The Blog

Thursday 03.18.10

Why Foursquare Ruled #SXSW

Bob Gilbreath

foursquare sxsw

Late Sunday night I got back from my first-ever trip to the much-discussed South by Southwest (SXSW) conference for Film, Music, and Interactive in Austin, Texas. After seeing many friends and other folks in the business rave and tweet about this event for a few years, I felt compelled to add yet another conference badge to my collection. Overall I found it to be one of the best conferences for digital marketing that I have attended in some time. That means something, because I think I’ve been to more than a dozen different digital shows in the past 24 months alone. Over the course of the next few blog posts I plan to share some of my biggest takeaways and examples of Marketing with Meaning.

First up is an example of a start-up digital service that used meaningful marketing to make the conference better for nearly everyone involved: Foursquare. For those who haven’t heard, Foursquare is a mobile tool that allows you to “check in” at locations where you physically appear—essentially a way of broadcasting to friends that you are, say, having a coffee at Starbucks, or waiting in line at the DMV. This is the leading brand in a new category of “geo-location” services. You might call it “Geo-Twitter”—in fact, you can update your Twitter and Facebook accounts with Foursquare when you check in around town.

SXSW is a very big event for the folks at Foursquare for many reasons. It is the place where partners and customers gather to see what’s new. Investors are lurking everywhere to spy the next hot winner. And some of the earliest early adopters and trendsetters (including a few celebrities) share their latest findings with their friends at SXSW.

So it is a clear business objective to own this event in every way possible. For most companies, this means paying sponsorship dollars to put your name everywhere, employing booth babes to walk around with branded snacks, and maybe hosting a giant beer-for-all for everyone at the event. But not Foursquare. Instead, Foursquare stuck with what makes its service special, and spent most of its time and money making it more so.

Foursquare is already a killer app for conferences. It is most effective when a large group of people who know each other and want to get together are located in a pretty close environment. This is exactly what conferences are all about. So instead of calling or texting to find out where your friends and contacts are, you simply see where they have recently checked in and walk over to the conference room, bar, or restaurant where they happen to be. This even makes it easy to “run into” people who you might unable to reach via email or telephone.

This is why Foursquare became so popular at SXSW in 2009. So the business decided to do more with this hyper-engaged, ultra-important audience in 2010. When we got off the plane in Austin and checked into the airport, we noticed that Foursquare had created special new features for SXSW participants. The main add was a set of special “badges” that you could unlock by performing various check-ins during the six-day event. Badges are a key element of the basic Foursquare service—providing you a fun way to show that you have, say, checked in at 50 different total places or from five airports or from a boat. They are fun for the user, and cleverly (and cheaply) train people to make Foursquare check-ins a habit. Some of the special SXSW badges include the “Austin Explorer” for hitting five locations in the city, and the “Hookup” for checking in at two different hotels. For me and our team, we found that these badges turned Foursquare into a living game that made some of the boring moments between sessions and meetings much more tolerable.

Foursquare did more than virtual badges, though. The firm partnered with specific locations such as the Pepsi Refresh Cafe and SXSW Web Awards to give people temporary tattoos to match their unlocked badges. And it partnered with PayPal to donate $.25 for every check-in to Haitian relief efforts. Foursquare even reported a running total of how much you had earned for Haiti. (I believe I hit more than $8.)

Only the folks at Foursquare know how much this modest expense in programming time delivered for its business at this big event. One key data point reported on its site shows that there were more than 15,000 badges awarded, including 6,025 versions of the Austin Explorer. That means that roughly 50% of the 12,000 people who went to the Interactive conference tried Foursquare.  According to this article, there were 300,000 check-ins in Austin during the event, and Foursquare added 100,000 users overall – “likely as a result of check-ins being broadcast to Twitter and Facebook.” This might have even helped the nascent company establish a business model; TechCrunch made the case that Foursquare could create a business around building similar special apps for other conferences.

So many thanks to Foursquare for helping me get a more out of my company’s significant time and money investment in sending me to SXSW. I will certainly repay the favor by giving this new service major attention in the months ahead.

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Tuesday 03.16.10

Let’s Ask Ourselves a Burning Question at Cannes

Bob Gilbreath

burning question

“A question asked in the right way often points to its own answer.”  —Edward Hodnett

Some of the most important changes in history began when groups of people asked difficult questions of their elders, their rulers, and their textbooks. Questions have sparked democratic revolutions from Boston to Berlin, they have driven scientific paradigm shifts from Darwin to Einstein, and they have triggered social change from San Francisco to Soweto. These “burning questions” compel us to step back from the way we have always lived our lives, help us discover that change is needed, and point us to an answer that suddenly becomes completely obvious—and betters the world. It is time for us marketers and advertisers to ask ourselves a Burning Question that will unleash needed change in the work that we do for our customers, stakeholders, employees, and society as a whole.

It is an ambitious objective, but one that is clearly ready for the first bold action. The historic model of marketing and advertising stands on the brink of failure in many corners. Mass media is increasingly an oxymoron, as our customers shift their precious eyeballs to 500 cable channels and 50 billion YouTube videos. Product and service purchases are screened through the lens of social media, not pricey ad campaigns. And citizens of the world are calling on their governments to protect them from advertisements on their mobile screens and school buses. Simply put, our traditional marketing model is unsustainable.

On Friday, June 25 at the annual Cannes Lions International Advertising Festival in France, Jim Stengel and I will bring together the world’s largest brands and advertising agencies to reveal a Burning Question that will allow us to transform our work and our world. We plan to use this biggest, most-followed gathering of global marketers to spark a revolution—and we hope you will join us.

This revolution will be socialized. As we prepare to spark the revolution in June, we need your help to guide the discussion and plan to offer several ways for everyone to be involved. For starters, we are asking people to visit www.burningquestion.com and share what they believe is the Burning Question that will unlock change in our marketing paradigm. We will share the ideas openly, and Jim and I will draw on your input for our session. In a few weeks we will launch a contest in which we will identify a handful of fellow change agents to join us in Cannes (on our dime). And we will announce more ways to get involved before, during, and after this event. I can promise you that it is something that the Cannes Lions Festival has never seen before—and it will be meaningful and memorable whether you are in France with us or not.

This summer we’re going to set fire to the old assumptions about what marketing is and what it can be. Will you join us?

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Thursday 03.11.10

Inside the Making of an Entertaining Banner Ad

Bob Gilbreath

distraktion

I’ve frequently taken the keynote stage or space in this blog to claim that banner ads are not the savior of digital marketing and marketing in general. I believe that too many traditional marketers have embraced banners as the easy way to “go digital” and fail to understand how this new media can allow for much deeper brand connections. That said, sometimes business goals require us to drive Awareness, and banner advertising can be a solution if it is done well. And my team at Bridge Worldwide is always pushing the creative/technical boundaries to deliver banners with meaning—which brings me to today’s post on some entertaining banners we recently launched for the Healthy Choice brand at ConAgra Foods.

Providing real entertainment is often a great way to make the banner ad meaningful to people who encounter such advertising on any given website visit. One of our best examples was the banner we did for Pringles last summer that resulted in 300,000 people choosing to visit our staging server and play with the banner over the course of a weekend. Oh, yeah, and we won a Cannes Gold Cyber Lion for this ad, too.

In the case of Healthy Choice, our advertising in recent years has revolved around convincing consumers to re-evaluate a brand that had come to be mainly focused on 50-year-old and older people who were told by their doctors to eat better. The brand has made significant improvements on the quality and appeal of its food, and our marketing has used humor and entertainment to get a 30-something consumer to notice what’s new with the brand. This is what drove our Working Lunch online improv show last year, and the recent campaign with Julia Louis-Dreyfus. Both campaigns successfully launched new products for the brand.

We were recently brought in to work on a new campaign, alongside Nitro/Sapient, which handles the brand’s television and print creative. The agency developed a print-focused campaign in which characters from a fake print ad on one page of a magazine look longingly at a Healthy Choice ad on the opposite page. It is a clever campaign, and our team was eager to figure out how to make it work online. In fact, we were excited that the digital space would allow us to bring it to life in a very fun way.

Go ahead and click this link to see what our team came up with. It’s a live URL that we’ll keep up, so feel free to forward it to your friends, too.

Our Healthy Choice team recently shared some of its keys to success in developing this banner at an all-company meeting—lessons that others might benefit from as well. First, they first shared the concept with our media planning and buying partner agency months in advance so that we could secure this type of rich media placement. Second, they did prototype filming of the ad to figure out how to actually make it work. Stand-ins from our office helped our production team understand what would need to happen in the actual shoot, thus saving us and the client time and money. Finally, the team worked with Eyeblaster to ensure that we could get the two ads to appear on the exact right timing. This is actually a type of sync that the folks at Eyeblaster said no one had tried before.

Unfortunately I cannot share results of the program because it just started, however I hope you agree that it brings some levity and fun to a medium that has brought mainly annoyance and irrelevance since the first banner was displayed 15 years ago. If you must make a banner—make it meaningful (please!).

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Tuesday 03.09.10

NASCAR Marketing Dept: Be Careful What You Wish For

Bob Gilbreath

rpm_a_keselowski_600

A few months ago I was watching ESPN’s SportsCenter in the morning while getting ready for the day and stopped in my tracks when I heard NASCAR CEO and Chairman Brian France tell a group of reporters at a press conference that the circuit would be changing its rules to allow more “bump drafting” during its races in the year ahead. To quote France directly:

“NASCAR is a contact sport—our history is based on banging fenders.”

In fact, after France’s rule-change announcement another NASCAR executive, Robin Pemberton, NASCAR’s vice president of competition, said, “Boys, have at it….” My first reaction: Uh-oh.

It’s the same reaction I experienced yesterday when tuning into the highlights of Sunday’s race in Atlanta, where star driver Carl Edwards took revenge on fellow racer Brad Keselowski for something the latter did earlier in the race. The Edwards bump caused Keselowski’s car to flip over in midair at nearly 200 miles per hour and sent him to the hospital for observation. The car careened into the “catch fence” that prevents metal from flying into the crowd—but has been known to allow killer debris through in the past. Contact sport indeed—and potentially an example in which the marketing minds behind a violent sport should have kept their mouths shut.

I’m sure most people would at least agree that this was a poor choice of words by NASCAR’s most-senior management, but is a rule change to allow faster, more aggressive racing “Marketing with Meaning”?

Since its inception, NASCAR fans and outsiders alike have claimed that people watch the sport just to see the wrecks, and by encouraging its drivers to “bang fenders” an incident like this was only a matter of time in coming. It’s the easy knee-jerk reaction by the leaders of a sport who are experiencing their first business decline in several years. Television ratings are down, seats are increasingly empty, and many sponsors and teams have called it quits due to economic pressure.

But I believe that this knee-jerk reaction by NASCAR officials is a poor decision and one that might even worsen ratings and fan engagement if and when this “contact sport” next claims a driver’s life. I’ve seen my fair share of NASCAR races and I actually enjoy and follow the sport. I first got into it back when I worked on the Tide brand at P&G and we had a car. I had the chance to see our drivers race in Indianapolis, Phoenix, Charlotte, and Daytona. I sat in the stands, hung out in the pits, and even got to know our driver, Ricky Craven’s, family. I came to see NASCAR as a sport with fierce competition and passionate people. They fight hard for the checkered flag every Sunday, but they also live together on the road for much of the year, and drivers’ families say prayers at the start of each race that their loved ones make it back alive.

NASCAR rose to greater ratings because it found a spot as a family sport in many American homes. In fact, it was female fans who first started the ratings to rise about a decade ago. In 2004, 42% of NASCAR viewers were female—up from 35% in 1995—and there were more female viewers of these races than for the NFL. That was a big reason why brands such as Tide, Clorox, and M&Ms got into car-sponsorship deals. So any effort to make the sport more violent will likely risk alienating mothers and children from embracing the sport as before.

What can NASCAR do to add meaning to its marketing? Well, for starters, I would find ways to make the sport more interesting and exciting for fans to watch with a cell phone or laptop in the living room. One of the exciting differentiators of NASCAR is that the action is constantly intense and data about everything from speed to tire pressure is created continuously. Fans love the information, but NASCAR has frequently chosen to exact extra fees for access to additional information. I would start by making the in-car audio feeds and track data that it currently charges $30 to $80 a year for free to all. This is something that other sports cannot offer, and I doubt there are many takers of this pricey service.

NASCAR should do something immediately to show its drivers and fans that it is not hoping to encourage more danger in an already intense event—and look for ways to add value for the entire family.

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Thursday 03.04.10

Marketing Lesson from an Oil-Change Business

Bob Gilbreath

village quick lube

I’m a little bit ashamed to not have written about Village Quik Lube in this blog until now. After all, I’ve been writing here for nearly two years, and I pass this little dose of Marketing with Meaning every day when I come and go from work. I guess it was this small business’s new Facebook effort that gave me the final push to feature it here—as another example of how social media best works as a way to bring an entire marketing strategy to life.

Village Quik Lube is a small oil-change business located in Newtown, Ohio, a small suburban Cincinnati village just about 2 miles from my home. The shop is known by everyone around as “the place with the funny sayings”—as the owner of the business updates the sign above a couple of times a week with a new joke. Some are funnier/cornier than others, but every time the sign changes we are compelled to look and laugh. Aside from this sign, the shop has several other remarkable features: There’s a fish pond outside, chairs made up of old-car seats and barber chairs inside, and the parking lot is often the host of grill parties and fund-raisers.

What I love about the Village Quik Lube is that it brings some personality to a business that most people grudgingly tolerate every three months or 3,000 miles. Most of us are used to going into the cookie-cutter Jiffy Lube and car-dealership services, which feel more like a trip to the dentist. Just like these competitors, Village Quik Lube has a convenient location and all of the periodic maintenance services we expect at a fair price. But this business spends the time between our visits making us smile on an otherwise boring commute. We appreciate the owner’s attempt to lighten our day, which leaves us almost looking forward to making the stop in for an oil change and tire rotation. All it takes is some time to think up the signs and change them a few times a week.

So it’s no wonder that Village Quik Lube has gone into social media with a fan page on Facebook. Interestingly, Facebook offers a direct transfer of the company’s “offline” marketing strategy for the online world. Facebook has become the virtual vehicle of our daily commute, so of course people who enjoy driving by and stopping at the shop would want to continue the relationship online.

But Facebook offers benefits that the signs and store itself cannot do alone. For example, the owner recently asked his 200-plus members if they would like to see some of the ideas for signs that were a little too racy for the road. I learned that he actually gets complaints on certain topics and has toned down the humor over the years. Of course the members said “yes”—and we were treated to jewels like:

“Did… you hear about the new vitamin just for men sold only at golf pro shops? It’s called Tiger Wood.”

Of course this one is a little too daring for the G-rated public thoroughfare, but I laughed out loud at this and some of the others I found on Facebook.

Reading further, I got to see photos from this intersection in 1970 “when there were cows grazing in the field nearby.” I saw that the shop staff is thinking about raffling off the chance to drive a demolition-derby car. And I learned how the owner was told by a Quaker State executive that his store would be out of business within six months; that was 12 years ago.

If you really think about it, Village Quik Lube is not new to social media because of its Facebook presence. Rather, this is a business that has always been about social media. Its goal is to make people smile and give back to the community. In return, it earns loyalty and positive word of mouth. Digital social media is just an evolution of what it has been doing successfully for 12 years.

When I read about the brands that are doing the most in social media, it seems to mainly be small businesses such as Zappos and the Kogi Korean BBQ truck. They have succeeded by starting out in social media and created businesses around this core approach, rather than just bolting on a Twitter feed or having an agency monitor buzz.

I believe there has never been a better time to start a business than the present. Large companies’ advantages in mass scale are falling away as people become more interested in niche products and meaningful brands—and marketing is as simple as telling your story on a blog, tweet, or Facebook page. The future of business might look like millions of passionate owners connecting with a handful of customers by adding value through products, services, and marketing.

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Tuesday 03.02.10

Olympics a Meaningful Marketing Windfall for NHL

Bob Gilbreath

Vancouver Olympics Ice Hockey

One of the interesting industries to cover from a marketing perspective is that of major sports leagues. The product (games) and brands (teams) receive tremendous attention and attract rabid, lifelong fans. But most of the marketing of these leagues gets little attention. We see constant SportsCenter coverage, hear that rules changes are made to the game, and might see 30-second ads to hype the leagues’ stars, but overall the marketing staff sits far down on the bench. As these leagues fight for fans in a fragmenting media market, good marketing is more important than ever. League commissioners and team owners had better wake up to this reality and invest in giving fans what they want. The National Hockey League’s (NHL) tenuous participation in the Winter Olympics is one example of where a new mentality is needed.

The NHL first took an official two-week break during the Olympics so that their stars could play for their home countries in 1998, which was 10 years after professionals were first allowed into the games. But every four years since then the NHL has warned that it might not continue this way in the future. This year, for example, NHL commissioner Gary Bettman was unenthusiastic about this year’s games in Vancouver—and he casts doubt on whether he will allow players to attend the 2014 games in Sochi, Russia. He claims that the break slows down momentum of the sport, and interest in games at odd hours in Russia won’t get much interest anyway.

But what Bettman completely misses is the reality that the NHL is not as popular as it has been (or could be) and the Olympics are perhaps the league’s greatest marketing asset. The Olympics bring the attention of the world, and hockey is one of the marquee events that gets the highest buzz. This translates to ratings that are significantly higher than even the NHL Finals.

For example, the USA versus Canada matchup in the preliminary round brought 8.2 million views to MSNBC. That’s the most viewers for MSNBC since the presidential election night, and the most people in the U.S. to watch a hockey game since the 1973 Stanley Cup!  And for the Gold Medal rematch game, half of all Canadians tuned in along with 27 million Americans.  That’s more U.S. viewers than any World Series game since 2004 and more than any NCAA basketball Final Four since 1998.

Olympic hockey is a great example of Marketing with Meaning. It exposes the world to the sport, showcases the best players and personalities (who play in the NHL), and wraps it up in the flag of national pride and Olympic glory. It is the equivalent of the annual All-Star break, but means so much more for those looking on.

Ironically, the NHL has had some success in recent years by bending its rules and embracing change. In my book I share the example of how the NHL began a new traditional called The Winter Classic, in which a regular-season game is played between two teams in an outdoor stadium on New Year’s Day. The first game in 2008 drew more than 70,000 paying fans and outstanding TV ratings.

So why would Gary Bettman downplay the Olympics when they are renewing passion about the sport and likely boosting ratings for the second half of the season? At least one sports analyst claims that it comes down to money. Bettman and his owners don’t like their stadiums shut down and their players boosting the Olympics’ business for two weeks. But that’s incredibly shortsided. It reminds me of how the NFL penalizes cities that cannot afford to fill their stadiums by blacking out games from regular fans.

I believe that sports owners and league commissioners hurt themselves and their fans repeatedly because of a combination of hubris and a lack of marketing understanding. The hubris comes from owners’ typically large bank accounts and the fact that cities identify with their teams so closely. As evidence of the latter point, Forbes created a list of “America’s 20 Most Miserable Cities,” and frequently cited poor sports team performance as a key misery maker.

But it is ignorance of marketing fundamentals that truly hurts these franchises and the fans. Here’s hoping that the NHL and other sports leagues remember that they exist for the enjoyment of the fans, not short-term maximums in ticket sales and other fees. If you take care of fans over the long term, they will take care of you. It’s a lesson for those in the sports business, and in any business for that matter.

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Thursday 02.25.10

P&G, Olympics: A Meaningful Sports Partnership

Bob Gilbreath


Early this week I got a random email from a publication that was looking for me to weigh in on sports sponsorships and whether they are declining or changing due to economic pressure. Luckily, I just happened to have walked out of an all-company meeting in which our P&G team here at Bridge Worldwide shared their contribution to the Procter & Gamble Olympic Winter Games partnership—a tribute to Moms that brilliantly ties together multiple brands in a meaningful way.

In the past I have been fairly unkind to sports tie-ins in this blog. For example, a while back I criticized the practice using the example of State Farm’s naming sponsorship of the Major League Baseball Home Run Derby during All Star weekend. At best, most sponsorships are just the 3,001st meaningless ad impression that a consumer might see on a given day. At worst, and as Seth Godin suggests, they are a way for marketers to get a free trip to a game.

However I genuinely love the work that P&G has done on a corporate basis around this year’s Olympic Winter Games. If you’ve been watching the games, you have certainly seen a number of TV commercials for P&G products such as Bounty, Tide, and Olay. While it’s true that I’m not a fan of this kind of advertising, I have to admit that pooling together multiple brands for a single media buy is a smart approach to making the medium work harder.

But what is really special is how the company decided to make its partnership and mass media buy meaningful by embracing Moms. As part of its Olympics effort, the company is specifically directing funds toward the mothers of Team USA athletes in a program titled “Thank You Mom.” This “cause” within an Olympics partnership recognizes that the economy has made it tougher for families to afford to travel to see their kids’ special moments. It is also a perfect tie to the company and its brands—most of which target mothers and are used by mothers for years in raising their children.

To bring deliver on the promise and address mothers’ needs. P&G is providing funds earmarked toward helping athletes’ families travel to the games in the form of debit cards that have gone to more than 200 individuals. The company also set up a special home in Vancouver near the games that provides a place for families to gather before and after events. (It’s a little-known issue that families can’t come into the Olympic Village where athletes stay.) And to honor these special mothers—and build a connection to mothers everywhere—P&G is using some of its media time for a series of truly tear-jerking videos. More than 130,000 people have chosen to view the video above so far on YouTube.  Kudos to Wieden+Kennedy for the nice work.

Online, our team helped activate the partnership with additional meaningful elements. There is the opportunity to download a $100 coupon book, which will help directly link the program to sales results. And we added content that cannot be found elsewhere—including video interviews with Olympic Winter Games athletes’ moms, and blog recaps and live Twitter reports from the games. If you are touched by the content and tribute, you can even send a thank-you note to your own mother with this tool.

There are plenty of big companies such as Visa and McDonalds that are back at the Olympics again, and they have also purchased a lot of commercial time with game-themed ads. But I haven’t seen anyone who has worked to do something special, memorable, or meaningful with their large commitment. The bonus for P&G, should it choose to continue sponsoring in years to come, is that it can “own” this idea around embracing the unsung mothers and make future events bigger and better. And we hope to help continue this new tradition!

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Tuesday 02.23.10

Hotel Seeds TripAdvisor Reviews

Bob Gilbreath

intercontinental trip advis

When checking out of an InterContinental Hotel in Toronto a few weeks ago, I encountered a new tactic in the sphere of social-media marketing. The woman at reception inquired about my stay, and I replied that it was pleasant (especially after she let me delay my checkout so I could get some work done in the room). Then she handed me the document above and explained that if I left a review on TripAdvisor, the hotel would provide me with a complimentary upgrade the next time I stayed there. I thought it was a very interesting approach to seeding reviews, and something I’m sure we will all see a lot more of in the years ahead.

Obviously, when a hotel rewards a customer just for leaving a review, it’s got to be Marketing with Meaning. The first, obvious benefit is that the customer has a chance to get a free upgrade at the hotel just for leaving a review and printing it out. A nice freebie such as this is always appreciated, and the hotel benefits by potentially locking in future stays by a recurring business traveler. The cost of an upgrade is likely very small as long as there are rooms available.

But the other great thing about asking for customer feedback is that this request itself makes people feel better about how they choose to spend their money at a key moment of truth. When we sign the bill at a restaurant or check out of a hotel, we are making both conscious and unconscious decisions about whether we would come back again. By visibly showing she cared with a physical card and direct offer, the hotel receptionist was planting a positive seed in my mind.

Flash forward to when someone such as me logs on to TripAdvisor to leave a review, and one is predisposed to want to say something positive. After all, the hotel cared so much that it was encouraging me to offer my opinion in a positive place. Even if things were not great, people will be more likely to give a company the benefit of the doubt in such circumstances. This reminds me of a study I read about how doctors who are nicer to their patients are significantly less likely to be sued for malpractice. And if all else fails, the fact that you have to print off your feedback and show it to the receptionist when you return means that you would be embarrassed to be too negative in a review.

I am a firm believer that the act of leaving a review is one of the strongest ways for “marketing” to make an impact on customers’ brand loyalty. Reviews take time, conscious thought, and a realization that what you say will be read by other people—forever. This combination of factors builds strong, positive neural links in the mind. A traditional advertising “impression,” which leaves the short-term memory bank quickly, pales in comparison to this kind of connection.

And, of course, the final and possibly most important marketing benefit of this review program is that the InterContinental Yorkville has a much higher chance of receiving multiple, positive reviews on TripAdvisor, a leading online resource for trip planning. Reviews are rapidly becoming the main way that customers discover and decide on hotel choices. And if you really think about it, maybe the InterContinental should be putting 100% of its marketing budget into seeking more and better reviews. Millions of dollars of print ads in Sky magazine and billboards in airports can’t touch the power of landing “above the fold” on a review website where people are in buying mode. How would you allocate your dollars to ensure better reviews? Easy, you just hire the best people you can find and ensure that guests love their experience. In other words, you put your marketing dollars into the service itself.

I don’t know how long this program has been in use by the hotel, but it has a nice spot on the site as of this blog post. It is rated #6 out of more than 100 hotels in Toronto, and it has 167 total reviews.

If there’s anything negative here, it is that the users of TripAdvisor might not be getting the true, impartial reviews that they are expecting when people are biased by positive seeding such as this example. Interestingly, a growing body of examples shows that the average rating on product- and service-review sites is 4.0 out of 5.0 stars. In other words, everyone is above average when it comes to ratings. (We call this the Lake Wobegon effect.) But at the end of the day people are smart, and we all learn to seek multiple opinions and assume that people are predisposed to be either overly enthusiastic or negative in their reviews.

Kudos to the InterContinental Hotel in Yorkville/Toronto. I plan on staying there the next time I’m in town and encourage you to do the same.

(For more on the power of product reviews, check out this post on an email follow-up we did on a Healthy Choice coupon offer.)

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Thursday 02.18.10

Must Viral Videos Start with a :30?

Bob Gilbreath

Last week the folks at our office were passing around links to the commercial above from Old Spice. It’s another manly ad from the brand’s agency, Wieden+Kennedy, and it certainly earned lots of LOLs in our office space. I personally found it amusing but very rushed. Many of the words are said so quickly that I missed them and had to go back. I wondered why the pace was so quick, until I began to recall sitting in an editing suite reviewing commercials with my then-agency when I used to be a brand manager at P&G. It came together for me when I looked down at the total time of the video on the corner of the screen and saw :30. Yep, this was a TV commercial also uploaded to YouTube.

Now, let me begin by saying that I don’t have an incredibly strong opinion on this case. Regular readers know that I usually come down hard one way or the other in these blog posts. But in this situation I have more of a working theory to air—and I’m not soft-pedaling just because Old Spice is a brand from one of our big clients, Procter & Gamble, and one of my long-time friends works on the brand.

My working theory is that starting with the 30-second ad is no longer the right way to do branded video. Note first that I am talking “branded video” instead of “commercials.” I think a lot of smart marketers and agencies are starting to reset how they think about “sight, sound, and motion” and are defining their success by whether or not people are choosing to view and share their marketing, rather than the number of impressions that can be bought.

My point is this: In a world in which it is more important for people to choose to engage with video, you can work without the confines of a 30-second box. One of the best early examples is BMW films, which became a DVD series. Other examples range from Will It Blend to the recent Coca-Cola Happiness Factory that I blogged about a few days ago. In these cases the focus is on creating video that people enjoy viewing. With this freedom, filmmakers can go to two minutes and far beyond. Remember, 30 seconds is no magical measure of the ideal consumer attention span—but rather a number that worked for TV networks to slam in multiple messages between content breaks.

So it feels to me that Old Spice and its agency started with the 30-second hole to fill and fought to push its funny content into the box, rather than making the most fun video possible, posting that online, and then, perhaps, placing an edited version onto the TV screen. Then again, people have chosen to view the Old Spice video on YouTube about 1.5 million times (and counting). I might be wrong. What do you think?

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Tuesday 02.16.10

Must We GRP-ize the Tweet?

Bob Gilbreath

05_Flatbed_2 - MAY

This week our strategy team got up in arms around a question from a partner agency that focuses on traditional (i.e., non-digital) marketing, and I felt it was worth sharing and discussing here. The agency was working on a project for one of their clients and asked the question: “What percentage of tweets are seen?” The data team at this agency was sitting down to build an algorithm to model tweet impressions and was looking for our digital/social expert opinion. An interesting question, indeed, and an example of how much baggage we need to overcome to move to the next evolution of marketing.

First, to address the question directly, our own Jonathan Richman provided some insights on the challenges of measuring how many people see a given Twitter message. He brought up the points that tweet readership varies by the time of day, how many people retweet a message, how many followers they have, the number of lists people might be on, the use of hashtags (#), and the types of Twitter API readers that people are using. There are challenges such as the fact that the more people you follow and more people who follow you, there are more “impression opportunities” but the ability to pay attention to any one of the individual tweets goes down. Richman’s answer as to how you can calculate all of these impacts: You can’t.

I added my own two cents to his response: You shouldn’t.

I didn’t have to ask my partner agency for an explanation to see what they were trying to do for their client. In the traditional marketing world that still dominates, clients want to measure marketing in common terms. For years this least common denominator has been the “impression”; brands have bought TV, print, and radio ads in the cost-per-thousand-impressions format, which allows them to compare spending across any form of interruptive media. In theory, this also helps marketers decide where to focus their budgets and time. Our industry’s most-frequent response to new media is to try and stuff it into the box of old media, so that dollars can flow from one to the other with confidence. So the question: How many impressions does each tweet receive?

So lots of very smart people are now spending their time modeling impressions per tweet, just because it’s the model we’re used to. The very obvious problem is that this is the wrong way to measure new media and new marketing that tools such as Twitter are bringing to brands. If we want to win in a world of exploding social change and killer competition, we must invent new measurement models rather than forcing ourselves through something that means less and less.

Last fall I wrote about how we marketers must abandon the common yet meaningless measure of impressions and instead begin to measure engagement—a key step on the path to Marketing with Meaning. Engagement to most of us in the industry occurs when a customer chooses to spend time interacting with marketing. It’s actually something that can be measured across all media as well. You can count the number of people who, say, choose to watch your YouTube video, subscribe to your email list, or become a fan of your brand on Facebook. Sorry, you do have to do a little more modeling to gauge the value of these different types of engagement—but this is how we marketers must earn our salaries, rather than just turning our jobs over to algorithms and up-fronts.

So instead of trying to count how many people view a branded tweet so that we can compare impressions to TV and print, how about we count something related to engagement? On Twitter, this would be the number of people who sign up for a brand’s Twitter feed, click on a brand-related URL through Twitter, mention the brand in Twitter posts, or retweet something about a brand. These are all examples of customers choosing to engage with a brand and share it with their friends. These activities (note the root “active” versus “impression”) show times when someone is consciously, choicefully dialed into your brand.

And, of course, we could develop similar metrics for traditional advertising. We could count the number of times people subscribe to your commercials on their TV sets, or how many people bring in print ads and hand them to their friends. Wait a minute: You can’t do that. No one does that. Which is exactly the point.

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