ANA Marketing Maestros

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 [email protected]. 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

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.

Innovation in Today's New Media World

by Barbara Bacci Mirque

In the Web 2.0 world we inhabit today, all of the paradigms are shifting.  Advertisers are becoming content providers.  Agency models are in flux. Media is the new creative.  There are hundreds of television channels, and microsites, webinars, social networking and podcasts are supplementing the traditional media channels I grew up with in my marketing career. 

In our Marketing Media Ecosystem 2010 study, conducted with the AAAA, IAB and Booz & Co.
across all of our respective  memberships, our research results demonstrated the need for all of the various constituencies to become more agile and flexible as they transform their business models.  This is because the landscape is at an inflection point - online is no longer experimental; there is massive audience fragmentation providing more choice for consumers but also for advertisers; search and ad networks are key growth drivers; media segments are blending. 

Thus, it is an exciting time to be a marketer but also a complex one.  Marketing accountability used to be the number one issue that kept up our senior marketers at night but that has been supplanted by the challenges posed in integrating new media with traditional media.  Recently I had a blast talking about this very topic with Gordon Hughes, CEO, American Business Media.  We were interviewed by Matthew Schwartz of Scribe Media in Scribe's very impressive studio. Not only are magazine publishers adapting to the digital age but they are now offering advertisers a variety of new tools and formats that were unheard of 10 years ago.  Through Gordon’s stewardship the ABM membership is living the results that we published from  MME 2010 – namely that media sellers must become consultants and demonstrate to marketers how to effectively navigate the choppy waters. 

To learn more about this topic, tune in to the videocast at: 
http://www.scribemedia.org/2008/07/29/from-print-to-digital-business-advertisers/

I hope you have as much fun watching as Gordon and I did participating!

ANA Embraces Social Media

By: Irina Skaya

In an effort to connect marketing professionals and share invaluable industry insights, ANA has established a presence on social networking sites such as Facebook and LinkedIn, and information-sharing communities such as Flickr and Slideshare. 

The ANA Facebook page currently offers a wide-variety of benefits such as branded videos from ANA events, slideshows and photo albums, polls, live RSS Blog feeds, marketing insight slides, ANA “how to’s,” otherwise known as 101’s, an events calendar and relevant announcements.

In addition to Facebook, ANA has created a members-only group on LinkedIn called ANA Marketers.  By joining LinkedIn a marketer will be able to connect with like minded marketers and have conversations with their peers from other companies. Join the 'ANA Marketers' group.

This month, ANA released our “101” series which are available on Facebook and the ANA Web site among other places. The 101’s were developed to provide busy executives with a general understanding of cutting-edge marketing related topics. To expand the 101 series, the ANA is recruiting “industry experts” to contribute to the project. If you have an area of expertise on which you would like to pen a 101 for the ANA, please write to Irina Gorodetskaya at [email protected].

Another new ANA product is Insight Slides.  These presentation-ready slides feature a pertinent piece of ANA content, including quotes and facts. Available to both members and non-members, the insight slides are shared across multiple Web channels, including Slideshare, Flickr and Facebook. Users are free to download the insight slides and incorporate them into their presentations across the spectrum of marketing.

Check out the widget on the right hand-side of this page, and feel free to download it to your own Blog, iGoogle, PageFlakes, and Facebook.

Driving Marketing Effectiveness Forward

By: Michael Palmer

ANA offers its members a unique opportunity – to benchmark six of its marketing processes (btw this service is free to ANA members) including:

1. Overall Process Linkage
2. Insights and Marketing Knowledge
3. Marketing Strategy
4. Annual Marketing Planning
5. Integrated Marketing
6. Marketing Measurements (Metrics)

What we have discovered is most interesting.  The two areas that have bubbled to the surface as those where marketers are having the most difficulty (regardless of whether they are B2Bor B2C) - Insights and Marketing Knowledge and Integrated Marketing.  Marketing organizations are horrible about collecting data and turning that data into insightful action – then sharing those incredibly valuable insights internally to drive revenue growth.  Integrated marketing is something we marketers talk about incessantly, but do little about.  This is the area where we have the paltriest of results.

What’s the problem?  First, a consistent weakness is an inadequate marketing library from which success models and critical marketing documents may be easily shared globally. Most companies seem to have a poorly maintained repository of aging and increasingly irrelevant documents which are largely ignored by the employee base.  So the information is collected but no one is using it effectively.  Not very smart when we know that marketing insights drive everything we marketers should be doing.

Secondly, most companies lack anything meeting the definition of a process in the areas of insight development, brand equity building and integrated marketing campaign assembly. Marketers seem to employ an ad hoc approach whose output depends upon the individual brilliance (or luck) of a team leader rather than an embedded, reproducible corporate competence.

And we marketers expect the rest of the company to respect us as business leaders? 

If you are an ANA member company why wouldn’t you want to measure your effectiveness in the six key processes listed above, the fact that you can learn where and how you could increase your marketing effectiveness and thereby increase your marketing leadership would seem most valuable – if this is the case, just send me an email ([email protected]) and I’ll hook you up. For those not ANA members who wish to find out where/how you can improve – email me as well and we’ll talk membership.

I Can't Hear You!

by Mark Fogelberg

So, the world's biggest marketer walks into sports' biggest arena with a stain on a shirt...

Unlike in the actual game surrounding the ads, this year's Commercial Bowl had quite a few winners. It's fun to see how industry insiders tastes align with average consumers.

Let's forget rankings, though, and concentrate on gibberish.

Tide's ad for the loud mouthed, gibberish spewing talking stain had me transfixed:

Today I made it to the site that enhances the buy. While spending quality, market research time on the site, I have to hand it to the masters at P&G. They have a giveaway and rather than mess around with something small, they give away 10,000 prizes each day! Lesson learned: if you want to leverage a large (give or take $2.7mm) investment - if you want to integrate to deliver - deliver BIG. 10,000 winners per day = 10,000 happy people thinking "I'm a winner" rather than the typical promo "many will enter; few will win".

Normally not one to jump into the the user-generated fray, I jumped because I want that Tide t-shirt they're giving away. Why? I don't know. Perhaps... their advertising affected my brand perception and future consumption pattern?

Tide...I mean...time to go.

New Media to Sell Old

by Mark Fogelberg

With all due respect to a certain futurist/CEO, many people - especially the people I would like to converse with - still read books. Perhaps its the portability, the on-demand entertainment possibility, the ability to engage one's imagination.

Books = Still Very Good.

So when a publisher makes a smart effort to market books differently, there's greater hope for a pulp future.

For the new release, Celebutantes, St. Martin's Press put its marketing dollars behind the creation of video trailers. (Celebutantes is the story of 26 year old Lola Santisi as she narrates her way through Hollywood in the days leading up to Oscar.) The trailers are as well-produced as ones for movies and video games - you know those video screen thingies meant to extinguish book reading. Using video and contemporary marketing channels to market an older product form? Nice.

St. Martin's Press set up a channel on YouTube for the trailers. Since this is PG blog, I'll allow you to find your own way to it.

It will be interesting to see how the book sells upon its release. For those not interested in paper, I am certain that a celluloid pixel version is being shopped round them thar Hills.

Watching for the Commercials

by Mark Fogelberg

For everyone who looks forward to the Superbowl for the commercials, a little bit of salvation has arrived.

Firebrand, a TV, web and mobile platform promises to deliver full screen live video and full web functionality for advertising content. Yes, it's a commercials only "multichannel" of content delivering over 5,000 spots.

This could prove a quite amazing tool for marketers. One gets a captive audience that has actively sought out a marketing message. The marketer is then given the opportunity to engage and reward this viewer. The demo shows a Levi's ad which links to a promotion which the viewer can enter while still watching the chosen spot. (Quite cool tech.)

With nearly every session at our Annual Conference touching upon digital's role at the marketing table; with the needs for ROI measures of marketing activity; with the permeation of marketing and brands on daily lives of individuals, here's an idea whose time has come.

Tune in on your TV/browser/mobile.

The UPS Whiteboard Guy

Last Thursday brought us to the ANA B-to-B Conference in Chicago. B-to-B marketers converged for a day of sharing & learning.

What's interesting about B-to-B marketing versus B-to-C is the high degree of specialization that many of these marketers contend with each day. Working with more limited resources, B-to-B marketers step into integrated marketing programs readily and eagerly - often to stretch their limited budgets.

Other times, a B-to-B campaign must have a big enough idea to support B-to-C components as well. That's where our friend drawing on the whiteboard comes in.

The now famous Whiteboard Guy happens to be the same gent that helped create & shape the ads. Andy Azula serves as SVP/Creative Director at The Martin Agency for his day job. Overtime starts when he picks up the wonderful smelling pen.

Whiteboard offered just what UPS needed to take its "Brown" brand to a new level. Plus, the pure simplicity of the concept lends itself to deep integration. Whiteboard.UPS.com showcases much of the effort so far - 17 commercials, deep interactivity, user interaction, and some seriously good salesmanship.

I dare any business person (or anyone who's ever wondered what's behind those brown trucks) to attempt a quick visit to the site. You can't because the content compels; the execution delights. You'll be pulled into the site to learn tons of great info painlessly and entertainingly. Talk about a great B-to-B marketing success story. Congrats to the client & the agency