CardMarketing 2.0

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.

Carol Vorderman, for those of you who haven't had the pleasure, is a C-, maybe even B-List British celebrity who made her name as an awkwardly dressed co-host on one of the nation's favourite weekday afternoon gameshows: Countdown. It's a word creation/number crunching show favoured by tea-swigging coffin-dodgers, although it's fair to say it also has a strong retro appeal with students, people off work ill or anyone else, as Les, a former boss of mine, used to say, on the ponce*. I was a huge fan, too, until the cult hero and main host, Richard 'Twice Nightly" Whiteley, threw a seven and someone else stepped in. It's never been the same since...

How Facebook has evolved. Launched from a modest dorm room in Harvard in February 2004, it quickly expanded to cover other universities, spread like a strawberry plant across college and high school networks during 2005, added work networks in May 2006 and then, in September last year, caved in to rampant demand and prostrated itself — all cherubic and virginal — before the altar of open registration. So, what happened next...?

The world is a crazy place. I'll rephrase that. People are crazy. In fact, I'll rephrase that, too. Cats are crazy. Wtf? Get to the point, man — spit it out. OK, here goes...

Firstly, I'd like to say that I'm not taking backhanders from Amex. In the Members Project, they have a great 2.0 marketing campaign, and talking 2.0, as far as I can gather, is what this blog is all about. It hasn't been suggested that I'm getting the rub, but I thought I'd just make it clear as this is about the third time I've shot them some ink in the past month. Of course, if they'd like to talk, then...