Another time, he was on air saying things about Apple products that were just not true. He made claims about what software was bundled (free Photoshop when you purchase a Mac?), and how the products compared to competitors. Since anyone who is vaguely familiar with their products would know they are untrue, some at the time suggested he was just making things up to make Apple look good.

So it should come as no surprise I guess, that after leaving the world of “journalism” (which is intentionally in quotes here), he ended up working for a PR firm – Burson-Marsteller. He was basically working as a corporate PR rep when he was with CNBC.

And maybe again, no surprise that he is at the center of a scandal this week. He was caught trying to get USA Today to publish a “largely untrue” story about Google. Although this quite likely happens all the time in the world of PR (“Psst, did you know my competitor likes to kick dogs? That would make a great front page story!”), the fact that USA Today decided to print his name, his employers name, and make the company look bad for trying to do this is rarely seen. It’s an indication that this was one of the worst examples of this USA Today had seen.

Burson-Marsteller needs a PR firm to get their reputation back.

And Jim Goldman needs to readjust his perception of what is right and what is wrong. Reporters are supposed to be somewhat objective, not unapologetic shills for the companies they cover. And as a PR person, making things up to try to get media coverage against a competitor of a client is not doing that client any favors. Now there are hundreds of articles scattered around the web linking Burson, Goldman and Facebook to a smear campaign against Google based on Goldman’s half-truths to USA Today reporters. And Facebook is not blameless. Companies should focus on making their products better, and even getting positive press out of that, instead of doing political attack-ad style campaigns against competitors.

Maybe Jim Goldman should be a politician?

One of the examples he gave was an author he knew spent $1,000 on Facebook ads, and sold one book as a result. (Terrible ROI.) Therefore, Facebook ads suck. Therefore, people are going to stop using them. And, similar to a Ponzi scheme, after the last sucker has been scammed, the train comes to an end. Or something like that.

As an aside, some analysts estimate Facebook had $2 Billion in revenue in 2010. And will have $4 Billion in revenue in 2011. That’s a lot of people buying Facebook ads I guess.

I see Facebook completely different. I’ve had the privilege, over the last few months, to see some of the technologies people are developing to leverage Facebook as an ad network, and I think we’re only beginning to see the potential here.

One company has developed an ad optimization platform. It will take one ad (or four) and spread it across hundreds or thousands of segments (gender, age, location, likes, marital status, month you were born, etc.) Then measuring the success of each ad, it will allocate more money to the most successful segments. Almost like doing core samples to find where the gold is and then spending all your money on the best samples.

Also, I am involved in a few projects that involve a “social media component”.  Actually, what advertising campaign in 2011 does NOT involve a social media component? Anyways, big multinational multi-billion-dollar companies woken up to the “engage your customer” movement.

So the reality is Facebook (as a concentrated microcosm of the wider Internet) is attracting more big advertising budgets. Newspapers, magazines, television, and other traditional media are all suffering. Maybe it’s working to Facebook’s advantage that some people question if it’s able to generate revenues – while it silently rakes in the dough.

They feature an actor playing a VP at Sony. It started talking about price cuts, but has moved on to include relationship advice for frustrated girlfriends who are not getting enough attention from their boyfriends, or frustrated boyfriends who are wondering what to do with their girlfriend who thinks they are watching a movie when in fact he’s playing a game.

The VP in question, Kevin Butler, always has a different job title in each ad, usually relating to the punchline of the commercial message. He’s been VP of Blu-Ray Superiority, VP of Epic Footage, and my favorite – VP of First Person Shooter Relations. This was taken from his Wikipedia page, which of course he has.

All in all, its a clever concept. And funny. Where other companies have attempted something similar, this campaign has come off being fairly well executed across the traditional television media channel, and there are definitely enough versions of the commercial so that you don’t feel overloaded with the same commercial over and over.

Included is a fairly funny Twitter account @TheKevinButler. I’m following him even. He interacts with fans, responds to questions, and is definitely not a one-way broadcast of marketing messages. He mixes in mentions of Sony products (God of War), with odd Jack Handy style reflections of life: naming devilled eggs after the devil is apparently unfair to the devil no matter how bad the devil actually is.

Additionally, Sony (or their ad company) has released videos only for online distribution. This is another way they are catering to online fans (who are the target market for the PS3 anyways) and making the commercial more than just a passive experience and turning it into something people search for online.

I’m not sure if it’s officially sanctioned, but of course a Facebook fan page has spawned with several thousand fans of Sony’s Kevin Butler.

All in all, its a very good television commercial with online elements. I wish more companies executed their ideas as well as this.

I really hadn’t thought of it much, but it does make a certain amount of sense. In Canada, Visa is the dominant player with Mastercard being slightly behind in terms of acceptance, brand awareness, and usage. American Express is a distant third.

So it appears Amex has identified the problem. People might have an American Express card in their wallet, but they don’t think about pulling it out when they go to the grocery store or McDonald’s. People might use American Express for booking concert tickets (Front of the Line), plane tickets, business expenses, and when travelling, but don’t think of it as their “day to day” card.

In fact, I would be willing to bet American Express is by far the number one “corporate card” in Canada, but a distant third when it comes to personal cards. American Express EQUALS Business Card in many people minds.

So Amex launches a promotional campaign with a picture of a hamburger, to try at least, to get people to use their American Express card day to day. Not sure it will have much effect, but I guess if it causes 0.5% of people to use their Amex more, it would pay for itself.

McDonalds will definitely see a sales increase from this type of program. Just as frequent flyers always fly the same airline for the points and the benefits of status, McDonalds can easily get certain people to go to McDonalds more often (every day?) on the points and status system.

More important to McDonalds is the data. Who are your customers? When do they spend more on food? When do they spend less? Give customers a reason to let you track them. Give them a web site where they have to provide some more data (age, location, marital status, more) and it makes the data even more valuable.

Just do it, McDonalds. I’ll even let you track me.

By telecommunications, I am referring to television, home telephone, internet and mobile telephone services. And the Canadian duopoly is none other than Bell and Rogers.

Bell Canada started its life as a telephone company. It was once a true monopoly, having exclusive domain over local and long distance services in Canada. But in the late 1980′s and early 1990′s, the government took several measures to encourage competition. Including restricting ways the company could compete in long distance until other providers had a reduced Bell’s market share to 65%. It was government-forced competition, and Bell had to wake up and start competing for the first time in 100 years.

Rogers Communications started life owning a radio station but quickly got into cable. By 1980, it was the largest cable TV provider in Canada. In 1985, it also expanded into the mobile phone space as the government was actively encouraging new mobile providers to start up. In 1989, it entered the long distance phone market, again by the encouragement of the government. As you can see, 20 years ago the government was anxious to break the Bell monopoly.

Fast forward to today, where Rogers has not only entered the long distance market, but they have entered the home phone market as well as a not so small player. Bell, on the other hand, entered the satellite television market and has its very successful mobile business as well. Both companies have high-speed internet service offerings. (As an aside, to reinforce the point that Rogers is truly everywhere – Rogers owns many cable tv and radio stations as well, along with The Toronto Blue Jays baseball team and Skydome stadium. Of course, not to be outdone, Bell is a major investor in a national TV network and newspapers.)

So basically Rogers and Bell compete head to head all over the place in the telecommunications space.

What’s really fascinating to me is all the subtle and not-so-subtle things they each do to aggressively compete (ie: attack) each other from time to time.

The most recent example of this is that Rogers is making a major marketing push into Home Phone. They are actually advertising their phone services as $25 a month cheaper than the comparable plan at the big phone company. That’s significant savings. Almost anyone would jump at the chance of saving $25 if they could keep there phone number and get the same service and services.

But wait, Bell effectively strikes back. They are offering their satellite cable services at $25 off the comparable service at Rogers.

They’re even using the same red/blue couch metaphor in their advertising.

True competition is good – it just so rarely happens among big companies like this. More often it’s co-opetition. Consumers win in the end.

It’s quite bold for the advertising agency (is it DDB?) to have Subaru Canada to use the first few seconds of the real Snuggie commercial as the hook before taking about their product. “Go outside more.” It’s actually a bit of a dig at the Snuggie product as being for couch potatoes. (Who needs a blanket with sleeves? Can’t believe that company has made millions of millions on that.)

But back to the matter at hand. Can the car maker use a few seconds of another commercial without violating copyrights and possibly trademarks?

Clearly not.

The Snuggies people must have a decent sense of humor, and accept a 5 digit check for the use of their brand name. Free advertising, as they say.

Anyone know for sure?

Apple has been getting a lot of slack recently in the blogosphere and even the mainstream press for it’s monopolistic business practices and anti-competitive behavior. Apple, however, is not truly a monopoly and so this is not illegal. If customers don’t like how restrictive the iPhone is, or how they can’t buy Mac OS X and install it on their own hardware, they can take their money elsewhere and buy any of the hundreds of other phones or buy a Windows box. All’s fair in that respect.

But the real fascinating story here is how a brand who was super-respected for proving that customers will pay more if you give them a truly magical experience is quickly losing its shine. The speed at which this is happening is incredible.

I logged into iTunes tonight, and noticed there was an update to one of my iPod Touch applications – PageOnce, a personal productivity application. But trying to download it, Apple gave me a pop-up warning that this application required me to certify that I was 17 years or older due to adult content.

This took me by surprise. A personal productivity application, that allows me to check all of my various phone, credit card, bank accounts, air miles, and other points card balances in one place – is flagged for adult content.

And when I went into the iTunes Store to visit the application page for more information, this is what I see:

Let me get this straight… “realistic violence”, “horror/fear themes”, “cartoon/fantasy violence”, “alcohol, tabacco or drug use or references”, “mature/suggestive themes”, “profanity or crude humor”, and “intense sexual content or nudity”.

APPLE, YOU HAVE GOT TO BE KIDDING WITH THIS!

It’s a productivity application. It contains none of those things. Your entire content ratings system looks like a joke. It’s one thing to annoy developers with your odd application rejection practices. But the above screen shot makes you look downright incompetent and foolish to your customers. Really. You’ve dropped a few notches of respect with me tonight. I’m truly stunned.

I know this one thing will probably get lost among all the other things Apple is doing right now to destroy it’s once stellar brand. But it’s a perfect example of taking a good thing and ruining it.

And I feel sorry for the people at PageOnce. A really useful web site and application.

“Customers who switched to us saved an average of $342 off their car insurance.”

There’s an old saying. There are three types of lies: lies, damn lies, and statistics. The advertising slogan above is basically a statistic. And as such is meaningless. It’s meant to imply in the consumer’s mind that this insurance company is the cheapest one you can find, when in fact it does not prove anything at all.

Car insurance is basically a commodity. If I presented you with two policies, with the same amount of coverage in every respect, and one was $1000 and the other was $1200, you would take the $1000 policy. Even the brand name of insurance, AllState, has only a small market share of the overall market. The brand name doesn’t mean much. Price is the determining factor – it’s a commodity.

So it’s a “given” that people do not generally switch auto insurance companies if it costs more money. So the reverse is true as well - almost every customer that switches companies saves money. Every car insurance company on the planet can make the claim that the average customer that switches to them saves money because only customers that save money switch to them!

The other axiom about car insurance is that you can almost always save more money by shopping around. There are dozens of insurance companies competiting for your business. Most people simply renew with the same company year after year. But it’s pretty much a guarantee that if you shop around a little bit, you can save money. Even only a few dollars, but there’s a 98% chance you can save at least $1 by switching to another company.

There are two reasons for this. The first is there are dozens of variables that go into determining the price of insurance (the year, make and model of your car, your address, your age, marital status, driving record, local crime rates, coverage, deductible, etc.) and no single insurance company is the cheapest for everyone at any given time. One insurance company might be cheaper for people over the age of 40 who drive a minivan and live in the suburbs, while another might be cheaper for people over the age of 45 who drive an SUV and live in the city. You might have been with the cheapest company for you last year, but this year your car is older and you are older and even the car theft rate in your city street has changed a couple of decimal points. All of these small changes means that you are probably not with the cheapest company any more.

The second reason is car insurance prices are not static. Companies change their prices, to try to manage their profits (hopefully increasing them year after year). Also they know most people do not change policies year to year. So it is a legimate strategy for them to offer “the cheapest rate” to married, 40-year-old minivan drivers, and then raise those rates steadily year after year until enough customers start shopping around and realizing they are no longer paying the best rate. Year after year, the companies can focus on a different market segment (there are dozens) and then raise their rates by 5%, 10% year after year. That’s how they maximize their profits. Simply being the cheapest company for a single segment year after year will not lead to the highest profits.

So the next time you see a commercial by Allstate actor Dennis Haysbert claiming drivers that switch save money, roll your eyes and say “Show me ONE company where people lost money by switching. Show me ONE. I dare ya!”

Those questions have largely been solved. Twitter is stable. The “Twitter Fail Whale” is on a well-deserved vacation, and with some celebrities approaching and passing 1 million followers, things seems to be going well for the service.

It wasn’t so long ago when Ashton Kutcher was begging and pleading his way to 1 million followers. Only a few short months ago. Currently he has 2.7 million followers. It seems usage of Twitter has doubled and doubled-again and keeps growing.

How many of those accounts are active remains a mystery. Some research has suggested that more than 50% of Twitter users have never “tweeted”. But you can be an active Twitter user and never say anything. Other research suggests around 9% of Twitter accounts show true signs of inactivity. That’s not too bad all things considered. But the truth is only Twitter knows and so far they’re not saying anything.

On the marketing front, Twitter’s effectiveness as a marketing platform has become more muted. That doesn’t mean it’s impossible, just that it’s becoming more difficult to get your message across in a sea of marketers and spammers. The key to effective marketing on Twitter is still through two-way interactions with your customers (“conversations”) instead of having a program auto-post press releases to an account.

Part of the problem, for me at least, is that the more you use Twitter, the more likely you are to follow more and more people. It’s only natural that you add people who communicate to you, add people who you find intresting through search, and add people who you have heard or read about who have Twitter accounts. The flow of information coming in to a particular users Twitter stream increases over time.

I have taken to start removing people who publish too much. If I log in to Twitter and notice 8 of the last 10 tweets are from a single person, and I don’t find anything particularly interesting in those 8 tweets, I will unfollow that person. That might sound like an unfair policy, especially if people are logging into Twitter only once a day and then replying to individuals that have sent them messages. But I don’t like the idea that one person can dominate my stream.

There is an old concept in computer science (probably from ham radio or older technology) called “signal to noise ratio”. If you are following someone, and out of their last 100 tweets they only had one or two interesting things to say, that’s a fairly low signal to noise ratio. That is, that’s a lot of noise for not much benefit. That’s why I prefer people who tweet less often, but may deliver more interesting content.

So for marketers considering using Twitter, I would try to avoid sending out too many messages in a day. It’s often counterproductive.