Topics for the 11/29/09 Show

Here are the proposed topics for this week's episode of The BeanCast. Please feel free to send in your thoughts and questions.

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This week's panel will be Kelly Eidson (Ad Age), Joseph Jaffe (Crayon), Angela Natividad (AdVerve) and Ian Schafer (Deep Focus).

TOPICS

Is It Black Yet?: Black Friday in the US is supposed to be the day that retailers go from red ink to black ink in their ledger books. Is that likely to be the case this year? What do the deep discounts and amazing doorbursters tell us about the state of retail? What about the scarcity factor this year -- retailers intentionally understocking items -- good or bad promotional strategy? Was the negative press from last year (people getting killed) something that suppressed enthusiasm this year? Let's talk about some of the strategies this year. What was the most interesting promotional strategy you saw to get consumers in the stores? Does black friday even mean anything any more with retailers releasing deals as much as a week or two in advance?

Circular Battles: One particular Black Friday story that stood out for me was that of WalMart finally caving and withdrawing its lawsuit against blackfriday.info for leaking its circular without confirming or denying veracity. Why are retailers so touchy about early circular releases? Is there any reasonable way to avoid the BF price battles like those between Amazon and WalMart? Is this another sign of consumers in control and the need for transparecy or is it making retailing an increasing untenable business model? Does the presence of online resources and informed consumers actually make it harder for smaller operations?

Tweeting Ads Grows: When the NYT times spins an old story, it's either a slow news week or they have a pretty good angle. I'll go for the latter with their two stories about Tweeting ads this week. First they wrote about Amazon bringing their affiliates into the practices. And the next was one about how lots of retailers are incorporating it into their Black Friday strategies. What does it mean when a retailer the size of Amazon adopts the practice? What does this mean for companies like Izea and the Ad.ly? Does this enhance the legitimacy of their offering or show retailers "we can do this ourselves?" I thought it was interesting that not all retailers are using Twitter for ads, though. Mall of America was tweeting parking availability. Some retailers are limiting frequency? Do limited uses like this make sense? More sense or less?

AOL's New Logo: AOL launched it's new logo and as anticipated, the snarks came out of the woodwork. But the opinion in Ad Age asked whether this was just "perfuming the pig." Is the AOL problem one of identity? How did they become so irrelevant? Do we agree with the Ad Age assessment about the brand or is Dean Crutchfield's opinion missing the point as well? With so many great (and strong) brands in their stable, should they be pursuing a corporate brand strategy or just become a house of brands?

Peperami Gets It's "Crowdsourced" Campaign: A pair of ad veterans are the winners of the new crowdsourced campaign effort by Peperami, the UK brand that fired agency Lowe in favor of the practice. My question is, Should we call it crowdsourcing or a contest? Is the model currently masquerading as crowdsourcing even sustainable?