Archive for April, 2010

Please Vote Pringles Can Hands for a Webby!

Tuesday, April 27th, 2010

For years I’ve been a big fan of the Webby Awards—mainly because they are not just another advertising industry occasion, but rather an annual attempt to reward what is truly the “best of the Web.” This year we are thrilled that our banner ad for Pringles—”Can Hands” (above)—is a finalist in the Webby Awards, and you can help by voting for it in the People’s Choice category!

If you love the ad and/or just want to do a favor for this grateful blogger, please take five minutes to register at the People’s Choice Webby center, and vote for Pringles in the “Banner Singles” category. The competition is tough in this little category—as we’re going head to head with banners from Apple (TBWA) and Burger King (Crispin Porter). Right now we’re leading with 31% of votes, compared to 29% each for these two. Net, it’s going to come down to the wire and your vote will be meaningful! Voting ends Thursday, April 29, so please vote now.

Thanks for your support—and please share with your friends!

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Posted in Agency Marketing, Awards, Contests | 1 Comment »

Gives and Takes from #AdtechSF

Thursday, April 22nd, 2010

Yesterday I returned from the first Ad:Tech event of the year in San Francisco. As usual, it was a great opportunity to reconnect with friends in the industry and pick up a few new nuggets of what’s new in digital marketing. I also had the chance to give back some knowledge to the event participants during a session that I joined Tuesday afternoon. Here in this post I will share what I shared, as well as some of the highlights from the Tuesday sessions.

A New World of Word of Mouth: Using Influence to Re-invent the Impression

This was the session that I had a chance to present in, along with three other brilliant digital marketers: Tim Schigel, CEO of ShareThis, Jim Price, President of Empower MediaMarketing, and Joel Lunenfeld, CEO of Moxie Interactive.

I moderated the session and kicked things off with a marketer’s perspective on what’s new in digital marketing—and I promptly shocked (shocked!) the crowd by declaring that marketers have lost their perspective on what makes digital marketing great. I launched into the slides above, in which I attempted to make the point that if we dumb down digital marketing to being measured by the same, basic “impression” that traditional media has used forever we will kill the innovation that makes new media great. I love starting with a provocative note and I think the audience reacted very well according to the smiles, nods, and Twitter feedback I saw during my short segment.

Following me, Tim shared some excellent research on how people share content, and why we need to remember the right “word” in word of mouth. Jim shared a case study on how his firm used a killer new media model developed by ShareThis in which the Mederma scar creme was able to target advertisements to people who had shared relevant content with others. And Joel wrapped things up with a story about how marketers need to move toward looking at creating digital content that mirrors the video game industry—starting with the joystick that is the mobile phone. I will share their decks here when they are available.

Jamie Cohen Szulc—CMO of the Levi’s Brand

Jamie kicked off the Tuesday session with a keynote speech about how his brand has hit the recent button in recent months to become more meaningful to consumers’ lives. While only six months into his job, Jamie is pushing a revolution through this legendary brand that has fallen off the tracks in recent years. I could barely keep up with the gems that rolled off his tongue, but some of the quotes and insights he shared included:

  • “Marketers want more, global control at a time when the market is fragmenting more than ever.”
  • “The Internet taps into core human values.”
  • Levi’s has to become “original, real, and relevant to ME.”
  • The brief for the new campaign was simple: “Make people fall in love with Levi’s again.”
  • Although the new marketing work started with a TV commercial “to signify a new approach,” the brand is taking it to much more digital and meaningful work from here on out.
  • “We must move from Marketing ROI to creating Business Models.”
  • “Change must start from within—you’ve got to change the organizational culture first.”
  • Change is great and needed, but “you can’t disrupt a market in a day… it’s a long-term investment.”
But the highlight of his talk was a case study of how Levi’s created a T-shirt brand from scratch in South Africa. I can’t summarize it any better than the video below:

Overall, it was great to see a big brand CMO take the stage and talk openly and honestly about a meaningful marketing transformation in progress.

Chris Anderson Talks About the iPad

This was another treat—to see the Wired magazine leader and author of books such as The Long Tail and FREE give us his take on Apple’s latest game changer. While I think I would pay to see Chris talk about anything, it was particularly interesting to hear him share his thoughts on how he looks at the iPad from a magazine’s perspective.

Carrying a silver iPad onto the stage (I kept worrying that he would drop it), Chris started off by claiming, yes, this is the next big computing platform after the PC and mobile phone. He claimed that despite misses on tablet computing in the past, the time was ripe today because of three things:

  • The success of the iPhone showed the power of a rich media application platform.
  • The success of the Kindle showed how a flexible, convenient media and distribution channel brings a better experience.
  • The rise of cloud computing means tablets need a less powerful chip, less bloatware, and less hard drive space—which frees up companies such as Apple to build a lovely device.

Chris tied together magazine insider insights with topics that he explored in his books. His main point was that he was excited that the iPad will offer a much better experience for Wired readers. He and his team have been working on the platform for a while already, and they promise to launch a magazine that will combine the best of print and digital. Chris talked about how the killer platform of the iPad might allow for scarcity again, and create a better business model. His point is that “scarcity power” for print magazines was based on the cost-of-entry barriers of printing and distributing physical magazines. But the free information of the Internet is destroying these entry barriers, making scarcity a thing of the past, and killing the magazines’ business model.

He thinks that it will take high-end designers to make the most of the iPad’s platform—meaning that Joe Blogger won’t be able to offer a free experience that matches what Wired is working on. So quality of the experience could be a barrier to entry and driver of scarcity that leads to new profits. While I’m doubtful that this will happen, it would be a “good” kind of scarcity that is based on reader enjoyment rather than means of production.

Chris lost me completely, however, when he delved into the case for how advertising could be revolutionized on the iPad. He talked about how it could allow for engagement, move beyond measuring CPM, and be more creative. But everything he said is already possible today with Web-based marketing. A relative handful of people using iPads will not cause a revolution. Rather, organizations have to take the first step to embrace these features and possibilities that already exist on the Web. He also was in awe that people would now have to page through full-page ads again with the new iPad magazine experience. This, to me, is a step backward in the consumer experience. It just seemed like a lot of wishful thinking for a business that just cannot survive without the mass marketing model.

So thanks to my friends at Ad:Tech (especially Brad Berens) for inviting me to speak at and learn from this great conference once again. I hope to see you in the next events in Chicago or New York!

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Posted in Applications, Conferences, Uncategorized | 1 Comment »

Promoted Tweets Might Unlock Marketer Engagement

Tuesday, April 20th, 2010

So the biggest non-surprise of the social-media business occurred last week when Twitter finally introduced its advertising model, Promoted Tweets. We all knew that the company had to show some significant revenue model in 2010, and we all knew that it would work to “monetize its traffic” by, we guessed it, placing advertising in front of people’s searches and tweet stream. Now it’s time to address the unanswered question that our clients are already asking us: “Should I jump into Promoted Tweets?” My simple answer, “Yes, and…”

Promoted Tweets basically applies the Google AdWords model to Twitter. Brands buy keywords based on what Twitter users are saying and searching for in hopes of getting a positive brand impression, click to website, or retweet of the ad to friends and followers. A very basic example is the one above: Search for “Red Bull” (full disclosure: a Bridge Worldwide client) and the first result is a Promoted Tweet that the brand created. Twitter is slowly and cautiously rolling out the service—starting with a handful of A-list brands such as Starbucks and Best Buy, and only using it on search pages. But the company promises to add this to the regular stream of tweets users receive, both on Twitter.com and the many third-party applications that use the Twitter API.

So what is a marketer to do? Especially one that is still not sure what to do on Twitter to begin with? This is the question that kept me up all Friday night as I pondered this blog post and a Digital Alert that we will send to our clients next week. There is a simple answer and a complex answer.

The simple answer is that marketers should definitely experiment with Promoted Tweets. Once it opens up to more than the first handful of brands, Promoted Tweets will likely be very easy to set up by anyone on the brand team. Like Google or Facebook, a very small amount of money can be used to start testing results. (I’m talking about even a few hundred dollars.) For brands that are already buying Google or Facebook ads this is an opportunity to divert a tiny amount of that existing budget to send traffic to the same places and gauge click-through rates and cost-per-click among these three options. Easy enough, right?

But the complexity comes when a brand manager opens a Promoted Tweets account—as this simple step can open up a can worms. First, you have to start thinking about people who like your ads and want to follow your Twitter feed. Uh, oh—you don’t have a Twitter feed. And if you start one, who is going to monitor it? After all, people expect brands on Twitter to be there for them and truly interact. This is what makes Twitter a “social media” after all. So when they complain about your service or rave about your new product, what do you do? Suddenly your work got a lot harder, legal wants to review your tweets, and your customer service and PR people are coming to your desk. Maybe it’s not worth the effort after all…

Don’t panic.

The lesson here is that it is time for your brand to start playing with Twitter and engaging with consumers through this new but high-growth service. The real first step is to create a Twitter account on your own and spend a few minutes per day playing with the service. Then read Advertising Age or Brandweek and see how a handful of marketers are using the service in new ways. By personally diving into the space you will quickly have the smarts to deal with the right approach to engaging with consumers as well as your organizational hurdles.

You will discover as a new Twitter user and already-smart marketer that the interruptive advertising model represented by Promoted Tweets is interesting, but by far the least meaningful to your consumers. Promoted Tweets will work best if you are already “out there” with added value. Red Bull, for example, bought its brand name on Twitter so that it can highlight its killer content and existing high-quality Twitter account.

But there are many more meaningful ways to use Twitter to create marketing that people choose to engage with, and advertising that adds value to people’s lives. For example, here at Bridge Worldwide, we recently gave Healthy Choice coupon downloaders the chance to share a product review on Twitter. Subway is giving people a chance to win gift cards by tweeting about their favorite celebrity. Dell sold more than $6.5 million in product through its Dell Outlet Twitter feed. And Southwest Airlines uses its Twitter account to live and breathe the fun that its equity represents. The possibilities can vary widely based on your business goals, customer insight, and the creativity of your team. And although you will have to put in some work to understand this new medium and get your organization comfortable with it, Twitter is an incredibly cheap and potentially powerful tool.

Just as Twitter is evolving as a company by experimenting with an ad model, your company should be evolving its marketing by experimenting with Twitter.

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Posted in Social Networking, innovation | No Comments »

Burning Question Contest: You Could Win a Trip to Cannes

Thursday, April 15th, 2010

A few weeks ago I announced that Jim Stengel and I will be taking our message to the annual Cannes Lions International Advertising Festival in June. We believe that there is no better place to start a revolution in marketing than this annual gathering of some of the biggest and best marketers and advertising agencies in the world. Our goal is to uncover a “Burning Question” that, when asked, helps elevate our work to unheard of higher levels. And for a few weeks now we’ve been gathering suggestions from people about what this Burning Question should be. After all, this is an issue that touches more than the relative handful of folks who get to fly to the South of France. Today, we are taking this open source involvement to the next level as we announce a contest that will send two individuals to join us at our seminar on Friday, June 25.

We want to bring two people who are just as passionate about changing marketing as we are—but who might not have the resources to get there on their own. We are looking for people who have had success in making change at their organizations, and have taken steps to share their lessons with the broader marketing world. We invite people who work at big or small companies, people who have shared lessons on blogs or classrooms, and people who have worked in marketing for one year or a lifetime.

Our team has put together a short application process for people to make their case. Jim and I will select winners based on the quality of their submissions. The only major limit on entries is that we are only able to take folks from the United States and Canada. I was bummed that we had to limit to this group, but contests are a legal nightmare, and we would have had to adapt rules to each nation’s laws (a cost much larger than sending people).

The prize is pretty damn cool—a chance to fly out to Cannes, participate in the event, meet passionate marketers from around the world, and help spark a revolution. Of course we will ask winners to be active participants in driving the buzz before the event and sharing the experience on the ground from Cannes—mainly through blogging and Twitter.

So if you are a meaningful marketer who wants to change the world in Cannes this summer, fill out an application and start driving support from your friends and followers. I look forward to seeing your responses—and to seeing two entrants in Cannes with us in June!

(Official rules here)

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Posted in cannes | No Comments »

Pringles Tests Spontaneous Facebook Fun

Tuesday, April 13th, 2010

I’ve read far too many articles and white papers about how brands should approach social media. Most make the topic more complicated than necessary—most likely in order to suggest that they have some secret sauce that is available at a convenient hourly rate. But complexity makes marketers even more frightened of jumping into the social pool. So here’s a simple suggestion: Listen and add value. Thanks to digital technology, it is extremely simple and low cost for your business to do both. As an example, let me share our work on the Pringles brand that just hit the social scene last week.

For well more than a year now Pringles has been very active in social media. We chose to embrace this as a focus of our digital marketing work because the brand fits within the world of entertainment and social sharing. The brand itself aims to create moments of unexpected fun. One of our first steps was to pull together many brand and consumer-generated Facebook groups. Within a few weeks Pringles became one of the top five brand Facebook accounts with more than 3 million fans around the world. In the months since, we have used the space mainly to share how others are playing with the brand. For example, highlighting fan-created videos such as this one.

We also used the Facebook page to share our “Can Hands” banner ad last summer. The ad that you can’t stop clicking became a minor sensation on sites where people share what’s cool (rarely advertising)—such as Reddit, CollegeHumor, BuzzFeed, and Fark. Over one weekend we had 300,000 people play with the banner on our staging server. Many completed all 95 clicks to get to the end.

But as much as we like to seed the engagement ourselves, a lot of Pringles social sharing comes from consumers’ passion and initiative. For example, in January someone created a Facebook page titled: “Dear Pringles, I cannot fit my hand inside your tube of deliciousness.” The group apparently arose as a humorous “protest” to the size of the can, and some people’s inability to reach down for the last few crisps. We watched as membership grew to 10,000 fans within the first week, and then to 100,000 fans over the first month. When the group reached 1,000,000, we knew we had to do something.

But what to do? Well, the most obvious solution when people are having fun with your brand in the social sphere is to join in on the fun—even if it means poking fun at yourself in the process. Our team worked with our global client to answer the buzz with something that could be quick, cheap, and meaningful. It’s important to call out why I chose these words:

  • Global: Pringles is a global brand and Facebook is a global platform, so we had to be broad.
  • Quick: The passion around this Facebook page might dwindle over time, so we wanted to act before it faded.
  • Cheap: You never know whether an idea will catch fire or not; in fact, the odds are against it. So better to try something that works on a small budget. Further, when you spend a little to test an idea it means you have to have fewer conversations about various approvals and ROI measures.
  • Meaningful: Again, the key is to add value to the community. People love to see a brand get involved, as long as its participation adds to the fun versus sucking it out.

Our agency and client team worked on ideas together and ended up choosing to use video to “respond” to people who are having trouble getting their hands into our cans. We developed ideas and shot video in an extremely short time period, and just uploaded them to YouTube and our Facebook page last week. You can see one of the directions we took in the video above—a tongue-in-cheek exercise video for people to work on their can/hand skills. At the end of the day, the Pringles can is engineered to protect the crisps and maximize value for consumers. A shorter can would mean fewer crisps, and a wider can would result in more broken pieces. So we’re not changing the can, but we can have fun with it—even building in the solution to consumers’ frustrations: “Tip & Enjoy.”

Another miniseries takes the form of a taunting voice from the bottom of the can. Check out one of these videos below:

It’s far too early to call this a success. We just launched it last week and will be doing a few things to seed it in the weeks ahead. Whether this becomes the next great social-media case study or not, we have entered the conversation in a meaningful way and will definitely learn lessons that will make us more successful as we continue our venture into social media. No matter what white papers you read or how many social-media experts you hire, there is nothing more valuable than getting firsthand experience with your fans.

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Posted in Entertainment, Social Networking | No Comments »

Cause Marketing at the Speed of Need: #IABSM

Thursday, April 8th, 2010

On Monday I had the chance to speak at the IAB’s annual social-media event in New York City. I led a panel that included Adam Fell, VP of Quincy Jones Productions, and Jory Des Jardins, Co-founder and President of BlogHer. The topic of the session was “Social Media, World Events and the New Face of Cause Marketing.” It was a chance to explore some new territory in cause marketing and Marketing with Meaning, and I hope to continue the conversation with you in the weeks and months to come.

Our session came from a discussion I had a few months ago with Lisa Milgram, who runs programming for the IAB. She had taken notice of the number of brands that had jumped in with investments of money, time, and supplies after the earthquake in Haiti, and called me to talk about whether this was a topic we could explore further at the IAB social-media event. After some thinking and discussion, we fleshed out what I think is a fairly new concept in cause marketing, itself a concept that only really began in the 1970s and 1980s. We realized that while most cause-marketing efforts are begun with careful consideration and long-term planning by brands, events such as Haiti were compelling brands to move internal mountains and respond at the “speed of need.” Thus a conference panel topic was born.

My role in the session was to introduce the concept of cause-related marketing, show how it is an example of Marketing with Meaning, and then explore the growing number of brands that are evolving their approach to become much more instinctual and speedy in their cause responses. I spoke about two examples over the past few years: (1) the Tide brand’s response to Hurricane Katrina; and (2) the Haagen-Dazs response to honeybee disease. Both efforts brought meaningful attention and dollars to worthy causes in quick time. And both efforts built the business: Tide achieved its highest copy scores in history for its promotion of Tide Loads of Hope, and Haagen-Dazs saw sales grow 16% through its honeybee campaign and promotional flavor. The slides above show what I covered, and this article in Tuesday’s SmartBrief on Social Media captures the session nicely.

I was happy to turn things over to my fellow panelists after this short thought-starter. Adam Fell came first to tell the story of how he helped pull together many musicians in rapid time for the “We Are the World 25 for Haiti” song. He started by showing the audience camera footage from his trip to the battered country—proving that when marketers actually directly experience the cause they are involved in, much better work results. Adam spoke about how social media amplified the need—and even helped spread the word back to Haiti that millions of people around the world were praying for and contributing to their recovery.

Adam also shared an interesting story about the Visa brand’s participation in the event. Visa had planned for some time to be a sponsor of the 25th anniversary of “We Are the World” when it was planned to be in support of Africa. But when Haiti hit and Quincy Jones and others chose to throw their support behind aid for this country, the Visa brand team was thrown a bit off. But the brand team eventually agreed that the need here was great, and adjusted to stay onboard this effort.

After hearing from Adam I turned things over to Jory Des Jardins to give us some perspective of bloggers—who are marketing savvy, yet anchored in the real consumer world. She talked about how bloggers also reacted quickly to Haiti and gave both money and attention to the issue. But she had a few warnings for the audience as well: First, she reported that bloggers—who I believe are the vanguard of changing consumer opinion—are growing wary of cause-marketing efforts that seem too small or self-serving. Second, she suggested that cause-marketing efforts often need some influencers (such as bloggers) to start the word of mouth behind a new initiative. In other words, just putting up a Facebook page and waiting for traffic won’t cut it.

My only regret about the session was that we didn’t have much time for questions and discussion about this rising trend of “speed of need” cause marketing. I am personally unsure about whether most brands have the core purpose and speedy systems to allow them to give when the gut-level need arises. I would also like to explore more about our consumers’ perspective, and whether “promoting” that your brand has given can actually backfire—after all, who among us tells all of our friends how much we gave to causes in our lives…

What do you think?

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Posted in Achievement, Cause Related, Uncategorized | 3 Comments »

Bounty Experiments in Brand Experience

Thursday, April 1st, 2010

bounty mess outside

On Tuesday I shared the story of my visit to the American Girl Store during a Spring Break trip with my daughters to Chicago. It is one of the longest-running and most-successful examples of meaningful-marketing experiences. While I was in the area, my girls and I also had a chance to check out one of the newest examples of a brand experience—the Bounty Make-a-Messterpiece. This new concept aims to give kids a place to learn, play, and create—without worrying about messing up the house. And while it’s too soon to say that these will be sweeping the nation, it’s a brilliant way for a brand to test out its purpose and to learn by doing.

(Full disclosure: Bounty is a client of ours and I am definitely biased in my reporting here, so please take this more as a personal example than a deep analysis.)

Located in one of those new kinds of outdoor malls in the northwest suburbs of Chicago, the Make-a-Messterpiece concept offers a place for parents (I was the only dad there, even during their Spring Break) to bring kids for an hour or two. Upon walking in you notice a large, open, and friendly space with several sections of specific activities. Parents pay $10 for their children to enter and get access to some of the basic art centers, and there is an additional $5 cost for a special-project area. This seemed like a smart pricing idea, as it provides options for multiple budgets and time availabilities, and gives kids a chance to choose.

I let each of my daughters choose an activity for both of them to do. First, they did “The Drum Roll”—which is essentially a special room with piped-in music where they banged on drums filled with paint. No art was created, but they had a blast. Next they painted pictures in the open workspace in the center of the room. Finally they finished with a project in which they made bird feeders using old Bounty paper towel rolls, honey (for glue), and birdseed. I was happy that the instructor for this project taught them a few facts about birds along the way.

My kids had a great time. They came away with paintings, bird feeders, and some nice memories of the experience. It was something they said they would like to go to again some time. (We’ll need one to open in Cincinnati, though.) From a parent’s perspective, I liked the chance to disconnect from the real world with them for an hour, and I felt much better about bringing them to this option rather than something like Chuck E. Cheese’s. The staff was all young, smiling, helpful, and smart—basically like a group of the world’s best babysitters.

As a marketer, I liked the Bounty Make-a-Messterpiece for a few reasons. Overall, it is a way for the brand to truly bring its Brand Purpose to life. Bounty’s purpose of a brand is to encourage families to “go for it”—to have fun, tackle projects, and basically enjoy life together without worrying about the messes and spills that freak us parents out far too much. What I love about this is that as a parent it completely resonates with what I have come to discover about myself as a parent. We all have these moments when your child, say, asks if she can make the peanut butter sandwich for lunch. Your first thought is how it will turn into a mess and it would be easier for you to just make it. But then something clicks, and you realize that she needs to learn, she wants to learn, and you’ve got plenty of Bounty on hand to clean up the mess. That’s why you work hard for the money to afford quality paper towels. And you go for it.

In creating this actual experiential business, the Bounty team has a chance to take its brand purpose to the next level. Instead of watching parents and kids in focus groups, the team can take a road trip to see real families engaging with a real experience that the brand has created. For a marketer, there is nothing more important than seeing how your brand can directly impact people’s lives.

Of course this was very effective marketing for Bounty as well. The brand is seen as enabling this clever idea and fun activity. There are plenty of Bounty cleanup stations throughout the facility. And the premium feel of the experience ensures that Bounty has a premium reputation for all who enter the facility.

I can’t say if this store is turning a profit or whether we can expect to see dozens of them opening up in a city near you. But I can say that my family had a great time and will treasure our time at Make-a-Messterpiece. And I give tremendous credit to the Bounty brand team and its experience agency, Gigunda, who took risks to turn this idea into reality.

Here are some additional fun photos from our trip:

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Posted in Experience, Retailers | No Comments »