Monday 23 August 2010
Amazing Roger Federer trickshot on Gillette ad shoot
Fantastic example of how you use genuinely engaging content that furthers brand equity without involving the brand! Total production cost = next to zero.
Social media is more engaging than online advertising - how incisive!
I was moved by a couple of stories over the last week. The first was a clever piece of social media work by Pedigree for its Adoption Drive Campaign which is usually fronted by a TV ad campaign and an extensive on pack campaign. Not this year....The brand says that while traditional channels deliver reach they don’t encourage engagement or direct action....well no change here - they never have!
Display advertising creates look and feel, it imbues personality to the brand but very few people have ever got up from their chairs to go buy things cos they've just seen them on the Telly and that's not a bad thing.
It allows people to form their opinions about the brand over time and adopt their favourites. The difference now is that people can interact with the brand online and tats great too but it’s unlikely that most of the Worlds biggest brands would have been built purely online - not yet anyway. Once they are built then they can afford to put themselves in the hands of social media.
Back to Pedigree where the results of the campaign appear to be over a million people 'liking' the brand which is great - I'm not sure that their tactic of releasing frankly quite average videos for every 25k views was particularly strong although the conation of 25k for every 25k views was certainly a good PR story....now perhaps that's the point?
The second relates and I saw this morning with the trumpeted headline that online ads annoy rather than appeal - well of course they do! More interestingly is the fact that young web users will react positively to online ads as opposed to the over 55's who apparently were brought up on intrusive advertising so therefore are less likely to engage than those who are used to content online - Sounds like one great big cycle going round and round and round!
Tuesday 3 August 2010
Marketing in Greece pt.1
I've been away on holiday staying in a wonderful small Greek sailing/fishing village called Paleros on the west coast. We have family there and my Brother in law Kosta runs a bar on the beach (yes it's one of the tougher things I have to deal with in my life). It was great to just forget about marketing things and to kick back and relax, enjoy the fabulous hospitality and spend some time thinking about the more important things in life.
It was weird though as I saw a real example of the effects of the recession that to be honest haven't really hit home while at home. It's a great place to go as it really is an authentic Greek town, its beautiful and it feels unspoilt although there is plenty to see and do there so you dont feel isolated. It does however rely heavily on tourist trade. mainly English, Greek and sailing types. Last time I went three years ago it was buzzing every night, the bars were packed and I could hardly get to the bar to get my free drinks! This time it was a very different story.
There were two main holiday resorts in the town and one of them went bust last year leaving an unimaginable hole in the local economy. It went bust due to the parent companies over ambitious Worldwide expansion plans that got scuppered by the downturn. While there are still plenty of people there it is noticeable how difficult thing have become. Not only are they down on numbers of tourists but the staff at the resorts who are major customers of bars like my Brother in laws now have far less money to go out with and so their custom is at a premium.
The feeling of competitiveness between the bars and resaurants in now palpable as they struggle to come to terms with a local downturn the likes of which they havent seen for a long time, if ever. New innovative ways of marketing their hostelries to those punters out there have had to be devised and this is where the natural form of marketing has started to show it's face.
If you mentioned mar comms to these guys they'd look at you like you were mad but dont think for a minute that they are not sophisticated in their approach. They play the same games as major multi nationals such as P&G do when they launch new and possibly unnecessary baby/child products to head off the decline in the birth rate and therfore profit (Kandoo anyone?). They are well versed in PR, Sales promotion, DM and a host of other techniques that we study at marketing school but they use naturally as a way of boosting sales.
I even managed to get in on the act while I was there. Kosta was running a promotion to attract the young English staff to his bar on one of his quiet nights, A free Watermelon Vodka punch night. He showed me the flyer. It was intricate and interesting but not very clear and so I set about producing a club style flyer with dodgy watermelons in various states of intoxication making words like FREE and VODKA and THURSDAY NIGHT leap off the page.
Our head designer would have murdered me if he'd seen it - not very sophisticated! Kosta thought it was ok and we plastered it in all the relevant places. The place was packed. I daren't take credit for this but it did get me a new client! I am now putting together some flyers for the Punch night on Saturday followed by some others to be briefed.
I'd like to say that this is pro bono work for a family member but actually it is going some way to pay off all the free drinks I got on holiday - They're pretty shrewd these Greeks!
It was weird though as I saw a real example of the effects of the recession that to be honest haven't really hit home while at home. It's a great place to go as it really is an authentic Greek town, its beautiful and it feels unspoilt although there is plenty to see and do there so you dont feel isolated. It does however rely heavily on tourist trade. mainly English, Greek and sailing types. Last time I went three years ago it was buzzing every night, the bars were packed and I could hardly get to the bar to get my free drinks! This time it was a very different story.
There were two main holiday resorts in the town and one of them went bust last year leaving an unimaginable hole in the local economy. It went bust due to the parent companies over ambitious Worldwide expansion plans that got scuppered by the downturn. While there are still plenty of people there it is noticeable how difficult thing have become. Not only are they down on numbers of tourists but the staff at the resorts who are major customers of bars like my Brother in laws now have far less money to go out with and so their custom is at a premium.
The feeling of competitiveness between the bars and resaurants in now palpable as they struggle to come to terms with a local downturn the likes of which they havent seen for a long time, if ever. New innovative ways of marketing their hostelries to those punters out there have had to be devised and this is where the natural form of marketing has started to show it's face.
If you mentioned mar comms to these guys they'd look at you like you were mad but dont think for a minute that they are not sophisticated in their approach. They play the same games as major multi nationals such as P&G do when they launch new and possibly unnecessary baby/child products to head off the decline in the birth rate and therfore profit (Kandoo anyone?). They are well versed in PR, Sales promotion, DM and a host of other techniques that we study at marketing school but they use naturally as a way of boosting sales.
I even managed to get in on the act while I was there. Kosta was running a promotion to attract the young English staff to his bar on one of his quiet nights, A free Watermelon Vodka punch night. He showed me the flyer. It was intricate and interesting but not very clear and so I set about producing a club style flyer with dodgy watermelons in various states of intoxication making words like FREE and VODKA and THURSDAY NIGHT leap off the page.
Our head designer would have murdered me if he'd seen it - not very sophisticated! Kosta thought it was ok and we plastered it in all the relevant places. The place was packed. I daren't take credit for this but it did get me a new client! I am now putting together some flyers for the Punch night on Saturday followed by some others to be briefed.
I'd like to say that this is pro bono work for a family member but actually it is going some way to pay off all the free drinks I got on holiday - They're pretty shrewd these Greeks!
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