Emma Brooks | Digital Media Enthusiast

When you get into advertising, you sell your soul to the devil.* Didn’t realize you sell your opinions too.

I’ve been a huge supporter of net neutrality for a long time here on my blog, with most of my wrath going towards the CRTC. Recent decisions by the CRTC have allowed for UBB (usage-based billing, or if you’re on Twitter #UBB); I’m not going to get all ranty and CAP-LOCKSY on you about this – though I strongly desire to. Many others who are quite more informed than I have done and are doing so, so I shall save you the misery. However, I was tweeting quite a lot today about this. It upsets me, it angers me, and I feel powerless, which makes me feel even more angry and upset. Vicious cycle, you see.

A couple of my Tweeps (that’s Twitter + Peeps for you, Mom) reached out to me to ask how I felt about tweeting about something that directly involves one of my agency’s clients. I have been on this account since I was hired waaay back as a wee Account Executive in June 2009. I understand their concern (curiosity?) but here is my take on this:

First off: I absolutely believe that companies that wish to structure their product offerings how they see fit are perfectly within their rights to do so. This is capitalism; they are running a business, not a charity.

Secondly: My anger is directed at the CRTC. What I am tweeting about is how a commission that was set up to protect the interests of the consumers is resulting in decisions that do the complete opposite. Do these decisions affect my client? Sure. Does this mean I have to support those decisions? Well…

The quote above I wrote today. Working in advertising, you tend to question your moralities every now and then. Are you creating a better world? Would your efforts and resources be used for the greater good elsewhere? Are you truly providing value for the world? I deal with this internal monologue every few months. But I love what I do and view it as the cost of doing what I love. What I didn’t realize was that working in advertising may mean I’m not allowed to publicly share an opinion of mine. As someone asked me, “Wouldn’t it be higher ground to refrain from entering the fray in personal comments?”

My gut feeling tells me no. This is not the time for higher ground. It’s a now or never intersection right now with net neutrality. We need to do what we can to support this incredibly important idea. Right now.

But these discussions got me thinking: How far does that client arm reach?

Are we supposed to also be brand ambassadors in our personal lives, as we work on their campaigns? Can we not separate our business life from our personal? Or are these two inexplicably entwined when it comes to advertising? I remember a coworker of mine at a lunch with me once. She grabbed a Pepsi from the shelf, then thought better of herself and took the Coke instead. “We are working on their campaign,” she explained. “It would be bad if anyone saw I was drinking Pepsi.” I thought to myself, “Really? Why?”

I love my job. I’ve said this a million different ways. I love this industry and I love the work it produces. And we are in the service business, absolutely. My clients are lovely people and I enjoy working with them on a daily basis. But I don’t believe it means I now need to fully support my clients’ business in everything I touch. I will where I can and where I feel comfortable, of course. I think this is perfectly acceptable for most people.

The question really is, then: Should I tone my opinions down in order to ensure good standing in my company and with my clients? Is this another cost of the job; an unforeseen one that I had yet to encounter? Maybe my gut feeling is wrong. Certainly, I can do no harm in taking advice from those who have been in the business longer than I. As my boss put it to me today, “You can have your opinions. Just ensure they’re not recorded anywhere.”

So what do you think? I would love your input on this.

I admit it, I freaking love the Knorr Sidekicks commercials as of late. Created by DDB, Toronto, it all started with this gem:

Adorable. People liked it; they felt sorry for poor ol’ Salty. It conveyed the message well (thanks to Knorr, you won’t need Salty around anymore) but kept it lighthearted. And Salty was so cute!

But it seems the ad idea is now bigger than the product it is trying to sell. Let’s take a look at an ad I found today:

The product isn’t even mentioned. Heck, you don’t even see it until a minute in, in the final lockup. And the copy doesn’t even speak to the brand benefits. Is this an issue? Well, no, I don’t think so. Because what it does speak to is the ability to get your own FREE salt & pepper shakers by visiting their website (sidekicks.ca) I can’t lie, I’m now checking this out to see how I can get them. I’m sorry, they’re just so cute!

So… clearly the high value task here has shifted between the first ad (buy our product) to this ad (visit our website). Upon looking at the site though, the user has two options: buy the s&p shaker now for $14.99 plus shipping (an additional $7.29) or buy 3 packages of Knorr Sidekicks plus shipping.

Hm. Pay more monies ORRRR get tasty foods and pay less monies. Gee, wonder which one most people will go with. Just another indirect way to sell Knorr Sidekicks. But with the added bonus of a unique hit to their website. It’s win-win. Also win for consumers who will get a cute Salty’s in their daily lives. I’m seriously considering buying these. I wish I was joking.

Some other cute Salty’s ads can be found here and here.

In any case, you can check out Salty’s Twitter, Facebook fan page or his YouTube channel. Few items I need to off shoot and rant here about regarding these properties:

1. Most of the Twitter stuff pushes to product pages, which is fine – IF labeled as such. Instead, they’re just teaser copy and links, without disclosure of what the link is. Kind of annoying, clicking on a link thinking you might see something funny or of value to you only to find yourself on a Knorr Sidekicks product page.

2. The Facebook fan page wall is linked to the Twitter account, so all status updates on the wall are the same content as on the Twitter account. This basically says to me, “Why bother following Salty on Twitter? You can get the same content and more (ooohh, a photo album with 8 photos, if you could call that more, so impressive) on Facebook.” Don’t duplicate content. Doesn’t work in SEO, doesn’t work in SMO. Give users a reason to follow each individual account if you’re going to be on these properties – an incentive, if you will: exclusive content, funny tidbits, etc – that you can’t get already on another property. It’s fine to link out to the other social media properties, totally fine, but offer more than what is basically a RSS feed. And if that’s the case: Don’t bother signing up to that property.

2. No sharing of YouTube videos? Are you kidding me? What’s the point of putting it on YouTube then? You might as well just embedded a Quicktime video onto your site and called it a day. Lot of good non-embeddable content on YouTube does me, or anyone other fan out there. I don’t want to link in my blog posts, I want to SHOW.

Ok, rant over. I’m done now.

So what do you think? Think this ad idea has enough legs to stand on its own and support a product it barely talks about anymore? Let me know in the comments.

Globalive (also known as WIND Mobile) just announced on their Twitter profile that the Campaign for Competitive Broadband has officially launched. (Note: Globalive is not the creator of this website, as far as I can tell, but a partner. There are many companies and people involved in making this campaign a reality.)

I have urged y’all in the past to write your local MP about the CRTC and the issue of net neutrality, as well have asked you to sign the petition to dissolve the CRTC but if you haven’t done either, this website makes everything way, way easier. And isn’t that’s the beauty of the internet? Giving us lazy folks who care the ability to make our voices heard?

I am not a protester. Trust me. I think protests, walks, marches, signs, chants that say things like “hey hey, ho ho, homophobia’s got to go” are pretty much the most useless thing ever. I don’t believe they work. I don’t get involved in those things because I’ve never seen it do anything. I have never written a letter to my local MP (ha ha, despite asking you to – yes, I am a hypocrite) and I rarely sign petitions. This is because I have yet to see any of these things result in a changing of government law, social discrimination, or stereotyping.

If I saw real results, I’d see that the my efforts would be worthwhile. I’m sure there are plenty of examples out there of it happening – but I have yet to see anything. I’m cynical. I’m lazy. And I demand to have my voice heard… but maybe from the couch, and behind my ice cream?

Either way, the Campaign for Competitive Broadband website is pretty sweet as. One click, and boom: You are presented with a pre-written protest letter:

Another click and bam! Who do you want to send this to?

I honestly don’t think it could be any easier than this. Like, really. I didn’t even have to move anything except my hand. A couple of fingers. But there you have it, a well crafted protest letter sent off to four government officials. Protesting just got a heck of a lot sweeter. And my throat doesn’t even hurt from hours of chanting!

This isn’t just an issue of who the bigger telco giant is, this is an issue of letting the competitive spirit run rampant among our Capitalist system (which you may have gathered, I am a fan of). All the partners listed on the above site should be allowed to be as competitive as they want, on their terms. They shouldn’t have to be as competitive as they can be, under the conditions Bell/Telus set forth.

Let’s help. Even if it’s from the couch.

Someone on my Twitter feed today posted about Twist, a site that lets you see stats for trending topics on Twitter.

This isn’t the first time I’ve been to Twist, or any other sites like it but I was just amused to see “Harry Potter” as a top trending topic.

Not surprised, mind you, just amused. After all, I went to the midnight screening last night (hello, geek alert) complete with Harry Potter-inspired scar on my forehead with my friends:

Like many of my friends, offline and online, we Tweeted about the film before and after the movie. Which is why this graph of the trending topic “Harry Potter” made me chuckle to myself:

You can tell exactly who was Tweeting about this trending topic, as it took a sharp downturn for the 3 hours the movie was playing in most eastern cities at midnight. Then back up again, as we raced to share our favourite moments, lines, scenes and characters.

Back in the day, before Twitter came along, I’m sure Yahoo! Groups, or MSN or even sites like FanFiction.Net would have seen a similar spike around movie premiere times. But thanks to Twitter, we now have an easier, highly addicting ADD way of talking about what we liked:

and what we didn’t:

Good times. I just wish I was running on a little more than 3.5 hours of sleep today!

If you’re behind the game, here’s a link explaining The Great Write Off of 2009. You can find links and discussion to all posts by checking out the Twitter trending topic, #WriteOff09.

So today is the last day of The Great Write-Off of 2009! I think it’s safe to say that if there was a “winner” for this challenge, it’s me. Dan kind of dropped off the face of the earth for a little while and hasn’t recovered since. Sorry you suck, Dan. :(

Nah, in all fairness, I think Dan has a lot less free time than I. Still, I’m a busy girl and I’m proud I did my absolute hardest to post every second day, on-time. It’s been fun and hopefully I’ll keep writing here.

One of the reasons I came up with this idea for a blog off was that I knew I needed to populate my website with more content and I also needed a promotion of some kind. I needed new eyeballs. Coming up with a challenge was the solution to forcing myself to create content but approaching Dan and baiting him into a blog off was my solution to getting new visitors to my site and hopefully new readers.

I’d say it worked, wouldn’t you?

In case you can’t see that very well (silly narrow content window!), traffic is up 532% over same time period last month (though it should be higher because, as you can see at the beginning of my month, I changed the layout and as a result my GA code got dropped). I have an increase of 524% in pageviews, and average time on site rose 28%.

Who doesn’t love statistics like that?

As you can see, my biggest spike in traffic was as a result of my interview with Zephyr of CollegeFashion.net. She posted a link to the review on her Twitter account, which has 3,950 followers, so of course some of them wandered their way over here.

I think my favourite post however, was the one about moving to a new city and trying to start over. It’s definitely a subject that is close to my heart (having done it in Toronto and then Sydney, Australia) so I feel I can talk to it with some conviction. Plus I do love Eric’s photo – it’s definitely one of my favourites of all of his.

In any case, it’s been fun and I’m surprised I’ve had enough to talk about, really. Some posts fell flat but some were well recieved and on the whole, I think I came out with some quality content!

Thanks for playing along, folks. It’s been grand!

I saw the following video pop up on my Twitter feed this afternoon at 1pm on the Leo Burnett Twitter account, with the tweet, “#culturalfuel Vendor-Client relationship in real life situations: Just found this on FB. No comment..”

I watched this video, laughed and marveled at how true it rang and then re-tweeted it on my account.

Since then I’ve seen it pop up at least 4 times on other accounts I follow on Twitter and on advertising blogs, such as AdJoke.

As of 5.47pm, this video has been viewed over 2,500 times and my guess is the majority of them were today. Already it’s received well over 63 comments – a much higher view/comment ratio than one would normally find on a YouTube video. It’s also been favourited 524 times, so clearly the video is clearly hitting a nerve in the ad industry.

Comments include things such as, “This made my stomach hurt. I have had this same type conversation three times this week alone” (shawngoesgreen) and “Five stars isn’t enough” (jforrest55).

This video was added to YouTube 5 days ago on an account that was made 6 days ago. Sounds like someone’s trying – and succeeding – in making this thing viral. Should be interesting to see what the numbers are like in a few days. I’m also curious to see whether “Mr Bennett” really did see this thing on Facebook or whether it was actually created by Leo Burnett itself.

I’m sure there a million posts on why people love Twitter. So I’m just making sure I add in my $0.02 and make it a million and one. These are my reasons for loving Twitter:

ONE. Free stuff.

Twitter is great for giveaways. Just today, I was quick enough to reply to this challenge that I’ve won a cooler from Canadian Tire:

Thanks, Canadian Tire!

TWO. Laughing at funny things friends write.

I love my friends, both on Twitter and off Twitter. I have some close ‘real-life’ friends that tend to crack me up with their random and insane updates and I’m glad they’re using Twitter so I can get a good daily dose of laughter:

Apologies for the language. Debated whether or not to include but it was just too random to not.

THREE. Learning about promotions and sales from companies I like.

One of my favourite reasons I like Twitter is that I can get updates from companies or services I have an interest in. I follow enough blogs that I don’t really want to necessarily add a corporate blog to my long list of blogs on Google Reader. Usually this is because I’m not terribly interested in new updates to the site, or company changes, but simply the sales and promotions. I find companies use Twitter to just push the sales and promotions, like this:

Because of this Tweet, I ended up purchasing a shirt from Cameesa. Just got it today! Thanks Cameesa for letting me know about the sale!

FOUR. Sharing and learning from great people in the industry.

Probably one of my favourite parts of Twitter is learning from people I find to be absolutely brilliant in advertising, marketing, digital and social media. I’m such a new player to this game, any and all information I can soak up, I will. So Twitter allows me to really take a seat in the back and watch the show. There are many really great minds on Twitter and I love following them all, such as this guy, Bud Caddel who works at Undercurrent in NYC:

The added benefit of listening and learning is that I am slowly building up my confidence with regards to my own opinions. I can own them more effectively when I see that there isn’t necessarily a right or wrong opinion to have on any given topic. There are many individuals in this industry that don’t necessarily agree on everything but this leads to discussion, which inevitably improves our thinking on certain processes.

FIVE. Funny links that users feel compelled to share and I’m thankful they do.

The internet is a strange and wonderful place and I welcome links sent to me over Facebook, messenger services or Twitter. Twitter, however, allows you to spam everyone on your friends list with funny and/or awesome links such as this one from Jessica:

I’m pretty sure my life would have been incomplete without that link. Just sayin’.

Bonus Love:

SIX. A Tweet from space.

Twitter doesn’t get any cooler than this!

So those are my Top 5 Reasons I Love Twitter (Really Six). There are many, many more reasons but these are definitely some of the main reasons.

What do you think? Can you name any additional reasons to love Twitter? Or perhaps reasons why you dislike Twitter? Feel free to share in the comments!