Archive for October, 2010

FTC Proposes Revused Green Guides; PMA to Cover at Law Conference and Webinar

Posted by ekabak in Advertising, advertising law, Marketing Law, Notable, PMA Events on October 7th, 2010

The Federal Trade Commission, on Wednesday, October 6 , 2010 proposed  long-anticipated revisions to its “Green Guides” for making environmental claims. The changes to the Guides dramatically change what advertisers are likely to say, especially in the areas of making unqualified environmental claims and in respect of certifications and seals of approval.  The Guides deal with claims addressed by the current Guides, as well as claims not addressed therein, such as in respect of “”renewable” materials or energy.

The revised guidelines are of major importance to anyone making environmental claims and worthy of  serious in depth review by all counsel and marketers dealing with these issues.

WEBINAR: The PMA will be hosting a webinar about the new guildelines featuring Chris Cole, an advertising law partner with Manatt Phelps & Phillips in Washington, DC on Tuesday, October 12th at 2pm EST.   Click Here  to register.

And in November the PMA Law Conference will cover the matter in even greater detail in the Friday November 19th session Green Advertising/ The New Rules with a panel headed by Brian Heidelberger, Advertising Law Partner at Winston & Strawn, and including David Mallen, Assoc Director, NAD, BBB, Julia Oas Corporate Counsel from SC Johnson and Wendy Reed, Partner at Heenan Blaikie.  Visit www.pmalink.org/law2010 for full details about the conference.

Ad Age and The NY Times have both covered the guides announcement.

Comments to the FTC are due by December 10,2010.

See www.ftc.gov.

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Forrester’s Josh Bernoff opens 2010 PMA Digital Summit

Posted by Rob Fields in Digital Marketing, PMA Events on October 2nd, 2010

Forrester’s Josh Bernoff joins us to kick off our 3rd Digital Summit, and gives his take on what to expect on the social media horizon. Get ready to hear about the peril and promise that awaits marketers in the not-too-distant future.

Josh is the coauthor with Charlene Li of the BusinessWeek best-selling book Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies (Harvard Business Review Press, 2008), a comprehensive analysis of corporate strategy for dealing with social technologies.

  • Advertising Age’s Abbey Klaassen picked Groundswell as “the best book ever written on marketing and media.”
  • Amazon’s editors put it in the top 10 business books of the year.

Josh’s newest book Empowered: Unleash your Employees, Energize your Customers, Transform your Business (Harvard Business Review Press, 2010), written with fellow Forrester analyst Ted Schadler, tells how to manage your company in the age of empowered customers and employees.

Josh will be signing copies of Empowered at the Digital Marketing Summit

Additional links:

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An Emotionally Uplifting Connection Via Direct Mail

Posted by Bonnie Carlson in direct/1-to-1, Promotion tactics on October 2nd, 2010

I am a breast cancer survivor.  I went through this experience when I lived in California and I ran in the annual Susan G. Komen Race for the Cure every September thereafter.

You can imagine my surprise when I received in the mail an oversized postcard with a photo of the back of a woman wearing a pink bib “In Celebration of Bonnie, Breast Cancer Survivor”.  Talk about intrusive!

This attention-getting marketing piece is for a bank, the Farmers & Merchants Bank, which must have bought a list of former runners in this race who were survivors. They offered me an opportunity to join their team in the race, and if I open an account at their bank, they would donate $125 to fund one mammogram for a medically under-insured woman in my county.

To me, this is an outstanding example of a very targeted, very persuasive, very timely offer (just before the annual race) that completely breaks through the clutter and makes an emotional connection with me without being too exploitative.  I didn’t particularly like the pink checks they were promoting, but the rest of their communication is spot-on, and if I hadn’t moved from the area, I might have seriously accepted their offer to go run with them.

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