ANA Marketing Maestros

To Tweet or Not To Tweet…

By Cara Brooke Schultz

It seems as if everyone is tweeting these days. In fact, your boss might even encourage you to write tweets. However, after reading an article on imediaconnection.com, I felt compelled to throw a few tricks of the trade out there. iMediaConnection rounded up a few sceneries when you should refrain from tweeting:

1. Do not tweet when you are in the middle of a crisis. If something terrible happens and you are dealing with a ton of negative feedback from customers, stay calm and try to rectify the situation prior to tweeting. One tweet announcing the change is enough.
2. Try to steer clear of all negativity on your twitter page. There is no reason to make fun of another company, a geographical location, or another person. Although you might think you are being funny, chances are you will offend someone.
3. Do not post everything online for the world to see. Always get the go ahead to broadcast breaking news, new deals or any developments that might come up in the office. Most likely, your boss will want to wait before making the news public.

I also wanted to add a few suggestions to the list:

1. Don’t write negative tweets about your competition. Your customers like you for several reasons, highlight those reasons and leave out the negativity!
2. Think before you tweet. Have well-thought out and spelling-error free tweets before making them live online. Remember, tweets cannot be edited once they go live, so do a thorough edit before posting.

Before writing your next tweet—take these ideas into account—it will help create a positive twitter experience.

Is Online Video Advertising More Effective Than TV Advertising?

By Susan Burke

At a recent ANA Brand Management committee meeting, a presenter from Nielsen IAG shared the following information:

• A piece of creative running on a site such as Hulu.com (or ABC.com, NBC.com, CBS.com, etc.) delivers more effective advertising in terms of brand and message recall, than the same piece of creative running on TV. (Click here to see the snapshot and presentation.)

This nugget of information spurred a great deal of discussion in the meeting. Some attendees agreed with this finding, while others argued against it. To me, it makes sense that an ad running on an online video site has more of an impact than one on TV for a few reasons:

1. Conditioning: If I happen to be watching live TV, I will generally take the garbage out, channel surf, or leave the room during a commercial break. Most of us know how long the average commercial break is, so we are usually able to time our return to the couch perfectly.
2. DVRs: As I said in my first point, “If I happen to be watching live TV”—this activity happens rarely. Commercials are generally skipped, thanks to my DVR. However, you can’t fast forward through an online video ad.
3. Appreciation: When an ad is shown during an online video, I often find myself feeling grateful to the advertiser. Their sponsorship of the program means that I can watch it at my leisure, so I don’t mind viewing a 30 second spot in return.
4. Captive Audience: When commercial breaks occur during an online video, they are much shorter than a television commercial break. Therefore, I’m more likely to watch the ad, as opposed to doing something else during it. I can pause or mute the ad, of course, but I’ll still have to play it at some point if I want to finish the show.
5. Recall: My recall of an ad played during an online episode of a TV show is generally stronger than my recall of an ad played during the televised episode. This is because there are generally fewer total commercials during an online video.

While I think there is still a purpose to television advertising, I also believe that online video advertising is an avenue that many advertisers should explore more thoroughly. Online video isn’t going anywhere, so it’s time to embrace it.

Ten Best Practices For Long-Term Growth In a Recession & Beyond

By Bill Duggan

ANA’s recent “Brand Building in Tough Times & Beyond” conference promised that all speakers would leave behind actionable ideas for immediate and longer-term brand growth. Below are highlights of those key takeways.  Your ideas for driving either immediate and/or longer-term brand growth are welcome too!

1. There is a reasonable chance the recession is over.  Therefore, if you are one of those marketers who plans to increase marketing activity three months before this recession ends, now is the time to act. 
    • Liz Ann Sonders, Senior Vice President, Chief Investment Strategist – Charles Schwab

2. Optimism sells.  People need to laugh, or at least smile, to feel good about parting with their money in this economy.
    • Cynthia Ashworth, Vice President, Customer Engagement – Dunkin’ Donuts

3. Focus on the 95% of growth that comes from big, established brands.  Most new products generate only a small amount of sales yet receive an inordinate amount of attention.  
    • Patrick Edson, Vice President, Marketing Innovation – MillerCoors

4. Spending in a recession can generate sales and share.
    • Steve Bratspies, Senior Vice President, Marketing – Wal-Mart Stores

5. Understand the difference between your customer and a shopper. Consumers are making purchase decisions well before they enter the store. Shoppers, on the other hand, are bombarded with in-store messages and are often distracted.
    • Jason McDonnell, Vice President, Marketing – Frito Lay

6. Redeploy your assets.  Focus on lifting the areas of most immediate impact.  Evaluate the contributions of all your current business partners.  
    • Richard McDonald, SVP, Global Marketing – Fender Musical Instruments

7. Value is important but it’s not just about price.  People want to be smart, but not feel cheap.
    • Cynthia Ashworth, Vice President, Customer Engagement – Dunkin’ Donuts

8. Optimize the experience of your product when it’s in the hands of the consumer.  That’s a key moment of truth.  
    • Patrick Edson, Vice President, Marketing Innovation – MillerCoors

9. Be true to who you are.  Your brand “is what it is,” so don’t change in the short term.  Look for partners and other alliances for growth.
    • Steve Bratspies, Senior Vice President, Marketing – Wal-Mart Stores

10. Frugality will be with us for some time.  It will be a longer-term generational mindset and advertising will need to reflect that. 
    • Liz Ann Sonders, Senior Vice President, Chief Investment Strategist – Charles Schwab

Remember -- your ideas for driving either immediate and/or longer-term brand growth are welcome too!

Golden Opportunities on Twitter

By Irina Skaya

Not a day goes by without someone asking me, “Why do you use Twitter? It’s so useless. Why do I care what you are up to every second of the day?” Wake up people! You are missing out on engaging with and learning more about your customers.  As Cynthia Ashworth, Vice President of Customer Engagement @Dunkin’ Donuts said, “We don’t have to justify Twitter. It’s free customer-service.” Indeed it is, Cynthia. It’s a free focus group and a cheap option for collaboration.

As I try to keep up with the cutting edge marketing trends, I enrolled in a two-hour course on Twitter Love where I learned how marketers can utilize the microblogging Web site to promote their products and services, research consumer insights, improve customer service, converse with and engage their customers, and group collaboration.  For instance, @JetBlue is using Twitter to help improve customer services and teamwork across business units.  As a customer service tool, Twitter’s benefit is that everything people say about your product/service is public on Twitter and is easy to find via using their built-in search tool. This makes Twitter an instant focus group with over 10 million participants, many of whom are your customers.  Collecting customer feedback via Twitter is easy and effortless, especially when you compare it to the number of responses you get back through email surveys.  Zappos is using Twitter to make personal connections among employees, and between the company and its customers.  For those marketers who want to improve their corporate culture and customer service, Twitter is a great tool.

So just like there was Facebook and then came LinkedIn, a professional social networking Web site, Yammer is like Twitter for business. Yammer offers groups for discussions on a subject between people in the same workgroup. It can connect employees from different departments, so if you work in a 500+ company, you won’t feel like just a number anymore.  Although some may argue that Twitter and Yammer may be distracting and may affect employees’ productivity, it can, if used moderately improve corporate culture by connecting employees to one another and letting them know what the organization is up to, its achievements and pretty much anything.

So for the Twitter rebels, get on it, add ANAmarketers to your list of the following, and most importantly, start talking and listening to your customers.  And here are some Twitter tools to get you started:

TweetLater.com – helps you in following everyone who follows you; includes auto DMs and a tweet scheduler.

Twitter Karma - keeps a follow-to-follower ratio in order for you unfollow those who are not following me, with a few exceptions.

TwitterCounter - see my followers in graph form. It also predicts how many followers you will have in 30, 90 or 365 days.

TweetDeck – as an Adobe Air app, TweetDeck allows you to see your @replies, direct messages, timeline, and a lis of folks you follow whose Tweets you want to make sure you read. You can also use it to update your Twitter and Facebook accounts simultaneously. I use and love this tool!

PS.  Download our most-read 101 on Marketing with Twitter. 

Recession: Glimmer of Hope?

As a follow-up to my blog, "Is an economic recovery near?" I would like to share with you are new video snippets from the 2009 ANA Building in Tough Times Brand Conference where heavy-weight executives from Dunkin' Donuts, MillerCoors and Wal-Mart shared their insights and best practices in regards to overcoming tough economic times.

Thank you to AdAge for these valuable video highlights. If you have any best practices on coping with the recession, please share in our comments section on this blog, YouTube page, or email me at irina@ana.net. I'd love to hear from you!

The Psychological Boost of Coffee Marketing

Turning Beer Temperature Into Marketing Gold

Partnerships, Not Brand Renovation, Best Growth Strategy

Is an economic recovery near?

By Irina Skaya

Yesterday’s ANA Brand Building in Tough Times & Beyond Conference was filled with optimism, actionable ideas for marketers to cope with the depressed economy, confidence for a speedy recovery, and Donut Love.  How does one recession proof their brand?

Dunkin’ Donuts emphasized the importance of relevance and empathy with their “You Kin’ Do It” campaign.  The goal of this campaign was to build trust and emotional connection with their consumers because 91% buy from companies they trust.  While Dunkin’ Donuts’ challenge was to convince people to spend a discretionary $4 on a cup of coffee for breakfast, Wal-mart partnered with Kellogg to encourage people to save money by eating breakfast or the Kellogg cereal at home.  And unlike Dunkin’ Donuts, Walmart had an evergreen approach that wasn’t fundamentally different from when the economic times are better.  Their proposition, “Save money, live better” is just as relevant today as it’s always been, except now they shifted their focus from functional to an emotional relationship with their consumers.  As a matter of fact, the two themes based on both campaigns emerged at the conference: 1. Know your customers and 2. Build an emotional relationship with them.  This is nothing new, however.  Instead what marketers are doing today is they are going back to marketing 101. In 2006 at the ANA Annual Masters of Marketing Conference, the same theme emerged, and we certainly did not foresee an economic crisis then. 

The other commonality all of the presenters shared at yesterday’s event was involvement in social media.  After all, it’s free and everyone is using it—what’s a better way to continue marketing your business in tough times? Dunkin’ Donuts said it best, “We don’t have to justify Twitter, it is a real-time customer service, customer promotion.”   It seems like everyone is tweeting—thank you for everyone who was tweeting at the conference. Just search #ANA to see all of the tweets from the ANA Brand Conference. 

Finally, I’d like to leave you with a touch of optimism, “I was asked what I thought a recession.  I thought about it and decided not to take part.”—Sam Walton, founder of Wal-mart.

Procter & Gamble Creates an Agency/Client Relationship of the Future

By Barbara Bacci Mirque

My blog about The Coca Cola Company’s journey into value based compensation as discussed at the ANA’s recent Advertising Financial Management Conference has generated several comments.  The last day of the conference we also heard about another interesting methodology from the Procter & Gamble Company.  P&G’s Rich Delcore described how they have been working to refine agency structure in a world of fragmented media and the need for more integrated communications.  Their former agency structures were created in a world of one dominant communications medium and a very specific communications funnel. Today we live in a word where the communications flow to consumers is generated from multiple touch points and consumers move through decision making processes very differently from the past. So Procter is now planning for integration from the start and in the process hoping to build marketers and agency personnel who are flexible, adaptable and comfortable with different communications vehicles. They are moving from decentralized agency planning in which there were 300 pay points, duplication and overlapping responsibilities as each brand undertook its own master planning and non advertising agencies were rarely involved from the start, to a model in which they have a Brand Agency Leader. This huge organizational cultural change is all about understanding the needs of the consumer – not their own internal needs. Under BAL there is a single point of contact per brand and a person and an agency leads an integrated agency team and manages the work of each member agency. The benefits they have realized are holistic communications, more efficient spending, a reduction in time and touches and the number one benefit – more integrated marketing. They find that every area of expertise is on the same issue from the start and all agency types have an equal seat at the table. When market opportunities arise, they can be quickly addressed and they all win and lose together. They acknowledge this approach may not work for every company but at Procter they have begun to reap the benefits.

Brands That Follow The Money

By Barbara Bacci Mirque

Procter & Gamble and Millward Brown mesmerized Monday’s ANA Advertising Financial Management Conference crowd by talking about the world’s leading brands, how they follow the money and what we can learn about them.  The top 25 brands added $400 billion in shareholder value in the period examined.  When studied in more depth, these brands – which included Blackberry, Toyota, Apple, Google, Pampers, Method, eBay, HP, Samsung, Zara, Esprit, Red Bull, Freshness Burger and four brands from the LVMH group – had some remarkable similarities.  They share a common set of brand principles, not the least of which is they are built on human ideals, not product ideals.  It is not about what people buy but why they buy.  These brands tend to serve a bigger purpose and tap into universal human values. They believe a brand is about owning a share of culture, not share of market.  And not coincidentally, the latter tends to happen when the former is invoked.  For example, the Pampers brand turned around when they went from being about the driest diaper to happy, healthy babies.  The second principle is they stick with the fundamentals such as heritage and design– the best brands respect and have one foot in the past and one in the future.  Design is part of the brand, used strategically and plays a lead role.  For example, Samsung has won 28 international design awards and Apple 22.  A third principle is they demonstrate brand leadership - the Brand DNA guides everything that they do from recruiting and training to advertising.  They are thought leaders who are first to market with break through ideas.  They know the product attributes that matter to the user and those that do not. They organize around the brand and empower creative minded business leaders.  They are guardians of the brand and always worried about the brand.  The entire organization is united around the delivery of the brand vision – from suppliers to employees.  The last common principle is engagement: the best brand builders don’t tell consumers why to buy the product, rather they invite them in and they co-create. Red Bull is famous for this. They balance price and value while creating exciting encounters for consumers.

The proof that this works is in the financials – these brands have all made more money than other brands and have grown more financial value for their shareholders.  Procter & Gamble shared this research as their hope is that other brands will engage in more research and that learning will also be shared at future ANA conferences.  Contact the ANA if this sounds appealing to you.  ANA members can read more about the study in the ANA members only Marketing Insights Center.

How Great Marketing Led Barack Obama to the White House

By: Irina Skaya

Today, Barack Obama will be sworn in as the 44^th president of the United States. Successful Internet marketing is the cornerstone of the 2009 historic inauguration. How did Obama connect with today’s diverse general market? How do we as marketers engage, inspire and motivate today’s consumers?

History was made when Barack Obama was elected President, but his win is beyond historic – his superb use of online marketing to promote awareness and create a loyal following has earned him AdAge’s Marketer of the Year award at the ANA Annual Masters of Marketing Conference. It also became be the template which all future presidential campaigns will draw inspiration from.  

Thomas Jefferson was the first President to use newspapers to promote his presidential campaign, Franklin D. Roosevelt was the first to use radio, John F. Kenny used television. Barack Obama is the first president to have the power to leverage Social Media in such a way as never seen before by our Presidency or Government as a whole.  

The secret behind any successful marketing campaign is to put yourselves in the shoes of the consumers. Sure, his multiracial and multicultural background represents today’s generation, but Obama has also appointed the best marketing staff that represents and knows its target market inside and out. That’s why his campaign has embraced social media. Youth vote had a major role to play in the landslide victory, and the role of the internet - the living space of the youth. His inspirational message of “change has come to America" has remained consistent throughout the presidential campaign. This message became even more important in the economic downturn.

On February 12^th, Jim Margolis, Senior Advisor to the Barack Obama presidential campaign will discuss the power of social media and share lessons from Obama's campaign at the TV & Everything Video Forum.

Building Brands with Widgets

By: Irina Skaya

Everyone is talking about these, many are creating them, and very few understand their purpose— widgets. If 2007 was the year for companies to join social networks like Facebook, 2008 is the year for advertisers to adopt widgets. What are widgets and how can you use one?

A widget is a bite-sized piece of portable web content, allowing anyone to personalize their web experience exactly how they want it to be. Widgets can live in a privacy capacity such as personal portals, wikis, private blogs, or publicly in areas such as social network pages, Web sites and public blogs.  Widgets can be used as a marketing tool, but they different from ads. You can’t force someone to take your widget and put it on his or her web page the way you can guarantee views of an ad. In order to entice people to subscribe to your widget, it has to be compelling. When you have a compelling, dynamic widget that speaks to the right demographic, your widget will do most of the work for you.

What kind of widget can you make? Well, there are two kinds of widgets: lifestyle and functional.

Lifestyle widgets are used primarily for marketing purposes in viral marketing campaigns. Facebook applications are examples of lifestyle widgets. For instance, an Obama badge is a lifestyle widget that can be placed on its supporter’s personal page. A StyleSlam widget on Bebo.com allows one to make an avatar that resembles the creator and dress it up. There are thousands of applications ready to appeal to a wide variety of interests.

Functional widgets help users interact with the brand in a relevant and useful way. Examples include Google maps, clocks, converters, ANA insights widget, Travelocity's widget to search best rates for flights, hotels and car rentals and RSS readers.

As the popularity of widgets grows, so does their potential as a source of revenue. Ads on social networks are expected to rack in $1.9 billion this year. If you haven’t explored the options of a widget, you should. Check out www.widgetbox.com and start making your own widget!