Can someone please explain…?

Looking for reason in all the wrong places.

Lands’ End’s Big Warm Up: The best viral video I’ve ever missed

Posted by jlsimons on December 9, 2009

Lands’ End’s Big Warm Up: The best viral video I’ve ever missed

I saw a video the other day that was so good it brought tears to my eyes, which was, after all, its intention. It was so good that it powered Lands’ End customers to bring 33,267 “gently used coats” to Lands’ End shops at Sears to donate to the homeless. (If you haven’t seen it, you can see it here.)

It’s a good video. It’s powerful. It makes you feel all warm and fuzzy and makes you want to do something good for someone.

All of which is going to make me look even more curmudgeonly than normal, because I am not here to praise Lands’ End.

I think they screwed up.

I didn’t see the video until  Dec. 1, which was one day too late to actually join the Big Warm Up and donate a coat.

And that really bothered me. Because I have a gently used coat I would have gladly donated. And because I was actually in a mall with a Sears the last weekend of the promotion. And because I love good cause related marketing. I love it so much I actually co-wrote a book about it.

I wondered, how could I have missed out on this? I’m a good Lands’ End customer. I have 3-4 pairs of their pants and half a dozen of their shirts. More than that, I’m a fan. I blogged about them back in July and how they helped build direct response retail with their “Guaranteed. Period.” (R) guaranty.

So I went to my inbox (luckily, I try and keep my inbox at a lean, mean 300-400 emails) and sure enough, there it was. And it had company. Lots of company. The Lands’ End email barrage had started on Nov. 9th, and by the time it let up on November 20th I’d gotten 16 emails in 12 days.

But only 3 of those 16 emails were about the Big Warm Up. The rest were about clothes… and canvas.

The first email in the campaign, on Nov. 11, was actually the second Lands’ End email I received that day. It had the subject line, “Save 25% on a new coat & warm a heart!” Being that I’m not currently in the market for a coat, I didn’t notice that this was actually the announcement of a cause related marketing campaign at www.BigWarmUp.com.

In fact, that grand announcement was considerably quieter than the “Introducing Land’s End Canvas” email I’d gotten earlier the same day with a link to a video titled “What Will You Make of It” about the exciting, Ken Burns-ish history of Lands’ End Canvas.

The Lands’ End email tsunami continued. 4 days (and 5 emails) later I got an email with the subject line “What will you make of it?”

This was intriguing, so I opened it. It lead to an interactive site where I could “explore a unique interactive experience — then make and share my own canvas.” Wow. Canvas again.

So when I got the 15th email in 12 days, this one with the subject line, “Join us in making a difference,” I just assumed it was another email about the glories of canvas and ignored it. After all, it had the word “make” in subject line. What else could it have been?

This is a classic case that highlights the dangers of mailing too frequently. Your customers get so overwhelmed they tune out.

30,000 coats donated to the needy is a good thing by any standard, right? So do you think Lands’ End was happy with the results?

I’m not sure I would have been. Here’s why:

Way back in 2002 when Sears bought them, the NY Times reported that Lands’ End had a customer file of 30 million households. Now, not all of those households has email, and that number could be considerably smaller — or larger — by now.

30,000 coats is certainly a lot of warmth, but in terms of results, 30,000 is only 1/10th of a percent of 30 million.

On a more granular level, the email campaign was ignored by at least one ideal target: me,  a repeat customer, who makes buying decisions based on cause-related marketing and corporate philanthropy, who had a coat to donate, and who is clearly on their email list. And if they missed an easy target like me, how many others did they miss, too?

Maybe if the subject line of the first email in the campaign had led with the cause rather than a discount, I might have noticed it.

Maybe if they’d used some of their fancy personalization in the subject line instead of just in their video I might have noticed.

Maybe if they hadn’t bored me to death with their celebration of canvas and trained me to ignore their messages, I might have noticed their worthy campaign to spread the warmth.

But one thing is definite: if they hadn’t sent me 16 emails in 12 days I would have actually read the really important one.  (I’ve asked around, and I’m not the only one who missed this needle in the haystack of Lands’ End emails… or who regretted missing the opportunity to join the Big Warm Up.)

Good cause related marketing is a win-win for everyone. In this case, more coats donated to help the homeless would most likely equate to more coats sold.

This was an important campaign. So can someone please explain to me why Lands’ End quietly buried it under a pile of canvas instead of shouting it from the highest mountaintops?

And while you’re at it, can you direct me to the nearest Goodwill Donation Center? I have a coat I want to donate.

Posted in Business, Marketing, Misleadership, Relationship Marketing, Social Media, direct marketing | Tagged: , , , , , | 4 Comments »

Tough love from Google and the US Post Office

Posted by jlsimons on December 3, 2009

Two seemingly unrelated news items about the US Post Office and Google caught my attention today.

The first was an article in DM News that said that the US Post Office is intending to penalize mailers who don’t

“meet US Postal Service standards for updating mailing lists, according to Jeff Platt, director of solutions marketing for US mailing at Pitney. Those updates must be applied 95 days before the mailing. As of January 4, 2010, mailers that do not do so will be subject to additional postage of 7 cents per assessed piece.”

Previously, the USPS gave discounts to people who made their mail more efficient. Now they’re getting out the big stick and making people pay for their inefficiency rather than rewarding their efficiency.

And the second was the news that Google is changing their policy about free news content and their “First Click Free” policy. That policy says that if you find content on Google News and click on it, say, an article from the Wall St. Journal, you get to read that article for free. Click on the next article on the site and the Journal lets you know that any additional articles is only available for subscribers, and they’re happy to let you subscribe.

Google is amending their policy to allow publishers who charge for their content to “limit the number of accesses under the First Click Free policy to five free accesses per user each day.”

According to Google, “While we’re happy to see that a number of publishers are already using First Click Free, we’ve found that some who might try it are worried about people abusing the spirit of First Click Free to access almost all of their content.”

I say bravo USPS and Google.

Let’s start with the Post Office. When it comes to the USPS, like most other direct mailers I know I’ve railed against the ever-increasing fees and the amazingly complex discount and fee structure for business mailers. (If you want to wade through the 44 page PDF of the Jan 4, 2010 rates, here it is.)

As the director of integrated marketing at a channel-neutral direct marketing agency, I’m an equal opportunity employer of whatever works: direct mail, email, FedEx, twitter, text, search… you get the point. But if the post office went away, my job would get infinitely tougher.

This time, though, when the USPS institutes a fee that penalizes mailers who don’t engage in smart practices in order to help defray costs and stay afloat, I’m all for it.

Running your mailing list against NCOA won’t catch every piece of undeliverable mail, but it does catch many of them. It saves the mailer the cost of wasted printing and postage, and turns missed opportunity into the chance of a sale. Undeliverable mail that could be avoided is a terrible waste that increases the cost of mail by adding extra work for the mail carrier and the post office, all to no good end.

Now let’s talk about Google and free news. Don’t get me wrong… I get most of my news from Google, for free. I love the WSJ, and I’ll miss getting their content.

But free sample content from the WSJ, or any other publisher for that matter, has never enticed me to subscribe to that publisher, if there were a fee attached. If I encounter a fee, I just move on to the next one for free.

I admit it. I’m a freeloader. And I’ve pretty sure I’ve read more than 5 articles from the Journal over the course of a day by accessing them via Google News.

The discussion about the death of journalism has morphed into a discussion about what news organizations are doing to stay alive, and in some cases, they’re exploring pulling back their free content into models that provide better value for their value. They’re fighting for their survival, and like the USPS, my world will be worse off without them.

There are many models that can be applied to online news that don’t involve the reader paying for their content. I proposed a few here in my blog back in June. From crowdfunding (read this great piece in the Columbia Journalism  Review about the NY Times’ first crowdfunded article) to advertising-supported mega blog news sites like the Huffington Post, most  “alternatives” to traditional news still involve some form of cost defrayal.

In this ever changing world in which we live, one thing is becoming fairly obvious:  if we don’t start paying for what we use, we’re going to lose it.

We’re in the midst of one of the most challenging business cycles of our lives. We’ve seen business after business shut their doors forever. Costs are rising, credit is harder to find, competition is global and the rate of change threatens to swamp old business models that can’t evolve.

And yet there are people who complain about UPS and USPS raising their prices to reflect increased costs, or , god-forbid, a news organization like the Wall St. Journal wanting to get compensated for reporting the news.

Can someone please explain to me how you can be expected to run a business without getting fairly paid for your products or your services?

While I wait for your answer, I’m going to go out and buy a copy of the Journal. Heck, I may even decide to pay for a subscription so I can read it online — the way it should be read.

Posted in Business, Media, PR and News, Value for Value, direct marketing | Tagged: , , , , , , | 2 Comments »

I see dead people…

Posted by jlsimons on November 16, 2009

I see them everywhere… on my computer, on billboards, in the pages of magazines and on my TV screen… dead celebrities drinking champagne and dancing with vacuum cleaners and driving cars that came out decades after they were rotting in their graves.

It’s easy to see why advertisers want dead people to endorse them. Dead people are safe: they’re known quantities. It’s unlikely an ad campaign will get torpedoed by new revelations or scandals. They’ll never be accused of sexually assaulting a waitress in their hotel room or getting addicted to prescription pain killers. And even if we did find out something juicy and new about James Dean or Marilyn Monroe or Steve McQueen, would it hurt their image or just add to their mystique?

Dead celebrity endorsements are big business.

Einstein made $10 Million in 2009, according to Forbes latest annual list of top earning dead celebrities.  All the way back in the 2006 edition of the Forbes list, Corbis image licensing said Albert Einstein was their most requested person. As Tony Soprano might say, “Einstein is a good earner.” Of course, in his case, his earnings go to a good cause. The Hebrew University of Jerusalem gets the cash, including a share from Baby Einstein (Disney), although how would Albert have felt about their recent settlement for misleading claims of jump starting juvenile intelligence? Do you think he’d be proud that being a character in Night at the Museum ended up with him as part of a Happy Meal movie tie-in at McDonald’s?

If you want to hire a dead celebrity like Marilyn Monroe to sell your products, just click on over to the Legends Media Archive. You’ll find advertising-friendly images for dead celebs from John Belushi, Ingrid Bergman and Ty Cobb to Jackie Robinson, Mark Twain and Natalie Wood.

Live celebrities are no better. Some of them have even tarnished their reputations by becoming product hucksters. Are you old enough to remember when Orson Welles did commercials for Paul Masson wine: “We will sell no wine before its time.” More recently, we all had to cringe when Ed McMahon made a Cash4Gold commercial his last role.

But whether you think they sold out or not, it was their choice. Nobody forced them to make those commercials.

The dead can’t do that.

These dead celebrities have been stripped of their most basic right: the right to self-determination, to choose what they do or do not do. They are slaves to the choices of their estates, or of the people who own the copyright on their images.

Some cultures honor their dead. We exploit ours.

There’s nothing illegal about it, although the FTC is considering new regulations concerning celebrity endorsements, according to this blog post by Jonathan Faber, licensing expert and former president of “CMG Worldwide, Inc., whose clients include Marilyn Monroe, James Dean, Babe Ruth, Chuck Berry, Princess Diana…”

One of the proposed new rules is that “Advertisers should only use endorsements of celebrities if the advertiser believes that a celebrity subscribes to the views presented.” (Not a problem for the Marilyn Dom Perignon campaign, since it was her favorite champagne, or Steve McQueen driving a Ford Mustang, which he did famously in the 1968 cop classic, Bullitt.)

But this post isn’t about morality or legality. This post is about marketing.

The point of celebrity endorsement advertising is to make a connection between the celebrity’s persona, the product and the audience. If a celebrity swears by it, that’s good enough for me.

When done wrong, it can backfire. Who would believe that Paris Hilton ever ate at Carl’s Jr. or that Tiger Woods, one of the richest athletes in history and currently the top earning athlete endorser actually drives a Buick.

When done right, it can build a brand. When Brooke Shields said that nothing came between her and her Calvins, Calvin Klein became the must-have designer jean.

But what’s right about using a dead person to endorse your product? Does having David Spade talking to a now dead Chris Farley make you more likely to want to get Direct TV, or less? How many people went out and bought a Dirt Devil because some art director used special effects to force Fred Astaire to dance with one?

I know vampires and zombies are all the rage these days, but can someone please explain to me why anyone thinks a dead celebrity who never used a product can make a convincing sales pitch to the living?

Posted in Branding, Business, Marketing, Misleadership | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 2 Comments »

Taxi Cab Technology

Posted by jlsimons on November 6, 2009

I took a cab this morning on my way from Grand Central to the Javits Center for AdTech NY. If you haven’t taken a cab in NYC recently, you may not know that most of them now have TV screens mounted in the center of the back of the front seat. It’s part of a unit that allows you to pay for your ride by credit card.

As a marketer, I love the idea of this media channel. You’ve got a captive audience with nothing better to do than watch the screen. What better place to advertise local restaurants, Broadway shows, clubs, stores and events?

Only that’s not what was on the screen. Instead I saw a few minimalist news items sandwiched in between commercials that had nothing to do with my location, my situation or even NYC at all.

I turned the programming off, to be greeted by a static NBC screen that promised that by watching this I would in fact find out what was going on in the city I was in.

I asked the cabbie if it was always like this. With an exasperated tone in his voice he told me what it’s like to listen to this same inane commercial ridden loop of content all day long. Even when one passenger turned it off, it turned itself on again every time the meter was started for the next passenger. Sometimes there were commercials for Saturday Night Live, but that’s as good as it got.

I asked the cab driver if at least he got a share of the revenue, to which he responded that it was worse than that:  he had to pay for it, 5% on all his credit card fares. He figured it cost him over $1000 a year.

When I got to the Javits Center I left the cabbie a good tip, in cash, and went inside to a day filled with presentations by some of the most forward thinking marketers on the planet. There was even one about place-based ad networks, a category that includes the screen in the back of my cab.

As I listened to case studies of personalized advertising delivered on high tech devices at the perfect moment to make a meaningful connection with the recipient and discussions about using semantic filters and advanced behavioral modeling to provide ever better targeting, my mind kept wandering to the backseat of that cab.

Our industry is in the midst of tremendous change: new technologies, new methodologies, new media channels, and new ways of listening to and engaging with our customers.

But can someone please explain to me what good all that technology is if we don’t have the skill to use it appropriately?

 

 

Posted in Business, Media, Misleadership | Tagged: , , , , | 6 Comments »

Are you a victim of Commercialus Interruptus?

Posted by jlsimons on October 28, 2009

Has this ever happened to you?

Your commercial for Romano’s Macaroni Grill Dinner Kits is running on a cable tv network like Food Network. Everything is going well, happy people cooking food at home that’s every bit as good as it would be at the restaurant.

“Just add your chicken and cook for 20 minutes. Romano’s Macaroni Grill Dinner Kits… the restaurant favorites that…”

and then, suddenly,

“How rough are your dry cracked feet? Now there’s Heeltastic”… as a woman takes a sandblaster to her bare feet.

Mmmm…that’s tasty.

You’ve just joined the ranks of thousands of advertisers who suffer from Commercialus Interruptus, a tragic, embarrassing affliction that is, sad to say, occurring with increasing frequency among anyone who advertises on cable television.

Why does it happen? More importantly, why does it seem to be spreading? I first noticed it on the Food Network, but now I’ve seen it on Comedy Central, TNT, TBS, USA, CNN and many other stations too traumatized to allow themselves to be mentioned in public.

Uninformed theories abound, some of them no better than old wives tales. Some say the advertiser couldn’t afford the full slot and is willing to settle for less. Some say it’s because the advertiser didn’t pay the bill. I’ve even seen someone post that they think it happens when the person running the commercials at the station is in training and screws it up.

Commercialus Interruptus can happen to anyone, no matter how famous or successul. Whether you’re Billy Mays or Bob the Enzyte Guy, you too can have your pitch prematurely pre-empted by a puzzling 2-second snippet of a mop in bed banging against a radio alarm clock.

The most promising theory I’ve found suggests that the problem arises from scheduling or programming conflicts between commercials that are running nationally at the same time as ones that are just running in local markets.

But there have always been national stations and local affiliates, and there have always been national media buys and local. And I don’t know about you, but I don’t remember this happening as frequently even a few years ago as it does now. (I refuse to believe it has anything to do with getting older.)

I know what you’re thinking: this could never happen to your commercials. Your commercials run their full 30 seconds and never, ever end prematurely.

But how can you really know? Do you get full playbacks of every single commercial you run? Do you believe the networks would tell you the truth knowing that it would hurt your feelings and, perhaps, damage your self-confidence?

I thought so.

There must be an answer out there. We do not have to simply roll over and allow ourselves to be stigmatized. We do not have to be victims.

So can someone please explain to me what really causes Commercialus Interruptus , and more importantly, what we can do to stop it?

Posted in Business, Marketing, Media, Misleadership | Tagged: , , , , , | Leave a Comment »

Delivery Confirmation Consternation

Posted by jlsimons on October 15, 2009

The other day my wife and daughter and I went for a walk. It had been raining on and off, and now the sun had broken through the clouds and we needed to get outside.

As we walked past one of the units in our garden apartment building, I noticed a USPS package in front of the door to Unit A.

Since I was expecting a package, I went up to check. We’ve only been living in this apartment for about a month, but in that time the Post Office had delivered Unit A’s mail to us in Unit C more than once, so I figured it was only a matter of time before the reverse happened.

The package was actually in the right place, Unit A, except for two minor details. First, Unit A was empty and had been for over a week since the tenants moved out. But more importantly, the package had a Delivery Confirmation label on it.

Now I don’t expect the U.S. Post Office to be mind readers. If someone moves without filing a Change of Address notification, I don’t expect them to peep into a window to find out that the residence is empty. (Although, in this case, since the blinds were up and the apartment was clearly vacant, it wouldn’t have been that hard to guess.)

But I do expect them to deliver on the specific features of a service someone paid extra money for. Here’s the U.S.P.S’s own definition of Delivery Confirmation, from their website:

Verify delivery with Delivery Confirmation.

Our low cost Delivery Confirmation service gives you the date, ZIP Code™ and time your article was delivered. If delivery was attempted you will get the date and time of attempted delivery. You can easily access this information with our Track & Confirm tool.

And from their Delivery Confirmation FAQ:

The customer will be provided the following information about items mailed with Delivery Confirmation:

  • If item was delivered:  the date and time of delivery
  • If delivery was attempted but not successful:  the date and time of the attempt

By what definition is leaving a box in the rain in front of an empty apartment a successful delivery?

I assume it wasn’t an attempted delivery, because that implies that the box wouldn’t have been left there. Although, technically, I guess it was an attempted delivery after all, but probably not in the way the sender was expecting.

As a direct marketer, I’ve had my share of unpleasant surprises from the Post Office. We once did a mailing in the Phoenix, AZ area where the variety of reasons for returned mail was so astounding and inconsistent that our regional rep could only laugh and offer some potential off-the-record explanations that could get them in trouble if I repeated them here. And we all remember the bad old days when Postal Carriers were getting busted for dumping catalogs or storing commercial mail in their lockers and garages.

But for me, this was over the line. I’m not going to get into comparisons with FedEx or UPS, because if you’re like me, you’ve been confounded by their occasional screw ups too. And I’m not going to conflate this into an indictment of  government incompetence and the “public option” like some congressmen or pundits have been doing these days.

But can someone please explain to me what was going through that mail carrier’s head when he or she chose to leave that package in the rain in front of a vacant apartment in spite of the sender having paid extra to know when it was delivered, or if not successful, when delivery was attempted?

Posted in Business, Misleadership, direct marketing | Tagged: , , | Leave a Comment »

How to Make Scrapple Less Appetizing

Posted by jlsimons on October 8, 2009

Have you ever eaten Scrapple? It’s gastronomically ghoulish, made up of pig or hog offal (liver, heart, head, and anything else left over) that’s smashed into a mushy paste, sliced and then fried on a grill slathered in fat.

I know, I know, you’re wondering  what could possibly make something that good tasting that’s also good for you be any less desirable?

The answer is:  Hoovers.

I was doing research the other day on Jones Dairy Farm and banged into the Hoovers profile for the company. You can read the public profile here. In that profile, Hoovers says that

The links on this company’s Web site are of the edible variety. Jones Dairy Farm produces sausage, bacon, ham, and more…In 1981 Jones Dairy Farm acquired Ralph and Paul Adams, Inc., which markets Rape Scrapple.”

Rape Scrapple?

Now some of you may know that I’m a mostly vegetarian, except for one day a year when I gorge on Hot Pastrami at Katz’s Delicatessen in NYC for my birthday, and maybe the occasional classic hot dog from a classic hot dog stand I may come across in my travels. But before I met my wife and became a vegetarian, I’d never met an animal I wouldn’t happily eat. So my vestigial meat-eater’s senses perked up when I read “Rape Scrapple.”

I had to know what tasty extras they put into ordinary Scrapple to make it into Rape Scrapple.

Alas, the truth is that the only way to make  Rape Scrapple is through typographic error.

It turns out that Ralph and Paul Adams, Inc. make Rapa Scrapple, not Rape Scrapple, and have since 1926. In fact, according to their website, they are the largest producer of Scrapple in the world. The name Rapa comes from taking a little bit from Ralph and a little bit from Paul and mixing them together, in not too dissimilar a way from the way they make the Scrapple portion of Rapa Scrapple.

Searching on Google turns up numerous repetitions of the Hoover’s Rape Scrapple error, passed blithely along to unsuspecting searchers by Answers.com, numerous contacts on DemandBase.com, AAAA’s Smartbrief, and of course, the ever popular but highly dangerous varta.rr.nu/germany-dialing/xionghim (NOTE: Don’t check this out: it’s a reported attack site!!!)

I think it’s safe to assume Hoovers made the first typo, and it was simply picked up by other companies that reference or license the Hoover’s information, since the Hoovers free profile says:

“Produced by Hoover’s in-house editorial team, the Company Description tracks ownership transitions, company progress via mergers and acquisitions, major growth milestones, and strategic initiatives, to provide a holistic view of Jones Dairy Farm’s evolution in the marketplace.”

Clearly Rape Scrapple is just a typo. Somebody inadvertently changed an “a” to an “e.”

So what’s the big deal?

The big deal is that Hoovers is a D&B company, and their stock in trade is corporate research. Hoovers made the mistake, and then they failed to catch it, and  it got picked up and repeated across the Internet (where it will most likely stay forever) by people who have reason to trust Hoovers to get it right.

Now I’m not suggesting that some potential investor or business person doing their due diligence will choose not to invest in or do business with Jones Dairy Farm because they make Rape Scrapple.

But can someone please explain to me why, if Hoovers can’t catch a simple error like this, we should trust them to get the financials correct? Or the media spend?  Or the annual sales?

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to microwave a Morningstar Farms Vegetarian Sausage Patty and pretend it’s Scrapple. It’s not the same, but then again, maybe that’s a good thing.

Posted in Business, Media, Misleadership, PR and News | Tagged: , , , , | 2 Comments »

If Lee Marvin were alive today he’d kick Don Draper’s ass

Posted by jlsimons on October 1, 2009

So I’ve got the place all to myself the other day and I’m watching The Dirty Dozen on AMC.

It’s bad enough that they’ve edited the hell out of this classic and see fit to interrupt me every few minutes with commercials, turning a 150-minute testosterone thrill ride into a slogging, 210-minute endurance test.

But I’ve got a DVR, so I’ve given the movie a head start and I’m racing through the endless commercial interruptions, jumping from scene to violent scene. I mean, it’s The Dirty Dozen:  Lee Marvin, Charlie Bronson, Jim Brown, John Cassavetes, Telly Savalas and company killing Nazis…it doesn’t get tougher than this.

Then we get to one of the few scenes where there’s no action at all, and Lee Marvin’s got me riveted to the screen with just a hard look, a bottle of scotch, and his gravelly voice, when suddenly, in the lower left corner of the screen there’s this hot chick in sexy lingerie standing in a doorway exhorting me to watch Mad Men — and she’s totally blocking Lee Marvin’s face!

Did the sexy chick make me want to watch Mad Men? Not one bit — quite the opposite, in fact. Nor did that slick Don Draper guy in the 1960’s suit that stood in the same left corner later on, blocking a scene where a real mad man was actually killing something. Nor the next time the sexy chick came back…nor the time after that, nor the…you get the picture. (Where’s Maggot when you need him? Hey, it’s an inside joke — if you don’t get it, watch the movie.)

What’s AMC’s plan? Do they think that somehow, somebody who has avoided tuning in to watch Mad Men for the last 3 seasons will be swayed suddenly by the sexy chick in the lower left corner? Or that somebody who is already watching Mad Men will suddenly go, “Oh my god, that’s right, I nearly forgot that I love Mad Men and I must make a note to watch it the next time it’s on. That Don Draper is so tough.”

Now I’m pretty sure there’s no intelligence behind the timing of the tune-in ads. They didn’t plan to obscure Lee Marvin with the sexy chick, it just worked out that way because nobody who cared was paying attention.

And that’s my point. AMC is supposed to be a channel about movies for people who love movies. In their own words, “Story Matters Here. Dedicated to American movie fans featuring popular movies and original productions. Long Live Cool.”

Does anybody else remember when AMC walked the walk they still talk? They were all about great old movies… and they played them without commercials. Sure, sometimes they edited them for content, but I could overlook that — what’s a few deleted expletives between friends?

But as bad as that got, at least they weren’t obscuring critical content with their own tune-in ads for their original TV shows. (TV Shows? Don’t they understand that if I want a good cable TV show, I’ll watch HBO or Showtime?)

It all comes down to respect. AMC doesn’t respect me. (At least not the way TCM does!) To AMC, I’m just an eyeball to be advertised to, whenever they want, as much as they possibly can, regardless of what I’m watching, in whatever inappropriate manner they think will work this week.

Can someone please explain to me why — in this day and age when dozens of commercial-free movie networks are just a click away, when I can download movies from Netflix instantly, or watch them On Demand — AMC still thinks any self-respecting movie fan will swallow their disrespect?

Maybe that kind of thinking used to work in the fictional 1960’s in which Mad Men is set, but it doesn’t fly now. And if Lee Marvin were alive today, he’d kick Don Draper’s ass for dissing The Dirty Dozen. Long live cool.

Posted in CRM, Media, Misleadership | Tagged: , , , , , | 3 Comments »

Costco Direct Mail Fail

Posted by jlsimons on September 24, 2009

I just received my membership renewal notice from Costco, and I was astounded by their blatant failure to apply one of the most basic rules of direct marketing:  give me a reason to buy!

There were at least 3 offers to upgrade my Gold Star (or Basic) Membership to an Executive Membership for an additional $50. The most prominent of these offers was a Yes! box on the reply “portion” (their lackluster word, not one my agency would ever use) of the renewal notice.

Since Gold Star Membership only costs $50, I was intrigued to know what extras I would get for double the price.

I looked on the front of the notice. Nothing. They spent a whole panel encouraging me to sign up for exclusive online offers and shop online, but not a single word about why I should upgrade my membership — at the exact moment in our relationship when I was about to take action to renew my membership!

I looked on the back of the notice, where they directed me to find instructions for upgrading to an Executive Membership. Sure enough, there were instructions… but no list of features and benefits or any kind of explanation of Executive Membership.

I looked at the inserts. There was one for Ameriprise Auto Insurance. Nothing there about Executive Membership.

There was an insert for the TrueEarnings Card from Costco and American Express Card. And miracle of miracles, it mentioned that with the TrueEarnings Card, you can earn 1% in addition to the 2% rewards “you’re already earning” with your Costco Executive Membership. But nothing else.

Just for fun, I went to the Costco website and looked up Executive Membership. Here’s what I found:

Executive Membership is our highest level of membership. Executive Members enjoy an annual 2% Reward on most Costco purchases, as well as additional values on member services, such as lower prices on check printing, auto loans and identity protection; larger Costco Cash card amounts for mortgage, real estate and home equity transactions; an account bonus for money market and online investing accounts; free roadside assistance for vehicles covered through the auto insurance program; and extra travel benefits.

That’s not a bad offer: Cash rewards, better benefits, extra features. At 2% cash back, I can even figure out my annual purchases and see that if I spend over $2,500 a year, the upgrade more than pays for itself. And that’s not even including the value of extras and account bonuses.

It’s a good story, one that might have convinced me to upgrade my membership, if it were anywhere at all on the Renewal Notice.

Direct mail isn’t rocket science. There’s a set of time-tested basic rules, a wider set of tested-into best practices, and some basic mindsets. A good direct marketing agency (like mine, Tanen Directed Advertising) knows how to apply these time after time to generate predictable, successful results.

But it doesn’t take a direct mail expert to know that if you want to upsell someone to a product or service that costs twice as much, you’ve got to give them a reason why.

Did they just forget? Were they trying to drive me to the website or the phone to get more info because they’ve tested into it and learned that they actually upgrade more memberships that way? Or did their lettershop screw up and fail to insert the buckslip extolling the features and benefits of upgrading to Executive Membership?

Since this blog is based on the premise that if we knew the reasons behind some seemingly incomprehensible choices those choices would make more sense, can someone please explain to me why Costco thought they could get me to fork over an extra $50 without telling me why? (And Costco, if there isn’t a good reason, give me a call. My agency can really improve your membership renewal mailings.)

Posted in Business, CRM, Directed Advertising | Tagged: , , , , , | Leave a Comment »

Are you my baby’s daddy? Oops… just kidding!

Posted by jlsimons on September 14, 2009

Have you heard the one about the beautiful blonde Danish woman named Karen who went on YouTube in search of her baby’s father, a tourist with whom she had a one night stand a year and a half ago? Turns out it was all a hoax, courtesy of the Danish government tourism bureau, VisitDenmark.

I found out about this on Mashable, perhaps the greatest blog covering all things Web 2.0 and Social Media. According to Mashable, the video got over 800,000 views on YouTube before it was taken down. If you hurry, you can still see it here on this Australian 9 News site.

More from Mashable, “…by her own admission, the woman in the video is an actress named Ditte Arnth Jorgensen and the baby is not hers. According to Danish newspaper Ekstra Bladet, it’s a hoax created by the Danish government’s tourism agency… It seems that the Danish government opted for quite a radical approach in luring tourist to the country; as they say, any publicity is good publicity.”

Now, it’s easy to get outraged by the hoax, as comments on the YouTube video proved. There were people who felt sorry for Karen, and then felt abused when they found out it was a hoax.

Setting aside the moral issue, I’d like to look at it from purely a marketing point of view.

I’m not against hoax marketing, if it’s done right and delivers a high degree of value to the people being hoaxed. Sega’s Beta-7 is a classic of the genre. FastCompany did a great post-mortem article about the campaign and Campfire, the viral agency that created Beta-7, and before that, the Blair Witch Project, reporting that:

“Beta-7″ ultimately clocked some 2.2 million followers and, for $300,000 (excluding TV spots), helped Sega top sales projections by 25% in a category overwhelmingly dominated by Madden. Along the way, however, Campfire had done something else: It proved that a young, cynical, media-saturated audience just might be willing to listen to marketers as long as they showed some respect. “The virtue of their work,” says ESPN’s Daly, “is that if you’re on the side of the equation that believes [the hoax], then it’s fascinating, and if you’re on the side that gets that it’s not real, then it’s just great entertainment.”

I think the key to successful hoax marketing is best summed up by Harry Anderson, the actor/magician who played lovable con artist Harry the Hat on Cheers and Judge Harry T. Stone on Night Court. Back in the 80’s I saw his live act at Caroline’s, basically a celebration of misdirection and the con. In bit after bit, as he tricked us while blatantly telling us he was tricking us and still got away with it, he made the point that you can take a victim’s money as long as you entertain him for it.

The Danish video certainly delivered entertainment value. It was compelling and engaging. It might deliver a great ROI and boost Danish tourism. (It even had a bit of mischief of which Harry the Hat might have approved: the word “Ad” is in the background as part of an innocuous piece of art.)

But the message it delivered was that the Danish Board of Tourism is willing to dupe you into visiting their country. If they’re willing to do that, what other practices may they condone? Bait and switch hotel packages? Cab drivers who overcharge tourists for trips to the airport? “Official” currency exchanges with rip-off rates?

And how’s this for a mixed message? In the video, Karen says that it was a discussion of “hygge” — the Danish word for a warm, fuzzy, cozy, comfortable feeling of well being (according to Wikipedia) — that led to the one night stand. (Don’t you feel warm and fuzzy knowing that the Danish government is willing to lie to you to get you into bed with them?)

What kind of tourist do you think an advertising message like this will attract to Denmark? If I were a Danish woman (or the father of one) I’d be appalled at my government right about now.

In the end, just because you can use an advertising tactic doesn’t mean you should.

So can someone please explain to me why VisitDenmark chose to advertise the warm and fuzzy nature of their culture with a hoax that is exactly the opposite of the brand character they were hoping to portray?

Posted in Branding, Business, Marketing, Media, Misleadership, Social Media, Value for Value | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , | 4 Comments »

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