February 27, 2006

Do you ever get the feeling that luxury magazines wouldn't exist if it weren't for ads for watches? And do you ever feel that if there were no Geico or Ditech ads, there would be very little advertising on television? How do we stop the madness?

Novel Non-Traditional Media

I'd love to start a collection of novel non-traditional media. Please, please, please pass along ideas you've seen or imagined.

My most recent sighting was ads on taxi hubcaps in Houston. The ads covered the entire hubcap and didn't spin...so they were eye-catching and readable. The happened to be about a basketball tournament, so they were the shape of a basketball and joggled back and forth just enough to catch your eye but not too much, so you could easily read them.

Very cool.

Great Moments in Television

Many are now preserved and disseminated on the web where they are viewed by many more people than originally watched them on TV.

The classic example is Jon Stewart giving Tucker Carlson a piece of his mind on Crossfire. A few hundred thousand viewers saw it as it played. But 3.5 million caught it on the web.

A small audience watched Isaac Mizrahi's laying on of hands with Scarlett Johannson on one of those Red Carpets. But 358,000 saw it later on the web.

Hardly anyone needs to be told to spread the word on these and other tasty tidbits that find themselves to the web.

Consider this:

If 25 people tell 25 people and the process is repeated five times. the number equals approximately the population of the United States.

One more iteration, and the number equals appoximately the population of the world.

Looking for Men in All the Right Places

Heineken is launching a new "Premium Light" beer and wants to reach men ages 25-49. Their campaign will have a major web advertising component, as well as its own site. But, even though the web plays the lead role in the $50 million launch, Heineken will complement that effort with TV, radio, print, outdoor, promotions, and a Hispanic-focused initiative.

Traditional media are always going to play a key role in any comprehensive campaign. In fact, Michelle Evans shared some strong stats with us today. Ad spending in '06 is estimated to be divided up by television (at 43.7%), magazines (20.5%), newspapers (19.9%), radio (7.5%), Internet (6.0%), and outdoor (2.4%).

And spending increases for the year are estimated at Hispanic Network TV (up 10.4%), Internet (up 9.1%), Cable TV (up 8.4%), Outdoor (up 7.2%), Network TV (up 4.5%) Newspapers (up 4.3%), and Radio (up 3.6%).

What you see is a strong across-the-board increase, and that's reflective of the multi-media approach needed to get your message across.

February 23, 2006

The Wal-Mart Nation

I watched an interview with Wal-Mart CEO Lee Scott the other day. He deflected concern about disgruntled employees, noting that with 1.5 million employees Wal-Mart would have lots of dissention even if only a small percentage were unhappy.

Indeed, if one percent of Wal-Mart employees were upset, that would be a small percentage but a large absolute number: 150,000 people!

Scott also defended the company's position on providing healthcare insurance to its employees...or NOT providing it, as the case is.

Last night ABC News featured a story about the per capita spending on healthcare in the United States. As I recall, it was somewhere around $6,500, compared with about $2,500 in each comparable Western European nation. The figure was around $700 for Costa Rico! One out of every five dollars spent by a company is for healthcare coverage. The situation has spun way out of control.

Malcolm Gladwell recently wrote about the importance of companies becoming involved in the improvement of public issues such as healthcare. After all, he argues, healthcare insurance is what is burying the Great American Corporate Giants like GM and Ford. It's doing a pretty good job clobbering us little guys too!

It seems to me that we need to use our communications skills to encourage more businesses to confront our country's crises like healthcare and public education. Both systems are seriously out of whack. Thomas Friedman hits the education nail on the head in "The World is Flat."

We all need to figure out how to be part of the solution. How can we use the skills we have to solve these problems?

As for Wal-Mart, even without providing healthcare insurance, the company is having some tough times. Year-over-year store sales increases have lagged way behind Target. So the company plans to remodel nearly half of the U.S. stores, strengthen its marketing, and expand its line of urban clothing.

Ads are dropping "always low prices" in favor of "look beyond the basics," in an effort to get customers with money to spend it on something beyond paper towels and dishwasher soap.

Can Wal-Mart win its customers? I don't see how, unless they win their employees.

And to win their employees, it seems to me that they not only need to provide healthcare insurance but they also have to play a much more pro-active role in getting this country to solve its healthcare crisis.

February 21, 2006

Dorothy Hamill has become Kelly Clarkson

That's how one commentator characterized the decline in Winter Olympics television ratings. They're the worst ever. And NBC's prime time coverage lost to Fox's American Idol big time. More than 10 million households prefered the battle of amateur performers to that of amateur athletes.

NBC's spokesman said that they used to consider the television network coverage as being for the family, cable coverage for the sports fan, and the website for the fanatic.

Obviously, that's all changed. Now the website is mainstream. And web traffic for Olympics coverage has topped 3 million unique visitors a day. In fact, while American Idol beat the Olympics on television, Olympic websites are clobbering the Idol's website by more than 4:1.

The time difference makes it difficult to follow the Olympics in a linear fashion. So we're subjected to the editing of others. And, in today's consumer-centric world, that just doesn't fly. So we turn instead to the seemingly unedited, unscripted, anything-can-happen Americal Idol.

Personally, I think NBC should have turned our lives upside down and provided incredible live coverage, preempting daytime programming and forcing us to watch stuff as it really happens. I think that would make it more of an event than the butchered we're-in-charge,-not-you coverage we're seeing every evening.

If the network won't mix it up, the viewers will. And they have.

Fashionable Tips

I loved reading Liz Claiborne CEO Paul Charron's five tips for reforming the fashion industry in the Wall Street Journal. They repeat themes that we think are so very important: transparency and collaboration.

Tip 1. Increase collaboration between retailers and vendors, making practices like markdowns more transparent.

Tip 2. Demystify fashion to take the risk out of marketing a trendy product by analyzing fashion merchandise with the same rigor as a consumer products company would analyze dish detergent.

Tip 3. Emphasize more interaction between divisions; even designers should understand business goals.

Tip 4. Commit to training and grooming managers, and moving them around so they always have a fresh perspective.

Tip 5. Evaluate your company against world-class businesses outside of the fashion industry.

All good advice, regardless of one's industry.

Be open with information, collaborative with partners, supportive of associates, and objective about your own business.

Let the sun shine in.

February 20, 2006

Capturing/Informing the Visitor

The folks at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis have a smart idea. They have phone numbers next to certain works of art. Call the number, and you get an audio description of what you're looking at.

At an exhibit of contemporary prefabricated houses, they had a leaflet with a headline, "Use your cell phone to learn more about prefab." There followed a cell phone number and a series of four-digit codes that would lead you to any one of 10 options . The leaflet also told you how to download to your iPod everything from "Art on Call" via the Walker's website or through iTunes.

Such a great idea.

Think of the versatility and flexibility. The ease of changing the message, the ease of directing people to other extensions. The opportunity to use this for walking tours, driving tours, etc. For example, we have long-promoted the use of cell phone marketing messages as a way to get pass-through visitors to stop and sample your destination.

For more info on the Walker's Art on Call initiative, go to newmedia.walkerart.org/aoc.

The Doorway to the World

I noticed that Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney is coming to South Carolina to woo the Republicans here. I read recently that he proposed a bill to buy his state's children 500,000 very inexpensive computers being created at MIT.

Apparently, MIT's Media Lab has developed the prototype of a $100 computer. And that could provide a doorway to the world to millions and millions of people. These computers would include wireless peer-to-peer connections that create a local network. And, presuming there's an Internet signal somewhere in the network area, everyone can get online and use a built-in Web browser.

Wow! Now we're talking! Now everyone's talking!

Nothing is as it Seems to Be

That's always the case, isn't it?

Take the latest trend in product placement. Instead of worrying about what to put where as a show is being shot, product placement is increasingly added digitally after the fact. That means, of course, that you could conceivably alter the product placement by market and by re-run, etc.

More possibilities!

February 7, 2006

Lifestyle Touchpoint Marketing

We talk a lot about Lifestyle Touchpoint Marketing...identifying how your target audience lives their lives and intercepting them in as many critical places as possible. So-called traditional media - like broadcast, print, and interactive - certainly represent touchpoints. But they need to be complemented by other touchpoint marketing as well.

Reading about the new campaign to strengthen Jane magazine's 20-something audience, I found it interesting to see that they intended to include coffee sleeves on college campuses, radio commercials in drug stores, and spots on plasma TV's in malls and airports.

Clever. Also clever is the magazine's refinement of its editorial product, focused now much more directly on its target audience.

The Cost of a Bad Customer Experience

I read somewhere that when the average customer has a bad experience, they share their woes with some unbelievably high number of people...and the story of their bad experience has as much as a 20-year life.

We do know that women make 80% of the purchasing decisions in this country and that they are several times more likely than men to tell their friends about their shopping experience.

So the cost of providing a bad experience is very high indeed.

A recent survey of online shoppers showed that not only did an overwhelming 82% of respondents say they would be less likely to return to a site where they had a frustrating shopping experience, but 55% said a negative online shopping experience would make them less likely to buy at that retailer's physical store.

Other interesting findings:

76% of respondents said they were more likely to buy products on a site that offers rich features, such as product zoom, 360-degree product views, and online videos of the product in context.

54% of respondents who choose to shop in a physical store vs. online do so because shopping in a store allows them to understand a product better (and women almost always want to understand a product better)

This last point is intriguing because the online environment enables you to show much more about a product than is necessarily available in a store. But you don't have the sales person to chat up, and that does make a difference.

And the Winner Is...

When it comes to Super Bowl spots, there is no clear winner. Different sources declare different ads as "best." What this says to me is that we no longer have a collective conscience. Our lifestyle and viewing interests have become so diverse that we each march to different drummers. When we are brought together under one roof (as more than 140 million of us were on Super Bowl Sunday), we may watch the same program or spots, but our response is no longer going to be collectively shared. We are a very divided nation. Not just divided into reds and blues (although that wide chasm exacerbates our divisiveness)...but we are now divided into a million little pieces. The spots haven't lost their ability to speak to us as one. We have lost our ability to listen as one.

And boy are there consequences of that!

February 6, 2006

Slicing and Dicing to Maximize Profitability

There's been a lot of interesting writing about segmentation recently. ProfitBrand is a book that explores the subject in depth, and there's a good article called "Rediscovering Market Segmentation" in the latest Harvard Business Review.

The data-driven world in which we live enables us to know much more about our customers. The challenge is to slice and dice your customer base so that you understand the characteristics of those customers who are most profitable to you...and devise ways of attracting more of them.

The HBR article talks about a bank that analyzed its "wealth management" customers, only to discover that the least profitable ones were being managed by the bank's most senior relationship executives. Not a wise use of resources.

Segmentation analyses also enable you to test product or service enhancements with focus groups of your most profitable customers. Ask them what they'd like that they don't presently get from you (or test your own innovation ideas against them) and even ask them what they'd be willing to pay for these enhancements.

How often we spend our time and resources where they may be least effective. Smart segmentation minimizes the likelihood of falling into that trap.

But...Beware of Generalizations

Just as I'm fascinated by segmentation, I'm equally intrigued by the pitfalls of generalization. That is, saying "Our best [or worst] customers are like this. Therefore, all individuals who share those characteristics should be good customers for us."

Malcolm Gladwell's latest article in The New Yorker gives you great pause for generalizations, especially in terms of profiling. As usual, he uses great examples to show how we ascribe certain behavior to certain types of individuals (or animals) and misguidedly extrapolate that across all people who share similar characteristics.

His classic example is the pit bull, which - it turns out - is not only several breeds of dog (not just one) but is also not generally a destructive dog. And yet, some communities have literally banned pit bulls. We have endowed pit bulls with an unearned and unjustified reputation. We have generalized.

And, what kind of dog bit the French woman so badly that she had to have the world's first face transplant?

A black lab.

Go figure.

The First 'Century'

This is my 100th blog. I enjoy writing a few words about things I read and think about. It's called "Notes on Marketing &Communications," and that's all it is. Just some notes. I love the work we do, the challenges we face, and the great people we work with. I especially like the constant changes and evolutions that make this work so stimulating.

Comments are welcome and encouraged.

February 1, 2006

Getting Ready for Super Sunday

A year after Last Year's Super Sunday, they're still talking about the spots. I just read that GoDaddy.com - which was ridiculed for stepping up to buy TWO spots in last year's Super Bowl - ended up having the last laugh. By April, the company had passed Network Solutions to become the web's leading domain-name registrar.

GoDaddy banked on the fact that their exposure ran way beyond the 30-seconds of airtime. After all, Super Bowl spots are replayed, talked about, written about and highlighted for weeks after the game in all kinds of media.

Equally important is the fact that there is probably no better way to optimize reach than through Super Bowl advertising. How else can you get the attention of such a sizeable audience in one shot? No way.

This year, experts estimate that half the Super Bowl audience will be women. So we'll be seeing ads for products that appeal principally to women (such as Dove soap). And we'll be seeing even better rings at the register after the Super Bowl, since women control 80% of the purchases in this country.

It's just so darn difficult to reach a lot of people all at once. The Super Bowl is solution number one.

RFID = BIG (as in "Brother"?)

RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) has been getting a lot of play...especially in our security-conscious society.

A new application of the technology enables companies with in-store displays to use radio frequencies to monitor those displays. Are the displays on the floor? Are they in the right aisle? What sales are being generated?

For companies that want to assure that their displays are properly placed and measure that placement against sales, this is big news.

For privacy advocates, concerned that the data will be used in frequent shopper profiles, this is Big Brother.

Fact is...it's now possible to attach small sensors to shopping carts so we can trace each shopper's path and pace through the store...which aisles did they go down, which products did they stop and look at, and for how long? And, ultimately, what did they buy?

The information is virtually endless, as is the opportunity to put it to good use.

Is there a point at which customers will balk and say, "Hey, you know too much about me. Get out of my life!"

I'm not sure...after all, the more we know about our customers, the better we can serve them. Right?

And why weren't people more upset with the story that anyone's cell phone records can be purchased for less than $200?