Posts Tagged ‘contest’

Burning Question Contest: You Could Win a Trip to Cannes

Thursday, April 15th, 2010

A few weeks ago I announced that Jim Stengel and I will be taking our message to the annual Cannes Lions International Advertising Festival in June. We believe that there is no better place to start a revolution in marketing than this annual gathering of some of the biggest and best marketers and advertising agencies in the world. Our goal is to uncover a “Burning Question” that, when asked, helps elevate our work to unheard of higher levels. And for a few weeks now we’ve been gathering suggestions from people about what this Burning Question should be. After all, this is an issue that touches more than the relative handful of folks who get to fly to the South of France. Today, we are taking this open source involvement to the next level as we announce a contest that will send two individuals to join us at our seminar on Friday, June 25.

We want to bring two people who are just as passionate about changing marketing as we are—but who might not have the resources to get there on their own. We are looking for people who have had success in making change at their organizations, and have taken steps to share their lessons with the broader marketing world. We invite people who work at big or small companies, people who have shared lessons on blogs or classrooms, and people who have worked in marketing for one year or a lifetime.

Our team has put together a short application process for people to make their case. Jim and I will select winners based on the quality of their submissions. The only major limit on entries is that we are only able to take folks from the United States and Canada. I was bummed that we had to limit to this group, but contests are a legal nightmare, and we would have had to adapt rules to each nation’s laws (a cost much larger than sending people).

The prize is pretty damn cool—a chance to fly out to Cannes, participate in the event, meet passionate marketers from around the world, and help spark a revolution. Of course we will ask winners to be active participants in driving the buzz before the event and sharing the experience on the ground from Cannes—mainly through blogging and Twitter.

So if you are a meaningful marketer who wants to change the world in Cannes this summer, fill out an application and start driving support from your friends and followers. I look forward to seeing your responses—and to seeing two entrants in Cannes with us in June!

(Official rules here)

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Posted in cannes | No Comments »

Preparing for Our Book Launch Event

Monday, October 5th, 2009

hack night logos

In a matter of hours, at 9 a.m. ET Tuesday, about 240 Bridge Worldwide employees will launch a social-media marketing experiment to support the launch of our new book, The Next Evolution of Marketing: Connect with Your Customers by Marketing with Meaning. I’m excited about the launch, and can’t wait to see what comes out of the groups’ work—and I look forward to readers’ participation and feedback.

The book officially launched on Friday, October 2, and it got off to a great start. That morning Advertising Age published an outstanding book review by Pete Blackshaw. I could not have asked for a better and compelling review of the book, and sure enough the sales lift-off was immediate. On Amazon.com, the book rose to the #1,200 seller across all books, and shot up to #2 in the Advertising category, just under The Tipping Point. McGraw-Hill emailed me soon after to let me know that they are already getting ready for a second printing. Thanks to all of you for helping me along the way and for your early book orders.

Tomorrow morning our entire company is going to try to generate some more buzz around the book by engaging in an exercise modeled after P&G’s successful “Hack Night” from back in March 2009. You might recall that the company brought together a couple hundred senior-level marketers and external digital experts for an evening to compete on teams, using social-media tools to sell the most Tide T-shirts in support of its “Loads of Hope” cause marketing program. I got to attend that event and saw it not only raise a lot of money in a few hours, but also get people to learn by working together and experimenting.

A few months ago, our President, Jay Woffington, asked me if we might do our own company-wide “Hack Night” in support of the book launch. His goal was to not only juice book sales, but to give all of our people a chance to further improve their digital sensibility by rolling up our sleeves and working together. This conversation spawned a project and a team and tomorrow’s event.

Here’s how it will work: The goal of the competition is to get as many people as possible to download the free chapter of the book.  We decided to do this because the free chapter itself is Marketing with Meaning, and it is much easier to track chapter downloads than actual book sales. We have split up the company into teams, and assigned each team a specific medium to use to market the free chapter: Facebook, Google, Twitter, LinkedIn, WPP resources, and this blog and community. The teams first met a little more than a week ago to start planning and preparing, and tomorrow at 9 a.m. they will begin their activities in earnest. We will have them each in separate War Rooms, with a live monitor feeding in the total downloads of each team. Everyone will stop working at 1 p.m. so we can go to have some fun at our annual company offsite, where we will announce the winner of the contest and present a few other awards.

Already people to seem to be having fun and are learning a lot. I don’t know much about what they have planned, though. A few teams have asked me mysterious questions, and one team dragged me into a room to film something before I left on a trip last week. “Winning” is one of the key words of our agency’s equity, so I’m sure the competition will be hot and heavy.

My only fear for the day is that the competition will drive people to do things that end up angering our carefully crafted audience. During the P&G Hack Night, one of my friends, Kevin Doohan, who knows several of the participants, wrote about how the contest felt like spamming. I have tried to reduce this risk by providing a coaching brief on how to approach people, as well as how to ask for forgiveness when you make a mistake. But I am sure that some of you might find tomorrow’s event annoying. I apologize in advance and hope that you see that our hearts are in the right place.

Although I am the author of this book and the most public voice of “Marketing with Meaning” I really believe that I am just one of many members of what can be an important movement. This idea has been driven by nearly everyone at Bridge Worldwide, readers of this blog have been incredibly supportive during the past 18 months, and now we have new tools such as our community to bring others into the cause. I am excited that our experiment tomorrow might give many more people exposure to what we’re trying to do together, and give more people the chance to be a part of driving a better future for marketing and society.

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Posted in Agency Marketing, Sampling, book | 4 Comments »

Sam Adams Supporting Craft Brewing

Wednesday, August 26th, 2009

I believe Sam Adams has been the most consistently meaningful beer marketer that I have come across. Last year I wrote about its launch of specially designed beer glasses that—at least in this beer drinker’s opinion—really do make the amber ale taste even better. Today I want to share some things I’ve learned about the company’s dedication to encouraging home- and craft-brew competitors.

As a subscriber to the Sam Adams email newsletter, I’ve had a chance to learn about its annual LongShot challenge among home brewers. It is an annual competition with judging events around the country that gives people the chance to have their beer mass produced in a special promotional six-pack. What I love about this contest is that it is much more than simply a “name our next flavor” or “make your own commercial” marketing promotion, which many brands have done with little personal engagement or connection to the product itself. Instead, this challenges the most dedicated brewers against each other and offers up the special reward of possibly seeing their years of investment pay off in peer admiration and distribution across the country.

My only disappointment is that Sam Adams doesn’t make the LongShot contest a bigger deal. After looking for the SKU in stores for years, I only just found it last weekend in a dusty corner of a local liquor store. There are actually three different winners in each six-pack: Cranberry Wit, Traditional Bock, and Double IPA (my favorite of the three with tons of citrus from the seven different types of hops). The Cranberry Wit was actually created by a Sam Adams employee, Carissa Sweigart. Giving employees the chance to participate is a pretty neat cultural build for the company. In total there were a little more than 1,300 entries from about 1,000 home brewers.

Last week I found another great story of Sam Adams support for small brewers. In a video at Fast Company I found an interview of Sam Adams founder Jim Koch. He tells the story of a recent national hops shortage, and how he ended up selling excess hops to competitive craft brewers who did not have access to this key ingredient. Koch put the reason simply: “They are my colleagues.”

The question is: Why would a mass marketer such as Sam Adams do small things like this that only touch a handful of their consumers? Where’s the scale, right? Well some might argue that these brilliant marketers realize that their positioning in the market as a legitimate microbrewer means that they must stay close to their roots and do things that the big players find too small. True, but I think Koch and his team are making these “small” efforts first and foremost because they want to. After all, Koch first brewed Sam Adams in his kitchen sink, and today they continue to behave like a bunch of passionate believers who want to make great-tasting beer. That’s just the easiest way to do the right thing for the business.

By sticking to their brand purpose and retaining a personal, hands-on engagement in the product, the marketing stuff comes naturally, and Sam Adams continues to be one of the best big brands in beer. Actually, with Anheuser-Busch’s takeover by foreign-based InBev, Sam Adams is now the largest American-owned brewery. I can think of no better beer representative for our country, and no better representative of where I hope our country’s brand marketing is heading next.

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Posted in Contests, purpose | 1 Comment »

Friday Fun

Friday, August 8th, 2008

Each of us has been disappointed by under-the-cap contests hundreds of times in our lives. I specifically remember being a kid and collecting Coke caps in a contest that awarded a grand prize if you spelled something like “Coke Is It.” My favorite contest as a kid was with McDonald’s during the 1984 Olympics – the Soviets are out and everyone’s a winner!

It’s debatable whether such contests are truly meaningful. My guess is that, like most advertising tactics that have been overdone, people are mainly immune to the long-shot odds afforded by such contests. Meanwhile, people are outsmarting the contests and sharing how with everyone thanks to the Internet.

The other day I heard a fresh take on under-the-cap contests from Comedian Mitch Hedberg. Enjoy:

“I opened up a yogurt; underneath the lid it said, ‘Please try again,’ because they were having a contest I was unaware of. But I thought I might have opened the yogurt wrong. Or maybe Yoplait was trying to inspire me. ‘Come on Mitchell, don’t give up! Please try again.’ A message of inspiration from your friends at Yoplait: fruit on the bottom, hope on top.”

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Posted in Contests | No Comments »

A Tale of Three Ales: (1) Sam Adams

Wednesday, July 2nd, 2008

In the weeks and months ahead, I will use this space to more fully detail a model for meaningful marketing. One of the features of our model is a grouping of the kinds of meaning that brands can provide. We call one level of meaningful marketing “Connection.” Connection marketing brings consumers closer to brands on a deeper, emotional level. It can be entertainment, experiences, a creative outlet, or social interaction.

Perhaps no product category better exemplifies meaningful connections than beer. Beer brands – and alcohol brands in general – depend on forming personal bonds with the people who drink them. After all, the category does not fulfill a true “need,” we often make beer choices in a social setting, and we tend to form loyalty to brands that reflect who we are (or who we want to be). As a result, great beer marketing is meaningful when it connects us closer to the brand and to others who share the same mind-set.

Recently I’ve come across three examples of beer marketing that hold high meaning for the specific consumers they target. This is the first of a series of three posts on meaningful beer marketing.

First up: Sam Adams

Sam Adams represents a cross between mass and class. It is an “entry point” in the microbrew category that adds higher quality to the traditional mix of nationally advertised brands. The target is likely someone who believes in paying for quality and likes to try new things, but wants a drink that is consistently enjoyable.

A few months ago I personally joined the Sam Adams brand world by purchasing a set of glassware that is specifically designed to maximize the experience of drinking Sam Adams beer. Founder Jim Koch met with a maker of wine glasses and wondered if glassware could do for beer what it has done for wine: Improve the taste and experience. I was already a fan of the brand, but when I read about this glass in Fortune I had to have it. You can see in the diagram below that the glass has several features that are designed to bring out the best in this beer, including laser etching on the bottom that produces a steady stream of bubbles.

I spent $30 for a set of four branded glasses and couldn’t wait to test them out on my own. Sure enough, my experience was excellent. I really do believe that these beer glasses improve the taste experience of the beer – and I won’t use anything else in my basement bar. Further, whenever friends come over and I’m serving drinks, I cannot wait to pour them a Sam Adams into my special glasses so that they can test the taste for themselves. Net, I paid $30 to become an ultra-loyal advocate for Sam Adams. That’s meaningful marketing.

When purchasing these glasses I also chose to opt into the Sam Adams email newsletter. As a digital marketing strategist, I’ve seen a hell of a lot of email newsletters. Many lack focus and feeling – but Sam Adams delivers. The newsletters are focused on the art of craft beers. Of course, there is mention of new seasonal brews that are arriving from the brand. But there is a lot of space dedicated to education about beer ingredients and helpful tips for home brewers. In other words, Sam Adams is driving consumer interest in making their own beer instead of buying Sam Adams. It’s similar to my post a few days ago about Tylenol using ads to help solve headaches without buying the brand. Despite a small risk to lower sales from home brewing, this builds a passion around craft brews and a deeper connection with the Sam Adams brand. It also pays off later in the year with the “Long Shot” home brewing contest, in which two winners get their work turned into a seasonal six-pack. Who wouldn’t want to buy the best homebrew of the year?

Sam Adams deepens its connection to their consumers in the newsletter by introducing a human element. The newsletter is authored by employees Andrew and Bert (pictured below), and shows photos of other employees and brand fans throughout. The personal touch helps a giant mega-brand like Sam Adams still feel like a local microbrew. It even allowed me to instantly forgive the brand when it had a product recall that forced me to pour a few bottles down the drain.

In my next two posts I will share additional examples of meaningful connections in the beer category. In the meantime, pour yourself a cold one and ponder the possibilities for your business.

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Posted in Connection | 2 Comments »