Marketing

Nagative campaigning, Mark Antony style

/ Angelo Fernando / Leave a comment

How does one market a presidential candidate?

The “soap” analogy (packaging, promotion and the the rest of the 4 Ps) is no longer relevant. Today’s political marketing strategists employ more subtler techniques. The negative ads have got so sophisticated that they don’t even look like ads.

Take Hillary’s campaign. The pitchman isn’t simply the talking head of some famous person. It’s a talking head of the first pitchman, the former incumbent. The medium isn’t even TV –it’s a much distributed YouTube video that happened to originate on television. The ‘negative’ isn’t even negative, in the Sean Hannity kind of slam. It appears so balanced, you can almost miss it.

Watch how Bill Clinton carefully labels Barack Obama without sounding negative, and having lightening responses to Charlie Rose‘s deeper questions that would have trapped anyone else. There’s block-and-bridge, and like Shakespeare’s classic technique having Mark Antony call Brutus “an honorable man,” he’s all praises for Obama, while stomping all over him.

When probed about whether he thinks they are all fit to be president, Bill prefaces it by saying “not to criticize anybody…” calls Obama somebody who is … “a compelling and credibly attractive, highly intelligent symbol of transformation.” Before that he described him as someone with “enormous talent, staggering political skills.”

The key (negative) word here is “symbol.” Earlier on he made it clear that “symbol is not as important as substance.” He calls Hillary the “agent of change” and Obama a “symbol of change.” Careful repositioning of the competition, without sounding like the old-fashioned negative ad.

Come to think of it, it’s a bit like a soap ad –Dove‘s repositioning of “beauty” not as anti-aging, but “pro-aging.”

Taking design to a different plane – Part 2

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Sometimes great design means using a different lens than the ones we walk around with. I’m not talking of camera work, but biases, hang-ups, and things we are so passionate about (in a good way) that prevent us from seeing things from the audiences perspective.

If you’ve always done direct mail campaigns, at least explore what might have changed in the ‘direct’ world with privacy, loyalty, database management etc. If you’re always doing landscape layouts for ads, look at what an split-page media buy might achieve. If you have a reputation for doing soft-focus, try grainy, or even degraded fonts, or sharp contrasty black and white.

If you’re a slave to the Logo guide… don’t even get me started. If you’re doing billboards with the standard clever headline and head shot, try something like this billboard for Gain detergent.

I got thinking about this after yesterday’s post on Ideo, and seeing the work of a photographer Joe McNally who talks about looking for “a different angle.”

He could have very well been talking about marketing campaigns, looking for fresh ways to communicate.

Check out McNally: The moment it clicks

Paperless travel arrives at gate

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I couldn’t wait for this to happen.

Continental Airlines has followed on the heels of Air Canada, and started allowing passengers to use a code sent to a cellphone as a boarding pass.

Marketers ought to take note about what this means for all other forms of paper validation, such as:

  • Coupons with short expiry dates and location-based offers (say a book discount at a Borders store in just one zip code)
  • Tickets to events that could be promoted and ‘pulled’ by a self-qualifying target audience

Text messaging campaigns are amazingly affordable, and less complicated than people think. Renting a short code, or buying a vanity code is a lot cheaper than, say, a magazine ad. Besides saving a lot of trees, and making you look good, too.

Publicity stunt or graffiti?

/ Angelo Fernando / 1 Comment

Sometimes art and ‘stunt’ exchange marker pens. Or in this case, aerosol cans.

Bansky, the British graffiti artist (who placed an inflatable doll of a Guantanamo Bay prisoner at a Disney theme park last year) is promoting his art on the famous security wall between Bethlehem and Jerusalem, with images like this.

This stunt is timed with the move to bring tourists back to Bethlehem.

Bansky had a sound bite that beats anything the city could do to draw visitors concerned about their safety.

“If it is safe enough for a bunch of sissy artists then it’s safe enough for anyone,” he said.

Facebook scrutiny good for everyone

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The debate about the backlash against Facebook’s moves into contextual advertising with Beacon doesn’t seem to end. That’s a good thing.

It’s good for marketers and communicators to be thinking of these issues beyond the potential for targeting accurately, and being able to measure everything. We take networking so much for granted, especially the ability to befriend a friend of a friend of a friend, that we could easily muddy social interests with commercial goals.

The problem is, when we start, even inadvertently, sending people in our network things they never asked for or don’t need to know. Like ads. Or how about getting “poked?” I never bargained for being “bitten,” but between these and “cause invitations” and “likeness quizzes” (if you don’t know what I am talking about, I ENVY YOU!) people seem to be spending way too much time –mine- on such Facebook bling.

On other social nets do I have to really be updated the second someone changes his/her profile? Plaxo was a major offender in this area some time ago. It earned the term “Plaxo Spam.” Facebook ought to have known it was tinkering with the underpinnings of the ‘social graph’ when they got into Beacon..

Long before online social nets, the practice of friends befriending people in grocery stores and parking lots gave a bad name to companies like Amway. We have to be careful about putting networking and targeting in the same cocktail shaker. I Googled “Amway and Facebook” and came across a brilliant quote from Robert Scoble. “I will not Amway my Facebook friends.”

No one could have put it better.

Sidebar: I posted this to ValleyPRBlog. It was a hilarious YouTube video poke at the stalking, “poking,” and friending phenomenon.

Social networking with a humble napkin

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napads.jpgIf you think talking billboards, pop-ups and ads beamed to your cell phone are intrusive, consider what a company called NapAds are doing.

They will create ads on napkins and place it in clubs and lounges where the hard-to-reach 18-34 demo hangs out. They aptly call it a way to be in on “the original social networking.” The company prints the message or artwork directly on napkins, so they still have the touch and feel of napkins.

Intrusive? Maybe (but so are branded coasters.) Functional? Hey, it’s a lot better than wrapping a chilled Molson in a brochure!

For now they can reach this target in New York’s Manhattan district, but NapAds they can get placement in other big cities. The ads will ‘run’ in a location for30 days. US Airways is using 10 million napkins a month! Probably more engaging than the flight safety instructions in front of you.

To be sure, napkin ads will soon make the leap from analog networking into the digital stream. If someone hasn’t already, I could see how a brand could print short codes and links to micro-sites for people to quickly subscribe to place-based content, upload pictures to Flickr, and interact with others via a smart phone. Perfect for outdoor events, consumer promotions, even packaged goods brands doing sampling at an event. It could be narrow targeted, and tightly integrated into other Marcom activity.

Senator Online exposes agenda-free stand

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The senator is neither left nor right, is not for the Greens or the Labor party. He/she has a Facebook group (with 699 members as of Sunday).

The plan is to have a truly democratic party online so that the Australian voter could be more aware of the electoral process.

SOL is quote savvy in its marketing, as you could see here, with supporters stripping down to their underwear in Perth to show how ‘transparent’ (or is it exposed?) this party could be…

Using social media to market Scottsdale Visitors’ Bureau

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Here’s one way to use a blog to support a marketing push. The Scottsdale Visitor’s Bureau is running a seasonal promo, inviting people write a post about a funny Christmas-related story/incident on its blog, and enter to win prizes.

The winning blogger gets three nights stay at the Boulders Resort & Golden Door Spa plus round trip airfare. Also thrown in is a dinner, golfing, a local tour and car rental.

Check JingleBlogScottsdale!

SCVB has got into social media in more ways than one. It has podcasts, cell phone alerts and a travel blog.

Lessons from Forrester’s Groundswell Awards

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In July, Forrester Research put out a call to organizations using social media to submit their work for the what they called the Groundswell Awards. These were anything innovative by way of blogs, wikis, and communities to achieve some goal.

Last week, they announced the winners. In the seven categories (Listening, Speaking, Energizing, Supporting, Embracing, Managing, and Social Impact) there were unexpected winers. Meaning, some of them were probably so focused on their niche, we didn’t hear much about them.

Alli Research Community (Alli being a Glaxo Smith Kline dietary product) was a finalist in the listening category. In the Managing section, Avenue A Razorfish won for a wiki, and many may remember the ‘design a border fence’ campaign from Brickfish.

To me there were two lessons worth taking away. It was all about focus and participation. Marketing groups tend to lose sight of these two elements.

Focus: It’s easy to set aside the rifle and grab the shotgun because many people are still operating in the mass media/mas marketing mode. Also, there are often too many fish to fry. Too many goals, too many audiences to ping, too many middle managers to keep happy. Chevy Aveo’s Livin’ Large was focused on students. Narrowly focused on seven campuses, in fact.

Participation. Allowing people to collaborate is messy, doesn’t work to plan, and makes the ‘gurus’ look incompetent –especially when the best ideas come from people without marketing or design in their title. We cannot know what kind of content showed up on Avenue A Razorfish’s wiki (it’s a private wiki) but with 6500 pages of content contributed by employees, and 2000 blog posts, it was most unlikely to have been oozing in HR-speak.

Pinch the firehose

/ Angelo Fernando / 1 Comment

This week I met a good cross section of business people who were intrigued and excited about the potential of new media. At meetings like this I try to explain what this media and marketing shift is all about by referencing the usual suspects: RSS, blogs, wikis, Search engine optimization, online video and networking.

But rather than further segmenting them into sub categories (and confusing the heck out of people) I tell them to think of it as not just technology fixes to marketing opportunities, but a way of rethinking what our marketing goals are. Are we trying to amplify the message –as in the old tactics of expensive media buys — or are we trying to empathise with our customers better? Are we trying to stuff our brochures into their inboxes or are we trying to get them to find us on their terms, on their time?

I also tell them not to drink from the proverbial fire-hose, and take these techno solutions in small sips. The fire-hose is not what you want opened when you’re trying to achieve specific goals. There are just too many tools out there that may not even be relevant to your marketing objective.

My take is that, in our exuberance, we might be opening the new media pressure valve a bit too far, making marketing look too complex, to “wild west,” too faddish. Sometimes it’s OK to pinch the fire-hose. Work with what you have. Maybe what you have is a marketing team of two-and-a-half people, a lean budget, and a CEO who first needs you to serve it out in sippy-cup. The big thirst could be filled down the line.