Carol Phillips is a Notre Dame Marketing professor, Millennial marketing expert, and Founder/President of the consulting firm Brand Amplitude. I had the opportunity to chat with her on “The Social Nerdia Show!” yesterday. You can stream the show in its entirety below, stream it on blogtalkradio, and subscribe to the iTunes podcast.

Carol started teaching Notre Dame sophomores in 2003 and she quickly realized that this generation, often called Gen Y, was “very different“. While she expected Millenials to be very marketing savvy, she realized that they did not know that much about marketing and that inspired an article she wrote for AdAge in 2007. It was that article about what college students don’t know about marketing that introduced me to Carol’s work and writings.

Her blog describes Millenials as the group that outnumbers Baby Boomers and is determined to change the world. The idea of “changing the world” resonates with me so I asked Carol to elaborate on this. “Globally, when they do studies of Millenials, of what’s most characteristic about them, the thing that comes back is the Obama optimism, a passion to want to make a difference.” (more…)

Brett Erlich is the co-host of The Rotten Tomatoes Show, as well as a writer, co-host and associate producer for InfoMania. Both shows are on Current TV and you need to watch them if you haven’t already. Take a second, stop watching CNN or MTV and go watch some Current.

I had an awesome time talking to Brett on The Social Nerdia Show! and you can listen to it below, on blogtalkradio, or as a downloadable/five-star-reviewable/subscribable podcast on iTunes).

I’ve been a fan of Current for a while now. With shows like Vanguard and Super News!, it’s as if Current knows what I want to watch. So when I heard that The Rotten Tomatoes Show (based on rottentomatoes.com) was coming to my television via Current, I got very excited. With hosts like Brett Erlich and Ellen Fox, as well as a ton of clever viewer-created movie reviews, the show has become a part of Thursday nights for me.

Brett told me about how the show got started, how they select the user-generated reviews, and how much he enjoys working at Current. The show is a great example of what you can do by combining television and the web. Part of its success is that they are crowdsourcing some of the best material to movie fans and critics sitting in their living rooms.  Brett explained that it’s good that the show is more than just the opinion of the hosts and that “the more people we have contributing opinons, the better the show gets.”

So many people becoming film critics and spreading the word like a virus has definitely made it a bit challenging for movie studios. They can no longer simply depend on great marketing and polished trailers. For a movie to succeed, it might actually have to be good these days. Word of mouth has gone from casual conversation at a dinner party to millions of random people sharing thoughts in the internets. Sure, some movies like Snakes on a Plane bomb even with great online buzz, but I doubt District 9 would be the movie it is if it had come out 10 years ago.  (more…)

It’s been a while since my last Top 5 post and to compensate for that, I’m bringing you two posts of creative nutrition this week. One today. One in a few days. Or else you’ll get a bit too excited. As always, I’ll be using this space on the web to showcase some of the things that brighten my day and re-ignite my creative thinking.

Enjoy!

1. Target – Every Color You Can Dream

This beautiful stop-motion campaign for Target takes you through a colorful, dreamlike journey made of fabric.  The song is “Everything & Everyone” by Boys & Girls.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b4EaiSVQGWw

Oddly enough, the commercial looks very similar to Coldplay’s latest video for song Strawberry Swing.  Check it out here: http://www.coldplay.com/videostrawberry.php

2. Olympics – The Best of Us

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These are scary times for old media. The Internet has forced them to change or die or both. The media decline is probably most obvious in newspapers. The New York Times is not yet “a print newsletter for the elite and the elderly,” as the EPIC 2014 video put it in 2004, but it is definitely not what it used to be. The Wall Street Journal’s gloomy financial results are not getting any better. You don’t have to be a finance guru to know that the rest of the newspapers are also struggling.

Similarly, magazines are barely making it. Book sales are great, but only if you are JK Rowling. Hollywood movies are downloadable, sometimes even reviewed, before they are released. Marketers and consumers continuously wonder if TV is overpriced. Record labels and the music industry are running out of dumb ideas and Radiohead’s good ideas make their dumb ideas seem even dumber. And AM/FM radio… well, I can’t remember the last time I listened to it, but I’ve heard several podcasts and Pandora stations in the last few days.

And while MySpace continues to slide downhill from social web darling to shady poster child for uncoolness, its less than proud papa News Corp. is trying to change the way we consume news by announcing that it will charge for news content. Yes, charging, as in asking you to pay money for it.

Last time I checked, the news were free. The news are available to all and shared via links. The clicks on those links are what keeps advertisers paying for ads and what should make them pay much more in the future.

Everyone knows that The Wall Street Journal is one of the best newspapers in the world and that its writers are exceptional. I subscribed to it once (several years ago) and then canceled shortly after because I simply didn’t know what to do with such a huge pile of unread paper. (more…)

Chris Kahle is a recently hired copywriter for Crispin Porter + Bogusky, one of the hottest ad agencies in the world. While I cannot pronounce “Bogusky” very well, I’m quite aware of the agency’s widely known work for Hulu, Microsoft, Guitar Hero and Burger King.

 ”Boulder’s great. For a town out of about ninety thousand, it’s got a lot going on,” Chris said to me about the city in Colorado where CP+B is headquartered. It must be especially great to be there right now considering the fact that Chris was out of  a job just a few months ago when he decided to use Twitter to get CP+B’s attention. 

“I kind of became a victim of the recession 3 months ago. I got laid off from the agency that I was working at in Vancouver… Being liberated by being laid off, I had free reign to do what I want,” Chris explained. And working at an agency like CP+B is what Chris wanted to do so he got in touch with them. He had some contacts within the agency, but he wanted to increase his chances at standing out from the crowds (especially since so many people apply to CP+B on an on-going basis).

So Chris came up with the idea of asking people to tweet about him and his RFE (Request for Employment) to co-chairman Alex Bogusky and interactive creative director Jeff Benjamin. “I made a list of the few Twitter influencers in the advertising world, and I sent them messages saying ‘Can you guys tweet my RFE to CP+B?’ and for each person that sends this tweet I’ll give a dollar to charity.” (more…)

By now most people know that Microsoft has finally scored the deal it’s been wanting for quite a while. I’m guessing CEO Steve Ballmer still gets a little annoyed when thinking about all the trouble and time he wasted trying to get Yahoo! to give in. Then again, maybe things would’ve gone horribly wrong if Yahoo! had accepted what now sounds like a crazy initial offer.

The fact is that Yahoo! was so concerned with how much they could get out of Microsoft (or maybe how cool they would be by playing difficult) that they lost track of their purpose.

Yes, Yahoo!’s purpose in life was search. That’s how I know about them. That’s how you found out about them. Ok, to be fair, maybe some folks that still use Yahoo! Mail don’t realize this, but they probably only recently made the switch from AOL, so that doesn’t really count.

For most people on this Earth of ours, Yahoo! used to be a synonym for search engine.

Well, no longer. And with that, Yahoo! proves that they not only lost the #1 position many years ago, but that they also didn’t realize just how important search was. I mean, if they cared about search, they would’ve done something about it, right?

Wrong. Yahoo! was so concerned with becoming a portal, becoming the source for movie information (I admit it, Yahoo! movies is pretty good), capturing screenshots of Geocities and Flickr (instead of enhancing them), and wondering if red or purple is cuter, etc. that they totally forgot about the reason for their very existence. (more…)