The Blog

Friday 07.17.09

How the Starwood iPhone App Pressures Delta

Bob Gilbreath

Over the weekend I somehow discovered that the Starwood Preferred Guest program was now offering a free iPhone app. In less than five minutes I had Googled it for a review, downloaded the app, input my membership number, and was checking out this cool new marketing service from one of my favorite hotel chains. My next thought: Why does my regular airline, Delta, not have an iPhone app yet? A great service by Starwood also made me feel worse about my airline, a company not even in the same business category! This reaction is an example of how great customer service and meaningful marketing in one category puts pressure on every business to improve.

My friend and colleague, Jonathan Richman, recently referenced this idea on his blog, Dose of Digital. It’s an idea that I share often with clients as we try to help them navigate the sea of digital choices and choose which services to offer and competitors to benchmark. This idea that customer-service expectations are rising across categories first sprung up in my mind when I read an Accenture survey from November 2008 of the customer-service attitudes of 4,000 respondents. It found that 31% said their customer-service expectations are higher than a year ago, and 52% said their expectations are up from five years ago. That’s an incredible increase in a short period of time, and it shows the path of the economy of today and tomorrow: As competition increases, service and value will increase, and people will expect these improvements to continue across every industry. The more we give them, the more they expect.

I believe this idea manifests itself in several divergent categories. My favorite example comes from Domino’s Pizza. In January 2008 it launched an online Pizza Tracker that shows an estimate of the step-by-step process of making the pizza you order online. Some laughed at the idea, but Domino’s felt it was necessary because a significant number of people call back to ask how their orders are progressing (before the 30 minutes, mind you). While others laughed, Domino’s racked up its millionth user of the tool before six months. Why? Well, I believe that people have become used to viewing the progress of their online orders from services such as UPS and FedEx. These two companies have great package tracking systems that millions of people have used. So the consumer’s expectation is that if these orders can be tracked, why can’t my pizza?

Other examples abound. A few years ago Facebook and Twitter started allowing mobile updates on information as trivial as when a friend updated his status or uploaded a photo, but banks and airlines were much slower to provide mobile updates for important information such as low balances and canceled flights. Another example is the increase in self-checkout lanes at retail stores. I firmly believe that they have rapidly expanded because customers are used to self-checkout online at e-commerce stores, and expect similar freedom in the offline world.

Our agency has seen this recently with our work on the Vicks brand. Just weeks before we launched our first online cold-and-flu tracking tool, Google came out with its own flu-trends tool, which grabbed the media spotlight before we did. So now CPG brands are competing with Google? That’s a pretty huge challenge!

But that’s reality. And on my other personal blog, The Challenge Dividend, you can read many, many stories of how Challenge Drives Improvement. (Warning: It’s not been updated in a few months as I’m focused on this blog and book.)

I believe that the many increasing examples of Marketing with Meaning will start setting a very high bar for businesses across every industry. Consumers will gravitate quickly toward those brands that provide value through marketing, and increasingly punish the brands that continue to interrupt and annoy them.

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Wednesday 07.15.09

Unique Coke Cannes Delivery

Bob Gilbreath


This week I’m spending some time catching up on sharing some of the best, most meaningful marketing to be awarded in the annual Cannes Advertising Competition. Our President, Jay, and Chief Creative Officer, Peter, both came back raving about an incredibly powerful vending machine for Coca-Cola that was put up in the bottom floor of the Cannes conference. It ended up winning a Gold Lion in the Design category. Check out the video above for a glimpse of the experience.

The biggest lesson for me here is a reminder that everything your brand does with the consumer is a kind of marketing, whether it’s customer service, packaging, delivery trucks, or vending machines. And every consumer touchpoint in this broad view of marketing can be made much more meaningful. In this case, Coke has taken the boring, predictable, exchange-focused vending machine and turned it into something remarkable, entertaining, and fun. I also love how this delivers on what the Coke brand and drinking experience is really about: a few minutes of fun and enjoyment. Instead of just advertising to people on TV with equity spots that are meant to help trigger a feeling of enjoyment hours or days later when the drink is consumed, this makes entertainment and happy feelings happen at the moment of truth of refreshment.

I think there are some other really interesting things about these vending experiences. First, they are completely measurable (obviously, because they sell product). Second, they could allow Coke to charge more and achieve wider margins (say, charging $2 or more for the machine experience and fancy bottle). Third, they draw attention in public places, which attracts more users, buyers, and observers.

I am most interested to see what happens from here with the vending machines, and whether they will truly roll out broadly. Sure, it’s easy to create a concept such as this, install it in a few malls, and win an award at Cannes. The challenge is selling this in broadly and getting distributors around the world to embrace the concept. This is where the marketing department often bumps heads with the old-school crowd, finance guys and general bureaucratic commitment to not making waves.

“Marketing” sits in a skyscraper in Atlanta, Georgia, making ads, while “Sales” is out on the streets making sure machines and store shelves are full. Placing ads and maintaining fancy machines is not their job, nor in their budget. Coke distributors are used to paying $X for a basic vending machine that needs almost no service. But what happens when “headquarters” forces them to pay $5X for this special machine? Who’s going to fix them when they break? Anyone who has worked in a large company can play out this tragic scene from hours in boardrooms and conference calls. A quote that I developed in my days as a big marketer was, “Doing anything new is hard.”

My congrats to Coke on a killer idea, and our hopes are with you as you try to take this meaningful idea outside the ad-award world.

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Monday 07.13.09

Bleeding Billboard Slows Traffic Deaths

Bob Gilbreath


It’s a few weeks after the annual Cannes Advertising Festival. I was able to post early on our agency’s Gold Lions win for Pringles, but I’m a bit slow in sharing other examples of great, meaningful advertising from the show. This week I’ll share a few examples of my favorite work.

First up is this incredibly powerful and simple idea from BBDO in New Zealand that won a Bronze Lion in the Design competition. The video above tells the story much better than I can, but in summary, its goal is to reduce car accidents on the roads of Papakura, New Zealand, which tend to spike when rains come and roads become slippery. This campaign reduced road deaths on this particular piece of roadway to zero.

It is great to see a piece of brilliant, meaningful marketing for a nonprofit issue here. One might argue that all cause-related and nonprofit marketing is meaningful, but I don’t believe that is the case. Issue-related nonprofits are in sales just like regular businesses; their goal is to “sell in” their point of view on a topic. But unless they draw true engagement and value for the targeted audience, they fail.

In this case, local government is trying to “sell” its drivers on the need to slow down during rain. To measure success, instead of tracking sales of a product, it is tracking the number of road accidents and fatalities. And clearly some marketing is more effective than others. Imagine TV commercials or print ads with a policeman or government official lecturing a viewer about the need to drive cautiously during rains. Failure is almost assured for such an approach because it does not come at a relevant time in an engaging way. Here, the bleeding billboards not only come at the right place and time (roadside during rain), but they communicate the message in a way that embodies the tragedy of drivers’ failure to adjust—the photo of a young child. This beats a flashing yellow warning sign any day. Not only is this effective in its roadside ad placement, but the ad has been viewed nearly 500,000 times on YouTube in less than a month.

My hope is that the concept and framework of Marketing with Meaning is also used by nonprofit organizations to better their strategy and results. Coming up in my book, The Next Evolution of Marketing, I share the story of how another nonprofit issue organization, the Partnership for a Drug-Free America, dramatically shifted its marketing approach from interruptive ads to meaningful messages and advice. I may also try to do something in the marketing of the book to specifically reach out to nonprofits, perhaps in a nonprofit way. Stay tuned and, as always, your ideas in the comments are welcome and appreciated!

(Special thanks to Chris Zieverink from our Creative team, who not only sent me this link but just created a killer logo for Marketing with Meaning that I’ll be sharing here soon.)

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Friday 07.10.09

What Not to Do for a Blogger Book Review

Bob Gilbreath

As most readers know I’ve been gearing up for the launch of my book, The Next Evolution of Marketing, which will be published in October by McGraw-Hill. For more than a year now I’ve not only been writing furiously but also going to school on best practices in book marketing. One of the obvious and growing keys to book marketing is reaching out to influential bloggers in hopes of positive reviews and word of mouth. Interestingly, as a blogger with a good amount of traffic, I have now been approached a handful of times by authors and publishers who would like me to review their books. This has given me a hands-on, customer-based view of what works and what doesn’t. Yesterday I received an offer that misses the mark, and I thought it would be interesting to share here.

(NOTE: I have chosen not to mention the book or publisher that reached out to me in this case, because I have no desire to negatively impact their sales or business, plus naming names is really not necessary to make my points.)

The Approach

A representative for the publisher in question emailed me with a note saying that he is “reaching out to bloggers to ask if you would help us spread the word about a new book…” This followed with a short paragraph summarizing the book and its target market. The publisher representative also attached the “pre-press page proofs” of the book—essentially a PDF of the almost-final book itself. He ended with the line, “Anything you can do from a Tweet to a full book review on your blog would be appreciated.”

My Analysis

As a target blogger in this case, I felt very little motivation to give attention to this offer. There are several issues and negatives that come through here. First, it is a general message that is likely copied and pasted to hundreds or thousands of other marketing-related bloggers. The only thing personalized is my name in the opening. It is clear that this person has not read my blog. Second, there’s nothing here to make it easy for me to act on the request. If the publisher representative had spent 5 minutes getting a feel for my blog topic and then added a sentence that suggested how this book was relevant for my topic and audience then I would have been much more compelled to pay attention, and it would have given me an idea of where to go with it. But the biggest issue to me is that I’m only getting a 380-page PDF of the book, rather than a real copy. There’s no way I’m going to read through this type of document on my laptop. Frankly, by making your target audience do more work, I believe you actually bias them against your product—or at minimum fail to take advantage of human nature to reward a free gift.

A Better Way

A few weeks ago I wrote a blog post in praise of the book Content Rich, the result of another example of blogger outreach that worked much better—obviously because it motivated me to spend hours reading the book and writing a (positive) review. In this case the author, Jon Wuebben, sent me a personalized email that specifically mentioned how his book was a fit with my concept and audience. He offered to send me a free copy of the book if I would be interested in reading and writing about it. This helped him ensure that books only went out to interested people. I agreed and the book arrived a few days later in the mail. It took me longer than I hoped to actually read the book and write the post, but it kept sitting on my desk as a constant reminder that I promised to review it. I didn’t want to let down the author, who had invested time and money on me and my commitment.

I don’t necessarily think it’s a bad idea to make a free version of a new book available broadly, as the publisher in this example did. Another example of this happening right now is Wired editor Chris Anderson’s new book Free, which he is releasing widely in digital file format at no cost. However this approach is unlikely to get many influential bloggers to quickly put out a positive review.

I’m still working on my own strategy for blogger outreach in the coming months. I want to make sure to personally touch bloggers with large audiences with a free copy, but I also plan to offer some incentive and/or reward for “the long tail” of bloggers with smaller audiences who write book reviews. I would appreciate your thoughts and ideas in the comments below!

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Wednesday 07.08.09

A Dastardly Direct Mail Piece

Bob Gilbreath

I got a piece of junk mail the other day that I just had to share in this space for the pure fun factor. Here’s the play-by-play from a user perspective:

1. The Envelope—This is the equivalent of the subject line in email spam terms. It’s got all of the latest bells and whistles that are aimed to keep you from dropping it directly into the wastebasket. You know, there’s the WARNING and “Penalty for Tampering” and an IRS-looking “FORM 2009 096-5B.” There’s the classic three-stage tear-strip opening procedure that only official documents bother to use, of course. On a side note, it is interesting that making it harder to open a piece of mail actually can result in higher open rates—but I digress…

2. The Invitation—Evidently I have been selected to receive two round-trip airfares to most major international airports of my choice! It appears that this is for a ride on a new company called US Airlines. You know, the guys from those commercials who say, “Fly the US Skies.” Note how the offer comes with a unique offer number and bonus grocery voucher for the first 100 callers.

3. BONUS—A boarding pass! Hey, I guess I can just take this to the airport right now and get on seat 07-C (which had better be First Class). But what about the boarding pass for my companion? I’m sure they’ll just take care of that at the Delta counter when I go to get on the flight to USA DESTINATIONS. Thankfully this is valid through 2009. But wait, at the bottom in small print this says, “Not valid for travel.” I’d better call for details…

4. The Phone Call—I had to do this post justice and call the number to see if I could get some more intelligence for you, dear readers. At the risk of getting on some super-duper short list of people who actually respond to these things, I did call in. An automated voice picked up right away and let me know that “because of the overwhelming response to this offer there is a 30- to 45-second wait time for my call to be answered.” In less time than that a friendly operator from “Reservations Services” got on the line and asked for my code to pull up my account. She said that not only would I receive the free air tickets but also two days and three nights of hotel accommodations. She then attempted to ask me some “qualifying questions.” (Hey, I thought this boarding pass meant I was prequalified?) Instead of continuing the charade I asked her to jump to the chase and tell me what the catch was. She said I’d have to attend a 90-minute presentation for a “travel agency” but was adamant that “this is NOT a time-share!” Unfortunately I don’t think I have an extra 90 minutes for this blog post, so I bailed at that point.

The Lesson: It’s wrong to fool your customers.

I don’t believe anyone reading this is foolish enough to fall for this nor jerk enough to think that this is an acceptable form of marketing. That said, these jerks are out there making it harder for the rest of us. Because of spam both in the mailbox and email inbox, our customers are more leery and have a more negative view of advertisers than ever before. There’s not much we can do except recognize the error of tricking people and ensure that we do the exact opposite of everything here.

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Monday 07.06.09

Selling B2B with Your Consumer Content

Bob Gilbreath

As I’ve said here many times before, Marketing with Meaning is not limited to consumer brands with multimillion-dollar budgets, but rather it can be the basis of business-to-business strategy as well. Several weeks ago I wrote about the example of the word-of-mouth agency, Abraham & Harrison, which sent me a valuable piece of data in order to get on my radar. Today I wanted to provide examples from Ari Rosenberg, who writes that publishers have a meaningful marketing tool lying right under their noses.

In an article that I’ve been hanging onto since April, Rosenberg writes that publishers need to be “buying what [they're] selling” by leveraging their great content into something that ad sales targets will find useful. According to Rosenberg:

If I am Business Week, I am using my editorial clout to host intimate business insight conferences for advertisers and agencies on the industry of advertising. If I am any one of the cooking brands out there, I am creating a catering service to feed a different agency’s media department once a week throughout the year. If I am Weather.com, I am sending emails or text alerts every Friday to all of my clients who opt in for a personalized weekend weather report. If I am a finance brand, I am conducting investment seminars tailored specifically for the media buyers I call on.”

Sounds a lot better than another round of cold calls, eh? What I love about these examples is that each one leverages content and expertise that is already sitting in-house at publishers’ offices. Further, these meaningful services completely reinforce the unique expertise and brand positioning of the brands that offer them.

Other business and industries are slowly moving to this type of model—essentially getting a B2B sales meeting by bringing something relevant to the customer. For example, a few years ago my team at Bridge Worldwide created a series of books on understanding the 65+ consumer that P&G pharma sales reps brought in to share with their physician customers. Because of an influx of 65+ patients resulting from the Medicare bill, these physicians had a need to improve their understanding and skills. P&G was able to leverage its core strength in understanding consumer behavior, and get many more meetings than those who just wanted to talk about a drug, or paid for a pizza lunch. P&G and many other large consumer products firms do something similar with their B2B retail customers by putting marketing people on the ground in their headquarters offices—with a charge to drive the retail customers’ total category sales, not just those of P&G brands.

So if you’re a consumer marketer that sells to a business as well, how can you offer something uniquely valuable to your B2B market that leverages your core product or strength?

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Wednesday 07.01.09

Recap of P&G Global Alumni Reunion

Bob Gilbreath

One of the benefits of having worked at Procter & Gamble (I was in marketing for six years from 1997 to 2004) is access to an alumni club of thousands of the smartest business minds in the world. Every two years the P&G Alumni Network hosts a global summit that brings together top leaders from around the world, including a few of the top current leaders still at P&G. Two years ago the event in Cincinnati was outstanding, so long ago I made plans to attend this year’s event in Rome, which was held two weeks ago. I took the opportunity to take the family on a vacation through Italy, which means this post is a little delayed, but I wanted to share some highlights of the sessions from the event.

The theme of the sessions was “improving consumers’ lives long term—a sustainability challenge,” and I found much in common with the Marketing with Meaning idea that I write about weekly in this space. Below are a few of my notes, on a speaker-by-speaker basis:

Fernando Aguirre, CEO of Chiquita Brands International

Chiquita seems to be making very positive moves on the sustainability front, a big plus for a company that uses natural resources heavily and works mainly in developing nations with rain forests, where problems seem to be significant and global biodiversity is in the balance. Aguirre talked about how his company is making several moves to embrace sustainability. For example, it is testing a new cleaning and packing station process that reduces water use from 80,000 to 3,000 cubic meters of water, which, if moved throughout the company’s operations, could save 3.4 billion gallons of water per year.

He specifically shared the case study of Chiquita’s challenge in Europe a few years ago, when cheap imports from questionable companies threatened the company’s sales results. Chiquita chose to highlight its sustainable harvesting practices and secured an endorsement from The Rainbow Alliance. Marketing highlighted Chiquita’s efforts and the Rainbow Alliance’s support, and as a result sales actually increased despite the huge price pressure. In other words, Chiquita’s sustainability positioning helped it differentiate a commodity and retain premium pricing. Because of these practices, Chiquita is now attracting “green” investors. Not a bad value equation case study.

Toni Belloni, Group Managing Director, LVMH

LVMH is one of the world’s most impressive houses of brands. The company is a luxury machine, with more than 60 brands ranging in sales from more than $5 billion to less than $5 million. Belloni oversees the company, but it is a very independent group of brands. He talked candidly about how this makes it difficult to drive a corporate sustainability movement. Another challenge is the fact that his luxury brands often work with very small “mom and pop” craftsmen, so it is hard to force them to live up to sustainability standards.

Nevertheless, the company is making a lot of progress. One example is a much-improved volume forecasting process and model that is helping shift shipping from airplanes to sea transport. The big downside of sea transport is that it can take many weeks longer to move goods. But better volume forecasting and planning can make a big difference. Shipping not only reduces transport costs by 90%, but it also cuts emissions by 80%.

I was very interested to hear that LVMH as a company is focused on the cause of supporting arts and culture around the world. In what is a perfect fit for the luxury brands and their consumer targets, it sponsors more than 30 art exhibitions every year, and created a “Haute Couture Academy” to encourage interest in the field and develop future hires.

Stef Kranendijk, CEO, Desso Group

The Desso Group is one of the world’s largest makers of carpets. A few years ago Kranendijk read the book Cradle to Cradle, a manifesto meant to convince companies that they can improve the world and improve their business results by pursuing more sustainable manufacturing processes. Stef decided to remake his company according to the manifesto, and he spoke about how his company is recycling carpet, using fewer chemicals, and innovating in areas such as office noise reduction. I gave him an advance copy of my book and I hope that he now reinvents his marketing according to my manifesto!

Len Sauers, VP, Global Sustainability, P&G

Sauers was one of the notable attendees who is not yet an alum of Procter. He was a perfect fit to speak in the conference theme of sustainability. He first spoke about P&G research into what consumers are willing to pay for more sustainable products. About 9% say they will pay more, 72% will pay the same or less, and about 17% ignore the sustainability issue altogether.

He went on to describe how the P&G corporate drive for sustainability can result in innovation down to individual products. For example, the company discovered that the Laundry Detergent category had the biggest negative energy impact among all of P&G’s businesses. That’s because a lot of energy is used in hot water washing cycles. This in turn helped drive innovation on brands such as Tide and Ariel that allow for better cleaning in cold water. And by advertising the benefits of cold water washing, P&G is helping to educate consumers on this simple yet meaningful step to reduce energy consumption. In the Netherlands alone, the company’s efforts have helped convince 52% of consumers to wash in cold water versus just 7% a few years ago.

Panel with Sir Martin Sorrell (CEO, WPP), Kevin Roberts (CEO, Saatchi & Saatchi), and Jim Stengel (Former Global Marketing Officer, P&G)

In one of the most disappointing parts of the event because earlier sessions ran very long, this panel of marketing giants was cut short. But there were a few good highlights from these strong voices for our industry.

Sir Martin spent time talking about how clients talk about holistic marketing, but their biggest barrier is actually their own behavior. They cannot seem to overcome the internal politics and silos of their organizations: “The amount of time we see our clients wasting on bureaucracy and infighting is appalling.” I wholeheartedly agree.

Kevin Roberts had some witty and accurate lines about what’s wrong with marketing today and what we need to do to fix it. Some of my favorites:

  • “The consumer is still not the boss at P&G; the brand is the boss… Consumers want to participate in building the brand.”
  • “It’s not B2B and B2C; it’s P2P—People to People.”
  • “Stop talking about touchpoints. Like the expression “counting eyeballs,” that’s not good enough. It’s about creating engagements, and we should measure return on involvement.”

John Pepper, Former P&G CEO and Disney Nonexecutive Chairman

Just days before the event, Procter announced that the CEO baton would be passing from A.G. Lafley to Bob McDonald, and we were lucky enough to have both A.G. and Bob join our event in Rome. What made the moment even more special was when John Pepper, another former P&G CEO, spoke for a few minutes about the success of A.G. and his confidence in Bob. I personally agree with John that Bob McDonald is a great choice for the role. I got to work for Bob when I was on the Tide brand in the late ’90s and found him to be an inspirational leader. (As an aside, on the Laundry floor I was jokingly known as “Little Bob” and McDonald was “Big Bob.”)

After praising Bob, Pepper talked a bit about how Disney thinks about sustainability in its operations and marketing. He made a great point about how “it’s key to record the company’s efforts around sustainability and promote them internally so that employees understand and value the work.” Pepper also talked about how Disney has a powerful ability to encourage sustainability and positive causes through its media channels and parks. Currently there are park exhibits that educate visitors about the need for environmental improvement, and Hannah Montana recently kicked off a Disney Channel effort that encourages kids to play a role in improving the world (see Disney.com/friendsforchange).

Finally, Pepper provided me with my personal highlight of the event. After his session I went up to hand him an advance copy of my book. The first thing he said was, “Well, any time someone gives me a book I have them sign it.” I was very touched to hear this request, which was actually the first time I have ever signed a copy of my book.

This interaction with John Pepper and the P&G alumni event itself reminded me of how special my time with this company has been. P&G took a risk in hiring me out of business school, and gave me incredible opportunities to challenge myself on big brands with big budgets. It trained me well and exposed me to some of the best marketers in the world. Now that I’m on the agency side with P&G as a client, the company has been an important partner for our success and growth as an agency—challenging us to continually take our game up a notch, and treating us with respect and fairness. Procter & Gamble has certainly improved my life and I look forward to continuing to build its business as an alum and agency partner.

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Monday 06.29.09

Celebrating Pringles Cannes Hands

Bob Gilbreath

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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Thursday 06.25.09

Kroger and Clorox Deliver a Dose of Prevention

Bob Gilbreath

A few weeks ago, Jonathan Richman from my team at Bridge Worldwide sent me this photo of complimentary disinfecting wipes that are available at our local Kroger stores near the shopping carts at the store entrance. I’m not sure if he specifically noticed this due to Swine Flu concerns, his growing traffic at his blog, Dose of Digital, or the fact that he is reading an advance copy of my book. Whatever the reason, it’s a nice reminder that little details can make a powerful impression on customers.

Kroger (full disclosure: a client of ours) and Clorox have actually been providing free disinfecting wipes for years. It is a very smart way to show the quality of service and amount of concern for shoppers at a “moment of truth,” that first step into the store. Interestingly, I could see an argument that providing these wipes could actually be a negative: They could send a signal that the store is dirty. But Kroger took the risk because it is the right thing to do for its customers. The recent concern over Swine Flu makes it even more critical.

Is this marketing? Is this a service? I’m not sure and it doesn’t really matter. What counts is that Kroger was thinking about the details and caring for the people who come through its doors each week. And the moment this blog post went up, it became word-of-mouth marketing… with meaning.

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Tuesday 06.23.09

Panera Adds Community Services

Bob Gilbreath

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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