play. ie They want to create their own networks so specific content can only play on specific networks.

The reason they do this, is because they are not happy with just being “pipe providers”. They want to add content services. Broadband providers tried this. Sites like AOL tried this. It doesnt work and it retards the industry because it is not business to one consumer that fuels use/excitement, its when people start sharing it. ie YouTube - its ok using it on your own - its a lot more fun when you can receive links from friends and pass them on to friends.

On the experience of “CV” on Bold - pretty good. Watched a clip of The Mentalist with no buffer and pretty clear. Then switched to music videos and it got a little weird. There was one channel called “Music Videos” that started charging me $0.99 a clip and then the VH1 music video channel next to it that was free. Weird Al. Also some of the clips were titled incorrectly - annoying. You would click on Coldplay and get some other random music vid. There was buffering on the music videos which made me click off them.

All in all - as soon as we reach a point where a person can find something in the menu of the mobile video section on a phone (industry calls it “on deck”) and then watch it and then easily share it with a friend who can receive it as an email and click and watch it right away regardless of which network he is on - then we will have take off. Till then, it will be a small, early adopter/tinkerer market. 

On Carbon Footprints and Even Carbon Treadmarks

We at Reindeer are thinking a lot about carbon footprints these days. First our client Tropicana got a big push in the New York Times about PepsiCo’s efforts to calculate the carbon footprint. And in the spirit of dialog, plenty of people are questioing what the move means, if consumers even care, and of course what the wider motivation might be.

On the other side of the equation we have been working with Chrysler’s amazing concept car Peapod which has an impressively tiny footprint in that it needs no gas and produces no emissions. Of course,  as TreeHugger reminded us it indeed has a footprint in that it was built out of materials like plastic and steel but it is certainly a smaller one than a gas guzzling regular car.

All of this has us contemplating our consumption, the impressive efforts of our clients, and the wider goal of making our planet a better one for the next generation. We will leave you with a quote from fearless PepsiCo CEO Indra Nooyi who believes in the end its all about doing well by doing good.

Basically, our goal is to make sure that when it comes to water and energy, we replenish the environment and leave it in a net zero state. So across the world we have unleashed the power of our people to come up with ideas to reduce, recycle replenish the environment and we are making great progress by reducing how much water we use in our manufacture and the carbon footprint that we put on the environment. As a consequence, what we are seeing is an incredible investment in all these environment initiatives. But is otherwise really in two ways, one is tangible financial investment, second is a huge return on investment and because new employees are usually idealistic young people who just graduated from college. They want to come to a company to work for a purpose, that is wise about the next generation.