Are You Right?

Advertising and marketing works best when you reach the right person, at the right time, with the right message, in the right context.

If your business can hone in on these nuances better each time a campaign is initiated then your success rate will incrementally improve.

The right person - Have you looked at your current database lately? Has your customer profile changed from its original intent?

The right time - Are your customers in the middle of their "season"? Will your message be pushed aside since they're so busy now? Do you know when they put together their advertising budgets?

The right message - What do your customers value the most - price, quality, speed, service, etc.? Are you still pushing old technology, inefficient processes, or lackluster services?

The right context - Are you too pushy? Should you be educating the customer before the hard sell? Can a referral make the sale better than you could yourself?

Take a little bit of time this weekend to mull over the above questions. As Billy Joel once said, "You may be right, I maybe crazy."

Jingle Ads, Jingle Ads, Jingle All the Way...

(First, allow me to apologize for today's blog post title. Corny, but relevant.)

Anywho, an interesting post on BrandingStrategyInsider.com today talks about the first radio jingle ever, which was a radio ad for Wheaties in 1923. Yep, that's the one that started it all. According to the post, the otherwise dying brand, at the time, was revolutionized because of the popularity of this jingle, thus saving Wheaties from extinction.

Today, ad jingles on radio and TV are prevalent everywhere you turn. Some are quite clever, some are quite terrible, and some just blend into the background. Without a doubt, the challenge of squeezing a well-written, memorable song into a 30-second plug while simultaneously telling the product's whole story is indeed one of the more challenging areas of advertising. But, as the Wheaties song can attest, it can also be one of the most effective if done properly. Even in today's scattered media market.

So eat your Wheaties and get writing...

"What's-a Matter Colonel Sanders, Chicken?"

Spaceballs has always been one of my favorite movies, and the quote by Lord Dark Helmet (Rick Moranis) that I referenced here in the title has always stuck with me. Classic line. ("Ludicrous speed, go!")

That "chicken" quote came to mind this morning when I came across an interesting blog post on Ad Lab (click the link to learn more). The gist of the post is that KFC has placed a jumbo sized image of Colonel Sanders in the Nevada desert and the image can now be seen on Google Maps and Google Earth. It's outdoor advertising gone supersized.

I suppose this trend will slowly take hold across America and across the world as more and more people go to Google to cruise around the globe to get a bird's eye view of the terrain. More companies will latch on to this novelty exposure, and bored web surfers will be able to play a digital version of "car bingo" (Remember that game? A simple piece of cardboard that helped you keep track of when you saw a license plate from each of the 50 states... quite a far cry from today's drop down monitors and PSP's. I digress.) by spotting 50 different logos in hidden places across the planet. Indeed, we may be heading towards a patchwork quilt of logos, insignias, and other images that can be seen from satellite. Kind of neat, kind of scary.

In the end, it'll certainly bring new meaning to "combing the desert"...

Peddler on the Reef

Ok, so perhaps the title of this post was a real stretch of a reference to "Fiddler on the Roof" but I would like to talk about a prospective form of advertising that really would get the most out of Sunrise and Sunset: Reef Advertising. It's a concept that may be Florida's answer to offsetting the cost to build new artificial reefs off the state's coastline.

The idea:
St. Lucie County is looking to dump concrete railroad ties, culvert pipes, and other fodder into the ocean, creating artificial reefs for fish to hide in and plants to cling to, and also avoiding having to dump this material into landfills. The burgeoning colony of aquatic life would help improve the underwater environment and perhaps boost the local economy as a rush of more fishing and scuba diving would inevitably follow.

The problem:
For each of the 23 planned artificial reefs to be created, it will cost approximately $20,000 to have the construction material collected and dumped, a cost that the county can't afford.

The solution:
Have local companies pay $20,000 to sponsor the creation of a new reef. This would allow companies to have their names listed on ocean charts marking coral reefs, and then subsequently show off their investment to potential clients.

The analysis:
Sounds like a whale of an idea.

Advertising in the ocean? I say it's time to take the plunge. Where else can people legitimately benefit on a personal level from a company's advertising... from sunrise to sunset?

Elevate Your Advertising

Previously in this blogging arena, we talked about parking stripe advertising on the ground. Now, here's something that might elevate your advertising to new heights: The Wall Street Journal Office Media Network, or OMN.

What is OMN? It's a network that delivers Wall Street Journal content and ads on flat-panel LCD screens to office buildings. And these screens can be placed to be seen in the ground floor of an office building's lobby, or scaling the floors in elevators.

OMN was rolled out in the past few months, and replicates the well-established Captivate Network by Gannett Co. OMN is targeted more for business coverage, while Captivate covers news and entertainment. "Captivate" being the key word here since your audience is captive and your ad is promiment once you sign on. That's a breath of fresh air for someone who feels s/he needs to shout louder over the other ads that a person sees at any given moment during the day.

Just like stumbling upon a parking stripe ad, catching people on their way to work who are watching the news in the elevator could be a fresh new way of reaching future customers. Intriguing, if perhaps controversial, ways to advertise from the ground up...

Park Your Ad Here

Thanks to Anita for spotting this article on a new under-the-radar (and tires) marketing vehicle: Parking Stripe Advertising.

The name of the game in advertising is breaking through the clutter. It appears that advertisers have now gone to seemingly the last bastion of unblemished space... the humble parking lot pavement of your local strip mall.

The idea here is to place a cleverly relevant ad on the ground to catch the eyes of passers-by as they walk to the store. I suppose this is the suburban version of Times Sqare... without all the glitz, glamour, and gaudy advertising rates. At about $1 per stripe per day (minimum of 250 stripes in one location, BTW), as is quoted in the aforementioned article link, you can have your own worm-level ad, and not have to compete with any other ad in the vicinity.

'Tis a unique way of diversifying your ad spend... from the ground up.

Image is Everything: A Riff on Value and Your Company

Two seemingly unrelated news articles crossed my radar screen this morning. The first, from Businessweek, discusses how a company's public perception can affect the value of a company's stock, while the second, from Forbes, talks about how a restaurant critic's reputation might be destroyed if the public sees his face.

The lesson from the Businessweek article is that the more positive a company's perception is among private investors the stronger their stock price becomes. An example is that Johnson & Johnson trades at a higher price/earnings ratio than Pfizer, in large part because the former has a better reputation than the latter. Reputation is certainly not as tangible as revenue, profits, cash, and the like, but without a doubt, customers will ultimately gravitate towards a company they like better, all things being equal.

And what we get from the Forbes article is that the Philadelphia Inquirer's restaurant critic--who has a long-lasting reputation of giving honest, objective advice, but without anybody knowing who he is (which would taint the service and food he receives while dining out)--is in jeopardy of having his identity revealed due to a pending lawsuit. Video testimony has been recorded and if released to the public, it is argued that restauranteurs will know who he is and treat him differently to get a better review. The lesson here being that Craig LeBan, the critic in question, has a higher value of NOT being known than if he were a local celebrity, so he highly covets his privacy in order to continue to do his job well.

Essentially these are two opposite takes on the same issue: Identity absolutely affects your reputation, and, ultimately, how people value your products or services. Keep this nugget in mind with everything your company does, including:

• Advertising-- do you present yourself as a company looking to make the world a little bit better or as a company trying to get "shock attention" ads looking for a quick buck?
• Customer service-- do the people at your company answer the phone in a friendly manner, or is it more of an inconvenience when somebody calls?
• Community recognition-- does your company actively help the local community or do you lurk in the shadows, not caring about how your business affects your neighbors?
• Public relations-- do you actively try to prevent problems and maximize your company's reputation, or do you try to "spin" a negative aspect/event into a positive one after the harm's done?

Face the facts folks-- your company's "face" affects the bottom line...

Outdoor Advertising: Good, Bad, or Ugly?

Two articles caught my eye this morning:

The first, from BusinessWeek, describes how the government of Sao Paolo, Brazil has decided to eliminate any and all outdoor ads, such as billboards, bus wraps, or the like within its city limits.

The second, from the Wall Street Journal, discusses the government of China removing billboards in its previously highest-profile area for advertising.

On a global scale, these two ad bans are just small drops in the ocean that is advertising. But they bring up an interesting point-- do people want, or at the very least, mind, advertising out in public? And subsequently, do these two occurrences indicate a gradual elimination of public advertising or are they just extreme examples of places where advertising is unloved?

My personal hunch is that if outdoor ads really bothered people all that much, there would be more uproars about them than we currently see. Occasionally we'll hear about a rural township banning billboards because they mar the landscape, but on the whole, people seem pretty used to it all.

But that's just me. What do you think, dear advertising pundits?

(Note: Image from mulfordgallery.com... nice stuff!)

The Olympic Logo Saga Continues

Okay, so controversy continues to build around the Olympic logo and this time its' supporters have delivered their case to the media. Doesn't anyone realize that Paris Hilton is still in jail?

First, sources say that the design firm behind the logo, Wolff-Olin, are pleased with the response the logo has received and that everything is going to plan. Uh-huh. Apparently they feel this nuclear burst of negative publicity was expected all along, and that the logo will "evolve" over the next five years to something everyone will want tattooed on their chest next to their tribal Clara Peller likenesses. Not sure I'm buying that, but I can't find a quote so maybe it's bunk anyway.

Next up refers to the pictures you see above you. On the left is what's called a "tanagram set". Chinese in origin, they're used to create indentifiable shapes like the pic on the right. A design studio in Chicago by the name of Coudal Partners suggests, among other things (ten in all, to be exact) that the logo's similarity to such an ancient puzzle game makes it "timeless". Other examples refer to mostly design elements of the 1980's, and may I say that even in the 1980's, the Olympics didn't care to use anything neon and, well, new wave of sorts. How did that competition fare? Did they sell a lot of t-shirts? Because I don't recall needing a lot of reminding that the Olympic Games were on their way, but I do remember a beach towel that I quite liked that had the '84 Olympics logo.

My personal view, after reading Coudal's views, is that it's still a huge miscalculation by a company who was paid well for their mistakes. It happens. I know they meant well, but all this analyzing is kind of missing the point for me. We don't need timeless for something that happens every four years. In fact, I'm not sure we need anything more than the traditional Olympic rings. A logo, in the end, catches on or it doesn't. Hardly anyone I know outside of the design and advertising business deconstructs the artists' vision when taking the half second to decide whether they like a logo or not. And let's face the heart of the matter, it's about what it will be on: t-shirts, mugs, hats...beach towels. Unless someone is dying to bring back the 1980's yet again, who's going to care how many different shades of day-glo it can service?

Apparently it works better in motion, which is saying something, I suppose. But it's when it's still that most of us will be delivering our consumer opinion.