Talking Doesn't Necessarily Drive Engagement

It was just announced that Mini USA will deliver “an ever-changing array of unique, personal, playful and unexpected messages” to Mini Cooper owners via “talking” billboards.

The company mailed 4,500 invitations to owners in 4 cities asking them to provide non-confidential information and opt into the program where billboards will be programmed to identify approaching Mini drivers through an RFID-embedded key fob. The signs will, for example, wish them “happy birthday,” or call the car by name. (It’s been reported that more than a third of Mini owners have named their cars.)

Issues of driver distraction and safety notwithstanding, one wonders if there isn’t a more effective way of spending one’s budget to engage customers. Yes, it’s true that the Mini brand was developed off a non-traditional, quirky and creative approach, but it also smacks of Six Million Dollar Man-thinking: We can do it! We have the technology!

If you’re asking yourself if this program doesn’t just reach out and “touch” customers who have already engaged with the brand, you’re not alone. But, it’s been suggested that this program will intensify the strong “tribal” connections between owners and the brand (presumably those are the people who named their cars), which, the thinking goes, will turn owners into evangelists.

Mini Cooper might be interested to know that just attending to advertising – however technologically-advanced – does not guarantee engagement. Getting noticed was never a problem for most brands, and “brand advertising” (even quirky, technologically-inspired advertising) does not make a very large contribution to engagement in the automotive category. Based upon the 2007 Brand Keys Customer Loyalty Engagement Index the contribution – even for a high-loyalty brand like Mini – was only .005%. They might also pay attention to the lessons learned by Volkswagen, where quirky marketing has done wonders to boost buzz, but little to boost sales.

And, if not Brand Keys or Volkswagen, perhaps a version of Ogden Nash:

I think that I shall never see
a billboard lovely as a tree.
And really don’t care if you guarantee
The sign I pass will talk to me!

Creative Nightmare

By now you’ve likely seen the ads for Rozerem, the newish insomnia drug. Those are the ones with Abe Lincoln and the beaver or groundhog or some sort of rodent in them. If you’re thinking, “Oh, them. Yeah I see them everyplace, but I didn’t understand what they were advertising,” you weren’t alone. Nearly everyone we’ve talked to about the campaign says that very same thing.

To be charitable, one might suggest that all the ads and creative media buys were merely teasers. Get the campaign noticed. Have people actually ask themselves, “What is this about?” Maybe pay more attention to the campaign just to figure it out. On the other hand, as the campaign trundles on, this is beginning to look more and more like a case of creativity for creativity’s sake.

These days, brands and ad agencies are so desperate to “engage customers” that some have forgotten that the business they’re in is one that deals with “disciplined creativity.” You know, creative that communicates the brand strategy in a way that gets consumers to behave positively towards you. Perhaps someone should have pointed out to the brand that, in the marketplace, it isn’t creative unless it moves product! Getting noticed, talked about, winning creative awards is no substitute for real engagement. Real engagement always correlates with positive consumer behavior and, ultimately, profitability.

How did this campaign do? It’s been reported that between January and September 2006 Rozerem spent nearly $100 million on ads, but only earned $48.7 million in wholesale revenue. You do the math.

Many a small pill has been made large by the right kind of advertising, but it’s those kinds of ROI numbers that keep marketers up at night!

Getting Fired Is Nature's Way Of Telling You That You Had The Wrong Job In The First Place!

Last week, the GAP’s Board of Directors fired CEO, Paul Pressler. If you follow the marketing world generally or the retail category specifically, you may be asking yourself, “what took them so long?”

After a 3rd mind-bogglingly miserable holiday season and a continuing death spiral of quarterly same-stores sales, you might well ask that. Although, perhaps the more precise question to ask is, “why did they hire him in the first place!?”

Mr. Pressler once ran Walt Disney’s theme parks. And he was apparently very good at doing that. So naturally, the GAP’s Board felt he was the perfect candidate, being that there is an absolutely perfect “fit” between selling clothing and hawking Pirates of the Caribbean and Mad Hatter Tea Party rides. Don’t see the immediate and compelling connection? Well, neither do we.

It used to be in the 20th century that when a company was struggling with sales and profits, the quickest fix was an agency review. Well, as creative (even good creative) doesn’t guarantee consumer engagement and profits, the 21st century version is to hire a change agent who, the logic goes, has done it once someplace else, so they can do it again here!

Over the past month, some version of the failure of a “God-we’re-in-trouble-get-me-a-marketer-who’s-shown-some-success-ANYWHERE” scenario has played out at other companies such as Wal-Mart, Volkswagen, Verizon and Coca-Cola. Clearly this is not a strategy that has been working very well.

Mr. Pressler is quoted as saying that he “enjoyed the opportunity to lead this iconic company,” and goes home with a lovely departing gift of $14.5 million in severance. Seems like an expensive lesson for companies to learn.

Tune In Next Week. Oops! Never mind, it's been cancelled!

Fads come and fads go, and no place more often than on TV. Take this season’s crop of TV shows. There were an unprecedented number of serialized shows spawned, one can only suppose, from the success of shows like Desperate Housewives and Lost.

These serialized shows are raising a lot of questions among viewers: What's the story of the woman with a false identity in Six Degrees? Who launched the nuclear attack on America in Jericho? What happened inside the bank during the hostage standoff in The Nine? Will Pauline get run over by the train?

OK, the Pauline thing was a while ago, but, as they used to say back then, “tune in next week,” although for a number today’s shows you won’t be able to do that because they will be (or already have been) cancelled before you get a chance to resolve any questions you may have.

Here’s a list of the shows (serials and others) that have already been cancelled this season: 3 Lbs (CBS), Daybreak (ABC), Happy Hour (FOX), Help Me Help You (ABC), Justice (FOX), Kidnapped (NBC), Runaway (CW), Saved (TNT), Show Me The Money (ABC), Six Degrees (ABC), Smith (CBS), Stargate SG-1 (SCI), The O.C. (FOX), The Rich List (FOX), Three Moons Over Milford (FAM), Till Death (FOX), Twenty Good Years (NBC), and Vanished (FOX).

Cancellations are nothing new. If you can’t generate the audience, you don’t generate ad revenues. That’s one of marketing’s holiest of rules. But the serial cancellations of serials can be more worrisome, as it breaks one of marketing’s other rules: Thou shalt not screw with thy audiences’ expectations! If you provide no closure for the viewers who tune in, will they become gun-shy about committing to these kinds of shows at all in the future? With all the other media touch points available, why should they invest the time and emotion and engage with something that just might not be on the next time they tune in?

Maybe producers should be required to film a pilot and a final episode at the same time. Worst case would be that it got run on the small screen. And by that I mean a phone or PDA!

Men of La Munchies

Last year – last October, in fact, we noted that a lot of consumer-generated content is pretty terrible, not particularly on strategy, and not engaging.

Consumer-generated content analysts have pointed out that there is no standard between paid and non-paid consumption, and that there is no norm when it comes to the extent to which the content is wholly created by consumers or assisted by marketers.

So it’s been interesting to see that sponsors like Dove and Doritos hawking the opportunity for consumers to create advertising that, for the former, will end up airing on the Academy Awards and for the latter on the Super Bowl. An industry pundit called all of this “the all-time laziest but most prevalent campaign style of the web 2.0 world: begging.”

All this hearkens back to an age ago when Account Planners were supposed to be the conduit between the consumer and the Creative. But back then the concept was to work with (and among) consumers, not openly beg for insights, let alone creative.

If you are going to be quixotic and have to borrow from someone, Cervantes comes to mind. He said “Never stand begging for that which you have the power to earn.”

"It's Not Enough That I Should Succeed - Others Must Fail."

It was either Attila the Hun or David Merrick who said that, but whoever it was must have had Apple (Computer) in mind.

As technology continues to rule, the impact of Apple's iPhone is going to have a continuing impact and there will be winners (Apple and their partners) and losers (everyone else).

Who wins? Well Apple is of course the big winner since the iPhone is going to give the company an iPod-like revenue stream for years to come. And by dropping the "computer" from its name, the company positions itself beyond just the Mac and iPod. Cingular wins because it’s the exclusive carrier for the iPhone.

Who loses? Motorola, struggling amid low-margin phone devices, will feel the pinch. Yes, the Q's been a success, but compared to the iPhone, it’s going to start to look like the cell phone Michael Douglas used in Wall Street! LG, Samsung, etc. have bundled music, but who doesn’t expect Apple to use its iPod/iTunes juggernaut to raise big problems for other phone makers. Verizon and Sprint? See “Who wins?” Cingular comment above. The surprise loser in this scenario may be Apple iPod: Some of the iPod sales are bound to be cannibalized by the iPhone, but generally speaking that’s only a tiny glitch in the overall Apple brand landscape.

Anyway, another quote worth remembering is a version of Sun-Tzu’s, “keep your friends close, and your competitors closer,” because, who knows how long it will be before Apple acquires Sprint!?

Come Along, Create A Song, And Join The Jamboree

In the face of young-skewing sites such as MySpace and FaceBook, Walt Disney Company unveiled its long-awaited revamped Disney.com website this week.

The upgrade of Disney.com has been much-needed for a while now. The old site had been designed to be more of an electronic cash register than an actual community. While the new portal is more interactive and creative, media analysts noted that children don't go to Disney.com. Instead, it's their parents who go to the Disney Internet destinations.

Disney has been looking for ways to make its Internet offering more appealing for a while now, though it’s a difficult balancing act; how do you be edgy and creative without overreaching grounds of taste that might affect their family-content status among parents?

But then, as Walt himself always noted, “it’s fun to do the impossible!”

How You Gonna Keep Them Buying Outdoor After They've Seen TV?

A box of washing powder signaled a watershed in French media at 12:01 AM on January 1st when it earned the notoriety of being France’s first TV ad campaign for a supermarket chain.

Chain stores have been banned from advertising on TV in France, under a 1968 law enacted to protect the regional press. But the European Commission ruled the ban unlawful and “la grande distribution” is preparing for a leap into the 21st century. The ground-breaking campaign was for Système U, a washing powder, but other supermarket chains have already reserved slots for a total of more than 60 television ads this month.

Traditionalists, of course, lament the arrival of what they see as an example of unbridled capitalism. The Union of Small Shopkeepers described the new freedom as “totally unacceptable” and “yet another competitive handicap,” and suggest the availability of this “new” media would have a catastrophic impact on France’s network of small shops.

But the really interesting thing about all this is that if the media-ecology in France is anything close to that of the US (and it appears to be), these new TV advertisers may just be doing something new just because they can.

Brand-to Media Engagement surveys – all of which highly correlate with sales – prove that not all media is right for all brands. Having already established their brands in the hearts and minds of consumers via the press, such a tactic may just end up washing ad dollars down the drain!

Flogging The Flogs

If the past couple of decades have proved anything it’s that consumers have been well ahead of marketers in creating “spaces” where engaging conversations take place. Marketers have, indeed, been adept at adapting what the consumers have created, and that includes blogs.

Some marketers, desperate to appear “with it” and wanting to maintain contact via new consumer touch points, and not content to have to deal with actual blogs, thought it would be a really good – and creative – idea to invent fake blogs, “Flogs,” get it? Anyway generally it backfired, following the well-established marketing precept, “thou shalt not screw with thy consumer.”

The Consumerist is hosting a survey to determine the best fake marketing blog for 2006. Leading contenders are McDonald's for its “4Railroads” and “McD Million winner” flogs, Wal-mart for its “Walmarting Across America” and Sony for its recent “All I Want For Xmas Is A PSP” flog.

Take a look at the survey http://www.consumerist.com/consumer/alliwantforxmasisapsp/vote-for-best-flog-224718.php and share your real voice!