Fefe Dobson Returns with Joy

Call it a comeback or call it coming full circle, Fefe Dobson’s sophomore album Joy is due out May 4th on Island Records, 7 years after her debut!

After finding mainstream success with her 2003 self-titled debut, the Canadian pop/rocker became a major label casualty and was quietly dropped by Island Records.  Her intended 2006 follow-up, Sunday Love, never got released, and although the lead single “Don’t Let It Go To Your Head” failed to make any noise on the charts, it did get some new life when both Lilyjets and Jordin Sparks covered and released the song themselves.

Since being dropped, Fefe has recorded an album full of completely new material titled Joy, including the Joan Jett-esque “I Want You,” already a TV/soundtrack/commercial staple.  It turns out, during production of Joy, Fefe’s fair weathered friends at Island came crawling back and resigned their former rogue pop princess.

After 7 years of enduring the turbulent business side of music, the now 25 year-old Fefe probably has a lot to say on her new album and it looks like Island is really ready to let her say it this time.

Edited: March 5th, 2010

For Brands, ‘Transparency’ is the new ‘Image’

The marketing strategy of the year award goes to… transparency. At its core, radical brand transparency is about being honest, sincere and direct with consumers, ousting the impersonal middle man, “no comment” snubs and canned responses in favor of a personal relationship with the public.

Who needs a spokesperson when your CEO can make the same announcements on your corporate blog? And fuck spell check, we’re transparent! Wild office holiday party caught on tape? Edit out the racial slurs and make it viral STAT! Actually, leave the racial slurs, condemn it publicly and make it a trending topic. We’re so transparent.

In the past, brands spent millions to determine, plan, create, and maintain an image. It was an era of brand opacity and controlling public perception using image was easy. At its worst, we call it propaganda:

smoke

But that kind of PR-opaganda is an inflatable raft: it’s gonna get holes and you can only patch them for so long before you sink. After some corporate soul searching, brands have had to learn to be OK with themselves, flaws and all. Enter: transparency.

But was transparency a strategic marketing move or a matter of if-ya-can’t-beat-’em-join-’em?

Companies want savvy, worthwhile employees. Savvy employees are on social networks. Worthwhile employees are influential on those networks. They become influential by being popular, and they become popular by being open books (aka transparent). Sure, discretion and tact still reign, but the standards of what’s acceptable have changed. And there’s always anonymity.

Then you have the public. You can’t cry libel over every bad Yelp review and when faced with a Twitterstorm of complaints about a new product, you can’t ignore it off the day’s trends. Being transparent means being hypervisible, dealing with crises head on and viewing them as opportunities to demonstrate poise and responsibility… publicly, of course.

Edited: October 1st, 2009