Ian Beavis, Vice President of marketing at Kia Motors, is known as one of the masters of automobile marketing. He dazzled the world of advertising last year, when as the Senior Vice President of Mitsubishi, he launched the integrated TV and web campaign “See what happens.” “See what happens” was a cliff hanger TV spot that included a drive-to-web component that resulted in 11 million visits to the website within the six hours following the ad’s debut. It’s great when the client has this kind of knowledge about how to use the web and the energy to go beyond simply feeling good that he dropped a million on a back-slapping Super Bowl ad.

In my interview, Ian discusses “See what happens” along with his views on a holistic and ROI approach to marketing, the use of TV as a video asset and how important it is to think RETAIL.

This is part one. We’ll put up part two next week.

Listen Now:

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Whew! And I thought it was 50%.

Check out the new book on “What Sticks” by Rex Briggs and Greg Stuart.

While the dust jacket hype might be a bit (to put it mildly) over the top…

“If there is one book you want to have read about advertising, it’s What Sticks. It is the most comprehensive review of how to succeed at developing Advertising campaigns that I’ve ever seen.”

—Bob Liodice, President and Chief Executive Officer, Association of National Advertisers, Inc.

“This book will be to marketers what Six Sigma was to GE’s Jack Welch. Everyone knows that marketing is broken. Briggs and Stuart have the data-proven fix. A must read.”

—Michelle Conlin, Associate Editor, BusinessWeek

… I’ll be checking this out myself.

This is the second part of my interview with Michael Donahue, the Executive Vice President of the four A’s, that’s the American Association of Advertising Agencies.

This interview includes Michael’s views on what clients should look for when choosing an advertising agency: Strategically smart, passionate and without preconceived ideas about what media and marketing techniques to use. Wait a minute, that’s us!

We also get some quick takes on his views on mobile marketing, video on demand and social media like MySpace.

Dig in.

I reference my white paper on mobile marketing in the Podcast. Here it is.

Listen Now:

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Jeff Jarvis, the master of BuzzMachine, has a great post today*, “Making war look worse”, about how a Reuters photographer doctored his photo of a Beirut bombing. Read it please.

Then refer to my post “Republican Marketing at Its Best” from August 5.

I know how much Photoshop goes into our design work for clients to clean up images and how much Photoshop could do to create an alternative universe (and lets not forget Playboy for that matter) but ENUF faking! The real world is interesting. I swear it is.

I just finished Robert Greenfield’s book “Timothy Leary”, a rather interesting and, yes, mind-blowing, book on the life and times of Tim Leary, the LSD evangelist. Leary, a well-branded charlatan, coined the rousing baby boomer call to action “Turn on, tune in, and drop out.”

Greenfield points out a couple of interesting facts about the generation and use of this phrase. He believes that it followed an instructional meeting between Leary and Marshall McLuhan, a media and communications theorist best known for the thought, “The medium is the message”. It appears, according to Leary, that McLuhan gave the following advice to Leary in 1966 about how to market his acid crusade.

“The key to your work is advertising. You’re promoting a product. The new and accelerated brain. You must use the most current tactics for arousing consumer interest.

Word of mouth from your satisfied consumers will help…”

Hmm… Positioning, advertising, word of mouth marketing (and we thought that word of mouth marketing was invented in 2002).

Leary’s “Turn on, tune in, and drop out” psychedelic tagline became so popular that even Sprite (“Turn on to the flavor, tune into sparkle, and, drop out of the cola rut”) and the Christian evangelist Billy Graham (“Turn on Christ, tune in to the Bible, and drop out of sin”) picked up on the power of Leary’s marketing prowess and turn of phrase.

Far out man.