New Events:

New Car and ~270 dollar car payments

New Full Time Job to offset those payments

Graduating in May

Yikes.

Speaking of marketing: rgreer seems to be trying to make some quick bank off of MindSay users, offering sub-par services. Dude, go advertise somewhere else, unless you want to give MindSay a couple points off the top.

*UPDATE* Just found out that this user also commented on his own blog to give himself props for his own site. Hilarious.

People...they just want to have fun. All you suckers are so fuckin' temporary. Me and my crew walking down the street; you can't beat the beat. -AWOL One
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I just recently viewed 9 presentations for my Integrated Marketing Communications (IMC) class.  Most were horrendous, some were decently half done, and some were completely moronic.  Most tried to be "trendy" with the ad industry- except these trends were 5 years ago.

What is IMC you say?

IMC deals with presenting a clear and consistent advertising message throughout all media vehicles, such as print media, commercial advertising, online advertising, website, etc.

I sat through these 9 presentations, and i'm going to go over 3 that I think were completely moronic, and if I was a real client shown these presentations, laughter would be followed by extreme nausea and vomiting.

Here are my main points.

All of these mock IMC campaigns ran into the millions of dollars.  One group, representing Honda, had a budget of 90 MILLION DOLLARS.  You could start a whole company on 90 F'ing million dollars.  That size budget is completely ludicrous.  Now I don't pretend to know all there is to know about the ad industry, but I think that I can safely say that any IMC campaign that augments traditional advertising doesnt have that amount of money allocated to it.  Ad budgets are not distributed in "Monopoly" money.

Point 2.  Some of these ad campaigns were like watching paint dry.  There was no cohesiveness, no interest, no captivation, no imagination.  Honda's campaign theme was "Got Gas?" for the new civic hybrid, obviously biting off of the got milk campaign of a decade ago.  Stab your eyes three times and marry your mom.

While I'm on the topic, Honda's goal was to create "buzz marketing" by doing "unique" print media on billboards... with green "got gas" signs.  I wanted to die.

Buzz marketing is not having people talk about your campaign.  That's word of mouth, first of all.  Buzz marketing consists putting a contrived "shill" person in trendy spots to talk to people about a product or service.  Word of mouth is more genuine and more effective in my opinion.

Lets move on to Dr Pepper, with their 30 MILLION dollar budget.  In their presentation, they had no idea if they wanted to target the hispanic/latin population or not. Grr...

And finally, there was team Oil of Olay made up of sorority girls and other nitwits.  Their company picked a new product called "Quench" body lotion that they obviously absentmindedly picked out as they walked through the aisles at Giant on their way towards the prophylactics and lipstick.  Now Quench's campaign theme was to go get "quenched."  Quench this.

Quench's campaign also offered "webisodes" on their website, which are small film shorts that portray some sort of advertising message that fits into the broader campaign.  These film shorts are meant to be viral and be spread by email, IM and word of mouth to viewers.  These interesting films showed old women running, a woman taking care of their child and "quenching"...ugh...and another going to the office.  Notice anything remotely interesting about these?  The class didnt either.  What a waste of my time.  Unless a webisode is well done, they're BLOWN.  Thats all I have to say.

What gives me some satisfaction is that some of these barbie dolls, social butterflies, and popped collars are going to be hired at an ad agency and be given accounts...and then be lambasted by people who actually know what they're doing.  The problem with all these people?  No Insight.