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Microsoft Bing’s Two Branding Campaigns

By
Steve Poppe
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Microsoft’s Bing ads are chasing down two ideas. Both are pretty strong but since they are executed together they both lose power and become watered down.

 

The first idea is the “cure for search overload syndrome.” It is fun, relevant, creates a problem (where one may not exist), and has the potential to be talked about and mimicked. I can see high school kids free-styling stuff like this. The second idea, “the decision engine,” hasn’t been fully carried out in the TV ads but it augers to the core of what searchers want: find, compare and decide. It’s a stand alone idea, not just a campaign tagline.  

 

Were I the brand manager at Microsoft, I’d pick one of these two ideas and stick to it. A tight branding idea is easy to execute. Open the door a bit to another idea and you confuse the consumer. It’s not that hard people. Peace!

 

Newsday Strategy.

By
Steve Poppe
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We know where you live is a strategy I wrote for Newsday over ten years ago. The saying “Campaigns come and go, but a powerful branding idea is indelible” is the basis of my consulting practice.  We know where you live is a powerful branding idea.

 

A little background: Newsday serves Long Island, home to about 3 million people  — 7 million if you include Brooklyn and Queens – and it’s the island’s only “local paper.” The New York Daily News, New York Post and New York Times are also options but they more city and nationally focused. What sets Newsday apart is its ability to report the local news. People care about where they live so if you prove to them you can deliver you should command an unfair share of readers’ daily newspaper dollars. No brainer.

 

The branding idea “We know where you live” is a clear, clean mission. As employees leave the building each night if asked the question “Did you bring readers a closer to understanding their home and hometown today?” they should be able to answer. It is a business-building, strategic mission. Different than “Did you sell more papers today?”

 

Newsday.com is the newspaper’s online property and like most online brand extensions it is still trying to figure itself out. The executives re-creating it have newspaper hats on and, likely, will not get it right for a while.  Why? Because they don’t have a branding idea to guide them – to free them up as they think through the property. As news, content, commerce, community and widgets are being developed to drive site relevance and traffic, the developers need to be grounded in a strategic mission. The site and paper need to prove that Newsday.com knows where we Long Islanders live. Peace!

 

The Cheese Economy.

By
Steve Poppe
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0

 

There’s a new trend in marketing — it’s called you get what you pay for. Not you get what you bet on. Or you get what you hedge. Or you get what may appreciate.

 

Too much of the economy has been about investing in the promise of returns. That’s what venture capital funds are saying as they get ready to cut way back. It’s what drove the financial industry meltdown. And the Internet start-up boom. 

 

Today, people are spending their hard earned on real stuff. They are shopping and comparing – even enjoying the pursuit of value.  American’s are tired of wasting money. Sure they will buy a new BMW, but only after making sure it’s a good value. No more cheese. No more futures. People want brick and mortar stability. Not products built to last 9 months.

 

The companies that will do well in this recovering economy are those who market smart. Build products with predictable returns. Good products. With efficient pricing. And proper promotion. Bet on packaged goods. Housewares.  Durables. Peace!

 

Marketing’s Tripartite System.

By
Steve Poppe
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The business of marketing is and will continue to be a tripartite business: marketers, marketing agents and media. The lines may blur every now and again and some companies will try to bypass one of the players to save a buck, but the system will endure. 

 

Microsoft purchased aQuantive and Razorfish to see if it could get into the marketing agent business and now has decided it can’t and is selling Razorfish. Smart move. Marketing agent Anomaly is trying to become a marketer and will enjoy some modest success, but they are more likely to make their bones giving independent counsel to makers of products and services than change the system.

 

At Cannes Eric Schmidt and Maurice Levy agreed to play better in the sandbox…but there needs to be a little friction between media (Google) and agent (Publicis) for everyone to make money. Friction and conflict keep everyone on their toes.

 

Media will change. Ad agent tools will change. Products and services will change. The tripartite system will march on. Peace!

 

Open letter to Penny Baldwin.

By
Steve Poppe
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Penny Baldwin is Yahoo!’s new brand savior.  Reporting to CMO Elisa Steele, Ms. Baldwin is tasked with creating the way forward for the Yahoo brand. Newsflash: If you are plotting the course for the brand, you are plotting the course for the product (hopefully).

 

For years Yahoo has been a multi-headed dragon: part search, part start page, part portal and Web tool kit.  Ms. Baldwin knows this and will likely use a variety of means to look into Yahoo’s past and determine where Yahoo’s brightest embers lie. Where its greatest loyalties reside and the treasure trove of revenue amassed. Researchers will look at competitors’ strengths and weaknesses. Anthropologists will delve in to time-of-day usage and where other media intersects. All this info and data will go into the hopper and be extruded into a hardened strategic mass that be delivered to 72 and Sunny or some such shop(s) and $65 million and six months later we’ll be humming a new song or reciting a new line, but Yahoo will still be foundering.

 

Here’s what needs to happen: Yahoo needs to get rid of 65% of its technologists, replacing them with really good free-agent and draft pick content creators: bloggers, video bloggers, podcasters and journalists. People make appointments with internet properties to be informed, entertained, enlightened, and educated. Yahoo isn’t "my home on the web.” People don’t need the weather and horoscopes and puzzles and shizz, they want curated pages leading them to the coolest original content. Invest in content Ms. Baldwin. Peace!

 

Is the Economy Turning?

By
Steve Poppe
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The front page of The New York Times today has pictures of smiling Iraqis, smiling Al Franken, a smiling German choreographer, a not so smiling uninsured couple and a big fat, juicy hamburger.  4 out of 5 ain’t bad. The first section of the Times is 34 pages thick with ads from Macy’s, Bloomingdales, Verizon, Liberty Travel, HSBC, New Balance, Chevrolet, Starbucks, Barnes & Noble, Sirius-XM radio and Cadillac.

 

The financial pages suggest hope and the bank ads are about saving, not spending. My friend Cory Teffiletti, who publishes a newsletter called “The Digital Influencials,” is once again filling his space with some exciting start-ups and Twitter is growing so fast, we marketers haven’t quite figured out what to do with it. In fact, it seems there is a Twitter Conference on every corner of every major city this summer.

 

Right or wrong, marketers of every stripe are embracing social media as a new way to improve sales and that has started up a cottage industry of consultants. Social media is also making traditional agencies fight harder for their breakfast – another good thing. Embrace the good people. I smell goodness in the market. Peace!

 

Foster, Bias and Sales

By
Steve Poppe
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0

Foster, Bias and Sales is the name of the ad agency I always wanted to start. The name, unlike many, contains a branding idea. Okay three ideas. If you know me, you know that breaks one of my rules about focus — brand strategies can’t have commas or conjunctions — but rules are made to be broken so Foster, Bias and Sales it is. 

 

Foster is about developing "good will" towards a client’s product or service. People need to root for the product. Foster is about creating a positive, conducive sales environment. Bias is a word I often heard used by Eric Keshin, a past and learned boss. Eric’s a big macher at McCann Erickson. Creating bias or preference toward your product is "selling."  Sometimes you might have to create bias against a competitor, but only as a last resort. And Sales? Well that’s why we market. Sales are the ultimate metric. Cha-ching! 

 

One caveat: You may have to do a lot of fostering and biasing before sales come. A friend’s your son was on a soccer team with a talented Irish-American coach who told the little dudes “This year we’re learning the fundamentals. We will not win any or many games, but we will learn how to dribble and pass. We will learn about spacing and defense. If you all pay attention and stay with me, we will win the championship in two years.” Guess what? Sales. Peace!

 

Twitter Spam

By
Steve Poppe
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0

Habitat, a British furniture company, spammed Twitter recently hawking a sales promotion tied to hashtag Mousavi (#mousavi).  Smartly, recognizing its error, Habitat posted an apologetic retraction, and even used “Social Media Today” to help spread the word.

 

Unfortunately, this type spammy promotion has only just begun. Like dinner time telemarketing, and “enhancement” ads in email, we can expect legions of marketers to jump on board and phantom tweet us for their own gains. Que nuisance!  

 

This being the Internet age, the technologists at Twitter will no doubt quickly figure out a way around it, but it will cost them time, money and resources. And considering Twitter has no monetization strategy in play, this spamming issue will be a setback resource-wise.  Let’s wish them well and in the meantime do our best to police this bogus crap.   Peace!

 

Augmented Reality. Selling in the Future.

By
Steve Poppe
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0

It’s fun being me sometimes. As a marketingand brand planner, I come up with branding ideas, selling ideas and selling schema. Much of my world revolves around consumers, products and services but having spent a good deal of time in the technology sector, there’s a part of my brain that relishes what’s next, what’s new and what’s possible. Properly harnessed, these things can really help in my marketing life. So I am a student of technology.

 

There are a few tech blogs I read pretty regularly: Scobleizer and TechCrunch are faves — GigaOm and ReadWriteWeb are a couple of other good ones. BBH Labs tweeted a post today by Marshall Fitzpatrick, who writes for ReadWrite, on the subject of Augmented Reality. (Marshall’s an important blogger…you heard it here first.) Check out his post and watch some of the short videos. Augmented Reality is going to augment marketing. In a very big way. Peace!

 

John Battelle’s Little Secret

By
Steve Poppe
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0

 

Have you heard the expression “To a hammer everything looks like a nail?” Well, I’m of the mind that to conversational media companies, say Federated Media, all marketing looks like a conversation. Thanks to Dave Knox and his blog HardKnoxLife, I watched a video of John Battelle’s introductory remarks his recent CM Summit. CM stands for Conversational Media. Mr. Battelle is CEO of Federated Media.

 

Mr. Battelle is a brilliant marketer, but if his platform for conversational marketing — Federated Media — was a conversation and not a well-managed brand, it wouldn’t be the successful property it is today. You see, Mr. Battelle has created and managed a brand with the help of great writers, terrific targeting, innovative positioning and a strong revenue model. He did it. The conversation may have been his inspiration, but mark my words, he created and nurtured it.

 

Content creators are still the life source of his business. Communing participants may be the blood, but they are not the brand. In my ebook, what Mr. Battelle is doing – and doing well – is brand management. He may not admit it, but he knows full-duplex marketing is a mistake. Good marketers need to manage the hen house.  Peace!

 

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