Month: December 2008

Categories
Business Directed Advertising Integrated Marketing Marketing

The Most Sexy, Surprising and Shocking Marketing Numbers of 2008

It’s the end of the year, and that means it’s time for bloggers everywhere to do one of two things:  an annual recap, or predictions for next year. I’d like to examine some marketing numbers that are in turn sexy, surprising and shocking.

SEXY

Let’s start with my favorite number of the whole year, and it’s about as sexy as a marketing number gets:  52% of  women 39-44 would rather give up sex for 2 weeks than internet access for the same period of time. It’s part of a new survey by Harris Interactive sponsored by Intel that finds that most Americans feel Internet access is essential to their lives. The survey also says that 82% say having internet enabled devices help them stay current on the economy and 87% say it’s helped them save money by:  price comparison research before buying (84%), simply shopping online (66%), or by finding coupons, discounts, or special internet-only promotions (65%).

With numbers like that, combined with the retail meltdown, rising costs of commercial space and inventory, and the uncertain cost of energy, can we as marketers continue to look at internet retailing as an ugly stepchild, with a mere fraction of advertising and marketing spending?

SURPRISING

Now my second favorite numbers: 23% and 36%. They’re the number of adults over 65 who play games, and the percentage of those who play every day. Why are they surprising? The 36% is higher than any other age group except teens.  That’s right — according to the Pew Internet Project’s Annual Gadget Survey, people over 65 play games more frequently than any other adults. A few other interesting numbers from this survey:   53% and 21%.  It’s the number of adults (18+) who play video games and the number who play every day! And of course, no surprise here:  97% of teens and 81.9% of 18-29-year olds play games.

With numbers like that, can most of us continue to ignore gaming platforms as marketing mediums any longer, or avoid figuring out an effective and hopefully respectful way to communicate with consumers using this medium?

SHOCKING

My third and final number is 16%. It’s the number of high school and college students who actually pay attention to marketing emails, according to an eROI survey reported on Marketing Charts.  And it’s shocking given that these are email super users. On average, they’ve been sending emails since they were 13, had email addresses for 8 years and have 2.4 email addresses each. They love email:  26% say it’s their favorite form of communication. (Of course, 37% choose texting.) 55% of them check their email more than 3 times a day.

And yet only 16% read marketing emails and 66% of them say that even if they read an email, they never take action afterward. (I know what you’re thinking:  a 16% open rate and a 34% conversion rate would be great, if it was your email. But that’s not an open rate, it’s an avoidance rate and it’s a nightmare for student marketers.)

With numbers like these, can we continue sending messages that are innocuous at best and spam at worst, rather than looking to use new technologies to make more engaging connections with the lucrative teenage consumer?

So, what are my predictions for next year? Sorry, my crystal ball is cracked and my prognostic abilities are more willful than prescient. For instance, some look at Twitter’s 600% growth in 2008 and the $1 Million in revenue Dell attributes to Twitter and see the next big marketing tool. I’m not sure what I see, although I wouldn’t be surprised if it gets overwhelmed with poorly conceived and executed marketing messages and become less use-worthy than it is now. (See, willful — I really don’t want to have to learn how to use Twitter.)

With sexy, surprising and shocking numbers like these concerning critical demographic groups like women, seniors and students, what I will do is leave you with one question to ponder as we enter 2009:

Can someone please explain to me how any marketers can even think of doing any business as usual in 2009?

Categories
Marketing

Shredding History to Make a Buck

A couple of weeks ago I was reading an article about Michael Eisner’s life after Disney in the Sunday NY Times and I came across a marketing gimmick that surprised me.

As you may or many not know, Eisner is the owner of Topps, the trading card company. The article mentioned an upcoming series of event-worn Topps Baseball cards, which are made by attaching pieces of a baseball uniform to trading cards.  These event-worn cards are very popular and highly collectible, precisely because only a few cards out of the whole set are actually event-worn cards. (The practice is far from new — in 1993 Press Pass started the category of event-used cards by offering redemption cards for NASCAR race-used lug nuts. Upper Deck issued the first cards with pieces of game used jerseys attached, Press Pass countered with race-worn fire suits and pieces of burnt rubber attached to the cards, and the arms race was on.)

What bothered me about this was that the uniforms Topps was cutting into tiny little pieces this time belonged to Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig.

And it didn’t just bother me.  Apparently, it bothers Mr. Eisner as well.

The article says that “Eisner, a serious art collector, is openly uneasy about the endeavor, but Scott Silverstein, the chief executive of Topps, explains that this gimmick is a big moneymaker.”

I don’t care what you do with a piece of a used rubber tire, Jeff Gordon’s racing suits, Kobe Bryant’s jersey, or even Andy Roddick’s jock strap. There are plenty of them, and you can always make more.

Some may say, “One man’s history is another man’s product line,” and in this case, unfortunately, they’d be right. Misguided, but right.

Some may argue that it’s extending the franchise, so to speak, democratizing the ownership of the collectible. Many more people can own a piece of the Babe and revel in his history, this way, than just the single collector owning the uniform. (Of course, frequently those collectors loan those items to museums, so many can benefit.)

Following that same line of thought, though, why don’t we grind up the original Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, sprinkle them into a giant milkshake, and let everyone in America drink some, thereby allowing all of us to share more deeply in our nation’s most important memorabilia.

But c’mon, Scott! Surely you could think of a couple of other ways to use these rare and historic uniforms to drive sales besides just shredding them.

Here’s just one from a friend of mine: How about putting 10 “golden” tickets into packs of baseball cards? The winners get flown to the new Yankee Stadium for the drawing, where two of them get to win the unshredded uniforms, which are then placed on temporary display at the stadium or in Cooperstown or the Smithsonian or someplace where the public can enjoy them. It’s a prize that can easily drive sales. The winners get a historic plaque, a trip onto the field at Yankee Stadium, and two of them get a valuable investment they can pass on to future generations. Plenty of sizzle and sales, with history intact.

Besides, in today’s collectible card industry, what’s so unique about one more set of cards with a sliver of fabric in them? And why stop with Ruth and Gehrig’s uniforms? Why not buy the Shroud of Turin and cut it up? I bet that would sell some cards.

Finally, have you even considered the potential for backlash? What if baseball fans and card collectors are so appalled at the lack of respect for history and tradition (which is, after all, an important part of being a baseball fan and a baseball card collector), that rather than flock to stores to buy the cards, they boycott them instead?

Mr. Eisner, I’m betting that you’ve done pretty well in your career, trusting your gut. Why are you surrendering your integrity to your CEO and his promise that if you just trust him and do what he says, everything will work out great in the end? After all, John McCain pretty much did the same thing with his integrity and it didn’t work out so well for him.

Look, I’m a marketing guy, and I’ve been party to my share of promotional innovation, especially during my years at Marvel. But there’s a line between leveraging content to engage fan interest and exploiting it in an attempt to sell product. And in my opinion, this crosses that line.

But maybe I’m wrong, and I just don’t get it. So if that’s the case, can someone please explain to me why it’s become acceptable to destroy history in the name of making a buck?

Categories
Marketing Partnerships Misleadership PR and News

Chinese Democracy, Marketing Larceny

“You can have anything you want, but you better not take it from me. ”                                 Welcome to the Jungle,  Guns N’ Roses

“I’m a pepper, he’s a pepper, she’s a pepper, we’re a pepper, wouldn’t you like to be a pepper too?”    Dr. Pepper

As you read this, Dr. Pepper finds itself in a sticky mess, entirely of its own making. This past March, Dr. Pepper declared that if Guns N’ Roses finally finished its album “Chinese Democracy” before the end of the year, Dr. Pepper would give a free soda to everyone in the country.

It probably seemed like a safe bet at the time:  Axl Rose had been working on Chinese Democracy for 13 years, an estimated $11 million dollar pipe-dream. The album had itself become a symbol of what the name implied:  something that was inevitable, but in no way imminent.

Well, G N’ R finished the album and released it on November 23, exclusively through Best Buy.

And so the Dr. Pepper Snapple Group (the company that makes Dr. Pepper) had to live up to its promise to give a 20 oz. soda to everyone in America. They intended to do this by allowing consumers to go to their website for a 24-hour period and download a coupon for the free pop. With the US population estimated at over 300 million, that means that to realistically deliver on their promise, if they ever had any intention of doing that, would have required their servers to handle an average of 12,500,000 hits an hour, or 208,333 hits a minute, or 3,472 hits a second.

Needless to say, their servers crashed and the site went down. Good thing, too, because I truly doubt Dr. Pepper’s ability to produce 300 million cans of soda by February, 2009, when the free offer redemption would end.

But I’m not here to write about a botched promotion. No, I’m here to write about a dishonest one.

You see, when Dr. Pepper first announced the promotion, Axl Rose said he was “surprised and very happy to have the support of Dr. Pepper with our album, ‘Chinese Democracy,’ as for us, this came totally out of the blue.” as reported in the LA Times.

And according to Reuters, Guns N’ Rose’s attorney Alan Guttman has written to Dr. Pepper’s CEO, saying, “that the original campaign was an “exploitation of my clients’ legendary reputation and their eagerly awaited album” and “brazenly violated our clients’ rights.” He is also seeking an “appropriate payment … for the unauthorized use and abuse of their publicity and intellectual property rights,” with the threat of further action if an acceptable offer is not made… The entire point of your campaign has been to use public interest in Axl Rose and Guns N’ Roses as a lure to increase consumer awareness of Dr Pepper.” He further states that “mocking undertones” in the online promotional content represent a “raw and damaging commercial exploitation of our clients’ rights,” adding that the association is “even more damaging in light of your shoddy execution of your disingenuous giveaway offer.”

Sounds like G N’ R had nothing to do with the promotion, right?

That may not exactly be the case according to Rolling Stone, who today reported that the Dr. Pepper Snapple Group claims that Guns N’ Roses’ own management group first approached them about a promotion, and Axl expressed support for the promotion.

But whether Guns N’ Roses knew or not, nobody is claiming that the band got paid for the promotion. And that’s the part that’s got me bubbling. After all, if 3-M stealing the Post-It Note covered car idea can get me annoyed, just think what Dr. Pepper’s public and parasitic theft of Axl’s thunder means to me.

Who at the Dr. Pepper Snapple Group decided that it would be okay to do a promotion based on an album release without compensating the band?  Are celebrities and their work now fair game?  Can I put a picture I take of Tiger Woods in an ad for Adidas? What about taking a picture of new Cover Girl Ellen Degeneres and put her in an ad for Maybelline?  Can I use a band’s songs or an artist’s painting in a commercial without paying for the right to do it? No, companies have to pay when they associate advertising and promotions with celebrities and their creativity. (Or at least get permission, as John McCain found out time after time with song after song in his campaign.)

Did they think that because they were wrapping the promotion around an event — the long awaited release of the album — rather than the actual album meant they could get away without paying? Because if they did, does that mean I can run a public, high profile promotion based on the Super Bowl? I think the NFL lawyers might have something to say about that. JK Rowling is releasing a new book tomorrow. Can I run a national promotion based on the book’s release?  People pay to sponsor and be involved with high profile events.

Maybe Dr. Pepper got confused and thought they were doing Axl Rose a favor in some perverse form of cause related marketing. (Way back in 1983 American Express ran a groundbreaking cause related marketing program for the restoration of the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island. And although they raised $1.7 million for the project, they actually weren’t an official sponsor of the project and never paid to be one.) But when you attach yourself to a non-profit through cause related marketing, the non-profit gets something for the association, usually in the form of contribution.

Or maybe it all just started as a dumb joke that grew out of control, and Dr. Pepper thinks they can wave it off. (Oh wait, they’re not waving anything off.  According to the LA Times, a spokesman released a statement that actually said “This was one of the largest responses we have ever received for a giveaway, and we’re happy we were able to satisfy the thirst of so many Dr Pepper fans.”)

No, I’m sorry, but I still can’t figure out a way to see this that doesn’t have Dr. Pepper trying to cash in on the creativity and reputation of someone else without compensating them for the relationship. But maybe I’m being stubborn and shortsighted.

So can someone please explain to me — ideally someone from Dr. Pepper Snapple Group — what exactly they thought they would gain by this ill conceived, poorly executed, and ultimately exploitative promotion?