American Express Shows Sponsors How It's Done
CNBC
I'll start with this: Sponsors of athletes, teams, tournaments and facilities, for the most part, do a bad job at maximizing their sponsorships.

They buy signage, they film commercials and they don't do what they're supposed to do, which is engage sports fans by giving them a reason to positively associate their company to the fan experience.

That's why it's so refreshing to see what American Express has done with its sponsorship of the US Open golf and tennis events in recent years.

The company has always been about making it special to be a consumer. Credit card companies face the risk of being differentiated by math—by the interest rates and financing charges and not by service or feeling. American Express has been one of the best sponsors in sports at these events because they you a better fan.

The Curation Nation
Marketing Daily News
The king is dying. Long live the king—Content Creation I. All hail the heir apparent—Content Curation!
We are witnessing the passing of the brief era in which all "companies are publishers" (content creators) and are entering a new age in which the act of separating the wheat from the chaff of our over-mediated lives will be the cornerstone to positioning corporate brands for success in their marketplace.

Content curation (CC), the act of distilling the flood of online information on a given topic into an editorialized narrative that enables one to comprehend the big picture, is all the buzz since the publication of Curation Nation by Steven Rosenbaum. Successful curation discovers, organizes and shares subject-specific information that is intended to provide added value to key audiences (stakeholders), well beyond content creation.

Or, in Mr. Rosenbaum's words, "In a world of bandwidth and content abundance, we're overwhelmed with data, tweets, blogs, check-ins and media. It used to be we surfed the web. Now the waves of the web are just too big. Curation is the new magic that makes the web work. Bringing the web back to human scale with human filters you trust and love. A powerful mix of passion and context turns noise back into signal."

Do Talk to Strangers: The Next Wave in Media is Connecting You to People You Don’t Know
AdWeek
With strangers like these, who needs friends?

Instead of just helping you connect online with your offline friends and acquaintances, a crop of burgeoning social media companies want to mine what they see as more useful relationships—the ones between people who might not know each other, but share a common location, interest, or friend. In a less-connected era, they would have likely remained unknown to each other. But capitalizing on digital networking—and the resulting boom in data—these companies are betting that they can turn unfamiliar people into sources of value for each other and, ultimately, for advertisers.

“As time goes on, people realize that there’s more value in the nuances and derivatives of that,” says Chris Dixon, co-founder of seed investment firm Founder Collective and founder of recommendation engine Hunch. “You start exploring things online that you can’t do offline.”

Last week, social sharing platform Meebo put research behind the theory, revealing that expert strangers trump friends when people are surfing the Web for content that matches their obsessions. The company’s study found that for information on specific hobbies or interests, 39 percent of people would seek the recommendations of strangers, compared to 28 percent who would turn to friends or acquaintances. For Meebo, a service that lets users check in to websites and follow the check-ins of others, connecting strangers around interests is about leading people to new content on the Web, and helping advertisers corral relevant consumers.

100 Leading National Advertisers
AdAge
Just what we needed: another financial and automotive bailout.

But this time it was banks and cars bailing out adland. Ad spending for cars and credit cards has come roaring back, helping drive 8.8% growth in 2010 U.S. spending for the 100 Leading National Advertisers -- the highest growth rate since 2004.

Financial advertising surged 29% in 2010, and automotive accelerated 28%, based on Ad Age DataCenter's estimates of U.S. spending for the 12 financial firms and 10 automakers that made the 100 LNA ranking.

To be sure, growth rates look good in part because the comparative year was so bad. Spending in 2009 plunged 10.2% in the sharpest drop since Ad Age began the LNA ranking in 1956.

This hardly qualifies as boom time. First-quarter 2011 U.S. measured-media spending rose 4.4%, the slowest growth since the ad upturn began in first-quarter 2010, according to WPP's Kantar Media. Kantar Senior VP Jon Swallen notes year-over-year comparisons became tougher this year because the ad industry has entered its second year of recovery.

Top Brand Ad Spending by Category and Social Media Ranking
AdAge
Ad Age asked social-media tracker Infegy to examine the sentiment of online conversations around the top 200 megabrands as ranked by 2010 expenditures in measured media. Infegy tracks posts on 40 million online sources including blogs, Twitter, Facebook and other networks and analyzes the sentiment of the brand references. Infegy's system looks both at the overall tone of a post and also the references within the post. So a post such as "I love my Apple iPhone. Despite its dropped calls it's the best phone out there," would count as a positive post with one negative and two positive references.

Following are the top 10 and bottom 10 for the four metrics: Volume, Reference, Article and Overall Score.

One-Third of Millionaires Use Social Media Professionally
Media Post / Marketing Daily News
Thirty-four percent of rich folks use social media professionally, according to a survey of millionaires by Fidelity Investments (assuming that millionaires still count as "rich"), including 28% who say they use LinkedIn. This is a pretty substantial number, especially considering that the average age of rich respondents was 56. Adoption rates for other kinds of communications technology were even higher, with 85% of rich respondents saying they use—or are willing to use—email and text messaging for professional matters.

More to the point for Fidelity Investments, two-third of rich respondents said they would like to be able to use social media, email, or texts to communicate with their financial advisors -- compared to just 43% of brokers and consultants who say they currently use these professionally. Scott Dell'Orfano, executive vice president of sales and relationship management at Fidelity Institutional Wealth Services, stated: "The results of this survey should serve as a wakeup call to advisers." He noted that financial advisers may be leery of using social media to talk to clients because "they don't want to remove themselves by communicating through technology," but warned that this attitude was increasingly obsolete, as efficiency and client preferences should guide communications choices.

Can Pepsi’s Big Marketing Shake-up Bring Back Fizz to Its Beverage Brands?
AdAge
After several years of turmoil and turnover—and against recent news that Diet Coke has nudged past Pepsi to become the second-largest U.S. soft-drink brand—PepsiCo is taking another shot at getting its marketing ranks right.

The company is moving to restructure its beverage marketers, adding three new positions and carving up the chief marketing officer-PepsiCo Beverages America position held by Jill Beraud, who is leaving, AdAge.com reported last week. The news triggered a fresh round of speculation over whether the moves are a step in the right direction or a shuffle that will further confuse the rank-and-file in beverage marketing, some of whom will soon be face-to-face with their third boss in four years.

Executives close to the company are baffled as to how the new structure will operate, questioning who, exactly, brand teams will report to. One executive close to the company speculated that, for example, under the new structure, brand Pepsi's marketing team could be split up, with some reporting to Brad Jakeman, who is taking on the role of head marketer for Pepsi trademark globally, and some reporting to Simon Lowden, who is moving into a U.S. role from Pepsi International.