Another productivity tool for small budget advertisers was released by Google today. The Campaign optimizer for AdWords.

It basically analyzes your campaign settings to check what worked or haven't worked well in your campaigns. Then throws up a few tweaks in terms of budget, keywords, keyword matches, bids and ad text. Add a regrouping strategy to the analysis/results and its ready to seriously affect the business of SEM firms.

Its not yet active for India though.

If you are a GMail fan (and use Firefox), this productivity list is a must read to update yourself of the possibilities with GMail.

Seth Godin in his blog note on Empathy says, blogs are boring because "they are about the writer, not the reader."

If you think this is the case here, read the header and blog description, go away, do whatever, this is my blog!

Last week I discovered that YouTube uses Tacoda to do behavioral targeting of ads and made a note somewhere to read up a bit on the company.

It did occur to me that it was prime target for a take over by Google. And today, I found out Tocada is being bought over by AOL!

The other day I overheard a few people, working in the technology domain, talking about a new Wiki in their workplace. Good initiative, but I don't think its going to work in the corporate environments of today.

HBS has this nice interview between Professors Karim R. Lakhani and Andrew McAfee at the end of an article on how Wikipedia works. I have just taken a few snippets that are pretty much my arguments on why Wiki's wouldn't work in corporates.

1. Value: "How valuable is the corporate encyclopedia" or collaboration or open discussions for the managers and top bosses? In corporates, decision making is usually top down.
   
2. Incentive: "How much enthusiasm or incentive do we have to contribute to the corporate encyclopedia." By the way, how many senior people do you think are technology enthusiast or early adopters and willing to contribute to a Wiki?
3. Openness: In corporates, knowledge and information is power and is the one thing that counts in keeping you where you are. You open up information and people a little more smarter can critique you and worst still, upstage you. Its "a technology that enables self-selection, transparency, openness—how does a manager or management deal with that?"
4. Peer Wisdom: In corporates superior and boss wisdom is what counts! In Wiki's "peer review is critical. A challenge for firms that are used to managing employees and allocating the resources in a very top-down kind of way."Can the boss take a subordinate editing and correcting his comments?
   
5. Freedom: "Wikis rely on the foundation of free expression. But can employees feel free to express their opinions to everyone in the company as Wikipedians do in their world? The CEO might be reading it, after all."
6. Boundaries: "There's lots of knowledge in the outside world". Will the corporate "enable the outside world (suppliers, consumers) to interact with them?"
   

And yes, they also discuss my fear when some one senior in the company says, "OK, we need an internal Facebook (or a Wiki). Why don't we put a three-person coding team together (and three more people to contribute and maintain it), and we'll throw one of these things up there?" Yes, expect that to happen!

A colleague forwarded a wonderful Nike ad that featured two celebrities and after going home I happened to see some ads featuring Indian Sports and Movie stars, in total contrast to the international ad. This set me thinking on celebrity endorsements and advertisements in India.

We see more and more Indian companies falling into the trap of using a celebrity to get their message across. The culprit in my opinion is the creative agency's' ineptitude. But the client is also to blame for this.

Usually the agency lacks ideas and what is best way to cover it up? A celebrity. I have a personal experience, in the company I work, of the agency proactively coming up with a celebrity creative (with the name of the celebrity of course) way off the marketing task.

Then there is the HiPPO (Highest Paid Person's Opinion) on using a celebrity (he either knows or has already signed one). Most likely this person had fallen into the trap of using a well-known face to stand out when the agency comes with mediocre ideas. Or when attacked by competition with a celebrity, he decides to retaliate with another one.

I have compiled a few ads (thanks to YouTube and the choice of a custom embed player) I have lined up starting with good (first 6) to mediocre (next 3) to bad (last 4).

No doubt a celebrity can get you saliency, make the new brand stand for something and influence purchase intention. But, they don't come cheap and can have a a polarizing effect on peoples opinion. Plus, the brand can sink with the celebrity's reputation.

Here a few pointers on how to make and evaluate good celebrity ad.

• Don't take the fish out of a pond, don't make a cricketer an actor and vice versa (Adidas-Prayers is a good example).
  
• Don't use a celebrity if he is not adding any value to the brand. (The Acer office ad is something I fail to understand. Hritik is an actor, a damn good one at that. What is he doing in the office?)
  
• Weave interesting stories around around a celebrity and if possible his star value (Coke-Thanda, Toyota Innova are good examples)
  
• Have a long term strategy of using the celebrity. You have already fallen into the trap of using the celebrity once. If the celebrity ad was great, rest assured the next ad you make is never going to match up.

The Business section of a paper had an article on Lenovo moving its entire Creative development to India.

"This could very well be Indian advertising's moment of reckoning.
Lenovo, the world's third largest personal computer maker, has decided to outsource all - repeat all - its international marketing-campaign activities to India, the first time a global corporation has done so. "

Big mistake. Whoever thought India was 'the' place to move high end creative work to. It is cheap, no doubt. But its cheap in every sense, cost and creativity too. India is the place to find good Engineers and Doctors. You get it - technical talent. At this point of time, good creative talent in India is not only rare but has completely deserted the media field.

I might be wrong here because there are some Highest Paid Person's Opinion's (HiPPO) which are contrary due to which Lenovo decided on this move. The WSJ says, "Mr. Deepak Advani got the idea for the hub because he was impressed by the slick Lenovo ads that Ogilvy's India team had created for the Indian domestic market".

I wonder, how can he refer to these ads for Lenovo as slick (just ignore the first 20 secs of the VO at the beginning).

All I have to say to marketers is that India's time will come in the creative fields. Till then, don't be penny wise and pound foolish. You are going to spend millions in making these sick ads and then airing them.