Feeling stressed by economic woes? Get a grip with CreativeFeed’s Squeeze the Banker stress dolls.

You know you really want to squash, squish, squeeze and shake down Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke, Secretary of the Treasury Henry Paulson and/or former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan — so don’t resist the urge, pick the financial figurehead of your choice and Squeeze that Banker!

Squeeze The Banker isn’t just an exercise in creative stress reduction, 5% of the profits from Squeeze The Banker stress doll sales will be donated to Modest Needs.

Founded in 2002, Modest Needs is an award-winning public charity with a simple but critical mission: work to stop the cycle of poverty before it starts for the low-income workers whom conventional philanthropy has forgotten. Modest Needs says: “We do this by empowering compassionate members of the general public to safely and securely help hard-working, low-income households to afford the kinds of short-term emergency expenses that we’ve all encountered before: the unexpected car repair, the unanticipated visit to the doctor, or the unusually large heating bill, for example. We make sure that no hard-working person is ever forced to choose between taking a child to the doctor and putting food on the table.”

Modest Needs’ donors have stopped 5930 low-income individuals and families from entering the vicious cycle of poverty and a lifetime of dependence on the public welfare system for their survival.

Squeeze the Banker stress dolls are CreativeFeed’s first retail product launch. The dolls will be sold via multiple channels, you can see and purchase them at SqueezeTheBanker.com

Brands who want to get the attention of social network site users need to think beyond the usual banner ads and widgets.

While those types of ads can work if they are creative and carefully targeted, in general we’re finding that interruptive advertising on social sites just isn’t as effective as marketing messages delivered in a format that dovetails with the things that people are doing on social sites — interacting with their friends and colleges.

One of the most interesting and measurably successful new ways for brands to connect with social network users is virtual goods, also known as e-gifts. It’s a business model that’s just starting to hit its stride in the US and Europe and is already a key business model in Asia. According to a recent article in BusinessWeek “Two-thirds of the $523 million in sales by China’s Tencent social sites comes from virtual goods such as pets; only 13% is from advertising.”

The BusinessWeek article Lucrative Alternatives to Online Advertising went on to note that “Virtual goods (also known as ‘e-gifts’) are a better fit than traditional advertising on socially oriented sites… That’s because ads are more distracting than alluring on sites where people are there to interact with one another rather than surf for information or products. By contrast, virtual goods are essentially social artifacts that people use to gain status among online peers.” …Read More…

The annual Minnesota Interactive Marketing Association (MIMA) Summit has established a blog carnival, and one of the subjects they are asking people to react to is “Where Does Content Start Or Marketing Begin…And Vice Versa?”

At CreativeFeed we believe that successful digital marketing — like all marketing — must focus on connecting with consumers. It’s easy to create a buzz by just making a lot of noise with some oddball content, but buzz always dies down fast. Creating an ongoing, mutually beneficial conversation between consumers and a brand is more of a challenge but infinitely more valuable.

Effective marketing today is all about conversation, and listening to this conversation is where marketing efforts/content creation should start. Companies should obviously pay attention to the blogs belonging to well-known influencers and the consumer review forums that pertain to the particular brand’s industry,plus check the chatter on Twitter and Technorati and subscribe to feeds from the meme aggregators like Reddit and Mixx as well as blog aggregator feeds focused on the brand’s target consumer groups. Listening to this conversation results in the kind of market knowledge that big firms pay dearly to obtain — a constantly evolving and highly accurate insight into why and how people are responding to the brand and its services.

…Read More…

We’ll be there.

WWD Branding Leadership Forum:

Mastering the Multi-Channel World
September 18, 2008
Condé Nast Theater, New York

Digital Marketing and Brand Development for Multi-Channel Innovators

The Bridge between Madison Avenue and Silicon Valley:
Building brands and driving sales in a mutli-channel world.

What kills good innovative marketing campaigns before they even have a chance to go live? Often it’s misguided ideas about control and the place a brand really has in consumers’ lives.

We need to ask ourselves, each and every time we come up with another brilliant concept for social/viral/user-generated content/engagement campaigns — “what’s in it for them?”

“Them” are the consumers, the people who you hope to captivate. And unless your brand is truly an essential part of peoples’ lifestyles (think Apple Computers or Harley Davidson) the hard truth is that consumers really aren’t interested in devoting chunks of their own time to talking about your products, bragging about what they bought from you, playing a flash game centered on your brand, decorating their desktops with your logo, or participating in any other brand-centered activity … unless we provide them with a compelling reason to do so.

Don’t think you can fool consumers with social networking plans that pretend to be meeting places but are really intended to get people talking only about the glories of your product, blogs filled with nothing but company news (and carefully monitored comment systems), or widgets that enable people to interact only with a brand rather than with each other. It’s not going to work and if you build it they will not come.
…Read More…

“Big companies talk the talk when it comes to adapting to the digital age. But do they walk the talk? It’s difficult to reconcile their desire to be nimbler – and more responsive to their customers – with the fact that at big companies budgets are generally scheduled a year in advance.

What’s more, when consumers are increasingly driving the dialogue online about products and services it may be problematic for big companies to be part of the conversation when they deploy a top-down strategy. Arthur Ceria, founder and chief creative officer of CreativeFeed Network, says these sorts of business practices are fast becoming antiquated and may be deterring large enterprises from capitalizing on digital technologies.

Ceria has blogged about the need for big companies to think small if they want success in the digital world. He stresses that, for many large companies, process has started to infringe on creativity.

Big companies grappling with the Internet need to embrace a “sense of discovery,” said Ceria, who has worked with Cisco, Intel and Yahoo, among other major brands. A sense of mission and a sense of awareness are also crucial if big companies want to take advantage of the Web. I recently spoke with Ceria about why bigger is not better in the digital age – and how large enterprises need to change if they want to stay in the game.

I also chatted with Ceria about trends in Web design. Ceria, who has an MFA from Yale University with a focus on graphic design, says far too many companies still treat their Web sites like a “brochure,” rather than a living, breathing “organism” that is part of the company’s DNA.

Enjoy.”

CLICK HERE TO LISTEN TO ARTHUR’S PODCAST

Saw a blurb in Device.com and Core77.com that the Nike mobile truck had arrived.

Nike's Truck

Reminds us a lot of the Sonim truck we developed last year to roll the streets of Sweden and Germany promoting the Sonim XP1.  Retailers and customers loved it when our Sonim ambassadors drove up in this super-rugged looking truck, complete with video monitors, collateral and “torture test” events Sonim Launch Event Compilation - Sweden

Sonim's Rugged Launch Vehicle in Sweden

We are finally settled into our new office here in NYC! Everyone is staying very, very busy and looking forward to all the new and exciting projects that are coming up in the next few months. Here is a shot of the new office:

Also, Arthur was interviewed yesterday by Matthew at Scribe Media. They will be launching a podcast early next week on http://www.scribemedia.org/, I will be sure to post the link when I receive it next week.

Welcome to 27 West 20th St, NYC, NY 10011.

Big business better think small if they expect success in the digital world. Corporate bureaucracy drains the life out of marketing campaigns. By the time everyone at the table has had their say, an innovative idea is generally transformed into yet another iteration of the same old safe thing. Then everyone wonders why their “new” blog/widget/forum/flash demo flopped and resolves never to do anything that inventive again.

Rather than dissect each new idea to death, adopt a start-up mentality when launching a new product or service. Since you’re basically starting from scratch, capitalize on this fresh slate. Startups aren’t afraid to be innovative, their mentality is all about risk taking, customer engagement and honestly. One can go after the competition full speed ahead without abandoning logic or taking undue risks. Rather than burn money on trial balloons like big companies, a must startup rely on deep knowledge of and consistent interaction with their market to decide what risks make sense.

Effective marketing today is all about conversation, and startups understand the power of conversation better than big enterprises. In a startup, senior management personnel talk directly to everyone in the company (and everyone can be forthright with executives), and everyone in a startup interacts directly with the company’s customers. That conversation results in a depth of market knowledge that big firms pay dearly to obtain. To get that startup buzz going strip away some organizational layers, connect directly with customers, talk to them not at them, respond to their needs, take some chances, have a little fun, and get passionate about your business again.

-Arthur