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Marketing Lesson from an Oil-Change Business

Thursday, March 4th, 2010

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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Posted in Connection, small business | 3 Comments »

Coke Captures a Moment of Happiness

Thursday, January 21st, 2010


I believe that one of the biggest opportunities for Marketing with Meaning lies with brands that are used to spending a lot of money on traditional advertising campaigns that have historically been launched mainly to remind people that the brands exist. Instead, they have an opportunity to create marketing that people choose to engage with and advertising that itself adds value to people’s lives. A few weeks ago I wrote about how brands that lack innovation can win by adding value, and last year this article I wrote in Adweek showed how brands such as Gatorade and Ask.com have hurt sales by continuing to trot out new ad campaigns. One company that is gradually moving forward on the meaningful marketing scale is Coca-Cola—and the video above is just its latest chapter in its next evolution.

Coca-Cola has been one of the biggest traditional advertisers out there, but I do believe it is turning itself into a meaningful marketing machine. In my book I included the examples of its Happiness Factory mini-movies, and its industry-leading Coke Rewards loyalty program. The company got into entertaining iPhone apps quickly. And in Cannes in July I wrote up the example of its new interactive vending machines.

I believe the biggest lesson here is that Coke has focused its Brand Purpose on “Creating Happiness.” If you step back and think about what the Coca-Cola product aspires to do, it tries to create a moment of happiness in an otherwise regular day. Traditionally the company has tried to inspire happiness through its marketing by showing carefully crafted ads with actors playing out scenes in commercials. In truth, this viral video is not too far away from an “ad”—but the key difference is that we see Coca-Cola doing something fun in the real world, and we smile, LOL, and forward this video to friends.

There is another smaller, yet important lesson here around how in-person, guerrilla marketing efforts can go viral and gain scale when you capture them on video. This mirrors the approach by Burger King in its award-winning Whopper Freakout campaign. In both cases the production quality and editing of this piece is fantastic, we see real people and reactions rather than scripted actors, and we actually can see and feel the fun for ourselves.

Of course we have no way of seeing if this video sells six-packs, but the YouTube results suggest this effort was worth the cost of a video crew and handful of props. When I first saw this video on its first day, Tuesday, January 12, there were about 40,000 views. Writing this post on Sunday, January 17 it was up to 400,000. That’s a lot of people choosing to engage with an ad, and coming away with a much more positive connection with the brand. And it’s even more evidence that billion-dollar traditional brands can make the move to Marketing with Meaning.

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Posted in Connection, Entertainment, purpose, video | 1 Comment »

Healthy Choice Offers “One Little Review”

Monday, November 23rd, 2009

healthy choice review

(Today Megan West, one of our rising star strategic planners, takes over for a guest blog post about a program that she and our ConAgra Foods team at Bridge Worldwide led for the Healthy Choice brand. I think this is another example of how social media is not a strategy, but rather offers many tactics that can help deliver better results on a strong overall marketing strategy. For more examples see my previous posts on Golden Tee, Estee Lauder, and MoMA.)

In September 2009, Healthy Choice launched a new TV spot featuring Julia Louis-Dreyfus, in which the main call to action was to drive consumers to the brand website to print a high-value coupon. This was a first for our Healthy Choice team, and the number of people who would actually visit the site was a complete unknown. To be clear, this wasn’t just a 3-second tag or 10-point font callout at the end of the spot, but Julia Louis-Dreyfus herself telling people to go print a coupon online.

This was big. We were going to give away massive amounts of $2 printable coupons for two Healthy Choice products. And we also saw an opportunity to capitalize on this influx of visitors by giving them an opportunity to register for the Healthy Choice relationship marketing program after they printed, which offers a promise of more offers and goodies in their inbox.

Because this campaign was about trial of the new Healthy Choice products, getting a bunch of new registrants into the database was a tertiary benefit for many of the key stakeholders on the brand. But the digital team challenged itself to make sure these new people stayed active and engaged with the brand far beyond a commercial message and coupon redemption.

The Idea: Bite-Sized Reviews

We saw an opportunity to hit our trial goals and build long-term loyalty by implementing a “Bite-Size” review program. Here’s how it works:

  • Two weeks after printing the coupon (i.e., enough time to go to the store, redeem it, and try the meal), consumers who registered for the Healthy Choice newsletter are sent a welcome email.
  • The email invites them to come give a mini-review of what they thought about the product in exchange for another coupon. We offer $1 off any two products to encourage repeat purchase of different varieties.
  • At the review site, consumers choose the product they tried, rate it, and post a 140-character or fewer review of what they think.

healthy choice review 2

They then get a preview of the review and the opportunity to share their review in real time by pushing it out via their personal Twitter or Facebook accounts. The tool makes it simple for consumers to sign into their account and update their status.

We put a lot of thought into what information we want them to be able to share via Twitter. As marketers, our immediate thought was, “Make sure to get the URL in there,” but after really thinking about the true objective of pushing out reviews (awareness for the products), we decided to leave it off to give consumers more space to write their review.

Why It’s Meaningful for Consumers:

  • It sends them an email soon after signing up, showing that the brand is going to deliver on the promise of “More Offers” and validating their reason for signing up.
  • It gives consumers a chance to post their actual thoughts about the products they tried, with no content censorship by the brand. This lets people know that the brand believes in its products and really wants to know what people think about them.

How It Delivers Marketing Results for the Brand:

  • It leverages our consumers’ social-media networks to build awareness of the brands’ products in the form of actual consumer language.
  • It keeps news registrants active and delights them with additional offers and a chance to share their thoughts, hopefully turning them into brand advocates.
  • The brand soon hopes to launch a Rating and Review section for all of the products on HealthyChoice.com (because they have recently re-launched the brand with all new food formulas and tasty new dishes!), and this helps us to build a repository of “seed” reviews that can pre-populate that section. We planned for this by asking consumers who submit reviews to agree to let Healthy Choice publish them for marketing materials later.

It’s far too early to report in results of this campaign and the specific review tool, and this gets into the area where we want to keep data confidential, anyway. But you can see for yourself the amount of reviews posted to Twitter by checking out the responses to @Healthy_Choice. As you can see, the reviews are starting to come in nicely in terms of amount and reaction. Taking just one example, @debbiemekler says: “Tried @Healthy_Choice Grilled Chicken Marinara. Tasty and well-seasoned. Would try move in the future.” This great, personal review went out to her 50 followers, who trust what she says as word of mouth, not advertising.

This goes to show that brands can benefit by finding ways to turn traditional marketing programs such as coupon offers into a way to tap into consumers’ growing desire to share socially.

healthy choice review 3

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Posted in Connection, Coupons, Social Networking, Solution | 1 Comment »

Golden Tee Video Game Extends Experience with YouTube

Friday, November 6th, 2009

golden tee youtube

A few weeks ago I was having a beer with a friend at a local watering hole, and something caught my eye in the background. It was a YouTube logo that flashed on the screen of the Golden Tee virtual golf video game machine behind our table. Being a passionate meaningful marketer and always on the lookout for a new blog entry, I ran over to the game to check it out. I discovered a very cool add-on to this ever-popular bar game.

One of my personal goals in my job as head of strategy at digital agency Bridge Worldwide is to convince my clients that they don’t necessarily need a “social-media strategy.” Yes, heretical as it might sound, social media such as Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube are all important and offer great marketing opportunities, but that does not necessitate a specific “strategy.” Rather, we should stick to strong overall marketing strategies, and discover ways in which new social-media tools might fulfill a need or take advantage of an opportunity. A few months ago I made this point here and used an example from New York’s Museum of Modern Art to show how great social-media ideas can deliver on a solid marketing strategy. Let me try that exercise again here in an effort to continue to make my case.

Background

Golden Tee is a coin-operated (i.e., arcade-style) golfing game that was introduced in 1989 . The game is produced by Incredible Technologies, the largest producer of these types of games in the world. Golden Tee is its biggest platform, and there is an update to the game system each year. Just like producers of home sports games such as Madden NFL and Tiger Woods PGA Tour, Golden Tee must add must-have features to its game system each year in order to keep players and bars interested.

Business Objective

Like real-world golf, Golden Tee (GT) is not for everyone. It is played in bars, standing up, with loud music in your ears. It takes some time and skill to master the roller ball used to hit the ball. It also sucks a lot more quarters from your pocket than what casual users are used to. In my personal experience, it normally attracts two or three guys who spend hours at a time on the machine pumping dollars into it.

My assumption would be that the company has a very thin number of customers who are responsible for a vast majority of the playing time. So GT’s business objective is likely something close to: Increase the playing time and occasions among regular customers. This puts more dollars into the machines for GT, and bars love their share of the cut and added drink and food sales, ensuring that they make the move to the annual game upgrade. And it is a business objective that is very easy to measure.

Customer Insights

First, these regular players are very competitive. They spend hours on the game going against close friends, and I’ve seen rampant wagering (often for the next round of brews). There is even a national tournament for GT players. One thing you have to know about competitive players of ANY game is that they love to remember and share the stories of their greatest feats. Basketball players remember their greatest shots. Regular golfers love to talk about their longest drive or first birdie. I will never forget taking the lead for my team at 5 a.m. in the Bourbon Chase run a few weeks ago. That’s the key insight for passionate players of any game or sport. The more we remember and share, the more the game becomes a special part of our lives, and the more we will (pay to) play.

Strategy/Execution

Put these together and the strategy is simple: Find ways to help regular users remember and share their greatest shots. But how do we deliver on this idea? Back in my days of playing at arcades this would be a real head-scratcher. The closest thing I can remember from those days was that Activision had a program in which if you got a certain high score on one of its Atari 2600 games, you could take a photo, develop it, and mail a copy to the company, and months later they would send you a commemorative patch. I still have a towel that I sewed all my patches on somewhere (unless my mom or wife has disposed of it by now).

Here’s where digital and social media come in: They give marketers unprecedented tools that allow them to deliver on strategies in amazingly rich and cost-effective ways. Golden Tee now flags certain “Great Shots” in the game (holes in one, for example) and provides players with a code that they can use to see and save a replay of the shot on their computers back at home. GT uses YouTube, a free, ubiquitous service that allows the company to organize all of its videos and provides players with a way to share them on their personal websites and social-networking profiles. Here’s one completely random example of a Great Shot from a player named “sixfootsixbrad”:

Results

The folks at Golden Tee have not shared results that I can find about the program or how it has affected their sales, but that won’t stop me from trying to measure it. On the Golden Tee YouTube channel, more than 58,000 videos have been uploaded by players. Most videos have anywhere between a handful and 100 views, and the most-viewed one has more than 7,000. My guess would be that there have been at least 1 million collective views of these user-generated videos in the year or so that the tool has been in use. If this is compared to the many other user-generated video contests, it would be at or near the top in terms of total participation and views. Not bad at all.

More evidence of success of the program is seen in the recent upgrade to Golden Tee 2010. Now the game maker has added the ability to update your Facebook status through the game itself.

The Lesson

The folks at Golden Tee might or might not have gone through my specific steps to come up with the idea of integrating with YouTube. However, I would bet a lot of quarters that they also didn’t pay an agency to “come up with a social-media strategy.” The company might very well have simply come up with this idea out of the blue, but it was a deep understanding of their marketing strategy and consumer needs that led them in this direction.

Brand managers don’t need a social-media strategy. They need to understand what social media is and what it can do for brands and their customers. Then, by laying out strong marketing strategies, they might find new and powerful ways to deliver on them.

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Posted in Connection, Contests, Experience, Games, Social Networking | 3 Comments »

Phish Has Halloween Fun and Serves Marketing Lessons

Monday, November 2nd, 2009

phish festival 8

Last week I wrote a recap about how BlackBerry bombed in its “love” for the band U2. At the end of that post I praised U2 both for putting on a great show and for giving it away for free on YouTube. Today I wanted to share the story of how a band at the other end of the musical spectrum, Phish, continues to draw loyal fans by adding fun experiences to the period leading up to its shows. Phish’s annual Halloween act shows how entertainment properties must keep their act fresh, and I believe there are lessons for any brand in how to be meaningful by just having fun with your fans.

Jessi Link, one of our search stars, clued me into the Phish Halloween experience recently and I was very impressed. Every year the band plays a “festival” in which it is the only band. It usually goes over a few days around Halloween and there is a buildup for very loyal fans around where they will play and what they will play.

For this, the 8th year, Phish decided to have a little more fun with their audience. The band started out by putting up a map of the U.S. and an announcement to “Save the Dates” of October 30 through November 1. On the Phish: Festival 8 website, the band gradually removed states from the map over a series of days to narrow down where they would actually be playing. Of course the removal had to be done in Phish style; for example, some were carried away by ants, others were turned over by Vanna White, and one floated off with a hot-air balloon. You can see one screenshot of the map in progress below. Eventually the state of California was unveiled as well as the specific venue: the Empire Polo Fields in the city of Indio.

phish savethdate

But that was not the only suspense around the annual Phish fest. Another Halloween tradition of the band is to play what they call a “musical costume” each year, which is an entire set from another band’s specific album. Past show “costumes” have included The Who’s Quadrophenia and The Beatles White Album. Like the disappearing-states act, Phish put up 100 different albums on a virtual board and gradually “killed” them until there was only one “left alive.” After some teasing around Michael Jackson’s Thriller, Saturday night the band played The Rolling Stones’ 1972 double album, Exile on Main St.

Reports say that around 40,000 fans attended the Phish event Halloween night. Not bad for a band that has played thousands of times and doesn’t have a single major hit record or song. Instead, Phish plays great music for a loyal following, and understands that the more they have fun with their shows and their fans, the more successful they will be.

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Posted in Connection, Entertainment, Experience | 1 Comment »

Dunkin’ with Meaning

Friday, September 18th, 2009

dunkin with meaning

Regular readers know that I’m a big fan of any marketing campaign that gives people the chance to squeeze their creative juices in and around a brand.  So it should be no surprise to hear that my favorite case study from the iMedia Brand Summit where I spoke this week was the “Create Dunkin’s Next Donut Contest.”  The case was presented by Cynthia Ashworth, Dunkin’ Donuts VP of Consumer Engagement (a title the audience loved).  It was obviously not the first “make your own product” contest, but the results show that people’s hunger to be creative and make a brand their own can never be satiated.

Business Challenge

In 2008, Dunkin’ Donuts saw the donut consumption rate among its core users drop.  The main cause was the concern about carbs and growth of the Atkins diet. Franchises were looking for help from the corporate brand to increase sales of this key profit and passion driver.  The company took several measures to improve, including various promotions and some new product launches, but a bigger marketing pop was required to jump-start sales.

Insight

Dunkin’ Donuts ran research with lapsed donut buyers.  They found that there were two key drivers of their love of donuts: (1) variety of choices and continuous new options, and (2) nostalgia for simpler times and basic pleasures.  The marketing team identified a “sweet spot” for its efforts to do something that rekindled these desires for variety and nostalgia.

Solution

The brand responded with “Create Dunkin’s Next Donunt,” a chance for the company’s core fans to have a hand in adding to the variety of the lineup, while triggering nostalgic memories of their first Dunkin’ Donuts experiences.  PR, TV, in-store, and out-of-home advertising drove fans to a very slick online donut creator developed by our WPP sister agency, Studiocom. Of course, the agency included a bevy of ways to share creations via social media. Many of the 12 finalists actually created and drove traffic to their own Facebook pages, which they used to solicit votes.

There were four key opportunities for press coverage and consumer engagement in the campaign: the contest announcement, the start of the contest, the vote for finalists, and the announcement of the winner. The winner turned out to be Jeff Hagar, with his creation, “Toffee for Your Coffee.”  Here’s a YouTube video from the brand that offers a great recap of the contest:

Results

The contest was an unqualified success.  In terms of engagement, there were 129,000 entries and 174,000 votes, and people spent an average of nine minutes on the site.  There were 90 million national media impressions (a $10 million marketing value). An online media plan was cut after three days because traffic was already far ahead of expectations. Franchises chose to get very engaged in the program, and supported it with more contests and offers in store.

The business results followed this strong engagement. Dunkin’ Donuts enjoyed its highest sales since December 2007. According to Cynthia Ashworth:

“The sales volume was huge, and all of our donut metrics during this period were through the roof.  America’s in love with donuts again.”

Conclusion

In my book, I spend several pages writing about how brands can forge meaningful connections with customers by allowing them to be creative, personalize their brand experience, and share with others.  I talk about how brands such as Kroger, M&M’s, Jones Soda, LEGO, The Simpsons Movie, and Pringles have all seen strong marketing results from this way of meaningful engagement with customers.  The core reason for success again and again is that people are literally putting themselves into the brand when they have a chance to co-create. Instead of just leaving a dull “impression” with traditional, interruptive advertising, customers who co-create a brand build a deep link to the core of what makes them who they are.  And they often cannot resist sharing their creations–and a little piece of themselves–with the friends and family in their digital worlds.

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Posted in Connection, Experience, Personalization, Restaurants | 5 Comments »

Starbucks Supplies Free Music and Drinks

Monday, July 27th, 2009

Last week I stopped into the Starbucks that I drive by nearly every day on my 20-minute commute to work. It was the first time I had been to this store in several months, and my first Starbucks visit of any kind in at least eight weeks. During that time I’ve been away, Starbucks seems to have been working hard to win back regular customers in a tough economy, and a few small signs of life suggest that this customer at least might be visiting more often.

There were two pleasantly unexpected examples of meaningful marketing that I encountered on this visit. First, when I was handed a receipt for my Vente Coffee with hazelnut, the server said that if I returned to any Starbucks today I could show the receipt and get a free Grande cold drink. This is a smart promotion in that it rewards purchase, plus helps drive in a second visit and perhaps an afternoon-visit habit.

I found the second bonus when I went over to load my cream and sugar choices at the toppings bar. (Is there a better name for that?) There was a small display of cards (see above) offering a Starbucks and iTunes “Pick of the Week” song. In this case it was a new Dave Matthews Band tune called “Write a Song” from their new album, Big Whiskey and the GrooGrux King. All I had to do was redeem a code on iTunes and I was enjoying free music from a band I love. This is actually an ongoing weekly promotion, with a new free song every Tuesday. The idea of free music at Starbucks is particularly new because the stores are infamous for pushing CDs on its visitors at every corner.

These are two small examples of meaningful marketing, but they suggest that the company is working hard to win our business back. It makes me want to stop into Starbucks on my daily drive more often to check out what new surprises the store has brewed up. And that’s exactly what the company is hoping for. Maybe there’s life in Starbucks yet.

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Posted in Connection, Sampling | 3 Comments »

Celebrating Pringles Cannes Hands

Monday, June 29th, 2009

As most marketing readers likely know, last week was the annual Cannes Advertising Festival in France—unarguably the world’s most prominent advertising industry get-together, where the brightest creative minds in our business gather to compare the best work over the past 12 months. Last year I got to attend for the first time (with blog posts here if you’re interested), but this year I was on vacation in Italy with my family instead of Cannes.

I missed one of the biggest moments of the history of my company, Bridge Worldwide, when our team won a Gold Cyber Lions award for the Pringles banner ad above. While “only” a banner, this remarkable little ad unit offers a great case study in meaningful marketing for both B2C and B2B.

The Consumer Story: Once You Click, You Can’t Stop

Before reading any further, go ahead and click on the banner above. A new window will open to our staging server where you can see our banner in context, just like the judges at Cannes did. Spend as much or as little time interacting with it and return here to keep reading…

…Welcome back. If you’re anything like the Cannes award judges or the thousands of other people who have viewed this ad online in the past few days, you enjoyed, too. Our team created a banner ad that makes people laugh for a few minutes, and then share it with their friends online. This happens to be a perfect fit with what the Pringles brand itself is all about: a few minutes of fun, and sharing with friends.

What I love about this ad is that it takes banner space that most people ignore or find annoying, and turns it into a fun, engaging moment of play with the brand. That five minutes of fun is rewarding for the viewer who chooses to engage with it, falling under a category of meaningful marketing that we call “Entertaining Connections.”

Aside from great data on clicks and time spent with the ad, we measure its success in the word of mouth that it is drawing. Since winning the award and posting the ad on our staging server we are seeing a steady, growing number of people discovering the ad and sharing it with their social networks. Twitter in particular is becoming the barometer of the buzz, and I’m seeing about one person per minute Twittering about the ad with 100% positive comments. Here’s a sample of some of my favorite recent comments from search.twitter.com:

  • @steveklabnik: Best. Ad. Ever.  Pringles are amazing.
  • @MegLG: A banner ad that is actually engaging…Can hands: Pringles. I probably just made someone a million $ for clicking so much.
  • @lisahattery: Bored? Go here…Click on the banner ad. Keep clicking. It’s not spam or porn, I swear. I want Pringles.
  • @floatnsink: This is probably the best & only advertisement that I want to click.
  • @stuartwitts: Award winning banner ad from Pringles. Great work. Can’t remember last time a banner ad made me laugh.
  • @adamcoomes: Best banner ad I’ve ever seen. This is hilarious! Props to Pringles.
  • @hunterupton: please please PLEASE! check out this banner ad. Hilarious Pringles! it’s the best i’ve ever seen!

The Cannes judges agreed completely. In a video that was shown during the Cyber Lions event Wednesday night, they said they each spent 5 minutes on the banner, laughing out loud at their desks. Our Pringles banner was one of only 19 Gold Lions that were awarded in the entire digital category, and only six of these went to U.S.-based agencies. But what are awards for, anyway…?

It’s Starting to Go Viral

Over the weekend we started to notice comments and traffic to our staging server spike. We worked to post links on Fark, Digg, Reddit, BuzzFeed, and other places. I checked in with our Tech team Saturday afternoon and learned that more than 100,000 people had visited the page in the past day! If this was a number of views on YouTube, we would consider it a viral video success with that number alone. It will be fun to watch the traffic this week and see the other places it gets picked up.

Building the Bridge Worldwide Brand

Advertising awards are a big deal in our industry. Thousands of entries are made every year to awards shows like Cannes, with each agency hoping to get credit for the work they have done. The purpose of awards is mainly for agency marketing, a business-to-business approach. Awards allow agencies to brag about the quality of their creative work in new business pitches. But are they meaningful marketing in a B2B environment?

Many, many advertising industry pundits cry that we are too obsessed with awards. But I actually do believe that they can be meaningful to the companies that are searching for an agency partner. Here’s the rationale: First, the creative work is really the number-one thing that brands need in their advertising agencies. It’s the job they cannot do themselves. Second, it’s very, very difficult to judge the quality of an agency’s creative product through the pitching process. Case studies show work for other clients, but it is difficult to judge it because beauty is in the mind of the brief holder—i.e., clients can’t judge whether work for a different business than their own was successful or not. As a result, clients look for other ways to get comfortable with the creative potential of prospective partners.

Here’s where awards can come in—they give clients an impartial measure of the quality of creative work. Agencies that have won awards have “proof” that the work was good, as measured by very experienced judges, and as measured against many other agencies that are putting their best work up against it. While creative quality is only one piece of what clients need to see in an agency, and awards are only one of several ways to judge this, winning a big award such as a Cannes Lion shows that our agency can do some of the best work in the world.

A Cannes Lions award can also be very meaningful to an agency’s current clients. Our Pringles brand team and the senior management at P&G were ecstatic about this recognition. Within minutes of the announcement we were cheered by email from clients at all levels. A handful of top leaders got to see the show in person and they enjoyed a toast together in Cannes, immediately talking excitedly about what else we could do in this space. For P&G as a whole, it was the company’s first-ever Gold Lion in the digital category. This award is another step in the world’s largest marketer’s shift to winning in the still-developing digital space.

This win renews current clients’ confidence in us as an agency partner, shows them that we can help them compete with the best in the world, and challenges them to buy “bigger” work that we bring to them.

Impact on Our Company Culture

As an agency we only first visited the show in person last year. Our three-person delegation of Jay Woffington (President), Peter Schwartz (Chief Creative Officer), and me talked often during that week about the work we saw and wondered what it would take for us to bring home a Gold Lion. We decided that we wanted one and that our company was up to the challenge. We thought it would be a three- to five-year journey, and as Jay said, “I knew we had the ability, the talented people, and the desire… but an award such as this is not easy.”

By setting this goal and sharing our experiences with the company upon our return last year, it got our teams fired up and determined. I believe our work across the board was better in the past 12 months, and we felt confident enough to submit four pieces for Cannes. We were excited just to be short-listed for one, and the Pringles Gold win blew everyone away.

What I love is that this is truly “the agency’s award.” Our Creative Director on Pringles, Jason Bender, accepted the award on behalf of many who made it a success. As people were congratulating him late into Wednesday night and early Thursday morning, he continually deferred credit to the team behind it. And to paraphrase Bender, we all woke up Thursday morning as employees of a Cannes Gold-winning agency. I couldn’t be more proud of the team and of the agency I work for.

Conclusion

I hope this story illustrates how meaningful marketing can be a multilayered win for your brand or agency. Marketing with meaning breaks through the clutter to deliver quality work and business-building results, it gets your clients and new business prospects excited, and it can help make your company a great place to work.

As for Cannes, the statue wasn’t even back in the U.S. before Peter came to me talking about how we have a chance to win the “agency of the year” Cyber Lion next year—and I think our other creative teams are anxious to get in the spotlight next year. It will be fun to see the impact of this award on our agency in the year to come, and I’m so excited to be a part of it.

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Posted in Agency Marketing, B2B, Banners, Connection, Entertainment | 1 Comment »

Panera Adds Community Services

Tuesday, June 23rd, 2009

What I love most about digital is that it opens up so many simple ways to provide meaningful marketing to a brand’s customers. As much as we all like to spend hours developing deep digital strategies and playing with the latest innovations, it’s often best to go to the absolutely simplest slam dunks that you can think of. My current favorite example of a no-brainer in meaningful digital marketing is a program called MeetAtPanera.

MeetAtPanera.com is a very simple website that allows people to set up a meeting with a friend or group of friends and send invitations to join up at Panera. It is a natural outgrowth of Panera’s historical strategy of embracing community meetings and friend join-ups. Its restaurants provide free Wi-Fi access, have open seating with moveable tables, and usually include a “community room” that can be reserved for large meetings at no charge. The business benefit of this approach is clear-cut: By embracing groups, Panera brings in a large number of regular visitors, who repay it with recurring business.

The MeetAtPanera tool is basic but complete. You can select the restaurant to meet at as well as a time, and send the invite to multiple email addresses. Each invite arrives with driving directions and an option to add the event to your calendar. No registration is required, and there is no email list that you are automatically pre-checked to join. There is even an offer for a free coffee for you and your group if you bring in the invitations.

If there is anything to complain about it’s the fact that this could be done instead with other tools that people are already comfortable with. Most people will likely either just send an email to friends, or potentially use Facebook to set up an event. But that’s OK; some people will use the tool and feel more connected and loyal to the Panera brand. And the cost to set up this small site is likely very, very small.

So kudos to Panera for making the effort to add some value via this online invite system. Although I’m unlikely to personally use it for setting up meetings, it reminds me that this brand is working to keep my business.

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Posted in Connection, Solution | 1 Comment »

Chick-fil-A 100 Hits Cincy

Thursday, May 28th, 2009

Last Thursday I was driving to a client meeting in the Cincinnati suburb of Mason when I drove by a Chick-fil-A restaurant. It caught my eye for some reason; maybe it was the fact that there was a grand-opening sign but more likely because the grass around the restaurant was covered in tents. Luckily someone at the meeting I attended that morning told me about the “Chick-fil-A 100,” and I learned about yet another fantastic example of Marketing with Meaning.

If you are one of the unfortunate few who has never eaten at Chick-fil-A, let me just say you’re missing one of the greatest fast-food chains in the world. Like me, the brand grew up in Atlanta, Georgia. It began in 1967 with a killer chicken sandwich and has since spread to nearly every state and more than 1,300 locations. The brand has always retained certain eccentricities. Due to religious beliefs of the founders, Chick-fil-A is always closed on Sundays. And the brand is loved for its outdoor ads featuring cows who spell out “EAT MOR CHIKIN.”

Back in 2003 at store opening in Goodyear, Arizona, the local Chick-fil-A opened with a large parking-lot carnival. One of many promotions of the event was a promise to give the first 100 customers coupons for a free combo meal every week for a year. Since then, the company has offered a similar benefit for the first 100 at every store opening, which ends up attracting people who camp out in tents for several days and drive from hundreds of miles away. The video from a local news station below is one of many great snapshots of these events:

Chick-fil-A has discovered a very smart formula for success with these meaningful store opening events. The key business objective of any local store opening is to generate awareness and traffic as early as possible. The Chick-fil-A 100 makes for a picture-perfect local PR event. Local newspapers and TV stations can’t resist stopping in to see people waiting out all night for free meals, and the national attention and attendance from people who drive for miles to join in adds to the impact.

Aside from the initial awareness boost, Chick-fil-A benefits from the thousands of fans it creates each year through these opening-day events. Like people in London who sang together thanks to T-Mobile, those who join the opening-night experience enjoy a special moment that sticks with them forever. And, let’s face it: These experiences can really stand out as special in the rural communities and exhurbs where Chick-fil-A stores are mainly going up. No wonder that a contact of mine with a connection to Chick-fil-A told me that the brand has a higher Net Promoter Score than Apple.

The next Chick-fil-A opens in Gaffney, South Carolina, on May 28, a town also known for its large, peach-shaped water tower off I-85. Road trip, anyone?

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Posted in Connection, Experience, Uncategorized | 4 Comments »

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