Archive for the ‘Branding & Advertising’ Category

I didn’t notice this until about halfway through the Super Bowl when Gary Vaynerchuk pointed it out. It seemed despite the millions of dollars big brands spent on Super Bowl ads this year, not one (at least that I saw) specifically directed people to their Facebook pages. Maybe it’s because my “day job” is now mostly consumed by social media, but this strikes me as incredibly obtuse. And possibly downright irresponsible on the part of their agencies.

At some point someone should’ve mentioned to Dennys, “Hey, you know you could probably spike your fan count by a couple MILLION in one night. Sound good?” That they didn’t either means a) nobody brought it up, or b) it was shot down by someone with no appreciation of the impact of such things. Or maybe they just don’t care about Facebook. I think a big factor in this is that “traditional” agencies still haven’t the first clue how to advise their clients on social media. This even includes a lot of digital agencies that only want to sell a client a website.

Throughout the game, I was reminded of when I first got into this gig. Around 1998 I built a website for a prominent local real estate agency in my town of Marietta, Ohio. At the time, I wasn’t doing anything very advanced, and the realty listings were powered by a third-party Perl script. I think I got a couple grand from the whole shebang, but it was 10 times better than what I was replacing.

Once the site launched, I made a lot of recommendations to them about how to promote the site. I pitched the usual stuff, but what I really hammered on was that they were insane if they didn’t put their web address on every single “for sale” sign on every property they had listed. They’d nod and acknowledge it was a good idea, but they never ever did it. I left Ohio in 2006, but my gut says they probably still haven’t taken my advice.

And here we are in 2010, the future, for pete’s sake, and clients are still compartmentalizing their media. This is our website and this is our broadcast ad, and ne’er the twain shall meet. Stunning.

It should be pointed out (as was pointed out to me), a couple spots included Facebook and/or Twitter logos. That’s great, but they were small and in the last tenth of a second of the commercial. Notice all Sears ads now have social media logos? WTF? Do you expect people to touch their television screen and go to your Facebook page?

What Denny’s (and others) should have done was had a clear social media call to action. Yes, we’re doing free breakfasts, but you have to become a fan on Facebook to get it. Or, tack on something extra, like become a fan and get a free cappuccino to go with that free breakfast. As of this writing, the Denny’s Facebook fan page only has 25,000 fans. In my experience with Facebook-based promotions (where Engauge helped take a brand from 900 fans to 100,000+), I’m sure they could’ve multiplied that by a factor of ten or more tonight, easy.

Not sure when these agencies (or brands) will get with the program. As much as Facebook makes me roll my eyes sometimes, I cannot deny it’s become a force to be reckoned with. And it won’t be long before no brand can afford to leave it out of their strategy.

That said, as long as there are agencies bungling through this, firms like Engauge will continue to show them up.

Last July, Bill Gates handed over the reins to Steve Balmer. But while Bill is no longer running operations day to day, his quest for world domination now seems to be immortalized.

In a recent preview for the movie Despicable Me, we found an odd similarity between one of the characters called Vector and Bill in his younger days. In the movie preview, Vector is defending his company from another villain who’s wearing goggles (get it goggles, Google). Well, if you don’t believe me, check out the image below or the link movie preview. Bill, I mean Vector, makes his debut about 40 seconds into this clip.

Happy New Year!

Despicable Me Movie Trailer

Two reports surfaced on Sunday/Monday about the start of the 2009 holiday shopping season:

• Coremetrics data revealed that online shopping was strong: the average online order grew to $170.12 or a rise of more than 35%.
• The National Retail Federation’s BIGresearch revealed that the average spend per person dropped by 8% this year to $343.31.

Here’s what the numbers are really telling you:

First, online shoppers were laser focused on finding bargains online. This shopping season retailers, like Lowe’s, flaunted their Black Friday orders weeks in advance. Additional media outlets, such as CNBC, featured articles that detailed how to get Black Friday bargains in advance of the Friday sales (source). As a savvy shopper, I happily traded getting up at 4 AM to stand in line on Black Friday for a quick online purchase at midnight on Thanksgiving Day.

Second, retailers cut back inventory levels in hopes of avoiding last year’s debacle of deep, post-holiday season discounts. Shoppers were well informed of this plan and apparently came out in droves. So while shoppers may have spent the same as last year, the larger number of shoppers simply drove down the average spend per person.

And finally, a big surprise for Department Stores.

Both Coremetrics and NRF indicated that Department stores were the clear winners (vs. discounters) in terms of traffic/spend. This was surprising because an October 2009 survey by NRF signaled that consumers were worried about the state of the economy and planned to spend less this year. Additionally, the majority of holiday shoppers (70.1%) indicated that they would shop at a discount stores (source). So why did shopper turn up at department store? The answer is likely a combination of factors including:

• Shoppers expected items to be out of stock at discounter due to tight inventory controls retailers.
• Shoppers avoided driving around for bargains due to higher gas prices vs. last year (source).
• Department stores offered better return/exchange policy than discounters.
• Department stores offered better customer service (eg: gift boxes).

Lastly, department stores clearly found a marketing message that resonated with shoppers: they too have bargains!

November’s AiMA event, “Mobile Marketing: How mobile is more than texting, tweeting, and talking,” was the first I’ve been able to attend. The event certainly was more than texting, tweeting, and talking (although there was a lot of texting and tweeting happening in the crowd); panelists encouraged incorporating mobile into marketing plans for 2010 and shared interesting facts regarding the growth of iPhone applications, the mobile web, and more.

The event was moderated by Michael Becker of iLoop Mobile, and there is no better way to describe him than with this tweet from the event:

@JermoH #aima – iLoop’s Michael Becker is like the Britannica of Mobile Marketing.

Becker opened the event by showing a commercial for a Motorola cell phone. From 1983. The advertisement stated that cell phones would completely change the way we communicate. Understatement of the century.

Given that the event was on mobile, it seems appropriate to sum up the key topics via what was tweeted live as each panelist spoke:

Mack McKelvey, VP of Marketing for Millenial Media.

• @briangupton: RT @ATLmobile: Mobile has lowest Cost Per Engaged User per @mellenialmedia #aima
• @JermoH: In Sept, there were 64million mobile users (1/3 size of Internet) #aima

Brian Seti, Division Manager and National Marketing Manager for Yamaha WaterCraft Group:

• @kristengreen: Yamaha no longer spends $ on traditional advertising. They focus on mobile & social and are able to deploy campaigns more efficiently. #AiMA

Derek Von Nostran, Director of Consumer Marketing & Analytics for The Weather Channel Interactive:

• @laurenmullins: Only 20% of iPhone apps downloaded are used the next day. – Derek Von Nostran, TWC #aima
• @JermoH Top phone for Hispanic market = iPhone, top phone for African American market = Razor. #aima

Von Nostran also discussed the popularity of TWC’s iPhone application. It’s the most popular weather application, and one of the top 10 applications (ranked just below Facebook). TWC launched a game as a follow-up, but the application met subpar success because of the target’s inclination to only utilize TWC for weather information.

To read more tweets from this AiMA event, search for #aima on Twitter. The November event was AiMA’s last big event for the year, but there is a web analytics lunch and a holiday party both scheduled for the first week in December.

Twitter as well as other Social platforms is beginning to suffer from the “campaign” marketing approach that often exists in brand marketing.  A recent story from AdAge rightly calls out that so many brands fail to realize the potential of Twitter.  This often holds true with Facebook, My Space and the like as well.  In general, brands plan out their year, it includes a series of campaign pushes, and the agencies that support them are forced to define how “social” should fit into the campaign.  In general, having social as a part of campaign planning that sits within a brand team or an interactive/media team presents an inherent flaw.  Social is all about ONGOING DIALOGUE.  It should be considered a part of the CUSTOMER RELATIONSHIP (CRM) PLATFORM rather than just a communication channel.  As such, when planning for social and twitter, the first step is to consider what role it plays in a brand’s wholistic view of CRM and how the communication channels of email, fan pages, apps, Twitter, etc. all combine to deliver ongoing points of dialogue with the consumer.  THEN, the campaign pushes are simply experiences and offers that can help provide relevant outbound message content.  That said, campaigns often only refresh quarterly at most.  As such, a CRM strategy that includes social needs to have far more frequent dialogue.  This dialogue should be guided by what consumers are sharing and saying…not merely by what the brand wants to tell them.

So … to achieve all of this, it becomes a challenge when the budgets sit within a team that can only make campaign decisions or at most annual decisions.  So, where should the budget and subsequently management of an ongoing social interaction sit?  In the instance of the dialogue being marketing and experience driven, rather than PR driven, perhaps the budget sits with the CRM team.  Or, perhaps we revisit how budgets are set entirely and map out a multi-year budget commitment to social platforms that can ensure the funds are available throughout the year and across years to ensure that the commitment to not “going dark in social” can be achieved.

The article that I’m referencing can be found on AdAge at :

Brands on Twitter: 76% of Accounts Are Infrequent Users – Advertising Age – DigitalNext.