Marketing Matters

Posts Tagged ‘Advertising’

There are a lot of reasons to follow me on Twitter if you care about marketing, compelling ways to tell a corporate story, or if you want to read about me writing my book. But from the look of the landscape, there are some good reasons not to follow me on Twitter, too, that warrant mentioning. Here are the top 5.

1) I care more about the brand than the brand’s products.
When I mention a company’s great branding initiative or a way they’re using social media or some new technology to communicate with their audience, it’s not a given that I’ll be talking about the same company tomorrow. If I write about Ducati, I’m going to follow the development of their new social media ad campaign as results become available, but I won’t write about how wicked cool their new model is or what it’s like to restore a ’62 bike. Apply that example to any brand you can think of and it will hold true for me and my tweets. If you’re really into a brand’s products but don’t care about how they voice their brand, I’m not your guy.

2) I only tweet when I have something interesting to say.
I follow PR and social media guru @sandrafathi and she recently noted that she loses followers when she doesn’t tweet for 24 hours. That’s crazy. She constantly has great content, so if a day goes by with nothing, there are still the other 6 days each week that have compelling content. I don’t tweet as often as her and have let more than that period of time go by without tweeting. So if you’re constantly weeding your list of people who haven’t posted in 24 hours, you’re probably better off not adding me in the first place.

3) When I do other things, I usually don’t tweet.
I follow a serious business leader who shall remain nameless who recently tweeted that “peeing is great twitter time”. He wasn’t kidding. I enjoy multi-tasking as much as the next guy, but there are times to put the PDA away or to not have your laptop on your lap. If you want me to tweet while I’m “busy”, I’m not your guy.

4) I’m not in it for the numbers.
I’m not on Twitter to be Ashton Kutcher. I’m there to talk about great brands and interesting marketing ideas. Not everybody cares about that and that’s fine. Accordingly, I don’t care if I have only 2 followers, as long as they’re the 2 right followers for me. Would I rather have 2000? Sure, but only if they care about what I’m writing. It’s better to have the right audience than a big but disinterested audience.

5) I’m not going to buy your Twitter tool.
“Millions! You’ll make millions!” I hear it every day. Paid content, paid followers, spam followers, games, toys – the list keeps growing. No matter how many times you want to try to convince me to place myself at the vanguard of social media marketing by letting Dell buy my every tenth tweet, I’m not going to bite. I don’t buy crap. I buy into great ideas. If you’re shouting at me in bad grammar in bold print or all caps, I’m not going to listen.

Thankfully, that’s not most of you, but it is a large number. Twitter is a pretty interesting tool and for anyone who gets exactly what I mean with this post, I look forward to seeing you there.

Burger King advertising around the world is in a cycle of offense and apologies. Is this an odd plan or a symptom of a lack of global brand coordination?
Read about it in Ad Age.

By the way, are you following me on Twitter? You should be. I regularly post articles of interest regarding marketing like this as well as updates about my other blog, Writing in the Sun, about my current book project

I’ll confess that my original title for this post was “It’s Cool, It’s Useful, It Makes Life Simpler – It’s from Microsoft???” Like most people, I’ve done my fair share of Microsoft bashing. After all, I use Vista, so that’s really no surprise. But I have to give credit where credit is due: Bing is really cool, very useful and even pretty.

Haven’t heard of Bing yet? It’s designed to do to Google what Google did to AltaVista  – lay it to waste by making life exponentially easier for the people who use it.

Bing’s introductory video does a good job at making it clear that this is a serious tool designed with the user in mind. That’s great, of course, but for me, though, what stands out the most is the approach Microsoft is taking with its marketing. The thing that impresses me is that it’s so thorough: they employed standard big-brand tactics like issuing a press release and doing a tradeshow launch, but then they created an interesting video that informs you about Bing’s functionality pleasantly in less than 3 minutes, and they make it easy for you to follow their progress on Twitter and Facebook.

As if that weren’t already an exceptional marketing program, they went and did it all really well. The video lets you know exactly why you should care and why we’re all probably going to end up using Bing. It elicits more “oh cool!” and “hey, look at this” reactions than most campaigns. The social media pages have actual information on them. And the site itself is sleek and well-designed.

I want to make it clear that I’m not just swooning for no good reason. I’m swooning for two good reasons: first, Microsoft really rose to the occasion in marketing Bing well. Second, it’s actually good.

To my friends in Redmond, my hat is off to you. Thanks for the pleasant surprise.

As if you need another reason to fast-forward over commercials on TV or ignore them in a magazine, have you noticed how most ad campaigns are increasingly cynical?

Apparently, someone told the major advertising agencies that a brand can only build an audience right now by appealing to our sense of snark. It’s actually gotten so bad that every time I’ve mentioned the subject to friends lately, I get another handful of examples that support the point. Don’t know what I mean? Just look at Old Spice, Super 8 and even Cheetos. Old Spice has no idea what its brand means anymore, Super 8 is shouting at me and Cheetos belongs on an after-school movie about clinical depression. It’s pathetic.

A brand is a promise a company makes about its products to its target audience. It’s supposed to be about a positive sense of emotion and community. If you don’t see something you want to be a part of, why buy that brand and not a competing one? Are we, the audience, really supposed to feel addressed by shouting sarcasm and lost identity?

Enter Cat Stevens.
After 30 years of silence, Cat came back. OK, well, he’s Yusuf Islam now, but his new album, Roadsinger, is out and he’s making rounds on TV (check out his interview with Stephen Colbert here), talking about peace and openness and singing about it, too.

He may have changed his name to Yusuf, but he sounds just like Cat: He’s delivering songs with a message and a point and he rewards listeners with insight and reflection along with memorable melodies that you find yourself singing quietly later.

It’s amazing that he can have such a positive and educational message, encased in a 30 year-old brand, while everyone around him is broadcasting the exact opposite. I don’t think he would have had the same impact a year ago as he does right now. The contrast wouldn’t have been as crass. Most of what we’re hearing these days is louder, more aggressive and more cynical than we’ve ever heard before.

I don’t know if it’s more dispiriting to hear those commercials or to think that that’s what marketers believe resonates now. The only thing I can think to say is, “Yell all you want, advertisers, I’ll just turn up the volume on Roadsinger.”

Just to keep harping on Microsoft for a moment, what’s really a shame with their last three major campaigns (Jerry Seinfeld, I’m a PC, and the Mojave Experiment) is that in trying to make their products and platforms interesting and engaging, they failed to engage their audience’s emotions. It’s all demonstration without audience empathy, they’re saying “this is funny, thou shalt enjoy” without eliciting the emotions naturally.  The stories aren’t well constructed.

And while they’ve been trying to confront Apple more and more directly, they’re not attacking them where they’re vulnerable. Apple will always get high marks for being interesting, but it will also always get equally poor marks for being an environmental hazard . One of Apple’s greatest strengths has always been its strong visual element, especially vivid colors. But Apple doesn’t seem to care for green very much. Sealed batteries in popular devices wear out in a few years causing a fully functional device to be tossed into the garbage heap. How much waste is Apple responsible for? And then let’s talk about battery chemicals seeping into the ground.

Meanwhile, the PC (and competitors’ phones, computers, portable music players, etc) have batteries and other parts that can be replaced easily and disassembling a PC to recycle its various parts is both a cinch and lucrative.

The only real reason that Microsoft wouldn’t steer its advertising in that direction would be that, as a company, it’s not exceptionally green itself. Correcting that, though, is a lot less expensive than high-profile ad campaigns that don’t accomplish anything. And it’s already a world better than Apple, according to environmental watchdogs such as ClimateCounts.

The “I’m a PC” ad used a world of faces. Make those faces do something good for the world they represent and people will care more.

It’s so hard not to talk about Microsoft’s new “I’m a PC” campaign, I’m not going to try to resist. It’s pretty obvious that the strategy is to put the “personal” back in personal computer, but they leave unanswered the question of what, if any, emotional tie those people have to their PC or that we viewers could have to them. That’s supposed to be the whole point of making a brand personal, right? Make people care about the brand and the product. They didn’t.

One could argue that it’s not necessary for us to feel anything about our PCs at this point. PCs are ubiquitous and utilitarian. They’re almost like water faucets or electrical outlets – I turn it on and it goes. And frankly, most PCs run Microsoft products most of the time. PCs running Microsoft products have become a basic household utility. When was the last time you felt one way or the other about your basic utilities (assuming they’re working)?

And that’s the reason we users get so upset about things like Vista when it crashes or has crappy functionality (a search function that can’t find anything???) or the like. That’s not how a utility is supposed to be. If my PC stops working when everything seems fine, I feel like I’m experiencing a rolling blackout in a third world country. My computer and the third world should not be comparable.

Which brings me to Orville Redenbacher. Mr. Redenbacher (or at least his agency) realized that popcorn was being widely consumed without much thought to the manufacturer or the respective quality. To make people think, briefly, about their choice, he got up in front of the camera and, like some quirky old uncle we all seem to have, talked to us about popping corn. He turned his product into a brand we cared about.

When I was growing up, it seemed like every third commercial was either Mr. Redenbacher talking about popcorn or Frank Purdue talking about chicken. So if Microsoft wants us to care about PCs and Microsoft products, why not use Bill Gates? How about if Bill Gates talked to the world about their PCs? If I saw twenty-five seconds of Vista-tweaking advice from Bill Gates and a five second tag, I’m not only going to watch that commercial, I’m going to care about it, go to the site to download the suite of them that will inevitably be released, talk about it and sing their praises for being smart. I bet a lot of other people would, too.