For years I’ve been a big fan of the Webby Awards—mainly because they are not just another advertising industry occasion, but rather an annual attempt to reward what is truly the “best of the Web.” This year we are thrilled that our banner ad for Pringles—”Can Hands” (above)—is a finalist in the Webby Awards, and you can help by voting for it in the People’s Choice category!

If you love the ad and/or just want to do a favor for this grateful blogger, please take five minutes to register at the People’s Choice Webby center, and vote for Pringles in the “Banner Singles” category. The competition is tough in this little category—as we’re going head to head with banners from Apple (TBWA) and Burger King (Crispin Porter). Right now we’re leading with 31% of votes, compared to 29% each for these two. Net, it’s going to come down to the wire and your vote will be meaningful! Voting ends Thursday, April 29, so please vote now.

Thanks for your support—and please share with your friends!

I’ve read far too many articles and white papers about how brands should approach social media. Most make the topic more complicated than necessary—most likely in order to suggest that they have some secret sauce that is available at a convenient hourly rate. But complexity makes marketers even more frightened of jumping into the social pool. So here’s a simple suggestion: Listen and add value. Thanks to digital technology, it is extremely simple and low cost for your business to do both. As an example, let me share our work on the Pringles brand that just hit the social scene last week.

For well more than a year now Pringles has been very active in social media. We chose to embrace this as a focus of our digital marketing work because the brand fits within the world of entertainment and social sharing. The brand itself aims to create moments of unexpected fun. One of our first steps was to pull together many brand and consumer-generated Facebook groups. Within a few weeks Pringles became one of the top five brand Facebook accounts with more than 3 million fans around the world. In the months since, we have used the space mainly to share how others are playing with the brand. For example, highlighting fan-created videos such as this one.

We also used the Facebook page to share our “Can Hands” banner ad last summer. The ad that you can’t stop clicking became a minor sensation on sites where people share what’s cool (rarely advertising)—such as Reddit, CollegeHumor, BuzzFeed, and Fark. Over one weekend we had 300,000 people play with the banner on our staging server. Many completed all 95 clicks to get to the end.

But as much as we like to seed the engagement ourselves, a lot of Pringles social sharing comes from consumers’ passion and initiative. For example, in January someone created a Facebook page titled: “Dear Pringles, I cannot fit my hand inside your tube of deliciousness.” The group apparently arose as a humorous “protest” to the size of the can, and some people’s inability to reach down for the last few crisps. We watched as membership grew to 10,000 fans within the first week, and then to 100,000 fans over the first month. When the group reached 1,000,000, we knew we had to do something.

But what to do? Well, the most obvious solution when people are having fun with your brand in the social sphere is to join in on the fun—even if it means poking fun at yourself in the process. Our team worked with our global client to answer the buzz with something that could be quick, cheap, and meaningful. It’s important to call out why I chose these words:

• Global: Pringles is a global brand and Facebook is a global platform, so we had to be broad.
• Quick: The passion around this Facebook page might dwindle over time, so we wanted to act before it faded.
• Cheap: You never know whether an idea will catch fire or not; in fact, the odds are against it. So better to try something that works on a small budget. Further, when you spend a little to test an idea it means you have to have fewer conversations about various approvals and ROI measures.
• Meaningful: Again, the key is to add value to the community. People love to see a brand get involved, as long as its participation adds to the fun versus sucking it out.

Our agency and client team worked on ideas together and ended up choosing to use video to “respond” to people who are having trouble getting their hands into our cans. We developed ideas and shot video in an extremely short time period, and just uploaded them to YouTube and our Facebook page last week. You can see one of the directions we took in the video above—a tongue-in-cheek exercise video for people to work on their can/hand skills. At the end of the day, the Pringles can is engineered to protect the crisps and maximize value for consumers. A shorter can would mean fewer crisps, and a wider can would result in more broken pieces. So we’re not changing the can, but we can have fun with it—even building in the solution to consumers’ frustrations: “Tip & Enjoy.”

Another miniseries takes the form of a taunting voice from the bottom of the can. Check out one of these videos below:

It’s far too early to call this a success. We just launched it last week and will be doing a few things to seed it in the weeks ahead. Whether this becomes the next great social-media case study or not, we have entered the conversation in a meaningful way and will definitely learn lessons that will make us more successful as we continue our venture into social media. No matter what white papers you read or how many social-media experts you hire, there is nothing more valuable than getting firsthand experience with your fans.

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.

Every business in the world right now is talking about how to better communicate value to its customers. Our agency, along with many others, is briefing clients on value case studies and preparing projects that aim to convince consumers that top brands are relevant and worth the price premium over store brands and lesser competitors. There is a lot of talk about what “value” really means. Elements include product performance, of course, and even some mentions of terms such as ”brand trust.” But what has been missing from far too many calculations is consideration of how brand marketing itself can add value.

At his m-cause blog last week, Ryan Jones writes about the idea of a value equation, beginning with a great quote from Ron Shaich, CEO of Panera Bread: Value is about the totality of the experience. This got me rethinking about common value equations from the marketing textbooks. The common formula for customer value is (Product Benefit + Brand Equity)/Cost.

But this formula fails to consider one large source of value that should be added to the numerator of this equation: the added value of the marketing itself, where applicable. I’m talking about Marketing with Meaning, of course. By creating marketing that people choose to engage with, marketing that itself improves people’s lives. Of course the textbooks and company trainings don’t include this (yet), because they are used to a world in which advertising is a cost of delivering eyeballs to a product offer and brand equity. It has always been a necessary expense, rather than a valuable investment. It’s time to evolve the value equation.

Panera Bread’s offer of free Wi-Fi service in its restaurants is clearly an example of added value marketing. When Pringles allows buyers to create their own decorative labels, or Doritos creates a mystery flavor and invites buyers to create a name for it, people get more enjoyment for their $.99. When Vicks offers cold and flu alerts, or Similac provides a pregnancy guide, people receive valuable information that store brands fail to offer. When Home Depot teaches people how to install plumbing, or ConAgra Foods helps people make more balanced life choices, the brands are actually delivering value far beyond the products that either sells.

And so, here we have yet another reason to shift your business model to the method of Marketing with Meaning. In this space, I have shared how meaningful marketing grows short-term sales, builds long-term equity, and allows for more efficient cost savings. Now add “improving the customer value equation” to the list.

My dream is that marketers in conference rooms around the world begin asking themselves: “How is our marketing plan improving the value equation?” Suddenly that annoying TV ad or useless sports sponsorship looks a lot more “costly” than ever, and meaningful marketing becomes the most logical direction to turn.

Once in a while I bring up a topic that is such a no-brainer that it almost writes itself. This is one of those occasions. From the headline you likely got it right away: People absolutely love to personalize the products and services they buy. The overall concept hits on both sides of the brain. The rational, left side believes that there is a perfect package of features that will maximize the utility of a given purchase. Meanwhile, the right side loves to create something and show it off to others. More and more marketers have discovered the power of product personalization across one or both of these lines, and they are discovering that such meaningful marketing leads to great sales results.

Let’s start with M&Ms, a brand that has been in the personalization game for some time now, and was recently featured in a 3-minute Ad Age video. It’s a pretty simple concept: Let people go onto a website and create a personalized message to print onto their M&Ms candy. After starting in 2005 with simple messages of a few words, the company’s manufacturing process now allows faces, sports logos, and pretty much anything a customer can imagine. In other words, M&Ms helps people make more out of special occasions and personal passions. The result is a value-added experience that connects people deeply to the M&Ms brand. When people create a bowl of M&Ms with their wedding date on it, or buy a package of M&Ms with the Phillies 2008 World Series logo, they are creating a permanent bond with the brand that drives loyalty beyond reason.

People want to express themselves more and identify themselves more… and a brand like M&Ms can really enable that and evolve that.” (Ryan Bowling, PR Manager, Mars North America)

But the business benefits of personalization are just as powerful as the customer payoff. The candy itself returns a huge margin. One 7 oz. pack of Kyle Busch-themed candy sells for $12.99, which runs to $38.97 (plus shipping) in the three-bag minimum. Compare that to less than a dollar for regular M&Ms at the checkout lane. Personalized products also enjoy a strong word-of-mouth factor, as people often give these as gifts or can’t wait to show off their creations to friends and family. In the Ad Age video, Ryan Bowling, PR Manager for Mars North America, describes some of the other key marketing benefits of the program:

• “Opened up new partnerships and allowed the company to reinvest in its manufacturing systems”
• Led to a similar initiative with Dove bars called “My Dove“—which specializes in chocolate for weddings
• Finally, he credits the program with: “Nothing less than revitalizing the brand.”

More and more companies are getting the message that personalized products represent a model of meaningful marketing and strong business results. Per my left brain/right brain comment above, product personalization seems to work best in categories where people have specific tastes (food and otherwise) that they want to get just right and/or where they can show off their creativity to others. Here are some of my favorites:

NIKEiD—This maximizes both logic and emotion by offering up the chance to pick the perfect shoe fit and a range of colors and styles. Nike continues to evolve this business and marketing machine with experiments in mobile and even a Times Square billboard.

Jones Soda—Add your photo and choose your flavor, and for only $29.99 per 12-pack (plus shipping), you can have your personalized Jones concoction.

Pringles Pop Art—I’m proud to say that we just launched this tool a few weeks ago at Bridge Worldwide. The Pringles can is iconic and with this simple tool you can create a new label, print it, and tape it on. With barely any media support so far, we’ve had thousands of people create and share personal labels. I’m amazed that: (1) people are already creating holiday versions; and (2) one of the senior Pringles leaders has already created eight cans! You can check out and vote for mine here (a remembrance of Pringles inventor Fred Baur, who was buried in a Pringles can this year):

LEGO Factory—Use special software to design whatever you come up with, then upload the design, and order the LEGO kit needed to make it a reality. Happy kids and high profits.

Heinz—The new labels are funny, but you can come up with a better one on your own, right? My only ding on this program is that there is some pretty heavy editing for trademarks.

Scion—The Gen-Y brand from Toyota came to market built around the idea of personalization. Car lovers continually tune their cars after purchase, so why not allow personalization off the assembly line? They have built on this theme of personalization with Scion Speak, a tool that lets you create your own coat of arms.

Of course, personalization hasn’t worked for every brand. I recall Millstone coffee offering a personalized-blend product several years ago through Yahoo! stores. It did a great job of asking questions about your taste preferences, and then made a personalized blend of beans under the name of your choosing. The plug was pulled on Millstone, however, as owner P&G discovered that the high-maintenance packing process was not paying out. I do wonder if the company could have figured out a success model by staying in the game over time. This also might have given Millstone a stronger competitive position in the marketplace.

Despite a few challenge and brands that have no right to play here, product personalization offers huge prospects for meaningful marketing and business success. If you are not at least experimenting here, your brand—and its most loyal customers—are missing out.

For the first “official” blog post here, I want to dive into mobile marketing and share some breakthrough work we just launched for one of our clients, Pringles. Yep, Pringles + Mobile = Meaning.

Mobile rapidly is shaping up as the next big target for marketers’ efforts to reach their customers at a time when traditional media is losing its effectiveness. Nearly every consumer has a mobile phone or device, the technology is advancing to allow for better experiences (see Treo, iPhone), and geo-targeting offers the chance to, say, ping a pedestrian with a pizza ad just as she is walking by the pizza restaurant. Marketers are also intrigued by the chance to make a deal with phone networks who “own” their customers in a way similar to broadcast TV networks of old.

Despite the hype, mobile has been very slow to show a viable marketing model, mostly because people will not tolerate unwanted interruption on this most personal of devices. We already know that people are sensitive about having their phone numbers used for marketing. At least 76 percent of Americans have placed their numbers on the National Do-Not-Call Registry. Studies by Nielsen in 2007 show that only 18 percent of people trust mobile advertising, and 67 percent of mobile-phone customers who use data services said that mobile ads are unacceptable.

The solution? Make the marketing meaningful.

A few companies have found that people actually will choose to engage with mobile marketing that helps them out. A recent Adweek story provided some great examples. Vicks is providing weather alerts via SMS. CoverGirl created a “ColorMatch” application that recommends makeup while women are shopping. And Visa launched a wine-and-cheese-pairing recommendation tool.

I’m proud to say my company, Bridge Worldwide, launched another great mobile tool just a few weeks ago. We are testing a mobile shopping list for the Pringles brand. We came up with the idea because we know we can significantly increase sales to Mom if we can just remind her of Pringles at the point of purchase. Meanwhile, we know Mom is increasingly planning grocery trips on her laptop. So it was natural to create an online shopping list tool that could be sent via SMS to her mobile phone.

We set up a way to read household panel data among our test group, which will tell us whether or not this process moves cases, the tool is limited to folks in a small test group, so I cannot share broadly; but we might be able to share results in the future. At least one other marketing blogger likes the idea.

Interestingly, just as developing nations are skipping telephone poles and “land lines” and going straight to mobile for their first phones, mobile might be the first medium that skips interruptive marketing entirely and goes straight to marketing with meaning.

Please send me any examples of mobile marketing tools you have created for your brand or clients. I just might feature them here.