As we get closer to our Burning Question seminar on Friday I’ve had less time than usual to relay my thoughts and discussions here in this space. I’m forced to combine topics from Wednesday and Thursday (today) here in Cannes, and in fact I only wanted to touch on one takeaway today—but it’s a good one.
Content Creators Are Waiting for Brands
Lots of people have written or spoken about how brands are becoming media properties and how they can spawn the stars of tomorrow, but this idea never truly crystallized for me until viewing relevant, related seminars over the past two days.
On Wednesday, master director Spike Jonze spoke about his work on everything from short films to television commercials to major motion pictures such as the recent Where the Wild Things Are. He spoke about how he loves to work with brands when they come to him with an idea that excites him. It can be a music video for Bjork or a commercial for the Gap in which he got to destroy a store. Jonze talked about how he often works with agencies to re-imagine the ideas that they bring him—usually tearing up all of the “junk” that got added to the brief or after dozens of client meetings.
His biggest advice for the hundreds of creatives in the room: “The most powerful weapon you have is ‘No.’” Jonze said he took his fair share of bad projects, but he eventually learned that only work that excited him would result in a positive result. It’s a lesson that I believe more brands (personal and corporate) must learn.
Thursday’s highlight for me was the annual Saatchi & Saatchi New Directors Showcase. For 90 minutes we saw a series of short films from some of the most talented rising film directors in the world. Examples ranged from the comedic (Drunk History) to delightful (Tone of Every Day) to animated (I Lived on the Moon).
The usual purpose of this 20-year-old event is to expose agencies to talent who might be great at filming their commercials someday. But after seeing dozens of examples of great branded content—rather than a raft of 30-second ads—I came to see the new model falling into place before my eyes. Whether it’s big name directors such as Spike Jonze or up-and-comers such as those in the Saatchi showcase, clients and agencies of all types were looking not for commercial directors, but rather for partners who could help bring ideas to life.
These directors have the stories, the passion, and the ability to capture people’s imagination—but they often lack the resources or opportunities to put their ideas in front of a large audience. Brands have the money and desire to connect with consumers, but most are not in the business of creating entertainment. So putting them together could make magic.
But it’s no longer about hiring a young director to film your commercial. It’s about crafting content and giving up control to the artist. It’s Gatorade filming a replay of a high school football game. It’s Red Bull sponsoring a rising fashion designer. If you get this right, the result just might be Marketing with Meaning.
On Deck for Tomorrow…
I don’t want to give away all of the special things we have planned for our Burning Question seminar Friday at 5:15 p.m. Cannes time (or 11:15 a.m. for those back in the ET). But I will share one secret for readers of this blog. We’re going to be opening up our seminar tomorrow with a live lead-in by a group of “parkours” who we flew over from California. Parkouring or “free running” is a new type of sport in which athletes turn everyday signposts, buildings, and other street-side objects into a jungle gym. We’ve been filming them jumping and leaping all week in Cannes, and they will come from the streets into our seminar tomorrow. Our goal is to shake people up with some entertainment to close out a huge day of seminars and it should be a fun way to start. If you’re reading this in Cannes, you don’t want to miss it. And if you don’t happen to be in the South of France tomorrow we will be sure to capture everything on video at burningquestion.com.
Is it digital? Traditional? Or are we way past the point of the online versus offline debate? That’s the question that was resonating in my head and among colleagues on Tuesday, Day 2 of the Cannes Advertising Festival.
Unfortunately most of the seminars I attended left me with little to write about. They seemed to cover the same material or be a bit too direct of a sales pitch than what should happen at Cannes. So I spent a good chunk of time walking the floor of work in the Outdoor and Direct category. And I came back with the following observations.
Outdoor has no scale—but no one doubts it.
The outdoor work that made the short list and won Lions was outstanding. It was entertaining, linked to brand benefits, and smart. Although I have debated in the past in this space whether outdoor ads are meaningful, the work here demonstrates that even a traditionally interruptive medium can add value to people’s lives when it makes them laugh, cry, or think. It reminded me that any medium can be meaningful.
But one of the things that hit me was that these award-winning outdoor ads are often one-off executions that might appear in a single city for a limited time. Because they are innovative and often surprise people with a laugh, there’s little use in keeping it up once everyone has gotten the joke. Several of the executions were also expensive and difficult to place. You simply cannot expose them to enough eyeballs to generate “scale” like a print ad or TV commercial. Take this terrific example from Hot Wheels, below:
Another favorite of mine was this campaign for James Ready beer. It offered billboard/photo coupons for local stores so that you could save money in other ways and put the savings toward beer.
Clients are looking for scale, so why would they sign off on this kind of one-off work? It’s a challenge we hear all of the time in digital, but I’ve not heard it applied to outdoor before. Perhaps this comes from the agency test/award budget, or maybe, just maybe, clients are starting to buy into great ideas that make a big impact with a smaller audience. It’s a question I’d like to explore further and would love your comments here.
Direct is digital.
In looking at the range of Direct nominees and winners I was amazed by the amount of work that I would call digital. “Direct” has traditionally meant something that went in the mailbox—but if Cannes is the standard, that definition is done. My friend David Sable at Wunderman has said for years that “direct is digital” and he just might be right.
Take the example above for Nokia’s navigation tool: The World’s Largest Sign. Here, people could search for directions online in London and the sign would rotate in real-life to point to whatever you searched for. To me, this is a digital idea that just happens to connect to the real world. But it was offered in the Direct category.
Another example is this direct/outdoor piece for The Economist in India that asked people to text for clues to decipher the political debate behind the ad.
Where are the digital agencies?
This merger of Direct/Digital brings me to my final takeaway of the day. This morning I opened the daily Cannes Lions magazine to look for the short-listed work in the Cyber (digital) category. It’s the category we won a Gold for last year for our Pringles banner. I was blown away to see that of the 150 or so short-listed entries, only about 6 or 7 of them were created by digital agencies from the Advertising Age list. Very big names such as Razorfish and Digitas were missing in action. This could be the big news of Day 3 when the final Cyber winners are handed out.
I’m not sure what’s going on here, but there are a few hypotheses. Maybe digital agencies don’t know how to do the kind of work that wins Cannes awards—or they don’t know how to “campaign” to get their work into the winner’s circle (a little-known secret to winning sometimes). Another possibility is that a lot of the work digital agencies do—such as e-commerce sites, mobile apps, search optimization, and social media relationship marketing programs—simply don’t fit into a creative awards competition. What tends to win here are one-off “ideas” in the form of smart, funny, interesting engagements.
Or, maybe traditional agencies are now very close to mastering digital agencies’ space. After years of wondering and waiting, maybe they finally now get it. If so, and if Cannes is the place this is judged, it’s not great news for digital agencies like mine. But this also might be a wake-up call for those of us on the digital-agency side to take our game up a notch or two.
Well, here we are in the South of France once again for the annual Cannes Lions Advertising Festival. I was last here two years ago for the yearly meeting of the world’s marketing leaders. (You can see some of my previous posts starting here.) Now, it’s one year after the economic crisis that impacted the advertising industry particularly hard. Attendance here at Cannes went down from a high of around 10,000 people to a mere 6,000. But things are looking up! Supposedly attendance is up to 8,000 or more and there is a positive spirit in the air here. Things are also looking up, of course, because we’re here preparing to answer The Burning Question on Friday this week. Preparation for our big event is going very well and I really wish we were on the stage presenting already. But while waiting for our big moment I’ve had the chance to listen and learn from others’ sessions and conversations over drinks. I will blog daily here to share a few things from each day. Read on for my takeaways from yesterday (Monday), the first major day at the Cannes Lions Advertising Festival.
JWT Presents “Ideas People Want to Spend Time With”
Bob Jeffery, CEO, and Fernando Vega Olmos, Creative Chairman, of our sister agency JWT presented some examples of their best work around the world, which represents an entirely new direction for one of the largest and oldest advertising agencies. Jeffery started by making the point that, “Time is the new currency… so we must create ideas that people want to spend time with.” It’s a concept that is perfectly consistent with Marketing with Meaning.
The pair proceeded to share examples of some killer work that is completely consistent with our concept of Marketing with Meaning. Examples included things that you’ve probably seen me tweet about over the past few weeks, including the Heineken classical music concert prank and hilarious videos for Kotex that poke fun of decades of tampon ads. But I was most impressed by two cause-related ideas that the company launched over the past year. First, a campaign for UNICEF in which vending machines were placed with the opportunity for people to donate their change to provide fresh water in Haiti. The campaign created a new way to donate and most users had never donated before. A second campaign for the Red Cross in Mexico created children’s rides (like the ones that used to be outside of supermarkets) in which all donations went to the Red Cross and kids got the chance to “play” hero. The campaign resulted in a +20% increase in donations during the horrible economy last year.
Schematic and Bridge Worldwide Show the Possibilities of a New Meaning Medium
One of our WPP sister digital agencies, Schematic, was back at Cannes with its revolutionary “touchwall” technology. Think of it as a giant iPad on steroids that reads an RFID tag in your conference badge and helps you get more out the event. You can find people, arrange for places to meet, get descriptions of the day’s sessions, and check out nearby restaurants.
This year our agency, Bridge Worldwide, was invited to join the Schematic demo to show how this new “medium” could be used for a variety of brands. We developed two ideas based on brands that we work on. We showed how Charmin could create an entertaining interactive game with mysterious people behind bathroom-stall doors, and we showed a concept for the Bounty brand in which people around the world could collaborate to make a work of art using the device. We’re a long way from having touchwalls installed worldwide, but the unit was a great chance to explore how new technology can become meaningful from the beginning.
Another Question…
One of my favorite things about coming to an event such as this is that you start hearing some common threads of thought as people have time to experience, reflect, and discuss. While we’ve been asking The Burning Question, a new question came to me when I did an interview with the Cannes Eye team here: “Should the word ‘advertising’ be dropped from the Cannes Lions Advertising Festival?” I had not really thought of that before, but the question came up a few hours later over drinks with my friend Rick Boyko, Director of the VCU Brandcenter (which I wrote about previously here). Rick talked about how we should evolve our craft away from “advertising” and all of its negative connotations and move toward something that is more relevant for our present evolution of marketing—around creating experiences and telling stories.
I’m not sure what the answer is yet, but a move away from “advertising” in Cannes and in our industry might be the “reset button” that we all need to elevate our game.
It’s officially conference season for marketers around the world and I’ve been doing my share to spread the good word of Marketing with Meaning on this variation of the campaign trail. Two weeks ago I got a chance to speak at the Cause Marketing Forum in Chicago, next week is our huge seminar at the Cannes Lions Ad Fest (where I’ll be blogging and tweeting all week), and last week I got a chance to take the stage at the Sustainable Brands event in Monterey, California.
Sustainable Brands is one of the largest and longest-running events dedicated to the topics of sustainability and corporate responsibility, and how they come to life in marketing for some of the biggest brands in the world. I had the chance to meet executives from companies such as Microsoft, Unilever, and Walmart. Some of the delegates hold specialized roles in their companies, while others were traditional brand marketers at companies that have mainlined sustainable business and marketing practices. I felt a little like the wild card participant at the event. I didn’t share a case study on sustainability or have an agency devoted to this surging specialty practice. Instead I got to come in and share how the interruptive model of marketing is no longer sustainable, but that Marketing with Meaning offers a new path—a path in which brands can reach incredible results both in building the business and improving the world. You can see the slides from my brief presentation below…
Interestingly, I got one piece of negative feedback from an audience member in a roundabout way that I would rather not describe here. Someone in the audience from a different advertising agency complained through certain channels that I was far too strong in my comparison of interruptive advertising to pollution, and that I might have embarrassed this person’s clients. This was a new first for me, as I’ve been tougher on our profession before (I always say “our” or “we” because I live in this industry, too) with many more advertising folks in the room, and never gotten this response. Sadly, I offered to discuss this concern directly with the person but I’ve yet to hear a response. What do you think? Was I too tough?
Moving on, I only got to attend one of the four days that the conference ran last week, but I did manage to capture some killer content for you, dear readers. There were three terrific presentations from marketers that had me giving my new TweetDeck iPad app a rigorous workout:
Timberland
Mike Harrison, Chief Brand Officer for Timberland, took the stage to share the story of the company’s resurgence behind its new Earthkeepers boots. A fellow Procter & Gamble alum, Harrison kicked off his presentation by saying that his years in traditional marketing at P&G did not prepare him for this new world of developing and marketing sustainable products. He went on to admit that the company is still figuring out the right path in this new space; but after listening to Mike on stage and in a Q&A session later in the day I believe Timberland just might be writing the missing manual for success.
Timberland itself is a company that is focused on delivering “commerce and justice” in everything it does; its positioning is “the authentic, sustainable outdoor brand,” and as a brand that is about enjoying and exploring the outdoors it has a built-in link to environmental sustainability. Last year the brand created a Facebook application that led the company to plant more than 1 million trees. The company has created a kind of “nutritional label” for its shoe boxes that shows what goes into them, and it has pledged to improve the sustainable sourcing of its products every year. And this also follows through the company’s organizational culture: For years, employees are encouraged to take a week of additional paid time away from the office to volunteer on causes they value.
This starting point helped the brand recognize the opportunity to create an Earthkeepers boot that uses recyclable materials and works with suppliers to minimize the environmental impact of activities such as leather tanning. The end product is something that looks good or better than other boots. (Well-used, recycled leather always looks better.) And the company is working on an Earthkeepers Boot 2.0 that can actually be sent back to the company for repair and recycling.
The idea works strategically because it is helping the company differentiate in a very crowded marketplace. As Harrison said, “Anyone with a fax machine and a friend in China can make a boot.” Results have been very strong so far: It should soon be a $400 million line and is helping the brand improve on key equity measures. Harrison showed how the stock price is up 50% since the company repositioned itself away from hip-hop and back toward the environment. Interestingly, a vast majority of sales of the boot are from outside the U.S., so this growth should only continue as the brand prepares to expand the line and its marketing budget. Expect more big things from this brand in the year ahead!
IBM
I was excited to see Lee Green from IBM at the conference because we will have his colleague, John Kennedy, join us at Cannes next week. Green is Vice President of Corporate Marketing at IBM, and he shared the story of the company’s move to make “A Smarter Planet.” Like Timberland and many of the best case studies, IBM’s new path came from years of slowing sales and growing competitive pressure. The company needed to be about something more than hardware or consulting services; it desperately needed a new focus and positioning on something higher-level.
IBM went to its roots and rediscovered its history of creating products that drive progress. It realized, however, that “progress” is not about the technology itself, but rather about how technology can be used to improve the world. IBM realized that “the planet is getting flatter… and smarter”—and it had an opportunity to make a Smarter Planet. This new direction is leading the company into some pretty interesting new businesses. For example, it is helping companies re-fit aging buildings to meet the latest green guidelines. It is working on a tool to allow people to see the energy they are using, which results in 15% less usage and a 10% cost savings.
Smarter Planet is more than a new ad campaign; this is really an entirely new positioning for the company—and it is delivering on the concept of Smarter Planet by doing more than running TV commercials. For example, it hosted an Eco-efficiency Jam earlier this year that brought together 1,600 business, government, and NGO leaders from more than 140 countries to work on some of these key problems together.
The results of this redirection are very preliminary but seem to be having an impact. IBM is growing again, and it was named as the second most valuable brand in the world in Interbrand’s annual survey, with a valuation of $60 billion.
Jack Daniels
We’ve recently begun doing some work the Brown-Forman, the parent company of Jack Daniels, so I was excited to meet and hear from Rob Kaplan, who leads Corporate Responsibility for the company. He shared the story of how Jack Daniels, arguably the number-one spirit brand in the world, is discovering the power of including sustainability in its marketing strategy. Like the two examples above, Jack Daniels did not have to invent or add a meaningful message—rather, it went back to its roots and what it has continued doing today. At its small distillery in Lynchburg, Tennessee, 99% of waste is reused. Used barrels are sold to others who reuse them, grain by-products are sold to local farmers who feed them to their animals, and the nearby streams are kept perfectly clean because it is this limestone-filtered water that gives Jack Daniels its smooth taste.
Kaplan spoke about how the company spoke with Sam’s Club, which was looking to feature brands that have true sustainability credentials. After hearing the story of the Jack Daniels recycling and reuse program, they asked for a very large order to feature on special nationwide. Now, those of you from the CPG world know that getting new distribution, on feature, at a chain such as Sam’s Club can basically make your number for the year. But instead of just putting some regular Jack bottles on a pallet and shipping them out, the brand took the opportunity to create a special SKU. This new, limited-edition bottle not only gave brand fans something unique, but Jack Daniels partnered with a nonprofit organization to plant 100,000 trees with proceeds from the sale of these special bottles.
Not only did this initiative help secure incremental sales at Sam’s Club, but it earned positive word of mouth from sustainable product fans. For example, this Sierra Club blog post glowingly wrote of the promotion.
Overall I came away from this conference convinced that “sustainability” is no longer just some kind of siloed corporate department or annual report box to check off. It is something that consumers are demanding of the products and services they buy every day, and it offers a strategic focus for brand marketing with meaning.
A little more than a week ago I purchased an iPad. Typically I am an early adopter for tech toys such as this for a few reasons: First, in my job as strategy leader of a digital agency, my team and clients are eager to hear our take. Second, I am always looking for tools that will help me be more effective and/or efficient in what I do for a living. In this case I have been increasingly feeling the limitations of my laptop, especially when I want to, say, show a few slides or websites to a client over breakfast or lunch; the last thing you want to do in those situations is haul a heavy bag around and wait 10 minutes for the thing to power up and down. But I was really most interested in purchasing an iPad to understand for myself whether this promising/hyped new category of devices would be dominated by the old, interruptive model of advertising or start with a platform for Marketing with Meaning. And after a few days of use I can safely include that the latter is the case.
So far, the interruptive model for iPad advertising seems to be moving quickly up the hype cycle. Some people actually believe that this will—finally!—be the year of mobile advertising, even before Apple got into the game. Apple is preparing to launch its own advertising network for iPhone and iPad apps with special creative formats, dubbed iAd. It has raked in $60 million in commitments already from some of the biggest brands in the world who want to test it first, including Unilever, AT&T, Sears, State Farm, and Disney. The hope is that millions of app developers will earn a living out of turning a percentage of their mobile pixel space over to new ad networks and wait for the money to roll in—and marketers can reach people closer to where and when they actually pull out their wallets to buy stuff.
But a few of us are warning that mobile advertising is not necessarily the next big thing. Along with many others elsewhere, I wrote in this blog back in May about the limitations of iAd as an advertising option. The Wall Street Journal blog recently featured an interesting quote from Kevin Ryan, former CEO of online-ad company DoubleClick: “The answer that people want to hear is that mobile is going to be huge.” “The People” obviously means investors who hope to sell their mobile-ad companies to the highest bidder. But it also includes the largest advertisers in the world—who are watching TV commercial ratings and print subscriptions sink and know that they need to figure out a mobile solution quickly.
The central challenge, however, is the lack of “scale” in mobile marketing. At the end of the day, traditional advertisers such as the big names above depend on an interruptive model in which many millions of eyeballs are exposed to a short message in hopes that some small percentage leads to a sale. Just because they long for this scale does not mean it will actually arrive. There are already too many ad impressions to compete with, too many media options for consumers, and too many mobile-phone platforms to allow for such scale.
The alternative choice for mobile—and advertising overall—is Marketing with Meaning. In mobile devices this looks like creating value-added apps that a smaller percentage of people download (as compared to mass interruptions), but because the brand engagement is so much superior, this small group buys products and services at a much higher rate, over a much longer time period. This is the bet being placed by brands as diverse as Charmin (public restroom finder), Nationwide (car accident guide), Starwood (loyalty points tracker), and REI (ski report). The Gilt Groupe, a high-end online retailer, is now seeing 10% of its sales come from the iPhone and iPad. The reason? A killer interface made specifically for these platforms, and a business that has great deals for a limited-time only—i.e., if you wait to log on at your desk to check out the specials they might already be sold out.
Now to my handful of impressions after using an iPad for a few weeks:
First, the device is exceeding my expectations. I do love it! I expected to have a tool that would allow for easy reading of email, books, and websites, as well as something simple for presenting slides. It does that more than adequately, and so much more. The keys to greatness lie in a brilliant piece of hardware. The device is thin, lightweight, features an incredible screen quality, responds well to the touch, and you cannot beat the easy on/off button. This is really what computing should be about in 2010, rather than the endless boot-up of bloatware operating systems and unknown creatures in the taskbar bin. With this platform and basic OS, the possibilities for developing apps that make best use of it are limitless. So far I’m loving Netflix, Kindle, The Weather Channel, TweetDeck, and GoodReader. And I’m now reading the paper newspaper again thanks to USAToday and WSJ apps. So many great apps and we’re only in the first couple of months of this thing, folks!
The “magazine” model of advertising is weak. I have downloaded a few magazines such as Wired and Esquire to test what this experience is like. Chris Anderson, editor of Wired, talked at an Ad:Tech speech a few months ago about how his company was betting heavily on the iPad and promised to have many cool bells and whistles in its digital version. I also checked out Esquire on an app called Zinio that lets you subscribe to digital editions of many popular magazines. At Ad:Tech, Anderson was excited about the fact that people would be “forced” to flip past each full-page ad in his virtual magazine. (See more on his speech here.) In my experience, the iPad magazine reading is fine, but I hated having to swipe past each ad. This is a worse experience than a physical magazine, which you can simply shuffle past quickly. In this case you’re likely to get a finger cramp with the number of ads crammed in! Again, maybe people notice such ads in the short term because this is a novel experience, but after a while we will all just tune out another piece of unwanted clutter.
Improved websites might eliminate the need for apps. What I mean here is that the Web-surfing experience with the iPad is so strong (despite the lack of Flash) that you might not need to develop apps to provide similar value to users. For example, I considered buying the ESPN app for iPad, but then I just pulled up ESPN.com on my iPad’s Safari browser. The latter experience was outstanding because the network has built a site optimized for iPads. So there’s no need for the $4.99 app. Remarkably, this is something I have not heard in relation to the launch of the iPad. It could be a threat to Apple’s desire to “control” the user experience for its own profit, as there is no need to purchase or download a special app. For consumers, it means you skip finding/downloading/updating apps. We are already working on making iPad-ready adjustments for some of our clients.
Despite marketers’ desire to make the mass/interruptive model work in mobile, and Steve Jobs’s record of overturning and improving business models, my advice to brands is to create an app (or an optimized website), not an ad buy, as a way to connect with consumers on the iPad. There are simply too many challenges of making an interruption pay out—and too many opportunities to delight people by creating added value on the iPad platform.
Last week I had the chance to attend and speak at the annual Cause Marketing Forum in Chicago. Conferences that cover specific topics such as this are a real joy to visit. It’s a chance to peer a little into an “ecosystem” of individuals and companies that are united around a common interest and goal. In this case, it’s a very noble one—cause marketing and corporate social responsibility. I got to speak at a marketers-only dinner during the evening, both introducing Marketing with Meaning as a higher-level paradigm for marketing, and then sharing how Cause and CSR fit in—along with some tips and learnings we’ve seen in this fast-developing space. Instead of rehashing my presentation here I wanted to take this space to share what I learned during the event from some of the biggest marketers in the world. (But do take a look at the video above where I was interviewed at the conference.)
Nike/Livestrong
By now everyone has seen the yellow bracelets and admired the very innovative way that Nike has supported Lance Armstrong and his drive to cure cancer. But few have gotten the inside scoop on how the program came about and the results it has seen. Tom Kelley, brand marketer for Nike, shared some terrific insights. He began by setting up Nike’s mission: “To achieve human potential… and bring inspiration and innovation to every athlete in the world.” He talked about when one of its prize athletes, Lance Armstrong, contracted cancer it became Nike’s first significant cause marketing effort. As Tom said, “We didn’t choose cancer; cancer chose us.” Nike, a brand that sticks very close to its roots in driving athletic performance, saw Lance fight back in the hospital, on the bike, and in the public eye. And when the brand got into the cause, it did so in a very unique way—by creating the yellow band campaign and raising millions of dollars for research.
Nike has also smartly continued its involvement in Livestrong as Lance, too, continues to ride to challenge himself and raise funds to fight the disease. Kelly spoke about the most recent innovation in the cause, the Nike Chalkbot, which debuted in the Tour de France last year. If you haven’t seen it yet, check out this great video:
What’s brilliant about the Chalkbot is that it hits on so many levels. It fits Nike’s drive for innovation and it inspires athletes to perform their best. It also builds off a tradition of this tradition-rich sport. It gives people around the world the chance to participate in a live event. And it’s all for a very good cause. I expect to see Chalkbot win a Cannes Lion when I go there in a few weeks.
The results from this one idea have been incredible: 36,000 cheers were submitted, there were 139 major PR stories, membership of Livestrong’s Facebook page rose 77%, and Nike’s Livestrong line saw the largest month ever for both product sales and donations. This year the Chalkbot will be back on the Tour with a few improvements—including a better eraser.
A final point on Nike: I later heard a presentation on Macy’s cause efforts which are vast and impressive. For its programs, Macy’s executives talked about how they closely look toward the causes that its consumers care about. This seems smart and is clearly what most marketers are trained to do. But this was not at all how Nike approached cancer. It didn’t survey its buyers and ask what they believe in; rather, the brand worked according to what it as a brand cares about. Maybe this is the way we are headed in the future: brands as true personalities (powered by social, of course), which attract fans who aspire to know and be like them. Something to think about…
Pepsi Refresh
Everyone wants to know how the Pepsi Refresh is going—mainly because it represents such a big step in a new direction by a major marketer that has done advertising the traditional way for so long. Bonin Bough, Director of Digital and Social Media at Pepsi, took the stage to update an eager audience. He started by grounding the effort on a bigger change, “Refresh is a small part of a transformation going on across PepsiCo… it’s part of our belief in ‘Performance with Purpose.’” (For more on that, check out my blog post a few weeks ago). The idea behind Refresh came from studying a survey of Pepsi drinkers. Thinking beyond just providing liquid refreshment, the brand uncovered the insight that “Optimism is a catalyst for ideas that change society.” Pepsi chose to embrace and encourage optimism, but not through just a logo change and raft of new TV ads—rather, they had to DO something. The marketing team knew they had to “create a movement, not a moment.” So Super Bowl ads were out, and Pepsi Refresh was in.
Best Buy
Tim Showalter-Loch spoke at an intimate breakout group at the forum with the title of “Teen Cause Marketing.” The room fit about 12 people, but somehow 24 people squeezed in to hear how this leading, growing group of Blue Shirts is tackling teen+cause marketing. Best Buy has begun to edge into cause marketing for a few reasons: First, the company is maturing and needs to better differentiate itself in a crowded marketplace. Second, research shows that the rising generation of young people expects brands to have a higher-level purpose. In fact, their research shows that teens see big companies as authority figures—and this generation expects authority figures to step up and solve problems (a variation on the helicopter parenting that they have experienced).
Tim talked about how the brand discovered a big opportunity to embrace “teens’ positive development.” Teens are obviously important because they purchase a lot of Best Buy products and influence their parents to buy a lot more. In fact, today’s teen is the household Chief Technology Officer. Tim made a great analogy to the first generation of immigrant children who grow up speaking the new language and have to translate to their parents. Technology is that new language now.
The company saw an opportunity to do something in “positive development” because the teen years are a time when little decisions and experiences can have a large impact on the personalities and paths of young people. And teens need something more than the “negative” campaigns against smoking, drinking, drugs, and texting while driving.
Best Buy’s focus here has just begun, but it has done some nice, smart work at a site called @15 where it is encouraging kids to learn and innovate. It already has more than 200,000 members thanks to partners such as DoSomething.org.
Tim talked about how this small start is getting Best Buy’s leaders to think about how they can do more. Perhaps enrolling teens to help design the company’s products and business models. Tim spoke about his evolving belief that “The future is about creating a business that works for social change… don’t just fix your reputation by giving money; do something.” We talked about how Walmart recently closed the gap in Medicare drug prices because of its enormous purchasing power.
Pedigree
John Anton, Marketing Director for Pedigree, spoke about the history of the brand’s embrace of cause marketing around pets. I first wrote about Pedigree well over a year ago here, so I was excited to get more firsthand info on its very successful program. Anton spoke about how Pedigree has a Brand Purpose both around providing high-quality food and a belief that “every dog deserves a loving home.”
Pedigree’s first major efforts in its cause to drive shelter dog adoption came in February 2007 when it aired a commercial twice during the broadcast of the annual Westminster Kennel Club dog show. The ad brought light to the tragedy of unadopted dogs and said that the brand would match donations during the event. This small effort raised more than $1.7 million and showed the brand they were onto something.
Anton provided some great background on the brand’s decision to create its own foundation rather than partnering with other, existing nonprofits in this space. The biggest reason came to light when a national nonprofit that it partnered with supported legislation that was seen as negative to pure-breed owners. Because of its association with the nonprofit, Pedigree received many negative responses and threats to stop buying its food.
So the Pedigree Foundation was set up as its own 501(c)3 organization apart from Mars, the owner of Pedigree. It has its own staff and annual report. Aside from funds from Pedigree marketing, the foundation receives about $1 million per year in donations from individuals. Anton admitted that it was new ground to figure out how to do this, but by creating its own foundation Pedigree is benefiting from added credibility, control, employee pride, and a positive long-term legacy.
Interestingly, this idea of companies setting up their own foundations is fairly controversial, as it creates some competition in the cause market. I’m sure this will continue to be a hot topic in the future.
JetBlue
One small new learning came from a conversation with an executive from JetBlue at dinner. In my presentation I talked about the Marketing with Meaning example of how Hyundai brilliantly grew sales in a down year by introducing the Assurance program—a program so good that brands as diverse as Pfizer and the Toronto Raptors followed with similar programs. She mentioned that JetBlue, too, had offered to fly you free if you lost your job. This program returned immediate results and virtually no tickets were returned.
Many thanks to David Hessekiel and his staff at the Cause Marketing Forum for putting on a great show and inviting me to both teach and learn. It’s clearly a pocket of Marketing with Meaning that is leading the way.
A few weeks ago I got an interesting phone call out of the blue: The Samsung Mobile marketing team was preparing to announce an expansion of its recharging stations and wanted to see if I could fly out to the UCLA campus to meet with Korean reporters covering the event and explain how this effort represents the next evolution of marketing. I couldn’t make the trip, but we ended up filming B-Roll video in Cincinnati that was translated into Korean and shared here and abroad as part of the big announcement. It’s not what I expected when I praised the Samsung recharging stations in my book, but I was extremely proud to be linked to a brand that is continuing to invest in this early example of Marketing with Meaning.
The Samsung recharging stations have become a fixture at airports around the U.S. To date the company has installed more than 300 units in 10 of the busiest airports in the country, and the units are accessible to more than 395 million passengers per year. While traditional advertisements are abundant and ignored at these airports, the Samsung recharging stations serve as beacons of meaningful marketing. Even if you don’t use them, you can’t help but notice a company that is offering a free, value-added service to frequent flyers who need it most. When you do recharge, you will notice a transparent box highlighting one of the latest/greatest new Samsung phones.
What I love most about Samsung’s effort is that it follows a very simple formula for success. First, there is a Business Objective of reaching high-income air travelers who spend a lot of money on personal electronics such as mobile phones. Second, the brand looked for a higher-level need of these travelers that it could meet in a way that is relevant to its products. All you have to do is walk through a terminal and see people in suits and skirts sitting on filthy carpets so that they can recharge their laptops and phones to continue getting work done. Airports are always cash-strapped and naturally appreciate when a company can pay to add value to fliers’ lives. Many, many companies could have come up with the idea, but only Samsung took on the effort and expense to make it happen.
Flash forward a few years and we come to the big news in the U.S. and even in Samsung’s home country of Korea: The brand announced in April that it is expanding the recharging stations to college campuses across the country. In 2009 Samsung first experimented on campus with 40 stations in nine colleges. With this success, the brand now plans to have 187 stations in 20 of the largest universities by the end of 2010. The lucky colleges include large state-funded schools such as Texas Tech University, the University of Minnesota, the University of Maryland, and UCLA. Samsung launched the stations with local events and a Facebook contest.
Again, the brilliance of these recharging stations is evident on college campuses as well as in airports. Here, Business Objective is to gain sales among college students, who are heavy mobile phone users/buyers, and to offer the chance to win loyalty for a lifetime of electronics purchases. The basic need for power is similar on-campus; in fact, the laptop and cell phone are critical for today’s classroom and social coordination. Meanwhile, colleges are continually cash-strapped and do not always have the funding for adding power stations everywhere. So Samsung solves a short-term problem, and earns long-term loyalty among a Gen-Y audience that largely ignores traditional sell-and-tell advertising.
I was excited to praise Samsung’s brilliant effort for Korean television, but I was even more excited when its CMO, Sue Shim, agreed to appear on video for our Burning Question session in Cannes. As we coordinated schedules for her appearance, Sue mentioned that she has bought several copies of my book and they are using it for internal training.
That’s why I wrote the book, folks—to shine a light on the companies that are making the move to the next evolution of marketing, and to create something that they can use to fundamentally change how they perform the marketing function.
Although the term “Social Media” seems due for its trip down the hype curve into the dustbin of once-powerful historic buzz words such as “Information Superhighway” and “Web 2.0,” the concept continues to gain traction because it really does represent a change in how people live their lives. When people can take private or small-group moments and share them with the world with a push of a mouse button or swipe of an iPhone, things can get more and more interesting. Small things that happen every day suddenly can turn into legitimate media movements. Such is the case of “haul videos,” which are turning shopping and sharing among girlfriends into the latest must-have for beauty and fashion marketers.
Haul videos have become the new trend for sharing among trendsetters and watchers. They represent the act of shopping at a store, then videotaping yourself showing off your purchases on camera, and then uploading it to YouTube for sharing. As seen in the ABC News video above, there are more than 100,000 individual haul videos on YouTube already, which have received millions of views. Some individual videos have been viewed as many as 700,000 times, while others are starting out with just two viewers (great quote: “…my mom begged me to do one!”).
The act of sharing your fashion purchases with other people is not new. Girls have been doing this for years—inviting friends over to their homes and showing off their latest buys from the mall. The difference now is that technology is allowing people to share with the world. Just as blogging turned diaries from private to public and Flickr allowed people to share their photos with the world, now cheap video cameras and YouTube are turning this once private activity into public, “social media.” Let’s also skip the concern that Gen Y is over-sharing or becoming too materialistic. These kids grew up regulating their privacy (with parents’ help) and are just doing what they’ve always done.
Once this private act goes public, some pretty interesting changes can happen. Some girls are able gather a large audience and can quickly impact product sales. Viewers see them as honest and “real,” and thus trust what they are sharing and saying much more than any advertisement. Advertisers become interested whenever they see a large, trusted audience and will continually look to earn a positive review. In fashion specifically, word of mouth has a very large impact on product popularity and sales, and these videos are a major catalyst for word of mouth. And not only do thousands of girls closely follow specific video producers, but search engines such as Google and Bing send additional traffic when the videos are posted.
This is an important point that signals a deeper change in how social media is impacting the marketing world. Instead of buying ad placements that are trusted less and less, advertisers are increasingly providing free samples to top bloggers and video creators. Advertisers must trust that their products will be liked by the reviewers, who in turn will talk about these products in their own words. If reviewers accept money or are perceived to be biased, then they risk losing the trust of their audience. This is much more meaningful than the typical model of buying glossy print ads or paying celebrities millions of dollars to promote your products.
This is also part of a larger trend toward social-media shopping. People are increasingly using technology such as Facebook and mobile phones to virtually take their friends along with them when shopping—both for assistance and fun. For example, they are using a location-based app called foursquare to tell their friends where they are browsing, and they are scanning UPCs to find product reviews on their mobile phones. At Bridge Worldwide, we created a tool for Pearle Vision that allows people to upload photos of themselves in various pairs of glasses so that they can get quick feedback from their friends before making a purchase.
So the question for you is: What can you do to make shopping for your products or services a more social experience? Social shopping isn’t going away anytime soon.
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