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Great article from Mahesh Murthy for the Journal (click for original article)

By MAHESH MURTHY

From the WSJ’s India Chief Mentor blog, produced by a panel of Indian entrepreneurs and investors, at wsj.com/mentor:

One thing I learned from my days in traditional advertising is that a brand doesn’t exist on shelves—it exists in the hearts and minds of people. Your brand is the sum total of perceptions about your product in the heads of your relevant audience.

If that’s true, then online media are the most important place for your brand image to be established, defended and grown. This is where your offering comes face-to-face with your audience and where its responses can be measured, shaped and—if need be—countered in real time. This is where perceptions can be built, person by person.

This brand building is more effective that the mode we’ve employed until now: TV commercials with 30 seconds of well-produced fiction that try to sell a brand image. It is more credible and much less expensive. In fact, it can cost you nothing, if you have the knack and can do it right. Not too many TV campaigns can match that.

Zero-budget advertising is a phrase no traditional advertising firm wants to hear. The old ad business is predicated on your spending lots of money buying space and time in media vehicles such as this one. But if you look at recent times, it’s a model that is dying.

Look at some of the world’s biggest brands. Google, Amazon, Ferrari, Starbucks, Ikea, eBay, Zara, Yahoo, Apple, Harley Davidson, Reuters and Goldman Sachs are a dozen among the 100 top brands in the world per a recent study by brand management firm Interbrand, each with a “brand value” that averages $10 billion. Word of mouth played a major role in building those brands. We await the Apple iPad with no ads released yet, we talk of Google Buzz without having ever seen a Google ad, and we throng to a Zara outlet without seeing its commercials on TV.

Today, the best way to establish your brand among big-hitter rivals is to make it remark-worthy and generate conversations free of charge. See how Red Bull took on big-ad-buying Coke and Pepsi with a product that sold at a higher price for a smaller pack size and built it to a billion-dollar brand with little advertising? The new axiom, call it Mahesh’s Law, is this: your marketing IQ is inversely proportional to your marketing budget. (Read Rest of Article from WSJ)

From Garrick Schmitt for Advertising Age -

The teams playing in this year’s Super Bowl have already been decided, but the Super Bowl shuffle for advertisers began in earnest last month when marketing mainstays like FedEx, General Motors and Pepsi made news by announcing they were opting out of this year’s ad extravaganza.

But for those looking to gauge the health of the ad industry, Super Bowl advertising is a bit of red herring. CBS is charging about $2.5 million for 30 seconds of commercial time — and rightly so. Rarely do you get so many Americans watching one event and actually enjoying the advertising. It’s a tremendous opportunity for most brand marketers and we’d be foolish to look at this year’s Super Bowl as proof of either the rejuvenation of the 30-second spot or the rejection of it.

That doesn’t mean some won’t try. After all, last year Hulu saw a 50% increase in site traffic after running ads during the Super Bowl and Denny’s traffic to its website soared nearly 1,700% as consumers sought information about its free breakfast promotion.

There certainly will be advertising winners (and losers) on Super Bowl Sunday but let’s hope that the Monday morning quarterback chatter doesn’t obscure the larger shift at hand for marketers this year. 2010 will be the year of the “platform” for advertisers. Read Rest of Article

CHICAGO (Reuters) – The marketing buzz that a Super Bowl television commercial creates is invaluable to advertisers, whether it gets broadcast or not.

With a national audience that could reach an estimated one-third of 300 million Americans on February 7, the National Football League’s championship game is more important than ever for companies and advocacy groups.

With a price tag of almost $3 million for 30 seconds, it can be just as effective for those submitting ads to have a spot rejected as inappropriate and use the attention generated from that to drive visitors and business to their websites.

“A whole cottage industry has grown up out of trying to make use of network turndowns,” said Martin Franks, executive vice president of planning, policy and government affairs at CBS Corp, which is televising the NFL game this year. “It can happen in the middle of July, but obviously this is a wonderfully high-profile opportunity.”

The commercial approval process has come under heavy scrutiny this year since CBS approved an ad sponsored by a conservative Christian group called Focus on the Family. Some U.S. women’s groups have urged the network not to air the ad — which stars college football star Tim Tebow — saying it has a strident anti-abortion rights message.

Industry executives and analysts recognize Internet domain company GoDaddy.com, which annually airs several ads during the Super Bowl as the best at attracting attention for its ads. On Thursday, GoDaddy in a press release invited consumers to view its latest rejected ad at the company website.

“GoDaddy was one of the first advertisers who set out to capitalize on the fact that ads get rejected and that there’s a PR opportunity in that,” said Tim Calkins, marketing professor with Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management. GoDaddy is one of the PR masters of the Super Bowl.”

Other companies that have had ads rejected as inappropriate this year include online jobs site CareerBuilder.com and gay male dating site Mancrunch.com. Last year, the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) garnered the spotlight for an ad General Electric’s NBC rejected.

The companies that have been rejected unanimously say they do not submit ads simply to have them rejected, but CBS’s Franks said a rejection and the attention that it generates can be as valuable as paying for a network ad.

“They’ve found a loophole in an otherwise well intentioned process,” he said in an interview.

Dominic Friesen, a spokesman for Mancrunch — whose ad CBS on Friday deemed inappropriate — sees it differently.

“It’s blatant discrimination,” he said. “The reason why it’s controversial to CBS is because they’re anti-gay.”

CBS also raised questions about the company’s credit history, although Friesen said Mancrunch offered cash and has no credit history as a new company.

In the ad, two men watch a football game on TV and begin to passionately kiss after their hands brush when they reach into a bowl of potato chips.

Meanwhile, CBS rejected GoDaddy’s ad about an effeminate ex-football player who launches a fashion design company online as potentially offensive to the gay community.

“We’re pretty used to being the fish in the barrel on this one,” Franks said.

However, Calkins said networks must look in the mirror. 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.

Read Rest of Article

CHICAGO (AdAge.com) — Kraft Singles is pulling an April Fool’s Day joke in December, armed with the insight that the product’s dairy-based recipe gives it a boost with Hispanic consumers.

Kraft timed today’s launch of a 39-week partnership with Univision to the Dia de los Santos Inocentes, the Hispanic April Fool’s Day that falls on Dec. 28 and features a long tradition of pranks and jokes in Latin America and Spain. In that spirit, Singles is coordinating a fake celebrity news story on Univision.com that diverts consumers to Kraft’s “Don’t Be Fooled” website.

Working with Lopez Negrete Communications, the independent Hispanic shop that won the Singles business in 2009, Kraft discovered that the real milk in its artificial cheese product gives the brand a leg up over low-priced rivals, which make their products with oil and water.

Read Rest of Article

Endeavour Marketing and Media – A Murfreesboro, TN Advertising Agency

The FDA is in the equation and Big Pharma likes to have uber-control over it’s image and marketing, so this will be an early first test of Google’s Sidewiki platform regarding useablity, abuse and how Big Pharma either fights a losing battle or embraces consumer input.

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Register for Google Sidewiki

Frito-Lay and their plans for user-generated ads (from Brandweek).

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MurfreesboroAdvertising.com – click here to visit

For many of us in the marketing and advertising industry, the concept of true viral marketing seems almost too good to be true. Here is a vehicle in which your message and brand can be spread pathologically via word of mouth for very little money and has the potential to reach hundreds of millions of people in a short amount of time…however, there’s a catch.

Viral only works if you can overcome the traditional “ad” feel. I know, I know, it goes against Advertising 101: no call to action, no tagline, minimal branding, no pitch, but the accidental groin shot will get forwarded much quicker than a clever commercial for paper towels. Bottom line – no one wants to endorse (which in the viral world, a forward IS an endorsement) something for free unless there is a darn good reason to.

The drive behind the new viral craze resulted from a combination of a few key consumer shifts and technology:

First off, people are looking for more genuine forms of entertainment. This trend is evidenced by the huge boom of reality television shows and the success of pseudo-reality “professional” shows like CSI and the countless lawyer/doctor shows.

With the advent of media outlets like YouTube.com coupled with social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace, media forms of all types are readily available on the Internet, and your friends (and fake friends) have never been closer. Video is no longer confined to television and audio confined to the radio. This, in effect, makes entertainment “open source” and gives the public the opportunity to be much more selective about what they tune in to for humor, action, and comedy.

The general public is tuning into the idea that they don’t have to be subjected to annoying ads via television and radio, hence the success of services like Tivo and satellite radio.

Given this perspective, it’s not surprising that the most viewed and notorious viral videos have no direct association with any company or brand. One example would be the Star Wars Kid video (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HPPj6viIBmU), with an estimated 900 million views since its original posting.

These barriers haven’t stopped companies from attempting to tap into this new frontier with their own “viral” campaigns. Here are a few examples of those who have done it right, and those who have failed;

Good Example:
Carlton Draught -
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B3xBk-qOjpQ
Here is a spoof ad that pokes fun at the fact that the company spent huge amounts of money on a commercial. This overcomes the “ad” feel by sarcastically poking fun at the fact that it IS an ad. The strategy was to release the ad on the internet two weeks before releasing it on television. In the two weeks prior to running on television, the commercial was viewed over 1 million times in 132 countries (Lees, 2005).

Bad Example:
Sony took a stab at viral marketing for its PSP product by hiring a PR firm to launch a “blog” that targeted a young hip audience. The pretense was that this blog was set up by some guy that wanted a PSP for Christmas (hence the now defunct domain alliwantforxmasisapsp.com). On this fake blog they loaded videos and other media supposedly created by this “fan” all made to promote the PSP. What Sony didn”t count on what that the public instantly saw through the garbage and inundated the blog with comments about how they had failed with their viral attempt. In the end it left the administrators of the blog blocking words like “viral” and “marketing” and had them deleting comments around the clock. Now, what’s really interesting is that this failed attempt actually produced other viral videos (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bwdhg_whoKw) – made by angry fans – that focus on how pathetically Sony had executed the campaign.

What this all boils down to is that the bar has been raised and nothing in marketing is for free. To produce a campaign that can pass for entertainment and make someone excited enough to forward it on, you’ve got to know what you are doing. If executed well, the rewards can be tremendous, but never underestimate the sophistication of your audience. To find out how Endeavour can help with your next campaign, visit us online or just call 615-907-5332.

Jason M Ehleben
Partner, Creative Director
Endeavour Marketing & Media

References:

Lee, J. (2005) “Very big ad shows why we still call Carlton a beer,” The Sydney Morning Herald: Business, 28 Jul., pg.29.