Endeavour Marketing & Media, LLC.

Very interesting campaign from Frito-Lay and great overview article by Tanya Irwin in MediaPost:

Lay’s is kicking off a nationwide experiential tour featuring the company’s potato farmers.

The PepsiCo’s Frito-Lay division brand is using a mobile greenhouse designed to bring a rural farm experience to city-based consumers. The six-city tour kicked off July 26 in New York City’s Times Square. Other cities on the tour are Boston, Detroit, Chicago, Los Angeles and Dallas.

Visitors to the 70-foot-long, 10-foot-wide and 14-foot-high traveling greenhouse can see plants that result in the ingredients in the potato chips and meet a Lay’s potato farmer. Interactive displays also are available. Consumers will find out about the tour via public relations, Facebook, Twitter and any local media coverage. The Lay’s campaigns are supported by multiple agency partners: Juniper Park (advertising) OMD (media buying), The Marketing Arm (events) and Ketchum (public relations).

The tour is an extension of the ad campaign that launched last year featuring the farmers that grow potatoes for Lay’s, says Linda Bethea, Lay’s brand manager, potato chip portfolio.

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Endeavour Marketing & Media: A Full-Service Marketing and Advertising Agency in Murfreesboro, TN

Interesting piece in USA Today (click for full article)

With retailers forced to take a hard look at their bottom lines during the recession, catalogs are adjusting, but not disappearing, says Leslie Linevsky, founder of Catalogs.com. As postage rates climb and customers become concerned about the environmental impact, retailers are scaling back on the number of catalogs they mail out and are using them to drive traffic to their websites.

Simon Doonan, creative director of Barneys New York, says retailers are becoming more creative when it comes to catalogs.

“I think because the Internet is so exciting and so immediate, we have to up the ante with direct mail and really make direct-mail pieces memorable, make them into keepers,” he says.

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Endeavour Marketing & Media, A Full Service Advertising Agency in Murfreesboro, Tennessee

Book Review from Matthew May for American Express OPEN

Feb 19, 2010 -

I have just finished reading Fascinate: Your 7 Triggers to Persuasion and Captivation, by Sally Hogshead. Sally is an award-winning advertising executive turned brand innovation consultant. In this book, she covers a wide swath of disciplines to weave a story-driven narrative that draws on her original research, a Kelton Study conducted specifically for the book, to look deeply into what captures our attention, and how we can create fascination in our lives and livelihoods.

Her goal in conducting a study of 1,059 Americans over the age of 18 was to define the role of fascination in our lives, and measure it in tangible terms. “Without fascination,” Sally says, “we can’t sell products, persuade shareholders to invest, teach students to read, or convince our own kids to stay off drugs.”

Some of the more interesting results are these:

• When asked how far they would go for a fascinating life, 60% of people said they’d be willing to bend their morals, standards, or loyalties.
• Only 9% of employees say their bosses are “extremely fascinating,” but 96% of parents say they’re fascinated by their own children.
• A fascinating brand can charge up to four times as much as an un-fascinating one.
• On average people will pay $288 per month to be the most fascinating person in the room. Five percent will pay more than $1000 per month. (Women will spend more to be fascinating than they spend on food. In fact, women will spend more to be fascinating than they spend on food and clothes combined.)

These results raise the obvious question: what does it take to be fascinating? The answer, according to Sally, is that it takes some blend of the seven triggers, which are defined as deeply rooted primal means of arousing intense interest:

1. Lust: the anticipation of pleasure, which we crave.
2. Mystique: unanswered questions, which intrigues us and makes us want to solve the puzzle (read rest of article)
   

From the AP:

Fast-food chain KFC is giving two Indiana cities $7,500 so it can emblazon founder Colonel Sanders’ face on their hydrants and fire extinguishers to promote new “fiery” chicken wings.

Experts say to expect more ads like this, on public property from sewer grates to the local landfill, as companies look to cut through the clutter of traditional advertising. Cash-strapped governments have long sold space on mass transit, benches, trash cans and other public property to help stretch budgets.

KFC told Indianapolis and nearby Brazil, Ind., it wanted to improve their fire safety by helping pay for new hydrants and extinguishers in exchange for advertising on them. The company plans to e-mail a national network of mayors on Wednesday to find three more cities to participate in the approximately $15,000, monthlong effort, which began Tuesday.

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By Andrew Hampp for AdAge

LOS ANGELES (AdAge.com) — When Delta Airlines wanted to reach business travelers just in the New York area last spring, it decided to test the idea of microtargeting with place-based media. So it teamed up with out-of-home vertical SeeSaw Networks to create multiple 15-second spots customized to a wide array of venues across five different digital out-of-home vendors.

Cafes from Reach Media Group’s Danoo, ferry terminals from Affiniti Group Media, Pump Top TV’s gas stations in the New Jersey and Connecticut areas and health clubs on the Netpulse and When networks were all included in the plan, complementing similarly targeted ads in New York-based print and digital media.

Although business travelers in a single market like New York may ultimately amount to a relatively small audience, the campaign represented one of the biggest digital out-of-home outlays to date from a client at Digitas, Publicis’ digital media agency that recently branched out into the emerging outdoor medium.

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Endeavour Marketing and Media, A Murfreesboro, TN Advertising Agency

By Christine Huang for AdAge:

The fourth Futures of Entertainment conference hosted by the Convergence Culture Consortium took place at MIT before the holidays, bringing together scholars and key thinkers from across TV, advertising, activism, new media and beyond. The hot topic of the weekend was transmedia.

A primer for those unfamiliar with the term: transmedia is that which moves across multiple channels of communication. Professor Henry Jenkins (formerly of MIT, now at USC), a transmedia scholar and founder of the Convergence Culture Consortium, distills the concept further: “Transmedia storytelling represents a process where integral elements of a fiction get dispersed systematically across multiple delivery channels for the purpose of creating a unified and coordinated entertainment experience.”

But transmedia approaches are applicable anywhere a narrative is formed. Here are four key takeaways from the conference for brands and advertisers to consider in this new transmedia age:

1. Make stories drillable. Jenkins, the event’s keynote speaker, highlighted “drillability” as his first key principle of transmedia storytelling, pointing out the importance of creating narratives that resonate widely as well as deeply. While many storytellers and brands focus on spreading their narratives horizontally—across platforms, networks, users, etc.—it’s in their vertical foundation, their drillability, that lasting engagements are formed.

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LONDON (AdAge.com) — Some 300 attendees gathered at the Saatchi Gallery last week for Ad Age sibling Creativity’s technology conference, Creativity and Technology, were treated to musings on bleeding-edge digital communication from Europe’s top talent in advertising, technology and design. Speakers ranged from agency creatives and technologists to writers such as Adam Greenfield, author of “Everyware” and head of design direction at Nokia.

Here are a eight takeaways from the conference if you missed it.

Curation is key
In a world of too many choices, both online and off, use your expertise to give consumers a small set of options in order to manage expectations. Choice is not always healthy, said Marko Balabanovic, head of innovation at Last Minute Labs, the exploration arm of travel site LastMinute.com. For the travel category, disappointment is inevitable in a digital, searchable world with too many choices — every selection could result in a consumer asking, “Could I have made a better decision?” But, if you don’t have overwhelming choice, you can’t regret making the wrong one. Read Rest of Article

From Coca-Cola

“Bloggers to Pursue Open Happiness”

From P&G

“P&G Seeking Bathroom Bloggers”

A critique from Jordan Zimmerman in AdAge:

I’m not surprised by all the ad accounts going into review in the automotive sector. I predict there will be many more in the next 12 months. Most will blame it on the recession, but I think that’s just an excuse. The fact is the business of marketing cars is too often mishandled because most agencies lack a fundamental understanding of how the industry operates.

Read Rest of Mr. Zimmerman’s Critique

The new “Droid” Phone from Verizon, Motorola and Google promises to be stiff competition to the iPhone but their recent ad campaign leaves us scratching our heads a bit.

The entire creative campaign is built on the foundation of calling out the “competitive differences” between the two handsets.  This is sound strategy when going up against an established leader in the category.  This helps get some converts from the “leader” product and rouse those who have yet to adopt the product as hopefully you are offering what has kept them from the product in the first-place…so called secondary advantage.

What has us scratching our heads though, is how “one-sided” the campaign is.  It seems like it’s falling into the classic trap of “I know you are but what am I?”  You can tear down, ah hum – excuse me, call out what you’re competitor is not all day long but if you’re not talking about what You are, at some point in the conversation, then you’re ceding a golden opportunity…and bleeding a heck of alot of media spend doing so!