The Top 10 Real-Life Branding Icons Of All Time

Like just about everything in marketing these days, truly successful branding — in which a visual identity, icon, tag line, or spokesperson (or oftentimes, all of the above) becomes synonymous with the brand being pitched to consumers, and the product or service being offered — is a challenging combination of art and science. This may be a trite statement which trivializes, and even oversimplifies, a very complex process which takes years to unfold, but marketers know deep down it's unequivocally true. And that makes experienced branding experts worth their weight in gold when trying to differentiate a consumer or business brand from those of competitors.

So which real-people branding icons (and we're just talking about actual persons here, not animated or animal characters) are the most popular of all time? In this interesting piece yesterday in Wallet Pop, Aol.'s consumer finance digest, the site outlines its top-10 list which includes some very recognizable icons...some of which have fallen by the wayside over the years, while others have been reinvented for today's savvy consumer:

1. Mr. Whipple; Brand: Charmin toilet paper.
2. The Marlboro Man; Brand: Marlboro cigarettes.
3. The Maytag Repairman; Brand: Maytag appliances.
4. Rosie the Waitress; Brand: Bounty paper towels.
5. Madge the Manicurist; Palmolive dish soap.
6. The "Where's The Beef?" Lady; Brand: Wendy's.
7. Mikey; Brand: Life Cereal.
8. Ernest P. Worrell; Brand: Numerous.
9. Joe Isuzu; Brand: Isuzu cars.
10. Josephine the Plumber; Brand: Comet cleanser.

Of course, if we were to expand this list to include animated or animal characters, then we'd be able to add such equally-recognizable icons as Mrs. Butterworth, the Michelin Man, the Pillsbury Doughboy, the Geico gecko, the AFLAC duck, and countless others.

Interestingly enough, though, with the exception of Maytag, which conducted an attention-getting contest in 2007 to find a new individual to play an updated, 21st-century version of the Maytag repairman in its print and broadcast advertising efforts, most of the brands, including those mentioned above, have dropped or severely curtailed (such as Marlboro) the use of actor-based icons in their marketing programs in favor of other tactics. And that makes sense, as campaigns due tend to run their course and become stale after years of years of the same schtick.

My favorite from this list? The insufferable, but still lovable, Mr. Whipple....of course:

In 1999, Procter & Gamble relaunched its Mr. Whipple campaign for Charmin using actor Dick Wilson, who played Whipple for years, and passed away in 2007 at the age of 91. Here is his glorious return spot:

And what does Charmin use now to differentiate its brand? Those cuddly animated, but somewhat annoying, bears that are constantly showing us how inferior TP sticks to their posteriors.

I Ain't Sayin' He's A Golddigger...But Kanye Finally Joins Twitter

The Twitterverse pratically came to a grinding halt yesterday when rapper Kanye West finally signed up for an account on the service, and began tweeting the same self-aggrandizing, self-promotional nonsense that has made him one of the most notorious and disliked performers in Hip Hop Land. Check out his first tweet here:

The irony? Just last year, Kanye went OFF in a now infamous online rant which disparages the micro-blogging service, and emphatically states he has no use for it. In case you missed it, here is a snapshot of that blog post which skewers Twitter, and profanely criticizes the number of fake accounts (at least at the time, and many of which have been suspended) purporting to be Kanye:

Apocalypse Now: Internet To Run Out Of IP Addresses In Less Than A Year

Is this for real? Apparently it is.

As reported in this apocalyptic piece by Richard MacManus on ReadWriteWeb.com, the Internet will run out of distinct Internet Protocol (IP) addresses in less than one year. The pressing concerns were first disclosed by John Curran, president and CEO of the American Registry for Internet Numbers (ARIN), and then echoed by Vint Cerf, Google's chief internet evangelist, and regarded as one of the Internet's original architects.

The reason? Check this out:

There's an explosion of data about to happen to the Web - thanks largely to sensor data, smart grids, RFID and other Internet of Things data. Other reasons include the increase in mobile devices connecting to the Internet and the annual growth in user-generated content on the Web.

The solution is to move to Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6), the next generation Internet Protocol standard which uses a 128-bit address. IPv6 supports a vastly larger number of unique addresses, enough to give every person on the planet over 4 billion addresses.

ARIN, the non-profit responsible for managing the distribution of Internet addresses in the North American region, explained that of the approximately 4 billion IPv4 addresses available, all but 6% have already been allocated. Curran expects the final 6% to be allocated over the coming year.

So what does this mean for all us? If you haven't grabbed your piece of online real estate, you better do it now, particularly since it is in unclear when the move to IPv6 will be made. This is especially critical for companies which engage in different online marketing activities, ranging from simple Web site development to mobile marketing.

Picture This: Yet Another PR Embarrassment, Black Eye For Beleaguered BP

The hits just keep on coming for beleagured BP, which continues to fumble its management of the public relations fallout from the ongoing oil spill crisis in the Gulf of Mexico. And it only has itself to blame for these ridiculous blunders, which look they they're coming from some novice, early-stage start-up rather than a huge multinational, billion-dollar corporation with seemingly endless resources.

In its latest gaffe, and as first reported by AMERICAblog, and then subsquently picked up by MSNBC, the Washington Post, Gizmodo, and other blogs, BP deliberately, and rather amateurishly, used PhotoShop to digitally alter a July 16 image of its Houston command center, and then released the modified photo to media outlets worldwide without proper disclosure.

According to Washington Post reporter Steve Mufson, "A blogger...noticed that the oil giant altered a photograph of its Houston crisis room, cutting and pasting three underwater images into a wall of video feeds from remotely operated undersea vehicles." The Gizmodo story actually reveals specifically where the alterations were made, and even more disturbingly, that its metadata clearly show the original image was captured all the way back in 2001. Here is a composite of the altered and unaltered image:

As if this is not enough, AMERICAblog further reported today in a follow-up that BP has faked ANOTHER photo on its Web site, this one of its "top kill" initiative last month to stop the spill. Check out the story here. The lead on this story sums it all up: "It's starting to look like Capricorn One over at BP," a humorous reference to the famous 1978 film starrring Elliott Gould and James Brolin about a Mars landing hoax.

Mufson hits the nail on the head in his lead, "Apparently BP is no more adept at doctoring photos than it is at plugging deep-sea oil leaks." And adding perspective, as well as accurate insult to injury in his piece on MSNBC, Wilson Rothman writes:

Though the command center alteration doesn't seem to be an attempt to hide facts or confuse the public, it heightens skepticism for the company at a time when it should be trying to build trust. As the AMERICAblog reporter John Aravosis wrote, 'I guess if you're doing fake crisis response, you might as well fake a photo of the crisis response center.'

Waste Management To Launch Branded Game App, Oceanopolis, For Facebook

It should come as no surprise that one of the hottest and most profitable areas of the social media sector is social gaming. As annoying as it may be to constantly see users' status updates on how many pigs or bushels of corn they've sold playing Farmville, or how many hits your capo friends have racked up playing Mafia Wars, social gaming is BIG business, with thousands of individuals each day signing up.

Most user are gravitating to apps developed by the top global social game operators, including Zynga, Playfish (now part of Electronic Arts), Playdom, Five Minutes, and SlashKey. These companies held a combined market share of 56 percent in 2009, up from 38 percent in 2008.

As further evidence, consider this. According to this piece today in GamaSutra:

Microtransactions will help social games generate more than $1 billion in 2012 despite growth in the sector slowing after this year, according to research from global media markets analyst firm Screen Digest. The social gaming market has seen explosive growth in the past three years, making $76 million in 2008, $639 million in 2009, and a predicted $826 million this year. With that revenue growth, the number of new titles and gamers playing these releases have also increased dramatically.

Need more proof that social gaming is here to stay? Even Google is getting in on the trend. As widely reported earlier this month by many mainstream media outlets and blogs, including Mashable and TechCrunch, Google has quietly invested somewhere between $100 million and $200 million in Zynga, which has raised nearly half a billion dollars in venture capital in the last year alone. Multiple sources indicated that Zynga will be the cornerstone of a new Google Games to launch later this year.

So aside from more companies, more app, and more platforms, where is social gaming headed? It seems that the next phenomenon wave, widely adopted by many consumer and business brands on Facebook, Foursquare, MySpace, and SecondLife (remember this???), is to create branded gaming apps/presences that are both entertaining (obviously) and directly tie in to a company's mission, culture, and product/service offerings. We've seen this before in other media channels, so the concept is not entirely new. However, the number of high-profile brands diving headfirst into the social gaming space with apps of this nature will increase exponentially in the coming months.

And that is why this piece of news caught by eye this morning, courtesy of TechCrunch. Waste Management, the multi-billion dollar, publicly traded provider of waste and environmental services in North America, and its subsidiary Greenopolis, an environmentally-themed social networking site and blogging community launched two years ago, are diving into social gaming with a new Facebook app called Oceanopolis. The game is now launching in beta, with a full rollout expected in the coming weeks. Here is a screen shot of the new game:

In Oceanopolis, players maintain islands by recycling trash to build sustainable communities, and by interacting with friends. Users virtually earn points which can then be turned into printable coupons redeemable at movie theaters, restaurants and stores. Alternatively, these points can be turned into cash donations. Points can also be earned outside the game by recycling or by blogging on the Greenopolis site.

Why is all of this significant beyond the branding component, and the first concrete sign of a trend? It's quite rare for a company, such as Waste Management, to be so forward thinking on the marketing front. In the past year, the company has forged high-profile product placement, advertising, and sponsorship agreements to be featured on Golf Channel's "Big Break" and on CBS's wildly-popular "Undercover Boss." In fact, I expect to see the company continue being innovative and aggressive with respect to its future marketing activities.

Social Media Powerhouses Facebook, Twitter Hit Major Milestones

Lost amidst all the hoopla, online chatter, and unrelenting media coverage this weekend concerning Apple's iPhone 4 press conference (and the resulting fallout) on Friday morning, social media powerhouses Facebook and Twitter both announced impressive milestones which deserved to be highlighted.

As reported in this story by Samuel Axon of Mashable, Facebook is expected to reach the 500 million user mark some time this week, based on the current rate of new user sign-ups. To commemorate the remarkable achievement, the service intends to launch a new campaign, called “Facebook Stories,” which will serve as a visual memorial to all the ways the social network has changed people’s lives around the world.

To put this rapid growth in perspective, Facebook reached the 400 million user mark just five months ago. Furthermore, this time last year (July, 2009), the platform was at 200 million subscribers. Only eight months prior to that, in December of 2008, Facebook had reached 100 million users. For those keeping score at home, this represents a 500% increase in users in only 18 months. Incredible. No wonder MySpace is in trouble. Oh yeah, and one more thing: even though Facebook officially launched in February of 2004, most of its growth has come in the last two years, and it has since become the most popular social site and a cultural phenomenon.

As far as Twitter is concerned, the micro-blogging service announced on Friday that Spain's 1-0 victory over the Netherlands in the championship game of the 2010 FIFA World Cup marked "the largest period of sustained activity for an event in Twitter's history." According to company spokesman Matt Graves, making the announcement on the company's blog, tweets per second reached 3,051 when Spain scored the winning goal, and there was an average of 2,000 tweets during the game's final 15 minutes. During the final match, people from 172 countries tweeted in 27 different languages, and at the moment of the winning goal, people from 81 countries tweeted in 23 different languages. The full story on WebNewser about this can be found by clicking here.

Interestingly enough, Twitter's analytics and relevance teams decided to capture and visually document all of this activity in the following Wordle infographic:

In reviewing the chart (of which you can view an enlarged version by clicking here or on the image itself), Twitter advises individuals to think of these results like sound waves: the louder and more consistent the "sound," the bigger the impact in all directions. In addition, countries' flags represent use of their hashflag. The size of the flag "waves" fluctuate with the frequency and consistency of tweets containing each country's hashflag.