Advertainment

Pretty sure i'm not the first to term the phrase "Advertainment" but if I am then let's hope I earn some serious royalties from it just like when Donald Trump tried to copyright the phrase "You're fired".

Anyways, the point of this post is to talk about how brands and companies can use Advertainment to engage users and get their message in front of copious amounts of eyes. As I was going through my blog reader today and reading Andy Sernovitz's latest post I couldn't help but laugh out loud. What a brilliant way to sell your impressively, terrible, beater of a car. The creator could have just put together a plain old Craigslist ad or posted it on Cartrader.com or any other car selling website but instead they created what can only be seen as one of the most brilliant marketing pieces i've seen in a long time. Although they clearly have an advertising background a similar ad could have been created using Microsoft office, not InDesign, Quark or other professional layout programs. He used humour and creative messaging to make his product go viral and that is a great lesson for small businesses everywhere.

You don't NEED to spend huge dollars to have an advertising agency create you an ad with Jerry Seinfeld or aliens. If you don't have marketing/advertising dollars to spend you have to use creativity and have a sense of humour to get the word out about your product/brand. In this digital age it is becoming easier for brands to make a big splash with a smaller amount of money. The masses are using advertisements as a source of entertainment and if you make one interesting enough they will do all the work for you.

Viagra-ing your brand

Newfoundland and Labrador don't claim to offer visitors a big city experience, in fact they market themselves as the exact opposite of that - quiet, small, and friendly. Have a look at some of their most recent television ads. The scenery is breathtaking, the music is calming and it makes you want to hop on the next flight to take it all in for yourself.





But they save the best for last, and enhance their brand image at the same time, by offering a personalized telephone number on the last screen. Sure it's a 1-800 number, but you have an actual person's name to speak too. How small town is that? How personal and special do you feel calling a specific person as opposed to a main phone line? Simply brilliant marketing, and no doubt leaves a smile on peoples faces - exactly the way they want people to react.

Great casting can make lasting impact

I don't know that I have ever seen a Banking commercial on TV that has actually made me think about switching banks.....until I saw the Ally commercials in Canada. Absolutely brilliant. They cast the perfect actor to play the role of the "big bank" and the children that they cast to act out the role of the confused consumer are budding stars.

Here is the latest ad from them that has me laughing everytime I see it.




That combined with this ad, which was the first one of theirs I saw make you seriously consider switching to Ally if ever your bank pissed you off.




Brilliant casting leaves a lasting impression in your mind. There are many different ways to make an ad a classic in peoples mind, and casting is clearly one of the best. Just think about the brilliant casting job Apple did for their recent apple v. mac ads, these Ally ads have much the same feel.

Pour some ketchup on me...

Your supposed to be singing that title to yourself to the Def Leppard classic "Pour Some Sugar On Me" and if you weren't before, i'm sure you are now. Have fun listening to that all day in your head, a gift from me to you.



Anyways onto bigger and better things. The ketchup packet has been remade! 40 years is all it took for a ketchup company to create something that gave their consumers the ability to "dip and eat it on-the-go" according to company Vice-President Dave Ciesinski.

It's actually a pretty cool new concept for the company and should please both the "squeezers" and the "dippers". I'm not sure if it should have taken them 40 years to create a new one, but at least they got there.

Makes you wonder if this new design will last another 40 years because where can you possibly go from here. Although that kind of near-sighted thinking wouldn't have allowed them to come up with such brilliant ideas as blue ketchup, and we all know that was a huge success. Is there a way to keep a brand like Heinz on the cutting edge of the Ketchup market? This new package clearly signals that they want to be there, but are efforts like coloured ketchup just a waste of time and money for the company. It certainly created a buzz in the condiment industry for that time period, but the lasting power of the product was minimal.

I wonder what is next for the high-tech ketchup market......what else can there possibly be. Should be an interesting battle for the marketing team, innovating when there is seemingly nothing to innovate....although I guess that is also part of the joy of innovation.

Non-personalized can work too

Often you hear that everything should be as personalized as possible to make customers feel like you are talking directly with them. But that might not always be the case.

99.3 CFOX is a local rock station in Vancouver and easily has the wittiest and sharpest morning show in the province, if not the nation. They have established a brand for the Jeff O'Neill Show that never veers from its true character. They know when they will get in trouble from the lawyers, execs, and government agencies and they will do whatever they feel like anyways.

So, what would you expect from them when you submit an email comment to the show? A standard autoresponse personalized with your name? Nope...something more like this.

A well thought out and pretty hilarious way of telling people that you got their email and you are interested in what they wrote. Works with their brand and leaves a smile on their consumers faces. I wonder how many times this has been forwarded to people's friends.

GM still singing the blue

In an update to my post from yesterday GM has decided to thankfully stay with the blue background for its logo. Smart decision i'd say.

Here's the post from Marketing News.

All in all Mr. Henderson seems to be making sense, my only problem came with this line

The new company will focus on three top priorities, customers, cars and culture, Henderson said

Okay.......either that is the dumbest statement ever or that just goes to show you why this company is in such trouble. They didn't even know that "Cars" or "Customers" should have been a top priority!!!!! It took a trip to bankruptcy to make this obvious????

When people have had enough of your antics

Yes, this is yet another post on General Motors. I can't help it, I read Jaffe Juice or watch Jaffe TV and he makes nothing but logical points about the mess that they are in and I can't help but blog about it myself.

However, this blog post is about how with the internet people now have the power to knock companies down a couple of pegs. It's an obvious statement and anyone that knows the power of social media and the internet realizes how disastrous one person with a vendetta can be to your brand. Unfortunately GM has many haters, which leads to things such as this:



This is not what GM was hoping for following their Chapter 1 television ad and the launching of the "Reinvention" website. They have also taken strides to be very prevalent throughout social media (including their head commenting on my blog), but no matter how hard you work the internet balancing the playing field. GM has spent millions and millions of dollars on their latest campaign and whoever started this website probably spent a couple of hundred. In terms of which has more impact, it may even be the GM Retardation site.

Unfortunate for GM but a humbling lesson that many marketers know.

True Service

Kal-Tire has got it right.

And their brand/image is incredible for an industry that is typically seen as a bunch of grease pigs that rip off the consumers.

Kal-Tire's slogan,"True Service.", is a bold statement. But one they back up.. To be honest, I have never heard anyone say anything bad about them because they treat each customer great, and clearly have a strategy of building an ongoing relationship with every individual that walks through the door. Everyone needs tires, and they will need tires throughout their lives. Why not build a good relationship with every customer.

Now when someone walks through a tire store's door they are at the company's mercy, they are more than likely frustrated, and they are probably irritable.

Yesterday I had the good fortune of waking up to a flat tire and after figure out my jack and lugnut wrench I threw on the magnificent looking donut of a spare tire. With this in place I headed to Kal-Tire to see about repairing the flat or getting a new one. I dropped it off and heard from them after 2 hours. "Your front one is not repairable, but we were able to fix your right rear tire which also needed it." So they went above and beyond to make sure the rest of my tires were okay, fine i'll gladly pay the extra amount for that service. They didn't have the tire I needed to replace the damaged front tire but were quick to refer me to a place that would have them. Perfect.

So I went in after work to pick up my car and got to the counter, "Here is your total charge and that includes a discount too." Huh? What did I do to deserve a discount? Nothing, I chose Kal-Tire and they know the value in having a happy customer who will bring their car back to them for any future tire problems.

That my friends is True Service, and truly an impressively run company.

Something to think about the next time you are trying to figure out what image your brand should project in your customers minds. How can you build a better relationship with customers to extend your customer lifecycle?

Re-Gifting your product

As I was watching commercials the other night and a Bounty select-a-size ad came on, I was struck by what must be one of marketings most impressive feats. The Re-Gift, or re-package, or re-whatever you want to call it. Basically taking your regular product and re-packaging it or re-marketing it as a brand new entity. The Bounty select-a-size isn't the greatest example because there is some innovation in the product, but it does offer a bit of a re-gift. Select a size basically takes paper towels and cuts the regular sheet in half and allows it to be tearable every half sheet instead of a full sheet. This is not a remarkable new technology or even a genius piece of engineering, it's a simple well thought out way to market their product that makes people feel like they are saving money by using less paper towels while at the same time their conscience gets a pat on the back because that means they are throwing out less garbage too. Thats win-win for the customers and definately a win for the marketing team.

But think about it, being able to re-market your product to an entirely new market or for an entirely new purpose is extraordinarily genius and creative, even if some may think of it as pulling the wool over someones eyes. But the majority of the time these new applications for your product/brand provide something to the target market your aimed at, otherwise they would fail miserably.

Probably the best ever representation of this was when Arm & Hammer realized that people were using their baking soda to neutralize the smells in their fridges. They now have a variety of products that are directly designed just for putting in your fridge/freezer to help keep them odor free. Genius.

Now unfortunately not all products/brands provide marketers with the ability to re-gift them to consumers, but maybe yours does. Does it?

Using your blog for good or evil

Let me preface this post by saying I understand writing your own personal blog is about building your brand and promoting yourself. But if you have developed a loyal following of people reading your entries when does too much selling yourself lead to a drop off.

I have followed the Pow! Andy Nulman blog for 7 or 8 months now and there was often some very interesting entries. He would talk about recent marketing campaigns that had used the Power of surprise to catch peoples attention and thus land themselves a good return. It was thoroughly interesting and I always looked forward to his newest post until.......

He got a book deal.

Now pretty much every single post is selling his book. Now he does mask it with promotions he is offering with the book, and contests he is running, and how he is trying to Pow! sell his book. But it all feeds back to being about his book, and in reality trying to sell more copies of his book.

Fair enough. You built your blog up, you built the brand of it, you got a book deal out of it so why not use your blog readers to sell copies. But what's going to happen when those loyal readers start to tire of seemingly the same thing every day. I know I am.

It's just like an overused advertisement. Wassssssupppp!!!!

Logos, logos, everywhere

The position I work in has allowed me to be a part of the branding process for both a new product and a revamped company name. The process is long, can be costly and is also extemely important. There are a number of steps in the process but the part I find most interesting is the logo development. This is the face of your brand, it speaks to your customers even when no words are exchanged. The colours, the font, the images they all add up to create a living thing with a theme, an attitude, and a personality. Its incredibly important to determine the message that you want your brand to exude because one wrong italic, one shade to dark can turn your spa into some kind of devil worshipping social club (or so it might seem in the eyes of the consumer).

As a marketer I am constantly assessing these logos as I pass billboards, see flyers, browse websites, etc. and I have noticed that colour is a huge trigger for me. But there are only so many colour options out there for a brand and sometimes a logo I see triggers another brand in my mind instead of the new one. For example here is the new Pepsi logo

Now everytime I used to look at the old pepsi logo I thought nothing but pepsi, but now everytime I see this new logo I can't think of anything other than this logo which you might recognize:

The majority of my mind triggering to oldspice clearly has something to do with the use of the blue white and red colours, or maybe I just like Old Spice. That is probably also a good sign for Old Spice as they have such a strong brand image that when I see a beverage product's logo all I think about is deodorant......or maybe i'm just weird.

Do you have any logos/brands that trigger other such logos in your mind?

Is Stephen Colbert the most powerful man in America?

Last night I was watching Late Night with Conan O'Brien and his first guest was Stephen Colbert. The talk led to Stephen Colbert's group of staunch supporters who he calls the "Colbert Nation". Stephen Colbert knows his target market, teens and young adults probably aged 17-35 or so. He knows that they are tech saavy and he knows that they enjoy a chance to disrupt the status quo. That is why when he calls on his "Colbert Nation" to do something such as change wikipedia entries to reflect his comical views, the website later has to adapt and alter itself due to the work of the "Colbert Nation".

Fortunately, it seems as if Stephen Colbert will not be having the Colbert Nation drinking special Kool-Aid anytime soon so they can visit the mothership. But this community of people seems to be developing into more of a religious cult following. The church of Colbert is up and running and people listen and hang on his every word.

Does that make him the most powerful man in America, or is he just a crack marketer? He knows his target, he knows how to keep them involved in his brand, he has developed an incredible following. Any brand/tv show/company would love to be in the position he is in.

Will he use it for good or evil? Only time will tell.