PGePROPEL is small enough that all of us worked directly with Deanna at one time or another, on one project or another.

Last summer, before she took a leave of absence, I wrote copy for several of her projects. Never mind the corporate constructs that are titles and hierarchies, it was clear from the get-go that she was the boss, a taskmaster. That was as it should be.

The clients for whom she managed projects appreciated her diligence and attention to detail as much as we did. There were several in attendance at her service yesterday.

The Deanna we knew and worked with marched to her own drummer. In fact, he was probably a tabla player she knew from some unpronounceable province in a country half-way around the world. She often regaled us with stories and achingly beautiful photographs of her adventures, most recently to eastern India, to the Himalayas.

The Deanna we knew was quirky. She was opinionated. The Deanna we knew was tough and sometimes a pain in the butt, always for the right reasons. She was funny and charming and she was fearless.

She lived and passed away on her own terms.

Her friend and colleague, Lorraine Fung, called her a force of nature. Indeed she was.

We miss her. We’re better for having known her and worked with her.

After making much of its Passat ad for last year’s gridiron extravaganza (Darth Volkswagen – August 2011), my expectations were high. In a noteworthy use of online media, the spot was teased on YouTube. Entitled The Bark Side, the teaser features dogs barking out the Star Wars march. Cute, though somewhat aimless and annoying; as a teaser it gets a passing grade. It’s YouTube, after all – a pet performance paradise.

Then there was the actual Super Bowl spot, interestingly also previewed on YouTube a few days ahead of game day.

A dog (in a fat suit) is inspired by VW’s redesigned Beetle to get in shape and then race it down the road. Love the dog; love the much improved Beetle – so far, so good. Then there’s an inexplicable transition wherein we realize the dog-and-Beetle saga is a commercial playing on a screen in the famous Cantina bar on Tatooine. Pint-size Darth Vader shows up in what looks like a desperate effort to tie this spot to last year’s.

The two parts of this thing are stapled together without a scintilla of relationship. It’s, well, a dog’s breakfast.

But as a commercial (within a commercial within the commercial that is the Super Bowl), does it work? Part one does: The viewer can’t help but smile and that positive emotion is, ultimately, associated with a new Volkswagen product – so, mission accomplished. Part two, however, is a head-scratcher.

It’s as if no new ideas for using the Stars Wars milieu were worthy of a production budget; they’d already shot some stuff and thought they’d just tack it onto the end of a completely different idea.

Or, the production budget was in fact the issue…

Here are the links:

TORONTO, ON (February 1, 2012) ̶ Marketing agency PGePROPEL has launched a unique online marketing tool specifically for financial institutions.

Initially optimized for communication with high-value clients, the marketing system facilitates customized email campaigns by client advisors. It creates several types of campaigns including e-newsletters, webinars and in-person events and includes comprehensive reporting via an online dashboard.

The application guides the client representative through a best-practices workflow, thereby ensuring adherence to company business processes and legal requirements. It also facilitates performance reporting for senior management.

“We have two installations in service today with a major Canadian bank, one in English and one in Spanish for their South and Central American operations,” said PGePROPEL president, Andrew Gage. “A French language version is also available.”

Permission-based email marketing has become an integral part of client communications for virtually all major corporations, including generally conservative financial institutions.

PGePROPEL is a boutique agency specializing in innovative marketing solutions. Their offices are in Markham, ON.

For more information contact: Brad Taylor 905.940.0200 ext 136

I take some heart in the knowledge that I’m not alone in this. And we’ve all heard (and nod in tacit approval upon hearing) the occasional report of a television set falling victim to someone with a handgun within easy reach.

Today, more and more people are reacting to what they see on television in a much more meaningful way; in a manner that may actually be making a difference. The masses are talking back through social media.

Throughout the world, 300 million public comments are made online every day, two-thirds via Twitter. On average, some 10 million are related to television. Social media makes it possible for viewers to express their dissatisfaction or approval early and often. And the networks are listening.

Though difficult to capture and even more difficult to make sense of, these expressions represent data. Television networks now employ senior research people to turn these millions of spontaneous, irreverent, often profane remarks into useable information.

There are a few sentiment-analytics firms that have developed some extraordinary technology to parse social media commentary, Cambridge, Massachusetts-based Bluefin Labs, founded by Winnipegger and University of Waterloo grad, Deb Roy, for example. Bluefin is focused on television, for the time being. The next frontier for Roy and his co-founder and his one-time PhD student, Michael Fleischman, is, perhaps unsurprisingly, politics.

Roy and Fleischman are confident that social media analytics will soon be applicable to all manner of marketing initiative. “If you are looking for a set of people with a particular interest, we can tell you how this relates to another set of interests,” says Fleischman.

Setting up a Facebook page and a Twitter account, using social media and online channels to help drive your marketing agenda is now part of the brief. Everyone is doing it, or should be. But part two is on the doorstep: using bona fide analysis of public sentiment to modify messages, products, services and service behaviour.

It is of course common practice for marketers to get their communiqués in front of their target audience by piggy-backing with newspapers and magazines going to our homes. So it wasn’t really much of a surprise when I got my Maclean’s magazine in the mail the other day and found that it was poly-bagged with what I expected to be just more recycling.

In fact, the hitchhiker was another magazine, Fusion, a lifestyle publication which, perhaps unsurprisingly given its name, was underwritten by Ford. It was filled with well-written fashion pieces and recipes, and more than a few pages devoted to Ford’s ubiquitous Fusion midsize car. Ford appears quite prepared to devote marketing budget monies to support this vehicle, notwithstanding the complete make-over they have planned for it in the next year or so. But I digress.

It’s called content marketing or branded content and it’s coming back into favour in a big way.

There are those that suggest branded content blurs the distinction between advertising and entertainment. Certainly infomercials come to mind, though I’m hard pressed to find much entertainment value in them. But that’s just my take; others clearly don’t share that view.

In any case, I don’t see this blurring as the least bit problematic. I start from the premise that audiences are quite capable of viewing content critically and understanding the implications of it being aggregated and presented by single commercial enterprise supporting its business objectives, as opposed multiple advertisers doing so, as in the more typical publication or program.

A 2010 survey showed nine out of 10 B2B marketers are using branded content to grow their business, with e-newsletters leading the parade. The professional services industry reported the most significant degree of adoption, nudging out computing/software, which had the highest ranking in 2009. Given the Ford example, or Cineplex Entertainment’s Famous publication to cite another, there are plenty of B2C marketers who think the same way.

PGePROPEL is helping several clients, all diverse in their products and business models, leverage engaging content to tell their stories, from the aforementioned e-newsletters to a full-scale magazine in the case of an industry publication.

Creating special content-rich vehicles to tell your story is an exceptionally effective way to capture a client’s (or potential client’s) imagination. And it suggests that content shows no inclination to abdicate its throne any time soon.