Brand Marketing Tips by Steve Poppe » at&t

Creating a Social Media Monster?

Steve Poppe — Wed, 23 Jun 2010 12:05:26 +0000

Mission Control is a well-produced 76 second video by PepsiCo’s Gatorade ‘splaining how Gatorade marketing monitors the web for comments, chatter and potential product improvements. The “war room” at mission control is filled with AT&T NOC (network operations center) -like people in front of multiple monitors — their fingers on the pulse of Gatorade enthusiasts. Looks like they are a busy bunch.

Interspersed with the mission control pictures are great shots of Kobe, Serena, etc., helping viewers work up a sweat…which is what Gatorade is and should always be about.

Right now this vid is kind of inside baseball for the marketing, advertising and social community – plus I think it’s being used in and around Cannes to round up votes. It’s a great spend, by Gatorade as they “set the stage for digital leadership.” I’ve written before that every large corporation in America will have a social media dept. and I believe it. Smart senior agency people have nodded in agreement yet told me that the truly creative ideas and productions that hit wire/less will still come from agencies. That, too, I believe.

After a while though, after all marketers have jumped on this listening bandwagon and consumers are conditioned to provide product input, message input and marketing input, it will begin to dull the strategic senses. It will turn the world into a place filled with screen-scratching marketing interns, when what we really want to do is listen to the influential “Posters.” (Google whatstheidea+posters.)

Let’s watch out for that monster that we are creating. Peace!

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The Ascent of Marketing.

Steve Poppe — Fri, 23 Apr 2010 12:42:57 +0000

Back in the 1700-1800s (in the U.S.) if you needed stuff you either made it or went to the general store. The Sears, Roebuck and Co. catalogue was the next marketing innovation (1888), showing pictures of products and published prices, allowing customers to purchase by mail. Among the 322 pages in the catalogue published in 1894 must have been products didn’t sell and had to be replaced. The birth of ROI?

Television

The next massive marketing innovation was television. Television commercials which began in earnest in the 1940s became the most popular, effective form of advertising. But can you imaging trying to track sales to media and production back then in the very beginning? “Where’s the ROI? How do you measure this stuff?” Mad men.

The Web

Fast forward to the Inter-nech. Banner ads and ad serving allowed us to count clicks. 2% click thru rates. Whoo hoo. Click to buy. Whoo hoo. But not everything could be bought over the web. (Discussion of that for another day.) CTRs diminished and web display ads became, so said the salespeople, a branding mechanism.

Social Media

Enter social media. And consultants. When consultants out-number practitioners you know the market is in flux. The Altimeter Group, some very smart people let me just say, created a social media presenttion ‘splaining how to measure social media via a marketing analytics framework. Here are some of the measurables: share of voice, audience engagement, conversation reach, active advocates, active influence, advocacy impact, customer problem resolution rate, resolution time, satisfaction score, plus a couple of metrics tied to gathering input for product innovation. What’s not mentioned here, something Messrs. Sear and Roebuck might have added, is sales. I love consultants ( am one) and the Altimeter Group is growing like a dookie, but until they and all of us tie these type of metrics back to da monies, we’re just making paper.

A smart client at AT&T once said to me, “we collect all this data now we have to do something smart with it.” That’s business. That’s return on strategy. Peace!

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Toyota Needs to Shush.

Steve Poppe — Thu, 18 Feb 2010 13:39:53 +0000

And shush its mass communications. At least until it knows the extent of the problems. They can’t offer heartfelt apologies and tell us they’re working “day and night” to fix things and each day break a new recall story. Yesterday, after weeks of apologies (months if you include the Prius floor mats) Corolla came under suspicion.

Toyota needs to go dark with its advertising and put that money into data mining, engineering analysis, added shifts and most importantly finding and identifying “proof” they’re doing something. Proof is good. Talk is bad. Proof might be a visual image or story consumers can relate to. Something that one consumer can tell another proving Toyota is doing something dramatic. (Repairing “up to 50,000 cars a day” is in the neighborhood, but no Rosie the Riveter.)

When AT&T was about to get its lunch eaten by MCI because the government legislated 800 numbers could be moved from carrier to carrier, Joe Nacchio emptied AT&T’s corporate building putting anyone in a suit or skirt on the street calling on customers. AT&T didn’t lose share. He went all Rose the Riveter on them.

Newspaper apology notes? That’s grade school PR stuff.

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Alcatel-Lucent Brokerage.

Steve Poppe — Wed, 17 Feb 2010 13:23:43 +0000

The mobile web business is a mess. It’s a mess like the PC business was back in the late eighties and early nineties. The voice side of mobile is working okay but the data side is the problem. Hardware standards are varied (data goes over different switching systems), operating systems are as plentiful as ice cream flavors, apps are being developed in garages, stores, offices and labs — and the telecom carriers are voting with their pocketbooks not their heads.

The only voice of reason today — creating some waves at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona — is that of Alcatel-Lucent. They are acting as an “broker” working to get all parties into the labs to create standards so we will have mobile web data interoperability. iPhone apps will then be able to work on Droids phones, T-Mobile widgets will connect with AT&T widgets, the mobile web will become a single web and prices will come down.

This stuff is really complicated. Hard decisions will have to be made by many. Heed the call. Go to the labs. Write down expenses. Be open!

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AT&T Vs. Verizon

Steve Poppe — Tue, 29 Dec 2009 13:28:46 +0000

Coverage

In my mind Verizon is putting a beat down on AT&T when it comes to the wireless wars. By now everyone knows 3G is the network that runs iPhones and smartphones. Most also know that iPhone coverage over the AT&T network is pretty poor, with dropped called aplenty. If you know someone with an iPhone, you’ve heard the complaints.

Advertising

Then there’s the advertising. Every day I open my paper paper to find three successive full page, all type, orange ads with B- headlines such as “Don’t dumb down your smart phone” or “Is AT&T Better? Appsolutely” or “When you compare, there’s no comparison.” Today’s investment in The New York Times alone probably cost north of $200,000. These ads which have been running every day for weeks create no muscle memory for AT&T. Together they tout what I’m sure research indicates is AT&T’s 4 key customer advantages: “faster, simultaneous talk and web, most apps, and most popular.” They package these 4 things under the line “a better 3G experience.” Too much.

Verizon on the other hand and its “phone wars” tested ad agency McCann-Erickson are pushing one primary idea: 3G coverage. The brilliant TV ad where the kid’s dense Verizon map blocks out the football game creates a memorable game-changing branding idea. Coverage. It’s smart on so many levels. Coverage = no dropped calls = good sound quality = fast. AT&T and BBDO need an idea (as in one) or it may soon be a TKO. Peace!

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Aol. vs. Yahoo

Steve Poppe — Fri, 11 Dec 2009 13:45:29 +0000

Aol. and Yahoo have both finally figured out that good content begets readership, viewership, referral, and participation which begets — the same. These two seminal online brands will be dooking it out for years to come. They both took different paths to get here and both have CEOs with unique perspectives, but the battle should be fun to watch. Coke and Pepsi, AT&T and Verizon fun.

Armstrong vs. Bartz

My bet is on Aol. Tim Armstrong hitched his ride to a rising star (Google) and got that success smell on him — but I think he created some of that smell with his focus and good leadership. Carol Bartz’s career advanced by good blocking and tackling and good business decisions, something Yahoo hadn’t had for a while prior to her arrival. Yahoo made lots of decisions, just not with a solid brand idea driving them. Until proven otherwise, I’ll give Mr. Armstrong the edge and write it off to “derring do.”

Ad dollars are moving online, no doubt, but those in the know will tell you the lion’s share are going to Google thanks to AdWords and their direct-to-consumer, DIY, analytics-powered ad model. As Aol. and Yahoo re-create their online brands and lead the market in the generation of original content (paid and contributed), search will stay a powerful, lucrative utility, but won’t be the best way to find good content. That will be the domain of Aol and, hopefully, Yahoo. Peace!

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GM. Come on down!

Steve Poppe — Fri, 11 Sep 2009 13:20:34 +0000

A new General Motors ad campaign is breaking Monday and it will star the company’s “untainted” Chairman Edward Whitacre, Jr. Says Bob Lutz, GM’s new chief marketing officer, Mr. Whitacre isn’t sullied the way other executives who went through the chapter 11 process are. Mr. Whitacre, for all his folksiness and warm southern manner is, I’m sure, a very nice person but he was also the CEO of AT&T. I repeat AT&T. That makes him untainted? That makes him believable? Plus, he’s only been on the job for a cup of coffee.

The problem with GM for the last 7 years has been leadership. No one looked around and noticed we needed to move America toward a smaller generation of cars. Management sat 40 floors up in Detroit and couldn’t see the street. So rather than highlight a past GM ivory tower spokesperson, the ad agency or Mr. Lutz decided to use a “phone” guy to deliver the message. Absurd!

These ads will appeal to corporate turn-around artists with million dollar salaries, all 40 of them, but not to the man or woman on the street. The new ads and the very smart “money back guarantee” should have been delivered by a line worker; someone we could empathize with. Someone with skin in the game…with a blood-pumping heart. Someone from down on the street. GM marketing is still fairy well out of touch. Come on down!

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A Strong Is-Does

Steve Poppe — Thu, 27 Aug 2009 11:37:00 +0000

Back in the day, I was on a McCann-Erickson task force for business client AT&T and we created a tome entitled “Emerging markets? Does advertising drive adoption?” We looked at numerous categories of new products, with a particular view toward technology, and compared units sales to annual advertising expenditures. A statistics nerd then used some formula with a funny symbol the word “slope” in it to prove advertising did, indeed, drive product purchase.

That was then….when people were educated about products and services through TV ads, print ads, radio ads and brochures.

Today, many new products are first introduced to consumers online. The FUE (first user experience) of a product happens above the fold on a home page. A well defined, well thought out brand does a good job with this. Most don’t. Steve Rubel posted today about how poorly, even the top tier social media sites explain their services. Check it out here.

The Is-Does

A good brand plan articulates what a brand Is and what it Does. And it accomplishes this in a simple, unambiguous, differentiated statement. I call this the Is-Does. A string Is/Does is the most important step toward brand success. Peace!

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Brand Planks

Steve Poppe — Tue, 26 May 2009 13:31:00 +0000

I wrote about brand architecture last week and mentioned that a good one includes a powerful branding idea supported by three brand planks. The planks — discrete reasons to believe — when combined, tell a story only your band can tell.

Interestingly, some planks may be at odds with one another and need to be carefully managed. Let’s say cost-competitiveness and product innovation are key planks. The more messages you pump into the market about your leading edge products the more likely the market will be to think you are high-priced. Conversely, the more low price advertising you do, the less you will be seen as an innovator. A number of years ago AT&T used these two planks as part of the architecture for its B2B services. Though the planks were at odds, the research nerds figured out how to modulate them to the point where they could almost predict market share gains based upon the spending allocation. Who says you shouldn’t take statistics at college? Peace!

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Goodbye and Hello Moto

Steve Poppe — Fri, 01 Feb 2008 11:56:00 +0000

Motorola has always been a perplexing brand. Like Lucent and AT&T before it, Motorola has operated for decades in the telecommunications hardware business. Makers of big network phone switches, tiny alphanumeric pagers and cell phones, Moto became most famous for its “gotta have” Razr phone.

Moto with frequent highs and lows in all of its hardware businesses has for some reason not been able to consistently fire on all cylinders. Just when they’ve had a strong run, they go soft. And the Street blames management. Carl Icahn has an answer, and it’s a good one. Split off the mobile devices company (read cell phones) and create two separate businesses.

Though Nokia and Apple will be strong competitors of the handset business, and I’m sure there’s a Chinese company on the horizon, Moto has the people, pride and market power to go back on top. With renewed focus and leadership we may all be speaking into Moto phones in a year or two. (And please don’t listen to any branding companies and change the name of the business. Fight the urge.)

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