Author: jlsimons

I’m a storyteller who has spent my life focused on the things people do for fun, from games and hobbies to comic books and podcasts. I love building and managing teams of incredible people and empowering them to do the best, most fun and fulfilling work of their careers. I am also a senior level marketing executive with a unique blend of over 34 years of podcast marketing, social media community building, promotional partnerships, advertising, interactive, branding, marketing, paid and organic search, direct response, analytics, and game design. Along the way, I've built a leading podcast brand and a million-plus-subscriber YouTube channel, created multinational promotions for global brands, and co-desiged critically acclaimed collectible card and role-playing games.
Oh yeah, and I write science fiction.

Specialties: Podcast marketing, social media community building, promotional partnerships, integrated marketing, social media, strategic marketing, alternate channels, direct response, corporate marketing, copywriting, advergaming, game design and development, financial advertising

Categories
Between Faith and Rationality Business Marketing

Between Faith and Rationality

There’s a spot in New York City, on 5th Avenue between 51st and 50th Streets. If you go there late at night, or early on New Year’s Day, you can actually stand in the deserted center of one of the busiest avenues in the city.  The spot itself isn’t remarkable — it’s what’s around you. To your left is St. Patrick’s Cathedral and to your right is the statue of Atlas in front of Rockefeller Center.

In other words, you are literally standing between one of the world’s greatest expressions of faith and one of mankind’s most enduring symbols of science, technology and rationality.

Whenever I’ve stood in this spot, the juxtaposition of life’s two great themes has added valuable clarity into the confusion of my choices and challenges.

As we begin a new year with its delineation, both artificial and realistic, between what came before and what comes next, I think it is important to keep these two themes in their proper place.

The challenges of business, marketing and our personal lives and finances which this new year will bring will seem unexpected and insurmountable to some, expected and easily addressed by others.

When you look at life as a continual set of challenges and opportunities, when you have a method for addressing problems rationally and intelligently, applying the right tools or the right processes and then testing the outcome before moving ahead, this year’s challenges are no more daunting than last year’s.

When you have faith in your own abilities and in your own ethical core, you have the strength to face any new challenges and opportunities because you have the sure knowledge that you are up to the task, and that even if you fail at times, you will not give up and eventually will find the answer or solution.

It is only when we confuse faith and rationality, and attempt to use faith as a tool to reach our goal, that we are doomed to failure. Faith is a feeling, not a tool.

I had a client who attended a Small Business luncheon and was told by an expert consultant that she needed a blog and that it would help her business. She believed the speaker, and came to my agency and said, “I need a blog.”

We discussed why she wanted a blog. We rationally explored who would be interested in reading it, and came to the conclusion that the way in which her customers find her business and what they want out of it would not be enhanced by a blog. We discussed the amount of time and effort it takes to maintain a blog, and compared it to other expenditures of effort which could have a direct impact on new customer acquisition and repeat business.

When we were done, her belief that she needed a blog and her faith in the speaker/consultant was replaced with a rational assessment of blogs and their ability to deliver ROI for her business at this time.

The conversation reminded me of the now classic, cliche conversation from the mid-90’s:

“I need a website.”
“Why?”
“Everybody else has one.”
“What do you want the site to do for your business?”
“I don’t know. I just know that I need one.”

We all know how well that turned out.

Now is the time to have faith in our ability to use our rationality to navigate the challenges ahead and come out of them stronger, smarter, and more able to succeed at the hard tasks at hand for our nation, our businesses and our selves.

It is not the time to reignite the war between faith and rationality that has divided and handicapped us for centuries.

So can someone please explain to me why something that’s so easy to see on 5th Avenue is so much harder to see in our own lives?

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?

Categories
Integrated Marketing PR and News Social Media

Dead…dead…dead

I don’t know about you, but I’m getting a little tired of hearing:

“Blogging is dead.”

“Newspapers are dead.”

“Email is dead.”

“The 30-second commercial is dead.”

“Print is dead.”

“Magazines are dead.”

“Paid search is dead.”

“Affiliate marketing is dead.”

“Behavioral targeting is dead.”

“Pop-ups are dead.”

“Friendster is dead.”  Well, okay, I’ll give you that one.

What is it with this feeding frenzy to pronounce media channels and tactics dead?

I’m as guilty as the next marketing guy. The account people at my agency, Tanen Directed Advertising, are getting sick of hearing me gleefully pronounce newspapers dead, as if I’ve somehow got a stake in the sale of their headstones and caskets.

And I’m just as wrong as everyone else, too, at least about Friendster and newspapers.

Friendster isn’t dead… it’s just different. 85 million members strong isn’t dead. It’s just moved to the Phillipines and Southeast Asia. (39% of it members are in the Phillipines.) But even in the US,  Friendster gets 2.6 million monthly unique visitors according to Quantcast.

Newspapers aren’t dead either, they’re just moving online. According to a Nielsen Online report done for the Newspaper Association of America, newspaper websites had 68.3 million unique visitors on average in Q3 2008, which is nearly 41.4% of all internet users, and is up 15.8% over the same period last year. It was also a record for page views, just over 3.5 billlion per month, which is 25.2% higher than the same quarter last year and the highest since the NAA started tracking it in 2004. The same quarter set records for page views, pages per person, time spent per person, and visits per person. In other words, more people are visiting newspaper websites more often, spending more time there, and getting more information there. (And those sites accept advertising.)

I just saw a great video interview with Michael Rosenblum at the Society of Editors conference 2008. He talks about how newspapers have a great, but dwindling window of opportunity, to retain and capitalize on delivering news to their audiences, as long as they keep the news and get rid of the paper. It’s worth watching, especially for his analogy of the death of the whale oil industry in New Bedford, and it’s here on Diablogue. (I’d also be remiss if I didn’t mention Seth Godin’s great post, “Do you own trees?” from all the way back in June of this year.)

We live in interesting times. The rate of change is amazing. Blogging, just barely out of the womb, is being declared dead yet again. (For a great post and history of Blogging obituaries, see B.L. Ochman’s What’s Next Blog post, “The Annual Death of Blogging is Baaaaaack!” here. )

This is what media fragmentation looks like. This is what technological revolution and social upheaval looks like.

Everything is changing, but that doesn’t mean it’s dying. Shrinking, retrenching, transforming… but not dying. And yet we seem obsessed with premature declarations of death that set the stage for us to glorify and justify the media channel or tactic that we like much better… this week.

Can somebody please explain to me when we’re going to grow up, consign “…is dead” to the trash heap of overdone phrases (along with “…is the new black”) and start seeing the turmoil for the opportunity it represents?

Categories
Branding Misleadership

Cover-Up Exposed: The Death of the Maytag Repairman

Do you remember the movie “Dave?”  In the 1993 political comedy, the President suffers a stroke while having an affair, and rather than let the public know, his Chief of Staff and Communications Director convince a look-alike to impersonate him.

In a conspiracy reminiscent of the movie, a much loved popular icon died recently, and rather than let him go, his handlers have conspired to make us think he’s still alive.

I’m talking about the Maytag Repairman, that lonely symbol of stoic superfluity in the face of unwavering reliability, a commercial icon who has been with us since 1967.

I’m not complaining about the latest actor to play Ol’ Lonely, Clay Earl Jackson, who replaced Hardy Rawls, who replaced Gordon Jump, who replaced Jesse White, the original Maytag Repairman.

No, I’m complaining about something that actually matters: brand integrity.

You see, the point of the Maytag repairman was that he was lonely because Maytags were so reliable that there was nothing for Ol’ Lonely to do. It was the core of Maytag’s brand image, the way Volvos are safe, Coke is refreshing and Apple is cool. “Built Strong to Last Long” says the Maytag website.

I was having lunch with my friend Steve the other day, and he told me something shocking. His Maytag broke down, more than once, and in the ensuing nightmare Steve found out that Maytag doesn’t service their own products anymore. They subcontract to third party repairmen through a third party customer support line.

In other words, the Maytag Repairman does not actually work for Maytag anymore.

Not that you’d know it from the language on their website: “To help you depend on your Maytag appliance for years to come, we’ve handpicked the best maintenance and service technicians.” And if you do need help, they’ve made it easy for you to schedule an appointment: “Skip the phone call and schedule an appointment online right now.” After all, they wouldn’t want you to talk to a live customer support representative who might spill the beans about their domestic outsourcing.

Another thing you might not easily learn from their website is that Maytag was bought by Whirlpool on April Fools Day, 2006. (No joke:  Wikipedia says April 1, although the Whirlpool corporate site says March 31. What a difference a day makes.) According to the Maytag article on Wikipedia, the plants would be closed within a year, most employees terminated, and the Board of Directors and CEO given 5 years severance. The name, however, would continue to be used on re-branded Whirlpool appliances. And obviously, so too the Maytag Repairman.

The Maytag site won’t tell you any of this. The beautifully produced flash Maytag Timeline goes all the way to 2007 and neglects to mention the sale.

In “About Maytag”, under “Corporation” there is in fact a link to Whirlpool, “Our Parent Company” as well as mentions in the press releases. And even though the “Investors” link says “Read the latest news and press releases from Maytag and Whirlpool Corporation” it takes you straight to the Whirlpool site… and then promptly disses Maytag.  Right there, in the Corporate Profile, it says “Whirlpool’s primary brand names — KitchenAid, Roper, Bauknecht, Ignis, Brastemp, Consul and its global Whirlpool brand — are marketed in more than 170 countries worldwide. Whirlpool Corporation is a significant supplier to Sears Holdings Corporation, which owns and controls the Kenmore brand name.”

Did you see Maytag listed?  Me neither.

Even worse, Kenmore was listed. Now I’m really worried. I was raised trusting Kenmore, and if Whirlpool has brought the same care and consideration to Kenmore that it’s brought to Maytag, I may have to switch to LG.

While the death of the Maytag repairman may come as a shock to you and me, customer review sites like BizRate and RateItAll are filled with uniformly negative reviews by customers who discovered he was gone the hard way. From their high end machines to their low, washing machines to refrigerator/freezers, the majority of the reviews all basically say the same thing:  Don’t buy Maytag. “Broke twice in a year and a half.” “We were warned but didn’t listen.” “Nightmare on Elm Street doesn’t compare.” “Buy at your own peril — Maytag’s folly.” “Extended service plan is awful.”

Interestingly, some of the customers say they bought their lemons because of positive online reviews. I did see professional reviews by a company named alaTest.co.Uk that were uniformly glowing and served to raise the overall ratings, at least on Biz Rate.

But when I went to Consumer Reports, I found that in the one category I checked, Washing Machines, Maytag was the most repair-prone among front loaders and second most among top loaders. (I wonder what Consumer Reports says about alaTest.co.uk?)

To sum up:  a company that built its brand reputation on quality and reliability, that took everything they stood for and created an iconic brand image symbolized by one of the most memorable advertising campaigns of all time, is not only not reliable, it isn’t even a real company anymore.

And yet, the Maytag Repairman is still starring in commercials, spewing an empty promise, like a long gone Fred Astaire dancing with a vacuum or a ghastly computer generated Orville Redenbacher shilling popcorn. Dead men walking.

In this day and age, can a brand actually believe that it can get away with pretending to be something that it’s not?  Is a brand reliable just because it says it is?  Is misleadership a virtue now?

I subscribe to the belief that a brand is the conversation its stakeholders have about it, not the marketing propaganda it spews at consumers.

So can someone please explain to me how long we’re going to allow this unholy zombie of a Maytag Repairman to walk among us before we get our torches and send it flaming into the blackness where it belongs?


Categories
Marketing Partnerships Misleadership PR and News Relationship Marketing Social Media

Obama and the AKC: Another Shaggy Dog Story?

Back on July 10th, in my post “Is Obama Going To The Dogs?” I wrote about the Presidential Pup website where the AKC was holding an election to decide which dog the Obama girls should get. I wrote in glowing terms about what I thought was an excellent and timely marketing partnership.

And a successful one… at least for the AKC. Since they started, there have been 42,000 votes and a clear spike in traffic. According to Quantcast, site visits to AKC.org, which were hovering around 2.5 million before the start of the promotion at the beginning of July rose sharply over that month to a high of about 2.8 million in early August, only to drop again to their pre-promotion level by late August.

By the way, the Poodle won the election.

So when President-elect Obama mentioned his canine promise to his girls in his acceptance speech, I fully expected there to be some connection to the AKC partnership, at least in the days ahead.

Empathetically, I thought, if I were the AKC marketing director, and Obama didn’t mention our partnership at this global-attention focal point, I’d feel a bit ripped off. Talk about a missed opportunity. The whole reason to do a marketing partnership like that with a highly public cause is for the attention it brings. Even more problematic, he mentioned shelter dogs, not exactly the territory the AKC tends to pee in.

I went to the Obama site. Nothing about the AKC and the Presidential Pup site.

I just spent the last week at Ad:Tech listening to all the ways in which the Obama campaign has rewritten the rules of online marketing. According to Shelly Lazarus, Chairman and CEO of Ogilvy Mather Worldwide, the Obama campaign is the “best CRM campaign that has ever been run.”  For the Obama campaign to be involved in a marketing partnership and not to mention it on their site isn’t a mistake, it’s an impossibility.

So then I went to the Presidential Pup site at the AKC.  The site landing pages were updated on November 5th to reflect Obama’s victory and discuss his public reiteration of his promise to his girls. The site discusses the voting, and goes on to say “We hope the Obamas consider the survey results,” said AKC Spokesperson Lisa Peterson.

“We hope”?  “Considers”?  That didn’t exactly sound like a partnership to me, and it certainly didn’t sound like the tone of the original site.

Somebody at the AKC is definitely on the ball, though. In addition to the speed with which they updated their landing page, the page has a picture of two adorable poodle pups with the headline “A Pair of Poodles for Pennsylvania Avenue” and the caption which partially reads “A pair of six-week-old Toy Poodle puppies rescued by Flora’s Pet Project/Poodle Rescue Connecticut visited the American Kennel Club offices in Manhattan today to be photographed in hopes of catching the attention of the Obama family. The pups will be available for new homes in early January. They can be adopted by contacting…”

That’s great marketing. Obama specifically mentioned shelter dogs, so the AKC adds the “rescue dog” element to make their efforts more relevant. (As I recall, there was no mention of rescue dogs the first time around.)

They’re also spreading a wide net to attract attention. They made sure to mention that it was reported that Veep-Elect Biden has said his wife told him that if he got the vice presidency and got elected, he could get a dog. This too is good internet marketing, adding additional key words and relevance;  last time, they made sure they got the McCains in the story as well.

The site goes on to say “No matter what breed the Obamas or Bidens choose, the AKC hopes they can assist both families. “I would be happy to personally assist Obama and Biden in identifying a responsible breeder if they are looking for a puppy,” said AKC President & CEO Dennis Sprung”

The first site really made it seem like the Obama’s were along for the ride.  But now, it’s clear that wasn’t the case.

Nearly a decade ago, in our book, Making Money While Making a Difference, Dr. Richard Steckel and I wrote about the dangers of misleading the public when it comes to cause related marketing.  It’s only gotten worse since.  When you pretend to be helping a cause or when you aid and abet consumers in reaching the conclusion that you are aligned with a cause or group when you are really just trying to cash in on their publicity, you are in danger of a serious, negative backlash.

If the AKC were aligned with Obama, wouldn’t he have mentioned it in one of his long and involved post-acceptance speech statements about the promised pooch?

If this were the marketing partnership it seemed to be, then wouldn’t Obama have mentioned it at least once during the many times he’s had to address this overwhelmingly important issue since winning the nomination?

It’s not his fault if the issue keeps coming up: I mean, our economy is in the tank, the mid-East is loping towards a meltdown, attack dog Rahm Emanuel is the chief of staff of the face of change, and the press keeps wasting our time on shaggy dog stories.

Oh wait, so am I.

No, I’m not.

According to Wikipedia, “Shaggy dog stories play upon the audience’s preconceptions of the art of joke telling. The audience listens to the story with certain expectations, which are either simply not met or met in some entirely unexpected manner.” While I don’t claim that the AKC intended to amuse us, I do think their whole presidential pup story is a bad joke with utterly unmet expectations and an unexpected conclusion.

I’m writing about a marketing disconnect. A missed opportunity. Or, more likely, a misleading one. Just another example of misleadership, this one on the part of the AKC.

What do you think?  Can someone please explain to me whether the AKC is practicing good marketing or misleadership?

Categories
Directed Advertising Integrated Marketing

In Praise of the Lowly Yellow Pages

If you asked my clients and colleagues whether I’m a lo-tech or hi-tech kind of marketer, they’d all say the latter.  It’s a rare strategy session that I don’t find some way to suggest search, or content syndication, or blogging, or widgets, or behavioral, or email, or… well, you get the picture.

But the fact is, like my agency, Tanen Directed Advertising, I am actually channel neutral.  If a tactic works, I say, use it.  Not blindly — you need a strategy, and the tactic has to have a measurable chance at achieving your strategic goals, but if it does, I say, go for it.

And that’s why I’m writing about Yellow Page Directory advertising. And no, not the online local search kind. I’m talking yellow cardstock cover, dead tree, “pile three of them on a chair so your 4-year old can see the monitor” kind of yellow pages.

You see, it seems that the lowly, lo-tech yellow pages has a ridiculous click thru rate.  According to a recent study, 78% of directory users contact an average of 2 businesses after referencing a directory.  The most popular action taken is picking up the phone, which happens 93% of the time.  But it’s not limited to a phone call: 31% show up in person, 10% go online, and 1% get in touch through the mail.

Those are monster numbers.  And when you consider that for many categories, there is far less noise and competition than Google, they’re even more compelling.

We all love search because we know that anyone who is in the act of searching is in some stage of the buying cycle.  (According to the Pew Internet and American Life Project, 81% of all internet users “look online for information about a product or service they are thinking of buying.”)

Local search is growing because it turns out that people who search online sometimes shop locally. (The increasing adoption and use of mobile phones and the growing utility and quality of mobile search isn’t hurting, either.)

Unlike most other forms of advertising, both types of search are non-intrusive and non-interruptive.  They are, in fact, requested and highly desired services.

The same logic holds true with yellow pages.  In fact, didn’t search really start with the yellow pages?  (This reminds me a little of how television advertising is beginning to return to it’s sponsor-driven, branded content and product placement roots)

The study was conducted by Knowledge Networks for the Association of Directory Publishers, so it’s lucky for them that the numbers came out as positive as they did.  But I don’t doubt their findings.  After all, how many times have you reached for the yellow pages in the last few months?  Not many, perhaps.  But, when you did, what did you do next?  See what I mean.

That’s the point.  We all still use the yellow pages sometimes, some of us more than others.  And when we do, we take action.  (Of course, that action isn’t always positive.  I’ve never thrown my computer across the room while cursing Google the way I have my local yellow pages because I can’t figure out in which poorly defined and barely indexed category my local movie 10-Plex is to be found.  Hint: It’s not movie theaters or cinemas, which aren’t mentioned at all.  And if you’re silly enough to look up  “Movies” you’ll be rewarded with “See: CDs, Records and Tapes, Retail; Video Tapes & DVDs Rental & Sales.”  Nope, it’s under Theatres, along with the Downtown Cabaret Theatre, Greenwich Shakespeare Co. , New Canaan Playhouse, Stamford Center for the Arts, etc.)

Now, I’m not suggesting we shift our entire budgets out of AdWords and into printed yellow pages directories.  But given the ridiculously low comparative cost of yellow pages advertisements, the extremely long ad life/placement persistence and the comparatively high level of response surrounding their use, can someone please explain to me why more businesses aren’t including them in their media mix?

Categories
PR and News

Another way to buy news coverage

A while back, I posted about companies buying their way into the news.

Well, it turns out there’s a way regular folks like you and me can buy our way into the news too.

Die.

See, unless you’re famous, it turns out that you have to pay to have an obituary printed in the newspaper. (Technically, you pay for death notices; obituaries are news items written by the newspaper about newsworthy individuals. Practically, though, they appear in the same area of the newspaper and are less distinguishable from each other than are paid and free search results. (Wikipedia has a good history of obituaries here.)

In fact, according to NY Times Obituary Editor Bill McDonald (quoted in 2006 and cited in the wiki above), death notices are actually handled by the classified department, and compete for space with the news department’s obituaries. The news department gets half a page, more or less, depending on sales of death notices that day.

I’m sure many of you know this already. In fact, 3 out of 5 friends I’ve asked about it answered me sadly and said, “Of course,” barely able to conceal their surprise at my naivete. Then again, many of you may not know this. As I’ve said before, I am still amazed by how many people don’t know that the “sponsored links” search results on Google are paid for by advertisers!

But if  you’ve never been through the process, like my family went through these past few weeks, it may come as a shock to you.

And it’s not cheap. Prices range from tens of dollars per column inch to hundreds. And there aren’t even any guarantees the paper will have enough space to print the obit on the day you want it there. You have to pay for the online versions, too.

Of course, there are some places where you can get coverage for free. The smaller papers still do it. I guess that their desire to serve their community and their desperate need for relevant content outweigh the business opportunity.

But I wonder, in this day of declining circulation and profitability at traditional news organizations, if that same thinking shouldn’t prevail? Maybe, if these papers did a better job of doing the things they can do better than new media, they would stay relevant.

Now, I am not going to join the online battles about what newspapers do best (exemplified by Jeff Jarvis’s post last year) except in this one area: people still read their local newspapers to find out who died — even if their local paper is the NY Times.

The local broadcast or cable news won’t mention your mother-in-law’s death. CNN certainly won’t, unless she was a Kennedy, over 100, a rock star, or somone equally important like a celebutante (contrary to popular belief, an old description first used in 1939 by Walter Winchell in his On Broadway column).

Your RSS feed isn’t set up to bring you news of the deaths of people you didn’t know died. (Well, most people’s feeds aren’t, anyway!) It won’t show up on The Huffington Post, Digg, YouTube, AOL, MSN or MySpace. (Maybe Twitter will start an obituary service. Hey, you never know.)

So newspapers, listen up: you’ve lost the jobs section (even the NY Times Jobs section is a partnership with Monster). You’ve lost the real estate section. Fight for this one piece of journalistic real estate you can hold on to by providing a free service to those bereaving family members who are getting milked by every other aspect of the death industry. Maybe even give more than half a page to it. At the very least, you’ll increase your circ by everyone who had a relative who died in the last few days.

That said, can someone please explain to me where the names are inscribed of the multitudes who have shuffled off their mortal coil and disappeared from this earth with no public notice of their passing because their relatives were too poor to pay for the death notice or who had no relatives at all? (Because, contrary to what I naively thought, it sure ain’t the archives of the-former-paper-of-record, the NY Times.)

Categories
Relationship Marketing Social Media

I have joined a triiibe and I love it

Seth Godin has a new book called Tribes. Before it was published, back in July, he built a social community around it called Triiibes that I was fortunate enough to be able to join.  (By fortunate, I mean that as a regular reader of his blog I read the single notice he posted about the new book and a limited, exclusive offer he made: buy an advanced copy of the book and you can join this unique community.) After a very limited time, membership to the community closed, and won’t be reopened again until some time this month.

In all honesty, I’m not really a social media guy. I rarely visit my facebook or myspace pages. I under-utilize LinkedIn. But I’ve been a more regular visitor and poster to Triiibes. I’ve gotten great value and given a little back, too. It’s been a great experience for me, because I finally understand the passion and connection that social media members can feel about their community.

The most interesting aspect of Triiibes, for me, was the casebook that we Triiibes members created, a companion e-book to Seth’s own book, Tribes. That casebook is now online. You can get yourself a pdf copy of The Tribes Casebook here.

The case study I wrote was called “The Tribe of Marrus.” It appears on page 79 of the ebook. It’s about my friend, Marrus, an artist, who I also blogged about in a post here called “Portrait of the artist as an integrated marketer.”

There are plenty of great case studies about tribes of all kinds. It’s excellent reading, and I highly recommend it.

I’ve been reading Seth Godin for about 8 years now. I’ve seen him speak more than once. I’ve watched with glee each time he rewrites the rules of publishing when he comes up with a new way to market his latest book.

He’s been a leading pioneer of “the new marketing” and an honest, inspirational voice. He’s one of the most published business book writers ever, a voice respected by the people running the most successful companies in the world.

Every once in a while, I see one of his books on the shelf of a client or a prospect, and we instantly get into a vibrant discussion about Seth and new marketing. Invariably, we end up reaching a point in the discussion where one of us or the other says, “How come everybody isn’t getting into this stuff?”

I’ve discussed Seth’s thinking with other marketing professionals I know, usually ones with decades of experience and perspective. They frequently net out at the answer that there’s always new thinking that argues that the old thinking is wrong or outdated, and only time will tell. Until then, they’re not ready to throw out the old ways.  They’re too invested in them, and they’ve worked for all these years, they say.

Not me. As a marketer, my only real rule is do what works best (as long as it’s ethical and honest.) Anything less isn’t worth doing, is it?

Not only am I a member of triiibes, but now that I think about it, it turns out I’m a member of The Tribe of Seth Godin, too.

Can someone please explain to me why everyone who works in advertising and marketing isn’t one too?