Kaye Leery asked:


A runner will not probably want to encounter a car, but Toyota hood protectors maker, Toyota, targets to have close encounters with thousands of runners in two marathons that will take place on the streets of New York.

In order to become an exclusive auto sponsor at both the ING New York City Marathon and the NYC Half Marathon presented by Nike, the giant Japanese automaker has signed a three-year deal. Financial terms were closed and the company will feature its hybrid platform, including the Prius, Highlander SUV and Camry Hybrid, through regional TV and print, on- and off-course signage as well as operational usage such as transporting athletes and officials. Aside form a money prize, both the men’s and women’s winner at the ING New York City Marathon will receive a Prius.

The alliance will activate in support of the NYC Half Marathon presented by Nike which will take place on August 5. The ING New York City Marathon will be happen on Nov. 4, and the previous car sponsor was DaimlerChrysler’s Smart micro compact in 2005.

Bryan Riss, Toyota’s vehicle operations manager for New York region said that Prius is their glamorous hybrid and it gets the most attention from the Hollywood crowd but they want to support their whole hybrid line. He added that Toyota’s long-term plan is to have a hybrid for each model the company builds, and that this alliance will help make more consumers aware of their hybrids. Also sponsoring the New York Marathon is Avis and said it would include Prius as a car rental option starting this summer.

Ann Hinegardner, svp-business development and marketing strategies at New York Road Runners, which monitors both marathons and several other running events year-round, said that the car category is very important to the marathon, and signing Toyota is in line with their commitment to the environment as well as to health. According to her, Toyota plans a full activation now through November.

Tour’s Third Time

The AST Dew Tour will have several new strategies in place as it enters its third season this week: Louisville, Denver and San Jose have been replaced by Baltimore, Salt Lake City and Cleveland as tour stops; MTV has been added to the media mix; and the tour name itself has changed from the Dew Action Sports Tour but Pepsi’s Mountain Dew remains title sponsor and all lead sponsors at the five venues are back.

The schedule began with the Panasonic Open in Baltimore in June 21-24 and runs through the PlayStation Pro in Orlando on October 18 to 21 featuring top action sports athletes in BMX, motocross and skateboarding contesting for points and monetary prizes.

Wade Martin, president and general manager at the AST Dew Tour, Aurora, Ill, said that this was the first part of their strategy to build AST [Action Sports Tour] as an umbrella brand that will be comprised with other events. He added that they want AST to become what NASCAR is to its fans and consumers. Martin further said that AST has plans include a U.S. winter action sports tour and global events.

Outlets such as NBC and USA Network (event coverage), Fuel TV (previews and reviews), FSN radio, VOD in a potential of 30 million homes and iTunes will be the avenues through which the tour will reach people. Two behind-the-scenes shows and features prior to each tour event are new this year on MTV and MTV2. Attendance last was about 250,000, which is up 15,000 from the inaugural tour. The AST Dew Tour is owned by NBC Universal and Live Nation.

Martin said that the challenge in their 3rd year will be the same challenge in their 10th year that is getting more people to attend in person, watch or access the events and support their sponsors. The Right Guard Open (Cleveland, July 19-22), Vans Invitational (Portland, Ore., Aug. 16-19) and the Toyota Challenge (Salt Lake City, Sept. 20-23) are other tour stops.



Emily

Gael Greene asked:


What’s new that I really love?



Mellisa Dennis books Sfoglia weeks ahead and explains the changing menu. Photo: Steven Richter

What’s new and good, all my friends ask? Of all the restaurants I’ve written about on InsatiableCritic.com since shortly before we launched, where do I want to eat again? Going backwards chronologically from November 5, 2007…

Bun.  In the exposed kitchen of this narrow bargain Vietnamese noodle shop, Chef and mini-mogul Michael “Bao” Huynh whirls and dashes…filling orders a la minute for sensational pho with beef and sweetbreads, and the duck confit with duck egg and dikon pancake that I can’t stop eating.  A few steps away his wife Thap Nguyen’s serenely fashions classic rolls, two by two, for a demanding crowd. 143 Grand Street between.Crosby and Lafayette. 212-431-7999.

Irving Mill. Unabashedly flaunting the genes of Gramercy Tavern, what’s new and exciting is chef/partner John Schaefer’s delicious food on a trim but tempting market menu.  Try grilled baby octopus, savory cockle-and-chorizo stew and arctic char on lentils with Savoy cabbage, speck and cippolini. 116 E. 16th Street between Union Square East and Irving Place 212 254 1600

Shorty’s .32.  After twelve years in Jean-Georges Vongerichten’s kitchens, chef/partner Josh Eden concealed in his own downtown, turns out wonderful cavatelli with arugula and wild mushroom ragout, fine braised short ribs served alongside macaroni and cheese of my childhood dreams, splendid roast cod in a gruyere broth, and a burger with crunch-perfect fries. He’s wooing the neighborhood, so no reservations for us. 199 Prince Street between Sullivan and MacDougal 212 375 8275.

TBar Steak & Lounge. Tony Fortuna’s recasting of the Lenox Room means a noisy scene at the bar and impressive steaks, a juicy pork chop and no more tasting tiers. He’s got it in his head that desserts should come in large crystal bowls and be big enough for eight to share. Go for chocolate sundae with molten brownie, and the layered banana parfait mille feuilles. 1278 Third Avenue between 73rd and 74th. 212 772 0404

Shelly’s La Tradizionale.  Nudged by the mercurial Shelly Fireman, this is now a Ristorante di Pesci with wonderful and original pastas, sparkling shellfish, the gorgeous lobster Catalana, and – you shouldn’t starve from lack of beef – first-rate steaks. 41 West 57th Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenues. 212 245 2422

Primehouse NY. Steve Hanson’s sprawling and elegant new steakhouse sticks mostly to the classics, splendidly turned out, with tableside theatrics, a crowd that loves itself because it’s hot, and an aging room for all the cow sired by Hanson’s own pedigreed bull. 381 Park Avenue South at 27th Street. 212 824 2600

Park Avenue Autumn. Fall may not be as exciting as summer in the Stillman clan’s seasonal evolution but Chef Craig Koketsu’s has found himself, and  Richard Leach  manages to show his dessert mastery without resorting to weirdness.  Try the wild quail and the venison, now before winter arrives and turns the place ice white. 100 E.63rd Street. (between Lex & Park Ave.) 212-644-1900

Toloache Bistro . An earnest Mexican bistro yearns for the big time with Chef/partner Julian Medina’s menu skipping around Mexico and beyond. Savor huevo ranchero, brisket with tomatillo salsa stuffed into corn tortillas or baja style hamachi tacos. 251 W. 50th Street near Broadway 212 581 1818

Fiamma.  Chef/partner Fabio Trabocchi’s complex dishes and star chef confidence in the freshly gussied up space are impressive in a very early tasting.  I plan to go back.  206 Spring Street near Sixth Avenue. 212 853 0100.

Accademia di Vino.  I never got to taste entrées in two evenings here because I loved the grilled pizza, salads and pasta so much. Wish it had opened in my neighborhood. 1081 Third Av. at 64th St. 212 888-6333

BLT Market. I’ve been back twice on my own credit card for Laurent Tourondel’s lush and delicious play on seasonal food (though I wished autumn leaves had chased away the sunflowers earlier). I’m even getting used to the idea of the Ritz Carlton dining room looking like a suburban luncheonette. 1430 Sixth Avenue or 50 Central Park South 212 521 6125

Kefi. I will suffer the annoyance of no reservations, no plastic, crowded tables, and lines out the door for the rustic country classics of Greece from the town’s reigning Greek Hero, chef Michael Psilakis.  Here is the food that inspired his gentrified odes in midtown at Anthos (below): cuttlefish stuffed with spinach and beans, mussels with gigante beans, radicchio and feta, a mellow moussaka. 222 West 79th Street near Broadway  212 873 0200



Yes, Yes Yes. That’s a burger to savor at Old Homestead’s sidewalk cafe. Photo: Steven Richter

Prime Burger Café.  I can

get a comforting hamburger fix steps from my home at Fairway Café and a really exceptional burger is as close at Brooklyn Diner.  But I confess, I’ve been obsessing about the giant peppered prime beef burger at Old Homestead’s outdoor café since I first tasted it. 56 Ninth Avenue at 14th Street 212 242 9040

Insieme. Craft veteran Chef Marco Canova reaches beyond the rustic boundaries of Hearth and doesn’t rely on bizarre juxtapositions to catch our attention with his Italian dishes, traditional and modern. Don’t miss sensuous baby beef tartare and the sea urchin risotto. 777 Seventh Avenue at 51st Street.  212 582 1310

Tree. A real find in the East Village for its gently priced comfort food classics by Gramercy Tavern veteran Andrew Robinson.  But once the chill closes the garden, it will be teeny again. 190 First Avenue near 12th Street. 212 358 7171

Daisy May’s BBQ.  The ready-to-go ribs are fine but Adam Perry Lang’s luscious couturier barbecued rack of lamb and the addictive fat-riddled short ribs smoked on the bone bring us to his ambiance-challenged back room as often as our arteries can stand it.  623 Eleventh Avenue, corner of 46th Street. 212 977 1500.

Wild Salmon.  I haven’t been back to this celebration of the Northern Pacific since a friends-and-family tasting with the boss man himself, Jeffrey Chodorow.  I might have been snowed by too much attention, but Chef Charles Ramseyer is a serious pro and I was impressed by his variations of salmon.  622 Third Avenue at 40h Street. 212 404 1700.



Anthos blossoms under Chef Michael Psilakis’s ardor.  Photo: Steven Richter

Anthos. This is the stage for Chef/partner Michael Psilakis’s obsessive dream - an homage to his mom’s rustic home cooking, everything Greek respun - lighter, more refined, sophisticated, and tantalizing.

I am especially grateful for the $25 lunch. 36 West 52nd Street near Fifth Avenue. 212 582 6900.

Sfoglia. Again and again I go back to Sfoglia.  Linguine with monkfish balls was a summer discovery.  Both the Road Food Warrior and I invariably have the exceptionally fat mussels with sausage in a fragrant broth. At dessert, we debate:  Shall we have the nightly fruit crostata or the chocolate bread pudding, warm from the oven? 1402 Lexington Avenue at 92nd Street. 212 831 1402

This summer I rediscovered Oceana with its new chef Ben Pollinger. I found Stanton Social noisier than ever but great fun — and most everything so delicious — for a birthday party.  Perry Street with its talented new chef de cuisine would be a serene place to hide out if they didn’t keep you waiting an hour.  What a shock it was to find marvelous raisin crumb coffee cake at Eli’s E.A.T. for just $5 a slice.

www.insatiable-critic.com



Scott

Andrew Catalano asked:


I recently started a new career as a Search Engine Optimization Strategist for Melville, NY based Prime Visibility, a big player in the Internet marketing field. This new position got me to thinking about some of my past experiences working as a consultant in various capacities for eCommerce businesses over the past decade, and how much the industry has changed. In fact, ten years ago, I don’t even think you could get away with calling the Internet marketing and Search Engine Optimization fields an “industry”.

In the late nineties the options available for marketing a website on the Internet were very limited. You had the main search giant at that time, Yahoo!, where as a website operator you had the ability to do a regular submit (which could take eight months to index your site), or a one time paid submission which generally had good results, often too good, leading one to believe that the system was less than honest. Your other marketing options fell more along the lines of what we would call “promotion”. Website owners would either do this themselves or hire outside people, akin to the club promoters of the nineteen eighties, to go online, visit chat rooms, gather email addresses and screen names, and leave posts in random chat rooms. These posts would either be blatant advertisements, or poorly disguised fake conversation, usually between the poster and himself (with a different screen name) talking up a product, service, or a website. This shady realm of web promotion could very well be the birth of viral marketing on the Internet.

Around this time I ran a very small consulting company called Long Island Web Marketing. Our methods of marketing were very limited. With the exception of paid submissions and link farming we were really left to our own devices to find unique solutions. Often times, because we primarily dealt with small “mom and pop” type stores who were more concerned with expanding foot traffic rather than building their global web businesses, we would rely on traditional print marketing, or looking for ways to geographically target our potential customer base on the Internet. One of our first experiences outside of this narrow marketing method was with a company called One Jewel.

They were a small company, about ten employees, based out of a building on Lafyette Street in Manhattan, right in the heart of China Town. There primary business was manufacturing and importing high quality luxury watches. Some of the watches they sold found their way into the hands of street vendors who would than modify these watches by adding counterfeited trademarked logos to them, such as Rolex and Cartier. A vast majority of their product though was sold to vendors in the wholesale district who in turn sold them to smaller jewelry and fashion design companies who would implement their own labels. Over the course of a few years we developed multiple websites for this company, in order to cover the large amount of different product lines that they manufactured; from the high end gold and platinum, diamond encrusted models made to compete with the high end Swiss manufacturers down to the lower quality models that were sold to private label retailers.

As a way to cross promote these websites we decided to develop a content rich, information based website. This site had forums, customer reviews, expert articles, and product evaluations from customers. The various retail websites run by One Jewel were than to be uniquely marketed throughout this website, either in cleverly crafted customer and expert evaluations, which were obtained after mailing free products to different experts in the field, by banner ads throughout the site, or by strategically placed mentions of the websites throughout the forum message boards. There were no other websites like this on the Internet at the time; it was the first of its kind for this market. One of our biggest problems was finding a way to market this website; how do you develop a marketing budget for a website that doesn’t directly generate any revenue for the company? In theory, we had great visions, but there was no direct dollar for dollar correlation between money that was invested into marketing for this website and the revenue that was generated by our partner sites. It was not like a pay-per-click program where we could calculate our exact ROI or the exact break even point so we knew the precise amount we can pay for a specific advertisement. The company did not have a large enough advertising budget at the time to take a chance, or to “let it play out” after we invested money into the marketing of this site. Of course another option was to abandon this idea and stick with direct advertising of the retail sites, but they had faith in our ideas and we managed to convince them that in the long term this site would be a self sustaining marketing avenue that could be very profitable for them.

We had a rather unique idea. Well, unique in the sense that you would not think of it as a feasible solution for an online marketing campaign. We had five thousand business cards printed up. They only mentioned the new information website; they made no mention of the retail end of the business. In June of 2001 I hit the streets of Manhattan with 5 boxes of business cards, with a total cost of $140.00. The target included flea markets, street vendors, the wholesale district, the diamond district, major shopping centers, and large department stores. I left the cards in phone booths throughout the neighborhoods, I handed them to shop owners and the window shoppers strolling along the streets. I even handed them out to people who were wearing nice watches. One of the things that I learned about the luxury watch business was that allot of customers were repeat customers, they were collectors, they were high net worth individuals. They had friends that were high net-worth individuals.

The people that heard about our marketing method that weekend tended to laugh at us. After all, a website should be marketed to the one billion or so people throughout the world with Internet access, not the few thousand random (or not so random) people on the streets of Manhattan who got our business card that day, or at least the ones who didn’t throw it in the garbage can on the corner as soon as they thought we had passed them by. Time would tell.

Considering that the only way this website had been marketed was through our business card distribution that one weekend on the streets of the Manhattan, it would be fairly easy to measure the results. The most prominent feature of this website for the user was the forum. It was designed as a place where people who collected luxury watches, were looking to purchase a high end luxury watch, or were in the business of selling or servicing these products can come to interact with each other while at the same time providing an avenue to advertise the various retail websites that the company operated. The biggest and most accurate measurement of success of our marketing campaign was the number of people that signed up to become members of the forum, and the overall activity in the forum. The website also had a multitude of other services including expert articles, “how to” guides, image servers, and more; but by far the focus remained on the forum because of it’s great potential to help cross promote our websites and ultimately boost sales.

Well, it started slow. In the first ten days we had twenty five people sign up for our forum and close to 250 unique visitors on our website. I figured that these initial visitors would wind up being the “viral seeds”, the front line of the viral marketing campaign. These were the people who were handed a business card or saw the website on one of the strategically placed cards somewhere in New York City. We hypothesized that if somebody was going to visit our website as a direct result of seeing one of these cards they would do it soon, not 3 weeks or 3 months from now, people were not going to save our card for a later date. Either they had an interest in the subject or they didn’t. Based on that theory we surmised that after 10 days or so we had seen almost all of the visitors that we would see as a direct result of the campaign. The rest of our results would have to come from the viral market. We had to rely on these “seeds” to help our website grow. Our client wasn’t overly happy with the results. After paying for our services, this campaign cost them nearly one thousand dollars. Not allot of money in today’s high priced Internet marketing world, but ten years ago, for a small company that had little faith in the Internet and our marketing efforts to begin with, this was a significant investment. It was a make or break for our relationship with them too.

It was nearly a month before we were able to see the true potential. And although we didn’t have a name for it at the time, this would turn out to be the most successful “viral marketing” campaign I have ever taken part in. The growth could be measured in exponential terms. It works just like a chain letter. If we start with those first 20 forum members and each one tells a friend or associate about our site, we now have 40, if they do the same we now have 80 potential members, then 160, 320 and so on…you can see the potential. The key to success in this field is to have a product that gives people a reason to come to the site in the first place, and then gives them something to talk about. This could be something funny, something controversial, something informative, or in our case at the time…something unique. Without these qualities, the chances of running a successful viral marketing campaign are very slim. It could be a very tactical and strategic maneuver or just a ruse to get people to visit your website, but the key is that people want to come to your site.

The end result: today, seven years later, the website for the watch company has nearly five thousand unique visitors daily, and over eight thousand active forum members. It has become a great tool for cross promotion of their retail websites, and their physical store locations. However, the most important thing about this marketing campaign at the time is that it was done with a very small budget, and a very unique idea.



Manuel