Hoi Polloi

TiVo could create a new interest in Opt-In ads

TiVo is at it again, reinventing the format, the medium and environment it works in. A easy-to-miss news item talks of how TiVo will have 'tags' that appear as small icons on the screen, so that a viewer can click on them with a remote, to find out more.

If advertisers are smart, they will plan for segments when they can create interest in products --like the iPod-- on TiVo. Wouldn't it be ironical if people were to freeze a program in its tracks using TiVo, to watch a demo, or a 'micro-episode,' of a product in the storyline?

I like the idea of being able to 'opt-in' to advertising. It's not often that we see a piece of (excuse the phrase) paradigm-shifting technology that could make marketers AND consumers happy.

Election Advertising

Lest we forget, amidst the embarrassing campaign ads we had to stomach during the U.S. elections, there were some high points.

Take this copy for Mini Cooper:

"Let’s always be law-abiding liberals on the gas pedal and ultraconservatives at the pump….Let’s lobby Capitol Hill for more twisty highways. Let’s all skip the mudslinging and stick to the road ahead. Let’s motor."

7-Election

Then there was the 7-eleven coffee promotion, called 7-Election. It was as simple as offering customers a choice of a John Kerry or George Bush coffee cup in the chain’s 5,800 stores in the U.S.

The race, predictably, was neck-and-neck –with 65.4% of coffee ‘voters’ undecided. But when the results were tallied, Bush got 51.08% of the votes!  It may not be a scientific poll, but as this story shows, considering that a million people a day drink 7-eleven coffee, it’s a promotion that’s got some clout.

As for Brand Bush and Brand Kerry…

Since several other marketers had joined the brand-wagon, Landor Associates interview 1,262 registered voters and found that:

Bush was associated with Bud Light, IBM and Ford ("reliable", "humble", "heritage", "solid")

Kerry is associated with brands such as Heineken, Apple, and BMW ("high-quality", "high-performance", "hip", "young")

Among undecided voters: Kerry was Starbucks while Bush was Dunkin' Donuts.

Paying for advertising!

I keep writing about how the advertising model isn't 'dead' but broken --and fixable. So it is with mixed feelings that I saw AdForum selling some of it's 'most viewed' TV commercials for $45! We live in a strange world where people spend a lot of money and time (TiVo subscription, pop-up ad blockers etc) to avoid ads, and yet, these things end up like any other product with a price tag.
This ad for Visa, "Pistol," is $25 bucks!

And why not? This may be a micro-target, but, going by Ad Forum's numbers, --from October 18-24 this year, over 112,580 ads watched their top 5 ads-- this is indeed a market.

Ramen Noodles gets unusual branding plug --from Michael Moore.

Trust Michael Moore to dream up a creative (read: controversial) way to garner media attention. His offer of a pack of Ramen noodles or clean underwear to 'slacker' students is not a silly choice as it may seem. (I am sure there will be conspiracy theories that Ramen goes well with you-know-what brand of ketchup.)

Infusing a few strong brand names into a political stunt is a good way to fire up the marketplace, and the media. That, plus Moore's silly 'letter' on his Web site, looks deliberately crafted to get the slacker story out there. Moore definitely understands the tricks of guerilla marketing, as this recipe reveals in a Movie blog. To which, a visitor comments that Moore deserves an Oscar for his marketing and promotion skills.

Street Spam and Election Advertising.

Len Gutman, fellow IABC chapter member and PR pro, writes about a topic after my heart: Political Spam on our street corners. The article, Sign forests just political poster pollution appears in yesterday's Arizona Republic.

Like Len, I don't get it. They have such poor impact, especially when cluttered together. Besides they all look alike, in the standard 3 colors. Brand differentiation? I doubt their campaign folk give it a thought. They follow the same principle of spammers, sometimes planting the same sign twice in one spot. The next time you drive by a vacant lot, take a look at the street spam and tell me if their advertising money is justifiable.

Just for grins, take a look at this sign.

Preventing ambush marketing at the Olympics

Every Olympics, someone tries to ambush the million dollar sponsors.

This time, in Athens, the organizers are making sure Coke, Burger King and other big players don’t get upstaged. See this news report. I grant, they pay big money to be a ‘TOP' (The Olympic Program) sponsor. In the neighborhood of 272 million Euro. But the brand guardians should guard against stunts that could undermine that reputation.

The article mentions --I thought this was really funny –-being forced to wear your T-shirt inside out, just in case the message was not commercially Kosher.

"Staff will also be on the lookout for T-shirts, hats and bags displaying the unwelcome logos of non-sponsors. Stewards have been trained to detect people who may be wearing merchandise from the sponsors' rivals in the hope of catching the eyes of television audiences. Those arousing suspicion will be required to wear their T-shirts inside out."

As Media Culpa, a blog devoted to Media and PR by Swedish blogger Hans Kullin notes,

"I'm sorry, but my soft drink preferences would start to lean slightly away from the word's #1 brand. This is just not good PR."

Inventing the 'new media' all over again.

Last month, I featured a story about how Macintosh users and Ferrari fans have been considered a target market --by a cell phone company and a sports car respectively. I know it gets confusing, when products target products. But the fact is that in the oversaturated media space, the quest for the holy grail of attention, is leading marketers to invent their own media.

Take this quote from the VP of Lifetime TV network, Catherine Moran. (Quoted in Advertising Age, Aug 2, 2004)

"We're all out there trying to find new media environments..Beaches do seem to be on everybody's hit list."

Hard to miss the irony of a TV network (the media) seeking a 'new media environment' to market itself.

Here's another similar story. A Magazine using a Retailer as a 'media environment' instead of the other way around. A new magazine, called "All You" by Time Inc, will launch in Wal-Mart. Here's what the publisher, Diane Oshin said about using Walmart.

"All You gives marketers the opportunity to target the ever-growing population of value-driven consumers in a high-quality environment that speaks directly to them," said Oshin. "And, with initial distribution in Wal-Mart -- where this customer shops -- this magazine will be an extremely efficient way to reach her."

Cell phones, fast cars and iPods

It’s a natural fit in marketing: products go after products in the quest for smart targeting. It's not your typical sponsorship.

Take this story about Vodafone looking at Ferrari racing fans as a great target audience. Over 360 million viewers (a cumulative annual audience of 5.7 billion people in 2003) watched each Formula 1 race live. The Vodafone brand was on-screen for an average 20% of every race broadcast. So Ferraris have become a medium? Check it out here.

But see how another fast-car alliance works the other way around: Jaguar considers Mac users a viable target audience.

"Mac users are people that shape opinion; they use Macs to create," said Stephenson. "They are independent thinkers that don't follow, they lead."."

Bush-Kerry Political Cartoon boosts viral concept

The Web cartoon, also referred to as the ‘bi-partisan toon' will give non marketing people a new look at the potential of viral marketing.

Produced by Jib Jab media, a Santa Monica-based animation studio to promote itself (and not a political message), it is one of the most entertaining takes on the present political brand war raging in the U.S. It is slightly irreverant, but the short film captures the campaign bullet points very well, in under 2 minutes.

Brand Stories

This post appears on the official Global PR Blog Week site.

Blogging is new to many of us who never imagined that something akin to gossip and story telling would impact deeply entrenched professions such as advertising, PR and journalism. But it has, giving rise to a journalism effect that fills the gaps of credibility in branding, politics, journalism, and mass marketing. My topic is marketing communications. As I noted in my backgrounder the people at the periphery have a voice –and the reach— that those at the center once enjoyed. 

Our modern variants of gossip –marketing communications (which is all about telling our commercial stories) and public relations (which is used to narrate particular angles of a story) – have quietly eclipsed the corporate video, the press conference, the product launch, and the celebrity-studded TV commercial. The most interesting seem to be the unofficial storytellers--the ‘unauthorized’ corporate bloggers, the ‘self embedded’ journalists-blogger posting stories from the war zone, the ‘citizen journalists’ reporting for OhMyNews in South Korea, and the ‘un-ad agencies’ such as Crispin Porter + Bogusky. Even a group of consumers who release viral content for benign reasons or some form of activism have an audience.

These communicators at the periphery have realized that people and institutions at the center --the corporate icons and the traditional gatekeepers— have lost their credibility. Notice how it’s not just the Ken Lays and Martha Stewarts of this world who are being put away. Also being sidelined are information and image brokers from Tom Brokaw (whom, we learn, is losing audiences), McCann-Erickson (a powerful global advertising network/conglomerate which is losing accounts to hot shops.) And yes, even newspapers have lost their credibility, as a recent Pew Research study shows.

Whose brand stories will people listen to? It depends on who provides more relevant content, rather than who crafts the best press release. Consider the GlaxoSmithkline 'story.' No matter how you spin it, when New York Attorney General filed a lawsuit against their product, Paxil, the patients took to the message boards.

Or take BBC journalist, Stuart Hughes, who’s Iraq 'audio blog' on the Web, is riveting journalism, more so, because it is not an official news report filed through Hughes’ employer. These are seemingly isolated examples of how spin, brand management (managed by one-time ‘brand guardians,’) damage control, and intermediation are not always what the audience wants.

This is not necessarily a pessimistic view of communications. We don’t have to look to Blogs per se for the answer. The concept of blogging, of transparency, and allowing multiple contributions is being embraced by the advertising and marketing world, even as we speak.

Larry Light, the chief marketing officer of McDonald’s proposed a curious marketing idea last month. He called it ‘brand journalism’ which is not a very accurate label for what he was proposing, since it is neither journalism, nor branding. “As a mass brand…we marketed a mass message through the mass media appealing to masses of undifferentiated consumers,” he said. But “customers will not accept monotonous, repetition of the same simplistic message. They want a dynamic, creative chronicle.” Mr. Light was not overtly referring to online ‘chronicles’ but he did have in mind the rich tapestry of multiple opinions, and daily inputs to this chronicle: “It means telling the many facets of our brand story every day in 119 countries.”

And in the face of those he warned as the ‘positionistas’ (those brand advocates who defend the ‘positioning’ theory of the one-voice, one-look, and one-brand image) he said that McDonald’s would redefine its brand communication in a “non advertising-centric world” where like the tapestries of old, this thing called ‘brand journalism’ would be an “endless story” when unfurled over time.

Welcome to the non advertising-centric world of marketing communications!