Marketing

The first Cluetrain ad

/ Angelo Fernando / Leave a comment

Now here’s a move that’s bolder than I expected. Ford, on it’s Bold Moves site has a dealer talking about the company being "a huge ship that takes forever to turn" and a marketing manager prefacing at a presentation about low morale. Marketing Vox is also reporting how Henry Copeland of Blogads has called a new bactch of ads the ‘first Cluetrain ad.’

This spot opens with a spokesperson for the Rainforest Action Network, talking of Ford’s problem. She is followed by an ‘industry analyst’ and others who continue the unflattering view. Ok, so there is some optimism that follows, with talk about hydrogen fuel fleets and the environment. But it sure tells a more compelling story than conventional commercials that feature beauty shots of cars zipping through the countryside. The new beauty shots are gas stations with the price boards displaying high prices, belching smokestacks and ugly congested freeways.

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Subway agency pitch a bizarre experiment

/ Angelo Fernando / 1 Comment

I’ve scrutinized the so-called viral video and it beats me why an agency would think of this as the most creative way to pitch a client. Does the fact that a team can put-together hand-held video footage (some parts obviously staged) tell you anything about their approach? They talk of wanting to ‘learn about the customers’ perspective’ as if it was some secret sauce for marketing. And what’s with that ‘research’ question a woman asks of a man on the street. he seems to walk away in a hurry and she asks "are you allowed to talk to women?" if I was Subway, I would be deeply troubled by handing over my account to people who trivialize what understanding customers is all about.

Sure, the stint about working at the restaurant for a day was a good idea, but nothing novel there. Agencies have done that for years. As Steve Rubel aptly puts it, in the macro sense, Agency.com has set back the credibility of the social media, and hurt all interactive agencies

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Amazon’s video ups the ante

/ Angelo Fernando / Leave a comment

Amazon’s got the brand recognition, and the marketing savvy to own the digital video space. It’s a very crowded playing field in the digital download business when you consider iTunes, Zune (the Microsoft answer to the iPod)  Urge, and not to mention YouTube, and DivX (a Google partner)

AdAge looks at it as "the digital version of the Netflix rental model."

Having watched the FishBowl experiment on Amazon, I can see how they’ll find some very creative ways market their service. Apple, meanwhile is rumored to have a larger video iPod, so suddenly it could be a battle between not just like-minded services, but service provider vs technology.

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Ultimate number: Word of mouth can be word of biceps!

/ Angelo Fernando / Leave a comment

Fred Reichheld’s book The Ultimate Question is facinating stuff for those interested in loyalty marketing. Who isn’t? Reichheld is known today for that esoteric Net Promoter score used by companies like GE for some years. It’s sort of the new, new thing for companies. Coming on the heels of continuous improvement and six sigma, (also adopted by GE) there’s some suspicion that its another fad.

However, there’s nothing faddish about tracking customer referrals and checking the pulse of your loyalty, no matter what you call it. Reichheld observes on a MarketingProfs presentation how he once had a converston with Harley Davidson CEO about retention as a measurement criteria for loyalty, and found that Harley wasn’t concerned about that number. Harley, he was told measures the percentage of customers who had the company tattooed on some body part. Hard to believe that, but then again, it’s Harley. He also says that if he had listened more closely, he would have written this book much earlier. You own customers’ loyalty when they cobrand their reputation with yours, Reichheld notes. It’s not word of mouth, it’s word of biceps for Harley.

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Businesses that blog –the more authentic voice

/ Angelo Fernando / 2 Comments

Should every CEO maintain a blog? That’s a question being asked more often now, with the rise in popularity of CEO blogs such as new evidence on how much businesses lag on the blogging front is reported today in MediaPost’s Online Media Daily. Only 5.8% of the top Fortune 500 companies have blogs.

In a recent article I wrote for CW Bulletin, I noted how communicators, and the PR department in a company may want to blog, and even the CEO may be tempted to start his own blog, but there’s another department that usually frowns on such endeavors: the legal department. The Jonathan Schwartz and Bob Lutz blogs for Sun and GM respectively, may not be enough to tip the scales of corporate blogging. What it might take is for a lot of smaller companies to prove its value, and create a bottom-up momentum.

Take a look at Munjal Shah’s blog about Riya, a small company with a big idea –a visual search engine that uses face and image recognition to search the web. He says things no corporate communications person would dare say anywhere, apart from on a blog. Commenting on one reviewer of his service, he observes:

While I disagree with some of their UI comments (especiall because they wrote it before I blogged the new search strategy), from an SEO perspective, Riya is a disaster. We haven’t done even the most basic things like good meta-tags.

That’s right, the CEO calling his product a "disaster." How often do you see that level of frankness in product blogging? The ability to say things minus the spin is what makes company blogs more credible. There’s the approved company voice on its web site, and there’s the true voice on its blog. If you were a customer, which one would you return to?

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Live Buy It and the power of sms

/ Angelo Fernando / Leave a comment

SMS marketing is an area that hasn’t seen a lot of movement, especially in the US. But a new program called Live Buy It will be an experiment worth watching. The New York Times reported yesterday how Lucky magazine will begin offering readers in September a way to buy from eighteen marketers. If it sounds a lot like PayPal’s Text2Buy, it there’s a reason. The service is powered by PayPal.

Expect to see other media companies adding similar programs as a value added service for their advertisers, allowing a marketer to create a campaign that can be tracked in terms of sales, rather than impressions. Publishers, especially online publishers have begun to look for ways to keep advertisers more loyal. They may not have seen the connection between cell phones and their product at first, but they will. With SMS, the possibilities are endless. TextMarketer in the UK, has a feature where someone can conduct a reverse auction via SMS!

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Social Media Press Release: it’s about time!

/ Angelo Fernando / 1 Comment

Shel Holtz writes (in New Communications Review) about the introduction of something called a ‘social media press release’ by Shift Communications, but does not come down too hard on the old media press releases as most people do.

His point: While saying he does not argue with the folk that say the press release is often not newsworthy and poorly written, there is still value in them. He makes a great case –that the media often adapt, and don’t just allow someone else to write their obituary. "new media do not kill old media. Old media adapt and evolve."

As for the Social Media Press Release, it issued its own press release in the new format, that includes a purpose-built del.icio.us site. if you’re wondering what’s so different about this press release format, check here. Someone issuing a press release cn mix and match non-linear media elements into the release, including an RSS feed, a photo, a podcast or a video, or all of them.

The social media approach to press releases defintely fills a void as we straddle the analog and interactive world.

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Making a friend out of foe in TiVo

/ Angelo Fernando / 1 Comment

Brian Haven blogging on the Forrester Research site observes how a mysterious ad flashing on LOST, turns out to be a way marketers are beginning to use TiVo as a creative tool in the battle to circumvent ad skipping.

I had said something very similar to this in my previous post.

This has implications for anyone thinking of non-linear campaigns. First, we need to think of how the three screens will complement each other. No longer will we be able to compartmentalize budgets into TV, mobile and PC. There can not be a TiVo strategy without a plan to get into YouTube, for instance. Cross-channel will also pull in podcasts into the mix. Notice how Fox has ‘foxcasts‘ to integrate the TV programs with the RSS-driven media audiences.

Then, we’ll need to find an alternative to the ratings system –to make sense of how viewers migrate back and forth to their different media for any given program or commercial interaction…er, ad. DVR’s will probably include some serious tracking capability in a few years.

Imagine how this will play out when IPTV comes into the mix, and the Nielsen-meets-TiVo kind of metrics become available. There was a WSJ article a year ago where a media buyer is quoted as saying that if people are not watching a show live, they don’t count –as they probably don’t watch the commercials. If they do, he said, then these viewings are "too late to matter." Going by Brian Haven”s experience, media buyers who see the DVR as a problem, not a benefit, will have to eat their words.

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DVRs and the Ad agencies: no strange bedfellows

/ Angelo Fernando / Leave a comment

The ‘ad blocker’ for which agencies had fear and loathing was eventually going to be their best friend, I used to say years ago. When TiVo launched, it looked like the end-of-days for advertising had come to pass, but when you peeled back the layers of DVR, it was evident that the consumer being in control (and being able to skip past commercials) was only one part of the equation. The digital interface was also the best tracking device at that time, and smart advertisers were able to see that this was another way to identify viewer behavior.

So the news that TiVo has signed up with Universal McCann (nicely coinciding with the news that the Up-fronts are not so important anymore) gives us an insight into where television’s going. There’ll come a time soon when very creative media buys and interactive campaigns could use the very DVR technology. Remember how KFC used a secret code in commercials only viewable when played back in slow motion?

Now imagine this in the IPTV era. We would probably be able to create advertising that requires the viewer to use time shifting to the advantage of the advertiser as well –say saving a commercial that would have embedded codes or links to microsites that would only be valid in a week. These rich-media stories (we won’t call them commercials anymore) would create a high level of audience participation that would have never been possible without TiVo-like devices.

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