Category — Advertising

Just when I write a post about how engagement represents the new, higher order of advertising (as seen with Nike+), Apple runs this headline takeover ad today on the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times.

All I can say is …. brilliant.

One of the biggest buzzwords in advertising over the past year or so is engagement, and this is especially true for digital advertising. Engagement in advertising relates to an ads ability to foster some form of interaction with a consumer, either with the ad itself or with other consumers in a branded environment.

The theory being that if a brand engages with a consumer in a meaningful way, they are more likely to develop strong emotional bonds with the product or service, which is something that doesn’t happen when a consumer mutely watches or reads a traditional form of advertising.

One of the best examples of engagement advertising today is what Nike is doing with Nike+ and social networking. Nike+ is a small sensor in running shoes that connects to an Apple iPod. After a run, the runner docks his iPod into his computer and uploads details about his run to a social networking site run by Nike, where the runner can then interact with other runners, get encouragement, and provide advice to others.
All of this in a Nike branded environment.

This program has been such a success for Nike, that it is shifting its media weight from traditional, non-engaging forms of media such as TV, to programs such as Nike+. In this article from the New York Times, Nike marketing VP Trevor Edwards bluntly states:

”We’re not in the business of keeping the media companies alive,” Mr. Edwards says he tells many media executives. ”We’re in the business of connecting with consumers.”

And Nike+ seems to be a very effective way to do just that.

In the mind of most sports fans, ESPN is sports. And Sportscenter defines ESPN.

What is insightful on the part of ESPN is rather than positioning themselves as a top sports news network, coming across like the CNN of sports, ESPN instead positions themselves as the world’s biggest sports fan.

This allows them to match the seriousness that fans have about sports and their teams and players, while at the same time recognizing that sports at their essence are still just a bunch of people playing games. So while they take their reporting and analysis seriously, they don’t necessarily take themselves too seriously.

All of this is why their ongoing, “This is Sportscenter” campaign has had such a successful run since it first started airing in 1995. The spots use dry humor to show top athletes together with ESPN anchors into mini-mockumentaries of everyday office situations at Sportscenter. This campaign developed by Wieden+Kennedy recently ran its 300th spot in late 2007.

Below is a great example from the campaign, which has Ben Roethlisberger of the Steelers helping out during an ESPN office fire drill.

As consumer packaged good companies work to incorporate search more into their advertising and marketing mix, they are running into some stumbling blocks. In this interview from Brandweek, Kevin Kells, who is the national industry director for CPG at Google, talks about some of the issues facing CPG companies.

In order for CPG advertisers to be effective online, Kells thinks that:

“Instead of focusing on a small amount of creative, they should be making more. They should be making 1,000 digital assets a years as opposed to three television assets”

Unfortunately, CPG companies aren’t currently structured that way in their relationships with their agency partners. They generally work with their agencies to develop a creative strategy that is motivating and steeped in the insights around the brands and their consumers. Then they blow this core message out across all the traditional media touchpoints: TV, print, in-store, etc.

Kells thinks CPG “needs to be online with different stories” through multiples of creative, while traditional CPG advertising is more about a single story told through several different vehicles.

While I think a mindset change could come, the more difficult part will be the costs behind developing all those different creative executions. Online is currently very efficient from a buy standpoint compared to traditional media. However, all that efficiency could go out the door if the non-working production costs behind developing 1,000 creative executions skyrocket.

CPG and Google are still at the hello stage, but at least they still are in the same room.

When was the last time you heard a truly memorable advertising jingle? One that you simply couldn’t stop humming and that you heard repeated wherever you went, with even kids on the street singing it to each other.

One look at this list from the Branding Strategy Insider and the dates they were introduced and you can guess it was probably about the time ad agency types such as the fictional Darrin Stevens and the rest of the “Mad Men” retired to Florida in the early 80’s. Only two from the list were from the 1990’s, and one was the four note Intel Inside tones, which barely qualifies as a true jingle in my mind.

I do have a belief (which I’m open for a challenge) that as media moved from being auditory dominant (radio) to more visual dominant (TV), the skill sets of ad agency creative talent shifted as well. We got visually stunning commercials, but the auditory complement was usually a pop song. But using popular music is expensive and it generally has stronger links back to the original artist that the brand it is advertising (”Like a Rock” for Chevy being a notable exception).

When I think about the emerging discipline of neuromarketing, I can’t help but wonder why marketers and their ad agency partners walked away from jingles. Although the medium is dated, I can’t think of any other form of equity communication that did a better job of cementing a brand into one’s brain than jingles did.

Lost in all the blog coverage of Facebook’s Beacon saga, was how the whole series of events emphasized the speed at which a company in the digital space can make a mistake and then adjust course in the face of a blizzard of bad press.

If this had happened in traditional media, the timeline between the announcement, the groundswell of bad PR, Facebook’s realizing they had a problem, and action on their part to fix it, would have probably covered months. In this case, Beacon was announced and gone in less than 30 days.

• On November 6th, Facebook announces the Beacon system to the broader world.
• Within two weeks, Moveon.org launches a campaign against the new system, citing privacy concerns. Within another two weeks, over 50,000 people had joined the anti-Beacon Facebook group.
• On December 5th, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg apologizes and announces substantial changes to the Beacon program, moving it from an opt out program to an opt in one, effectively killing it.

Flash on, Flash off.

In this iMedia post on Behavioral Targeting, Dilip DaSilva rightly calls out the problem of behavioral targeting focusing too much on product specific behaviors or attitudes. Many web advertisers assume that the key behaviors they need to target are related to the purchasing or consuming of their product. However, sometimes it is and sometimes it is not.

Take the hypothetical case of the core Duff Beer consumer, Homer Simpson. The most “relevant environments” for purchasing or consuming his product are liquor stores, bars, and in the majority of times, in front of the TV. However, Homer’s “relevant environment” for online behavior may in fact be a couple of degrees removed. If you knew that the core Duff Beer consumer generally checks sports sites on Sunday evening to see how his fantasy football players did, you’d probably want your ad somewhere in that “relevant environment”, even though it is only tangentially related to buying or drinking beer.

In this Ad Age interview with Sue Davidson at Atmosphere BBDO, we get several good best practices on setting up online media for success and then measuring results on the back end. These include starting with a business objective, rather than a media tactic: “I want increase brand awareness 90%” versus “I want to do an online promotion”. Another example is moving beyond such necessary but ultimately soulless measures as time-on-site, and move to tracking changing consumer attitudes and beliefs through surveys.

All good stuff, but as someone who has worked on the client side for a long time, I wonder how healthy it is to have both your creative team and the analytic team that reports on how well the creative team did, both on the same side of the table. I’m sure at some level objectivity rules, however I think I know which way the report will lean if the data isn’t so black and white. This is not to fault BBDO: if their clients don’t bring their own digital insights and analytic power to the table, then they are providing an invaluable service. However, the marketing teams that have their own marketing research group minding their digital ROI will always have a their own advantage, this time on their side of the table.