Final video this weekend! A new ad from P&G, where Mother Nature (in her lovely green dress) tries to interrupt a woman’s dream only to find that Tampax Pearl is there to avoid the disaster:
Some nice humour for a tricky situation…
Archive for the 'Marketing' Category
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Ray Ban has been extremely successful with a new viral video seen and then sent to friends by millions of people:
So can you tell why Ray Ban is behind it? Enjoy !
For those of you who follow the series ‘Mad Men’, you may have heard about the twitter story around it where characters from the series appeared on Twitter. After having been closed down by the company AMC behind the series as they were not endorsed, they were then reinstated after the following outcry from fans.
The fans behind the twittering ‘Mad Men’ discuss in an article on CNet their experience and the lessons that can be learnt from it. Two interesting quotes from the article:
First, she [Carri Bugbee] said, producers should strive to reserve the Twitter accounts for all the characters in whatever show or film they’re making. “I can’t believe that any of us would have to say that,” Bugbee said, adding that for fans, “if you have a favorite TV show, you could probably go reserve (any character’s) name on Twitter” even now.
“Ross said there are further lessons producers and marketers need to draw from the “Mad Men” Twitter experience. Perhaps most important, she suggested, advertisers need to “stop siloing.” In other words, they need to understand that to get their message out, it is necessary to spread it across a wide variety of platforms”
Update: take a look at an interview of Carri Bugbee’s interview on Ad Age
So if there were some type of celebrity match ‘show down’, SEO would at the moment win against behavioural marketing. SEO is for many just a buzzword, to throw in front of the client without understanding what it entails, in the same way that mentioning Twitter is the hip thing to do at the moment.
But when clients start to understand that most SEO efforts are far more difficult to analyse from an ROI perspective than behavioural marketing, the latter being far easier to analyse when used properly, this should change.
When you realise that the technology exists to tailor content ‘on the fly’ to a visitor of your web site that can try to learn click by click or even by the movement of the mouse what a visitor is interested in, and subsequently serve them more appropriate content, you shudder to think what is coming next. I was interviewed and blown away by a company called Touch Clarity that was gobbled up by Omniture several years ago, and still wonder whether I should have pushed forward with them to this day but hey life is full of surprises. 
You can easily see how serving content will not only help companies spend their money more efficiently (both ad and site development using behavioural targeting) but should also provide them with better analytical data to better understand their clients. Kind of explains why Omniture invested in a company like Touch Clarity. But only time will tell whether Behavioural targeting (or BT among friends) will win the competition with SEO.
Note: just read that the Marketing Sherpa report has behavioural marketing placed just below SEO in terms of efficiency. Funny story when trying to find out more information about it, the page I was served stopped me from getting to the site.
So, imagine you have to come up with a campaign for selling shoes, sports shoes, trainers. You tell yourself well there is a right foot, a left foot and what does that make you think of. The Ying and Yang concept of course, or opposites attract, etc. Well Asics have come up with such a campaign and they are putting the left and right forward… “What’s a left without a right?” And pronto you think about Adam and Eve of course. I started thinking about the left and right parts of my brain but then I’m a bit weird
And of course the temptation to go back to basics and talk about Adam and Eve…
Using focus groups to test an upcoming product / service / system is common practice and can really help pin point issues before launch date. Depending on the money behind the product, the size and variety of the target population there can be several focus group tests and/or different phases before launch. On the other hand some companies don’t do anything, considering that their knowledge is paramount to any form of focus group feedback.
It is more and more frequent that companies launch web based services as a ‘beta’ and thus acquire testers to provide feedback on the system and help them perfect it. When done properly it can even be sold as a special invite only, VIP type event so that users feel special. But companies that launch their new product or service, with a new look and feel, can get a deluge of feedback from unhappy customers. If a focus group has one person representing loyal customers and gets swayed by the whole idea of being part of the focus group this can skew the feedback. The other loyal customers may be really unhappy about seeing a change in the packaging or look and feel of the new product. Tropicana recently changed their design but has now decided to switch from their new packaging design back to the old following all the complaints. As a Tropicana loyal customer it was a shock for me to see this new packaging (even though it is for the US). I mean it looks like some cheap orange juice and has no soul to it!
And the one that I just love to see in my fridge:
What is interesting around the whole Tropicana packaging debacle is that how the message got back to Pepsi the owners of the Tropicana brand. There was a deluge of messages telephone calls, forums, letters, emails, twitter…
An article on NY times about the Tropicana incident talks about the ad for Motrin pain:
And in November, many consumers who used Twitter to criticize an ad for Motrin pain reliever received responses within 48 hours from the brand’s maker, a unit of Johnson & Johnson, which apologized for the ad and told them it had been withdrawn.
Articles are flowing about how big companies are cutting away at their budgets, if they are not cutting then they are renegotiating costs with their agencies, here and here…
The article on AdAge explains how companies are also taking a look at consolidating:
PepsiCo last week reported a 43% drop in fourth-quarter profits on write-downs and restructuring and a 9% drop in full-year profits. During Coca-Cola’s fourth-quarter earnings call on Feb. 12, CEO Muhtar Kent said the marketer has slashed its agency roster by more than half. “We have consolidated, ” he said. “Agency numbers have gone down by more than half, and I think we have driven a lot of efficiencies in our marketing, our market-research costs.”
The survey in the above emarketer article indicates cuts are increasing in the various marketing and advertising areas.
The survey also demonstrates it is not always about cuts in spending but also about reallocation of Ad spending. We are seeing during this time of recession that ROI and the ability to provide hard data about ROI is important. There is a distinct move of money from TV to Digital and big companies are putting their money behind the idea that there is a better return on investment in digital media.
Being more efficient with money that is available to spend on advertising is therefore very important. You see so many catch-up campaigns where companies are just trying to better their competitor without looking about being innovating and really thinking about what will allow them to provide interesting and hopefully even innovative services to their customers. There is great article from the creator of the subservient ‘chicken campaign‘, not really innovative or providing an interesting service but as memorable ads go this is right up there with the effective few.
But even though it is cold outside, paying attention to clients needs does pay off and companies that are doing a good job in this arena, like Google, are getting top scores.
“Since new customers are harder to come by in an economic downturn, firms need to pay even more attention to building loyalty with their most important customers,†wrote Bruce Temkin, author of Customer Experience Correlates to Loyalty.
Companies that have a good brand, that people will trust and who also advertise efficiently are highly likely to come out of this recession far better than the others…
Note: there is a new article on emarketer (20 March 09) concerning a Myers Publishing survey providing a new view on how ad spending will evolve.
Sony has announced that the “Mylo”, a wifi handheld device, should be available from September at around $350. It has been presented in black and ‘white and orange’ (as seen below).
You can find out more from the press release published at Sony’s site.
Bill Nguyen, a serial entrepreneur explains in a CNN Money article why he feels that his experience has pushed him to be less bold in his approach and thus probably takes off an edge he would have had on ‘the market’, the first time round :
“Here’s what I think about the whole serial entrepreneur thing: Every time I do something, I suck a little bit more,” Nguyen says.
“Experience teaches you to be less bold, more concerned. All these life experiences teach you to be afraid. I have to try so much harder now not to be the sum total of my experiences.”
Unusual honesty and an interesting read…
There is nothing like bad publicity the ad people will tell you. Well, You Tube is making the headlines with bad, good and excellent media coverage !
You Tube has made uploading video to the Internet in order to share it, a simple procedure. Sharing videos really is dead easy. Although tagging the content efficiently is still to come, their site is also full of interesting functions.
Media companies realising the potential
When you hear a successful entrepreneur saying this product is never going to work, while at the same time companies like Google, Yahoo, MySpace, MTV… trying desperately to copy them, you’re kind of left puzzled by such comments. The arguments of Mark Cuban are ‘You Tube is just allowing people to upload content they don’t own the rights to’. From a simple perspective though Cuban owns companies (like HDNet) that distribute content just like You Tube. All his content is with copyright owner’s consent though. Wouldn’t that make you mad too – especially if they are likely to be selling it for a lot of money soon ?
Now even though that may be part (even a large part) of You Tube’s content the guy is missing a point and a big one. Cuban doesn’t seem to have noticed how much the Internet is changing things.
You Tube has a massive audience, actually a real community behind it. It is a platform to broadcast a message on. The issues it faces are similar to those that MySpace faces. The big media companies realise this type of platform could potentially be a “highway to heaven” but certainly not a ‘pathway to hell’…
An example of this is the deal that You Tube has just signed with Warner Music Group “that will let users embed some Warner wares in their own music videos and amateur flicks”.
The main issue for media companies was the idea of losing money. Attacking the everyday Joe and making his life hell rather than looking for ways to distribute their content intelligently and easily, is slowly being dropped.
Warner’s deal with You Tube like iTunes’ numerous deals for series and films should pave the way for simple and accessible content via the Web.
It is easy to appreciate how a lot of people could miss the trend that led to this. The large media companies have realized that they can capitalise on these massive communities AND make money from it. Hey, they finally realised that the MP3 fiasco and all the legal mayhem surrounding it was really negative for them. The media companies have started to embrace the Internet as a medium to sell their products !
Forbes dossier on You Tube
So when Forbes magazines does a whole dossier on you, do you listen to some entrepreneur who got it right once or twice, or to Forbes ?
An example from the Forbes article (there is a whole dossier actually) on You Tube :
Miles Beckett, a creator of the fictional “lonelygirl15″ videos that lured 900,000 viewers in recent months, foresees the advent of “wiki-television”–where fans get involved in the story; those who provide the most clever responses get a cut of the ad pie. “If the fans generate enough revenue from their videos they can quit their day jobs, too,” Beckett says. “We think it’s such a cool way to tell a story. It is just something you can’t do with the traditional media.”
And this is the example used in the Forbes article, a video you can simply paste into your article just like I’m doing here :
Rewarding video makers
But You Tube receives criticism from companies that have built different models. The Forbes article also talks about Revver and how they distribute, just like Google a portion of the revenue they receive with the creators of the videos. In the same way Netscape is trying to pull away key participants of Digg and pay them to add content to Netscape this type of criticism seems valid :
The amateurs who filmed the geyser effect of Mentos candy jammed into bottles of diet Coke have reaped nearly $35,000 from Revver.
Just as money speaks to the media companies looking for profitable ways to distribute their content legally, video creators who provide real value will not need long to choose between ‘money and fame’ versus ‘fame alone’.
Although You Tube are making more and more big deals this issue will need to be addressed in the medium to long term ! Key community members and followers may feel (like the Digg example) that all their hard work is only filling the pockets of You Tube and turn elsewhere…
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