Each year, the Financial Communications Society (FCS) recognizes firms in various categories for excellence in financial services advertising, collateral and (now) digital. You can read the press release announcing this year’s winners HERE.
There are two reasons I wanted to write a quick post on this event:
(1) FCS named two of my faves as Best In Show. The first is American Express, which was named Best In Show – Corporate Image advertising for its Martin Scorcese-Tina Fey “Timeshare” (my label) ad. The post I wrote about this ad is HERE. The second is E*Trade which was selected Best In Show – Consumer Retail for its “Baby” campaign – and you know how much I love this campaign. I first wrote after its premiere at the 2008 SuperBowl, then again this past January when the second round of ads came out (“I wanna punch the economy in the face“). And E*Trade has kept it rolling with two more greats, Singing Baby and Golf.
(2) It’s a walk down memory lane. 2009 is the 15th year FCS has given its Portfolio Awards. 1995 was the very first year – and my team won an award for our ChaseDirect launch campaign. ChaseDirect was the U.S.’ first national direct bank (even before Bank One’s Wingspan, which many remember), and we won that night. It was a business that we all felt passionately about and my team from Chase and Wells Rich Greene were there to celebrate.
Monday May 18th 2009, 7:53 pm
Filed under: Twitter
I just feel like I need to mark the occasion: I got my 500th follower on Twitter today!
That means that 500 people have elected to see everything I tweet on their home page, ever day. Day after day. All the time. Who are these people??
Actually I know who they are, and anyone can see for him/herself at www.twitter.com/stephfierman. It’s an eclectic group of digital, business, marketing, PR, advertising, social media, non-profit and strategy folks… and I thank every one.
And I’m learning more and more about how Twitter works every day, too. If you want someone to follow you, for example, start retweeting their tweets until they notice. They’ll check you out, decide they’re interested in what you have to say and voilà! your favorite ad agency or magazine decides to follow you.
I’ve mentioned him before, but Kent Huffman is doing an incredible job on Twitter, transforming simple but great ideas into an ever-widening community that’s good for him and everyone else. He started with the most popular CMOs on Twitter and has now created a list of the top marketing authors. He gives a shout-out to everyone on these lists, they pick up followers, positive karma comes back to Kent and on it goes. Brilliant.
There are also new automatic tools that are supposed to help you with Twitter arriving every day. Some are helpful, some are not. One that I tested this weekend puts supposedly like-minding people onto your “Followers” list automatically. One of these new follower’s business pages involved the words “live s*x” – I kid you not – so there’s spam and garbage on Twitter just like everywhere else on the Web. But TweetDeck, Seesmic and Tweetie for Mac and iPhone all have fans.
So thank you, Carol Phillips, for being my 500th follower. Carol is a professor at Notre Dame and an expert on millenials marketing. The chance of me “meeting” Carol and hearing her ideas (because now I’m following her) without Twitter? Quite close to zero. So that’s pretty great.
I may get in trouble for this opinion, but… so be it.
This week’s AdAge features an editorial, “InBev abusing agencies with its payment terms,” written by the president of an advertising agency in the Midwest.
InBev is the Belgian company that bought Anheuser-Busch. The brewer is notoriously cheap and frowns on pricey marketing and advertising, both of which had been a highly visible of A-B’s strategy for decades.
The editorial points to numerous cost reductions and policy changes that InBev seems to have implemented after the purchase. The author mentions a couple internal corporate changes, such as the replacement of offices with bullpens and the elimination of first-class travel and baseball tickets. There’s a snarky retort after each mention including, “So what?” and “Hey, times are tough.” So much for this agency executive’s public expression of empathy for (or any effort to protect the privacy of) InBev/A-B employees.
He’s far clearer in his disdain for the company’s treatment of external partners.
“The company has gone one step too far” by announcing that it would now take up to 120 days to pay its bills - a “horrible precedent.” After InBev’s CEO says (in an unrelated WSJ interview) that he’s going to run the company on a tight leash, our author quips “… that’s true of any company, but we all still need to pay our bills.” Oh, snap! He grinds on, quoting a Morningstar analyst as describing the InBev team as “ruthless” “machete-wielding investment bankers.”
Finally, the writer crows that the Belgian government may soon examine the new policy to determine whether it is an abuse of power.* I suppose he throws this in to point out that others (a whole government!) see what he sees.
And here’s where I may get in trouble.
I’ve been an executive for 20 years. I value and am grateful for my relationships with the agencies that have made me look good and helped grow my brands. There are many in the agency business whom I consider friends. But there are some fundamental, DNA-level business principles and tenets that are not negotiable. Discretion is on the top of the list.
If the Belgian government instructs InBev to reverse the policy, great. If I worked at InBev and one of my agencies was hurt by this new policy, I would take up its cause with my superiors and encourage the agency to privately protest and/or resign.
And if that agency went to the press to air private and confidential matters such as billing and payment policies, I’d dismiss them on the spot.
This is such an unholy, obnoxious breach I wouldn’t think twice. An agency executive who takes a business matter to the media cannot be trusted with a private conversation, negotiation or anything else. You do this and you’re done. At least in my backyard.
What purpose did this agency president believe his editorial would serve? Is he an InBev agency or did he simply decide to speak out on behalf of his trade? ‘Doesn’t really matter. Could anyone believe, particularly in this economy, that he could or should pressure a global company by throwing a temper tantrum in public?
I’m tempted to tell him, “Hey, times are tough” (where have we heard that before?), but the policy may in fact be unreasonable. It would be unjust for a small agency to suffer or even go out of business because InBev wants to make money on the float. Not my point; I plead no contest. But an agency leader who takes private business and/or contractual matters out into the public forum should perhaps consider a different line of work because – in the increasingly fragile, trust-based business of advertising – I wouldn’t trust this guy to pull out my chair at dinner.
* Update: the Belgian government has dropped its probe, determining that InBev’s new payment policy does not violate any antitrust regulations.
So yes, this is another post about Twitter. What can I say? It’s the fastest growing, probably weirdest social media phenom thus far, and I’ve been sucked in.
One of today’s interesting tweety tidbits is a quite lengthy email that Rupert Murdoch – sorry, I meant the Deputy Managing Editor at The Wall Street Journal – recently sent to employees outlining “do’s” and “don’ts” for employees on Twitter or otherwise engaged on the “social Web.”
It’s sort of a doozy.
Don’t ”friend” confidential sources, don’t criticize colleagues, and my favorite (verbatim): “Don’t engage in any impolite dialogue with those who may challenge your work — no matter how rude or provocative they may seem.”
Employees may cite (but not push) their own reporting and – well, that seems to be pretty much all they can do. And even that rule, as you can see, comes with a murky qualification.
Some of the restrictions make perfect sense, such as not detailing how an article was edited. Others are ripe for wrongful discharge lawsuits, such as the “don’t” that says you mustn’t recruit family or friends to promote your work.
In most instances, this particular restriction would be nearly impossible to dissect and prove. If I retweet comments from a former colleague who then talks up my work, did I solicit that positive feedback? And, I’m sorry: if my mom claims that I’m just the cleverest person ever ever ever, there’s nothing I can do about it.
So I was thinking that the whole thing seemed very 1984… until I spotted a blog post detailing real tweets that some knuckleheads have posted on Twitter. A sample (with all grammar errors intact):
- “I just got to work (Oracle) and I am doing as little as possible”
- “Huh, with my boss on twitter, maaaybe I should take down that sexy picture of her… but her reaction will be priceless!”
- “hate my job!! i want to tell my bosses how dumb they are and how meaningless this job is, then quit, and be happy!”
- “Workin… This job sucks worse then [sic] the economy!”
The title of this blog post? “TwitterFired: The Top Ten Tweets to Get You Fired.”
Huh. Maybe The Wall Street Journal Twitter police knows what it’s doing.
Kent Huffman, Chief Marketing Officer at BearCom Wireless, a published author and all around smart, nice guy is doing something so smart on Twitter.
He’s publishing and frequently updating a list of the “top” CMOs on Twitter– those with the largest number of followers. So what does this mean?
– It makes Kent a leader in the marketing community on Twitter. It makes his “personal brand” stand out in a positive way among friends and colleagues with shared interests.
– It’s likely that many on the list will retweet the post but, just as importantly, they’ll send it to others outside of Twitter (Hey Mom, look at this list I’m on!). This exposes Kent and his work to an ever-widening, friendly crowd on the Web.
– It connects everyone on the list to one another.
– It gives Kent fresh content to create meaningful tweets over time. Not always easy.
– It drives traffic to not only Kent’s Twitter page, but also his own website, which is where he posts the list.
– Each time he posts an update, everyone on the list has their names, their brands and their Twitter addresses repeated, thus making it likely that they’ll get even more followers, and giving the search engines yet another page to crawl for their name.
– And of course, each new update can potentially bring changes to the list, thus given a new CMO a fresh spotlight and creating renewed interest as everyone checks the list anew.
Kent leveraged his profession – which any of us could have done but didn’t – into its own mini-phenomenon that spreads learning and excitement across the Web, simply by calling attention to a community in which he’s already a member. It’s a marvelous example of social media marketing at its best.
I’m proud to be on Kent’s list (#30 with a bullet!). For those of you on Twitter, take a quick look at the list: you may want to follow someone who is the CMO of a brand you care about. At #1 is Best Buy ’s Barry Judge (with more than 6,800 followers!) and it goes from there.
Man, it’s a tough time to be a media company. What with News Corp.’s operating income dropping 47% (99% in the newspaper business and 97% in the TV division) and both Arianna Huffington and Jeff Bewkes declaring the death of big media, what’s a media mogul - or budding mogul – to do?
One obvious answer IMHO should be an enhanced, more enlightened focus on women, because their behavior is changing and not enough advertisers and media companies appear to be keeping pace. 36% of women claim to be reading fewer magazines and 39% are spending less time reading newspapers. These are consumers – moms, in particular – who control 85% of all household spending and are worth more than $2 trillion in US spend each year. That’s “trillion” with a “t.”
A lot of these women say they’re migrating online. The fastest growing segment on Facebook is women age 40-50 in the home; moms aged 25-35 with at least one child are heavy online shoppers (see chart); and twitter moms showed Motrin who’s boss in November 2008. “Power moms” are also increasingly focused on video, and even upload their own on a variety of topics at sites like NewBaby.com.
SFMOGD came across two ads this week that are real… which just seems sort of impossible!
Ad #1 was brought to our attention by our friend, Jonathan Gilbert, and has some disturbing things to say about the condition of German underwear. Here is a billboard currently posted in Berlin’s shopping district:
That would be Chancellor Angela Merkel on the left posing in front of various undressed members of the German government, with her ”weapons of mass destruction” in full view. The ad is part of an underwear company’s national ad campaign. Modeled after the country’s successful ads promoting ”cash-for-clunkers” exchanges, the ad’s copy offers Germans who trade in their old underpants a €5 credit toward a new pair with the slogan ”The country needs new undies.” No mention of whether the old panties need to be (*gag*) washed before you trade them in.
Ad #2 appears to be a real television commercial for a North Carolina furniture store that takes race relations very seriously. Based on the company’s perfectly normal description of the ad on YouTube, the weird humor and full-on racial context appears to have been lost on The Red House. Luckily, it’s not lost on us:
