Promotions That Make Sense: 99 cent NYC cab rides (tipping is optional, cursing is free)

For those of you new to promotions, it is recommended but not morally obligatory to make your promotions make sense, but it's great if you can. Cut out my heart if I'm lying, but I saw a banner outside a bar that offered free manicures with the purchase of a certain kind of beer. A dark stout beer at that.

My point is this: I used to work for a stand-up dude with a steady reputation in promotions, and somewhere near the top of his list of things that made him crazy were promotions that didn't support the brand. "Why the frak is my bank giving away iPods? What does that have to do with banking?" Unless they're quietly nodding to the mindless hours in line they'd like to help you kill, I'm not sure either. His point remains, if you're going to give something away as an incentive to purchase Energizer over Duracell, or a Whopper over a Big Mac, make it something that supports the brand, like dipping sauce, or a small appliance that eats batteries for example.

Today and today only, I see this awesome Verizon promotion. A fleet of branded yellow cabs in NYC will be offering 99 cent cab rides. Think of it as a 95% off coupon for your commute, courtesy of Verizon and McCann Erickson. Thanks guys, now take this cab to Vermont.

It's cool, but how does this support the brand? Verizon has prepaid 99 cent a day cellular plans which no one knows about, and this kind of guerilla tactic makes a deeper connection to the value the company is offering for just 99 cents. Sad you missed it? Good news then. On the 3rd (of June 2009) they're giving away 99 cent ice cream. As BrandFreak points out, it will likely be about 99 degrees by then, so they should consider a 99 cent dry cleaning promotion as a follow up.

I promise you, this is a real ice cream menu, and somewhere some poor population is forced to choose between Garlic Amaretto and Bacon Ice Cream on hot summer days.

Advertising and Children: who needs times-tables when you have Happy Meals™

So my son woke me up telling me he needed Star Wars toilet paper. That Star Wars Toilet Paper was the only paper that could help his bum. He just turned four, and has never seen Star Wars, so I'm thinking there is actually a product called Star Wars Toilet Paper trademarking off Carrie Fisher squating in front of a droid begging for help?

Here's some stuff you need to know about children and advertising I want to pass on courtesy of the National Institute for Media and the Family. In 1997, $1.3 billion was spent on television advertisements directed at children. Counting all media, advertising and marketing budgets aimed at children approached $12 billion (McNeal, 1999).

By the age of two, my children are all able to call out McDonald's, Zoo and Home Depot logos. The average child watches as many as 40,000 commericals a year, and can't tell the difference between commercials and regular TV shows. What I can say is my guys know when the really good, really short little shows are lined up and perk up for commercials so they can bow to the alter and play "need it, want it".

Simply put, children influence parental spending, so all advertising now aims at children to increase "nag factor". I've pointed out in the past how marketers target the young to create brand loyalties and children don't just influence spending on kids toys and food - it's everything from carpets to cars. A lot of adult products are being paired with kid-friendliess (oh, and billions of dollars) to influence the young to pressure the old to part ways with their money.

We're all familiar with the use of cartoon characters and toys to draw attention to all kinds of products, but I was surprised to learn there was a Sports Illustrated magazine for Kids. And I was really surprised to know there were ads for Minivans in it. Come join me in my slack-jawed awe at these tidbits of information.

• databases of child customers are being built from information gathered on Internet sign-ups and chat rooms, from electronic toy registries at stores like Toys 'R' Us
  
  
• in-school news briefs force kids to watch commercials in school
  
  
• budget cuts draw advertisers like food brings racoons, offering cash for access to students
  
  
• in-school news briefs force kids to watch commercials in school
  
  
• Promotional licensing of products aimed at kids which include media pitches
  
  
• Do you have any idea how many Children's TV and radio networks there are?
  
  
• Children's toys are starting to carry product placements (Barbie™ dolls with Coca Cola™ accessories for example)
  
  
• almost every fast food chain now has give-away programs including promotional merchandise (McDonald's™ "Happy Meals, etc.)

Product Sampling: the rise of the machines

Yesterday I pointed out that statistically, more people have been crushed to death by vending machines than killed by swine flu this year. Wait, stop dialing. I'm not calling for an all-out panic on vending machines. I'm using it as an excuse to talk about free sampling.

To my knowledge, free sampling is a popular mechanic for generating product trial and has killed no one this year. But here's the secret truth about free sampling - the thing they don't tell you. When marketers offer free samples they're hoping to cannibalize you away from whatever brand you're already using, stealing away your loyalty by changing your preference, AND they're hoping you'll unconsciously purchase their product faster than your normally would, even if your need for it isn't totally immediate! Wait, that doesn't sound all that evil either.

Okay, so what do vending machines and free samples have in common? Last time you checked, your relationship with your vending machine was "you eat my money, I'll eat your snacks". Well meet the BooBox. Belgian designers Fosfor have created a machine that spits out different trial-sized samples of good. It can even handle chilled items.

Both marketers and actual people are always looking for more experiential ways to generate trial and move samples from cargo van (A) to shopping list (B). To date the delivery has been fairly one-sided, either through direct-to-home mailings or interception teams in stores or on the street. Delivery systems like the BooBox put the sampling decision in the consumer's hands, but unlike calling or emailing for a redemption, the pay-off is almost immediate. All you do is send out a text on your phone and they fire back an PIN number for free goods. Boo(m)! A more interesting vending and sampling experience signed, sealed and delivered.

So where's the evil? You fell right into their hands.

Marketing as Dating: let's hook up and exchange money for services rendered

lot of people I talk to are in dark places right now. They see excess office furniture and the people who used it carted out on dollies and they panic. Belt tightening can be inevitable. Even the parades of former co-workers dead-man-walking out the front door seems understandable to a degree.

Hands down the most common concern I hear from people contemplating the jump to freelance work or even just sideline freelance work is how to make contacts. Networking is creepy and makes stalkers of us all. Yesterday I heard an analogy that changed the way I think about networking for business contacts. It was a dating analogy, which blew my mind. Dating is all about prettying yourself up and making as many impressions if you can till someone gives you the time of day. It's so obvious.

Be a good listener

The dating scene seems a little quiet out there, doesn't it? Before the economopocalypse, everyone was shouting from every direction and a dollar spent on advertising was worth a dollar. It's no breaking news that many companies have shrunk or collapsed their marketing budgets lately, or as I now look at it, every other guy at the party voluntarily contracted larengitus. It's an unusal opportunity to shove that better looking guy off his feet and steal market share while your competition sits mute and forgotten. I'd say a dollar is just plain worth more when it doesn't have to work as hard.

You can't be afraid to be a hustler

I'm not proud of this next part, but it's only because the looks bad when using the dating analogy. If your client base shrinks by the numbers due to their own internal budgeting, you don't kick them to the curb; you cheat on them. Same analogy about marketing dollars, now is a great time to mad hustle for more clients. And not just regular clients. Consider married clients too. Some clients might get turned on by the aggressive swagger of an upstart leveraging against their AOR's more conservative, respectful stance.

Grow the relationship organically

All that furniture and deadwood wasn't bringing in clients; self-promotion and sales efforts do. A plant won't grow if the leaves all shrink. It needs to grow new leaves. The leaves in this horticultral analogy are one-off projects to help keep client money flowing. Now is the time to propose brave new areas of branding and promoting businesses, now that social media has removed some of the financial hurdles of traditional media. Presenting creative strategies and aligning partners on a project basis, like bringing a squirrel out of a bush with a peanut is what will grow those leaves.

Try, try again

When you're trying to woo someone and they turn you down flat, you don't crawl back in your car and leave, you step up and try someone else. I always tell the story clubbing with an old friend; it was late and everyone wanted to go but before he'd leave he ran out and hit on about fourteen women, struck out fourteen times, and we were off. He believed in the numbers game, and so should you.

On the surface of it, everything I've said follows the rules of common sense, but I believe people need to hear it some times. Getting noticed is the first step to getting laid. I mean, paid.

Product Placement: just what the doctor ordered

I'm not going to pretend that I don't park myself in front of 90210 every week to nourish my soul. It is after all, the funniest sitcom on TV these days. It also deserves an award for pioneering acheivement in Product Placement. In the olde days, an actor might place a product by saying, "sorry hon, no time for dinner. The captain's going to have my ass so I'll stop by McDonalds on the way to the precinct" and boom, some money changes hands and the audience associates the character with their feelings about McDonalds, and vice versa. Today it feels like producers assume you won't notice the Big Mac unless the actor is basically posing with it and talking about it like it's another character. Let's explore some bad examples of product placement.

Innapropriate usage of a product


Really? Dr. Pepper for breakfast? Product placement without context will always catch the eye because something doesn't fit. Take this shot; would it have been crossing a line to have the cast enjoying delicious bubbly Dr. Pepper with a Western Omelette? Cheers to the producers for putting their foot down and puting a more tastefully positioned gigantic logo beside that slightly larger crying cabbage deal weeping off the table to make this scene more realistic.

Intense usage of product

I've been less excited about bandages after accidents than these two (Dixon and Annie) were while road tripping through the Arizona desert. I couldn't decide if the cooler in the back was small, or if it only looked small because of the stylized log jam of delicious, refreshing Dr. Pepper. Either way, the director gave us whole seconds of screen time to think about it as Annie decided between regular delicious and diet.

Ridiculous non-satirical over-statement of product usage

This is the use that most taxes suspension of disbelief. In comedy I think they call it a cap or a tag when you add to the punchline of a joke with a follow-up line to milk or continue the punchline. In this example, Dixon craftfully chides his step-sister at a rest stop when he explains that maybe they wouldn't need to stop so often if she didn't drink so much Dr. Pepper. Oh snap, right? Wrong. Annie replies: "We're on a road trip! Drinking Dr. Pepper is practically a requirement". This smacks of an SNL skit, but it's not. Satire free. See my earlier note about money changing hands.

All up-in-your-grill usage

I may have over-stated my adoration for 90210. The first time I saw the new series, Naomi was trying to fit in with the rest of the Heathers at West Beverly High and won them over by teaching them how easy it is to program the new T-Mobile Sidekick. This had squat to do with the plot and the intense close-ups were really distracting. Maybe they could have CGI'ed in a few sparkles or played awesome dance music in the background to enhance the effect. That would have been less obvious than running a crawl of product features along the bottom of the screen. In this scene, Annie advances the plot by changing the station (read: cuing the next track from the official soundtrack) while holding (read: hand modelling) her Dr. Pepper. I'll point out they wasted a strategic partnership with Sirius/XM here.

Not-so-generic brand placement

No wonder these people love their Dr. Pepper. Dr. Pepper evidentally owns every inch of ad space in Beverley Hills. There is no where you can go without a giant logo being shoe-horned into view. I wanted to say seemlesslly, but the term doesn't apply. In traditional sitcoms, actors take pauses to allow for audience reaction so scripted dialogue is not missed by laughter. Attention 90210 producers: your brand placements are so focal and distracting that by the time we finish laughing and/or complaining, we're all like "that's nice, now why is Justin so mad at Silver?".

I'm going to start watching just to make a product placement drinking game out of it (see a logo, take a drink of delicious Dr. Pepper). When they innevitably pull out the old teen-alcoholism chestnut, they could seemessly work Dr. Pepper into the plot by partnering with Barcardi to invent a drink called a "Bacardi & Pepper". Annie: "I'm all worried about Shasta. All she drinks anymore is Bacardi & Pepper". Shasta: "I do it because of the delicious taste, and my daddy issues".

The producers need to get off the fence and either change their product placement strategy to be less obvious, or commit whole-hog and go for that gold medal.

Strategic Partnerships: lightning in a bottle, or an insanely obvious misuse of trust and money

Webster's defines Strategy as "a careful plan or method; the art of devising or employing plans toward a goal". Partners are defined as "one associated with another especially in an action".

When I was a kid, friends told me there was an mirror version of the Earth on the opposite side of the sun that no one could see. Assuming this opposite Earth exists, do you think their version of the Hockey Hall of Fame saw a partnership with a Green Food detoxifyer and said "sign here, please"?

I asked a few people in the related field to comment on this photo but there was nothing they said I could reprint here. I'm reminded that the Hockey Hall of Fame is a building full of Hockey Memorabilia. It has a soul, but no colon. I have to wonder what awesome list of candidate partners did they fire through before they ened up here. Not just a green suppliment sponsorship, but an Official Green Suppliment Sponsorship.

This blog post could be literally eight pages long, but there isn't enough snark in the world I'm afraid, so let me leave it at this: if you doubt the description of Strategic or Partnership, you likely shouldn't be creating them. And as I've said in the past, when in doubt, consult a professional.

Marketing your Fight Club: easier than you think

Fight Club has a fantastic "exclusive product offering". It's the only business that offers torn ligaments and abrasion as part of a satisfactory customer experience. The first two rules of Fight Club (you do not talk about Fight Club) make it hard to market, but is it impossible? Let's explore how simple and inexpensive marketing techniques can make your customer experience more profitable and exciting.

First things first, know your client

You know why they come. They had a tough day and they want to snap a tibia to take the edge off, but what else do you know about them? A good marketer takes the time to talk to their target and understand their needs and desires. You would be surprised how often the feedback you get from patrons can inspire and spark an idea that shapes your entire marketing approach.

The simple gift of swag

You might think key chains and t-shirts don't add any real value to your brand, but if your brand has a founding myth, a sense of community, or any kind of tribal initiation, your target audience would likely see these items as a symbol of pride or ritual or fellowship. Just because you might not wear an "I went to Fight Club and all I got was this dislocated jaw" trucker hat doesn't mean someone else wouldn't. Now try to think about more strategic offerings and how you might partner them to differ costs: a carrying case for collecting your teeth at the end of the night brought to you by a local Dentist's office as an example.

Strategic partnering

Whether you approach a national brand like Band-Aid or a local Reconstructive Surgeon, consider what you each bring to the table and how you might cross-promote. Consider partner-branding ideas, and don't be afraid to be creative. Maybe it's a crushed eye-socket, and maybe it's Maybelline. Here's a simple creative exercise to get your thinking outside of the box. Draw the human body (a handy reference here), and indicate an injury to any part of it. Now make a list of every product or service that could benefit from the associative repair of those injuries.

The classic black eye = sunglasses, make up, long brimmed hats, halloween masks

Promotional ideas

So the rules of Fight Club pretty well kills brand advertising and obvious word-of-mouth strategies. This does not mean you cannot market within your niche audience. A promotion of the "$10,000 Separated Clavicle Challenge" sponsored by your local HMO is a great way to generate excitement and trial while offsetting the cost by associative branding. The HMO picks up the tab while you put a map to their clinic on the back of every entry slip. Be creative.

Social media

Fish where the fish are. Nothing spreads a message more effectively and inexpensively than a carefully crafted social media platform. Consider the viral potential of Twitter as a great example. In previous stories I've shown how Twitter has the power to unite a niche crowd into a localized spending frenzy.

@nucklelicious will be handing out hairline fractures in the Mill St. Sharky's Grill basement after 11pm

Bearing in mind the frown put upon open discussion of Fight Club, you can consider a cross media platform like YouTube to share videos or Flickr to gallery images and to help bond your community. Budget permitting, you might talk to a web developer highly adept at social media to creating your own moderated FightBook social network. Many platforms such as YouTube and FaceBook can essentially be bought as a package and customized these days.

On a long enough timline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero, unless you prepare and plan ahead. The first two rules of Fight Club make it hard to market, but not impossible. With a little imagination and guts, even the most inexperienced operator can turn a satisfactory customer experience into a fantastic customer experience!

[author note: I found the ceramic punching mug here]

Suggested reading is Bertrand Cesvet's "Conversational Capital" to change the way you see the customer experience.

Consumer-Service Marketing: Harsh times force large corporations to take menial part time jobs to make ends meet

Little trivia: did you know Howard Stern once ran for governor of New York on a campaign that included filling the state's potholes with the rich ashes of death row inmates?

Did you kow Colonel Sanders himself is personally filling Kentucky potholes with what we hope is "asphault" and marking them with a "Re-freshed by KFC" stencil?

You could make the joke that filling a pothole with asphault while running TV spots where they top off a chicken bucket with corn, mashed potatoes, cheese and gravy makes the buttocks clench the wallet pretty tight, but they're hoping people make the more obscure connection between "refreshing the street" and its new "fresh" campaign which focuses on food quality. It's actually called "consumer-service marketing" or "cause marketing", and in a nut shell it's a very old idea.

Early American advertising is rammed with puppets and cartoons shilling everything from Michelins to Marlboros. Here's the thing: Fred Flintstone wasn't trying to get Johnny Lunchpail to smoke Camels. He was working to create a warm feeling about the brand in Johnny's brain so one day he would feel comfortable enough about Camels to throw a pack in his adult-sized lunchpail.

Consumer-service or cause marketing works on the same principal. It creates a quiet feeling of goodwill between companies and consumers. While you're suspending your disbelief about chicken-flavored road holes, keep in mind I'm applauding KFC for their ballsy initiative. I'll explain shortly.

For my money, a better example of a company helping people on a grassroots level that builds directly to it's brand in a more strategic way is Charmin toilet tissue. For the last three years, they've provided custom port-o-lets in Times Square, and even have an iPhone/BlackBerry application that finds the nearest toilet in an emergency. They've embraced experiential event marketing and social media applications.

And now, the thorn in my paw revealed: for years I worked on an unnamed disinfectant manufacturer (not necessarily featured in my portfolio) that repeatedly shot down every attempt at any guerilla style awareness marketing and brand building in high traffic public washrooms.

Toilets and germs seems more literal than the association between fresh asphault and fresh chicken, but they didn't want to risk turning off consumers "by associating their brand with germs". So you can see, whenever a company is brave enough to engage in long term brand building rather than short term product lifts, my hands slap together involuntarily.

Definition: The Three Second Rule

Brand messaging is (almost) always going to have more visual appeal than promotional messaging. At least, that's been the trend, but it's my experience that there there are enough good people working in promotional advertising today who feel promos deserve attention to design and well-crafted visual story-telling that promos have come a long way. There are those clients who feel as nice as it is, this only slows the in-take of the "what's in it for me" message, but I beg to differ.

Store environments are highly visual places loaded with thousands of square feet of competing brand messages and product images. Throw signage and promo materials into the mix, unfreeze a caveman and watch his head explode. The hunter/gatherer part of the modern human brain has the ability to treat grocery store aisles like wallpaper, only really focusing on the occasional tin of soup or bag of dog food.

By my math, and this is really conservative, if you throw promo materials or display in someone's path you have three seconds or less to engage them or they're gone.

You can easily test this yourself by people watching in a store. Watch how their eyes fall on it, do a quick backwards Z from top to bottom and either engage or keep walking. They need a reason to want to keep looking; to read beyond your clever headline or value proposition, to decide to take part in your promo and somehow commit your URL to memory. That's another story.

The reasons? First: craft a value-add or promotion so strategic and irresistible to your demographic that they think it would be stupid not to take part and you've already cleared shelf space for that next award. And second, strategic design; well-crafted visual story-telling that engages the consumer.

If your program has no lead time or money to put against it, I know it can be hard to deliver the bacon, but if you can't find a way to use strategic planning and design to do this, you're letting opportunity and money slip through your fingers.

A professional gibberish-sounding post about professional gibberish

As note in my last post, Pepsi paid over a million dollars to redesign it's logo. Whether the leak of this work-in-progress document was intentional is debatable, but take a flip through and with just a few pages in, you're ankle deep in "breathtaking" Marketing Speak. To wit:

"The Pepsi ethos has evolved over time. The vocabulary of truth and simplicity is a reoccurring phonomena in the brand's history. It communicates the brand in a timeless manner and with an expression of clarity ... Breathtaking is a strategy based on the evolution of 5000+ years of shared ideas in design philosophy creating an authentic Constitution of Design."

Who does what now? Sure, it sounds vague, it leaves you feeling empty, it begs for clarity, but it's called Marketing Speak and if you thought regular english was hard...

It all started with the Corporate Mission Statement? You'll find them etched into nickle plates outside many offices or in the About section of many websites. A mission statement is a brief statement of the purpose for a company. If you're familiar with them, then you've probably wondered why they sound so random and intentionally vague? Well according to Wikipedia: "In management, by stating organizational goals with opaque words of unclear meaning; their positive connotations prevent questioning of intent, especially when many buzzwords are used".

Sigh. Can't we get a computer to do this? Well, a Mission Statement Generator is a simple program that contains a short list of simple nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs which are randomly belched out into print-ready statements such as:

"Our mission is to continually leverage existing catalysts for change with a high level of employee empowerment."

or...

"Our mission is to establish a reputation as the first choice to network wealth-generating enterprises and delivery inexpensive solutions to our clients."

or...

"Our mission is to seamlessly integrate profit-drive teamwork and network principle-centered benefits."

Congratulations, you have an instant MBA in Pro Gibberish. Sure, at best it's a ramshackle syntax, so overwhelmed with topical buzzwords and empowering business jargon that the end product rings generic and hollow, agreed, and the fact that a computer spewed it mocks the entire industry, but people get paid and paid really, really well to sound fluent in this kind of stuff.

So much of modern Advertising & Design is not what you make, but how you sell it. Word to the wise, learn to do it well, and you're writing your own cheque, tap dancing into the future sipping martinis made with pickled panda eyes instead of olives or onions.

Sadly, the Dilbert model no longer exists but many clones can be googled in it's stead.