Archive for the ‘Entertainment’ Category

« Older Entries
Newer Entries »

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.

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

Product Demos with Meaning

Wednesday, May 20th, 2009

If you sell a product or service I can read your mind and know that you are spending a lot of time thinking and talking about how to improve your value equation. One of the old tools of the trade that marketers are pulling out a lot lately is the product demonstration ad. Last week a client mentioned that one of his senior managers suggested we “put some product demos online” to help move cases of product. A few members of our Strategy and Research practice at Bridge Worldwide huddled to bring some thinking to the table and I think it’s a great topic to cover in this space.

This renewed focus on product demos is based on the hypothesis that people are getting “back to basics” and want to make sure that the brands they buy work well. This is a take-off on the old value equation I wrote about a few weeks ago—that Value is a function of Product Benefit + Brand Equity divided by Price.

The challenge is while brand executives and product researchers might get excited about product demos, most people just don’t get fired up about them, especially when they are wedged into a television commercial that interrupts our favorite show. However a handful of brands have found a way to not only grab attention to killer demos, but achieve massive word-of-mouth as people share them with their friends. My team studied several of these, some clearly marketing tools and others just cool videos; here were some of our favorites (in addition to standards such as Will It Blend?, Dove Evolution, and Diet Coke + Mentos):

Water Balloon Exploding in Slow Motion: It’s not a marketing example—simply fascinating to the tune of 1.7 million views and counting.

Samsung Extreme Sheet LED Art: Samsung used sheep with LED-lighted backs to highlight the brilliant brights of its new LED televisions. Nearly 8 million people have viewed this on YouTube alone.

Heinz Talk to the Plant: This was a live, multiweek experiment to test the hypothesis that tomato plants that people spoke to (via a text-to-voice speaker device) would grow faster and taller than plants that felt no love. The Heinz team even published its research results in a six-page PDF report. It’s a great reminder that Heinz ketchup comes from real, quality tomato plants.

Putting these examples and many more together, we believe product demonstrations can be something that people choose to engage with, find entertaining to watch, and feel are worthy of forwarding to their friends—in other words, Marketing with Meaning. Laura Melin and Dan Whitmyer from Bridge Worldwide offer up the following guidelines for brands that wish to create engaging demonstrations in the digital space:

1. Start with a business strategy. Marketing is meaningless if it doesn’t deliver on business objectives.  Begin the project by laying out what you hope to achieve. Dove wanted to dramatize its core brand belief to increase loyalty. Heinz chose to reinforce its premium and natural equities. These business objectives can all be measured with pre-/post-surveys, if not actual sales changes in the market.

2. Ensure there is entertainment value. While your demonstration might be informative and end up highlighting product benefits, the only demos that win viewers and pass-along are those that tap into our desire for diversion. Will It Blend? makes us laugh, and then makes us think that Blendtec blenders must be powerful. Common entertainment elements to tap into include humor, shock, drama, reality, and nostalgia.

3. Seed it in many places. Very few people are coming to your website, digging around to see what new video demonstrations you have posted lately. Even the most successful viral demos got a quick start by going beyond YouTube to places such as Metacafe, Veoh.com, eBaum’s World, and College Humor—in some cases paying for some initial placement in prime locations.

4. Stay genuine and unscripted. Viral demos that feel too polished and perfected have less chance of catching on. Keep the production budgets low on purpose and don’t be too obvious in your selling.

5. If it works, keep going. Once you’ve got an audience engaged with a hit demo, they are highly likely to give you another look with a follow-up effort. But the sequels have to be as buzzworthy as the original. Ray-Ban is one of the leaders here, as they hit a viral home run with “Guy Catches Glasses with Face” and kept going with several other demo-like virals. My favorite new one is called Super Chameleon:

I’d love to hear your reactions and favorite examples in the comments below. We might even turn this post into a wiki page that others can add to.

Tags: , , , ,
Posted in Entertainment, Solution | 3 Comments »

Marketing with Meaning in Colombia

Thursday, February 5th, 2009

As I briefly mentioned last week, I just got back from a week on the road at an agency summit event in Buenos Aires, Argentina. It was a great chance to bounce the Marketing with Meaning concept off my colleagues there as well as gather a few examples of great work they are producing.

The most interesting case study that I had not heard before came from the Grey agency in Colombia on behalf of one of its clients, Pantene. For the launch of a new Pantene night treatment product, the team came up with an integrated and entertaining idea delivered on a shoestring budget. The agency recruited a national celebrity, actor Isabella Santo Domingo, and generated a juicy gossip story around “Who is Isabella sleeping with?”

Isabella fed the tabloids with teasers in interviews with the media, and a website was launched to announce that she would be announcing who (or what) she was sleeping with on a certain date. On the evening of the announcement, Colombian households were invited to see live video from her home at famososenvivo.com. Several male friends stopped by as Isabella filmed the action herself. Finally, she kicked out her friends, went into her bedroom, and announced that she was “sleeping with” the new Pantene night treatment formula.

Overall, it was a simple, cute, and entertaining way to build buzz around a new product launch. Much more than a traditional celebrity endorsement, Isabella’s involvement was innovative and played up her personality. Advertisers love to use a “rug pull” device in commercials—leading people in one direction before surprising them in the end. Here the device lasted more than 30 seconds, and engaged people in multiple media.

The teaser buildup and online experience resulted in 60,000 visits in only three weeks. The results were extremely strong for this product launch; the new product actually went out of stock early on, and Pantene reached its highest market share in Colombia since 2005.

So “salud” to the Grey/Pantene Colombia team for trying something different that added a little diversion to people’s lives while introducing them to an impressive new product.

Tags: , , ,
Posted in Entertainment | No Comments »

Burger King Strikes Gold Again

Thursday, January 22nd, 2009

In our upcoming book version of Marketing with Meaning, one of the companies that I feature early is Burger King. Since its acquisition in 2002, Burger King has reinvented itself as an entertainment brand that appeals deeply to young men, while making many of the rest of us smile as well. From reinventing the King character to producing branded Xbox games and branded boxers (my 8-year-old daughter just looked over my shoulder and added that one) to playing the Whopper Freakout prank, Burger King continues to parade new ways for us to be entertained and to form meaningful connections with the brand.

The latest chapter in its story is the launch of the Whopper Sacrifice Facebook tool, in support of its limited-time Angry Whopper. The premise was pretty simple: “Unfriend” 10 people on your Facebook account, and Burger King promised to send you a coupon for a free Whopper (a $3.99 value). The application and offer launched on January 5, and news stories claimed that more than 200,000 people had been unfriended successfully within a week.

I discovered the application on January 8—and I’m a little embarrassed to say that I successfully did the deeds necessary to receive a free coupon. Little did I know that I would be one of the last to cash in on friendship. Facebook quickly stepped in and claimed that Burger King should disable the feature that showed others which friends had been sacrificed. Burger King decided to pull the plug but not before another big burst of media attention came to the promotion.

Overall, this had to be a huge win for Burger King: two bursts of media coverage, lots of social network activity, and traffic to stores from people eager to cash in their coupons. The cost had to be tiny: Facebook applications are fairly low cost (even for a nice one such as BK’s), and I would estimate about 20,000 coupons were sent, of which maybe 10,000 will be redeemed. That’s probably in the ballpark of $150,000 all-in, a fraction of what a large weekend TV media buy would be.

On a side note, I was extremely impressed that Burger King sent the coupon to my home exactly a week after I finished sacrificing. Most brands promise coupons in six to eight weeks, and don’t get me started on Dr Pepper’s goof-up.

But is it meaningful to consumers? Of course it is! Tens of thousands of people chose to engage in the tool, and they didn’t have to purchase anything to enjoy it. The coupon and opportunity to clean out some Facebook dead weight are extra benefits. There likely is some net negative karma around the friends who are dropped, but that’s life, and we have a handful of Facebook friends who don’t need to see what’s going on in our lives. This even might start a real conversation and some social norms about what kind of Facebook relationships are legitimate. Oh, and Burger King is capitalizing on its bad karma with the opportunity to send an “Angry Gram” to those who de-friended you.

I cannot wait to see what comes next from Burger King. Odds are that it will break the rules, surprise us all, and be worth talking about at the watercooler each day. You can’t say the same thing for McDonald’s.

Tags: ,
Posted in Connection, Entertainment | 6 Comments »

The Gift of Regifting

Wednesday, December 31st, 2008

(This is the second guest post by Ryan Kolbe, who is covering for me over the holidays. Thanks again, Ryan!)

 

 

The holidays are a time for family get-togethers and overindulging on great food. They’re a time of reflection on the previous year, and anticipation of the future. Sometimes, if you’ve been good all year, the holidays are about giving and receiving gifts! Even in these tough economic times, it’s a tradition that many people take part in, and I, for one, am thankful for that.

Something that is different this year is that fewer people will travel to be with loved ones due to the economic crunch and less money floating around for excess travel. MSN.com reported on December 10 that “Airlines will operate about 2,500 to 3,000 fewer domestic flights daily during these holiday periods compared with the corresponding days last year.”

Because of all of this, Uncle Gary will be sending that fully wrapped train set to little Scotty via the United States Postal Service instead of hopping into the RV with the kids and driving East. Aunt Peggy will have to wrap up her famous fruitcake and have FedEx get it to the relatives with two-day shipping rather than flying to Phoenix for some fun in the holiday sun. It costs a lot less; it’s just not as personal.

Because of this, UPS has come up with a new microsite to highlight those “not so great” gifts from the relatives who weren’t able to make the trek home, or even some who were! “To give someone a gift that was previously received from someone else” is how Merriam-Webster defines “regifting.”

UPSregifter.com is a site that allows you to virtually regift a subpar gift to friends or family. As a child, I was always taught to appreciate the gift that I received, even if I didn’t really like it, and that “it’s the thought that counts.”  Thankfully, UPS has come up with this idea to quietly make fun of those horrible, “what were they thinking” gifts.

So why is this meaningful? UPS is acknowledging something in a “tongue in cheek” manner that everyone has come across at one time or another. Inevitably, at some point in your life, you’ll receive a gift that’s totally out of left field, and a huge flop. In acknowledging that in a fun, interactive way, UPS is getting themselves into the mind of the site users. The thought is that if someone does receive a horrible gift this holiday season, he or she can upload a picture of it, write a small description, and regift it to someone. Then, taking it one step further, if the “regifter” actually finds some desperate soul who wants the gift, they can then take it to the UPS store and physically send it to that person. The site never explicitly says that, which allows the users to put two and two together, and turn to UPS for future package-sending needs.

UPS has successfully marketed their services in a nontraditional way to people who may have initially thought of going to FedEx or the United States Postal Services for their holiday gift-sending needs.  Although it’s a simple site with viral aspects for sharing, the interactivity makes the marketing meaningful to those site users-and should successfully build on the awareness of UPS and their services this holiday season.

Tags:
Posted in Entertainment | 1 Comment »

NORAD Does a Great Deed

Sunday, December 28th, 2008

‘Twas the night before Christmas, and as I put my daughters to bed, the oldest, Grace, asked, “Can we track Santa on your computer, Dad?” It was way past bedtime, but I couldn’t resist. Grace is 8-going-on-18 and the chance to let her fully believe in Santa for maybe the last Christmas tugged at my heart.

So… away to the laptop I flew like a flash

Booted it up, hoping for not a crash

Jammed in the Sprint card and pulled up the Net

Figured a search on Google would be the best bet

Soon a smile on our faces started to grow

For Santa was just crossing o’er the Gulf of Mexico

Thanks to NORAD and Google we found Kringle in flight

And I tucked Grace in for a long winter’s night.

All bad poems aside, it was really a special father-daughter moment to pull up the NORAD Santa tracker and see where he was along his journey. And I kept thinking about this tool days after Christmas. I wondered why NORAD, a government agency that tracks incoming nuclear missiles, would be the organization that tracked Santa on behalf of the world’s citizens. I was surprised not to see a for-profit company such as Sears, USA Today, or Coca-Cola take the reigns of this annual tradition.

So I consulted Wikipedia, of course, and discovered a very interesting story of how NORAD got into the Santa-tracking business all the way back in 1955. It seems that marketing did have something to do with it, in a roundabout way. That year, Sears advertised a telephone hotline that children could call to speak with Santa. But the ad printed the wrong number, sending children to NORAD instead. Rather than turning eager children down, the surprised NORAD officers accepted the calls and began giving Santa’s position on the radar.

From there follows a history of continuous upgrades, improvements, and generations of magical moments for children around the world. Now, of course, Santa can be tracked live online, and even through Twitter.

There are a few really good lessons here. First, it shows how a long-term meaningful marketing investment can pay off. In this case, NORAD has “owned” this valuable service for more than 50 years.  Another good example is Butterball’s turkey help hotline, which has become more interesting and relevant (and itself newsworthy) than any print ad or TV commercial the brand could conceive of.

But the real morale of this story is that organizations can win just by paying attention and doing the right thing. And it often comes down to your company culture and individuals’ care for their customers to unlock magical experiences like this.

Happy holidays to all of you. I cannot wait to continue the Marketing with Meaning revolution with you in 2009!

Bob

Tags: , , ,
Posted in Entertainment, Government | 3 Comments »

Analysis of RecessIsOn

Wednesday, December 10th, 2008

As the word gets out about Marketing with Meaning, we are starting to attract some interesting outreach from unexpected places. A few months ago, a company engaged us in a project to do some consulting, which I hope to talk more about later. More recently, for the first time, I was asked to provide a review of a new marketing campaign from an agency on behalf of its client. In other words, I was suddenly elevated to the lofty list of targets for “blogger outreach.” I feel so special. But seriously, it is cool and I am happy to provide my honest assessment—according to Marketing with Meaning principles—in this post…

The Morgans Hotel Group has launched a new advertising campaign under the mantra RecessIsOn, a clever play on the word “recession,” which is dominating too much of the news lately. Morgans is playing on this depression around the now-official recession by calling for fun. The boutique hotel chain is using targeted print ads (see above), wild postings, and PR to drive traffic to Recessison.com. Once there, visitors can discover the path to parties and other enjoyment at Morgans’ hotels in cities such as New York, Los Angeles, and London. Each hotel is hosting events (most seem to require a charge) as well as several added-value offers such as free massages, room upgrades, and complimentary dirty martinis (full disclosure: my favorite kind).

Survey Says: It’s just so-so.

First, let me say that I love Morgans’ decision to focus on the economy and to embrace the idea of having more fun with more freebies. Many marketers (including our clients) are working on ways to adapt messaging to appeal more to people who are struggling to make ends meet. It is very clever to see a company stare the recession in the face with defiance.

Second, I think that Morgans has some smart promotional offers for its customers. Each hotel has a wide variety of packages with complimentary services at a lower-than-usual cost. I really felt like Morgans was doing something special in this down economy.

My main issue is that this campaign is not offering significant value aside from these specials. If you’re not staying there or buying a party ticket, there’s really no meaning for you. The posters and ads might make you smile for a minute, but they don’t merit more than a half-second pause. This is not Marketing with Meaning.

My big suggestion is for Morgans to turn its party atmosphere into an open event. Once its clever campaign got the attention, it needed a meaningful hook to pull people into something valuable. What if Morgans held weekly parties with free admission, cool music, and low or no-cost drinks? They could use word-of-mouth and these wild postings to, say, publicize a code word to get in these parties. And the company could focus on its historic guest list as the best source of traffic. The attendance could even be limited to out-of-towners to encourage a hotel stay on an upcoming trip. The idea of a free party with a guerrilla-marketing guest list worked well for the Stoli Hotel, which got a ton of buzz for its effort. And if this can work for a $20 vodka brand, it’s got to work for a $300-per-night hotel.

Finally, Morgans and its agency should make sure to do more in terms of blogger outreach. I received an email and a request to cover the campaign. Thanks very little, guys! How about an invite to one of these parties with celebs such as those below, or even a free night’s stay? In case you’re listening, I’ll be in L.A. on December 16 and will be happy to update this blog with more of the Morgans experience. :)

Tags: , , , , ,
Posted in Agency Marketing, Entertainment, Experience | No Comments »

Serving Up a Working Lunch

Thursday, November 13th, 2008

(From time to time I like to use this space to brag about Marketing with Meaning that we launch for our clients. Today is a huge day for our agency, as we launch the Working Lunch, a live entertainment program that’s a cross between The Office and Whose Line Is It Anyway?  I asked Marc Connor, one of our star strategic planners and someone who was integral to this idea, to guest write this entry.)

Bob’s out; I’m in… at least for today. I recently joined Bridge Worldwide, and one of the most important factors in my decision was the shared vision for using marketing, in and of itself, to bring value to consumers’ lives. I carry this thought with me on every project on which I am engaged. In this competitive and fast-changing world, it is increasingly important to differentiate our brands with not just messages…but with meaning.

This week we launched the Working Lunch-another exciting and meaningful marketing program for one of our clients, the Healthy Choice brand of ConAgra Foods. ConAgra Foods has launched a new innovation in healthy, great-tasting, shelf-stable meals with Healthy Choice Fresh Mixers, and they are appealing to a broader and younger audience than the brand has sought in its history. The opportunity was to create an experience that introduced the brand and this unique product in a meaningful way to a new segment of consumers.

The insight that drove the development of the Working Lunch was that lunchtime has become the new prime time, particularly for reaching the new, gainfully employed, “distractainment”-seeking consumer. First, we learned that 60 percent of office workers regularly eat lunch at their desks. They are often multitasking at their desk through the lunch hour, working, shopping, surfing, and connecting with others. Therefore, the options are many for this audience, and as a content provider one must provide bite-sized, snackable options to get their attention. People wander in and out of the short-attention-span theater; you have to grab them quickly but make it easy for them to engage or disengage at will.

And so we created the Working Lunch, the world’s first live sketch-comedy programming delivered via the Web and powered by the audience. With the Working Lunch we’re engaging our audience at the greatest moment of receptivity, second only to being at shelf. As they eat their lunch and graze for engaging content during the few minutes of break they get at their desk, they will enjoy unpredictable live comedy and have the opportunity to influence it directly and almost instantaneously, through polls and by proposing meeting agenda topics. The world of DeLaney, Delaney, & Delaney, the inept but always humorously optimistic company whose actual business is always delightfully ambiguous, is at the center of the sketch comedy concept. The Working Lunch was developed with MSN and will be aired live for two weeks in November and another two weeks in January. We’re extending the experience by recording all the action and creating best-of clips that can be shared easily with MSN’s care package.

By positioning Healthy Choice Fresh Mixers as the sponsor for this entertaining concept, along with a generous dose of product placement throughout the show, we create a positive association and emotional involvement with the product. As the Working Lunch proves, meaningful marketing does not have to be serious to provide value. So join the fun; it’s sure to be one of the best working lunches you’ve ever experienced.

-Marc Connor, Director of Strategic Planning, Bridge Worldwide

 

Tags: , ,
Posted in Entertainment | 2 Comments »

YouTube Breaks Its Mold

Monday, September 29th, 2008

“Best page takeover ever!”

“This is an idea that I would have said, ‘It will never work!’”

“One of the most brilliant pieces of digital marketing I have ever seen.”

These are just a few of the quotes I heard from friends who forwarded me a link to YouTube’s viral video takeover in support of Nintendo’s new game, Wario Land.  Check it out here and then return to this blog for further analysis….

Pretty cool, huh? Let’s delve into the Meaning and Marketing benefits.

In terms of Meaning, you have to start with the fact that Nintendo selected a media platform that is entirely dedicated to consumer engagement. People viewed nearly 5 billion videos on YouTube alone in July 2008.  People choose to go to YouTube mainly for bite-sized entertainment during their day. They are looking for entertainment, and the medium is successful in part because it does not force viewers to sit through interruptive commercials. Thus, the only way for marketers to win in this channel is to create entertainment that people find valuable. And we can easily measure the consumer value – and to a certain extent the business impact – of YouTube creative by counting the number of views of brand videos. Dove’s Evolution video has more than 10 million views combined, but this controversial Snickers ad only has about 400,000 views. You can’t buy YouTube viewers – rather, you’ve got to create work that people find worth watching.

To date, YouTube has been mainly used by marketers to host viral videos and consumer generated video contests. But this Nintendo work breaks the mold and shows great promise for the marketing on this still-new channel. Many viewers likely come to the page initially because of an interest in video games, the Wii and the Mario series specifically. But all are rewarded with a surprising, fun concept that is executed flawlessly.

We cannot see the business impact for sure, but it looks promising so far. In terms of number of views, on Wednesday, 9/24, the site had 500,000 views, and a day later it was at 1.1 million. The ad unit iself is generating free press coverage. Game marketing is a lot like movie marketing – the initial buzz and opening sales are critical to long-term success. We’ll have to track how it performs, but this is a great head start.

My one negative comment on this example is that I don’t think it’s scalable. It works as a one-hit wonder for Nintendo, but will the next YouTube takeover be as surprising or fun? And imagine the work it takes the YouTube team to both dream up this idea and execute it on their system. When you have to make a cool creative idea every time (rather than just sell mass eyeballs), it becomes a lot harder for both YouTube to sell and clients to buy.

That said, I feel more bullish on YouTube as a digital marketing professional, and I feel that both the Nintendo AND YouTube brands have provided a special experience for me.  Bring on the next one, guys.

Tags: , , ,
Posted in Connection, Entertainment, Games | 1 Comment »

Sanyo Recharges Brains

Wednesday, August 13th, 2008

Yesterday I wrote about how next-generation gaming consoles are allowing for meaningful marketing by brands that figure out how to add value to the gaming experience. Over the weekend I discovered a current-generation advertising platform that hosts an added-value game for readers.

While enjoying my Saturday ritual of coffee, bagels, and The Week magazine, my eyes stopped at a crossword puzzle in the middle of the issue. A crossword puzzle is fairly unusual in this magazine, and while I’m not really a crossword guy, seeing it here with the headline “Recharge Your Brain!” certainly earned my attention. I soon discovered that this puzzle was actually a paid advertisement by Sanyo in support of its new line of ready-to-use rechargeable batteries under the sub-brand “eneloop.” Far from being a gimmick, this was a legitimate crossword puzzle that sent readers to theweekdaily.com/eneloop for answers.

Overall, I think it’s a pretty clever marketing idea for a new product coming into a crowded category. The idea of a free crossword puzzle as a way to recharge your brain certainly opens people’s minds to learn about a new type of rechargeable battery. It got my attention and made me respect the brand in a way that “just another battery print ad” could never do. There’s also a nice tie to positioning Sanyo rechargeable batteries as “smarter” than the existing competition.

I do wish Sanyo would have gone farther with its “recharge your brain” idea. A trip to its website leads the interested consumer to just a regular piece of brochureware. For very little cost, Sanyo could have invited readers to participate in other mental challenges or to sign up for something like a daily trivia contest. The brand could have invited people to challenge their friends–thereby spurring word-of-mouth.

But at the end of the day it took a lot of guts for Sanyo to launch its new battery with a national print ad that gives more than 90% of its space to consumer enjoyment.

Tags: ,
Posted in Entertainment, Games | No Comments »

« Older Entries
Newer Entries »