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.

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.

The problem with a good deal of market research is that it measures reported behavior rather than real behavior.  People have a habit of reporting behavior through the prism of what they believe are your expectations.  It’s a truism that has haunted political pollsters for decades.  The question, “Did you vote in the last election?” carries with it a significant lie factor.  To not vote, would be unpatriotic.

The tendency for real behavior to be different from reported behavior has troubled marketers as long as it’s troubled pollsters.  How many marketers ask their customers for the source of information about the product only to be told “word of mouth?”  The reason we get that reply is that they think they are gullible if they say advertising.

Humans are hardwired to edit behavior reporting when that behavior might reflect badly upon them.  So, they may answer questions very logically, when the real answer lies in their emotions.  They may tell you they watch public television, when in reality they’re watching Punked on MTV.

The key to good research is to strip away the ability to misreport behavior.  The best way to monitor TV viewership is a meter on the TV.  The best way to know how people shop is to watch.  You can discover how people feel if you give them a way to express their emotions without exposing their vulnerability.

Try this.  If you want to know where your product ranks in terms of prestige or quality, create a poster with logos of cars ranging from Mercedes to Yugo.  Ask your customers to describe your product based on the car that they perceive best describes how they feel about it.  Then ask them why.

We use many different techniques to drill down to the emotion that drives most purchases.  We think it makes the communications we create richer and more effective.