Studies have been conducted to identify whether consumers adopt the personalities of brands. In one study, female shoppers were asked to tote either a Victoria’s Secret shopping bag or a shopping bag with no identifying brand label while they shopped in the mall. Afterward, they were asked to evaluate themselves on various personality traits. Those who carried the Victoria’s Secret bag saw themselves as more beautiful, sophisticated, and womanly than their counterparts who carried the plain bag. Additionally, the research uncovered how fluid or fixed consumers believe their personalities are. Victoria’s Secret bag carriers felt that their personalities were static but brands could contribute to positive aspects of themselves. Plain bag carriers felt that that they had more power in changing themselves through their own efforts rather than relying on brands.

Another study revealed that even after participants were told they did not do well on a math exam, carrying a pen with an MIT emblem on it made them feel smarter and more influential than the control group not carrying the pen.

Because brand personalities are becoming more powerful, a deep emotional connection is being formed. People are striving to become more like the brand that they feel best represents who they are aspiring to be. This is very useful for brand marketers to recognize and may make targeting a specific persona worthwhile.

Fast food restaurants have become more and more popular throughout the years, and have consequently impacted the way we behave. Being able to access food quickly has helped us to become more efficient in our daily lives. Being exposed to fast food has also impacted our time expectations for other tasks unrelated to food.

In recent research, people have been found to be more hurried while completing tasks, favor products that helped them save time, and have become more impulsive regarding money.

In one experiment, participants were shown fast food brand logos too briefly to be registered consciously. Then they were asked to perform a reading task. Participants shown the brand logo performed the task faster than the control group. Another experiment examined the relationship between recollecting the last time fast food was eaten and preference for time-saving products. Those who were asked to remember eating fast food were more inclined to report favoring products that save time, such as a shampoo plus conditioner versus a regular shampoo. A last experiment found that individuals who viewed fast food brand symbols chose to receive smaller payments sooner rather than larger payments later.

Well known fast food brand logos are obviously very powerful to be able to subconsciously affect behavior. Their marketing messages trigger a sense of productivity and haste that our society values. By constantly being exposed to fast food advertising and first hand consumption of fast food, the consumer not only needs to be aware of the risks that fast food can have on their health. They also need to acknowledge that there could also be some behavioral side effects as well.

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.

Along with the proliferation of DVR’s comes the drive from marketers to use unusual tactics along with different mediums to spread their messages.  This has resulted in product placement rearing its ugly head all over some of my favorite programming, including 90210.

I was able to laugh off the Dr. Pepper signs in the background.  We’re accustomed to billboards, so it’s not that huge of a shock to my brain to have a logo peeking out from the corner of my eye.  But not this.

Reaching into the cooler for a full 2 second shot of nothing but Dr. Pepper’s.  The main characters lauding the importance of Dr. Pepper when it comes to road trips.  And one character even holding the soda can up (with logo facing forward) while engaging in dialog, striking a classic product-modeling pose.  This may have been okay in the vein of the movie Wayne’s World.  The product placement, which included Pepsi, was treated as a hilarious spoof on product placement.  It was funny and effective.  The Pepsi “Pepsuber” Super Bowl ad featuring members of the SNL cast, although less humorous, achieved that nice over-the-top balance of promoting a product in a cool way, because it didn’t take itself seriously.  (Anyone else noticing a trend emerging?)

But part of the problem with 90210 was that there was no context around the Dr. Pepper placement.  Almost as if the show wasn’t sure if it was making fun of itself for ridiculous placement, or if it was pretending like there was nothing out of the ordinary going on.  So it lost on both fronts – I didn’t laugh, and I didn’t feel a subconscious urge to drink more Dr. Pepper.  In fact, I am irritated that the product so blatantly infringed on my enjoyment of one of my favorite TV shows.  And so was the Live Web via Twitter –

On the flipside, it seems like the digital folks over at Dr. Pepper get it.  Their website is a beautiful piece of artwork.  And I’ll spend time with your brand so long as you let me do something like this.  Just, please, stop hijacking my entertainment.

By Jacqueline Petty

Echo Boomers, Generation Y, Millennials … these are some of the terms used to describe people born between 1979 and 1997. I’m a member of this generation, and learned a lot about my cohorts at Engauge’s Lunch and Learn: Marketing to Millennials.

According to the presentation, the top priority for millennials is to get rich. Our generation was coddled, yet empowered by our parents. We stay on top of the latest trends. Time is of the essence, and we want everything now. Millennials are very skilled at multi-tasking. There isn’t a prime time for us to consume media, but we “snack” or take bits and pieces what we want throughout the day.

After learning these facts, I understand why marketers struggle to effectively target millennials. Here are some tips to help you talk to my generation:

1. Be authentic. Try to keep a pulse on the trends, but never stray from your brand’s core values. If you constantly change your message, we’ll never trust you.

2. Be quick. We don’t have all day to listen to your message. Get to the point already.

3. Be open. If your brand made a huge boo boo, own up to it immediately. Make sure you’re readily available 24-7 to address concerns.

4. Be social. Use social media to learn what people are saying about you. Don’t try to police the conversation. Listen and respond candidly.

5. Be helpful. Tell us why you’re better than the competition, and how you can best help improve our daily life.

6. Be responsible. Millennials like to make a difference. If your brand is a good corporate citizen, you should tell that story as often as possible.

We’ve all seen it. We’ve all seen the awards, the praise, the articles in Media Post, Advertising Age, etc. Heck, it even garnered its own wikipedia page. And Crispin has been riding a high ever since.

Who is this ‘we’ I’m talking about? Hm, well, it’s not my wife, she hasn’t heard of it. It certainly wasn’t my dentist when I asked him. Nor the various family members I asked over the holiday breaks.

I suppose ‘we’ in this sense is agency folk. Well, no worries if only that tiny sliver of people have heard of the campaign. It was HUGELY successful. Major ROI on that campaign. Sold a lot of hamburgers…right?

Just look at this award submission page that Crispin put up. This thing was a HUGE success! Over 450 million hits to the website! More than 7,000,000 broadcast impressions! And the site says, “a significant increase in chicken sales directly linked to the success of the site”. Huh? No gaudy numbers of how much sales increased?

Now, granted, I’m not the first to question the real success of this campaign. But I’m contending that this campaign has actually hurt the progression of social media and viral marketing and it’s taken us almost four years to overcome it since its inception in April of ‘04.

Here’s what happened. Back when this campaign came out, the world wasn’t sure what social marketing, viral video, or any of this ‘emerging channel’ stuff was all about. So this campaign came out and blew everyone away, myself included. The campaign was amazingly creative and honestly, it was cool as hell. A dude in a chicken costume that would do whatever you told him to via a website? Brilliant.

But it was never measured against direct sales. It was measured against hype, which predominantly was us talking to ourselves (the ‘we’ I spoke of earlier).

Our industry has only just now started to understand that the true power of digital marketing is when it intertwines effectively with direct marketing – i.e. it actually drives sales and is measured accordingly. Our own chairman, Stan Rapp, recently moderated a panel at Advertising Week entitled, “What You Need to Know About Direct + Digital = EXPONENTIAL GROWTH“. Why these two areas of marketing have largely worked independently of each other for so long is amazing to me.

So for the past four years, marketers have tried to emulate what the subservient chicken accomplished. Impressions. Check. Industry praise. Check. ‘Viralability’. Check. Sales? Not hardly.

And agencies, always far too focused on keeping up with the other agencies, have been pushing these types of campaigns harder than the TV networks have been pushing reality TV ever since the first Survivor and Real Life’s came out (I mean seriously, have you heard of this new show, “Hole in a Wall“, where people have to…jump through a hole in a wall? Seriously, you know there was a focus group that thought this show was a good idea. I want to sell products to THOSE PEOPLE). And hey, awards and recognition win new accounts, right?

How do we overcome this? Well, I think its starting to happen naturally due to this economy (yes, this economy actually has some positive elements). Because marketers are being forced to measure the direct success of their efforts and defend their budgets, they are working hard to tie direct sales to their campaigns. This is a good thing (for agencies that understand the direct + digital mentality).

So we’re naturally on our way to overcoming this ’subservient effect’.

What else? Well, how about all the award groups make direct sales a major, if not the only, criteria they analyze to determine the winners? And marketers, how about forcing your agencies to give you direct KPI’s that tie to sales (key performance indicators) on all the campaigns they run?

In the end, its not Crispin’s fault that they put a four year hiatus on social marketing’s progress. They just created a really cool, highly praised campaign back in 2004. It’s all of our faults for never asking the real question, “So what did this actually do to sell burgers”?

Well, I am finally writing my first posting as an author of the new Engauge blog.

So many in our industry are full of anxiety in the face of this volatile economy and changing media landscape.  I think it is the most exciting time ever to be in this business.

And so I hope this blog will express my enthusiasm, optimism, and faith in the power of our creativity, strategy and sound execution to grow our client’s brands.

I am certain of our destination.  

The agency that will create transformational ideas that move someone to act.

The agency that will be superior at melding great creativity with accountability.

The agency that can celebrate the different cultures needed to be excellent at brand advertising, direct marketing and digital communications while having excellence in collaborating together.  

In short the agency that clients need in these challenging times.

I hope I can give some valuable perspective on how the forces in the marketplace will influence our journey together. Of course much of the time I will be just passing along some observations in life from family to fun to politics and maybe some good humor.

And I hope I get some comments back. Because, I know I will learn from hearing from all of you.  I already learn from working with you every day.

Until the next time.