Paul Pomeroy weighs in on a couple of car ads.

As a guy who works in advertising I often get asked by family, friends, acquaintances and perfect strangers to offer my opinion on current ads in the marketplace. I find this funny because, unlike most people, when I meet doctors, lawyers and auto mechanics, I don’t find a way to wedge questions related to lumps on my back, clauses in my will or an incessant knocking noise coming from under the hood of my car into the course of casual conversation. But whatever. Most advertising people are raving narcissistic know-it-alls who are more than happy to share their opinions on just about anything — especially good ads vs. sucky ads.

OK, that really just describes me. And that brings me to the point of this post.

Good ads can’t be everything to all people. Nor should they be. When digesting marketing material, we make constant use of our eyelids and earlids; we focus like a laser on material that is relevant to us and filter out everything else. Ever notice how when you’re looking for a car all you see or hear are car ads? But when you’re not — white noise.

Therein lies the value — and the importance — of knowing your target market and effectively positioning your value proposition in a smart, concise and memorable way.

So what’s a good example of this? Let’s stick with cars. You may remember the most recent (and final) Mercury car campaign built on the theme line: “You gotta put Mercury on your list.”

You gotta put Mercury on your list? That’s like a high school junior (let’s call him Paul P.) going up to a senior girl and saying, “Hey, when you’re thinking about guys that you’d like to spend some time with over the weekend, I hope you’ll consider giving me a call.” Two words: dead end. I know.

So with apologies to the delightful Jill Wagner — who did all she could to salvage that campaign — a weak value proposition, bad execution and fuzzy definition of the target audience sank this campaign. Sucky ad.

And in case you haven’t noticed, Mercury cars are no longer being manufactured.

Now let’s look at an example of an effective ad populating the auto space:

To be clear, if you’re an urban hipster or a midlife crisis baby boomer looking for a car, this ad wasn’t intended for you. If, however, you’ve recently been to a grade school open house, signed someone up for karate lessons or loaded your DVR with reruns of the Wizards of Waverly Place, you may be a little choked up right now. Good ad.

Have an ad you’re wondering about? Contact AB&C and maybe I’ll check it out and offer an opinion. Who am I kidding? I’ll definitely offer an opinion.

Disclaimer: The opinions in this post are solely those of the author and not of any of his co-workers or other industry colleagues who may cringe while reading this post. Please be sure to formulate your own opinion on all products and product advertising featured here — which is, of course, the entire point of advertising in the first place.

Miracle Whip's current campaign

Advertising used to have one goal: to make you buy a product. But recent campaigns from big names like Miracle Whip and Domino’s are taking the opposite path. They are spending big chunks of time, space and money to tell us that lots of people hate them.

Jay Sinha, a marketing professor at Temple University’s Fox School of Business, calls this “anti-marketing,” arguing that traditional advertising no longer works because consumers have become jaded from years of heavy-handed promotional tactics. Instead, he says, more successful techniques should be simple, straightforward and truthful — even if the truth isn’t pretty. I’m not sure I completely agree with Professor Sinha, but I am a big fan of making your brand stand out in the marketplace. Telling me why your product isn’t that great definitely makes me sit up and take notice (even if it doesn’t make me buy).

In Miracle Whip’s new TV spots, celebrities such as the Jersey Shore’s Pauly D and political commentator James Carville join “everyday” people to proclaim their love — or hate — of Miracle Whip. Pauly D says that he hates Miracle Whip so much that if he had a girlfriend who liked it, it would be a “dealbreaker.” But Carville lovingly details how his favorite sandwich begins with a voluminous spread of the product.

The Domino’s campaign, which launched more than a year ago, began by showing feedback from real people, including focus groups noting that the crust tastes like cardboard, and photos of unappetizing pizzas sent in by dissatisfied customers. The ads have since evolved to show what Domino’s did to address these complaints, and how the brand’s new recipes are winning back old customers — and a fair amount of new ones, too.

One thing these campaigns have in common is you either love them or hate them. As a PR person, I love them! Buzz-generating advertising lends itself to so many great PR opportunities, and is a terrific example of how public relations and advertising can (and should) work hand in hand to generate successful results for a client. In Domino’s case, the initial risk ended in a true feel-good story: company listens to customers, company turns profit, everybody’s happy. Miracle Whip’s strategy has already led to an engaging social media campaign that lets consumers weigh in on the love/hate debate via Facebook.

So what do you think? Do these ads make you sit up and take notice? And if they do, it is for the right or wrong reasons?

Check out some of the ads here:

http://www.youtube.com/user/MiracleWhip?blend=3&ob=5

http://www.youtube.com/user/dominosvids

Marketing to the Baby Boomers

According to a recent report from NielsenWire, advertisers focus on reaching consumers 18–34 or 18–49. While these consumers spend billions of dollars every year, the report states that advertisers and consumer goods manufacturers are overlooking a group that has tremendous buying power — the 78 million Baby Boomers.

Born between the years 1946 and 1964, the Boomers are seeing the oldest of their generation beginning to retire. But today’s middle-aged and older consumers are different from their predecessors, the report says. The conventional wisdom that they spend little, resist technology and are slow to adopt new products should be reassessed. Boomers are an affluent group who adopt technology with enthusiasm and have shown a willingness to try new brands and products.

Boomers spend 38.5% of consumer packaged goods (CPG) dollars, yet it’s estimated that less than 5% of advertising dollars are currently targeted towards adults 35–64.

Pat McDonough, Senior Vice President at the Nielsen Company, says Boomers should be as desirable for marketers as Millennials and Gen-Xers — they are the largest single group of consumers and a valuable target audience.

And that’s the truth!

The benefits of our TAAN membership

Think there’s a typo in that headline? Wrong. TAAN stands for Transworld Advertising Agency Network.

TAAN is the oldest worldwide agency network and has member agencies in 47 markets around the world. From South Africa to St. Louis, members meet and share openly and willingly. Often they will partner on projects when the blend of expertise or location makes sense for the client.

TAAN is a membership-based organization with dues and benefits and responsibilities, created for agency owners. We are very honest about everything happening at our “shop” and look for advice from others. The most exciting part is that we truly are global. Every two years we hold global meetings where we not only learn new ways of approaching the advertising business, but get a chance to build or renew relationships with folks from other cultures and countries.

So why is TAAN important to our clients? One benefit is that we have reliable relationships with at least 30 agencies from around the country and over the oceans. Another is that we get outside the agency walls for three days twice a year. We spend so many intense hours focused on meeting deadlines, accomplishing creative goals, establishing brands and making sure the right ad ran, there’s not much time to think. Attending presentations by industry specialists gives us a chance to step back from the daily hustle, process new lessons and apply them to our own situations. Also, we get to have one-on-one conversations with colleagues from other agencies about all sorts of important minutiae that we can’t talk about with folks at our own agency. It’s stimulating and energizing — and a client wants a stimulated, energized agency. Of course a side of discipline and process orientation is valuable too!

Now there is one caveat — if I don’t act on the new information and new perspectives I’ve gained at a TAAN meeting, I haven’t helped my agency. So the next time you’re considering an agency — to hire or to work for — ask if it has ever been a network member — and whether it has applied any of the knowledge gained as a result.

Did I mention that I just returned from a TAAN meeting (which we hosted in Wilmington, DE)? The focus was on applying social media to an agency’s growth.

Traditional marketing tactics may be like your old mix tapes.

It seems like only yesterday. I wanted to catch the attention of that special person and I knew the perfect way to go about doing it — the mix tape! A combination of all those songs that would tell her exactly how I felt and why she should want my company as much as I wanted hers.

Times have certainly changed. Now you wouldn’t make a mix tape, or even a mix CD. Now it’s all about the playlist.

Are business relationships really any different?

Looking at it from a marketing perspective, traditional tactics are like that mix tape—time consuming, more expensive and once they are recorded they are unchanging.  Today’s nontraditional marketing tactics have a lot in common with the playlist. Messages can be shared quickly; you can ask friends and colleagues to share their opinions; and if the message you want is no longer being spread, it can be changed on the fly.

How do you communicate for your business? If you’re focused only on traditional marketing tactics, it’s as if you’re trying to reach your target with a mix tape. There’s a segment of the audience that appreciates the effort, and the medium, but the biggest part of your target has moved on.

It’s time to embrace new media, to realize that the Internet is not going away, that more and more people use it to do everything from shopping to getting medical advice. It’s time to realize that smart mobile phone use is not going to decrease. That within the next couple of years it won’t be enough to have a good-looking website — you’ll need a mobile-enabled, good-looking website. It’s time to think about how your company is going to tell those special people why they should want your company.

Cue up Lloyd Dobler with his boombox playing “In Your Eyes.”

I still miss those tapes  — the awkward “flip” after side A was done, the feeling of writing a title on the label — but I would miss my iPod even more.

Creating a customized online risk assessment

So how do you get a cardiovascular campaign to stand out above the clutter when there are more than 50 hospitals flooding the market with similar messages? How do you engage consumers to come to your website and sign up for your marketing materials? How do you get people to realize that they’re at risk for heart disease and proactively seek out a cardiologist in your health system?

These are all questions we were asked by The Chester County Hospital (TCCH) marketing team and questions we asked ourselves as we developed marketing recommendations for their cardiovascular service line.  Our answer was to develop an online risk assessment that would determine an individual’s risk level for heart disease.

But this assessment needed to be different from the templated ones that could be bought from other companies. It needed to be customized and reflect the TCCH brand.  It needed to have evidence-based questions and it needed to promote and link to the system’s monthly screenings and community outreach programs. It also needed a personal component that offered a resource to individuals at high risk.

After several planning sessions and a month of programming, Heart Tracks emerged. This customized online heart risk assessment was built with the marketing and Cardiovascular teams at TCCH, and provides a custom report that links the individual’s risk factors to TCCH programs and services. Those who are at high risk can request a personal consult with the TCCH cardiac nurse navigator and if necessary, have an appointment immediately scheduled with a TCCH cardiologist.

Backed by a comprehensive advertising campaign, this initiative has been hugely successful with more than 1,500 people completing the assessment, 300 people signing up for TCCH marketing materials, 20 scheduled appointments with a TCCH cardiologist and an appearance on the cover of a leading health care marketing publication. All of this in less than three months!

Applying strategy is critical to social media success.

99 ways to use Twitter?

There are plenty of articles on the Internet that outline the 17 ways to use Twitter or the 32 ways to use Facebook. If your approach to social media has been to start with these types of articles, you may be focusing too quickly on tactics without an appropriate social media strategy. Tactics without a strategy are particularly bad because they often end up being ineffective, hard to measure and mask real opportunities a more strategic version of the tactic may provide.

Because social media tools are so accessible and seemingly easy to use, a planning/strategy phase is often skipped, perhaps also in part because the realm of social media seems so complex. Because there is no clear place to begin, there is a tendency to start with tactics, a fatal mistake.

How to approach the problem

One technique for approaching a problem that seems complex is to break it down into a series of simpler problems. This is a great approach when it comes to the social media landscape. Instead of looking at a list of 50 ways to use Twitter, it makes more sense to look at a smaller list of ways to use social media in general.

Such a list might look like this.

In fact, you’ll find that any social media strategy probably consists of several of the leaf nodes in this diagram being used in various channels. (For the purposes of this discussion, a social media “channel” is Facebook or a blog or Twitter).

Your challenge then is to identify:

1. the kind of information your organization has or can generate, ideally something conversational
2. the types of people you’re trying to reach through social media
3. the items from the diagram above that can be used to put that information from step (1) in front of those audiences in step (2)
4. the appropriate channel for each item in step (3)

Now, just because we have a plan of attack doesn’t mean this is necessarily an easy or straightforward task. The best social media strategies look easy in hindsight but have usually been cooked up with some outside-the-box thinking. The above map is not a magic wand, but it is a starting point.

Examples, please!

Let’s look at a real-world example. Imagine your real estate agent. There may be a temptation for him to jump straight to tactics and use Twitter to post listings. After all, he has listing information (this is his product) and Twitter is easy to sign up for. Plus, this is on the map under Sales/Marketing --> Product announcement. We’re in good shape, right?

Well, Sales/Marketing on the diagram has a red flag on it. That red flag means if you’re only using something from that category, you may be on the wrong track. In this case, our real estate agent’s listings probably aren’t that useful to most people (who only wants to see the listings from a single real estate agent?), it’s not very conversational (what would people say back to him about a listing?) and he’ll probably find he won’t get a lot of followers.

Even worse would be to have a Facebook page where he is re-posting the exact same listings. Now he has a situation where even if a person were to be interested in those listings, it’s not in their interest to follow him on Twitter and be a fan on Facebook because then they’ll just get the same information twice. As silly as that sounds, we see this all the time.

Lesson learned: Directly promoting your product or service on as many social media channels as possible is not a good strategy because it abuses your potential followers and misses the whole “social” part of social media. You’re not listening, you’re just talking. And you’re saying the same thing in multiple places. And nobody cares.

This can take many forms including using Twitter to post links to your press releases or using Facebook to post links to your blog posts. I’m not suggesting never doing that but only doing that puts you in the PR category on the diagram and it, too, has a red flag. Oops.

Okay, give me a better idea.

This real estate agent has a problem, however… Aren’t the listings the only content he has? Possibly, but remember the first step is to identify the kind of information your organization has or can create. The listings may be the only content he has at hand. Grabbing whatever information you already have and using social media as a one-way channel (outward) is a missed opportunity.

This is where the strategizing comes in. What about creating a tips/tricks list for homeowners? (See the map above under Educational --> Tips/Tricks). This could include reminders to disconnect your plastic hose fittings in the winter so they don’t crack or money-saving tips for efficient energy use. Maybe it’s one tip a week and every once in a while he throws in a property listing (Sales/Marketing --> Product announcement) or an open house announcement (Notifications --> Events/Reminders).

Now this real estate agent has something useful he is providing to his clients. All of his existing clients would potentially be interested and he’d stay top of mind when they’re looking to sell or buy or even just make a referral to somebody else: “You should use my real estate agent. I follow him on twitter and he’s got great homeowner tips.” This takes the form of branding (Topics/Issues --> Brand related) and on top of that, he gets his listings and open houses in the mix. He’s now using five concepts from the diagram!

Plus, followers who have tips of their own can reply to him which means (a) the rest of his followers benefit from the tip (“Comments” from the Social category on the diagram) and (b) he can file it away later to use next year (a form of Research on the diagram). Wow – we’ve got seven nodes covered on the diagram, only a couple are red-flagged and a real social media strategy is taking form!

Hopefully you can see the difference this approach can make. Obviously there are issues like staffing and creative elements and ongoing maintenance and monitoring but try this process with your organization or give us a call and we can walk you through it.

Dashboards can help drive marketing strategy.

Looking for an easy way to gauge your client’s driving forces? Ask what’s on his or her dashboard.

Dashboards are a businessperson’s CliffsNotes®, condensing tomes of information into readily digestible nuggets. Where do overall profits stand? Any new leads from the northeast territory? Is maternity patient volume up? Dashboards provide a snapshot of the key metrics your client needs to succeed.

Which brings us, as usual, to marketing strategy. Knowing what’s on a client’s dashboard enables you to customize a plan that speaks to his or her exact needs and goals. And that’s a plan you can get some serious mileage from.

Changing the way they advertise.

Everyone wants to reach the top. Mountain climbers have always set their sights on conquering Mt. Everest. Baseball players have always aimed for the World Series. Big companies have always budgeted to advertise during the Super Bowl.

Until now. Pepsi is ending its 23-year run as an advertising staple during the most watched television event of the year. According to the Wall Street Journal, the soft-drink powerhouse is moving its advertising dollars online to kick off the “Pepsi Refresh Project” that will “award grant money for community projects proposed and selected by consumers, such as helping high-school students publish books to develop their writing skills.”

ESPN reports that the website will go live on January 13, and voting will start February 1 to determine which projects receive money.

A 30-second spot during the Super Bowl costs an estimated $3 million and reaches 98.7 million viewers. Pepsi’s new cause-related initiative is reported to use up at least $20 million of its 2010 marketing budget. Apparently, Pepsi has noticed all of us flocking to the Internet for every purpose imaginable. No doubt this site will draw hundreds of thousands of applicants who want to win these grants. Of course, when Pepsi awards the money, it’s a huge PR coup. Most likely Pepsi will plant its name on each winning community outreach program, bestowing an almost sponsor-like status upon itself — for a lot longer than 30 seconds.

We all love watching what agencies come up with for Super Bowl ads, but that tradition may be dying as big companies bail — FedEx has also opted out of the big game. Whether or not the giant courier will sponsor its own cause-related initiative remains to be seen.

Social Media Strategy and Success Stories

About to plan your social media marketing strategy? Wondering about the return you’ll get on your investment? Check out Socialnomics: Social Media ROI. This short video showcases success stories, plus some interesting facts. For example:

• More than 300,000 businesses have a presence on Facebook; about a third of these are small businesses.

• A Wetpaint/Altimeter Study found that companies that are heavily into social media blow away their peers in both revenues and profits. The study also found that companies using social media the most increased sales by 18%, while companies with the least social activity saw sales decline 6%.

• Dell sold $3,000,000 worth of computers on Twitter.

• eBay found that participants in online communities spend 54% more money.

What’s your social media strategy?

Sometimes you have to get mean.

If your communications department has been enlisted to shore up compliance with hand hygiene requirements (pre- and post-patient contact), take a lesson from Denver Health. As reported in the February 2009 issue of the Journal of Communication in Healthcare, Colorado’s primary “safety net” institution tried humor, incentives, prizes — but nothing worked until they got mean. They put a button on the home page of their intranet so employees could report offenders anonymously. Communication professionals are taught to rely on positive messaging to initiate change. But the Denver example shows that sometimes you have to slap a few hands to get them washed.

The Philadelphia Phillies - an example of great strategy!

It’s one of my favorite performances: George C. Scott as General George S. Patton. Love the attitude. But, most of all, I relate to what Patton was all about. This is a guy who knew what he had to do. He wasn’t popular because of it. He knew a thing or two about strategy. In one situation, when interrogating a German office, he wouldn’t give the guy the satisfaction of speaking to him in German — even though Patton spoke the language fluently. Strategy in action! The quote I remember most says it all, when Patton articulated what it would take to stymie the Nazi rampage — “First, you have to have a plan.”

Flash-forward about 80 years. A battle of a different sort — this time on the baseball field. The Philadelphia Phillies become contenders for the National League pennant and the World Series — not once, but twice. The first time, nobody saw them coming. Like Patton, these guys don’t leave anything to chance. Pitching rotations. Batter and pitcher matchups. Right down to who can be tempted with a high-pitch fastball for an easy out. They grasped the concept of having a plan. They’ve put together a formula to win.

Is it that easy? Hell, no. If it were, everyone would be winning World Series games and beating the crap out of bullies en masse. The truth is, there is no way to just luck into success. It takes a strategy to get you there.

For some people, that’s a hard lesson to learn. But the first time someone asks you, “Why are you doing that?” you get it. You’re forced to think about what you’re trying to accomplish and how. It may seem simple. But it’s the golden rule of strategy. Whatever project you have on your desk, ask yourself at least one question: “Why am I doing this?”

Oh, and as for Patton — he won. But you know that. And we’ll see about the second World Series crown for the Phils. But my guess is, since they have a plan, they’ve got a better-than-average shot to win the whole thing again.

Creating demand for Paranormal Activity.

Have you heard about Paranormal Activity, the low-budget horror movie that has been terrifying audiences over the past few weeks? It was reportedly produced for $15,000! But the very strategic marketing paid off as well as a multimillion-dollar campaign.

First came very scary trailers, followed by updated trailers with footage of terrified moviegoers at a sneak preview of the film. This was followed by a limited release in a handful of college towns around the country.

Then came the really clever part: what appeared to be a grassroots campaign to get the movie distributed nationwide. By teasing us, the filmmakers created a public demand for the movie. They drove us — both in commercials and online — to eventful.com, where we could demand that the movie open in our hometown theaters. The site had a real-time running tally of votes and bragged that Paranormal Activity is the first movie to ever be “demanded” by “we the people.” We could also show friends and associates that we supported the “movement” by spreading the word via Twitter, Facebook, a MySpace widget or links in emails.

The best part? It worked — whether or not they ever needed the votes to obtain a national release. How’s that for creating artificial demand? I wonder how future marketing campaigns will incorporate Paranormal Activity’s grassroots web marketing.

Tourism and economic development

Tourism. It’s vital for many countries and many island nations. It’s also important for the economic development of the State of Delaware and its neighboring states. Millions of dollars are brought into these states through businesses that serve both tourists and locals, and thousands of jobs are created in service industries associated with tourism.

Whether it’s trips to nearby attractions (25% of the population of the United States is located within a four-hour drive of Delaware) or weekly visits to the lovely beach communities that line the eastern coast of New Jersey and the Delmarva Peninsula, tourism is key to this area’s economic development.

Want a novel way to raise awareness of your state? Missouri created a lot of buzz recently by giving away a Harley Davidson motorcycle and later contacting the contest entrants with information about the state and its attractions. It makes sense for states to invest in tourism, because tourism pays back. According to Rich Harrill, director of the Institute for Tourism Research at the University of South Carolina, “Tourism is the world’s largest industry and it’s going to continue to be very important as an economic development strategy, as an industry nationally.”

Here are some fun facts, courtesy of the U.S. Travel Industry Association:
* Travel and tourism is a $1.6 trillion industry in the United States. If one dollar bill equaled a second of time, then $1.6 trillion would equal almost 51,000 years.
* Travel and tourism generates $110 billion in tax revenue for local, state and federal governments. If you placed 110 billion one-dollar bills end-to-end, they would circle the world 419 times.
* Each U.S. household would pay $995 more in taxes without the tax revenue generated by the travel and tourism industry. That $995 will buy about five weeks of groceries for a family of four, will fill the average car with gas 17 times, or will even pay the average cost of a ticket to a Michigan vs. Ohio State football game.

Never underestimate the power of tourism and its ability to generate dollars for the local economy.

Let AB&C be your GPS.

After getting hopelessly lost in Washington, DC, a few weeks back, I decided to buy a GPS navigation device to make sure that it never happens again. My new friend “Mindy” now guides me through each turn and makes sure I reach my destination regardless of road closures and detours.

As I was loading Mindy with all of my information and favorite destinations, I thought a good marketing agency is like a GPS. Clients provide their information and objectives, and the agency provides a targeted road map to help them reach their marketing destination.

AB&C is a good example. We provide focus and step-by-step directions on how to reach your target audience with a customized message that won’t get lost in the market. Call us if you need a marketing GPS. Just don’t call us Mindy.

Good is the new green.

You remember Gordon Gecko and the whole greed thing? (Or maybe you'd rather forget.)

Then we did a segue into Green. Environmental responsibility was the new Holy Grail. Remember those spots by Subaru about their plant in Ohio? And how recycling was the new “we are the world”? (Apologies to whoever that was who started that because that was really cool.)

Well, here we are staring down a quadtrillion bajillion dollar budget deficit and everyone’s looking around going “Who, me?”

So…where am I going with this and why should you care? OK. Here’s the thing. Saving. Giving. Sharing. That’s the new buzz. You’ve already been exposed to it. Macy’s did this big thing around the holidays about sharing. Even the high roller retailer Restoration Hardware hit the streets with a catalog giving buyers a chance to give with the chance of winning a vintage Shelby Mustang rag top if they gave $$$ to select charities. (No, I didn’t win—but as most of you know I am a sucker for convertibles.)

Good is the new green. Or the new greed.

We think you’re going to see a lot of companies talking about giving back to the communities they’re in—and using it as a marketing message.