Monthly Archives: March 2010

JWT: “Periods suck, the ads don’t have to.”

By
Steve Poppe
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0

Jason DeTurris was the JWT account planner on Schick Quattro this past year and winner of a AAAAs Jay Chiat Award for work that led to inspired, effective creative. His branding idea was “transform your topiary.”  You remember the TV spots…they encouraged women to shave and sculpt their nether regions. It was fun, grown up advertising and it sold lots of razors.

Well, I can’t confirm it, but Jason’s back — or at least JWT’s back with some bold women’s advertising for U by Kotex. The idea, targeting women 14-21, is based upon the fact that historically work in the category has been paternalistic. That is to say, it has discussed periods and menstrual products as a single father might with his daughter. Awkwardly.  Facilitators of this euphemistic story telling are the TV networks, two of which won’t even run the new work. The spots parody and make fun of old campaigns and their silly demonstrations; the pouring of blue water onto a pad being one.

JWT is breaking ground here and thanks to the web (site created by Organic) is taking a much richer story to young women.  In addition, it has created an enemy in fem-care advertising that everyone can rally around – a conversation starter. JWT is going to make some serious bones (I’m reading the Godfather) in the fem-care category and should be a go-to shop for excellent creative (along with Ogilvy) that targets women. Schick and Kimberly Clark (Kotex) prove it. So Jason, is that you?

Brand Planning Sets You Free.

By
Steve Poppe
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0

Following a successful pitch a number of years ago, I was told we won the business because we were bold enough to suggest keeping the previous agency’s tagline. According to one board member who had been with L’Oreal, this was unheard of in the healthcare industry.  The brand strategy we pitched was perfectly in synch with the organizations existing tagline, so why get rid of it?  The problem was, the incumbent agency’s advertising wasn’t proving the tagline.  Their ads were communicating and informing but not in an organized, brand-building fashion.

Marketers have to find a brand promise, believe it, live it and invest in it. It should be supported in news, trade shows, retail, ads, Adwords, tweets, etc. As a client once said to me, all communications need to make deposits in the brand bank.  Not random deposits — planned, meted, brand-differentiating deposits, based upon a brand plan. A brand plan is hard to make but simple to follow.  It comprises a claim or promise and three discrete support planks. Prove the promise through the planks every day – in messaging and product development – and you will build your brand and market share. The brand plan sets you free. Peace!

Where you at Rock, where you at?

By
Steve Poppe
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0

RFID stands for radio frequency identification.  It is a really haps technology with great marketing upside. If you have a phone that is RFID enabled and walk by a pastry shop with tarts fresh out of the oven, you might get a special alert. “Hot apple tarts.”  If you don’t pay attention and continue walking the shop may ping you with a coupon to slow you down. (Nuisance? Perhaps. Smart? Very.)

Checkin

Checkin (a term that foursquare would like to own) is a manual geolocation application that allows your followers on foursquare to know where you are. If you checkin to Mary Carrol’s Irish pub on St. Paddy’s Day, your friends can find you. If Mary’s Carrol’s knows you have lots of friends, they’ll be smart to encourage you to checkin.  Should you decide upon stealth mode, don’t do it.    

These services subscribe to the marketing view that where you are is more important than what websites you visit.  Don’t get me wrong, visiting websites is a directional indicator of interest, but feet on premise or near prem is a big driver of da monies. And thanks to social media apps like foursquare, gowalla, loopt, etc. we marketers have new exciting mobile toys to play with.  Peace!

Accelerator Pedals and Online Ads

By
Steve Poppe
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0

There was an article today in the New York Times by Stephanie Clifford about new ad serving technology supported by real-time bidding, allowing ads to be served based on keywords and cookied behavior.  Supposedly everything takes place in milliseconds — before the page even load. (Is it me or are page loads getting slower and slower?  Thanks ads. Thanks beefy Web 2.0 apps.)

It stands to reason that as this technology matures a good deal of these immediate, personalized ads will be price-based. And how do marketers lower prices?  By cutting margins elsewhere, meaning brand advertising budgets, etc.  Fast forward a year or two and think about all the low-cost, challenger brand/no brand, tailored ads filling up your screens. Likely, you will have bitten on a price ad or two and had a poor experience and now avoid these ads altogether. Your avoidance behavior may be similar to that toward telemarketers.  And it’s too bad because as the behavioral modeling grows it has an opportunity to be an important selling mechanism.

But initially it will be price, price, price!  A word of caution marketers: Don’t fall into the price war — web ad bidding war.  It will be hard to get out of. And some of your accelerator pedals might stick. Peace!

South By…the Future

By
Steve Poppe
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0

I am really Jonesin’ for SXSW (South By Southwest).  A couple of years ago while with Zude.com we had a music thing going so we went to South By Music. South By Music is different than South By Interactive which starts tomorrow, but they are back to back events in Austin, TX.  Interactive is about web apps and Music is about musicians and bands looking to be signed. There is some cross over but for the most part the shows have different attendees.

 At Interactive Mark Zuckerberg speaks.  At Music the band X plays.

At Interactive iPods are emailing and tweeting. At Music they’re tuned to BootLiquor.

At Interactive the kids from UT have resumes. At Music they have CDs.

At Interactive there’s lots of paper. At Music paper is verboten.

At Interactive the kids are hungry for money. At music they are hungry for food.

At Interactive the taco joint on 6th is jammed. At music the taco truck is jammed.

Both shows are awesome and showcase their industry’s rock stars.  The Shiner Bock flows, the line at Stubb’s BBQ is McCrazy, the taco truck at the loading dock at the Convention Center still sells the cheapest tacos in town (with mashed potatoes) and the vibe is the future.  Peace!

PS. Please comment your Interactive/Music comparisons.

Cashiers, Conversationalists and CMOs.

By
Steve Poppe
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0

There are two factions in online marketing these days: Cashiers and Conversationalists. 

Cashiers

Cashiers care about the sale. They have the small dashboard that tracks click-to-sale and spits out an ROI calculations. Cashiers can’t wait to wake up in the morning to see the new numbers. They are in to usability testing, shopping cart abandonment, media optimization and other measures but their interest and energy pretty much stops at the sale. The buck stops there.

Conversationalists

Conversationalists are a daintier.  They immerse themselves in the process.  They want to make friends.  (Like the kid with the runny nose in grade school, sometimes they just walk right up to you and ask “Do you want be my friend?”)  In my world, conversationalists are actually more likely to find truths and insights about their products and win in the long term.  All the pop marketing gurus today are into the conversation. They are not technologists, thank God, so they are easy to listen to and learn from but their failing is that they’re a little too caught up in the sausage making, not the sausage tasting.

CMOs

For a CMO it’s great to have both types of people on staff.  A Yin and Yang thing. Cashiers are imperative for sales now. Conversationalists care about future sales, and loyalty and sale predisposition. But it’s hard to take predisposition to the bank. Good CMOs have a brand plan in place that gives direction to the factions.  A brand plan is informed by the work and findings of both factions, but it drives them.  A brand plan helps Cashiers and Conversationalist organize “claim and proof” in a way that creates Return on Strategy near and long term. Peace!

An unlikely mind.

By
Steve Poppe
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1

Noah Brier is an exciting, off-piste marketing strategist.  His post the other day suggesting some businesses would do well to have born on dating is a case in point. 

 Head of planning and strategy at the Barbarian Group, Mr. Brier is unique because he likes to question rules, norms and the tried and true. He looks at the blacks, whites and grays.  His mind mashes up things and, I suspect, he sometimes introduces a bit of randomness to his rigor – just for flavor. In the advertising or creative business some might call this approach disruptive. I think of it as natural. Seeds grow in the oddest places…not always where the farmer plants them. They blow around, are carried by birds, find unlikely hosts for germination. If Steve Jobs is embodied by the advertising tagline “think different” Mr. Brier of similar mind and value in a strategist’s body.

 Don’t get me wrong, Mr. Brier can go head-to-head with traditionalists – he just doesn’t always chose to.

 His monthly likemind — something he and Piers Fawkes came up with — is an audacious idea bringing people of similar views together in coffee shops around the world.   I suspect it won’t be long before he and Mr. Fawkes invent UnlikeMind.  Let’s start with one here in the states on the topic of healthcare. Might work. Peace!

Upwardly Mobile App Neighborhoods

By
Steve Poppe
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0

Nice article over the weekend in the New York Times on the growth of web start-ups in NYC.  Silicon Valley East some might say.  Other suggest the East coast is trumping the West when it comes to start-ups in the media, mobile and publishing areas.

NY is likely to be the hub of these companies not just because advertising, publishing and media companies reside in NY, and lets not forget the financiers, but because the next “haps” development area is mobile and there’s no better place on earth to test mobile apps than in a city of 8 million people — and the businesses they frequent. It’s a commercial petri dish. 

Brooklyn Vs. SoHo

There seem to be two factions in NY where the action is. Brooklyn is where the gearheads and coder-savants have their businesses and SoHo is where the artsy, consumer-savvy go to work. The two areas are only a couple of subway stops away and are feeder neighborhoods, but they are different mindsets indeed.  I’m not sure which one is the shark and which the pilot fish but I’m working on it.

I haven’t forgotten you Union Square and Flatiron people, but you are just a little too focused on da monies and PPT and not enough on the art and code so I’ll remove you from the fray for now.  Anyway, there is something very exciting going on in these two communities and it will be a hotbed of technology innovation and seriously cool mobile growth. Ride the subway between these two communities and watch the future happen.  Peace!

Tattoos or Marketing with Meaning?

By
Steve Poppe
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0

Here’s one of my favorite song lyrics. It’s from the rawness that is David Allan Coe:

The old man was covered in tattoos and scars;
He got some in prison and others in bars.
The rest, he got workin’ on old junk cars…
In the daytime.

I was reading the paper paper today and noticed a nice big Rolex ad featuring Lindsey Vonn skiing.  She is not covered in tattoos but might as well have been.  Here are some of her sponsors: Red Bull, Spyder Thinsulate, Nature Valley, Charles Schwab, Audi, Visa, Sprint and Alka Seltzer Plus — and that’s just on the front of her racing suit. She also represents Head skis, I believe, but they’re on her feet and hard to see.

Red Bull

I tweeted a couple of weeks ago before the Olympics that someone smart should pick up Lindsey and sponsor her. Within an hour someone from Red Bull (good job monitoring, btw) responded that they were her sponsor. Red Bull has done a better job than some with Lindsey – they own her helmet – but the reality is much of their stuff is still tattoo-like.  As Bob Gilbreath says in his good book The Next Evolution of Marketing (better known as Marketing with Meaning), tattooed logos aren’t particularly meaningful.  The reason I didn’t know Ms. Vonn had sponsors was because no one had really pushed their brand idea into her being.

I read somewhere that the Red Bull branding idea has something to do with “flying.” Can’t tell from their website.  And if I can’t spot a brand idea, there probably isn’t one. Sponsors need to understand themselves before they can create a meaningful and promotable relationship with a spokesperson. They need to know their idea. Peace!

What Keeps WPP, IPG and Omnicom Up at Night?

By
Steve Poppe
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0

Google and Facebook are collecting scads of data about each and every user of their applications.  They are doing something smart with that data, serving ads, but have not yet scratched the surface of what they can do with that data.

Google bought DoubleClick a couple of years ago, the world’s leading advertising server and analytics company. Facebook is also strengthening its analytics capability.

Planning and buying media, both online and offline, has always been a pretty technical and complicated science and it still is to a large degree. The practice has been specialized and data-driven but always managed by the capable hands of usually creative human beings.   Yet if Google and Facebook use the algorithm to parse and predict buying behavior, and do it with NASA-like precision, what will become of ad agency media departments? Or Nielsen? Or stand alone media buying agencies?

Do you think C-level agency executives are thinking about this?  Does this keep Mssrs. Levy, Wren, Sorrell and Roth and their successors up at night?  Mr. Levy and Publicis own Altas – that was a smart move. Do you think there will be a backlash against Google and Facebook? Are they getting too much power? Love to hear your thoughts.  Peace it up!

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