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Crayon – A New Marketing Company [in brief]

Posted: October 23rd, 2006 | Author: | Filed under: Marketing | 8 Comments »

Crayon – A New Marketing Company Team includes some new marketing/new PR heavy hitters IMHO, Joseph Jaffe, Shel Holtz, Neville Hobson, and CC Chapman. Very exciting news guys.

More on tech crunch, although Arrington seems a little confused on the Second Life connection, Crayon is a marketing company/social media consultancy and they have a presence in SecondLife, but TechCrunch has grabbed on to Crayons claim to be the first company launched in secondLife, ironically it seems that Crayon has their first PR challenge :-)

More from Shel himself

crayon is something of a mashup. We’re not an agency or a consulting firm, but we do bring the best of what those types of companies have to offer. We’ll approach our assignments with fresh eyes that see the new environment in which traditional marketing and advertising is failing so dismally. We understand that customers (in the broadest sense of the word) are fed up with being marketed to, communicated to, advertised to. Engagement, conversation, co-creation, involvement—these are the approaches that we are anxious to bring to our assignments. Not as an afterthought or add-on, mind you, but as the cornerstone of our work.

More on this later, this is my first day in the Nokia office, so I need to get busy with the multitude of tasks of a new hire, ordering a new computer, choosing a new phone (n95), and generally mixing it up in the office. I did actually start with Nokia a week ago, but the first week was in Finland for a multimedia conference, some wicked jetlag, and a finair strike.

  • http://dating.corante.com David Evans

    I had a marketing consultancy presence in Worlds Inc in 1996, take that you early adopters :-) That said, I’m glad more smart branding and PR people are entering SecondLife. As soon as it doesn’t eat of 50% of our CPU’s everyone will be there. Oh, and a browser plug-in as well. Oh and don’t forget in-world net neutrality. So much to do to make sure SL stays open to innovation before we worry too much about your Fortune 100 client buying an island, sending out a press release and then letting it languish, which is what’s happening already.

    Much easier to create say Apple’s Nano page on Myspace than it is to create a presence in SL. How are people measuring impressions in SL?

  • http://www.emergence-media.com Daniel R

    Karl,

    Now that you’re in the city, we (as in me, you, and other blog readers in the area) should meet up sometime – maybe somewhere in the Mission. I work around Union Square.

    David,

    That’s my thoughts exactly. I’m compiling a list of SL marketers to talk to regarding demographic data and tracking. While SL is great for some markets, I wonder how much of the recent moves by companies are more “me too” than actually having a real strategy of engaging SL members. I’m hoping to finish the interviews soon, but it gonna take awhile.

  • karl long

    i think there is a huge “me too” thing going on here with little thought given to how to engage with customers. In crayon’s case, they are actually just a “new marketing” consulting company that has it’s head office in secondLife and no physical location. i don’t think they are trying to engage consumers as much as facilitate communication with their own geographically dispersed team.

    I think David brings up some good points about openness in secondLife, i’ve brought it up a couple of times that secondLife is different from the internet in the fact it’s wholly owned by a private company. It’s a dictatorship, and currently a pretty benevolent one, but it is not a democracy. There is surely a danger of someone coming up with the 3d equivalent of tcp/ip and secondLife could go the way of the dodo. That being said VRML has been around for years and floundered, and secondLife is a runaway success compared to that. I personally think they should opensource secondLife and you’d get a lot more outside development innovation and integration. Firefox plugin anyone :-)

  • karl long

    Oh, and yes, meeting up sounds great. I’m currently living in Union square, and work in SOMA. Actually might be meeting up on friday or the weekend with Dino from the chroma blog

  • http://www.emergence-media.com Daniel R

    Great, I live near Union Square on Post Street. I’ll email you my contact information. I should be relatively free.

    Cheers,

    Daniel

  • Bill Payne

    I want to like Crayon, but they seem to be about 5 degrees off on everything. Plus their front guy talks marketing gibberish.

  • http://moblogsmoproblems.blogspot.com Mack Collier

    I think this was all a ploy by the boys to get a link from Tech Crunch ;)

  • karl long

    It was certainly a classic PR stunt/claim :-) I think Bill has a point when you see the stuff that was quoted on techcrunch, that was a crazy bunch of buzz words, but I find their description that I quoted quite descriptive and not too buzz wordy.