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    Wu hoo…activism.

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    Google Reason.

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    A Clear Brand Idea.

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    Marketing

    Data-Driven Marketing.

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    Steve Poppe
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    When writing a marketing plan I need to know the size of the category. Globally and in the country I’m working. As the world becomes more data-fied, these figures should he easier to come by. Well, one can hope.

    Television ad spending in the U.S., for instance, is projected by Magna Global to be down 3.5% this year. Good marketing planners will ask “Where that 3.5% will go?” To another medium? Or will it just be the ebb and flow of money in the market? Category data is important so you can see where your brand nets out. Are you growing faster than the category? More slowly? Or are you sliding along with the others?

    Sources of data don’t always agree so picking one is important. And not all data is reported the same way. It’s maddening. Marketers know data is big business and quite expensive. The big guys are willing to pay, the little ones not so much. Category and brand sales data can cost from $5,000 to $10,000. Hefty indeed, for a spread sheet. It’s necessary and worth every penny.

    Though the world may run on Dunkin, marketing runs on data.

    Peace.

     

    Far from the mADdening crowd.

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    Steve Poppe
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    There’s a wonderful black and white EOS Airlines ad in the Wall Street Journal today. Their tagline is “Uncrowded. Uncompromising.”   The ad is simple and direct. It doesn’t try to do too much, so you won’t wade through piled-on features and benefits.

     
    The headline “Uncrowded in a crowded world” sits beneath a big logo and a crowd shot of what appears to be a tennis match.  Dead smack in the middle of the stands, however, is an area roped off by velvet, measuring about 20 x30 feet, in which sit two spectators. They sit beside a little table with an iced bucket of champagne and a server in white uniform.
     
    The line from the copy which is the branding idea is “Travel between New York and London on the world’s only fleet of 757s outfitted for just 48 Guests, you’ll never want to fly the crowded way again.” 
     
    Thanks for not showing the reclining seats Eos. Nice job once again.
     

    Social Media and Warts.

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    Steve Poppe
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    “Authentic” is the latest marko-babble term being tossed around by today’s social mediaists – people who practice social media as if a religion. Since it’s on the tip of every digital marketing tongue today, I’ve been trying to learn what it means — and I’ve asked some pretty smart people. The answer I often get is another marko-babble term “transparent.”  It seems authentic and transparent connote the honest and forthright response to the consumer baring of a product’s warts. When online consumers suggested “Comcast service sucks” an authentic response from the corporation was to fix the problem and socialize that fix online. Well that’s just good business.

     

    Here’s my problem with authenticity and transparency: It’s not always managed properly.  When consumers are driving the conversation, the weighting of messages may not be most conducive to sales. Let’s say iPhones sales are optimized when the media mix is 75% apps and 25% price — something that can be managed by Apple. But what happens when consumers are allowed to move the dial in favor of apps and that changes the optimized mix?

     

    Don’t get me wrong, I love social media and I love consumers who are passionate enough about a product to post, but I also believe ceding control of the conversation can have a downside…and it needs to be managed. Peace!  

     

    Gawker With a Capitalist G.

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    Steve Poppe
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    Gawker is one of my favorite blogs. It’s the reason I love blogs. Attitude is what makes Gawker work for me. It speaks to me in a voice I rarely hear anywhere else.

    Today, its managing editor Choire Sicha and two key writers left. Their gripe? They don’t like the new compensation system that will pay them based upon the number of page views their stories generate. They want to be paid by the post or, perhaps, by the hour. The pay-per-view approach, the departing writers say, will encourage them to be more competitive and outlandish. Hello? Have they read their own stuff? That’s what they do. 

     
    I am very sorry to see them all go`and do hope the writing will not go so cartoonishly over the top it becomes unreadable, but the pay-per-view compensation system is here to stay. It’s the American way baby! 
     

    Return on Strategy

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    Steve Poppe
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    Ad agencies make money selling stuff. Want a TV commercial? That will cost you $350,000. Want a billboard? $25,000. How about a direct mail program? $125,000. Website? $75,000, if we don’t have to outsource it. If there is commissionable media…all the better.

     

    As an ad guy coming up in the business a great day was one during which you presented brilliant creative and the client approved it with excitement, energy and money. If the creative really worked and sales followed you could just smell success.

     

    But, today, as a brand planner the real excitement comes from presenting a brand strategy that lights up a CEO. When s/he reads the paper or the screen and breaks out in a smile and says “You get me” that’s the home run.  A brand strategy is not the creative, it’s the idea that leads the creative — it is the long term idea that makes the money.  I use a line in presentations all the time “Campaigns come and go, but a powerful branding idea is indelible.” Powerful branding ideas are how agencies should make money. Their ability to deliver on that idea should be the key to remuneration. Therein lies the ROS (return on strategy) conundrum.

     

    Any thoughts on how to make this work? Drop me a note at steve@whatstheidea.com Peace!    

     

    Google and Carbon Footprints.

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    Steve Poppe
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    On its homepage today Google promotes it is Carbon Neutral since 2007.  I believe Google. But I also Googled “Google’s carbon footprint.” The result?

    “Google unleashed 12,529,953 metric tons of CO2 into the atmosphere in 2019. That’s roughly equivalent to more than 2.73 million passenger vehicles’ pollution in a year.

    That’s a lot of nasty gas. The fact the company has been carbon neutral since 2007 doesn’t mean they aren’t releasing CO2, it just means they are buying carbon offsets to minimize their CO2 pollution until they can meet their 2030 goal, stated as “We’re decarbonizing our energy consumption so that by 2030, we’ll operate on carbon-free energy, everywhere, 24/7.”

    Being carbon neutral or, better yet, zero carbon is the goal of planetary health. Google gets that. But their server farms are causing greenhouse gases like few others. The good news is they want to fix it. Buying carbon offsets until such a time as they can actually power their farms with renewable energy is laudable. But for the next 8ish years, it’s still a spew-fest. And the globe is warming.  I would not be surprised to see parent company Alphabet get into the energy business. If they are listening, a topic for another day, I suggest they use the next 8 years researching and developing renewables. It’s a better near-term mission than colonizing Mars.

    Peace.

     

     

    Ads. TV vs. Online.

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    Steve Poppe
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    Quick, think of the best online ad you ever saw. What is it?  Thought so, you can’t. Okay maybe the BMW webisode or Whopper Challenge…but that’s about it. Know why? Because, for the most part, web ads aren’t that artful. Low cost, lacking in original music and idea, most leaderboards and rectangles are stilted, choppy and pretty ham-handed (whatever that means). The audio is usually sub-par and often stock.

     

    McCann-Erickson was once the best shop in the world at creating original music for its clients. Today it’s a lost art; now agencies crow about buying music from the next Emo or House band. On the cheap. Music adds a richness and a tone to advertising;it becomes part of the story. Most people on the web don’t want audio in their ads.

     

    The reason TV commercials still work better than any other advertising medium is the story telling. The casting. The stylists. Sounds design. Editing. TV commercials create emotional responses. Writing for a :30 must be perfect because the story is so short. Every word counts.

     

    Digital advertising is a wonderful new medium in that gets consumer one-click away from purchase or inquiry, but today that ROI metric is overshadowing the potential artfulness of the medium. When ideas have to be bounced off the Flash editor, you know you are in trouble. Peace!

     

    Marketing Buildables and Strategy.

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    Steve Poppe
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    I’m guessing the percentage of global marketing budgets spent on strategy is 1%. Maybe sub. I’ll also go on record as saying that 90% is invested into buildables – the ads, websites, POS, and content we built to help sell. That leaves 9 percent for what? Measurement, analytics, quantitative research.

    This is a shame. It’s also why only half of advertising works. It’s why Google is killing it and in many cases becoming strategy for marketers.

    What is strategy? It’s a plan to accomplishing a goals. An organizing principle for tactics. Talk to many marketing and you’ll find many who confuse objectives and strategies. And tactics and strategy.

    The absolute most important part of a market plan is the strategy page. It’s the page that requires the most thought, the most time, the most discussion and the most complete buy-in from senior management. When the marketing plan is reviewed by senior management, in what typically is a 2 hour meeting once a year, it’s the budget page that gets the most attention. Who will get the most buildables? Who will create them? Where will they go? What will they achieve?

    It’s backwards. For every percentage point taken from buildables and put into strategy, the payout is truly significant. As my Norwegian aunt used to say “Tink about it.”

    Peace.

     

     

    Crispin

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    Steve Poppe
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    Junk in the trunk.

    Crispin Porter is a good ad agency.  That said, I’ve often wondered whether they can represent large consumer brands in a way that actually grows and sustains business.  I’m not alone.  They have taken some heat in the press and had high profile account losses.

    This past weekend, though, they ran a Volkswagen Jetta ad in the New York Times and it was “terrific.”  Sitting beneath the traditional silhouetted car photo – the traditional layout from years past – was the headline “Junk in the Trunk.”  I couldn’t pass it by.  Expecting to read about extra trunk space, I was surprised to find out all about Jetta’s extra features. 

    I know Crispin is a great media company and that they conceive startling creative, but maybe they should just sit the creative teams down and ask everyone to hone their print advertising skills.  Our business is not only about being inventive, it’s about learning how to “sell.”  This may be a good place for them to recharge their batteries.   

    Tags: Cripsin Porter, Volkswagen, Jetta, New York Times

    Curing Cancer on the Weekends.

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    Steve Poppe
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    lab equipment

    I attended a free webinar sponsored by the Altimeter Group (thank you Charlene Li and crew) and Ray Wang said something that really stuck. He said all the innovation in technology over the last couple of years , certainly on the Web, has come on the consumer or user side – not from the enterprise. With the exception of Apple, this is pretty dead on. I’m no Faith Popcorn, but in my view this is due to something I call the webertarian ethos – the need for people and in this case developers, to be free of corporate chains when they create.

    I’ve written before that I think the Dachis Corporation and its Social Business Design concept will accelerate the cure for cancer. When we get a world of scientists and physicians working together on a project we are likely to get some serious innovation, logic disruption, and progress. Even if they work together only on weekends. Social Business Design products and their free cousins will provide a webertarian-like platform over which meaningful global change will happen. And on that happy note, I bid you… Peace!

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