ANA Marketing Maestros

New Tech Not Just For Kids

At the aforementioned ANA Enhanced Television task force meeting, new chair, Kevin George, VP Deodorants, Unilever US and Jacquie Corbelli, President, Brightline Partners, provided an overview of some of the very interesting and cutting edge new media work done for the Axe brand. 

As has become typical at presentations of these sorts, an advertiser noted..”that is fine for you with a young target (young males) but my business is _____(fill in the blanks – pharma, food, finance) and we have an older target.  What are we to do…?”  To them I say, get with the program! 

My 83 year-old mother is on the web all the time and so are many of her friends.  Fortunately she is in great health and not in need of products from my friends in the pharma business, but that aside, she is very active in communities of people with similar interests.  In fact, on a recent trip to my grandfather’s birthplace in Italy, we stayed in hotels and ate at restaurants recommended by the people on one of the online communities she frequents.  In fact, at the hotel she told the young man who owns it that he needs to monitor this community and correct postings about his hotel that contain misperceptions and she wrote up a favorable posting for the hotel that she had him review.  Now, how many of you out there are paying new media consultants a lot of money for that type of advice?  My mother is available for consultations…

Viral Video A Boone for Advertisers

J.D. at New Media Musings has an interesting recap in Flavors of Grassroots Video. Online video has been an increasing area of interest for  marketers -- recently we have heard American Express talk about their creative as rolling video stock.

A week or so back, Unilever (they call their creative "filmed assets") kicked off an  Enhanced TV Task Force with a case study where they used a viral online video they had developed for the Axe brand in the UK. The beauty is that they repackaged their "filmed assets" as a short clip on the Adult Swim Video on Demand channel. The story of a small town in Alaska with no women that turned to Axe body spray was a huge success for Unilever. They were hoping for a million viewers to download this low-cost endeavor. They got 2 million.

Tahoe CGM Campaign Not So Bad After All

At our recent Masters of Integrated Marketing Conference there was discussion of – among other topics - consumer generated advertising.  At every presentation on this topic at which I have been present, someone asks a question about how the company or brand can control their carefully crafted  image when consumers are running amok creating their own content. 

Chevy Tahoe experienced this first hand and is the case study we all reference when this issue surfaces.  (Unless you have been spending a lot of time in your cave, you have heard about what some think was the law of unintended consequences when in a March Apprentice tie-in, consumers were invited by Chevy Tahoe to visit the website and create their own Tahoe videos - some of which were negative about SUVS and their drain on environmental resources.)   I for one applaud the Chevy Tahoe brand group.

Despite how you feel about SUVs (I drive a sedan and loathe it when an SUV blocks my view or I am parked between two of them!) you have to admire the company for being out there, participating in this new medium and allowing consumers to interact with their brand.  I also think the publicity that emerged about the supposed “negative consumer reaction” was a bonus.  Not caring a whit about cars and thus not paying attention to car advertising of any kind, I would never have heard about this new model had I not been reading about the consumer generated campaign in every advertising related trade publication that exists.  I now have a favorable  - and more contemporary perception  - about Chevrolet because of this.   I had not  thought much about the brand since my Dad gave me his Chevy Caprice after I graduated from college many, many years ago.  So Chevy Tahoe brand – keep it up! I will be looking to see the next brilliant advertising tactic you add to your arsenal.  Oh and by the way, go to Google and search Chevy Tahoe Consumer Generated Advertising – there are 34,000 results!  Not a bad return on investment…

Managing Your Media Organization

When we started this blog, I never realized what a great avenue it was to discuss our book publishing efforts -- until I realized everyone is doing it, so why not. Our members tell us what intellectual property they want developed and we do our best to comply. Our newest title, Managing Your Media Organization, is one of these efforts. Client side advertisers, big and small, across every industry are struggling with their media and how to manage it. An interesting excerpt from Marketing Vox on media:

"Marketing accounts for about one trillion dollars of spending in the U.S. annually. If marketers slow their spending, that could hurt traditional media channels and the economy overall."

I have included an excerpt from the book (not an e-book, just a simple excerpt) -- a checklist of watch outs for those dealing with the the transitory stages a lot of media organizations are going through. Feel free to pass it along.

Blogger Notes and Q&A with Steve Rubel

Blogger News

• Blogger in the news, Mark Cuban, gets fined $250K by the NBA -- see his response on his blog (Congrats to my Miami Heat on their first world championship).
• Here is the long promised Steve Rubel Q&A session (.mp3) from ANA's Masters of Integrated Marketing Conference. Steve answers marketer's tough questions on the future of social media. (He has a lot to say about Mark Cuban and the "blogosphere's team")
• Eric highlights his findings from the Human Face of your blog's traffic (disclaimer: he interviewed me for this piece)

How Can You Become a Smarter Marketer?

Where do we start? 

First by moving your strategy and spending decisions down the consumer purchase funnel – the one which starts with building awareness and ends with brand loyalty.  Stop being satisfied with building and reporting gains in awareness.  As Scott Bedbury said “Awareness is fools gold”.  Anyone can drive it, but does it really matter today?  Only as a precursor to how many consumers you’re driving into your purchase funnel.  It time to look for ways to connect with your customers in a way that helps to lock them into your brand.  This means finding new media formats that are a better mixture of promotion and advertising – online media is certainly a strong candidate here.  Find those mediums that can deliver an indication of customer reaction – “how may calls or online registrations did we generate” not what is the cost of a GRP.

Its time to start shifting dollars in a major way from TV to other mediums; it time to face the fact that we need to integrate brand building with product movement.  This will require changing the way we allocate our funds.  It will require that we innovate, think differently, think like our customers.

Starbucks and LL Bean used little advertising to build their businesses.  They instead used a lot of very smart marketing.  How can you become a smarter marketer?

What is Your Marketing Function?

The findings of the ANA/Booz Allen study on Marketing Organization DNA are redefining the way we look at the marketing function. I encourage you to keep your eyes on the evolution of this study.

All right...Its time to call a spade a spade and be honest with ourselves.  We marketers for the most part fulfill a marketing services role to some degree – we coordinate, we communicate, we cheerlead.  We are not considered to be the corporation strategists or decision makers.  It may hurt to face the music, but by doing so now, you can begin to take steps to change your position and your potential tenure – especially if you are your organization’s CMO (Wikipedia).

Those that drive corporate direction share two important traits. 

They are proactive, not reactive.  And they can identify how they have driven revenue growth.

Being Media Agnostic Big for Marketers

Surprise: organizational issues are the greatest challenge for marketers in their integration efforts. We hear this all the time -- advertisers are not set up to properly take advantage of the media landscape and agencies still have a dated approach. But enough about that, here are some of the key nuggets of information from our latest survey:

• Sixty-three percent of marketers rank organizational issues as the greatest challenge to successfully integrating their marketing efforts. More specifically, they identified the existence of "functional silos" inside their companies as a key challenge.
• Most marketers (72 percent) feel the development of the “Big” creative idea that can be leveraged across all marketing channels is the most important contribution an agency can make toward an integrated marketing campaign.
• Almost 50 percent of marketers want their agencies to be media neutral when developing an integrated marketing program.
• Sales data and ROI analysis are viewed as the most important measures of the effectiveness of an IMC campaign.

Masters of IMC

The premiere of ANA's Masters of Integrated Marketing Conference is tomorrow and we will be attempting to blog from there if we can get some WiFi at the Grand Hyatt.

Some speakers of note:

• Steve Rubel, of Micropersuasion fame : Talking about blogging being a trend in this post. (Disclaimer: Steve worked on our account when at CooperKatz)
• Joseph Jaffe of Jaffe Juice fame: listen to the latest edition of his excellent pod cast Across the Sound
• Ed Keller talks word-of-mouth, which should be entertaining, especially after reading cgm critique Keller at the Beyond Blogging Conference in D.C.

Insights and the Growth Champion

Insight - A profound understanding of customers that leads to a business idea which drives
profitable growth. 

Knowing the insight that drives profitable growth give you as a marketer, the power to help others understand what they are doing and why.  You will be able to bring real meaning to your team – help them understand their purpose, there input, the benefit that makes all of their work relevant.  By being able to tell a relevant and compelling insight story, others within your company will turn to you for additional insight.  They will respect your opinion and ask for your direction. 

Build a great customer insight story add to that a set of metrics to measure whether you’re on target and you too can become a “Marketing Growth Champion” – the driver of the corporate bus.