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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

    Neutered Agencies

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    Steve Poppe
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    Gavin O’Malley, in his MediaPost column today, talks about Open Source in the marketing and advertising world. Those who know the provenance of Open Source trace it to the technology world where Open Source software is software available to all, with no intellectual property restrictions. Linux was an Open Source phenomenon years ago and it hurt Microsoft’s business. In the advertising world, it simply refers to a marketer and its agencies sharing intell. 
     
    Because agencies are competitive animals, they are always looking for advantage. A general ad agency doesn’t want to lose budget to the direct agency. The direct agency doesn’t want to lose budget to a digital agency. None of these want to lose money to a promotional agency….
     
    Well, what if the marketer and agencies were able to aggregate their best learning, best research, best practices, and share it with one another? In other words, if all agency partners had access to the same code? Would this Open Source marketing world be more effective? Would the ideas be stronger? The process more streamlined?
     
    Nah!
     
    It’s up to the client to share what’s most important with its agencies. The marketer needs a tight product, a tight brief, and lots of consumer insights. Also, it needs proper budgeting and budget allocation to meet the objectives of the business.
     
    Making all agencies play nice neuters them. Agencies that work well together, will. Otherwise, let them do their own thing. Who needs neutered agencies?

    Too big, too fast?

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    Steve Poppe
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    Well, Google just stepped over the line. Their recent YouTube purchase only made sense to me because it furthered Google’s franchise as the world’s best search engine. Though video hosting is not a core competence of Google, searching for those videos certainly can be. Now Google has made a deal to buy DoubleClick, the Web’s leading ad server business.
     
    Some might say an ad server uses search algorithms to find the most appropriate place to host an ad, but I’m going there. This purchase is about growing bigger and growing faster…in almost Googolplex dimension. It will prove too much food on the plate for one company to eat with elegance. Is anyone getting a Monty Python image?

    Kindling of a sort.

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    Steve Poppe
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    You don’t have to be a Star Trek fan to believe that one day the majority of books will be distributed digitally and read on non-paper devices.   Amazon believes this and spent a good deal of money developing the Kindle in an effort to get out in front of this market. The kindle allows owners to download books wirelessly to the device for $9-12 dollars each then read them one page at a time with a battery powered flat panel tablet. The product costs about $400.
     
    It sounds like a good first start, but has been panned by some pretty smart people. Robert Scoble did a vlog screed on the design here http://www.kyte.tv/ch/6118-scobleizer-sponsored-by-seagate/77475-dear-jeff-bez#uri=channels/6118/77475 .
      
    The Journal’s Walter Mossberg was nicer but echoed Robert’s points about button position and clunky usability. I have yet to touch one and being a tree-hugger wannabe applaud the effort, but must agree that Amazon may have been long on vision but short on execution. They should have done a lot more usability testing on the Kindle before finalizing design and rushing it to market.  (Hear that Microsoft Zune marketers?)  People read books everywhere. With feet up, down, tucked. Standing in subways.  Slouched in beach chairs. Not just in Seattle test kitchens.
     

    Officemax elf

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    Steve Poppe
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    Are you Elfing kidding?

    Over the Christmas holidays OfficeMax and their agency Toy Inc. cobbled together a fun little creative effort to build gift sales.  Not many people go to OfficeMax to roam the store looking for Christmas/Holiday inspiration, so getting bodies into the store that time of year for anything other than pen sets and desks is probably a challenge. 

    The program, a piece of branded entertainment called Elf Yourself, generated 36 million visits to the online site over 5 weeks. 

    Here’s a quote from Ad Age on the program results: “It ended up with a 20% bump in online traffic during the holidays, though it’s tough to say if the web effort was responsible for a sales rise at OfficeMax.” 

    Are you Elfin kidding me?

    If I parse the Ad Age sentence, the quote either means that 36 million new consumer impressions did not translate into store sales, or there weren’t any increased store sales.

    I certainly hope it was the former and that there were increases but management felt they couldn’t be sure they were attributable to the 36M impressions. (Must have been those holiday point of sale signs and end-caps.)  If stores sales were not up YOY, then I would call that an Elfing opportunity lost.

    Denny’s Grand Slam Promo Indeed.

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    Steve Poppe
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    I remember hearing in advance about Denny’s Super Bowl spot and even remember watching it, but don’t remember it being a promotion offering free Grand Slam breakfasts the Tuesday after the game. Must have had nachos in my ears. Talk about a promotion? Absolutely brilliant!

     

    I love the Grand Slam breakfast, which is a great value at $5.99: 2 eggs, 2 pancakes, 2 pieces of bacon and 2 sausage. What else could a body want? Denny’s promotion was intended to reestablish the sit-down breakfast as an American pastime, then take their unfair share. Let’s see if it worked. Denny’s estimated 2 million Grand Slams were given away on the fabled Tuesday, at a total cost of $5 million, inclusive of the spot.  Since a Super Bowl spots ran $3M for a :30, Denny’s generated well over 2 million visits and fed those visitors for less than the cost of 2 spots. Hear that Budweiser?

     

    Getting people into the stores, getting them to talk to friends about going to Denny’s, on top of the good will generated during tough times plus the free publicity is a huge hit in my book.  So long as the food was served hot and tasty and the servers held their own, I would estimate that America will be doing breakfast at Denny’s in much greater numbers starting this week. Take that IHOP. Bravo. Peace!

     

    Spreadsheet and sickle

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    Steve Poppe
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    The McClatchy Company today reported it is letting go around 1,400 of its newspaper employees. This, after having let go 2,000 others over the last 18 months.  Samuel  Zell has his spreadsheet and sickle out at the Tribune Company and who knows what will becomes of Newsday as the Dolans take control.  Is there less news to be reported?  Is there less advertising to pay the bills?  Or is it the Internet?


    It’s a perfect storm of all three, actually. There is not less news, but more.  Technology has enabled few things in the world to go unnoticed.  Add to that the millions of bloggers reporting and analyzing news and events and the choices become even greater.  Bloggers are competing with favorite newspaper columnists for Share of Day (SOD.)  That’s the impact of the Internet.  And in this recession-like clime, ad pages are harder to come by.

    Newspapers will always be around. The delivery medium will change, but the news will be there.  As for reporters, there are good and bad and regardless of where they publish, smart media properties will hire the good to attract readers.  With the right packaging and the right mix of advertising, the strong will reemerge and all will be fine.

    Newsday’s New North Star.

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    Steve Poppe
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    Patrick Dolan bought Newsday back from European Telecom company Altice yesterday and so Newsday is in the, tah dah, news. I like the move. Over 15 years ago I wrote the Newsday brand strategy that went on to be its tagline for many years.  It was a tight brand strategy — competitive with the NYT, offered a very home-town and hearth angle, and strong family pull.  The brand claim was “We know where you live.” (A brand strategy remember, is one claim, three proof planks.) The tagline ended up being “It’s where you live.”

    By substituting “It’s” for “We know” the strategy was more than partly eviscerated. The emphasis is all wrong. The push back from Newsday was “It’s stawker-ish and creepy. Voyeuristic.”  Too silly for words, was that criticism.  Putting the emphasis on Newsday as a place or community, rather than a journalistic endeavor devoted to understanding what makes Long Islander tick, may sound subtle but it was huge.

    We know where you live is a strong today as a claim, as it ever was. Perhaps stronger. As an organizing principle for news, community and digital experience, it is a north star.

    Good luck with the ownership Mr. Dolan, let’s talk brand strategy.

    Peace.

     

     

    Sony – Passion or Commitment

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    Steve Poppe
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    Passion or commitment?

    Here’s a quote from today’s New York Times by Sony Electronics new SVP of advertising “Sony’s consumer research showed that consumers had great passion for Sony but that the brand was not making an emotional connection.”

    Could we please, please stop confusing passion for a brand with commitment? People love Sony because of amazing design and quality. Sony ads need to convey that design and quality and do so without getting in the way.  But to listen to BBDO’s David Lubars it’s all about the ads.  Said Lubars, “They make products that delight people, that are fun and entertaining, and their communications should reflect that humanness.” (I’m sure Mr. Lubars said a lot more this, but that’s all that was reported.) The Times reporter embellished, “The humorous quality of the ads was meant to make the brand feel accessible.”

    Passion and “feel good” are byproducts of advertising — related to tone. Commitment to purchase is what agencies need to work on. Commitment to purchase and repurchase are the rational things people conger up when being passionate. Demonstrations of product superiority and difference are the way to that grail.                

    Sony Electronics, David Lubars, BBDO, Sony advertising, New York Times

    Webertarians Speak. To Facebook.

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    Steve Poppe
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    When writing branding briefs and their little cousins creative briefs I find that key insights can come from anywhere. More often than not though, they come from the target or as I like to call it the Living Breathing Target. The target on the brief for Zude.com, the social networking start-up I worked for, was “Webertarians,” an marriage of the words web and libertarian.

     

    Webertarians rue the rules, restrictions and technological impediments that keep them from doing what they want on the web. Zude’s big breakthrough was the ability for regular people to build websites without knowing HTML — simply by dragging and dropping web objects.  The usability promise played out nicely to the masses who are not technically inclined. Those who are technically inclined are also webertarians in that they like open source code (free code not owned by Microsoft). Let’s just say there are a lot of webertarians out there.

     

    Today’s big webertarian fight is taking place on Facebook over the issue of “Who owns my stuff?” Facebook changed the rules for a few days and its users balked, so they contritely changed back their terms of service.  Facebook already understands the “webertarian ethos” or it wouldn’t have 175 million accounts. That said, it needs to work those ethos to its advantage – and quickly – as it tries to devise a monetization scheme. Facebook can’t afford too many more missteps or they will start looking like "the man."  Peace!

     

    Rear-view Mirror Planning

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    Steve Poppe
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    One of my brand planning peeves is what I call rear-view mirror planning. Basically rear-view mirror planners discovery process is all about what’s happened in the past – what’s behind the brand. To take the metaphor further, there are also side-view mirror planners. Side-view planners care about what’s going on now. Which competitors are gaining? What brands, trends, and attitudes have traction today? But real genius in planning is predicting the future. Creating the future. Sound cocky? Yep.
     
    Fashion designers live with this every day, as do artists, and in advertising so do the really great creative people. It requires sticking your neck out. But it’s the fastest way to success. Watch where you are going.
     
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