ANA Marketing Maestros

Live Is Good!

By Bill Duggan

ANA continues to advocate for a “Live Only” data stream for local television ratings. Nielsen is making three data streams available to the industry and has decided that all streams should be “plus” streams to including viewing in DVR playback: Live + Same Day, Live + 3 Days, and Live + 7 Days.

It’s critical to recognize that local ratings are based on program ratings and not commercial ratings (national ratings are commercial ratings).  All of the “plus” streams include program viewing in DVR playback but do not recognize commercial skipping in DVR playback.  Ratings would be significantly overstated as a result.  And prices charged to advertisers could potentially (and unfairly) increase as well.  With DVR penetration over 30 percent this is already an issue which will intensify as DVR penetration grows further—an increasingly number of viewers will skip commercials in DVR playback. 

Given that three local reporting data streams can be produced by Nielsen, it is reasonable for buyers to request that one of these streams be Live Only.  To have all three streams be “plus—”including DVR playback of programs but with no recognition of commercial skipping—seems unfair and unnecessary. 

On January 15 ANA and the 4A’s conducted an industry meeting to discuss local television ratings.  Read more about that at www.ana.net/localratings

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. 

Advertising as Art or Creative, Creative

By Barry Garbarino

As I rode home on the train last night – for some strange reason and old jingle from a telecommunication company popped into my head from thin air.  I think it went something like, “second class phones, their making, second class phones, phones you can’t hear though, phones with no tones...” I have an idea who the company is, but I don’t want to point any fingers.  I guess what really jumps out to me is that the creative jingle stuck with me after all these years (normally, I would post the ad creative in this blog, but sadly, it isn’t available online as of yet.)

Classic ad campaigns like, “Where’s the beef” and the ever popular “Meow Mix” jingle (which I believe some ad genius ran during morning news programs, so the annoying catchy song would get stuck in all of our heads.)  have left a void in the current mix of creative execution in the broadcast medium.




The perception that some advertisers have today is that every commercial they produce must have broad-appeal content that reaches multiple demographics.  While other cutting edge marketers are blazing new trails with edgy, dare I say, controversial commercials.  Take the recent “Whopper Freak-Out” campaign that Burger King ran.  The scrappy burger joint, removed their famous menu item, the Whopper, from one location for one day.  The results were not only dramatic, but also shocking and quite amusing for the viewing public.  

Take a look at this daring social / marketing experiment below.

The Initial ad creative spurred many a social media parody (most I can’t post on this blog as they are even too edgy for me…) My suggestion would be to look some of these up on YouTube.

The bottom line I guess is that with new innovative shows coming this fall, marketers need to raise the bar when it comes to their advertising.  Shows like “gLee” on FOX, give creative marketers the opportunity to step up their executions and borrow from the excitement (and musical numbers) of the

show.

 
Times are always changing and the viewing public expects to be more entertained or they will just fast forward with their DVR’s and leave the expensive advertising in the dust.  

Who Are You? Mac or PC?

By Irina Skaya

                                                                 There has always been a constant debate between McDonalds vs. Burger King, Porsche vs. BMW, and now Mac vs. PC. I use both—I have a Macbook at home and I work on a Windows Vista machine at work.  Although I use them for different purposes (Mac when I am feeling creative), I like both for different reasons.  However, I really love Apple ads for their creative!  A recent online video ad produced by TBWA/Media Arts is especially intriguing—it takes a unique approach by telling users NOT to click on the ad.  It’s sort of like reverse psychology that a parent uses to get their teenage child to listen to him/her.

This recent article reported in AdAge this week shows an ad that tells the user if he/she clicks on it, they will receive an electric shock.  AdAge says that this may be the only way in the world to get more than 2.5% of viewers to click on an ad.  Will this work? It will definitely arouse some curiosity, but chances are if the user is a loyal PC customer, he/she would not click on it regardless.  It’s definitely creative, but I am not sure if it will help generate market share for Apple, but cheaper products might.  

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. 

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!

BIG Ideas in a Shrinking Economy

By: Irina Skaya

Having BIG ideas and being creative is crucial more than ever in today's tough economic climate. Being innovative will make your company stand out from the competition. Everyone gathers around the water cooler to talk about creative ads no one talks about dull ads. Even in a recession, customers will spend money on things they like and enjoy. This means that marketers must work even harder to produce creative ads in order to engage consumers emotionally and want their products more.  Here are a few of my favorite creative ads from around the world to inspire you to think outside the box. If you d like to share ads that inspire you, feel free to comment on my blog and respond with a link.

Who said car ads can't be creative?

Subaru Forester 2009 commercial

Below is an example of bagvertising at it's finest: YKM, a Turkish department store chain.

Below is a bus stop ad in Australia advertising customized stamps.

Below is the "Express Yourself Ad" from Samsung

If you want to view more winning, creative ads, visit: http://adsoftheworld.com/blog.

Social Media is Not a Paine in the Butt!

By: Barry Garbarino

It seems that lately more and more people are re-connecting on sites like Facebook, Myspace and BeBo. Gone are the days that we wait until our 10^th, 20^th or even 50^th class reunion to reconnect with friends from the past.  Unlike the awkward experience of trying to catch-up in three hours or less (at the dreaded reunion, which is sometimes held in the gymnasium of one’s alma matter), individuals are able to re-establish relationships and build on them through social media. 

I know this from daily personal experience.  There are numerous people that I have reconnected with over the past year that I have had little to no contact with for many years.  It seems like it only takes two or three days to recount the memories, bring each other up to speed and resume a “virtual” friendship all over again.

In many ways, social media is a very American institution.  I know that it might sounds crazy, but back in the late 1700’s there were many people blazing the trail of social media.  In a way, Thomas Paine produced some of our country’s earliest social media.  As the author of Common Sense, Paine helped start the long tradition of media produced by the people for the people.  He would later write The Crisis, which helped inspire the Continental Army and assisted to swell its ranks!  It was such a popular pamphlet, that as a percentage of the population, it is estimated that it was read by or read to more people than today watch the Super Bowl. 

Ok, so while most people today use social media as away to connect with friends, families and new people, many companies and organizations are also utilizing it to reach out to their audiences in new ways. 

(Insert shameless plug for ANA’s social media.)

Well, if you haven’t joined the ANA as a fan on Facebook or visited us on Slideshare, or Linked-In with one or more of us, or even Twitter’d, you should check us out!

We’ll see you in the cyberspace!

Inauguration in the Age of Social Media

By: Irina Skaya

January 20, 2009

7:00 a.m. - Woke up and turned the television on to watch continued inauguration coverage by Diane Sawyer and Charlie Gibson.

8:00 a.m. - Picked up the NY Daily News newspaper to read the schedule of upcoming inaugural activities.

9:00 a.m. - Logged on to www.abc.com/news to watch live coverage of Barack Obama's swearing-in as the 44th President of the United States.

9:15 a.m. - Updated my Facebook status to share my enthusiasm with friends.

My day was not atypical. For decades, people have passively set in front of their television sets to watch historic events like the inaugural celebrations or the Watergate hearings. The historic inauguration of Barack Obama, the 44^th President of the United States and the first social media President, flocked viewers to the online live nation-wide celebration coverage and social networks such as Facebook and Twitter where users actively updated their “statuses,” and microblogged to share their reactions with the rest of the world.

When I logged-on to the Facebook Web site to update my own “status,” I was pleasantly surprised at the exorbitant number of status updates I’ve received from friends—and how much more enhanced the experience became for me. Some of my friends were reporting live from the event, uploading photos almost instantly via the use of their mobile devices. Others who celebrated the historic moment elsewhere also uploaded our own photos and videos to the social network. I, myself, have uploaded a couple of photos and video (to Facebook and Barack Obama’s online photo album) from Times Square where a small group of ANA co-workers and I witnessed the inauguration of the first African-American president. In minutes, I edited the video using the editing software that came with the flipcamera and posted it to the Web. In a way, we were all reporters for the day with the help of mobile devices and pocket-size camcorders. It felt great to be able to actively participate in the inauguration (the non-traditional way) and share my impressions with friends in real-time.

Even for those of us who weren’t in Washington, we still felt the camaraderie and unity within the social community. I am looking forward to the new administration and to further explore the power of the social media.