ANA Marketing Maestros

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.

The Clydesdales Remain at Anheuser – Busch InBev

By Barbara Bacci Mirque

Keith Levy of Anheuser – Busch InBev had the crowd laughing as he debunked the myths perpetuating since the A-B purchase by InBev.  He promised that the iconic Clydesdales would not be replaced by lower cost and cheaper to feed mini horses.  And the creative focus we have seen from A-B also remains a key priority as brands must help grow the topline and innovation plays a role in that.  What has changed he said is more of a movement to manage costs and optimize business efficiency – a change to which we all can relate in the current economy.  As they take the best of both companies they are now using zero based budgeting and adding data driven decision making into the mix.  So for example, they will begin to do a bit more rigorous pre ad testing as they add precision and create higher persuasion scores from their creative executions since modern consumers require both rational and emotional benefits.  The world’s most valuable brands innovate at the core he said, and he pointed to Bud Light Lime as a recent innovation.  He also described a core consumer insight that emerged after some ethnographic research and that was the notion of  - in consumers’ words - “drinkability.”  As they question every touch point he also noted their digital spend is double what it was a few years ago since people don’t wake up and say “Today I am going live in the  analog world.”  Oh and Michelob is tweeting.  These changes seem very progressive and those that will build the business and maintain their carefully cultivated brand equity.

The Digital Agency Compensation Paradox

By Barbara Bacci Mirque

One of the paradoxes that marketers are currently grappling with is that in many circumstances the production costs of digital media exceeds that of the media costs. And since production is something for which agencies need to be compensated, digital agency compensation costs are rising. What I have heard some senior marketers say is that their bosses don’t understand this situation since digital media was initially touted as being more efficient than traditional media. Some of this can be attributed to inefficient processes that currently exist in the digital media ecosystem which the IAB and AAAA, with support of the ANA, are working on. To help our members benchmark digital agency compensation, the ANA recently fielded a survey on this topic. Mary Conrad of Jones, Lundin, Beals was nice enough to be our subject matter expert and interpret the survey findings. The initial results reflect this contradiction. 

The good news is that digital budgets are increasing despite economic stress.  But along with that, the number of digital agencies being utilized is also increasing as services proliferate.  The bad news for marketers is that the expanding roster of digital agencies means more complex agency management issues and higher agency compensation fees.  The bottom line is that on a percentage basis digital agencies command a higher percentage of the marketing budget than traditional agencies.  As we obtain more survey respondents, we will be delving into and releasing these findings in the coming months.   A preliminary report will be issued at the ANA Advertising Financial Management Conference beginning Sunday April 19 in

Phoenix

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If you are a client side marketer and would like to take the survey, contact Lindsey Raczka at [email protected].

The Twitter Revolution

By Irina Skaya

You know Twitter is powerful when the tiniest and the poorest country in Europe, Moldova, where I was born is tweeting to draw thousands of people to antigovernment demonstration in its capital, Chisinau following preliminary election results that show that the ruling Communist Party has won the majority in weekend parliamentary elections. Not only are the Moldovans are using Twitter to announce information about the organized protests, but are blogging and tweeting to spread the word to the West. In my opinion, that is their exact intent—if you did not know that Moldova was a country, now you certainly do.  If that wasn’t the case, they could have easily used Friendster and LiveJournal, which is still the number one choice of social networking sites for Eastern Europeans.  So how powerful is Twitter?

To illustrate just how powerful blogging is, one of the leaders of ThinkMoldova youth movement has posted a blog to spread the word about the demonstrations, and within hours, she was able to recruit 10,000 people to join the rally. That’s a staggering number period, but for someone who comes from a town of a population of 10,000, that is ‘ginormous’. 

This is not the first time the Internet has been used to gain support in political rallies, but this is the first Twitter revolution to date.  Why was Twitter so effective in organizing the demonstrations? One microblogger said, “When you follow somebody, you usually know this person, so you trust this person — it is coming from a real person, not an institution.”

In tough times, most companies do create new brands—they still to the well-known existing brands to avoid risk. My theory is as long as we create good products, consumers will use them and spread word about them via the Internet. But the Twitter revolution that took place in Moldova shows that social media and blogging is so powerful and is truly changing the way we communicate, marketing online, and do business. 

Leverage Your Data

By Barbara Bacci Mirque

At the ANA I have the good fortune to see lots of data and hear from many different client side marketers.  I personally have worked on five ANA marketing accountability surveys (and about to start the sixth one) and on our seminal MME 2010 cross industry study fielded in partnership with the AAAA, IAB and Booz & Co.  Recently I was privy to a report from a recent digital study.  The same issues keep surfacing:  it is not just about measurement be it digital or analog-it is also about how data is collected and categorized in an organization and how internal silos are broken down. What digital has added into the discussion is the ability to measure more and  more–some in minutia-and the need to wade through and discern what is relevant and what is not. 

Today organizations can gather reams of data but if marketing needs are not considered the data will be difficult for marketers to utilize.  Leveraging data is a key challenge faced by many organizations and marketing is sometimes left out of these discussions.  Marketers must  talk to Finance and to the Analytics staff and work as a team on this task to stop this cycle.  There should be a centralized database which  all users access and into which marketers input data from their powerpoint oriented marketing plans. It sounds simple but putting together such a database is an enormous undertaking.   However, it should be a starting point that will reap many rewards, the least of which may be measuring the return on marketing investments.

Let's Get Digital

By Barbara Bacci Mirque

I recently attended Shelly Palmer’s Get Digital seminar (http://tinyurl.com/crfhsr.)  (I am now so digital I figured out how to create a tiny url instead of having to rely on Irina Skaya to create hot links for me!) I have known Shelly for a few years since our work together on interactive television so I was intrigued by his fast track class to becoming a digitally savvy marketer.   

As many of you know from ANA’s MME 2010 study fielded in collaboration with the AAAA, IAB and Booz & Co., most marketers know they need to be digitally savvy. They also realize that they are not.  So classes such as this one which are about building personal skillsets, or the ANA’s own digital marketing class which teaches you how to market digitally, are sure fire ways to jump on the digital bandwagon.  Or as one of my classmates so succinctly stated, after attending the class at least he now knows what he doesn’t know! 

So here is a crash course on how to build your own digital skillsets: Join Facebook and post photos to it and write on your friends’ walls, join LinkedIn, write a blog, create a personal website, start using Twitter, study Google apps, buy a really good PC or Mac, use a PDA, purchase a URL of your own name, and learn how to back up your files.  If you aren’t engaging in these activities yourself, how can you determine the best way to market to your consumers – many of whom are?  You can also read some great case studies from digitally aware marketers in the ANA’s Marketing Insights Center. I know I have forgotten half of what I learned so if you are a digital novice then be sure you have some young marketers on your staff to reverse mentor you.  Now I have to sign off and go find Irina to explain how to create those hot links again!

To Twitter or not to Twitter, that is the question…

By Barry Garbarino 

As a former employee of AOL and a few other hi-tech companies, I have always felt the need to be on top of whatever new technology that comes my way.  It could be said that I wanted to be an early adopter from an early age (well, as early as I could get, considering that I typed my last senior high school English paper on an IBM Selectric typewriter, but I digress.)  Social media and user generated content seems to be all the rage now.  I will fully admit that I do the occasional status update on Facebook and give a peak (to my friends) on what is happening in my life at that point in time.  From time to time I will also post the lyrics to certain songs (or YouTube videos) that I know will get stuck in people’s heads – it’s a public service that a few of us started a few years back and believe me, there are some whoppers that will take weeks to get out of your head.

For example the following was posted some time back on my Facebook page.  See if it gets stuck in your head (you got to love digital technology!)

That brings me to Twitter.  Some people absolutely love it and others have no idea why people would want to share all this information.  Many companies are jumping on the Twitter band wagon and are utilizing this tool to inform, entertain and connect to their consumers.  Consumers are utilizing Twitter to stay informed and to connect with a larger audience then they may have on other social media sites like Facebook and MySpace.

I came across the following videos on YouTube and thought that anyone who has an opinion about Twitter would get a kick out of them.  Let us know what you think!

Geiko's Gecko Gets Jiggy With It

By Irina Skaya

Having been around for almost ten years and gracing the screen with funny television commercials and 30-minute vignettes on National Geographic’s Dangerous Encounters with Brady Barr" and "Wild," Geico’s Gecko has become the most popular ad icon since Taco Bell’s Chihuahua brand mascot. In 2005 it was named the top advertising icon during Yahoo’s Advertising Week in New York. This week, Geico launched a new marketing campaign that combines viral video stars such as the “Numa Numa” guy, Gary Brolsma with the green lizard.

The campaign is expected to release nine parodies of popular videos by April 9, three of which have already been created. The campaign created by The Martin Agency and promoted by Geico’s media agency, Horizon Media, is a new way to engage the viewers without bombarding them with direct response messaging.  The parodies are featured on various video-sharing Web sites such as YouTube, Metacafe and Slide, next to the amateur-produced superstar originals. The views of the online videos are already racking up traffic numbers, but only time will tell whether or not these videos will generate leads and drive sales.  

Check out the parody of the “Numa Numa” video (that has generated over 18 million hits since 2004) with the dancing Gecko (my favorite of the three-I think I am addicted!):

You can watch the Numa Numa Kid's original lip-synch performance to the Romanian "“Dragostea din tei”" pop song here.

Here is another parody video that depicts a girl who photographs herself everyday for three years:

Watch the original here.

Keep up with all nine parodies at http://www.youtube.com/user/itsthegecko. I certainly will!

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.

TV widgets...upcoming trend of 2009?

By: Irina Skaya

Apparently, widgets are taking on a new life--they are now coming to a TV near you! And who is behind this revolutionary thinking? Yahoo! in partnership with Samsung, Sony, LG Electronics and VIZIO announced their launch of an internet widget-based function for the TV, this week at the CES conference. The idea behind this Widget Channel is to develop mini-applications that can complement TV viewing with information from the Internet, providing viewers with relevant and targeted information while enhancing their television watching experience. Widget Engine combines key attributes of the Internet, including openness, community, and personalization, with the power of television.

This is great for advertisers because the widget could allow users to purchase products advertised on TV from online store. There are several applications planned such as MySpace, Twitter, Flickr, eBay, CBS, Netflix, Blockbuster, New York Times and various Yahoo! widgets.

We all know that despite the rise of the Web, TV is not going anywhere. People still spend more time watching television than they do on the Internet. TV widgets is a great way to converge the two. For instance, MySpace users will be able to access the widget using a remote and type message to their friends using an on-screen keyboard. Flickr users will be able to share photos with family and friends or watch a slideshow on their TV screen. Many of the widgets are still in the development process, but you can preview them here.