Quicky: Playing hard to get

Companies rarely like teasers, at least true teasers, which is unfortunate, because they tend to create a lot of buzz, circumvent traditional audience mental blocks and engage potential customers in ways that make them much more likely to open their wallets for you.

The marketing of the film Cloverfield is an example of this strategy used to great success.

Find out how they did it here

Conservative talk shows find advertisers’ limits

With reality TV and “news” programs of all political ideologies sounding more and more like fear-mongering, sensationalist pundit megaphones, I begin to believe there was not longer content you could put on TV that would scare away advertisers.

I was wrong.

Glenn Beck recently discovered where advertisers draw the line when he called President Obama a racist. Within mere weeks of making the comment, 33 sponsors have pulled their advertising from Glenn Beck’s show, including the advertisers with gargantuan ad budgets like Sprint, Walmart and Clorox.

While I am a proponent of free speech, I am not a proponent of punditry parading as news, regardless of which “side of the aisle” it comes from. In an era of increasingly shocking and outrageous television, it’s nice to know there is still a line of decency somewhere, however far, that advertisers simply won’t cross.