Marketing

  • 01 Jul 2010 at 2:37 PM
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  • Marketing

The World Cup’s Marketing Winners and Losers, Part Two

By Jonah Bloom

Today, we finish out our rundown of the heroes and goats from the pitch and beyond.

Budweiser 2, Other brewers 2.
Budweiser will be happy to have moved on from Germany, where the official beer sponsor was soundly pounded as spulwasser (that’s dishwater to you) by a populace that takes its beer seriously and didn’t appreciate the lack of local brews at the games. In South Africa it seems to have scored a few more fans and won’t have done its developing world distribution any harm at all.

As you can see from the Nielsen numbers, however, Carlsberg managed to score too with its legends World Cup ad. And Dutch brewer Bavaria stole some headlines too with its 30-women in orange mini-dresses. However, booze is an overall winner during the World Cup, with bars jam-packed even in the avowedly-disinterested United States.

Hooray beer.

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  • 30 Jun 2010 at 12:15 PM
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  • Marketing

The World Cup’s Marketing Winners and Losers

By Jonah Bloom

While we wait impatiently for Holland versus Brazil, let me bring you a few of the latest World Cup marketing scores.

Castrol 0, Visa 1.
If a sponsor’s checkbook opens on Sepp Blatter’s desk and there’s no one there to hear it, does it make a sound? Castrol is not the only marketer to pony up tens of millions for official Fifa sponsorship rights, only to fail to leverage its outlay, by, you know, letting the rest of us know about it. (Did you visit Continental Tires’s site? Are you more likely to fly with Emirates than you were before the tournament? What about the chances that you buy a solar panel from Yingli Solar?)

Visa, one of many brand giants that sometimes seems to be applying the somewhat questionable “well, it’s a global event and we’re a global brand” logic to its sponsorship, at least found a few ways to activate its purchase by offering cardholders access to tickets in pre-sale events and making this thoroughly likable ad.

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  • 28 Jun 2010 at 12:19 PM
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  • Marketing

Customer Service Invades Cannes with Best Buy’s Twelpforce

By Matt Creamer

Every year the ad industry descends on Cannes, in the south of France, to hand out a few trophy cases of work for the best efforts of the year. In typical French fashion, the ad festival’s relationship with the real day-to-day business of marketing is flirting at best. That June week is a time for pink wine, pinker skin, long, sweaty nights of networking, and the celebration of big, flashy ad campaigns. Extended, careful rumination on marketing’s eternal questions — what makes people buy, or simply like, your brand — does not exactly flourish in that tropical sun.

One of those things that doesn’t get much attention is the hard business of customer service, something that changed this year that changed with the handing of the Titanium Lion Grand Prix to Best Buy and agency Crispin Porter & Bogusky for their work on Twelpforce. The program takes the business of customer service, so often confined to call centers located in the land of God knows where and the return counters in stores, and opens it up for all to see. Employing Twitter — hence the “Tw” — and open to hundreds of Best Buy employees who can tweet from a single account, it’s the mobilization of the retailer’s army of experts to deal with customer complaints or question as they’re expressed in real time.

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  • 17 Jun 2010 at 3:46 PM
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  • Marketing

McKinsey Gets Social. Maybe Now CEOs Will Start Listening

By Matt Creamer

I was initially unmoved by the news earlier this week that McKinsey is doing a joint venture with Nielsen leading the management consultancy to take over BuzzMetrics, one of the many firms out there that analyze what people are saying about companies online. There’s been so much acquisition action in that monitoring space over the years that it was hard to get excited.

But then this morning I read some late coverage of the announcement in the Financial Times that woke me up to the significance of the deal.

What the FT told me that I didn’t know is that NM Incite, as the new company will be called, is the first time McKinsey has attached its name to another company. “We have never done a joint venture of this magnitude before,” McKinsey’s Dan Singer told the FT. That detail got me thinking about how far the incredible popularity of social media has traveled upstream into corporations.

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  • 15 Jun 2010 at 4:27 PM

A Corporate Website That Doesn’t Suck, Courtesy of Crispin Porter and Bogusky

By Matt Creamer

I never thought I’d say this, but I just saw a corporate website from an ad holding company that doesn’t completely suck.

For the uninitiated, the lion’s share of the largest ad agencies are owned by a handful of publicly-traded conglomerates with names like Omnicom, Interpublic and WPP that function largely as financial institutions. They’re not typically given much credit by creative types — except when they’re handing over buckets of cash and stock in exchange for an agency. These companies generally play the role of beancounters and aren’t known for adding much to the creative process. And, as you’d expect, their websites are usually lifeless.

A notable exception is the new internet home of MDC Partners, owner of Crispin Porter & Bogusky, one of the more famous agencies in the land. The main attraction on the relaunched site, designed by Crispin, is a map that tracks the comings and goings of key executives. So with a bit of clicking and sliding you could see that Alex Bogusky, the creative legend who now works at he MDC level, is splitting this week between New York and his headquarters in Boulder, Co. You can also see his recent Tweets and a profile. And of course the site also does all the other stuff you’d expect a corporate site to do: investor information, mission statement, etc.

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  • 26 May 2010 at 3:26 PM
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  • Marketing

Nike Reminds Us that Brand Ads Can Be Worth the Investment

By Jonah Bloom

Nike’s “Write the Future” ad reminded me of something the vivacious magazine publisher Felix Dennis said in the mid-nineties about the then ad-bloated issues of the revenue-producing beast InStyle magazine. He called it the last roar of the T-Rex before the dinosaurs became extinct.

I’m not saying that either magazines or video ads are going to die, partly because that’s simply not the case and partly because it’s the wrong argument to make. But with so few strong brand-building commercials to watch these days, it is easy to imagine that this expansive and expensive commercial from Wieden & Kennedy Amsterdam and director Alejandro Iñarritu is an endangered species. Name me one other ad of its quality since Google trotted out its simple, but beautiful little Parisian love story during the Super Bowl back in February?

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  • 13 May 2010 at 2:47 PM
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  • Marketing

Public Relations Needs a Metric That Makes Sense. Ad Equivalents Isn’t It

By Matt Creamer

This week one of our site editors received an email from a junior PR person asking for the site’s ad rate. The reason for the email dawned on me only after a while: this publicist was determining the ad value equivalent of a recent PR campaign, one component of which was a successfully pitched story on our site.

Advertising value equivalency (or AVE) is one of those things I’d read about, and even written about a bit, but had never seen in the wild. I’m sure I’ve been complicit in many a PR scheme, though no publicist has ever asked me for my publication’s ad rate. The fact that it’s happening in 2010 is mindblowing. PR, after all, is on the way up. Among the constant reminders that we live in a media-made world are the facts that Britain’s new prime minister is a former PR executive and more and more corporate activity seems to be judged by the amount of PR — or earned media — it gets. That goes double for the corporate activity known as advertising.

So to try and develop a correlation between the two just seems strange, all the more so when you look under the hood of ad equivalency. How the metric is applied varies wildly, but it’s generally based on a simple concept: What would news coverage have cost if it were purchased as an ad buy of comparable space (or time.) For years, the metric’s had PR people measuring column space in newspaper clippings mentioning their clients, counting seconds of TV news broadcasts, and, now, guesstimating online impressions in an effort to determine a reach. That reach is then multiplied by ad rates plucked from media kits. It doesn’t matter for the sake of the exercise that in practice those rates get discounted in negotiation. As you can imagine, this kind of conjuring results in inflation that Zimbabwe would look at in awe.

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Beyond the iPad: Get Ready for the Internet of Things

By Jonah Bloom

Earlier this year, at the Abu Dhabi Media Summit, I was struck by a remark that I thought I heard from Ericsson CEO Hans Vestberg. “By 2020,” he said, “50 billion devices will be wirelessly connected to the internet.”

GlowCaps Remind People to Take Their PillsI was going to tweet his statement from @breakingmedia but hesitated because I thought I must have misheard. After all, that’d be more than 10 times the current number of mobile phones in the world—an already incredible 4 and a half billion—and about four web-connected devices for every person on the planet. While those of us who live in the narcissistic media navel of New York are often tempted to imagine that everyone totes an iPhone, iPad and laptop—as well as whatever desktop is getting dusty in their study at home—it seemed a stretch to imagine the average resident of, say, India or China using four or more devices. I concluded that either I wasn’t paying proper attention or Vestberg was indulging in a little bit of corporate boosterism—Ericsson is in the business of enabling mobile connections, so 50 billion of them would be good business for the Swedish equipment manufacturer.

Then, at about the time the iPad was released, I had the chance to talk with David Haight, AT&T’s VP of Business Development, Emerging Devices Organization. Ten minutes of conversation with Haight is enough to change your vision of the future from one where everyone is carrying a wireless internet device like a mobile phone, to one where that device in your hand connects you with an internet of things all around you. Everywhere.

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  • 06 May 2010 at 3:17 PM
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  • Marketing

Why Microsoft’s Bing Is Sponsoring My Dogwalker

By Jonah Bloom

My dog walker has become the latest weapon in the escalating search engine marketing wars.

Since I first met Rodney Dorival, owner of Big Paws Little Claws, I’ve thought he could just be the next Cesar Milan. He’s amazing with dogs, erudite, unfailingly charming, drives an immaculate, celeb-ready ’68 Buick Skylark that he restored himself, and as you can see from the photo he looks like the linebacker who gets the brand endorsement work (the arms come in handy for keeping my skateboard-chewing Rottweiler under control.) So I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that Microsoft also saw his potential and recently decided to turn Rodney and his staff into a marketing channel, wandering the streets of New York in T-shirts emblazoned with the Bing logo and search box.

I’m pretty skeptical about ambient media. When I was working for Ad Age I was frequently bombarded by press releases from people who thought that their network of hubcap-cum-tea trays or toilet seats that double as frisbees, were the perfect branding medium, and I tend to think this stuff is just commercial clutter best avoided by brands. But for Bing, Rodney’s crew seems a smart choice.

Sean Carver, director of brand entertainment for Bing, explains why he did the deal: “Dog walkers make constant decisions about where to go, and get asked for directions and help all the time too. They’re also inherently expert on their local areas, and we wanted to stress that one of our strongest feature is the ability to find what you want locally. We’re trying to humanize search, to put the person in the middle.” And, as Rodney himself points out, “we’re walking billboards surrounded by dogs that people want to stop and pet, what could be better. I’ve always used Bing’s visual search to research my clients’ pets, so Microsoft seemed like a natural partner.”

PR maestro Keith Estabrook who represents Rodney (yes, my dog walker has a publicist, the same publicist as Lebron James!), connected him with Microsoft, and has helped them get some nice earned media on the back of the sponsorship with Rodney appearing in the New York Times and on CBS’ Early Show, sporting his Bing t-shirt. Bing is now planning to sponsor dog walkers in Chicago and San Francisco, and is also working on a map app that’ll help people find their local dog parks.

Of course there’s a bigger story behind this, in the shape of an escalating marketing battle between the search engines.

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