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    Kellogg in the omelet business?

    By
    Steve Poppe
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    I love social media.  I do.  It is changing the marketing landscape. Not always for the better, but that’s okay, we can learn from our mistakes.  The key is to use it. 

    One of the areas in which I think social media is misused is cause marketing – specifically when paired in transmedia  programs tied to advertising and promotion.  Case in point:  In an article in yesterday’s New York Times, there was a story about the Kellogg Company getting behind a very important cause – feeding impoverished kids breakfast.  Kellogg is said to be donating $200,000 across the country to feed school kids healthy breakfasts.  Yesterday was National Breakfast Day. The cause was clearly a good one.

    Where it gets a little hinky and bit forced is when Kellogg campaigns (verb) the effort and promotes a social activity called “Share your breakfast.”  For each picture of a breakfast uploaded to the Kellogg www.shareyourbreakfast.com website a breakfast will be donated to an under-served school.  The program will be promoted via traditional advertising, digital, event, mobile and the rest of the kitchen sink.  There will be a long table TV spot, free breakfasts in Grand Central Station and a bunch of agencies sharing media plans. According to Kellogg this is their largest integrated program yet. 

    I truly applaud the “feed the under-served” intent, though $200,000  wouldn’t pay for half the TV spot production.  That said, the total program is a bit like an undercooked omelet prepared with a bunch of back-of-the-refrigerator ingredients.  The initial idea was a good one no doubt, but the transmedia requirement took it way off the rails.  The cause component would have been better handled as a solo PR effort. Perhaps next year will be tighter.  Peace!

    Selling business.

    By
    Steve Poppe
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    Native advertising is defined by some as advertising done to look like the content of the media on which it appears.  The ads are tailored to the media. A couple of decades ago if you made your TV ad to look like a newscast and scheduled it to run on the evening news, standards and practices would not approve it.  It had gone too native. Lately, I’ve seen some cable stations using program actors to promote products in commercial pods during the show.  It’s worth a rewind…until you see it’s an ad.  Smart idea actually.

    In the web world, native advertising is doing similar things, allowing marketers to appear to offer site content but then pulling the rug out quickly to reveal a product endorsement. It is a way forward, and if does properly effective yet it will make us callous to the media channel.

    I’m all about value…and native advertising has the ability to add a little value to the selling message, but it does detract from the media channel’s integrity.

    But here’s the thing.  Today many regular ads aren’t native to their own selling message. So why be native to a media property.  Ads are typically native to humor, to visual extravagance, to performance and story but not the product. Let’s fix that first before we go mucking up other media channels.

    Great consumer insights married to emotional and logical selling schemes are the way forward. Let’s not forget we are in the selling business.  Peace.

    Marmot’s super bowl spot.

    By
    Steve Poppe
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    (This post originaly appeared February 10, 2016, then was taken down die to a hack.)

    I love the Marmot brand. I ski in Marmot, I sleep in Marmot, I do outdoors stuff in Marmot. I want to own more of it.  The gear is well-designed, engineered-to-the-max and good looking.  They’ve done a wonderful job with branding and marketing. (I have tend pole that bent, and it doesn’t even bother me. Why? Because Marmot is like family.)

    Then, before the Super Bowl, I saw a Marmot teaser ad campaign and knew I wasn’t going to like. Super Sunday I saw the real thing.  It’s a Goodby, Silverstein and Partners spot, focusing around, you guessed it, a marmot. Were this toilet tissue or insurance, maybe. But cuddly talking Marmot? Oy. I can only imagine the 2 other campaigns the agency pitched to beat this one. It should never have been presented. Lazy ass trade craft. It is so unfitting of the brand.

    I can just imagine the engineers in the goose down research center, breathing feathers all day, watching the game on TV with their friends. “A talking marmot, really?” No wonder advertising and marketing people have a bad name in engineering focused companies.

    As a brand strategy guy and Marmot fan it was a sad day. Even if the spot tested off the charts with the teens and tweens – the next generation of buyers – it was a brand mistake. A 5 million dollar mistake. And that’s a lot of feathers.

    Peace.    

     

     

     

    Advertising Generics

    By
    Steve Poppe
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    Advertising generics in this case does not mean store brands or value brands, it refers to the selling words we use in advertising and sales.  Quality. Service. Tailored to your needs. Savings.  You’ve heard these words a million times in selling. They are the flah, flah, flah of selling.  Key words, if you will, that tell consumers you have no real message. Today, if you are selling quality, you are not selling.

    If you want to study selling go out and do some cold calling. Or telemarketing. (No don’t. You may find your way to my door.)  Advertising is a little like cold calling.  But at least many who create ads understand the notion of engagement, product benefit, value demonstration and simplicity. 

    The best advertising and cold selling does not use generics.  It uses meaningful selling ploys —  to be figured out on a case by case basis. It’s an art.

    In sales the pop technique for the past 10 years has been “solution selling.” Don’t sell the features – ask, listen, find the pain points and create the perception that your product can heal.  Solutions selling has spawned a generation of listeners.  “Hi, I know you are very busy but tell me about your company.”  Nuh, uh.  No thanks.  Busy. Buh bue. 

    Stay away from generics. Don’t sell education, sell Princeton. Don’t sell medicine, sell your branded scrip. Listen to yourself selling, experience your ads.  If you wouldn’t buy from you who would? Peace!

    Celebrate, rinse, repeat.

    By
    Steve Poppe
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    I often use the word “celebrate” when talking about branding. It’s a great word. Once you have your brand idea and planks together, spending money and calories celebrating your product, service and/or customer is the best way forward. A great many ads and sales schemes focus on tearing down competitors.  Consumers don’t appreciation that. They appreciate and gravitate toward the positive.  “If you don’t have something nice to say…” 

    When it comes to advertising, too often we build ads that people like.  By celebrating the above, we are building up products people like. There’s a difference.  One can imply a negative, so long as it’s done by superimposing a positive.  One of my favorite ad sayings is “make them feel something, then do something.” Feeling good is good. Peace!

    Papa John’s. Better ingredients, better ads.

    By
    Steve Poppe
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    It’s time to retire John Schnatter from the Papa John’s advertising.  The founder of Papa John’s, the number 3 national pizza chain in America, has long been the focal point of its advertising.  The only other constant has been the line “better ingredients, better pizza”  Not a bad strategy but an unrequited strategy if you ask me.

    Better ingredients do make a better pizza, when properly cooked and assembled — with meticulous attention to cooking detail. But all we get is Papa John talking to the director behind the camera on a football field somewhere with a forced smile and a few red tomatoes flopping around the screen.  The dude is a great business man, but has an almost Mark Cuban-like need for air time.

    Please sir, go to Italy and cut a deal on some mountain grown olive oil or hand milled flour and get us better ingredients. Better ingredients, better story, better pizza. Peace! 

    The Silo Chasm

    By
    Steve Poppe
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    How does a brand idea cross the silo chasm?  It’s doesn’t always. 

    Matching luggage is creative term for creative that travels nicely from media to media.  Let’s say you have a selling idea for a TV commercial – but it’s visual.  How does that idea transfer to radio? (“Hi, I’m a talking horse from Yonkers Raceway.” Ouch. )  Similarly, what if you have an experiential idea, perfect for promotion or digital but it lies like a lox in print? Campaign ideas don’t always travel. So what do you do? 

    And today, with marketing silos expanding not contracting, it is even harder to corral a campaign idea and bring it to life – especially for big clients with multiple agencies, all of which want to come up with the “big” idea.  

    So here are some rules to live by. Campaigns come and go…a powerful branding idea is indelible. Coke must “refresh” no matter the campaign.  Corona must convey a hot, vacation-like retreat. Norelco electric razors must convey a smooth shave. Rule 2:  Don’t kill yourself trying to force fit a campaign idea to a media. Media is not a strategy.  A hammer does not turn a screw.  Do your best to allow an idea to travel, but don’t force it.  It only will diminish the original idea.  Matching luggage may be nice for Paris Hilton, but she doesn’t have to carry that much shizz with her — she got peoples.

    Peter Kim (the deceased one) once told an AT&T client spending hundreds of millions on TV “Campaigns are overated.” Peace.

    Geico burnout vs. new paradigm churn-out.

    By
    Steve Poppe
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    Here’s a fresh idea for bold national TV advertisers.  One and done.  Okay, maybe five and done is better.  Create and run TV spots 5 times then take them off the air and move them to the web.  A question many large agencies asked back in the day of the $385,000 TV commercial and still ask is “What is the burn out rate”?  How many times can a consumer can see a TV spot before his/her eyes start to bleed.

    In today’s fast twitch media, where clicking is a sport, the burn out factor has grown even more sensitive. This is why sooner or later Geico is going to need to chill.  I was reading today about The Gap and its desire to become more relevant to the younger set – more relevant is a euphemism for sell more – and I’ve also been reading about Denny’s, similarly strategized.  The former will do nice ads and burn, burn, burn them.  The latter is running ads only a few times, then driving people to the web to watch them on-demand, on-desire, in longer form. Denny’s and Gotham get the target’s media habits and will save money. Gap and Ogilvy will not…unless.

    Unless they use the new “five and done” model.  Should Ogilvy decide to turn itself into a crafty, creative TV production studio for the Gap it will have a chance. Buy high profile mass reach media and run their ads only a handful of times.  Then move on. Lots of freshies. Story-tell with lots of chapters, a la James Patterson. And it shouldn’t necessarily be a serial story, just a gestalt-y all around the brand strategy story.

    Smart shops can create spots at low costs these days. Fast twitch ads, not burn out campaigns, are what the daring will do. That’s what the youth market wants. Peace.

    Supersized Claims.

    By
    Steve Poppe
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    I was just watching a video from the recent PSFK Event in NY showing Graham Hill’s new project LifeEdited.com.  His interesting “life editing” concept fits nicely with the Craft Economy, me thinks.  Anyway, the opening for the video talks about how America has super-sized our culture over the last 50 years. Quite right. Mr. Hill’s suggestion is to downscale one’s physical footprint on earth, which is a savvy and necessary idea. 

    You can find the video here.

    In addition to our lives, though, we’ve spent years supersizing our advertising claims: most, best, largest, unparalleled, flah-flah-flah.  These words and their overuse have made advertising and marketing unreal. Who do we believe? Coors Light is the most refreshing beer in America? Are you kidding me?  What happened to standards and practices?

    Marketers need to stop pizzling into the wind.  They need to find own-able territory, live it, mean it, and be it. It’s nice to aspire, but don’t aspire to the un-noble supersized claim. You wouldn’t brag at a keg or cocktail party, why spend millions on such boorish behavior in advertising?  Peace. 

     

    Visuals.

    By
    Steve Poppe
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    0

    There is subtext in every marketing piece.  For instance, today there is a big hubbub (and rightfully so) about a Mad Men outdoor billboard showing Don Draper in free-fall high atop a building on the West Side of Manhattan.  (The board is 95% white space.) To show watchers it’s an iconic visualization of the show and Don Draper’s life.  To New Yorkers and others who lost friends and loved ones 9/11, it’s an insensitive punch in the como se llama. 

    Visuals, more than words, tell immediate stories. We need to be mindful.  Pictures that show danger may be eye-catching but convey danger which research shows can transfer that feeling subconsciously to the brand.  Imagery that conveys happy (Coke’s happiness factory) can transmute smiles.  Visuals that depict chaos or disorganization similarly hurt an organization story.

    Ergo, think before you select a visual.  Not everyone sits around a computer for hours trying to select a visualization to match a brief.  Most pass marketing pieces with nary a glance.  So look up. Stay true. Be sensitive. Peace.

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