Social Media

Desperately needed: creative media buying

/ Angelo Fernando / 1 Comment

Most college advertising tends to be boring. OK, let me rephrase that since I work for one!

Most college marketing tends to follow the same formula when trying to recruit new students. I know this from another perspective, because I’m in the process of reviewing a boatload of marketing aimed at us because of my son’s impending college decision. Of course we try to shake things up here, but the standard elements are postcards, brochures, web sites, invitation to virtual tours, personalized URL’s (PURLs) etc. Bring up Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace and Delicious and people get queasy, but we try.

But sometimes someone breaks the mold.

I wrote about how one school used an unusual media buy to do this, and why marketers ignore three fundamentals of marketing:

  • Exploiting the medium
  • Knowing the customer
  • Giving them information they could act on

On the first point, marketers seriously underestimate the power of the medium, and that is precisely where the message falls flat. Media buyers and planners are not on the same page when everyone’s trying to hammer out the message.

To use an example from a different, competitive category, most car ads also tend to be extremely me-too and boring. But take a closer look at this “medium” used for Mini Cooper in Germany. Which do you think came up first with the idea? The hotshot Creative guys or the boring media planners?

Crayon’s critics rush to judgement

/ Angelo Fernando / 11 Comments

So predictable. The ad industry turns on the anti-30-second-commercial guy, Joseph Jaffe, because he is repositioning the company Crayon after several key people departed. In case you hadn’t heard of it, Crayon was the new marketing agency launched in a new media environment, Second Life, less than a year ago.

If you’ve read Jaffe’s book, listened to his podcasts or read his blog, you’ll know that he –an ex agency guy– is Madison Avenue’s worst nightmare. Or if I may rephrase it, Old-Madison Avenue’s nightmare. Indeed, many agencies have embraced new media and new marketing, but for many, new media is still a slide they add on at the end of their presentation. (“vlogs? short codes? What’s that?”)

No mater what Crayon does, you have to agree that this “shape shifter” (their term) has been a pace-setter /embarrassment / thorn in the side / to an industry slow to adapt to new new consumer behaviors & motivations. No different from how Richard Branson pushed a lot of buttons and upset a lot of “industry” apple carts, Jaffe is always challenging the way things have been done.

Conversational marketing is something Jaffe’s upcoming book will be all about. In fact he did a survey earlier this year on just that topic. Critics of this kind of marketing and advertising are probably disturbed by all of this. They are quick to call his repositioning a “fall from grace.”

But there was some vindication last week. AdAge ran a page-one story (“Old-world media starts to feel the pain“) on the shift away from traditional media to conversational marketing.

But there’s something else going on that has nothing to do with the natural rhythms of booms and busts or the fortunes of Madison Avenue’s biggest clients. Simply put, American companies are shifting more and more marketing dollars out of paid media. You see it happening every day as marketers—smart ones, at least—talk about things such as word-of-mouth and conversational marketing…

Did they just notice? Companies have been talking about these ‘things’ –and taking their money with them– for many years now. Jaffe was been of the first to chronicle that shift.

Breathtaking blog layout

/ Angelo Fernando / Leave a comment

So many blog designs look so similar that it’s refreshing to see a totally new creative approach. And this is not from any agency, mind you! It’s the blog of a U.C. berkeley professor and writer, Jesús Rodríguez.

I think the search box is neat too! Whoever said it ought to look a symmetric box?

He calls it “a treasure trove of (possibly) worthless intellectual trinkets.” Every page brings up a new collage, and fabulous typography.

Taser hits wrong nerve. Gets wrong kind of Google juice

/ Angelo Fernando / 4 Comments

Taser is not unfamiliar with controversy, even when it comes to students. But yesterday a Taser hit the wrong kind of target –a student being videoed -and the company has started getting the kind of media coverage and social media backlash it never bargained for.

It’s an incident that shows what could happen when you combine rudimentary citizen journalism and the ability to quickly form an online community around an event.

The Facebook group formed in protest is just one way this incident is getting played out, apart from in the media, with online comments, and headlines not very flattering to a company. But it’s not only how it’s played out. It’s how the story gets enshrined. The phrase “Don’t Tase Me Bro…AHHHHH!!!” uttered by the student Andrew Meyer before he went down is used by the Facebook group. It could live on — right next to say, “Die, Press release, Die! Die! Die!” and “Dell lies. Dell sucks” in a Google search.

There are many interpretations of the several videos taken at the incident, eye wittiness accounts, and some calling this an overreaction. The eyewitness who had also been waiting to ask John Kerry a question makes a good point, wondering why Meyer could not have also waited without rushing the microphone. Some called Meyer a jerk, and another said it was justified.

But if you watch the video, you’ll see there were many cameras on the scene. One report suggests Meyer knew his was being videoed.

All this of course doesn’t help Taser. The company recently announced a ‘subtle shift’ in its positioning, from one of protection to “saving lives.” It’s an impressive technology from an impressive company here in Arizona. But it goes to show what a tenuous task public relations is today.


Facebook president with analog touch

/ Angelo Fernando / Leave a comment

As I have been observing before, McCain’s campaign, after early signs of engine trouble, is now picking up speed. He’s adjusted his slogan from “Straight Talk Express” to “No Surrender” in classic repositioning tactic –no different from the way packaged goods tweak their slogan when sales start to tank. He’s got Facebook profile and a MySpace presence –as do Obama, Clinton and everyone else.

But will next year’s election be decided on the basis of a slogan, the contender’s social media presence or something else?

A recent poll by the Associated Press says that John McCain has a “solid shares of suburban, college-educated and Midwestern Republican voters.” The Washington Post last Sunday was somewhat optimistic too. “No surrender” is well timed, and probably resonates well with the Petraeus decision. But slogans aside, McCain seems to be doing something right. He may be more analog than digital, but in my opinion that could be what’s makes him more like the real thing.

Having watched the genesis of the YouTube debates, and now the Yahoo election debate, this going to be the first social media election where public opinion is sampled, targeted and better understood before the actual polls.

Markos Moulitsas –he of The Daily Kos – had this to say of supporters’ ability to assemble and the candidate’s capacity take charge of their own narrative:

“Because there are now so many more millions of people who are being engaged by politics online than in the last presidential election, our ability to control or fight back against media narratives is much stronger. We can create our own stories and push back against the ones that are BS. To me, the beauty of this medium is that there are so many centers of power in Netroots that no one can ever really dominate.”

In other words, if every candidate is plugged into the social media, a ‘Facebook President’ may need something extra.

To me that could require one thing: Good old-fashioned momentum generated by good old-fashioned face-to-face communication.

Southwest Airlines retakes the story

/ Angelo Fernando / 3 Comments

“The publicity caught us with our pants down, quite frankly. The story has such great legs, but we have an even better sense of humor, so we’re going to jump out there and lower our fares to match the mini skirts we’ve all been hearing so much about.”

What other company could write a more innovative (and credible) ‘manufactured quote’ for a press release than this? This was Southwest Airlines that took back the story when it was widely criticized for poorly handling a situation on board.

Dan Wool at ValleyPRBlog last week wrote about the incident (involving a Hooters girl, and inappropriate clothing on a flight) and the need to apologize. That’s what the airline did.

But it leveraged the incident to issue not one but two press releases, and to lower its fares it promptly called Mini Skirt Fares. Even if someone hadn’t hear of the Hooters girl incident, this is guaranteed to make them talk about and around it.

The first press release was about the apology from President Colleen Barrett. If you’ve ever read her column in SPIRIT magazine, the in-flight pub, you’ll know that Barrett is quite the champion of new PR, and highly aware of the value of social media.

Nor was this a standard apology. Here’s her quote in that release:

From a Company who really loves PR, touche to you Kyla! … As we both know, this story has great legs, but the true issue here is that you are a valued Customer, and you did not get an adequate apology.

There are some valuable firsts here:

1. Communicating with a single customer directly through a press release.

2. Humor from the top of the totem pole in an organization, via a communication tool better known for bland communications

3. Using its positioning – FUN – to address, rather than cover up the incident

4. Damage control, fast –check the Google Juice it’s received

5. The President blogged about the incident right away, as did Brian Lusk whose post had comments critical of the airline.

It’s a classic example of taking charge of the conversation, before it takes off without you on board.

Luddites and…people with legal degrees, take note

/ Angelo Fernando / Leave a comment

Who are the stumbling blocks to progress in your organization? I bet you could name a few who sit at your meeting and who have that glazed look when something risky/new/untested is suggested.

At a conference in the U.K. last week called Verge, Ogilvy Interactive has been discussing just this. More specifically how “luddites, conservatives, late adopters, naysayers, people with legal degrees and others in the organization” stand in the way of digital progress.

They were looking at how brands need to “listen, engage, experiment” to stay relevant in today’s networked economy. One post had this on marketing: “avoid fishing in a shrinking and over fished pool.” To which I feel like adding “avoid using the same bait when your move to a different pool.”

Not sure what the “people with legal degrees” was supposed to mean, but I often hear people complain that legal department often puts the damper on a campaigns. Shel Holtz and Neville Hobson for instance talk of  how it’s now in vogue for HR and Legal to ban Facebook, on the grounds of being concerned about employees spending too much time there, having no clue about the productivity gains being made because of these informal networks.

For this you went to college?

/ Angelo Fernando / 3 Comments

A college level YouTube video class about using YouTube video!

It had to move in this direction sooner of later. A YouTube video of a class about YouTube.

Half the class is asked to do a post, and half the class have to respond to it using a YouTube video. It is a college level class at Pitzer College, Claremont, California and the class is called “Learning From YouTube.”

And since this is an actual class assignment, you can track the students’ assignments by viewing 49 videos –as of today. They will also lean such things as video press releases. The class is taught by media studies prof. Alexandra Juhasz.

It’s easy to be cynical, but when you look at the pace at which social media is moving, and how unprepared or ignorant graduates are when entering the media and marketing today, it is commendable to see these kinds of hands-on approaches.

In the age where the social media press release, the viral video, text messaging and that thing called ‘folksonomy’ is making antecedents predecessors like the block-quote press release, the 30-second spot and email obsolete, the digital classroom is worth experimenting with.

Next up: “Learning from Facebook” and “Learning from Delicious?”

Is Bin Laden a brand?

/ Angelo Fernando / 1 Comment

“He’s a brand name, probably one of the most recognizable brand names in the world”

I found it strange that a professor of Georgetown University (quoted in an AP story yesterday) called Bin Laden a brand name, after the two videos emerged this week.

People attach the word “brand” to anything these days, in the same way that agency folk in the eighties used to drop the word “strategic” before a lot of words (like “management,” “response,” “investment”) just to sound profound.

One could assume he was simply expanding on the idea he had just described describing the man as a “marquee name wheeled out in dramatic fashion.” Bin Laden may have some odd PR tactics ( insert “strategies” for “tactics” if you want added effect) but releasing a VNR now and then does not bestow brand status.

Finally, a code of ethics for pitching Bloggers

/ Angelo Fernando / 1 Comment

Will someone please turn off the spigot gushing out naive, formulaic emails fin the name of ‘Blogger Outreach?” They come from junior PR folk eager to generate some buzz from anyone who leaves some Technorati tracks. I get these from time to time, especially when it’s close to a conference I have attended or plan to cover, and very often it’s not even in my realm of interest. Imagine what a full-time writer or journalist has to put up with!

OK, so it’s not gonna happen anytime soon.

The backlash against poorly targeted Blogger Outreach has been brewing for some time. Some, like Weber Shandwick, have been posting guidelines. Others have been incensed, to say the least.

That’s why it is refreshing to see Ogilvy PRs 360 Digital Influence blog, come up with a Blogger Outreach Code of Ethics. It’s appropriately called Take 1. Remember Ogilvy PR comprises both sides of the equation –PR people who pitch stories to bloggers, and prolific, influential bloggers like Rohit Bhargava. Which is what makes this list more attractive to me. I urge you to read the whole list. Among them are:

  • Before we email you, we will check out your blog’s About, Contact and Advertising page in an effort to see if you have blatantly said you would not like to be contacted by PR/Marketing companies. If so, we’ll leave you alone.
  • If you are initially interested in the campaign, but don’t respond to one of our emails, we will follow up with you no more than once. If you don’t respond to us at all, we’ll leave you alone.
  • You are entitled to blog on information or products we give you in any way you see fit. (Yes, you can even say you hate it.)

They invite comments from readers, plan to take the best and in two weeks post an ‘evolved’ version. Probably Take 2.

A very good start to a problem that could otherwise pollute perfectly good, well meaning PR.

There’s another issue that came up based on comments to the post –the eroding wall between promotion and advertising. I will take this up in my next post. Stay tuned.