Edited by Ken Wheaton, kwheaton@adage.com

Could your brand
benefit from the right
boycott? We can help

Sometimes your enemies do the nicest things for you.

Take, for instance, the website One Million Moms, which the American Family Association (AFA) launched for mothers who are “fed up with the filth many segments of our society, especially the entertainment media, are throwing at our children.” One of the current calls to action at OneMillionMoms.com: “Please send Ben

HOWDARETHEY?

Outrage over an SNL-themed ice cream flavor lead to more media coverage—and possibly higher sales.

& Jerry’s public-relations manager,
Sean Greenwood, an email letter
requesting that no additional Schweddy
Balls ice cream be distributed.”
I bet a lot of people didn’t even know
Ben & Jerry’s has a new ice-cream flavor
inspired by a classic “Saturday Night Live”
skit staring Alec Baldwin as bakery owner
Pete Schweddy, who enthuses about his
shop’s signature treat (“No one can resist
my Schweddy Balls”) on “Delicious Dish,” a
parody of an ultra-low-key NPR cooking
show. But thanks to widespread media
coverage of this irresistible story—
OneMillionMoms.com pans “the vulgar
new flavor” for turning “something as
innocent as ice cream into something
repulsive”—now everybody knows about
Ben & Jerry’s Schweddy Balls. Good luck
finding it in stock at your local supermarket.

Or consider Glenn Beck’s recent take on the latest Levi’s “Go Forth” commercial, which he says “glorifies revolution.” (It shows scenes of urban unrest juxtaposed with partying kids while a gravelly voiced announcer reads the Charles Bukowski poem “The Laughing Heart”: “Your life is your life/ don’t let it be clubbed into dank submission...”) “Never again, Levi’s, will you get a dime from me,” Beck declared on his show in a soundbite that ricocheted across the media. “I won’t wear your stupid red tab.” You could practically hear the Champagne corks popping at Levi’s headquarters in San Francisco.

Do you wish youcould get this kind of
“bad” publicity for your product or service?

Email Ad Age media columnist Simon Dumenco at sdumenco@adage.com.

Do you have something to say? Send letters and corrections to viewpoint@adage.com or to Advertising Age, Viewpoint, 711 Third Ave., New York, NY 10017. Please limit letters to 250 words

In battle between social
and mainstream, hybrid
media will be the winner

Social-media marketing is getting boring—at least by itself. It still largely sits in a silo and therefore fails to realize its full potential.

Need proof? Put down your Kindle and head to your local bookstore. There you will find volumes on the topic, many of which read like get-rich-quick schemes. That’s a sure sign of trouble.

What many fail to see is that the dirty little secret of social media, according to a study by researchers at HP, is that most conversations are driven by media outlets, not individuals. However, not all media are created equal.

There’s an emerging class of media brands that are smart, scrappy and unmatched in their digital DNA. Call them hybrids. They’re digitally native and entrepreneurial. They use social and search to their fullest, yet many of them have a traditional ad-sales network that resembles their legacy-laced brethren. Hence the descriptor.

In a world with too much content and not enough time, hybrids are the future of media. They’re a planet of quick, agile ants that’s challenging the apes for dominance. It’s where marketers will increasingly focus their time, energy and money with a mix of paid and earned strategies. That doesn’t mean the media stalwarts or social networks will fade, mind you, but this is the breakout group to watch.

Hybrid media are transformative not only because they take chances, but also because they have incredibly loyal followings. They’re both trusted and disruptive. And that’s a recipe for success. The category is comprised of three distinct groups: aggregators and curators, personality-driven blogs and incubated disruptors.

Aggregators and curators are platforms that help us filter and remix the news from a wide array of sources. Some are automated. Others we program ourselves or allow the crowd to do the heavy lifting for us. They include mobile-centric platforms such as Flipboard and Pulse, controversial revolutionaries such as Demand Media and curated roll-ups such as Summify, Storify and TechMeme.

Personality-driven blogs—
VentureBeat, Politico, GigaOm and Sports
Blog Nation—tend to be vertical in nature.
What separates them from others,
however, is that their editorial roster is
packed with personalities who have
hugely loyal followings because of their
expertise and voice in a given area.
Personalities come and go like free agents
in baseball, but readers still tend to be
very loyal to the team.

Successful hybrids are bottomless fountains of content, even on weekends. And they’ve mastered the art of brevity.

time and with the right words and visuals to impregnate search engines and social networks just as they are, well, ovulating with readers.

Hybrid media brands aren’t standing still. FlipBoard, for example, is forming content partnerships with brands. Meanwhile, vertical blogs such as Business Insider are branching out into natural adjacencies like sports, where there are overlapping demographics and interests.

Still, this is the time for marketers to overweigh on hybrid media. The payoff is not only visibility within these individual properties but in the reverberating ripples they cast across search engines and social networks.

Rather than trying to cross the ocean in your own sailboat, to scale in social, it might be better instead to be a stowaway on someone else’s ship. And that’s why this writer is long on hybrids.