Kudos to Liz Bastiaanse Hamren on her AdAge “CMO Strategy” interview that came out today.  Great comments on the role of PR, Channel Marketing….and CreativeFeed!

When it comes to launching consumer technology products, Liz is a consummate pro. We’re thrilled with the work we’ve done together over the past year. And mentioning us in her AdAge interview was not bad.

Ad Age: Had Plantronics focused much on consumer marketing before? And was that the challenge?

Ms. Hamren: The marketing challenge is to communicate effectively how good the products work…We what we wanted to do was communicate to a broader audience how good those products are. This is why I brought in Creative Feed as an agency because I felt like they strategically got what we were doing, and they could also execute in a really fast way. That’s what we needed — that bridge between Silicon Valley and Madison Avenue.

Ad Age: So you hired the agency and then created a marketing campaign?

Ms. Hamren: We developed the messaging for both of the two new products, and to give you some context, Plantronics launched two products into the high-end [of the headset market] at the same time. The first, the Voyager Pro, launched in April as a performance product. We developed a video used for both consumers and retailers and created channel-marketing collateral from end caps to shippers that communicated the message that this product was engineered for sound quality. The marketing is all about bringing out the science behind the product.

Then we launched the Discovery 975 in August, and that was at the other end of the spectrum in the premium space — a product meant to be the essence of technology and design. We created a campaign called “Ingeniously Simple.” It has amazing audio quality, but in a much smaller and more discreet form factor that’s easier to take on and off.

They’re both high-end products at $99 and above. We divided the whole market by people who only care about performance, and so here is this form factor, battery life and speaker designed to be worn all day. And then for other people who still want a high-end headset, but want it to be more discreet, easier to take on and off, for them, we have this other product. [Then] the two don’t cannibalize each other. It’s been an interesting strategy to take the high-end part of the market and segment it this way.

Ad Age: How do you figure out the media mix for a niche tech brand like Plantronics? It’s obviously not a “Desperate Housewives” TV buy, but what is it?

Ms. Hamren: The two things to really focus on are public relations and channel marketing. These decisions are made at retail, so it’s about working closely with channel products where the product is sold to create great campaigns with them at retail. Everything from promotions and shippers and great creative in all the channels, whether that’s Best Buy, Radio Shack, AT&T, Verizon, Sprint or T-Mobile stores, and then also online, where Amazon is a big channel for us.

At CreativeFeed, we’re all about launching big things.  So we were very excited for our good friend Jon Kane (who directed fantastic video demos for our clients Sonim and Plantronics) when his film about the iconic NYC tugboats that re-launched the carrier/museum Intrepid in Manhattan was tagged as a “must see” video by the New York Times, and was Vimeo’s pick for “Videos We Like”. Good job, JK!

We’re proud to announce that our first shipment of Squeeze the Banker dolls has shipped to Bloomingdales. The now-famous bankers will be available at select Bloomingdales stores around the country, including the Flagship store in New York, and also the fashionable Soho location. Keep an eye out for them near you!

Bankers Enroute to Bloomingdales

If Firefox is your browser of choice, click here right now and download Ubiquity, a Mozilla Labs experiment that attempts to find a new way to do common Web tasks more quickly and easily. Try it a couple of times and you’ll be hooked.

Essentially Ubiquity is a way to work with the command line within Firefox, but the result is that you can use natural language commands to do all sorts of things on the web superfast. Just hit “Control/Space” and type whatever you want to do into the command line. Ubiquity comes pre-loaded with a slew of commands, but you can create your own commands to mashup your daily tasks too.

But how could typing commands make your life on the web easier? Here’s just one example — let’s say you want to send someone an email with directions to your office. Rather than going to a map app page, typing in your address, copying the link, going back to your email program and pasting in the map you can simply type your address in the email, select it, enter the command “map”, click on the preview, and then insert the map. You don’t have to fully type all the commands either, there’s a handy autofill feature.

Check the list of commands here, and look at the tutorial here and you’ll start to see the potentials.