Bloghound

I rarely notice billboard ads, but this one from financial firm UBS got my attention while I was driving up the Southeast Expressway in Boston early yesterday morning . It conveyed a compelling message in just 6 words:

Bank fees are like financial wedgies.

I was recently invited to share my views on the effect of social media on the 2008 Presidential Campaign for an upcoming feature article in the Public Relations Strategist.

Here are a few highlights:

Is the use of social media mainly tactical or strategic?

• If a goal of the candidates has been to convey a message of change, the use of social media represents a clear change from traditional ways of reaching out to and engaging voters.

• If a goal has been to engage with young voters, the use of digital has been a hugely successful strategy. According to Rock the Vote and CIRCLE (Center for Information & Research on Civic Learning & Engagement), voter turnout among 18- to 29-year-olds has doubled and tripled in almost every state primary and caucus. These young voters’ preferred way of learning about candidates and participating in the campaigns is through social media and word of mouth marketing. According to a Pew Research Center for the People and the Press study that looked at voter behavior, two-thirds of Web users under 30 use social networking sites, and only 25 percent watch television news for campaign news.

• If a goal has been to manage positive and negative feelings about the candidate - and help people connect with candidates’ personal characteristics — social media has been strategic for Obama, but far less so for Clinton or McCain. Obama has shared more about himself- and social media is about people wanting to connect and share with people. He has also used a relaxed conversational communications style vs. speaking in “message points” during interviews and in videos. Clinton and McCain have used social media more as a channel, filling it with traditional “produced” videos and ads. Clinton and McCain haven’t adjusted their content or communications style for the new medium nearly as well as Obama, although Clinton has done a better job than McCain.

How has social media changed the game of the campaign so far?

The three biggest impacts of social media on the 2008 campaign:

1. Fund raising: Changed the game on how candidates raise money, putting more power with the everyday people than in any previous race. In March alone Obama raised $40 million, largely from the campaign’s 1.5 million Internet donors. According to Clinton’s campaign she raised $2.5 million after winning Pennsylvania primary and asking people to go to her site and donate. According to the most recent Federal Election data, 43% of contributions to Obama’s campaign have come from donors of $200 or less, compared to 27% for Clinton and 20% for McCain.

2. Traditional media: Changed the influence and role of traditional media, with more and more people going direct to hear and read about the candidates - viewing speeches on YouTube vs. TV, and going direct to sources vs. reading journalists’ coverage and analysis. For example, after Obama’s speech on race in March, the transcript of the speech “ranked consistently higher on the most emailed list than the articles written about the speech,” according to The New York Times (“Finding Political News Online, the Young Pass it On.” )

3. Advertising: Showed the diminishing effectiveness of “packaged” TV advertising. Leading up to the Florida primary Mitt Romney spent $29 million on 34,821 ads, more than three and a half times as much as John McCain who spent $8 million on 10,830 ads, according to analysis of data through Jan 27 by the University of Wisconsin Advertising Project. The effect of the big advertising spend? No lift for Romney who soon pulled out of the race.

In addition, millions of people are tuning into candidates via video vs. TV ads - on their campaign sites and on YouTube and other video sharing sites. Obama’s speech on race, “A More Perfect Union,” has been viewed by almost 4.5 million people on YouTube since March.

Getting management to buy into innovative marketing approaches can be tough.

Here are six facts to support change, based on performance data that Copernicus Marketing Consulting has collected from more than 500 marketing programs (consumer and B2B products and services.)

1. 84% of programs are resulting in declining brand equity and market share.
2. Customer satisfaction averages just 74%.
3. Most acquisition efforts fail to reach break even.
4. No more than 10% of new products succeed.
5. Most sales promotions are unprofitable.
6. Advertising ROI is below 4%.

For more, see the Harvard Business Review article, “Don’t Blame the Metrics” by Kevin Clancy and Randy Stone.

   The buzz is that CBS may “divorce” itself from anchor Katie Couric long before her contract expires in 2011. What went wrong?

Maybe it has nothing to do with Katie Couric or the fact that people are tuning out of  television for their news.   Maybe it comes down to a Viagra problem.

Watching the evening news — CBS or the other networks — we are bombarded with ads for one medical ailment ad after another. Penile erection, bladder control, constipation, bone loss, arthritis, diabetes. What kind of customer experience is this? Terrible. Erections and constipation happy messages while trying to make dinner, and maybe catch up on the news.

CBS, like most companies, has different silos responsible for different functions, and no one organization is looking at the customer’s experience. CBS News is responsible for Katie & Co., while the advertising group is bringing in the television dollars — and the Viagra ads.

In many retail companies, marketing is responsible for branding while operations oversees the stores, and never the two shall collaborate, often creating a mixed message and uneven customer experience.  Similarly, customer service isn’t usually part of marketing, yet the customer service group often has more influence on customers than advertising, promotions, or pricing.

I hope CBS doesn’t put the blame for poor ratings on Katie Couric, a fine journalist. CBS has bigger issues; the customer’s experience matters more than the ad revenue. If the first is bad, the second will become disastrous.

I’ll be blogging The Conference Board’s “Marketing Effectiveness Conference” next Tuesday and Wednesday in New York. There’s a great line up of speakers from companies like Citibank, Eli Lilly, Pepsi, Disney and Met Life. The conference leader is Don Sexton, professor of business and director of the Jerome A. Chazen Institute of International Business at Columbia University.

Some of the things I’m interested in learning:

• How are leading organizations assessing the effectiveness of social media and digital strategies? Advertising Age’s Jack Neff wrote a great piece last month, “Why Mix Models Don’t Mesh with Digital,” about how many companies aren’t investing in these new areas because the budgets aren’t big enough to be factored into the marketing mix models. So because innovative approaches can’t be measured with the old tools, that’s reason not to invest? Yikes!
• How are companies taking a holistic view of what is influencing customer decisions? It seems that most companies measure silos — search, broadcast, direct, online advertising, PR, promotions. These discrete views often cloud real issues and opportunities.
• Are there different approaches for measuring B2B vs B2C? Could a B2b software company, for example, use the same strategy as Pepsi?
• If a company could only do one thing when it comes to assessing effectiveness, what should that be?

If anyone has other questions, please post them here and I’ll be sure to raise them at the conference and post the replies next week.

I’m so honored and thrilled that my book Beyond Buzz has been awarded a gold prize in the 2008 Axiom Business Book Awards in the Advertising/Marketing/Public Relations category. I’m especially honored to share the gold with Andy Sernovitz’s Word of Mouth Marketing. Here’s a list of all the winners.The awards are sponsored by Independent Publisher, Inc, Jenkins Group, and Padilla Spear Beardsley.

The people at Bose must know that people trust other people far more than a manufacturer.? So in its ads for its new Bose Computer MusicMonitor Bose does something very clever that disarms and earns credibility.? Before listing the product benefits the ad uses a “warning.”

BEWARE THIS IS THE MANUFACTURER TALKING!

Then, rather than the usual “benefit” copy, the ad lists four things that Bose believes, e.g. “We believe that the Computer MusicMonitor also comes the closest to our goal that sound is meant to be heard and not seen.”? Another clever tactic as people gravitate to beliefs and points of view.

 

This Anheuser-Busch ad got a bigs thumbs up last night when it aired on the Super Bowl. Hank, the Clydesdale, doesn’t make the cut to pull the Budweiser wagon. His friend, a Dalmatian dog, steps in and trains the dejected Hank so he can win the following year.This spot wins because it’s aspirational and affirms the? American values of friendship, discipline, and never-say-no.? The music from “Rocky” puts it over the top.

When looking to connect with audiences aspirational themes always win. One reason Obama is neck-in-neck with Cliinton is his how he so expertly uses aspirational messages to connect with voters.

Every once and a while you see a TV ad that is so good you want to share it. Here’s one for Jeep Liberty that makes me smile every time I see it.

Is Unilever a hypocrite or just doing good brand marketing as usual? Here’s the controversy: Dove’s successful “Campaign for Real Beauty” introduced a video called “Onslaught” this fall educating girls on a wider definition of beauty, warning of the onslaught of typical beauty industry messages about what makes a beautiful woman (plastic surgery, bulimia, etc.), and advising parents to “Talk to your daughter before the beauty industry does.”

At the same time AXE, another Unilever brand, introduced some videos that depict women in just the opposite way — sex-crazed, busty, near-naked Amazons.Then comes this Dove-AXE mash-up spoof video, with the line ” Talk to your daughter before Unilever does.”

Since then there has been a blizzard of media articles, like this Op-Ed in the Boston Globe, “A company’s ugly contradiction” by Michelle Gillett.

“But the launching of “Onslaught,” the most recent of Unilever’s efforts to foster self-esteem, has also launched a controversy about the sincerity of its commitment to “real beauty.” …Viewers are struggling to make sense of how Dove can promise to educate girls on a wider definition of beauty while other Unilever ads exhort boys to make “nice girls naughty” and assure them, “the more you spray, the more you get” in the Axe deodorant body spray ads.”

Business school marketing courses taught us to create brands that connect with the target audience’s values and appeal to them emotionally, which both Dove and Axe seem to be doing superbly well, especially when you look at the revenue and market share growth of these two brands over the past few years.

In this new world of transparency, do branding “best practices” need to be rewritten? Instead of “connecting” with artificially constructed brands, do people want to connect with companies whose values and causes they identify with? Do people want “relationships” with brands or with the companies and people behind the brands?

I think the Unilever controversy shows that people want to buy from companies they like and identify with, not brands. A new marketing mash-up is in the making — branding and corporate reputation. The new stars won’t be the ad agencies, but the company’s leadership team.