Marketers To Ad Agencies: “You Still Don’t Get it.”

I’m an ad agency veteran. My fellow Mad Men fanatics call me Peggy. Once upon a time, Madison Avenue was the place to be; the pulse of all possibility.

Then came the digital age. Luckily, I discovered the ‘Internets’ early on. I made a speedy exit from advertising, where the Petes and the Ducks were asking their ‘girls’ to print out their emails and insisting that Mrs. P&G  could never figure out AOL.  As my Supra modem squawked,  my world was instantly slashed into the ones that ‘get it’ and the ones that don’t.

Ad agencies still don’t get it.

Sapient recently sponsored a national online survey to gain insights into what marketers want from their advertising and marketing agencies in the next 12 months. The survey polled a pivotal group –more than 200 chief marketing officers (CMOs) and senior marketing professionals.

Sapient has put the key takeways from the survey into a Top 10 Wish List for Agencies of the Future.

It’s all about technology, baby.

Virtually every item on the Top 10 Wish List centered on the digital space, from Web 2.0 and social media savvy to interactive advertising to virtual communities to even the availability of a Chief Digital Officer.

The List of Digital Shame:

More than a third of marketers surveyed say they’re not confident in their current agency’s grasp of online digital marketing and interactive advertising. 

• 79% of respondents rated “interactive/digital” functions as ‘important/very important.
• 45% of the respondents have switched agencies (or plan to switch in the next 12 months) for one with greater digital knowledge or have hired an additional digital specialist to handle their interactive campaigns.
• 90% of respondents agree that it is becoming increasingly important that their agency uses ‘pull interactions’ such as social media and online communities rather than traditional ‘push’ campaigns.
• 94% of respondents expressed interest in leveraging virtual communities (public and private) to understand more about their target audience.
• 92% of respondents said it was ‘somewhat’ or ‘very’ important that agency employees use the (social media) technologies that they are recommending.
• 49% of marketers surveyed said that agencies with chief digital officers are more appealing than those without.
• 63% of marketers surveyed said that an agency’s Web 2.0 and social media capabilities are ‘important/very important’ when it comes to agency selection.
• 79% of respondents rated “interactive/digital” functions as ‘important/very important.

Guru’s Take:  Ad and marketing agencies have got to quit insisting that being digital is about age. Yes, the whippersnappers have grown up with it.  My daughter has been online since she was 2, clutching blankie as she easily navigated ancient Macs and PCs. (Cross-platform since Pull-Ups, that’s my girl!)  But that doesn’t mean abdicating social media marketing, new technology or anything interactive to the kiddies.  When the first dotcom era bubbled up, those of us who could no longer squeeze into our high school cheerleader uniforms surfed our way through gallons of Visine and even more Starbucks to stay relevant. And guess what — we are.  We bring solid marketing skills, new product expertise, and consumer-centric insight to a digital world that sorely needs these capabilities.  I’d stack up my digital chops next to a Zuckerberg any day.  Even a divine digital diva like this one.

I suspect that some of this digital malaise on the part of agencies is senior management that ::::sigh :::: still doesn’t get it.  Maybe they’re still waiting to land the Pan Am account.

Pure Hog Heaven For Fans and Marketers: New Harley Davidson Museum Opens This Weekend.

This coming Saturday July 12th marks the opening of a new piece of classic Americana – Harley Davidson’s new Museum guaranteed to get ‘your heart racing’ by ‘experiencing the H-D story from dream to legend.’

The Museum is yet another example of Harley Davidson’s brilliant brand strategy and Customer Experience expertise, as the company continues to fan the flames of its most passionate users with high engagement experiences. From a marketer’s point of view, the Museum is nothing short of a Temple of Ethnography and a field trip to this $75 million new 20-acre complex is likely to generate new insights into how to cultivate the cult, as well as a wardrobe of hot new chappies.

Yanked Off Yelpers: How To Piss Off Your Most Passionate Users in 7 Days or Less.

One of the many positive outcomes of Dell Hell, “Cancel My AOL account”, and “The Comcast Dude is Sleeping on My Couch” is the dramatic change these mighty-mouth insurrections have wrought in the way companies perceive — and interact with — their customers. Most companies these days are not only fervently interested in customer retention and the lifetime value of customers but they’re also laser-focused on their best customers. As a Customer Experience pro, I’ve conducted research studies on countless loyalty programs, goldmining projects, organic transparency, and ‘highly engaged’ market segmentations. I spent five years working with some of Microsoft’s evangelist programs in which we experimented with numerous ‘preferred’ or ‘insider’ strategies and nearly as many years with Yahoo Global Customer Care. Everybody (and rightfully so) is ready to jump through hoops to keep their Loyal Customers purringly happy.

Everybody that is, except Yelp.  SFGate reports that the online review site yanked ‘an undisclosed number of accounts after finding that the business owners had swapped positive reviews with other business owners. Yelp also regularly deletes reviews it believes are phony. The move sparked an outcry among local businesses, and has even led some entrepreneurs to band together with thoughts of a class-action lawsuit. Their reasoning is, if they legitimately spend their money and patronize a service, why can’t they review it?”

I’ve had an upclose-and-personal view of the mystifying way Yelp chose to treat its most passionate users via firebrand Adryenn Ashley, who in the grand tradition of “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore” decided to fight back by putting her considerable marketing and citizen journalist expertise to good use. On Wednesday she created Yelp-Sucks.com and YelpLawsuit.com, asking people “yanked by Yelp” to sign up for a class-action suit. Apparently, response to these sites is growing as frustrated yelpers chase after both reinstatement — and that so-far elusive apology.

Here’s what puzzles me. Yelp is based in the Bay area. Its founders have deep Internet expertise. They understand the power of igniting a conversation and watching it grow like the wildfires down here in Big Sur. A recent article in the New York Times says: “What Yelp did differently than these others, as Jeremy Stoppelman, the site’

s co-founder and chief executive describes it, was to spend most of its energy attracting a small group of fanatic reviewers.”

Now, I have no insider information on the deleted accounts. I have no idea if any of them violated Yelp’s (fuzzy) rules. But I do know that Yelp is violating most of today’s cardinal rules of Customer Experience. Why would they choose to deal with their most passionate users, some of whom probably come from this ’small group of fanatic reviewers’ in such a harsh and old-school way? Why the cold, quasi-accusatory termination emails? Couldn’t they have at least considered possible explanations for what may appear to be phony reviews? Couldn’t they have started with contacting the questionable Yelpers and saying something like: “Hey, we’re growing like crazy because people like you love to Yelp. But we’re trying our best to keep Yelp a great tool for everyone — and some of your recent activity is raising questions. Here’s a handy contact form. Talk to us.

While Techcrunch claims that these pissed off passionate customers are merely a sign of Yelp’s power, it might be good to mull over these numbers from a recent survey: Eight out of 10 people who go away will bad mouth you. Then they’ll tell somewhere between 25 and 250 people about the problem they had — and they’ll relish explaining it in enraged detail. And woe-is-you if among these customers is a wow-is-me Adryenn Ashley . . .

After they finish bad-mouthing your company? That’s when they’ll scour the Internet in search of your competitors.

New Site “Living Room Candidate” Presents 12 Classic Fear-Based Campaign Commercials.

Just as the 2008 Presidential Campaign kicks into full manipulative mode, New York’s Museum of the Moving Image launches a powerful new video-rich website featuring TV commercials dating back to the first campaign television spot.  Called Living Room Candidate, the site is packed with fascinating political factoids from 1952-2004 and is a powerful history lesson for any voter.

But what struck me to the core were the twelve commercials whose unmistakable mission was, quite simply, to scare the hell out of us.  Anyone who took issue with Hillary Clinton’s “3 a.m.” spot should take a look at a few of these classic chillers to experience real fear.  Click down the list starting with ‘Daisy’ (nuclear war) to ‘Bomb’ (more nuclear war, this time with vivid mushroom clouds) to ‘Bear’ (Soviets lurking in the woods) to ‘Revolving Door’ (Dukakis frees murdering rapists) to 2004’s Osama & Friends (”These people want to kill you”) and more.

The ‘Mad Man’ behind ‘Daisy’, Tony Schwartz, died last week.  Produced in collaboration with advertising agency Doyle Dane Bernbach, Schwartz’s minutelong spot was broadcast only once – on Sept. 7, 1964, during NBC’s “Monday Night at the Movies.” It showed a little girl in a meadow (actually a Manhattan park), innocently counting aloud as she plucks the petals from a daisy. Her voice dissolves into a man’s voice counting downward, followed by the image of an atomic blast. President Johnson: “These are the stakes. To make a world in which all of God’s children can live, or to go into the dark. We must either love each other, or we must die.”

(W. H. Auden.)

It’s a long way to November.  Prepare to have your pants scared off.

Are The Carbon Cops coming? Will We Be Dragged Off to Carbon Rehab?

41% of Britons think the Carbon Cops are coming.

25% think ‘repeat offenders’ will be shipped off to Carbon Rehab and forced to take Carbon Addiction classes.

So reports Reuters in an article about a recent survey conducted by the Energy Saving Trust, an organization set up to help people kick the carbon habit.

“The UK’s perception is that by 2050 we could have the sort of draconian infringements on our civil liberties that have been highlighted in our research. This need not be the case,” said EST chief Philip Sellwood said in the Reuters article.

Note: I’ve been waving this green flag for a while now.  Do you want your product to be the plastic bag of the future?  It’s either abide by our new millennium’s mantra — Reduce, Reuse and Recycle. Or expect a visit from the Carbon Offset Police enforcing that fourth R: Regulate.

I will undoubtedly be the first to be taken away in (hemp) chains.  Convicted of cheeseburger, paper towel and Crystal Geyser addiction.

 

Inside IKEA’s Marketing.

If you want to test out that hot new relationship of yours, taking him or her home to meet Mom may not be the answer. Instead, the true test of compatibility is buying something at IKEA, taking it home and (maybe) assembling it. Later, you can see how well you two do at Anger Management classes, the ER or while sharing a handful of Xanax.

This is why IKEA’s Flash masterpiece ‘Come Into The Closet’ makes me so crazy. The 5 minute spot brilliantly lures you into five different closets, from Pax Stordal’s 5th floor cool glass look to an urban party room with shimmering disco ball to a craft room so pretty-in-pink that it made me want to buy a glue gun. Almost immediately you begin to believe that all this detail and design is possible to achieve in your own home. You believe that you can twist and wind and pound those shelves into submission. You believe that because ‘prices are dropping’ you’re saving some money, too.

This then is the marketing genius of IKEA. They make you believe. They tease and tempt and convince you to give it one more try. You forget that the cost of the handyman you call for rescue plus the price of your stitches will pretty much wipe out the savings from IKEA’s sale prices.

But call me old-fashioned. Marketing has always been about dreams, possibility and what could be if only you use my product.

Do You Speak IKEA?

From a great site named Pigtown Design comes this additional peep inside IKEA marketing and naming:

• Sofas, coffee tables, bookshelves, media storage and doorknobs are named after places in Sweden (Klippan, Malmö)
• Beds, wardrobes and hall furniture after places in Norway; carpets after places in Denmark and dining tables and chairs after places in Finland.
• Bookcases are mainly occupations (Bonde, peasant farmer; Styrman, helmsman).
• Bathroom stuff is named after lakes and rivers.
• Kitchens are generally grammatical terms
• Kitchen utensils are spices, herbs, fish, fruits, berries, or functional words such as Skarpt (it means sharp, and it’s a knife).
• Chairs and desks are Swedish men’s names (Roger, Joel)
• Materials and curtains are women’s names.
• Children’s items are mammals, birds and adjectives (Ekorre is a set of children’s toy balls; it means squirrel)

Who wants to find out where Fartful and Jerker come from?

Going Bananas Over Dole Organic’s Marketing Savvy.

I always love it when I get a new food project.  I get to wax eloquent with phrases like farmers-market-fresh and sun-plumped perfect. I get to invent new blends, flavors and colors. I get to nose around in my stockpile of ingredients and decide whether they should be mulled, cold-pressed or frappe’d.

But all of this is wimpy indeed — mere puffery, in fact — when compared to the way in which Dole has masterfully re-tooled its Organics line, giving it new life and a compelling new story to tell.  In an era when our favorite veggies suddenly turn villainous, made in China means made with mercury and lead, and no one is really sure what ‘green’ means anymore, Dole has taken not just the eco road but the ethical one as well.

The story: Dole Organic lets consumers “travel to the origin of each organic product”.  By typing in a fruit sticker’s three-digit Farm Code on Dole Organic’s website, customers can find the story behind their banana. Each farm’s section on the website includes background info, shows photos of the crops and workers and tells consumers more about the origin of Dole’s organic products.  You can even use Google Earth to get a closer look at the community.  A new Carbon Compensation 2008 chart is available as well.

I typed in code 698 and here’s what I got:   

Farm Name: La Gloria and Las Palmas

Las Palmas Farm and La Gloria Farm belongs to Andrés Altamirano, a member of VRAM group. La Gloria farm has 20 hectares of organic bananas and 20 hectares of organic cocoa. The farm is located in Machala, Province of El Oro in Ecuador. The farm is been certified by BCS Öko Garantie since 2005. Mr. Altamirano as well as his partners of VRAM group is commited with the improvement of the organic farming.  Las Palmas farm has 25 hectares in third year of conversion to organic, next January 2008 the farm will be certified as organic and will start exporting its organic fruit with Dole Organic Program too.

Now that carbon footprinting and corporate transparency are here to stay, it’s likely that more marketers will soon come up with their own seed to spoon stories and labels. Enquiring minds now urgently want to know: Where the heck did my dinner come from? Who grew it? How did it get to my local Safeway? What kind of footprint did it leave behind?

And the ultimate question of all: Which is worse? Carbon or calories?

Just When You Thought It Was Eco-OK To Run That Online Media Campaign …

We calculated our carbon footprint for all those red-eyes we flew to London, the SUVs we rented, the hotel rooms where we showered for 20-minutes and requested extra Egyptian cotton towels.  We even tossed in the methane from the cheeseburgers we devoured after Brett was intercepted in overtime.

And while our eco-sins are piling up like so many plastic bottles imprinted with 7’s, it didn’t occur to us until this very moment that we marketers need to calculate the environmental impact of our online media campaigns.  We felt so virtuous switching from treeware to those flashing banners and Facebook fan pages.

But now, a company called imc2 has launched Clear Sky Digital Media, a free tool that allows marketers to calculate and then offset the carbon footprint of their online media campaigns. The tool converts an online media buy into a kilowatt hour measure of the energy necessary to support its delivery. This measure is translated into carbon emissions and then used to determine the cost of buying offset credits.

Initially, I tried to calculate the carbon footprint of this blog but was quickly disheartened by the quantity of 0.0’s that appeared. Then I fantasized I was Chief Media Buyer for The Plastic Bags of America account, deep into planning the launch of a major online campaign featuring user-generated videos showing off the many healthy uses of recycled plastic bags. I picked the dimensions, selected high traffic sites like Yahoo, MSN, and AOL, then added the number of expected impressions. In seconds, Clear Sky not only calculated the carbon cost of the proposed campaign but told me how much it would cost me in green credits to offset. In this case, my Healthy Plastics campaign would create about 10 metric tons of carbon — and cost around $127 to offset.

So why do we need this new tool? Isn’t switching from forest to server farm virtuous enough? After all, an average issue of Time magazine is responsible for a quarter-pound of greenhouse gas emissions, while newsprint consumption alone is some 9.2 million tons per year. Electronics have got to be greener, yes?

Apparently Clear Sky’s mission is to simply persuade us to re-think all of our energy consumption and to start an industry-wide conversation about sustainability. Although currently not as devastating as dead trees, electronic media is having a growing impact on the environment. It’s already running neck and neck with air travel, each accounting for an estimated 2% of the world’s carbon emissions.

imc2 has raised some interesting issues — and here’s another one: Should the candidates in this year’s Presidential Election be required to calculate (and offset) the carbon emitted as a result of their campaigns? Imagine what it might cost to offset only the $45 million the money-making machine known as Barack Obama raised in the month of February alone and then spent aggressively on TV ads, particularly in Texas. A Presidential campaign carbon offset could be a significant energy investment windfall.

When Name Generation Isn’t About Naming.

Whether it’s the R-word, job loss, midlife crisis or simply some kind of cosmic tipping point, the Guru is getting inundated with Name Generation projects for small businesses.

Normally, name generation centers on coming up with a new brand name, tagline, descriptor and sometimes promise statements, triggers or testworthy concepts for products, services and websites. In the past year, however, probably 60% of my projects have actually been about what my friend Claire calls woo-woo. That is, self-discovery, transformation and ultimately ‘getting’ who you are as a businessperson and your place in the competitive landscape.  The naming process itself, which forces a deeper dive into everything from product to sales to legal to marketing, is provoking more realistic strategies for building businesses. The ones I’ve seen — and helped guide as provocateur — are likely to have a better chance of surviving and thriving.

Planning for the future has always been a significant part of the name generation process:

How scale-able is the name?
Will the name stay relevant? (Hello, dotcom era)
Will the name allow you to migrate into new categories as the marketplace evolves?
And these days, how do you avoid being the plastic bag of the future?

But what’s happening here is more akin to: Does this name fit who I am? Who I want to be 5 years from now? A sizeable portion of these clients are seeing the future via potential names and saying: No way. I don’t want to be perceived in that light. I don’t want to try to squeeze into that slot. Or simply: That’s not me.

This afternoon, one of my all-time favorite client teams called me and rejected all of the names and taglines I presented yesterday.

I was thrilled.

This is because, by wholeheartedly engaging in the process, they learned exactly what they did not want to do or be as a business. They grappled with each of the platforms and names. Some were spot on strategically. Some were spot on creatively. Some were spot on for where they thought they wanted to be when we launched the project.

The good news: The new brand name and strategy they came up with is inspired.  It’s as tongue-in-chic and kicky as they are. Thankfully, they happen to be risk-takers with a history of significant success and the guts to pull this off with panache.

I’m psyched.  I love to watch woo-woo at work.

“Getting” The Mom Market: Three Winners

It’s my daughter’s birthday today.  Which means that my Momhood is front and center this morning, as I scroll back, way back to the day before being a Mom was rockstar cool and wearing your kids on your hips is hipper than Prada’s latest.

I remember the day a senior executive (and Mom) took me aside at my new job and whispered: “Never talk about your daughter. Don’t post her pictures. Don’t bring her to the office. No one should even know you have a kid.”

Nowdays, Momism is not only a badge of honor but also a booming business, thanks to some 83 million U.S. Moms who are spending 2 trillion + dollars a year on everything from baby spas www.skinspababy.com to NASCAR umbrella strollers.  Although the whisper in the VC world in Silicon Valley may be that the ‘Mom market is saturated’, the Guru thinks that conversely, the marketplace is going to continue to grow right along with every toddling step these kids take.  

Here are a couple of winners:

www.cubesandcrayons.com Cubes and Crayons, ‘office space and kid space’ is a concept well worth watching.  Launched in January 2008 by frustrated Mom and Founder MF Chapman, this savvy combination of full-time, flexible childcare and office space is already a hit and sure to spawn more mini-Mom communities where both Mom and kidlet benefit.

http://maternalinstinct.net/   Just up the road from Menlo Park’s Cubes and Crayons is Mom-marketing powerhouse Maternal Instinct. The brainchild of award-winning creative marketer, Kat Gordon, this talented team of Creative Problem Solvers knows exactly how to tap into the growing band of Mom Influencers.  Check out ‘What’s My Blanket’ for tips.

And finally, we Moms know that each and every one of our offspring is a creative genius.  Check out this latest winner, where self-publishing meets kids, Tikatok: beta.tikatok.net.

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