CardMarketing 2.0

There's a TV ad in the UK that's been running sporadically for donkey's years. God, the first time I saw it I was a disillusioned undergrad, absorbed in Camus and Sartre, imperious in my despair but generally happy sleeping my way through halls and getting smashed. I'm talking about the famous 'Ronseal' ad, an ad about a can of woodstain that, cue the immortal strap, "does exactly what it says on the tin".

Whichever 'creative' in whichever agency Maestro paid to create the billboard ad that's currently riveted to a filthy pigeon-infested wall above Boots in Victoria Station deserves to be taken out, stripped to the shreddies and publicy flogged. When I see most ads these days I feel contempt, but this one made me erupt with anger — in a quiet, non-violent kind of way. It was just so middle of the road, so predictable, so pathetic.

Now here's a book you absolutely must read. It's called Naked Conversations (how blogs are changing the way businesses talk with customers). It was co-written by Microsoft employee Robert Scoble, author of world-famous tech/business blog, Scobleizer.com, and veteran consultant Shel Israel.

Summer 2007 in the UK has been a washout — it's rained like never before. In Gloucestershire, ironically, a water treatment plant was flooded and hundreds of thousands of people were without any water for nearly two weeks despite being up to their waists in it. As a creature of quite frightening habit, my dad couldn't miss out on his daily shower so would simply trot out into the garden, in flip flops and nothing else, stand in the rain, which he promised me was more powerful than the Mira Advance shower system upstairs, and perform his ablutions. As yet, he has not been arrested.

GE Money's Earth Rewards Platinum MasterCard, available to US consumers, is the latest 'green' card to be launched. Each time cardholders use it, a portion of their spend goes towards offsetting the emissions created by their purchases and activities. You can learn more about the card here, but what interests me most is the 'holistic' nature of the website and program. It doesn't come across as just another rewards offering, a hard (or come to think of it, even soft) sell, but successfully positions the card as a key lifestyle tool of the environmentally conscious. It's a great piece of card innovation and online marketing.

Stumbled across an interesting post this evening on 25hoursaday.com, a blog by Dare Obasanjo, aka Carnage4Life. The post, entitled 'Your website's UI is synonymous with your brand', is a riposte to a post a few days earlier by Jeff Atwood on another blog, Coding Horror, re. the redundancy of a key element of the minimalist Google interface: the 'I'm Feeling Lucky' button. (Yes, I know, what a bloody mouthful).

Bob Hanney was a typical Gloucester 'boy'. He was stocky, almost always turned out in a tracksuit (even during Speech Days at the grammar school at which he taught), had a hard but knowing face through which shimmered a certain pained warmth, and, nine times out of 10, had a Lambert & Butler hanging out of his mouth.

The Members Project, Amex's hallmark Web 2.0 marketing campaign (which we've sycophantically covered on several occasions — most recently here), has been narrowed down by cardmember votes to the Final 5 Projects. The winning project, which will be announced on August 7, will receive up to $5 million, depending on the number of cardmembers that register over the course of the campaign.