Manhattan Marketing Maven

Getting the Message Right: Return to the Obvious

Every marketer gets carried away by a big idea. Unfortunately most of those ideas aren't articulated clearly enough to make a selling difference.They ignore the obvious basics.

In a world where prospects have limitless options, endless choices for information and countless proffered deals, he who crafts the differentiated message that is clear, stands apart from the crowd and resonates wins.

But how do you get to the message? You walk back the cat starting with your customer's problem. Every product or service solves a problem. Every campaign, every great slogan, every persuasive pitch begins by understanding the genuine problem and mapping whatever you are or whatever you have to it. If you skip this part, nothing can save you.

Doubt me? Read "Optimizing Sales Messaging: the Impact of What You Say on Sales Performance" a white paper by CSO Insights. This benchmark survey documents that he who frames the message properly sells better.

The first and monumental thinking task is to quickly identify that problem you are solving and then convince yourself that you can solve the problem; hopefully better than anyone else. Then you have to explain it in a way that your prospect will understand, relate to and desire. It helps if they desire it sooner rather than later and are willing to pay the asking price.

I know -- its basic and obvious. But if I had a nickel for everyone I work with that skips this step and starts blathering about features and benefits, starts imagining dancing bananas or animated monkeys singing or the funniest jokes or the wackiest sight gags, I'd be rich already.

Bottom line: If you don't clearly stand out from the crowd, you don't get noticed. You can't get there by sounding, acting or talking like everybody else in your segment. Customers need a clear, concise reason why to pick you and why to act now. It all goes back to how you can solve their problem or relieve their pain.

Superbowl Ads Are an Xray of Advertising

When the Superbowl -- our annual national TV advertising festival -- interrupted by intermittent football segments kicks off on Fox during the afternoon of Sunday February 3rd, we will be treated to a x-ray of advertising. The principal trends and tactics that advertisers and marketers grapple with will be played out in the how and when these commercial messages are shapred and presented.

A showcase for either creativity or crassness, thirty-second Superbowl spots reach the last remaining super-sized audience, 92 million viewers in 2007. The ad time in the game sells out early and usually generates as much heat, light and noise as the ultimate pigskin contest wrapped around the ads. With individual spots priced around $ 3 million each, its a high stakes game for brands seeking visibility, breakthrough awareness, rehabilitation or exposure to new audiences.

Traditionally dominated by male-oriented products like beer or cars, the Superbowl has become a platform for a wide range of brands to strut their stuff. Budweiser, with 9 spots and an investment of 18 million dollars, is, as usual, the lead advertiser. Cars.com, Audi, Hyundai are in along with car-related products from Bridgestone Tires and Nationwide Insurance. Under Armour will break its first ever spot this year and Victoria Secret will be back, it's first Superbowl ad exposure since 1999.   

And yet for all the hype, these spots and the strategies behind them offer a clear x-ray of the state of advertising. Consider these issues.

Concentration vs Fragmentation. With 90+ million viewers you can reach almost a third of the US population at one time, or at least those not out of the room or away from the screen getting munchies or using the bathroom. And yet there is rarely a mass response to ads. In fact, the number, intensity and variations of responses make watching the ads and talking about them fun.

This mirrors the perennial media debate between those seeking and favoring the efficiency of mass exposure (and yearning for the good old days when network TV dominated America) and those seeking to identify and target discrete segments. Its a Yin and Yang tension that will never really be resolved but offers us grist for a million great conversations.

Creativity. The Superbowl legitimizes advertising as art and creates a competition for the funniest, most touching and most memorable execution of a movie in thirty seconds. Careers have been made or broken on these spots and a few memes have entered the popular culture as a result. The Superbowl is part learning lab, part focus group that by inference gauges the mood of the majority.

It also gives us a face-off between creative approaches as animations, celebrity spokespeople, guys in cows suits and ethereal brand concepts compete with each other. In a good year, the choice of copy, talent, settings or spokespeople gets spiced up by some real or manufactured controversy about skin, language or politics.

Targeting. Do you go for young men, do you aim at the women who are semi-watching the game or do you use sex appeal to focus the men on the women? All these targeting approaches and more are played out in Superbowl advertising.

Spot placement is another element of targeting which seeks to match the message with the likely mood and attention span of millions during the course of a live and unpredictable event. The calculus revolves around picking your shot by placing your spot in a pod during the pre-game, first quarter, after the 2nd-half kick-off, at half-time or in the post-game show. The folks at Firebrand created a series of spots spoofing Kick-Off, Half-Time and Post-Game spots.

Placement is a function of price. Each time slot and each placement within each pod has a different price and is viewed differently; often based on the action on the field. Add to target selection, the choice of a straight pitch, the time-sensitive offer or the deal tactic.

Superbowl ads reveal the collective psyche and the full alchemy of advertising. They display our greatest hits, some of our greatest talent and all of our greatest anxieties. Tune in.

      

Brands Wanna Be Your New Best Friend

Brands want to be wherever you are and do whatever you are doing. Your favorite brand is your new best friend.

Anxious about the reduced pulling power of advertising in a fragmented digital media world, brands are looking to create direct relationships with customers. So read Louise Story's breathless prose in the New York Times on October 14th.

Ever heard this one before?

This is the latest in a long line of pendulum swings where big brands remember that identifying and talking directly to proven customers is way cheaper and much persuasive than blasting ads in all media into an empty void. The usual attention span for and tolerance of brand marketers for this kind of "direct" marketing usually lasts 6 months, one TV season or the run of a new brand campaign; whichever comes first.

Nike is cited at the head of the pack for creating exercise tools and online experiences that help connect their customers to exercise, sports and other customers with similar interests. But many brands are formulating plans to collect names, create digital experiences and mix-it-up live with their customers. This isn't exactly a new marketing tactic, even though the exodus of dollars from traditional media might be.

The perennial marketing question isn't "Should we mix it up with customers?" It is "How do we do it credibly and sustain focus with dynamic content over time without becoming magazine publishers, site builders or TV producers -- far from our core business?" This is a particularly pointed issue for insurgent brands who don't have Nike's bankroll or bandwidth to experiment with messages and evolving media.

Finding the right answer for your brand is a bit easier than you think. Here are 6 starting tips:

1. Watch your customers closely. Figure out what they do and what they have in common. Then decide what you can bring to their party.

2. Identify your best or core customers -- the one's that talk you up and the ones that buy a lot and buy frequently. Collect the data and monitor behavior. Forget what they say. Watch what they buy.

3. Ask your best customers what they think. Test your ideas with them. Ask them to guide you. You'll be surprised at how eager they are to speak their minds.

4. Don't promise what you can't deliver. Start small and iterate. You don't want to piss off your best customers nor do you want to dilute the brand equity you've built. It's always easier to add more than to explain away a stretch plan gone awry.

5. Give customers what they want. Don't be seduced by the fad of the moment or what the other guys are doing. Often your customers want something simple and basic. Giving it to them will win you many more points than building a Taj Mahal they don't care about. Prepare yourself for the possibility that your customers sort your brand into a very narrow niche in their minds or in their lives. They might just want you to produce a quality product or service and let them do the rest.

6. Put a genuine face on your brand. Customers require human interaction. They have questions, complaints, ideas and suggestions that can quickly become annoying, especially to marketers used to working at a comfortable distance from the "field" wielding PowerPoint slides. Somebody -- a real somebody -- has to own this and actually talk to customers. Otherwise your direct or relationship marketing is a fraud.     

The Enduring Advertising Fantasy

Many businesses, especially start-ups, have an enduring fantasy that if they create a product or a service, advertisers will quickly embrace them and bankroll their brand-building efforts. It reminds me of the old Life cereal commercial where the idiot younger brother "Mikey" would east just about anything.

But advertisers aren't that dumb or that gullible or that open to ideas.

If I had a nickel for every client who told me that his or her idea was a natural for advertisers and that he or she was sure that as soon as Coke, Nike, GM or P&G see the plans the dollars will start flowing; I'd be rich already. My experience has been just the opposite. Both as a senior advertising executive and as an entrepreneur the ideas rejected outpace the ideas that even get hear by 1000:1. Advertisers and their agencies are usually the last to embrace a new idea in spite of the widespread perception that that they are forward-looking, creative, intuitive and always in search of new ideas. Its always easier, if not cheaper, to pile on than to pioneer.

Consider the public record. After almost twenty years of sustained online growth and hype the majority of ad dollars today are spent in network TV much as they were in the 1950s. Advertisers are hooked on mass audiences even now. And to the extent that they have found segmentation and embraced it, they've put their money into magazines and cable networks and a few online portals. But if you follow the bucks and ignore the blab -- mass media still rules.

To the extent that advertisers are looking for new tactics, they rely on agencies to filter and edit the ideas and vet potential media parters. Agencies have two agendas in this process: retain or extend their fees and find things that they can embrace and execute without threatening their standing with clients. Agencies have a limited appetite for inventions and inventiveness. The agencies that serve the leading brands talk the innovation talk but their business models and profit streams rely on not rocking the boat and on consistently delivering results without annoying their clients or challenging clients perceptions of their audiences and markets. There are far fewer genuine change agents among agencies than you think. But there are legions of agency executives that are expert at promoting incremental tweaks as monumental breakthroughs. And lately they are all adding digital gurus to help advertisers understand and negotiate their way online.   

Bottom Line: There is a very small window of opportunity for new ad-supported products and services and a zillion entrepreneurs and their VC backers are gunning to claim the prize. To pry a dime out of advertisers a new product or service must:

1. Address or capture a specific, preferably virgin, audience that is keenly and measurably relevant to the particular advertiser's business and has been untouched or unacknowledged by any other marketer or brand.
2. Be an exclusive ownership posture in the next slam-dunk American Idol style cultural phenomenon.
3. Be a guaranteed yet secret position in the next Google.
4. Capture completely an existing "at risk" audience that constitutes a significant portion of an advertisers revenue.
5. Be a cornerstone position in the coming of the Messiah.

Everybody else needs to figure out how to position and market their product or service to the people most likely in need of it. And find the money to build their brand without advertiser support.    

We're Watching More TV Happily

If you have a digital video recorder (DVR) you are probably watching more TV than before in less time and are happier about it because you are only seeing the stuff you like best and fast forwarding through the commercials. That's the implication of a new global study done by the IBM Institute for Business Value. which is summarized on MarketingCharts.com.

The study of 885 US and 1515 households in other countries found that 24% of American respondents have a DVR and half of them watch TV recorded TV programming on them. Two-thirds watch 1-4 hours of TV daily and one-third report watching more TV since acquiring their recording device. For Drew McClellan this suggests that DVR ownership reverses the downward trends on TV consumption (versus interactive media).

DVRs allow peple to watch their favorite shows whenever they want and to sample new shows without having to plant themselves in front of the tube at a particular time. They enable viewers to create their own content marathons, follow their favorite teams and manage their time and their media choices as they see fit. 

This makes TV programmers and advertisers crazy because all those highly creativite and expensely produced spots featuring big name talent get zapped. According to Tivo's Stop//Watch Analysis, reported by Burt Helm in Businessweek, direct marketing ads and ads with a straightforward direct offer or appeal are the least fast forwarded spots recorded.

The common theme? If its relevant to the viewer they watch it.

Lesson for marketers: Know your audience. Create and distribute relevant messages contextually.

Behind the Ad Serving Buying Spree

Why did Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, and WPP spend more than $10 billion to buy up ad serving companies? Because they can.

The acquisition frenzy has all the markings of a classic arms race -- its intramural, reactive, focused on an ill-defined future, flexes current muscles and impresses Wall Street and each other. Does anyone really think that these behemoths have clearly thought through their ad strategy or does anyone believe that every major technology firm had to acquire ad-serving technology quickly at inflated prices last week for some mission critical reason?

Its a race to lock up a critical perception -- the idea that now each of these firms has some kind of technology capable of competing with Google's not-so-secret plan to build a single front end for all advertising sales and service. Does the reality match the desired perception? Probably not. But that won't sink in until after the immediate hype dies down. In the short run the relative balance of power has been restored. Each leading firm has an equivalent shot at the brass ring.

Evidently the technology leaders believe that we've reached the tipping point where demand for digital advertising will exceed the demand for analog ads. As the curves cross, even before the cash follows, these guys want to corner the market for the enabling technology and gain a toehold in the advertising marketplace. By staking their claims, they can spike out some competition by intimidation but more importantly they bought some seasoned talent and can gather practical knowledge and real-time intelligence without having to reveal their next moves.   

And while last week's play was designed to to keep up with the Joneses, consider some of the possible down range implications of these deals:

Technology. Ad serving has not had many breakthroughs or significant upgrades in several years. No one has refined a method for behavioral targeting that is universally recognized or widely used. You can imagine that the application of technical expertise resident in these companies might yield a quantum leap in our ability to target discrete audiences, attitudes, behaviors or lifestyles. Each of these companies has bought up a bunch of discrete technologies and has an army of smart technologists and savvy marketers. Who knows what tools or software are under development that when combined with ad serving, databases and snappy creative will change the game and drive a new level of digital customer engagement?

Integration. Microsoft, Yahoo and Google each has huge databases of consumer and business names filled with profiles, preferences, opt-ins and online activity histories. Imagine integrating the data they hold with content they create or license to create turnkey 1-to-1 and one-to-many multi-channel digital communications streams. The possibilities are astounding, assuming they can get beyond their own internal politics and product silos and withstand increased anxiety about Big Brotherism.    

Agency Alignment. Now each major technology firm can be its own agency and/or sell agency and marketing services to others. All of them are major customers of Madison Avenue constantly seeking greater efficiencies, economies of scale and effectiveness. Now they can potentially achieve better ROI by using owned resources or benchmarking their agencies against their new assets.

Are many clients willing to put both their technology and communications eggs in a single basket, especially one owned and run by an organization with the weight and scale of Yahoo, Microsoft or Google? Maybe or maybe not. But the fantasy of vertical integration still drives an awful lot of corporate thinking and the existing corporate and client relationships these guys have combined with widespread dissatisfaction with ad agencies and their digital capabilities will probably convince some leading clients to defect and try them out.   

Blockbuster Blows It -- Again

The current anti-Netflix ad campaign mounted by Blockbuster is the flailing effort of a brand on the ropes and singing the blues. It’s the latest example of how Blockbuster routinely shoots itself in the foot.

In full-page ads Blockbuster asks consumers to trade their red Netflix mailing address flap for a free movie rental. Apparently you can do this again and again, getting free movies and giving up your address and your rental frequency to Blockbuster. It’s a classic rental; traffic-building promotion. And oh by the way you can also get a free trial at www.blockbuster.com.

Blockbuster never got the Internet. Still doesn’t. And while they were madly opening new stores and driving every Mom-and-Pop video store out of business, Netflix snuck up on them and ate their lunch. Netflix understood two critical things – the Blockbuster brand experience sucked and that convenience drives the video rental marketplace.

Blockbuster thought like a traditional retailer. They focused on locations and price. And they assumed that a bold, snappy and large blue logo would cover a million sins. It doesn’t. Anyone who has ever been in a store has hated every minute of the brand experience.

The aisles are too narrow, the titles are hard to find, the help is either invisible or truculent. In recent years they’ve added all kinds of junk food and other point-of-sale lures to distract you or extend the time you waste in the store. And then there’s the issue of late fees. For most of their existence, late fees significantly contributed to the company’s balance sheet. They were assessed early and often and hardly ever forgiven, no matter what the excuse.

Did it surprise anyone that Netflix’s principle value proposition is “no late fees”? In the last couple of years the late fee controversy has been reversed by the massive defection of customers from the blue company to the red one and a reluctant dropping of the policy; after a few last gasps of disingenuous messaging.

It’s a classic battle of the old world versus the new. Blockbuster gave customers what they thought they ought to have on the company’s terms. You come to them. They make and enforce the rules. They’re still doing it this way. The current campaign is proof. Its sob deeply ingrained in who they are that they can’t adjust, can’t adapt and can’t get out of their own way.

Netflix comes at it from the opposite perspective. The customer drives the boat. It’s all about vast, easy and quick selection, fast delivery and flat monthly “all-you-can-eat” pricing with no late fees ever. It’s also about respect for the customer’s time and sensibility. And it’s no contest. Netflix exists to fill the void Blockbuster created.

Bubbies Back Broadway

If you are older than 30 and feeling decrepit, achy and ancient just attend a matinee on Broadway during the holidays. Look around the theater and you’ll instantly feel like a Spring chicken.

Half of Broadway audiences are upscale, primarily white adults 70 and older who live in affluent close-in suburbs like Saddle River, NJ, Greenwich, CT and Great Neck, NY and have an endless appetite for coming into the city for culture, live performance, rich food and exorbitant parking fees. These are the core audiences that support the industry we call Broadway week-in and week-out. And if you doubt me, just look at the brands aiming at these theater-goers advertising in the Broadway Bible – Playbill.

Playbill, which also now has a companion e-commerce enabled website, is the program booklet distributed at every self-respecting theater on The Great White Way. Each show gets a dedicated few pages. Common content and advertising fill out the rest. This year, as a testament to the strength of the theater and the economy, the Playbill for Company, arguably Sondheim’s smartest. most insightful and best show, boasts 88 pages and 4 covers.

The roster of categories and brands is an indicator of the current thinking in targeting upscale audiences. Automotive is the strongest traditional, national category with glossy 4 color contributions from Acura, Lexus, BMW, Toyota Avalon, GMAC, Cadillac and Sirius Radio, which is basically an aftermarket automotive product. Images and models are geared toward those favored by older adults who can afford luxury cars.

Media is also aggressively represented. I guess the thinking is that if you’ve traveled to see one show, maybe DreamGirls, Spamalot, The Magic Flute at The Metropolitan Opera, Peter O’Toole in Venus, Judi Dench and Cate Blanchett in Notes on a Scandal, The New York Gilbert & Sullivan Players, Kristin Chenoweth in The Apple Tree, Grey Gardens or Altar Boyz might appeal to you. If not maybe you’ll find the show of your choice at Stubhub.com or Broadway.Yahoo.com. Or maybe you’ll just buy your grandchild a gift at the Disney Store on the way home.

Perfume and jewelry and the retailers who sell them also appear frequently as you flip through the pages. Macy’s Bloomies, Lord & Taylor and Ann Taylor Loft tout gift giving. While Burberry, Movado, Chanel, Anne Klein, Sarah Jessica Parker’s Lovely, Estee Lauder, Lancome’s Tresor, Citizen Watch, Tweezerman.com, and Geoffrey Beene present themselves as gifts ready to give or get.

The funniest but most logical category is pharmaceuticals where brands seem to truly understand the needs of the audience they share with the members of the American Theater Wing. Lunesta and AmbienCR for sleeping, Mucinex for mucus control and Fosamax Plus D for postmenopausal osteoporosis all make their case and provided added pages filled with contraindications.

The marketing lesson is -- understand your target audiences. Know what they like, where they go and what they do and intersect them at times and in places that they will be open to your message and apt to consider or buy your product. The only irony is that the type size in the Playbill is way too small for older adults to read, especially in the limited lighting of a Broadway theater.

Brands Buzz Brains

Strong brands prompt strong brain reactions. Radiologists are proving what marketers have been preaching for decades. 

Dr. Christine Born, a radiologist at the Ludwig-Maximillians University in Munich conducted a series of MRIs exposing 20 adults (upscale for income and education) to logos of strong and weak German brands. The results, reported in the Wall Street Journal, were that bigger brands make bigger brain waves. This comes on top of previous data indicating that shopping can alter blood pressure, heart rate and respiratory rates.

Apparently well-known brands fire synapses associated with positive emotions, self-identification and rewards. Weak brands either don’t register or provoke activity in parts of the brain associated with negative emotion.

The surprising conclusion was that the big brand buzz exists regardless of the category. Dr. Born found that the reaction to an automotive brand like Volkswagen that has significantly greater media weight and probably stronger creative executions was as strong as the reaction to Allianz, an insurance brand. Both leading brands prompted much bigger reactions than the logos of smaller, less-known competitors.

The implication is that investing in building a strong, memorable brand pays off. What isn’t clear is how to do it and which components of branding give you the best bang for the buck.

The other, not-so-surprising, evidence was that strong brand recognition did not stimulate the decision-making centers in the brain. So now we have scientific evidence that awareness and purchase motivation are two separate things andthat buying is a hybrid of rational and emotional processing.

And even though the sample is small and skewed, its comforting to have data that validates our experiences. Now the debate about how to move customers from awareness to desire to purchase to loyalty can continue with new ammunition.

A Digital Reality Check

The American Advertising Federation meeting opened with a bang. Leading ad executives admitted that they are behind the power curve on digital media.

Is this news to anyone?

Ad agencies are madly playing catch-up on all things digital. Clients, many of whom have already handed off these chores to marketing services companies or are doing them themselves, certainly aren’t blown away by this new data. In fact most agencies are scrambling to stem the migration of budgets from high margin TV and print media to digital formats and digital advertising vehicles. Is it any wonder that any idea executed online is heavily touted in the trade media?

AAF President Wally Snyder’s comment “Things are moving real fast and we aren’t even on the fast track yet” probably provoked a collective “duh” from the crowd.

Why you ask are agencies so far back in grabbing hold of a predictable phenomenon?

Consider a few reasons ….

They don’t get it. Key ad guys have the latest digital doodads but they fundamentally don’t get the multi-tasking, simultaneous processing, multimedia thing because they lack personal experience and because they don’t spend enough time with their kids who do. The personal experience of using a Blackberry and a Star-Trek-like Bluetooth mobile phone ear piece isn’t enough if you don’t rely on digital media, read blogs, listen to podcasts, download video and music, buy stuff online or trade ideas, images or experiences on MySpace, Flickr or other networking sites.

It’s too intense and takes up too much time. Advertising used to be gentile. You made an ad, placed a buy and then played golf and drank with the client. Now it’s all about continuous messaging and media aimed at plethora of audiences who ruthlessly choose and sort what they want, when they want it and access it at any time from a variety of devices. What you have to know has multiplied geometrically, the competition is overwhelming and the number of so-called experts seems limitless. And clients are all on low-cal, no-cholesterol diets. You have to work too hard to earn much less than you used to and many feel that it’s hardly worth it.

They can’t figure out how to make money from it. The big agencies don’t have big relationships with digital publishers and they haven’t locked in most-favored-nation pricing on sites with massive audiences. They don’t know how to think about the audiences and segments, they can’t get their heads around metrics and ROI, can’t mark up the creative and are trailing the pack in terms of inventive promotions or savvy deals. And they are locked into business processes that are ancient, inflexible and costly so they spend their time trying to pay for their past rather than reinvent their future. .

They can’t sort out reality from relentless hype. Web 2.0 is coming on stronger than the last Internet bubble. There’s lots of money chasing fewer deals and even fewer great ideas. Every new wrinkle is trumpeted like the second coming and there’s no reliable guru to predict the winners.

Agencies can’t get their arms around a measured, on-demand world where time shifting and small audiences dedicated to narrowly focused content are the rule not the exception. Maybe at next year’s AAF meeting, they’ll all just lie down and collectively fossilize