We thought it would be interesting to talk to a few golfers about Tiger Woods and his current situation…especially as it relates to a lucrative Nike contract. So we went to the Longview Golf Centre with a camera and a list of questions. This video is what a few golfers said about the situation. We’d love to hear your thoughts.

What would you do if you were the Marketing Director of Nike Golf?

When we talk to teens, and we talk to them a lot, they tell us their biggest motivation for doing anything is fun.

They go to shopping malls for fun.  Football games for fun.  Facebook for fun.  MySpace for fun.  YouTube for fun.  They watch fun television programs.  Like fun movies.  Come to think of it, it’s not much different for adults.

Nothing supports the need for a fun factor more than social networks and YouTube is a prime example.  Marketers lust after the views that amateurs get by accident.  The “Charlie Bit Me…Again” video above had 118 million views.  But not all amateurs are any more successful than the pros who think they can make their YouTube channel the next NBC.

Without fun, your video will be limited by those searching expressly for you.

Facebook is much the same.  Take the State of Nebraska’s Facebook page.  It has 1,587 friends and fans.  Not bad.  But when you look at the page it is a never ending list of governmental announcements.  Should Nebraskans be interested?  Probably, but it’s not fun.  Contrast that with the fan page for Nebraska Football.  It has over 52,000 users who access the page at least once a month.  Fun, as well as life and death.

The fun factor influences our job satisfaction, life, marriages and leisure.  It’s why we spend mone on vacations, dining, dancing, concerts and sporting events.  It’s why we celebrate when we win and cry when we lose.

If we can harness fun in our communications, they become far more effective. Hopefully, Charlie helped this post be a little more fun.

Five years ago, the winners in marketing were the brands that had substantial budgets, creative agencies and the ability to buy millions of impressions.  Then they would track those impressions to results and rebuild their marketing plan for the next year based on which impressions produced the best results.  How many times did we hear the words, “If we only had a bigger budget we could…?”

Enter YouTube and Julia Nunes.  Julia plays the ukulele and covers songs by famous bands.  She writes some herself.  I found Julia on YouTube a few months ago and became an instant fan.

Someone along the line sent me a link to her “Build me up Buttercup” cover.  I watched.  I was the 848,312 viewer of Build me up Buttercup on the ukulele.  I went to the next cover.  500,000 views.  The next cover 750,000views.  Now for the crescendo.  Her original song “Into the Sunshine” had 1,710,934 views.  Amazing.

Here is a cute college aged girl, with a good bit of talent, gaining a national following, creating her own brand with absolutely no monitary investment.  She was not measuring success on impressions… which can be nothing more than driving by a billboard…her success came in the form of creating fans and engaging an audience.  And she did it from her dorm room.

I can imagine the look on one of my clients’ faces if I walked in and said.  Client, we’re going to get this young girl who can sing a little, teach her how to play the ukulele and sing about your brand.  Then we’re going to put her on YouTube and watch the views roll in and up.  Trust me on this.

Julia may have had big plans for her videos, but I’ll bet she did them for the fun of doing them.  And that’s what makes them so endearing and entertaining.

The point of Julia’s success is that if you’re going to try to build your fan base on YouTube or any other social network, it has to be fun for your viewer and you should have fun with it too.  If not, you’re just buying impressions.

Today’s health care environment is all about outcomes.  Positive outcomes depend on everything from how sheets are folded to how heart attack victims are treated.  It is a system wide endeavor that requires everyone in the system to realize their part in providing positive outcomes for patients.

Bill Leaver, president and CEO of Iowa Health System, put positive outcomes into a mantra for the organization.  He created the vision and slogan of “Best Outcome for Every Patient Every Time” to communicate to the focus to thousands of IHS employees from the maintenance workers to the neuro surgeons.  No small task.

In collaboration with Cheri Bustos, Vice President of Corporate Communications, we developed a strategy that made Best Outcomes for Every Patient Every Time more memorable.  We distilled it into an acronym that sounds like a miracle drug…BOFEPET.

BOFEPET began showing up all over Iowa Health System’s hospitals and clinics with little explanation to generate buzz.  We followed the buzz with videos posted on the IHS intranet.  BOFEPET became part of the language and short hand for a much larger vision.

Cheri Bustos commented on our efforts by saying, “ZLR offers just the right mix of humor, message and strategy to give us what we need.  Humor in health care can be tough to pull off.  ZLR did it masterfully.”

Just when you were ready to believe that television advertising was a thing of the past evidence to the contrary gets in the way.  Certainly, television spending leaves took a tremendous dive as a result of this lousy recession, but its effectiveness apparently hasn’t.

Advertising Age recently reported that a new seven figure ethnographic study conduced by the Neilsen Co.  found that “TV remains the dominant medium even for reaching youth, despite the inroads of digital and social media.”

The article goes on to say that Media Marketing Assessment (MMA) a unit of Aegis Group’s Synovate has not seen a trend toward the erosion of effectiveness of TV.  In fact a third of search queries for brands studied are driven by offline advertising, particularly TV.  Higher than what’s driven from online.

Leonard Lodish, a marketing professor at Wharton and author of “Why Advertising Works,” says that TV advertising’s effectiveness has actually increased since 1995.

So, in the face of the clamor from “new age media” gurus, what do you do?  Our suggestion is to not buy the hype, but listen.  We are big believers in the power of the web, but we’re also big believers in the power of traditional media when combined with the web.

No one goes searching for a product that they don’t know or care about.  I still haven’t received an answer to the question of “Can you name one consumable brand built entirely on the web?”  Traditional media, while changing, is not dead.  It’s a good thing too.  I’d hate to miss the next episode of the Simpsons.