Money Can't Buy Happiness, But Neither Can Poverty

YouTube, one of the most popular websites on the Internet, only launched about a year ago and already has an estimated 75 million visitors a month. So it’s fair to say that currently they’re the most trafficked of any video-sharing sites around. It’s been reported that 100 million videos gets viewed each day. Lots and lots and lots of site visitors. Google bought them recently for $1.65 billion, casting themself in a starring role in the online video revolution.

Google CEO, Eric Schmidt, said, "The YouTube team has built an exciting and powerful media platform that complements Google's mission to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful." He assiduously avoided mentioning how they were actually going to make money from offering media entertainment services to users, content owners and advertisers, though.

Viacom’s $1 billion copyright-infringement lawsuit, and NBC Universal/News Corp’s launch of Big Media notwithstanding, it’s really too bad these “natural partners” haven’t stumbled upon engagement metrics as a viable advertising model to monetize the partnership. Because in both the real and cyber worlds, making money is better than generating lots and lots of site visits alone, if only for financial reasons.

Announcing An Amazingly New Marketing Concept: TV Commercials On TV

OK, not quite, but almost. ABC Program Development has introduced a new commercial format that would place real, paid commercials in media vehicles shown on the network's shows where characters in a make-believe show, who were making believe that they were “watching” TV, for example, would actually be “watching” a real TV commercial. And while the characters in the TV show were “watching” the commercial, the real, paid commercial would widen so the viewers at home – a real home, with real viewers, not an imaginary TV home set – could then view the commercial just as they would if they were watching a real commercial on TV, except this one would be embedded in the show they were watching. Get it?

This approach would also be used for print ads in magazines and newspapers “read” by TV show characters, as well as ads beamed to cell phones and web advertising on computers for characters “going on-line” or getting ads beamed to their make-believe cell phones. Presumably all of this would be seamlessly integrated into the shows and would only appear within the fictional shows where the “commercial” was integral to the plot and advanced the story line just as any other scene would! Natural, you know what I mean?

Look, we know that everyone is looking for ways to insinuate brands and engage consumers. And producers are always looking for new income streams. But we wonder if this is not the wave of the entertainment future but merely an attempt to find a “solution” to ad zapping á la TiVo or viewer commercial-ennui. One further wonders whether already-cynical, ‘bionic’ viewers of the 21st century will put up with this additional level of irritant.

So it seems as though the future of broadcast entertainment is going to be much like the present – only with far more commercials!

It's The Girls, Stupid!

Hooters Girls are a cadre of 17,000+ women who work at the Atlanta-based chain’s 438 restaurants in the US and abroad. The restaurants are best known for waitresses in low-cut, really tight tank tops and very short orange short-shorts. Or so I’ve heard.

Hooters still raises eyebrows and draws criticism. You can use an owl for your logo, but few consumers are unfamiliar with the fact that the name is also slang for a portion of the female anatomy. Although any censure isn’t apparently fervent enough to disengage consumers.

But a brand that focused on staff wearing less has meant a lot more for the 13-year old privately held company. It has grown into a chain that is expected to pass the billion dollar mark this year, which is a lot of engagement by anyone’s standards!

In Tuesday’s New York Sun, there was an announcement that Hooters – already in 30 countries – is planning to open its first branch in Israel. The man who bought the franchise noted, “I strongly believe that the Hooters concept is something that Israelis are looking for.”

You think!?

Love Is All Around. Really!

The TV set was on last night but I wasn’t really watching and was only half-listening when a familiar theme song insinuated itself into my consciousness. You can hum the tune to yourself, but the opening lyrics go:

Who can turn the world on with her smile?
Who can take a nothing day, and suddenly make it all seem worthwhile?

I won’t take you through the rest. It’s likely you know all the words already to the Paul Williams song, which was the opening theme for the Mary Tyler Moore Show. It aired more than 30 years ago and back then people actually refused to make plans that would take them away from their TV sets for fear of missing the show. That’s how popular it was! As was, of course, the theme song.

So it wasn’t much of a surprise that a few years ago Chase resurrected the song for a commercial of a young woman getting her first paycheck. It was pretty engaging, so when the song came on last night, my first thought was, “Mary Tyler Moore theme song” and then “Chase.” But then I looked up and discovered that the woman getting her first paycheck had been replaced by a different actress strutting around in attractive outfits, and figured that it was an updated Chase commercial. But it wasn’t. It was a commercial for Talbot’s clothing.

Anyway, that today’s blog but there is a lesson here. For Chase it may be that the next time they buy the rights to a song they should make sure they have an exclusive. For marketers, it may just point out that with all the new and technologically advanced consumer touch points in their marketing arsenal, sometimes there’s no replacement for a song that consumers can’t get out of their heads!

If You're So Smart...

A number of regular Keyhole readers contacted us regarding last Tuesday’s “Bad Ad” blog with comments that can best be summarized with the phrase “if you’re so smart let’s see what you think is a good ad!”

OK, here’s one for the online retailer Bluefly. Go to the link below and then come back. We’ll wait for you.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wSCoYi_tGRc&eurl=http%3A%2F%2Fflypaper%2Ebluefly%2Ecom%2F

Customer service (including the attribute “overnight delivery”) has become a more important differentiator for both clicks and brick retailers. Some of them even know that. But as we’ve said before, you can get the strategy right but if you can’t crack the problem of the right creative shell, you many end up with egg on your face.

Bad Ad

We have always had a good relationship with creatives, and can honestly say that creative folks are some of our biggest fans.

Some of that’s because we always provide them with differentiating insights. Strategic grist for the creative mill, as it were. Part of it is that our loyalty metrics tend to identify BIG and engaging ideas.

But mostly it’s that we keep our opinions about the creative “shell” that goes around the strategy to ourselves. We have our territory and they have theirs. Yes, ideally there should be a partnership between strategy and creative, but there’s also metaphorical truth to the saying “good fences make good neighbors.” Want insightful ad criticism? There’s always Bob Garfield!

However, sometimes a piece of advertising reveals itself that is so egregiously bad that it raises advertising to a new low! So in the interest of truth, and as a public service, we are calling attention to it. You can find it at the link below, but just remember, we warned you!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_-vjD3ih2dk

Another advertising actuality is this: A good ad tells the truth about the brand and a bad ad tells us the truth about the agency.

Good News, Better News, Best News

Our subject for today’s blog came to us as we reviewed the 2007 Brand Keys Customer Loyalty Engagement Index results for the TV Evening News category. These assessments were gathered in January and February of this year and are based on predictive viewer loyalty and engagement assessments, not just viewership numbers, which are, of course, collected after-the-fact.

This year the show rankings are:

1. ABC
2. NBC
3. FOX
4. CNN
5. CBS
6. MSNBC

I make particular mention of this category because yesterday’s New York Times reported that for the third time in four weeks (and the second time in a row) ABC’s World News With Charles Gibson was watched by more viewers last week than NBC’s Nightly News With Brian Williams. CBS’ Evening News With Katie Couric came in a distant third. (In a related story today, CBS announced a change of producer for the show. Couric was quoted as noting that she “never obsessed about ratings,” but then, on the NBC Today Show, she never had to. Someone should point out to Couric and CBS that the most-important thing that drives viewer loyalty is “The Host”!)

When you have loyalty and engagement metrics in front of you and you’re virtually certain of market outcomes, modesty can be a vastly overrated virtue. And by anyone’s standards the correlations between our loyalty assessments and actual viewer behavior can be said to be exceptional/extraordinary/unparalleled. (Feel free to pick an adjective with which you’re comfortable. We’ve gotten used to it!)

For most consumers no news is good news. For the press, good news is no news. For marketers, the best news is that loyalty and engagement metrics provide predictive (and leading-indicator) news for any category!

Soft Core Marketing

In September 2006 we published our book, Predicting Market Success: New Ways to Measure Customer Loyalty and Engage Consumers with Your Brand. We did some on-line and traditional print advertising and the book’s been selling pretty well. But here’s a new promotional device for your interest and review.

The authors of the book, Punk Marketing, put a video on YouTube in which a sexy woman reads an excerpt from the book while slowly removing her clothing. You can see it at:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rMLIEzH_wOw

OK, she has a nice voice, so you could treat this like a book-on-tape snipit. Or you could just lean back and appreciate if for its soft porn qualities.

A small-sample test of its engagement qualities revealed that after about 30 seconds, people thought the “text” began to sound like “blah, blah, blabby blah” ambient noise and very nearly everyone ended up focusing on the strip tease, but you be the judge.

To paraphrase Noel Coward, we don’t think pornography is very harmful, but it can be terribly, terribly boring and in the marketing context, not very engaging.

Reports Of Its Death Were Greatly Exaggerated

With the arrival of a real 21st century media ecology, that is to say, an environment where consumers are virtually cocooned by media of one sort or another, media planning has gotten more and more complex. Right now we track 26 individual media touch points that marketers might use to engage and persuade consumers to the brand’s particular point-of-view.

Yes, it’s true that some media formats are more practicable than others. And – based upon our predictive Brand-to-Media Engagement metrics – some are actually more efficacious for certain categories and brands than others.

A soon-to-be-released Brand Keys study that accounts for the percent-of-contribution each of the media touch points makes for different categories to engagement and loyalty – finds that TV (cable or broadcast) generally falls into the top-10 contributors. So reports of the death of the 30-second commercial may have been a bit premature, especially in light of some average daily viewing numbers that were released at the end of last year for the Total U.S. To wit:

Total Households - 8 hrs. 32 min.
Total Persons - 4 hrs. 48 min.
Women 18+ - 5 hrs. 28 min.
Men 18+ - 4 hrs. 54 min.
Teens 12-17 - 3 hrs. 25 min.
Children 2-11 - 3 hrs. 26 min.

Groucho Marx noted that he found “television very educating. Every time somebody turns on the set, I go into the other room and read a book.” Apparently that’s not the case for everyone.