ANA Marketing Maestros

Drawing Attention to Yourself by Going Local

By Adrienne Tallacksen

My daily commute takes me past a local gym. I always look forward to checking out the latest advertisement they have to get people in the door, which is posted on a chalkboard easel on the sidewalk. The handwritten ads sometimes feature quotes (always altered in some way to play up the fitness angle), sometimes verge on offensive (needling those who might not be physically fit), and sometimes they aren't ads at all (a simple "YAY!" was posted on November 5th after President Obama was elected). The messages are often targeted to the Jersey City, NJ audience with references to local restaurants and even our most recent political scandal. Above all, the ads are clever and witty and almost always get my attention.

The gym is part of a small New York/New Jersey chain, so it may be easier for it to target the local audience than it would be for a national advertiser. But new tools are making targeted ads possible on a larger scale. At a meeting of the ANA's Television Advertising Committee Meeting in March, committee members learned about how Canoe Ventures is using community addressable advertising to target television viewers in different markets.

When an ad is targeted at people who live in my community, I feel like I can relate to the advertiser, even if I might not be interested in its product. This can be a powerful connection for marketers to make with consumers.

Doing Well by Doing Good, Even in a Tough Economy

By Adrienne Tallacksen

Commercial media has advertising; public radio has underwriting. Those of us who listen to public radio are all too familiar with the phrase “Support for this program comes to from…” Recently I heard the following underwriting message:

Scotts Miracle-Gro, supporter of the 'Gro Good pledge,’ asking backyard gardeners to plant extra vegetables to help feed the hungry—at GroGood.com.

Many advertisements today are focusing on a product’s price or value. Fewer are focusing on a message of altruism. This underwriting spot reminded listeners that even if they’re not feeling the impacts of the down economy, their neighbors may be suffering. The spot was also relevant to the product, which is used in many gardens. The only problem is that I had a lot of trouble finding the web site—GroGood.com. As a listener who isn’t very familiar with Scotts Miracle-Gro, I had assumed the name of the web site was GrowGood.com with the conventional spelling of the word “grow.” (I’ve often heard the URLs of web sites spelled out in underwriting spots, but that wasn’t the case here.) Nevertheless, it was nice to hear a message about helping your community instead of another ad focused on low, low prices or the down economy.

Out of home, out of mind?

By Adrienne Tallacksen

A few weeks ago I was coming out of the subway station at Grand Central and noticed that the turnstiles looked different than usual.  On second glance, I saw that the turnstile bars were wrapped with ads for an unnamed airline.  As far as I could tell, there weren’t other ads for this airline in the subway station.  Granted, I didn’t go running around the subway station looking for more ads (who has time for that during her morning commute?), but it appeared that the advertising was limited to the turnstile bars.  I may not even have remembered the campaign, except that later in the week as I walked through a different part of Grand Central, I saw ads for the same airline on the walls.  Were these two campaigns related?  Maybe, but I’m not sure. 

Another more effective example of out of home advertising in New York’s subway stations comes from UPS. Senior VP and Creative Director Andy Azula discussed the campaign at this year’s TV & Everything Video Forum.  In this case, UPS wrapped underground subway pillars to look like whiteboard markers and used nearly-blank white wall ads that resembled whiteboards.  Consumers could see how the wall ads and the ads on the pillar were connected.  This was an engaging and interesting campaign.

I still wonder if the two ads for the airline were connected or not.  If the turnstile bar wrappers were only one piece of a campaign, where was the rest of the campaign that I missed?  Was the campaign really spread throughout Grand Central?  Or were the turnstile bar wrappers the entire campaign?  If so, it wasn’t entirely effective.  While the wrapped turnstile bars caught my attention, more than anything, I was puzzled by them and certainly wasn’t moved to do business with the company.  I think this was a lost opportunity for the airline to create an exciting out-of-home campaign.  Instead of being engaged, I was just confused. 

Links:
http://www.ana.net/conversation/miccontent/ss_azula_021209
http://www.ana.net/events/conferencemtg/TAF-FEB09

Respect Your Customers or They’ll Look Elsewhere

By Adrienne Tallacksen

I don’t own a TV. It wasn’t really a conscious decision—after my husband’s TV broke and I had to give a borrowed one back to its owner, we just didn’t bother to replace them. I can’t say I’ve missed having a TV all that much, but there are a few shows I still like to watch, and like many others, I watch them online.

There’s one show I’ve been watching online for a couple of years. The network, which will remain nameless, was nice enough to post the entire first season so I could catch up with the program after I’d missed the show’s broadcast television debut. I’ve enjoyed watching the show in an online setting. I can pause and rewind if needed, and while there are the same number of commercial breaks online as during the TV broadcast, there has been only one commercial per break…until now.

I don’t mind commercials—that’s not the problem here. In fact, I’d rather watch a program with a few commercials from a legal source than go to the trouble of looking for illegal downloads. My problem is that instead of getting the expected single 30-second commercial, it’s now followed up by another 15-second commercial. This may not sound like a big change, but it was startling and surprisingly annoying that commercial breaks are now half again as long as they used to be. I know, 15 seconds is next to nothing compared to a 45-minute program, but as a viewer I felt disrespected.

One 30-second commercial seems to have been the standard, but apparently the standard has changed. Now that there are two commercials, I’m more likely to spend the commercial break annoyed that there are two commercials, rather than give any of my attention to the commercials that air.  When I knew there was only going to be one commercial, it did catch my attention, especially when one company advertised throughout the program. In my mind, this is a double whammy for advertisers—the consumer is annoyed and is also not paying attention to their ads.

This change isn’t enough to make me stop watching the program entirely, but it was enough to make me switch to Hulu.com, which carries the same program. And, for now at least, Hulu has stuck to one commercial per break, so that’s where I’ll be going to watch TV online.