So I figured there might be more than a few things in the new Sex and the City movie that would make me sad and sentimental for the show.  I was right.  I mean, it is not a good movie for movies’ sake but – if you watched the show – you cannot not see the film, and the girls in all their glory.

I thought long and hard about seeing the film its opening weekend, being that I’d have to see it in Florida to do so.  It’d be over 90 degrees outside and I’d be looking at my hometown and the dirty streets and the subways and, no doubt, snow at some point, and my skin wouldn’t be leathery like a few of the ladies around me and what would that feel like?

Overall, I’d have to say it felt fine.  I live in New York, my mind and my heart are in New York, and a pitstop to the inside of an oven wasn’t going to change that. 

But if there was any question at all, it vanished when Carrie Bradshaw has to get a new cell phone.  And a new cell phone in New York is likely to mean… 347!  34*!?*&7!  “347?  “But I’m a 917 girl!” says Carrie.

And in that moment, I was home and knew exactly what she meant.

Perhaps you’ve heard that Rachael Ray was responsible for 9-11, or that her recipes are actually written in code, hidden messages of love to terrorists everywhere.   Or maybe she should just fire her stylist.

Last week, Dunkin’ Donuts made a silly story even sillier by pulling a Web ad showing Rachael Ray wearing a scarf and hawking iced coffee.  This, after a Fox News commentator observed that the scarf Ray is wearing looks like a kiffiyeh, a traditional Middle Eastern headdress ”popularized by Yasser Arafat and a regular adornment of Muslim terrorists appearing in beheading and hostage-taking videos.”

The story began on the Web, when blogger Pam Geller posted an item titled “Rachel [sic] Ray: Dunkin’ Donuts Jihad Tool.”  Once it hit the mainstream airwaves, Gershom Gorenberg of The Huffington Post wondered to himself whether he’d missed the fact that “The Onion ha[d] bought out ABC’s news division.”  The story is that bizarre.

I always knew in my heart that paisley was dangerous, but the real danger is that Dunkin’ Donuts caved.

Yesterday’s Wall Street Journal including an article on Gap, Inc.’s plan to create a shopping cart that stretches across its Old Navy, Banana Republic, Gap and Piperlime websites.  Fill one cart, pay one shipping fee.  In a sense, “it’s all one big website now,” says Toby Lenk, President of Gap Inc. Direct.  The company believes this integration will help drive sales.

I don’t know about that. 



I suppose I’m aware that Gap owns Banana Republic and Old Navy in a strictly business kind of way, but – as a shopper –  I have not stopped to consider how much money I’m spending across the entire Gap, Inc. organization, or wondered why I’m not getting Gap store coupons by mail for being such a good customer of Banana Republic.  I think I will now.

This is a strategy that is not without considerable risk.  Once you create links between brands in a consumer’s mind, you cannot pick and choose when those connections apply and when they do not.  You potentially compound product quality, customer service, discounting, merchandising and credit issues that were once resting comfortably in their little silos.  Now you’re training me to look at them all at once.

At the most basic level, once I open a box with Gap and Old Navy merchandise in it and find that something doesn’t fit, your entire corporation better be prepared for me to go online to whatever site or call whatever customer service phone number is closest at that moment.  And I will most certainly expect preferential treatment – particularly deals and discounts – across all your brands if I am a heavy customer of (even just) one.

I think they’ve opened a Pandora’s Box with this.  If the company made this move thinking the effects would be contained to streamlining online check-out and saving customers a few bucks in UPS charges, I think they may get a very prickly surprise. 

This is a very, very interesting exercise that nearly all multi-brand companies should watch closely.

A new study indicates that love for a brand has greater impact on sales than do awareness and purchase consideration.

“Mind-set Metrics and Marketing Mix Models: Never the Twain Shall Meet?” is based on data from a panel of 12,000 households that tracked their purchases and the prices paid, 500 stores that tracked distribution and promotional activities and a survey of another 13,000 homes that asked questions about awareness, attitudes and purchase intent. The study focused on the sales performance of 61 cereal, shampoo, water and fruit juice brands in France over a seven-year period.

I certainly think that this is interesting – and a nice confirmation of what companies like Nike, Apple and even Mimobot already know – but I have questions about the validity of the conclusions.

This is because brand love equates to a desire and favoritism that is conscientiously built over a lifetime for many products. A Coke drinker who cannot stand Pepsi has developed these feelings over many, many years of ad exposure, promotions and personal experience: any one point in time – even a seven year one – cannot take this factor into account and is therefore, in my opinion, not too much more than an confirmation that people like brands more than others.

The fact that product preference may, in fact, be built over a lifetime also explains the researchers’ observation that distribution may be a bigger driver of choice than advertising. It’s not that this is necessarily the case, but that – at any giving point – it may be more important for an already-well-loved product to be readily available than to have $1 more worth of promotional exposure.

To do this study properly, then, the researchers would have to start with brands that had all been in the test market for the same number of years, with the same spend levels in the same media, and that started with the same approximate level of “brand love.” Otherwise, the results would be inconclusive.

Nine little digits: 457-55-5462.

When Todd Davis put his own Social Security number in his company’s print, online and tv ads, marketers thought he was either brilliant or crazy.

Crazily brilliant? Brilliantly crazy? Hmmm.

Todd’s company is Lifelock which, for about $10 a month, provides consumers with “a proven solution” that prevents its customers from becoming identity theft victims. So Todd’s advertising strategy was the penultimate “Eat your own dog food” tactic.

Today, Lifelock has over 1 million customers and Goldman Sachs recently led an investment round that scored the company $25 million. But when you wave a steak in front of a dog…

Turns out that Todd has been “hacked” more than a few times (out of more than 80 attempts, he says) and one guy in Texas succeeded in getting a $500 payday loan in Todd’s name using his SSN. Several class-action suits have now been filed, and multiple states are coming after the company, as well.

There are many, many instances where product demonstration is a great way to prove that something does what it says it’s going to do. Vacuum cleaners. Water filters. iPhones. Take a look at this one for Scott paper towels. “Uhhhh-mazing!”

The distinction, however, is that these are products whose excellence, or “proof of concept,” is solely in the manufacturers’ hands. Assuming the product does work, the only way a consumer could invalidate it is to use the product in an unintended way: a small girl trying to vacuum up her baby brother, for example.

But LifeLock is nearly the reverse. Lifelock cannot prove it works – only its customers can. That’s why Davis did what he did: become a customer. But when core functionality is somewhat subjective, can be disproven given enough tries and becomes something of a dare in the marketplace, tempting fate is likely to get you taken for a ride.

This week was hopefully the first of many CMO Club summits.

The CMO Club is a labor of love created by a friend, Pete Krainik. I met Pete when he was working for yet another friend, Kevin Ryan, as Doubleclick’s CMO. Three years ago, Pete had a vision for an organization that would be strictly “by CMOs, for CMOs.” A club that would be a professionally gratifying and rich experience for a group of people sharing the same trials and tribulations. Nothing pulls people together, for example, like an average life span of 23 months…

The CMO Club has become all of this and more. The dinners all over the country are well-attended, the conversation is both deep and entertaining, and I think that many of us have made friends with whom we’re willing to share, listen and learn.

At the end of the second day, the Club’s advisory board met, and I was so proud to be one of three folks (along with Jarvis Cromwell and Alex Romanovich) who have been pondering, pacing and pulling for Pete since the very beginning.

There’s another summit planned in Napa this November. Pete is off and running.

Can anything be made “cool?” It seems like a worthwhile exercise for a marketer to brainstorm about how her product or service could be tranformed into an “It” item.

While at Time Warner, I got DC Comics involved in a Time Warner Research Council exercise that permitted several businesses to share one subscription to The Cassandra Report (see a sample here). The Report is published 3 times a year by The Intelligence Group as an deep dive into the lives of 14-34 year olds. I would recommend it highly. In addition to lengthy, well researched and documented observations and recommendations, each package comes with a set of product samples: products referred to in the report as being “of the moment” with people in the target age range.

One of these products was a Mimobot. A Mimobot is a USB drive “dressed” as various characters: animals, people… characters from Star Wars or Happy Tree Friends. They are so unbelievably cute, it’s not a surprise to me that the manufacturer, Mimoco, sells a 1G Mimobot for $40, while standard 1G competitors can be found for $10 or less.

Mimoco also transformed a boring commodity product into a hip one by creating a fun and involving viral community online, complete with video, design-your-own, widgets, contents and the like. The dang things are addictive! And fashion sells.

I spent most of my childhood trying to get out of going to Sunday school. One of my companions in this weekly endeavor was Davey and his dog, Goliath, of the show of the same name.

“Davey and Goliath” first aired in 1960. It was produced by Clokey Productions, Inc., creators of Gumby, for the United Lutheran Church of America (ULCA). Dick Sutcliffe, a former newspaper reporter working in Manhattan for the ULCA, was the person who got the idea to use stop-motion animation to teach gentle lessons about G-d and being a good person.
Davey and his best friend, Jonathan, was one of the first interracial friendships appearing on television. The show has been translated into 40 languages and broadcast on every continent except Antarctica.
And, come on: who could resist a talking dog that only its owner could hear?

Dick Sutcliffe died at the age of 90 on May 11, 2008.

In yet another tribute to “retromarketing,” PBS is reviving The Electric Company, a ’70s skit show that was all the rage when I was a kid.

TEC was way cool, as I recall. PBS broadcast 780 episodes from 1971 to 1977. The show continued on in reruns until 1985 and, to date, DVD boxes sets have been tremendously popular. Even iTunes has already gotten in on the action that introduced Morgan Freeman and Rita Moreno (“Hey you guyyyys!”) to the elementary school set.

Exactly what can bring a dead media brand to life is the subject of an article in The New York Times Magazine. Familiarity, positive associations and loyalty that transcends a currently available physical product (or, in TEC’s case, a show) are certainly key measures. In a crowded marketplace, though, I would imagine that a creator’s confidence that it can not only revive loyalty to the existing format but create revenue streams that may not have been available the first go-’round. Since the Internet, video on-demand and the overall home entertainment business were not widely accepted consumer propositions in the 70’s, I’d say that PBS has a good shot.

P.S. Could “Come on and zoom, zoom, zoom, zooma zoom!” be far behind?

La Cense Beef (which I’ve never heard of – maybe that’s the point) has arrived in Manhattan with a campaign that does a great job teaching consumers about good beef without being dull or preachy.

With the help of its agency, Olive, the company reinterpreted classic pop culture references and plastered them on posters all over the city. My favorite: “Say hello to my little grass-fed friend.” 175 entries have been posted to the company’s website, http://www.winagrassfedcow.com/, so far.

Here are my entries – all from movies. How many of the films can you name?

1. “I’ll never let anyone put me in a grass-fed cage!”

2. “Don’t f* with me fellas. This ain’t my first time at the grass-fed rodeo.”

3. “Badges? We ain’t got no grass-fed badges. We don’t need no grass-fed badges! I don’t have to show you any stinkin’ grass-fed badges!”

4. “There’s a very wicked ‘55 grass-fed Chevy lookin’ for you.”

Depressed by the garish lighting, bottles and boxes in his drugstore’s aspirin aisle, Richard Fine envisioned a kinder, gentler packaging for headache medication. The result is the very interesting company/design experiment, Help Remedies, and its addictive website helpineedhelp.com.

The company currently manufactures two (real) products – help I’ve cut myself and help I have a headache. It does so using ethically produced packaging, a commitment to contribute 5% of profits to charity and a point of view that there must be an alternative to the “fear mongering” of the healthcare industry, even if it’s just their little statement.

Go entertain yourself by creating your own “help I’m t-shirt” or by playing with the interactive features associated with such common maladies as:
help I’m evil
help I’m dumb
help I’m bored

and one that’s happened to everyone:
help I am in Munich and need to use the restroom but I don’t know how to say restroom in German (I mean, duh)

This company is sort of an entire mini branded renaissance world in one tiny package: physical product, packaging, website, clothing, pr, green living, gallery exhibits and music booths…

help I wish I’d thought of that

By the title of this post, I am attempting to emphasize the basic importance of not insulting the exact customers (or influencers) you need: hence my “Why, this isn’t Rule #1 – it’s practically Rule #0!” thinking.

The subject of my shock-and-awe today is Cadillac’s “Cup Holders” ad staring Monica Bellucci. If you haven’t seen the commercial, Monica appears to be driving a Cadillac, all sly looks and mellifluous tones… playing a part that could only be described as… I don’t know – cheap woman for sale? She explains that research has found that the most important thing that women want more of in cars is cup holders. Then she gives the camera a come-hither look and posits that perhaps these researchers need to start spending time with “a different kind of woman.” At that point, I am expecting her to hold up a card offering various sexual favors in exchange for a Cadillac purchase. Here’s the commercial:



What I don’t get is why GM felt the need to insult – by implication – all of the obviously dull, pathetic, robotic suburban soccer moms who want cup holders. It’s just so dumb. Women control 83% of all consumer spending in the US and, even more directly relevant to Cadillac, the Luxury Institute reports that automobile purchases are controlled by women in 40% of wealthy households.

In the same campaign, Cadillac manages to poke fun and allow Kate Walsh to enjoy herself without insulting anyone else.

The Berllucci ad really rankles.

Nick Arrojo. This is a well-known name to the (mostly) women who watch “What Not To Wear” on TLC. Nick comes on before the makeup but after the clothes, usually to somewhat indelicately tell women that their hairstyles, uh, stink. And the accent! “Yaw heh eez lye-flesss…”

It turns out that Nick is quite the businessman, as well. An interview in last week’s WSJ reveals a man hyper-focused on delivering a quality product and decent value to the end consumer.

He’s created a “hair miles” loyalty program: a very smart move in a business where, as with brokerages, customers often feel loyalty to the individual with whom they work – not to “the house.”

He also uses and promotes a P&G line of haircare products at shows and in his studio, and takes great care to protect the relationship despite the fact that he is launching his own line.

A guy who finds ways to protect and grow his own brand by innovating ways to keep fickle customers longer and keeping corporate partners happy definitely has his eye on the long ball.
”Nick Arrojo”””What Not To Wear””

Well, hallelujah. Giving my fixation on online reputation management (see series’ part 1, part 2, part 3 and part 4…) , I was delighted to read that consumers do appear to reward companies for ethical practices.

In a somewhat unscientific study undertaken by the Wall Street Journal, consumers were shown identical products but some were told that the product was “ethically produced” while others were told the opposite. In all of the tests, folks were willing to pay a premium if they believed that a product was created in an more ethical fashion. The consumers’ personal pre-test beliefs were important, as well, for a subject starting out with her own high ethical expectations rewarded an “ethical product” more than a person who did not share the same concerns.

The products used in the test were coffee and t-shirts: products that are fairly relevant to everyone. Interestingly, the WSJ chose to end the piece with the “lesson” that a company should segment its market and focus on being (or just appearing to be?) ethical among those prospects who actually care. I guess the implication is that a company should not bother among those that do not.

So much for “corporate responsibility” (or impartial research). Rupert – are you listening?

Last week’s Crain’s New York (5.5.08) had a small piece listing the top 10 summer vacation spots as chosen by New York business execs. This list supposedly comes from Chief Executive Air, a 7 year old private jet company.

I was expecting the old (but darn good!) suspects like London, Paris, Rome… I dunno, maybe Hawaii. My guesses would have been confirmed by other surveys – but not so with Crain’s.

Here’s their list in alphabetical order: Berlin, Black Rock Desert, Chicago, The French Riviera, Hvar, Ibiza, Montreal, Mykonos, Provincetown and Reykjavik.

Black Rock Desert? Reykjavik? Hvar?? Raise your hand if you know where Hvar is. The answer is Croatia.

Now, this is marketing for something, but I’m not sure what! It’s certainly a kooky list.

Last week’s Crain’s New York (5.5.08) had a small piece listing the top 10 summer vacation spots as chosen by New York business execs.  This list supposedly comes from Chief Executive Air, a 7 year old private jet company.

I was expecting the old (but darn good!) suspects like London, Paris, Rome… I dunno, maybe Hawaii.  My guesses would have been confirmed by other surveys - but not so with Crain’s. 

Here’s their list in alphabetical order:  Berlin, Black Rock Desert, Chicago, The French Riviera, Hvar, Ibiza, Montreal, Mykonos, Provincetown and Reykjavik.

Black Rock Desert?  Reykjavik?  Hvar??  Raise your hand if you know where Hvar is.  The answer is Croatia.

Now, this is marketing for something, but I’m not sure what!  It’s certainly a kooky list.

New York City now requires restaurant chains with at least 15 outlets nationwide (including my beloved McDonald’s) to display calorie counts on menu boards, menus or food tags.   This means that you will find this depressing information in about 2,000 locations all over the city.

Will this new law have the effect that the city’s health department desires?  I don’t think so.

Granted, it is heart-stoppingly appalling to discover that my favorite sandwich at Cosi has 801 calories and 34g of fat.  And that blueberry scone at Starbucks boasts 400 calories and 18g of fat.   The problem is… do YOU know what your target calories are each day and, if you do, how about the maximum grams of fat for a person of your size, weight and sex?  I probably gotcha on that one.  You could find out… most of us just don’t care.

And so it will go for those of us who are educated enough to (already) know that Big Macs are hazardous to our health.  We know, and could afford to eat more healthily:  we’re just too lazy to do so.  For us, the new signage will soon become yet another piece of the scenery to which we pay little attention. 

And for those low-income families for whom obesity is a terrible problem, (a) less of them are likely to have the information the rest of us do, and (b) what are they supposed to do about it?  A 2007 study revealed that a low-income family would have to devote between 43% and 70% of its food budget to fruits and vegetables in order to meet federal dietary guidelines.  And healthy, low-cost foods, in general, tend to be less available to the poor.

This action by the city health administration is a band-aid that will do little if anything for those who could use the most education and assistance.  The city would have been better off taking the cash these companies are spending to change their signs and putting it into the school lunch program or some other initiative that delivered a direct benefit to the community.

childhood obesityfast food caloriesobesity

So it turns out that spam just turned 30.  30 years of junk!

Widely considered to be the father of spam, Gary Thuerk sent the first spam to 600 people on May 3, 1978 to promote DEC (now HP) events.   The message was sent over the network of government and academic computers that made up the Internet at that time.  For the major nerds among us, here’s the original message. 

[As an aside, the very fact that I can show you an email from 1978 (a famous one, but still!) is why I am such a promoter of active online reputation management for individuals and for corporations.]

There’s not much to say about spam, other than it’s a ginormous industry.  80% of the emails delivered to AOL is spam:  that’s 2.5 billion messages per day.  I personally receive numerous “comments” on this blog from folks marketing Valium, Viagra, Tamoxifen and various other drugs, but I resist posting them…  Pundits estimate $8-$10 billion in lost productivity each year because of these frequent, fantastical messages.

I thought it an interesting juxtaposition of events to discover that the World Wide Web has only just turned 15(ish).  It seems like such a perfect “who will survive” statement about our digital lives:  before and probably after the Internet as we know it existed, there is spam, the cockroach of the Web.

 For your bloggy amusement… another Adland from one of our favorite cartoonists, David Jones.

Does anyone believe that big, bad Annie Leibovitz forced/tricked/cajoled/hypnotized Miley Cyrus into posing seemingly without a shirt on?  I hope not.

There are two possibilities here, in my opinion:

(1) This was a considered effort on the part of the Cyrus family to begin marketing Miley – have someone even be able to envision Miley – as an adult performer.  If this is the case, it was probably more trouble than it was worth, based on the fact that Miley is frequently seen looking, uh, older.  Additionally, one must wonder about the judgments made on the set, as I think this photo with her dad is a lot creepier than the one causing all the brouhaha. 

Like any product, the handlers of child stars eventually begin to struggle to keep their product relevant and current – no one wants to be a child star has-been (or worse), or let the gravy train grind to a halt. Unfortunately, things don’t always go your way. 

(2) Some experienced media observers think that it just sort of happened.  That there’s no dramatic story here at all.  You’re getting your photo taken by the Annie Liebowitz!  She’s an artiste!  If she says do a one-handed cartwheel (or look like I’m half-naked) I’m gonna do it!  Then you go home, sober up and suddenly Disney’s holding on Line 2.

Either way, it seems that marketers forget the lessons of the past.  What does America love more than anything else?  Contrition.  An apology.  And sometimes, these are actually quite sincere (think Tylenol) and the “product” is embraced even more intensely than before.  This is not only a “teachable” moment that Miley could deliver on a silver platter to parents, but she can come out and make a big deal out of this being a mistake.

The problem is not Vanity Fair – it’s that anything Miley might do or say regarding this one photo shoot looks hollow in the face of her own, voluntary behavior.  The Cyrus family and Disney have a tremendous franchise here.  But no one, really, has figured out how to turn child stars into automatons that don’t do what all their friends do:  that is, act stupid for a while and then grow up.
DisneyDisney ChannelVanity FairMiley CyrusBilly Ray Cyrus