Well Tim Dickinson has an article in Rolling Stone that outlines in detail exactly what happened. To sum it up in a sentence what happened was a lack of leadership, no strategic planning, and political infighting. Wow, surprising something like that happens in Washington, DC.

As as Chicagoan, I’ve seen the campaign close up. A recent poll suggests Chicago citizens are about equally split on whether or not they want the games. The results show slippage from the 2-to-1 support found in an earlier Tribune poll in February.

I think this reveals a flaw in the local marketing of the games. And I think there’s a good lesson in all this: Chicago sold the features, not the benefits. Chicago didn’t tell its citizens why the games would be good for Chicago. Chicago didn’t lay out the lasting legacy of the games for the city. What’s really in it for us? Why should we really support it? What happens after they are over? 8 years of work for a few weeks of sunshine. Then what?

This is a bit of Friday-morning quarterbacking, but here’s what I would have loved to have seen: A campaign centered around Chicago 2017. Show us what the city will look like after the Olympics. Give us a reason to want the games for the decade after the games. Give us examples… If a kid’s 16 years old today, what will the city be like for her when she’s 26? How will the games make Chicago a better place for Chicagoans. Will it be a better place to grow up? Why? Will it be a better place to work? Why? Why would we want to put up with all the construction, traffic, congestion, and attention? Why will it all be worth it?

Problem is I shop at a Dollar General store that is less than a mile away, been open for years. It is also located in the same town and even zip code of my mailing address, which of course they know or I never would have gotten the mailer in the first place. As somebody that has done millions and millions of direct mailers stuff like this, and that it happens in our high-tech world, just blows my mind.

A wasted opportunity to make me a more happy and loyal customer.

Product placements in television shows have been around for years, if not decades. Shows like American Idol or Survivor (just to name a two) have done it very effectively for a number of major brands. If I had a client that had a product that was targeted to these audiences I’d suggest this as a tactic in heartbeat. It has proven to be effective.

But this is just over-the-line:

In recent weeks, anchors on the Fox affiliate in Las Vegas, KVVU, sit with cups of McDonald’s iced coffee on their desks during the news-and-lifestyle portion of their morning show. The anchors rarely touch the cups.

Executives at the station, one of 12 owned by Meredith Corporation, say the six-month promotion is meant to shore up advertising revenue and, as they told the news staff, will not influence content.

For decades media outlets (newspapers, magazines, TV, radio) have always maintained a virtual firewall between ad sales and news/editorial. But as traditional media outlets attempt to maintain ad revenue as the entire market becomes more fragmented that firewall is being breached.

In a connected world I think traditional media outlets are losing viewers, and therefore ad revenue cause a large percentage of the population wants to go to the source of the news and not have it filtered. Or said another way, many folks think the media outlets are just an extension of their parent companies (NewsCorp, GE, Disney) and therefore they report the news slanted to protect and promote corporate America.

So what are the media outlets doing, moving to product placements in their news programs. Therefore, just reinforcing one of the main reasons they’re losing viewers and ad revenue in the first place.

Very shortsighted to say the least.

• Low price is a great way to sell a commodity. That’s not marketing, though, that’s efficiency.
• Conversations among the members of your marketplace happen whether you like it or not. Good marketing encourages the right sort of conversations.
• Products that are remarkable get talked about.
• If you are marketing from a fairly static annual budget, you’re viewing marketing as an expense. Good marketers realize that it is an investment.
• People don’t buy what they need. They buy what they want.
• You’re not in charge. And your prospects don’t care about you.
• Business to business marketing is just marketing to consumers who happen to have a corporation to pay for what they buy.
• Good marketers tell a story.
• Marketing that works is marketing that people choose to notice.
• Most marketers create good enough and then quit. Greatest beats good enough every time.
• You can game the social media in the short run, but not for long.

[Found via Buhler Works]

To promote the premiere of Lost Season 4 in Europe a number of Dharma Initiative boxes have been placed throughout Lisbon. Question, what the heck is in them? Io9 ponders:

A polar bear? Walt? (Maybe Walt.) Boxes of Dharma coke and Dharma cereal? We don’t know for sure, but Lost fans in Lisbon were psyched to see artifacts from their favorite TV show appear on their doorsteps in real life.

I generally find most guerrilla marketing actives pure junk, but this is creative to say the least.

You don’t need to be a Mac owner to be a cutting-edge hipster. Turns out just thinking about Apple can make you more creative.

That’s according to researchers at Duke University and the University of Waterloo, who found that exposing people to a brand’s logo for 30 milliseconds will make them behave in ways associated with that brand. And in Apple’s case that means more creatively, Gavan Fitzsimons, one of the Duke professors who conducted the study, tells the Business Technology Blog. The study will be published in the April issue of the Journal of Consumer Research.

Scientists have long debated whether subliminal messages, the idea that subconscious exposure can shape behavior, really work. In recent years, the consensus opinion has tended towards no. But most studies measured if subliminal messages caused people to buy products. Fitzsimons and his colleagues wondered if the exposure resulted in behavioral changes that don’t show up on the balance sheet.

You can download a PDF of the complete findings here.