Hoi Polloi

Dow's Blue Plant Run. Could Press releases make this much impact?

The Dow Chemical's Human Element campaign may not have taken it to a level of humanizing it in it's first iteration of the campaign, but it was a start of showing the company's commitment to critical issues facing the world in which it operates.

This is tough when you're a positioned in people's minds as a "chemical" company. But they try.

So could press releases and advertising be part of an extreme makeover kit? Consider what they are up against. Dow inherited (OK, bought) Union Carbide in 2001. Those of you born before 1984 will remember that Union Carbide was associated with Bhopal, the huge pesticide-related tragedy in India that killed thousands of villagers. Dow has to operate in a PR world where organizations other than them keep this story alive, and issue 'lipstick on a pig" press releases like this about long term contamination. Thanks to the internet and our access to information is only a keyword away, straightforward PR won't cut it.

Against this backdrop, take a look at Dow's second phase of the Human Element campaign. The press releases on the Dow site don't scream out CSR (corporate social responsibility), but bring attention to climate change issues, water and food supplies are built-in. It's sponsorship of  Blue Planet Run with National Geographic has a non-linear approach to a PR campaign, that has advertising, celebrity, media, and outreach all blended together. There's a Celebrity-endorsed sneaker selling on eBay (auction closes July 20th). There's a team blog covering the 95-day, 16-country Blue Planet Run. And there are press releases like this that don't tell you much considering what good in-depth coverage is coming off the blog.

No matter what your position is on Dow, you have to recognize that this is a well thought out program supported by good marketing communications. If it's good PR, it's because it's so well integrated into the other components, and invisible.

Sri Lankan Tea firm, Dilmah, in Fortune magazine.

Kudos to Dilmah Tea, a Sri Lankan company I know very well.

I just picked up this copy of Fortune magazine (July '07) and there's a good feature on this maverick tea company. There's no link to the article on Forbes Online, so let me paraphrase. It's a story of how a independent company is making the big guys sweat. Big guys meaning the Lipton's and Twinings of this world. What's special about them? 

First, Dilmah makes a claim to product quality that no other tea marketer could -a single source of the leaf. Most people don't realize that when they dip a tea bag in boiling water, the tea inside  is 'blended' -- meaning it comes from several countries in one big, tasteless mash-up! I could attest to that -- as a huge tea drinker I stock and drink many varieties, including the real thing from Dilmah which I store and serve like, um, wine!

Which brings me to the second point in their marketing differentiation. They position the brand somewhere between a wine and a heath drink. As Fortune reports, the multinationals pooh-pooh the wine analogy, saying it is ridiculous. That's expected (beyond sour grapes!) because they don't appreciate the nuances of tea, the climatic differences, and the soil etc in Sri Lanka.

Third, and this has to worry the multi-nationals, Dilmah is getting into the experiential retail business of "tea bars" --hipster Starbucks-like hangouts for the other caffeine crowd.

The Fortune article didn't mention Dilmah's other major promotional thrust: cricket! The firm is a big promoter and sponsor of the sport, and in some ways synonymous with it in Asia and Australia. No accident, when you think about it. Tea and cricket. Two British exports that now have a distinctive 'Ceylon' flavor.

Harry Potter’s social media impact on branding

Harry Potter is an extended tale of no, not just wizards and magic but the wisdom of the crowds in action. But that story got buried in the hoopla around the launch of Harry Potter & The Deathly Hallows last Saturday.

Very predictably, the traditional news media covered the event in the same way they did, say, the iPhone. Too much attention to people queuing up for the book, the parties, the ‘education’ component, but very little about the phenomenon itself.

The fact is, the Harry Potter franchise just doesn’t belong to J.K. Rowling anymore. The books may be in 200 countries and 63 languages, but the Potter brand goes beyond that geographic reach. It’s been open-sourced in more ways than you could imagine; the wisdom of the Potter crowds has always ruled when it comes to creating their own message channels, cranking out their own Potter-esqe stories etc. Despite the fact that this is a book, and not a digital product, the fans are all over the social media map. There is:
    * The Mugglecast podcast run by high school students, that has some 50,000 listeners a week, and features Elton John and Bono.
    * The Leaky Cauldron leaks news about the books and carries a disclosure that it is in “no way affiliated with J.K. Rowling.”
    * No shortage of Potter blogs, including one that suggests a Bollywood storyline for an Indian audience.
    * The Harry Potter Fiction store, that’s not managed by Scholastic, the book publisher; it’s also “unofficial.”
    * The Academy of Virtual Wizardry, at “Caledon Highlands” in you guessed it, Second Life!

I could go on…

So I wanted to track how the raving fans were behaving. I had a haunch that there would be an equal outpouring of passion on Saturday the 20th July around midnight not in front of the bookstores where the TV crews were waiting in hoardes, but on Wikipedia. At 11.00 pm Pacific Time the discussion (on the “comments” page of the Harry Potter Wikipedia showed signs that things were heating up. The Wikipedians had been discussing the value of locking down the Wiki, since everyone knew the book had leaked and the plot was being discussed elsewhere.

“Just wait until the official release time. Then we can put everything up in 5 minutes or so, considering the number of wikipedians interested in this.” said one editor at 11.03 pm. This was clearly a hard core editor, but also a big Potter fan. “Most people, me included, will be too busy reading the book on Saturday to check the article.” Others like him (or her) were unhappy that some editors had moved to freeze the pages until a week after the launch. Fan passion was expressed in the form of outrage that some newspapers’ reviewers had created spoilers by discussing the plot before the launch. Reading through their discussion gives you a glimpse of not just how these unpaid wikipedians work, but how fans operate late at night, doing a thankless job for what? To them this isn’t JK’s book. This is theirs.

If only other brands let their customers work their magic this way!

Two stories, different brand awareness

You've probably seen or heard stories about food marketers, supposedly scaling down their marketing to children. Great story, except they have a lot of wiggle room about what they plan to market, and how. Packaging is the one place they obviously won't give up, with boxes of cereal saying more about the characters like Shrek and Spiderman than the contents.

So while the Grocery Manufacturer's Association is busy debating the topic how to do the minimum and seem like its members are helping the consumer, it's good to take a look at another story about actually anticipating a target audience's needs and doing something about it.

Samsung has started installing charging stations for cell-phone and mobile accessory  at Los Angeles International Airport. It sems so simple, that you wonder why carriers like Verizon or T-Mobile hadn't thought of it before. It's a great way for a brand to communicate that it understands what its customers (and all potential ones) face when traveling.

Newspapers, still a great place for brand "impression"

I often cover the daring, creative ways newspapers and print publications do to stay relevant. Usually it is about relevance to their core audience --readers.

But ever so often we see them create advertising environments that make you go wow! This is one of them. New York Magazine featured a double spread of two completely unrelated products, but designed (by their ad agency) to belong to a double spread, and stop a reader in his tracks.

There's a lesson in this: Being relevant to the reader also means being intensely relevant to the advertiser, and it takes a great publisher to encourage layouts like this. Of course, the idea probably came from the agency, but an advertiser and an agency will always gravitate to a medium that allows some flexibility.

So as you could see in this ad, the key was to use two products that are right for the demographic --in this case pearls with the Yogurt. The product on the right is a Greek Yogurt, Fage.

MediaPost reports that there's another ad involving a Tourneau watch, and the yogurt. I wonder if the advertiser on the left gets a better rate than Fage, since the yogurt company is essentially using the product on the left to make a point.

Where SEO meets social media meets PR

Yesterday, IABC's Phoenix chapter put together a terrific meeting on something that's on everyone's radar. I suspect the topic ("Using SEO & Other PR Tactics to Communicate with Social Communities in a Web 2.0 World") was intentionally long and geeky to make a point. More on this later.

MarketWire had pried open the controversial but hot topic of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Social Media. Whenever these two buzz phrases occur in one sentence, advertising agencies, media relations people and marketers get a little hot around the collar. I know, because I used to work for a SEO-meets marketing company. There are lots of myths and concerns out there. Just a year ago SEO seemed like a lot of pixie dust before things like Twitter and User generated Content showed up. "Social bookmarking" sounded like something Paris Hilton does when thumbing through National Inquirer.

Unfortunately, the world inside corporate marketing is still looking at what's unfolding before us as pixie dust 2.0. Look around you. The world of marketing and PR is roughly divided into people who think "we don't have a budget for this crap" and those who go "could we upload this sucker to YouTube?" So it's about time we discuss Google Juice, and Digg, and the social media press release, and what in the world is Facebook up to, trying to upstage our beloved search engines.

Could people game the search engine, someone asked? Do "Diggs" mean anything a few days after the story breaks? Was there some 'white-hat' way to get better rankings on search results? Everyone probably knew the answer to that last one. Sure, there are black-hat methods of sneaking past the algorithm, and there's marketing.

You don't need to know how this algorithm thing works, but if you accept the logic behind it, then you gotta work on it. Good case in point: Southwest Airlines. Three years ago, they optimized a press release by editing it based on search terms they had been tracking. They tracked the results and saw a direct correlation to a spike in sales. They won an award for this. It's a matter of crafting headlines and knowing where to drop in a hyperlink, and a meta tag.

Which brings me to the MarketWire topic. Google (or Yahoo) the words "SEO PR social media" and see if IABC Phoenix is anywhere in sight. Now Google (or Yahoo) the topic (Using SEO & Other PR Tactics to Communicate with Social Communities in a Web 2.0 World) and see what pops up at the top of your search results. Brilliant huh?

Or is it still pixie dust?

Enistein's lure: One brand different audiences

Not all good brands can achieve this kind of success, being a magnet for the hipster, college crowd and being family friendly at the same time. I stop by at least three Einstein Brothers here in the valley, and each has its own niche. They have one thing in common: long lines of hungry people who stick around, too.

So what's the lure of Einstein's? Is it their brilliant invisible marketing, or is it a brand that classically fills a need? Personally, I'm not sure if it's my weakness for bagels, the environment, or the coffee that pulls me back. The company says that "Marketing is a key ingredient in our business process. Our programs typically target very specific markets/regions..." Yet I don't get postcards in the mail, I don't see coupons, and I rarely see any advertising. Do they have a secret word-of-mouth channel?

The marketing side of me tells me it is the ambiance, not the baked goods. They have spared little in looking after the retail side of things. The menu boards are so much more friendly than, say Starbucks, their signage gives them a mom-and-pop feel that doesn't have "slick franchise" written all over it. The employees wear buttons with high-school like slogans ("Thrilled to Chill"), and take time to get to know you.

Then there's my five-year old daughter, who's a different market segment obviously. She will choose Einsteins over McDonald's any day, making me wonder what's their secret sauce. We have a father-and-daughter Sunday morning date. She loves reading the goofy murals about the 'darn good coffee' and posters that declare such things as 'great moments in poultry' while enjoying a cinnamon twist. But she also recognizes good customer service, that at her age is a significant thing. A former manager at the McClintock and Guadalupe store knew her by name. She was thrilled that "Uncle Ron" would come by and chat.

Tempe Einstein's, the iconic store at the corner at Rural and University is a patently ASU hangout, with Sparky and ASU posters competing with drinks advertised as "The Cold and The Beautiful" or branding around Elmo.

The Phoenix store, at the corner of McDowell and 7th, shares the same wall as Starbucks, but if the lines are any indication of a brand's strength, then Elmo wins hands down among the busy working crowd of doctors and women checking their Blackberries.

Even if you're not in marketing, if you have to deal with multiple audiences, spend a few moments at Einsteins. It's a lesson that'll cost you less than two bucks.

Stop the presses! Newspaper turns to music marketing in Planet Earth launch.

With so much turmoil in newspapers today, it still comes as a shock that the The Daily Mail on Sunday in the UK gave away three million copies of Prince's new album, Planet Earth.

What's remarkable about this is that this is the "official release" of the album. Gives new meaning to the term 'Media Release' doesn't it? More shocking: The album won't go on sale in the UK! It will be launched in other parts of the world on July 24th, says the paper.

Prince has managed to annoy Sony BMG over this, but apart from his motives, it gives a new insight into how newspapers may be looking at marketing to stay relevant --and alive. A newspaper as a distribution mechanism for music? Brilliant. Think of the integrated online marketing possibilities.

A interesting note: The Mail didn't just tip the CDs into the paper. They produced the copies themselves.

Die, phone tree, die! (and marketing opportunities that come with its demise)

So you've been placed on hold (again) and are convinced that customer service has left the building --for Bangalore, perhaps.

But there's a neat solution taking shape. It's called NoPhoneTrees.com, and it could eliminate the phone-tree headache. It's from a San Francisco-based company called Bringo. How it works is amazing: You click on the company you want to call, and enter your phone number and hang up. NoPhoneTrees dials the company, circumvents their phone tree, and calls you back when you are in queue for the next customer service rep., shaving off valuable on-hold time. Perfect for days when you're multi-tasking, or your minutes are running out.

It's still in demo mode so it looks like a web site with limited lists of lists. (In insurance, Humana and Geico are listed, but no State Farm). But The company says the full service will launch soon.

I see great potential. I don't know about you, but I add pauses into my speed dials so that the technology zips through the phone tree of frequently called numbers --airlines, credit card companies, even calling cards, and doctor's offices. I would like to see how this could work when I'm driving, and don't want to tie up the phone while waiting in the queue to check a flight status. What if the service wold allow us to set a day and time in advance, so we could get into the phone queue of the airline, three days down the road just to make sure the flight's not delayed?

What's this to do with marketing communication? Consider this. It's a free service to anyone, but as the go-between, it could easily ask customers to pay back for the service with their attention. No I don't mean listen to an ad --through that's the predictable model to go after. It could be a 15- second survey of the company you just spoke to. Surveys are everywhere. You've seen companies use register receipts inviting customers to do a phone survey, redeemable for a gift card or generous coupon. To use the airline example again, if US Airways gave you 100 air miles if you answered a 5-question survey at the end of your phone-tree-avoided call to Flight Reservations, would you say no? If Kinkos gave offered 10-color copies, or Borders gave you a coupon for a latte for taking a survey?

Customers will trade off  attention for value-added service or products. Marketers value timely feedback. Someone who allows you to to put a spike through the heart of the phone tree could create a win-win situation for both.   

What Ogilvy would have said about Flickr

If David Ogilvy was alive, I bet he'd have very cool blog. He'd have a podcast and rant about writing and pig-headed Creatives. And a Flickr account, for sure. More about David at the end of this post. 

Why do I make this strange correlation between a dead adman and a new media-slash-social media company like Flickr? I got an email from Yahoo Photos yesterday informing me that they were porting my albums to Flickr, which as most of you know, is owned by Yahoo. They were all cheery about this, and I followed their prompt. Within ten minutes I had a response from “The Flickreenos.” It started out with “Yee har! All your photos have been imported from your Yahoo! Photos account…”

Before this were two other emails written by a seemingly highly caffeinated communicator (or very human one) in the tech department. Zero corporate-speak, almost like the buddy-talk we engage in on Facebook. Coming from a mega company like Flickr, that's now in eight countries, and has some 24 million visitors a month, I must say I was impressed.

It’s this kind of upbeat communication that I miss, when someone sends me a legally-whetted, PR-sanctioned postcard or email these days, with my name dropped into appropriate slots to personalize it and make it look like they know me.

My point? Variable-data printing, a sophisticated form of mail-merge is great, but should not be a crutch. It should not replace genuine, passionate communication. I don’t know where the good writers have been locked up in organizations these days, but we don’t see a lot of Flickreenos-type communications.

Which brings me to Mr. Ogilvy. I was thumbing through my old copy of The Unpublished Ogilvy, and couldn't help noticing that this copywriter at heart sort of anticipated the Cluetrain idea, often asking people to spike their college-bred stilted communication and communicate like humans. He came out with such gems as “Woolly people write woolly memos, woolly letters and woolly speeches.”  This was in the early eighties, when we all know, MBA-speak was all the rage! “Write the way you talk. Naturally,” he often said.

I could just hear the man who once wrote stunningly human copy for Mercedes Rolls-Royce go Yeeeee har! about Flickr’s un-woolly communication.