By Lindsey Campbell, Captains of Industry

Here’s your Daily Deal:

1. If You Don’t Want People To Drink and Drive, Just Overcharge Them

Even though Brazil has zero tolerance policy on drunk driving, 35,000 people still died last year from drunk driving accidents. Since it seems that Brazilians aren’t concerned with threats of fines and jail time, Ogilvy Brazil decided to show bar patrons just how much their tab would cost if they decided to get behind the wheel while intoxicated. By adding up things like an ambulance ($3,050), X-Ray ($820), and wheelchair ($1,350) to tabs, Bar Aurora in Brazil not only showed their patrons just how costly drunk driving could be, but how deadly. Check out this video called the $73,000 Bar Tab. Just watching the shocked look on people’s faces when they get their mortgage-payment-bill is priceless.

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By Lindsey Campbell, Captains of Industry

Here’s your Daily Deal:

1. Teenage Boy Harassed on Facebook…By His Mom

I don’t think Lane New, a 16 year old from Little Rock, Arkansas, will be getting “Mom” tattooed on his arm any time soon. According to Tom Parsons of the Huffington Post, Lane’s mother, Denise New, went on his Facebook account, posted her own comments while posing as Lane, changed his password, and wouldn’t let him log back on to his account, all because Lane posted a comment about a girl that didn’t sit well with Mama New.

What’s a teenage boy to do? Yell? Scream? Runaway from home? None of the above. Lane decided to take the grownup approach and filed an official complaint with prosecutors who approved the harassment charge in March. In his complaint, Lane claims his mother “posted things that involve slander and personal facts about my life.” Denise’s defense? “I was only trying to be a good mother.”

If Lane New wins, it could become a landmark case that could potentially change the rights parents have over their children’s social media in the future. To learn more about the case, read Parsons’ article.

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By Lindsey Campbell, Captains of Industry

1. Going Beyond the Grave is Going Too Far

In Tiger’s debut ad since his stint in sex rehab (it’s a tough job, but someone has to do it), Nike features Tiger’s father, Earl Woods. But here’s the clincher—he’s dead.

In the spot, Earl’s voice asks Tiger “what he’s learned” and a pitiful looking Tiger shoots the camera his best puppy dog eyes, and then the Nike logo appears.

I’m not sure what kind of feeling Nike was trying to evoke from its followers, but based on some of the comments from AgencySpy’s posting of this spot, most viewers thought it was a “stomach-turning, exploitative low” while others felt at the very least that the message didn’t “connect with the brand.”

Is Nike so great that one can still “Just Do it” from beyond the grave? I think not.

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By Lindsey Campbell, Captains of Industry

Hey Captains’ Table readers,

Lindsey here. For a while now I’ve been writing The Daily Deal for my fellow captains. It’s basically a low down on the latest news in renewable energy, marketing, social media, and really anything that we might need to know about this forever-changing, forever-growing industry we work in: marketing. And we figured that if we’re in the know, you should be in the know, too. So as of today, we’ll be publishing the Daily Deal on our The Captains’ Table Blog. Happy reading, and feel free to send it to your fellow captains as well.

Over and out,

Captain Lindsey

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By Lindsey Campbell, Captains of Industry

Some agencies still don’t get it. Traditional advertising is dead. Gone, checked out, finito! Yet some traditionalists still cling to the vain hope that they can shove whatever brand message they want down their consumers’ throats and they’ll immediately start buying like it’s going out of style.
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By Ted Page, Captains of Industry

One of the more interesting things we’ve learned running our Incredibly Boring Web Content Challenge is that there is no recognized and well-understood definition of “content”. Most companies who submitted sent a link to their whole website, hoping for a free makeover. What we thought we would get was links to specific web pages (or pdfs) that described one product or service. A web page with boring text describing, for example, Xolor – a medication, could be “captainized” into an engaging video, ebook, quiz or podcast that brought the product to life. Something so interesting it would help draw the right customers to see it.

That’s how we define content: An engaging element that’s information-rich, yet entertaining, that exists within the larger context of a website.
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By Ted Page, Captains of Industry

Nation, today’s word is “Content.” That’s web content, my friends, in this case a video Captains of Industry created for a company called Vitality. Their product, the GloCap, is  a drug prescription bottle cap  that’s connected wirelessly to the Internet and is able to send alerts to remind patients when it’s time to take their medicines. The video we created was featured on the Colbert Report on March 18 as part of a segment on mens’ health. This is one more example of how good web content generates greater visibility for clients’ products and services. People search for topics on the web. They browse and snack on information. A web video that tells a story is more tasty than boring text, so more blogs link to it, resulting in higher search engine rankings. Colbert’s show is really funny, but there’s a serious lesson here for marketers. Instead of spending a fortune on SEO tricks or advertising, companies are better off investing in web videos or other content that tells a great story and gets found faster, easier and more cost-effectively.

By Lindsey Campbell, Captains of Industry

Companies have been following the advice from social media gods like Seth Godin and David Meerman Scott ever since they realized that having a “fan” equated to having a customer. They created Facebook pages. They tweeted. Maybe they even hired a social media specialist. Yet some of these companies still restrict or even ban social media from their employees. Why? They’re scared. And a touch paranoid.

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By Ted Page, Captains of Industry

Whew! This continues to be an amazing experience for us at Captains, and a great learning opportunity for us and everyone involved. We applaud all the entrants for understanding that you can have a great product or service, but unless you’re telling a good story on the web with interesting content, there’s a risk of being ignored. We also want to thank Ann Handley of Marketing Profs for her invaluable help in the review process.

We’ve selected 4 great finalists, and have provided some insights on each of them here. Over the next two weeks, we invite your feedback on which of these 4 should be the ultimate winner. While Captains will make the final decision, the dialog in the marketing community about these entrants, and the very nature of web content and engagement, will play an important role in the process. Please weigh in and tell us what you think.
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By Lindsey Campbell, Captains of Industry

In the age of “the sooner the better,” it seems some of us might have gotten a little lazy with our manners, etiquette, and grammar skills. But after years of sending and receiving friend requests and invitations to LinkIn, there hardly seems like there’s time to keep up with Emily Post, never mind knowing when to avoid a dangling modifier in a 140 character Tweet.
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ZZZ…

The Incredibly Boring Web Content Challenge has been quite the intense process. The Captains have been hard at work reviewing one utterly uninteresting submission after another. The entire team has been working late nights, downing double espressos, and reading and re-reading until most of our employees have developed double vision. To see for yourself just how grueling the submission process can be, check out the latest video from Captains of Industry.

All submissions are due today (March 8)! So get them in to www.captainsofindustry.com/yawn while you still can.

By Ted Page, Captains of Industry
One of the more attention-grabbing submissions we’ve received with our Incredibly Boring Web Content Challenge is from a company called “Intimate Surprises.” They have a web-based service you can sign up for that sends you and your mate monthly surprise packages with “items that are fun, sexy and unexpected – and designed for couples to enjoy together.” Although there are no photos of these items on the site, I am making the leap that the items are not related to knitting, baseball card collecting, or scrabble. In any case, the submission from Intimate Surprises raises a very important question: Is it enough for your product to be sexy in order for people to seek it out on the web, or does the web content – the interactive elements, the video, the copy, etc – have to MAKE the product sexy?
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