New ad for opposition to same-sex marriage features beauty queen

A new ad opposing same-sex marriage spotlights the firestorm that was created when Miss California beauty contestant Carrie Prejean answered a question during the pageant saying she was against same-sex marriage.

The ad is titled "No Offense" and says "Gay marriage activists attack people for supporting marriage because they don't want to debate the consequences of same-sex marriage. They want to silence opposition."

Consequences? That is hilarious. We would probably lose in Iraq if gays were allowed to be married. I wouldn't be able to make my credit card payments either. The environment? Forget it.

The ad is the second spot in a $1.5 million campaign by National Organization for Marriage. Soooo....we're in a recession and times are tough, yet we are spending money on this??!!! Unreal.

"Our mission is to protect marriage and the faith communities that sustain it," the group's executive director Brian Brown said Tuesday. "We want to highlight the very real effects on our liberties and especially on religious organizations, businesses, and individuals."

If it wasn't so sad it would be utterly hilarious.

Should you market to baby boomers?

This article on Entrepreneur.com says you absolutely should, and we would agree with them. These people are a huge market and they have money!....or whatever is left of it.

The fact is boomers spend far too much money to be ignored during tough times. By some estimates, they spend $400 billion more per year on goods and services than any other generation. The numbers tell the tale: According to our analysis of U.S. Census data, over the next 10 years, the 18 to 49 age segment is projected to grow by only 1 percent to about 137 million. Meanwhile, the 50-plus age segment will swell 21 percent to 116 million.

Five tips to avoid in SEO

Janet Meiners Thaeler of SmallBizTrends.com offers five helpful tips on what to avoid when doing search engine optimization on your website:

1. Putting too many keywords on your web site. If a website repeats words or phrases so often that it’s unnatural to read, it’s called keyword stuffing and could get the site penalized. Some sites hide keywords in the text or code of the site which have nothing to do with their site. They might use the same words over and over but otherwise give very little information and no news value. You might find web sites that have hundreds of keywords in the footer or bottom of a web page - this is ineffective and your SEO company should not employ these techniques.

2. Overuse of bolded text or too many links. Not only does this look terrible but it also doesn’t build trust with people or help your search engine rankings over time. Again, while it’s important to create search engine-friendly content, writing for people will be better in the long run.

3. Hidden links. Sometimes these links are hidden in the code of a site or in the footer of a website. They code the site to hide the links or they are the same color as the background so you can’t see them. The links are often unrelated to the site but even a huge list of related links that are hidden can hurt you. My blog was recently spammed so that every time it loaded there were links to viagra sites. You couldn’t see them but they slowed down my site considerably. I got it cleaned fast because a friend of mine recently had his site banned by Google for the same problem.

4. Complicated link schemes. Google can detect unnatural linking patterns and there are many variations of link schemes. An example is that overnight your site has thousands of links when you did nothing to deserve those links. Some people build programs that add links automatically or that create new web pages or blogs (splogs) full of spam content and links.

5. Multiple domains or subdomains with essentially the same content. These sites or pages have practically the same information but with different keywords. Here’s an example I saw when I was looking for a locksmith. When I type in a city name the same site comes up again and again. The only difference is they have a different domain for each city or state. They are not regional but contract out to various cities. The page for Denver is the same as the page for Las Vegas, only with the words “Denver” swapped out for “Las Vegas.” There are many variations on this tactic which may work short term but long term they are risky. Example of duplicate content:
www.completelocksmith.com/locksmith_city.php?cid=denver
www.completelocksmith.com/locksmith_city.php?cid=las vegas

How to add humor to marketing

Entrepreneur.com has some tips how you can add humor to marketing. They always make it seem so much easier than it really is.

Don't initially set out to be humorous. That may be the most important aspect of humorous marketing. You don't want to force anything, says Linda Kaplan Thaler, whose advertising agency The Kaplan Thaler Group's clients include Procter & Gamble and Continental Airlines. The company is responsible for the Aflac duck and the Swiffer ads, where a mop and broom stalk their ex-owner and try to woo her back.

"You need to not have a preset idea that something's going to be heartfelt or funny," Thaler says. Marketing "needs to be emotional in some shape or form."

The humor should fit your product or service's personality. It sounds obvious, but even some brands that seem as if they could easily fit into humorous marketing don't--or at least as well as you might expect. Cult branding expert Bolivar "BJ" Bueno believes Miller Lite's humorous ads are lacking compared to others like Budweiser. "People drink to have a good time, and Budweiser has spent a lot of money to say, 'We're about entertaining you,'" says Bueno. In contrast, Miller Lite's message has always been that it's a lite beer. Calorie count is a serious topic to anyone concerned about weight, so wacky ads revolving around being lite don't really work in Bueno's opinion.

Humor can work in even the most unlikely places. Lately, banks have been going with gallows humor in light of the economy. Last Christmas, Denver-based FirstBank offered tongue-in-cheek gift ideas on billboards: It suggested you take photos of yourself next to the signs, which featured a picture of a seascape. Then you could frame it and send it to your friends.

The humor can't overpower the brand. The best humorous marketing ads take risks. Take Nationwide's "Life Comes at You Fast" ads. In one, a young man bumps the car of an elderly couple and apologizes. Then the elderly woman starts beating him up while a narrator somberly observes that not everyone handles "accident forgiveness" as well as Nationwide.

Google TV ads

Have you seen Google TV ads? Could be a very powerful tool for getting your word out through the medium of television.

Finally some good economic news?

The London Telegraph says that according to the Bellwether Report, a quarterly survey for the advertising industry trade body IPA, business confidence has rebounded from the all-time low in 2008's fourth quarter. The report seems to indicate that a bottom has been reached in the slashing of marketing budgets.

The proportion of companies reporting that prospects had deteriorated fell from 63pc in the fourth quarter of last year to 44pc in the first quarter of this year.

Those who said prospects had improved rose from 5pc to 14pc, suggesting confidence has improved

"This data supports the view that the bottom of the market has been reached," said Moray MacLennan, IPA president and M&C Saatchi's European chairman.

"It will be a long road to full recovery, but this may be the turning point. It is good to see a graph going in the right direction for a change."

Italian newspaper gets creative

While the newspaper industry is getting hammered, many newspaper execs have decided to complain. Others, like Italy's Il Sole 24 ORE is being creative. Here are some shots of their new magazine, IL: