Well, my Tappening idols – Mark DiMassimo and Eric Yaverbaum – are back with a new campaign that got a big write-up in The New York Times yesterday. Boo-yah!
As you may know, Tappening is a grass-roots effort DiMassimo and Yaverbaum started together as a laboratory for a social world marketing experiment focused on the negatives associated with bottled water (which – outside of convenience - turns out to be pretty much everythingabout bottled water). I first interviewed them nearly two years ago about the initiative and covered their first ad campaign back in March of this year. To date, Tappening has sold about $5 million worth of re-usable BPA-free plastic and stainless steel bottles, much of which is plowed back into the effort.
The team’s second campaign turns up the heat. “Lying in Advertising” includes several treatments featuring such claims as “Bottled water causes blindness in puppies” and “Bottled water is the primary cause of Restless Leg Syndrome.” If you cannot see the posters below, click HERE and check out the bottom of the page.
The new campaign has a dedicated website at www.startalie.com from which you can easily ”spread” your lie about bottled water via email, Digg, Twitter and Facebook (a nice touch). My first contribution was “Ben Bernanke says that bottled water caused the global recession.”
Ah, the sweet satisfaction of being able to vent. You know the feeling: you have an awful customer service experience and vow to tell every man, woman and child all about it until the day you keel over.
And so you do.
But how many people is that – 5, 6, maybe 10? And how quickly did you stop telling anyone about it – a week?
Brands often still behave as if they live in that world when – in reality – that world is gone forever. The “social media” phenomenon has seen to that. And I preach this as often as possible, even making presentations on the topics of online reputation management, the implications of new sites and technologies for marketers and how companies need to adjust to survive.
But we all know that this doesn’t happen. Three of my all-time favorite this-reputation-disaster-could-have-been-avoided stories are Jeff Jarvis’ Dell Hell, the recording of Vincent Ferrari trying for 15+ minutes to cancel his AOL account and KFC/Taco Bell doing nothing for hours and hours while local NY news crews shot video through the front window of a closed store while rats scurried here there and everywhere, thereby turning a gross story into a global event (not a good day for Yum Brands…).
Today, I share my latest fave: Sons of Maxwell creating an absolutely masterful video and song, “United Breaks Guitars,” about an awful experience it had with United Airlines.
It seems that the band, Sons of Maxwell, were on the tarmac in Chicago when some fellow United Airline passengers looked out the window and saw one of the bandmember’s $3,500 guitars being thrown by United baggage handlers. The guitar was severely damaged and unplayable. United did not deny responsibility, but tortured the band for nine months until finally refusing to compensate the guitar’s owner, Dave Carroll, for the loss.
Mr. Carroll subsequently vowed to “write and produce three songs about my experience with United Airlines and make videos for each to be viewed online by anyone in the world.” HERE IS THE FIRST of the three:
The video was viewed 150,000 times in its first 48 hours and several comments on the page are from those who say that the band’s experience has negatively impacted their opinion of United Airlines. One person remarks that, based on the video, he shifted a group’s travel plans to another airline, thereby costing United about $10,000.
Now I’ve worked in plenty of places, and know that sometimes individual employees can be dimwits (the video dramatizes the apparent reaction three in-flight airline employees had when first alerted to the problem). I also know that it’s a fact of life that a company can’t resolve every customer service complaint to a person’s satisfaction: some companies even calculate the likelihood and cost of getting sued, based on past experience, and consciously do not address costly errors. History dictates that it’s more cost effective to take the risk of a lawsuit. But this… is not that.
The guitar cost $3,500. United Airlines does not deny responsibility. By the time Carroll is finished, I predict well north of 1 million views of his videos: videos that will last forever and be ”rediscovered” from time to time.
We’ll see. United says it has contacted Carroll, but first reports say that the airline likes the song (gee, thanks) but has not yet offered remuneration.
In the meantime, the band sold 40 albums on its website in 24 hours after releasing the video. It usually sells one per day.
Which entities would have a really tough time attracting positive attention right now? AIG, yes. GM, no question. Bernie Madoff, no doubt.
Added to the list are two little words that have to got to shake any agency to its core: Mexican tourism.
Yes vacationers, remember Mexico? That was the place to which thousands of you were headed before the swine flu outbreak… and the resulting fears have weighed heavily on Mexico’s economy.
The United Nations World Tourism Organization says the country boasts one of the largest tourism businesses in the world, welcoming more than 20 million tourists a year. It’s the only country in Latin America on the list of top 25 most popular vacation destinations, and tourism is the third largest contributor to the economy. 70% of all visitors come from the United States.
But that was before the cooties came.
President Calderon plans to spend $92 million on new advertising and promotion to bring tourists back. With t-shirts boasting “I went to Mexico and all I got was the swine flu” in circulation, he understandably feels he’s got to do something.
There’s no real point to this post. I think I just wanted to express a certain kinship and sympathy for a brand that feels it must include a medical update, the phrase “keep the people safe” and a quote from the dean of the Harvard School of Public Health in its new television ad.
Oh, well now I’m definitely in the mood for a Cancun vacation! Que es muy terrible.
I have no idea if they’ll sell even one tampon, but P&G’s Tampax is the stealth sponsor of a series of viral videos that tell the story of a 16-year-old boy who wakes up with – uh – “girl parts.” And at least from an art point of view… they’re good. Click HERE if you do not see the ad below.
Leo Burnett created the campaign at Zack16.com. Its big link to the brand thus far is when our hero, Zack, gets his first period in French class and sneaks into the girl’s bathroom looking for a Tampax vending machine.
P&G calls it “a learning lab out on the net” that’s “not very heavily branded at all.” Hmm. And so far the videos aren’t a huge hit, with about 10,000 views in the past week on YouTube and elsewhere.
I really wanted to dislike this campaign and - if I were a P&G stockholder - I probably would. I also wonder if the best way to pitch tampons to young women is with stories about young men baking brownies, but what do I know? I hope it sells something.
In the meantime, I’m enjoying the work of a good copywriter and have started following Zack on Twitter at @ZackJohnson16. He appears to be trying to figure out how to manage menstruating while at soccer camp.
Note: the “hovers like a UFO” comment is from the Day 3 video. Really – these are pretty humorous.
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.
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.
There have been several articles recently pointing to the rise in both offline and online coupon use. While consumers 65+ are more likely to use newspaper coupons and younger individuals prefer online coupons, there’s no real news here given that these stats will change over time as newspapers become less available and older consumers become more and more comfortable on the Web.
In the meantime, don’t leave home – or buy online – without it!
I’ve become accustomed to checking online for coupons and promotion codes prior to making either a store or Web purchase. There is an art to this and, once you get the hang of it, you’ll become savvier about what sites are likely to bear fruit and which will not.
There are four general categories of sites I’d recommend you consider:
1. Aggregators – these are sites whose sole purpose in life is to offer coupons and “promo codes” from many retailers, typically across multiple industries. Some examples would include:
4. Forums - some activities tend to make people want to vent (like having to take your shoes off at the airport…), and folks on these sites love to let others in on a deal:
If you’re set on a particular brand, it only takes a second to check out that company’s own site, too. KFC, for example, has a pre-set button on its home page pointing visitors to printable coupons. I’m actually surprised that more brands don’t take advantage of this simple way to build a solid customer database. If a consumer is a fan, he will part with valuable demo and psychographic information in exchange for a steady stream of deals delivered by email.
And as a final tip: consider opening a brand new email account exclusively for your interactions with coupon and promotional sites. You’ll be able to see all your coupon- and deal-related email in one place without clogging your own email inbox.
So start looking for coupons online and, pretty soon, you too will understand the nirvana of “stackable codes…”
Poor Dominos.
In a nutshell, two employees posted a “prank” video on YouTube that shows them at work spitting and sneezing on food, putting cheese up their noses and then onto pizzas, passing gas on meat then – ouhhhh – putting said meat on the food…
As the beauty says to the gross Ben Stiller character when he asks her out (in that great philosophical movie, Dodgeball),I think I threw up in my mouth. Just a little.
I coach corporate clients on how to manage their reputations and build brands online. I show companies how to proactively create meaningful online interactions with prospects and customers. I use case studies to demonstrate the usefulness of one social community vs. another. I present lessons that apply to all businesses, and some that are industry-specific. And I do train companies how to assess and react to negative content on the Web. Be proactive and, when you must, here’s how to react to problematic online content.
And then there are things that you just can’t plan for. We’ve seen vanity urls (walocaust.com, ihatestarbucks.com) and online stunts created by disgruntled employees and angry investors. We’ve seen rats scurrying along the floor inside a fast food restaurant. These kinds of events are now so frequent that they can and should be part of a company’s online crisis strategy. [NOTE: You have one of those, right?]
But two employees, with no ax to grind, demonstrating phenomenally bad judgment? All a company can do in advance is reinforce its own employee policies with respect to unacceptable behavior and… make sure the Internet is covered. I’m sure that disparaging the company to this extreme is already grounds for dismissal, and these two MENSA members have been fired. And arrested and charged with a felony.
Unfortunately, Dominos is taking a real hit. But the company has come out swinging online - play fire with fire – and I give them enormous credit for that. Take a look at Dominos’ own YouTube response (click HERE if you do not see the video below):
If I were advising the company, I’d suggest a 5-point action plan over the next 90 days. What they’ll actually do? We’ll have to wait and see.
In the meantime, if you order a pizza and think you see boogers… I’M KIDDING!
I just want to say how relieved I am to discover that I am NOT the only one who is totally digging the song in State Farm‘s TV commercials.
I’m serious: I’ve been pondering a blog post about this for awhile, but assumed that I was just an ad nerd, grooving to some random tune in a car insurance ad. That State Farm had come up with this insurance jingle… and you would mock me.
I really should have more confidence in myself. Not only is it not a jingle… it’s a remake of the The Sound of Musicsong, “Sixteen Going On Seventeen,” by Modern Music. And it’s all over the web, like HERE and HERE and HERE.
Perhaps the strangest cover of a song ever – but brilliant just the same (and not a Von Trapp in sight).
While I’d prefer to come up with these on my own, I’m afraid that I would be the one who’s hard of hearing if I didn’t pick a recent Pepsi ad for G2 (low-calorie Gatorade) as the tone-deaf ad of the week.
You can see what Pepsi was trying to do almost immediately, but BLAM: this thing has really come back around and smacked them in the head. This means Pepsi now have something in common with AIG – but I’ll get to that later.
The spot switches back and forth between NBA player Kevin Barnett and a normal, suburban-looking guy – also named Kevin – swimming like crazy. The voiceover also switches back and forth and herein lies the problem. In trying to write a standard “athletic striving” ad, they get seriously tangled in a lot of language that many are considering cruel and insulting to people who have lost their jobs and are otherwise suffering because of the economic crisis. See for yourself (if you can’t see the ad already, click HERE)
When I first heard about this controversy, I really, really wanted to support Pepsi. Then I saw the ad, and that became impossible.
The lines hurtle between insensitivity and cruelty:
Garnett: “I’ve never been handed a pink slip and “I’ve never had to tell me wife ‘We can’t make the mortgage.’” (Kevin “The Big Ticket” Garnett has a $24.75 million NBA contract)
Normal Kevin: “I’ve never had to fill the holes in my sneakers with cardboard.”
That last one IMHO is the most offensive of all. Normal Kevin appears to be taking us past unemployment and foreclosure straight on to visions of being homeless in the park.
The tragedy here is this was completely unnecessary. The financial services companies got into trouble for how they handled their (financial services) business! Gatorade just runs right into a buzz saw for no reason at all.
And so, let me wrap up a Friday by coming back to how Pepsi is now an AIG comrade. Both companies have fundamentally failed to grasp how people are feeling today… how many people are suffering. 1.3 million children in the United States were homeless at some point in one year – and that was before the recession started. I would assume that many of those children have had to use cardboard to plug the holes in their shoes.
If you think I am overdramatizing, I would respectfully suggest that you could make a mistake not dissimilar to the ones made by Pepsi and the banks, either while on the job or at a cocktail party. This is vast, vast pain.
I am counseling clients today to look hard at the need to advertise. If you are running ads, make sure they are seen and tested with a much broader swath of consumers and experts – ones who may not be in your target audience.
Is all this fair? NO ONE CARES. We are all in the business to sell, of course, but think long-term. If you’re not 100% secure in next week’s flight, cancel it. Because getting this wrong could negatively affect your brand’s reputation for years, if not a lifetime.
P&G’s Charmin brand has found a fun sponsorship opportunity with SitorSquat.com.
A woman in New York, Danika Landers, started the site as a blog in 2007, and it uses Google Maps to help you find the nearest public bathrooms anywhere you may find yourself in need of one. It purports to be the largest (only?) “toilet database and locating service” in the world. It is essentially a wiki that is easily accessible via mobile devices including the iPhone and Blackberry. Both the site and the downloadable apps are free to use.
Danika describes the impetus for creating the site as a personal realization that “that the act of relieving oneself is somewhat an artform” that becomes suddenly complicated “when our personal space is not our personal space.” Anyone traveling with an infant or parent – or on any highway road trip in America – can attest to the veracity of such a conclusion.
Danika has a little extra fun with the site by allowing users to submit a rating for the public restrooms in question; a rating of a 2.5 or over will be characterized as a “sit,” while a toilet with a lower rating will be a “squat.” As such a rating might change with every use (ick!), I would suggest that a user make his or her own judgment in the moment: this is truly a case where past performance may not indicate future results. P&G jumped on the opportunity to sponsor the site and its sensibility as a great fit with the brand’s overall efforts to support grassroots activities that make the bathroom experience a positive one. The company has set up mobile bathrooms at events like state fairs in the past, has had Charmin Restrooms in NYC’s Times Square for three years running (see dramatic video here!) and – my favorite – toured the U.S. from 2003 to 2005 with a bathroom mobile nicknamed ”Potty Palooza.”
“Our goal is to connect Charmin with innovative conversations and solutions as a brand that understands the importance of bringing the best bathroom experience to consumers, even when they’re away from home,” says Jacques Hagopian, brand manager for Charmin.
This blog has commented on companies sponsoring public bathrooms before – remember Visa’s sponsorship of porta-potties at a music festival last year? While consumers may always appreciate this benefit, SitorSquat.com is likely to get bigger results for Charmin* based on brand fit and is the only site of its kind with which the brand has associated itself. 1,600 users have downloaded the mobile app thus far and the site has over 500,000 UVs since launch. Nice find!
* Lysol just announced that it’s taking over the women’s restrooms at 9 NASCAR races this year. This also sounds like a decent brand fit, obviously. Assuming Charmin’s sponsorship wasn’t too expensive, though, the remote/mobile aspect of SitorSquat makes it a winner as it puts the Charmin brand in the home and on the phone of thousands of users every day.
Yesterday’s Wall Street Journal had an article about the knowledge management and CRM strategies that are filtering into the U.S. airline industry. Huzzah!
While I’m sure many airlines are experimenting, this particular piece features Alaska Airlines, where Steve Jarvis, the company’s head of sales and customer experience (and a man intensely focused on delighting high-value customers), talks about what they’re doing and learning along the way. Wordlessly delivering a frequent flyer’s favorite drink (in coach) “is not about the cocktail. The point is the recognition and thanks for your business.”
As a frequent flyer desperate just to be treated like a human being when I get to the airport, Steve Jarvis is my hero for recognizing that it’s good to be nice to people you need and actually doing something about it.
This will not be easy. The foundation of my entire career is customer segmentation and CRM. I know – in technicolor – how gigantic the technological and personal demands can be inside a company determined to change.
For starters, identifying even what customers do today – at every touchpoint – requires considerable data alignment. As with banks, airlines tend to have (a) outdated systems, that (b) don’t talk to one another. So whether a customer buys a ticket online (and when and for how much) is likely to be invisible to a gate agent. A phone representative most definitely does not know about the luggage problems you’ve had 2x this year already, and a customer service rep at the airport has no idea whether an email notification re. a cancelled flight was delivered to you or not. If this information exists, it typically sits in silos that either must be refitted or, sometimes, blown up entirely.
Second, the modeling capabilities needed to capture and place a quantifiable value on behavior – evolving usually into some kind of score that informs the type of service a customer receives – is imprecise at best and far more sophisticated in industries that have been at this for decades, like banks and credit card companies. The European airlines have a jump on us, though, and that’s good news for the learning curve.
Third, the really-really stripped down implication of all this work is that the value assigned to a customer will change the marketers’ human behavior. This is very hard – far beyond basic training and comp changes. In a crowded airport, you finally reach the counter, already yelling, and the agent is supposed to capture your name, “read” your score and follow the instruction that would be appropriate for a customer with that score. Good luck. It’s doable, but must be implemented with patience and empathy.
So if this is the direction in which the airlines realize they must head… fantastic! There are a lot of weazened but wise customer experience/CRM/segmentation veterans out here whom I’m sure would want to help. I, for one, will continue to watch for hints of progress, both on the plane and off.
As a promotional tactic, BOGO (Buy One, Get One Free) has been around for decades. Now Coca-Cola has put a fresh spin on the concept.
Coke is offering a free bottle of Vault (its own Mountain Dew competitor) when you buy a bottle of Mountain Dew – a program it’s calling the “Vault Taste Challenge.” That’s right kids, Coke is giving you its product for free when you buy the competition.
Based on the sites I’ve scanned, no one seems to remember any other marketer trying this; it’s really fascinating if you think about it.
Why doesn’t Coke just offer coupons to get its product free? A couple reasons: (1) The gimmick is getting a lot of mostly-positive attention in the marketing world - when was the last time an average free coupon landed on the of AdAge? and (2) Maybe Coke actually thinks that a one-on-one taste test will show customers that Vault tastes better. Mountain Dew has an 80% share of the citrus segment and Vault has 4% so Coke doesn’t have a lot to lose.
I feel I must report that some are griping that the program will be super-expensive, and that “a few million people” who might not have otherwise bought a Mountain Dew will now do so in order to get a free Vault. Not likely. Given the recession and the particular preference for citrus soda that a shopper either does or does not already have, I don’t think that helping the competition (with its 80% share) is a real concern for Coca-Cola in this instance. No, in this case, Coke can only win with the press and the public. And you gotta give the company points for guts.
So, rock on – promotional innovation is not dead! I hope that some sort of results are released; it’d be interesting to see if Vault does the Dew (get it?).
I am often surprised at the shallow definition some have of marketing or its true meaning…. but I would not expect this from a top business school and marketing association.
According to a new article published by eMarketer, Fuqua and the AMA fielded a survey last month among 581 marketing executives “to find out how top marketing officers around the country are dealing with adverse economic conditions.” Here’s a deck that Duke created to present the research findings.
I have not seen the survey to see the exact wording of the questions but the article says that price dominated when the CMOs were asked about customers’ top priorities in the next year. Here’s a graphic of how their answers shook out:
I would respectfully propose that this is a serious problem of garbage in, garbage out. Concepts such as “innovation” and “trusting relationship” – particularly the latter – address the very essence of a brand. No one is going to say they love Apple because of their “relationship” with the company. Price and quality can be seen and touched: trust and value cannot be.
That does not mean that the latter concepts are less important – they are in fact, what drive the notion of “value” (which, after all, is only a product’s competitive blend of price and quality) over a long period of time.
But on their own, ideas such as these are not palpable to the average buyer. My ”relationship” with a brand is like oxygen: I can’t see it, but I know when it’s there and when it’s not.
And I’m not even going to get into how truly problematic it is to force-rank “brand” as a consumer priority on a list that also features “price” and “quality” during a recession. Big-time apples and oranges.
I realize that I’ve taken up a semi-habit of posting something goofy on Fridays… and there is definitely something goofy about McDonald’s new Filet-O-Fish ad.
Have you seen it? If not – and you don’t see a video box in this post - click HERE. There’s just something mesmerizing about it - hypnotic almost, as the fish turns and sings “Gimme back that Filet-O-Fish, gimme that Fish!” in a weird voice. And a lot of people seem to agree with me, given that the ad’s been viewed on YouTube more than 300,000 in less than two weeks! DJs are remixing the song in clubs, and fans are using it as a ringtone.
Most marketers will appreciate the business reasoning: the ad developed from the challenge of producing a spot that could be used in both English and Spanish, minus the idiosyncrasies in dialogue that have plagued many an advertiser in the past. Singing fish turns, dub in any voice and dialogue you wish, and it’s spot-on everywhere.
It’s been nearly 18 months since I interviewed the marketing and communications brains behind the highly successful tap water effort, Tappening. Man, time flies when people are out saving the planet!
I also covered Tappening’s first ad campaign right HERE, which took iconic imagery and – without being too heavy-handed – delivered a hard message about the global impact of bottled water.
Mark Dimassimo and Eric Yaverbaum created Tappening as a fun and meaningful consumer movement to sensitize everyone to the financial and societal costs of bottled water and to “make tap water cool again.” Since then, the effort has gone so public, and reached so many fans, that not only are average people making fan videos on YouTube but the effort was recently the cover story of Brilliant Resultsmagazine. To see a pdf of the cover and the full story, click HERE.
Keep up with Tappening: it’s not only a model for how to create a messaging phenom from nothing – drinking tap water is a quick and easy step you can take to help preserve our world and save money.
Skittles’ foray into the social media universe had the marketing blogosphere and Twitterverse on overdrive week.
On Tuesday, Mars replaced the candy’s “normal” website with a live feed from Twitter.com of tweets that mentioned Skittles. If you click HERE, you’ll get a current snapshot of what that site might have looked like several days ago when this experiment first began, but things have calmed down dramatically since then. When I took a look at the feed on that first day, there were tweets full of curse words, comments such as “I found a finger in my bag of Skittles,” “Skittles are made from dead animals,” “Skittles gives you cancer and kills babies,” “Eating Skittles will kill your parents” and so on.
In other words, the idea that anything in a tweet would instantly appear at skittles.com brought adults out of the woodwork to see just how outrageous and inappropriate they could be before Skittles changed strategy. Alas, all these tweets did appear on the site, and it was child’s play (pardon the pun) to get around the site’s age verification tool in order to see every word.
That’s just dumb – and dangerous. If one 8-year old had done something awful as a result of viewing some sort of silly fake directive as to what to do with Skittles… Mars would have had an enormous and entirely self-provoked communications disaster on its hands.
So while many marketers labeled Skittles’ experiment as bold and exciting, I stand with a minority who is not with the “lemmings” on this one. The site started as a confusing mish-mash of wildly unacceptable language attached to a candy, and has since evolved into the most boring site in the category.
Social media is not an end in itself. No tactic ever is. Advertising’s goal is to create goodwill and sales among a product’s target market. Will this effort do that? No. And did the stunt bring non-buyers out in droves? You bet.
While Mars (or its ad agency) may certainly win some wacky 2009 social media award when all is said and done, look for the company to announce that this “successful experiment” has come to an end, and that it is returning to a more standard interactive (and managed) site. It couldn’t happen soon enough. Skittles Skittles_Twitter
It is a good thing that bank and investment advertising no longer touts high-higher-highest (!) returns, Morningstar stars, 40-something couples retiring to their house(s) in paradise, and the like. Outside of just a few stalwarts, such as Vanguard with its measured point of view and Bogle-esque approach, many of the siren calls in the newspaper, on television and online had all begun to (or already did) sound and look the same. That’s not effective.
Now we appear to have swung all the way to the other extreme. Take a look at a list of advertisers, all crammed into today’sWall Street Journal, along with text pulled verbatim from their ads:
MORGAN STANLEY: “To find the smart investments today, you need to be world wise.” MERRILL LYNCH (aka Bank of America): “Seeing clearly. Acting confidently.” “With personal insight into your goals and an understanding of the market…” “…Find a smart place for your money.” CME GROUP: “Rise Above the Risk.” “For more than a century CME Group has provided competitive, transparent and safe markets.” “…protect customers and ensure financial integrity by guaranteeing the performance of every transaction on our exchange.” TD AMERITRADE: “There’s never been a better time for a second opinion.” FIDELITY: “Guaranteed income you can live with.” GLENMEDE: “There’s no substitute for safety and stability.” PNC: “…It’s also a way of doing business that has strength and stability at its very core.”
Safe, smart, transparent and guaranteed: these are the adjectives financial firms are now scrambling to use, as they adjust to our new reality The problem is – well, it’s the same problem as before – if you sound like everyone else, the messages essentially melt into one and stakeholders become unable to distinguish one from the other. If I held a focus group tonight, and scrambled the names of the above firms and the quoted text, I would challenge anyone to re-match the elements correctly.
I’ll also say this: killing your ads’ effectiveness may, in fact, be the most benign result. Worse? Just as when every firm claimed great returns – which turned out to be untrue and, in some cases, unscrupulous – everyone claiming safety now looks equally unlikely and untrustworthy.
All of these brands are more and are capable of doing more: the “more” being the hard work needed to determine exactly what it is about the brand that is unique and distinguishable from the competition.*
Without doing this work, going out with a “safety” message isn’t safe at all.
* I am aware that many of the above firms are in different businesses and are not competitors per se. It does not matter, because it does not matter to the public. For individual investors (and Congress…), too much of the same becomes one, amorphous perception. Morgan_Stanley Ameritrade PNC Fiduciary_Trust_International Glenmede_Investment Fidelity CME_Group
The enormous matters of CEO and corporate trust and transparency - or the lack thereof – are everywhere these days. The need for CEOs to be open and honest… to communicate with all of their stakeholders about what’s happening and what they’re doing to ensure their companies survive the recession. Weber Shandwick, a very large PR agency that’s won many accolades, has taken a position at the front of the line on this topic.
Weber Shandwick has a practice called ReputationRx, and its site offers numerous press releases and papers, including “Seven Out of 10 Global Executives Fear For Their Corporate Reputations As Online Risks Grow” and ”Company Leaders Not Communicating To Employees On Financial Crisis.” The agency’s CEO, Harris Diamond, penned an Op-Ed for The Washington Times in October titled, “A crisis of confidence, The lost art of communication.” Etc. etc. The place takes reputation and open communication seriously.
So I had to laugh at the inadvertent comedic timing of a just-received business school event newsletter [verbatim] :
THE C.E.O. SERIES: MANAGING AND COMMUNICATING IN ECONOMIC CRISIS
Tuesday, 3/31/09 at 12:00pm
Harris Diamond, C.E.O. of Weber Shandwick Worldwide, will share his thoughts on communicating to stakeholders when your company is going through a rough patch. THIS EVENT HAS BEEN CANCELLED!
After offering a trustmeister wince of sympathy (these things happen) all I can say is…
As a fun way to head into the weekend, I thought I’d write a quick post on a TV commercial that I’ve been enjoying lately.
The ad is for Sprint Nextel and it’s called “What if delivery people ran the world?” Here it is:
The reasons I like this ad (and some rules of thumb I apply, in general) are:
1. Product features are clearly represented
2. The benefit(s) of those features are presented in a thoughtful way
3. The ad is told as a story that isn’t so outlandish that it steals attention away from the product. Callahan’s unfortunate adventure is a solid underpinning for the product itself – not the other way around.
4. It’s a positive ad. Some products make it difficult to tell a happy story, but Sprint made a conscious choice. Instead of, say, showing parents using their walkies while searching for their missing child, Sprint’s tale makes the viewer smile. That’s not always possible and I’m no goodie-two-shoes but it’s nice to see a ”happy” message once in awhile. I might also propose (with no research to back it up whatsoever) that positive ads may get more than their fair share of mind right now, given the economic environment.
My only demerit would be that I think the voiceover swallows the name of the particular product (“Direct Connect“) while the card is up at the end.
While I’m at it, here is my favorite ad from 2008 that observes the 4 principles above. Enjoy.
In the meantime, I’m enjoying the work of a good copywriter and have started following Zack on Twitter at 
Tappening 
Mark_Dimassimo 
Ericho_PR 
Eric_Yaverbaum 
tap_water 
Dimassimo_Goldstein 
Skittles 
Skittles_Twitter 
Morgan_Stanley 
Ameritrade 
PNC 
Fiduciary_Trust_International 
Glenmede_Investment 
Fidelity 
CME_Group 
Weber_Shandwick 
Columbia_Business_School 
