TV may no longer have seasons

It started with shows like Survivor, Big Brother and the Amazing Race. Not just the reality TV business, but the lines between the TV season and the land of re-runs are getting, well, a bit dirty.

But now the recently settled writer’s strike may help further blur the line. The NY Times is reporting that the giant ad agency holding companies are looking for a year-round television season. The rationale is that September is full of hyped shows that usually don’t make it to Christmas.

The other system that the agencies would like to change (and the networks almost certainly would not) is called the “upfront“– a May period in which the advertisers pre-sell their new shows. According to the article, the media buyers still want to buy ahead of time, but they don’t want to have to make all their bets during the same month.

A lot is changing in advertising and in television broadcasting. In an era when college football is now on virtually every night of the week, all those weeks when there is “nothing on” represent lost opportunities. You can safely bet that those opportunities won’t stay lost for long.

Why GPS will change advertising

GPS units are becoming cheaper and cheaper, which means more than saving a hundred bucks on a Christmas present. Since GPS units are essentially just receivers that can do math (to triangulate your position, basically), when the chips' cost falls that's a big share of the cost of the unit.

But what happens when the chips move out of the GPS units and into cell phones (obvious applications), cameras (Flickr geo-tagged pics), and of course advertising. Business Week points out that a company named Yell.com is putting GPS-enabled ads on the sides of London buses. This lets them serve ads based on where they are.

Look for 2008 to be the year that we started to see GPS technology really change our lives as it moves out of the car and into a lot of unusual places. The marketing implications are huge.

What if Google AdWords Could Listen to Your Phone Calls?

We all know how Google AdWords works, right? Whether on the search engine results page of a Google search or even from the text of your Gmail emails, Google is constantly evaluating content and serving up relevant text-based ads.

Now, a company called Pudding is looking to do the same thing, by electronically listening for keywords you say during the free VOIP phone calls they provide you. If you know what Skype is, then you're on the right track.

Basically, Pudding is like Skype except it's designed to be free instead of really, really close to free. And in exchange for giving you free calls, Pudding listens for words you might say like "pizza" or "vacation" and serves up ads relevant to what you are talking about.

Some, like the video below, are squawking about privacy concerns. One relevant point they make: Do BOTH parties to the phone call know that they are being recorded?



Because our research at Brogan & Partners has shown that people value relevant ads. These could be relevant ads. This newscast seems to be a bit of a hatchet job on this CEO, who is poorly prepared to defend himself. What do you think?



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TV "Events" Are Compelling Media Buying Opportunities

Cross-published on Brogan Blog

I think I watched about 1 hour of TV over the last 3 months. There was nothing on. I've got stuff to do. I didn't really miss it.

But then Monday: Wham! TV was back, and it wasn't playing around. How I Met Your Mother, Heroes, the new weird show Chuck. Tuesday with Two and Half Men. All of sudden TV was back. And I watched some Monday and <<gasp>> even a bit more on Tuesday. (Completely coincidentally, someone in my office just said to someone else: "Isn't tomorrow the Office premiere? Boom. Done. I'm there.")

There's been lots written about fragmentation of TV channels, the proliferation of DVRs like Tivo, the rise of alternative entertainment choices (online, gaming, etc.) and much of it is true. But let's remember that TV can still be an event that brings people together.

These events are advertising opportunities, and they are getting more valuable. Think season premieres, season finales, award shows, big sporting events... We've bought the Oscars for clients and been very happy with it. TV has problems, but to reach the world quickly, there are still opportunities.

What do you think? Leave a quick comment.

Google Moves toward Behavior-Based Targeting

First of all, apologies for my less than prolific output recently. Working on a book on social media marketing and it's taking a lot of time. Hope to have it finished in the next 30 days.

In the meantime, news out of Google that they are working to introduce behavior-based ad targeting. They made the announcement very quietly. Perhaps they fear a backlash from privacy advocates.

I could see that backlash coming, but frankly I don't get it. As a marketer, I look at behavior-based targeting as sort of the holy grail. Advertisers get to reach the people they really care about, but equally important, the ad recipient sees ads that are most likely to interest them. Lots of surveys have shown that people use ads to help them make purchase decisions. They like ads about stuff they like. They don't like ads about stuff they don't like. Easy enough. Behavior-based targeting does exactly that.

Maybe privacy advocates don't realize that they are already leaving big, giant, easy-to-find tracks all over the web. (Look at all the murder trials where they go back and reconstruct exactly what the person did on their computer after the crime.)

Good for Google. We can already do behavior-based targeting in TV, radio, print and direct mail. A few firms have it for the web. Good to see Google in the game.

"Creativity" in Ads May Be Linked to Media Buying

In an earlier post, I've talked about how important the media buyer is to the creative team. No matter how creative the ad, it does no good if it's in the wrong place. Now, new data from Tivo is providing further proof that the "right" ad in the "wrong" place is not worth much.

Would you believe that the top three least skipped ads among 20,000 Tivo families were for:

• Cort Furniture Rental
• Dominican Republic Tourism
• Hooters Restaurant

Not particularly "creative", not funny, not touching and not big budget, the Cort Furniture Rental spot shared these attributes with other winners. They tended to be straight forward and, most importantly, relevant to their viewers (that's where media buying savvy comes in).

A Bowflex commercial running during professional wrestling was one good example.

Watch for more segmentation to come, not just among stations, but WITHIN INDIVIDUAL SHOWS. Digital signals will allow one type of household to get one TV spot, while another type of household can get another TV spot, even during the exact same show, at the exact same moment.

Yeah, best be nice to your media buyers...

Revenge of the Media Buyers

In a lot of agencies, the creative team gets all the glory. They create the spots that make people cry, make them laugh, make them buy... They write the ads that win at Cannes, that win Addys, that win Tellys.

But often it's the media buyers who have the real power. If they buy the right shows, the right space, the right type of media, the great creative gets its chance to shine. But now the website Oddee shared these examples of ads where the media buying was probably not as careful as it could've been. And the creative message definitely changed as a result.










So remember, be nice to your media team... Or your creative might end up licking a garbage can... You can see more of these at Oddee.

~Jim Tobin
Life Is Marketing

Volkswagen's Latest Crossover is Bourne Spot

A "crossover" used to mean a cross between an SUV and a minivan, but the new VW spot for the Touareg 2 may redefine the word. 80% of the spot is a movie trailer for "The Bourne Ultimatum" featuring footage of Matt Damon running from crooked police in, of course, a Touareg. But then, there's a brilliant 2 second shot of another guy, looking at the car and uttering the "Holy..." This is, of course, the signature line of VW's powerful earlier Safety Happens campaign.



The ad, done by Crispin Porter out of Miami is part of a much larger $40 million deal between VW and NBC Universal. That's why you've seen VW's in movies from "You, Me and Dupree" to knocked up, but the team is doing more. VW has movies on their website showing how the stunts in the Bourne movie were done, and much more.

The ad is a great surprise with VW going from subtle product placement to movie star in a couple of seconds. This is a great example of outside-the-box cross promotion thinking, and it's getting some good attention in the blogosphere around the globe: Link 1, Link 2.

Interactive Advertising Without A Computer

The advertising community has been excited for years about interactive advertising--online advertising that can engage the consumer. The theory is that engaging people in your brand is the single best way to built brand equity.

Today I stumbled across some great examples of truly interactive advertising that take place offline--out in the real world. Good fun stuff. The first campaign is for Quicksilver, a maker of surf and skate wear.

This Quicksilver campaign is a good example of really thinking about what your target audience wants , particularly right when they are seeing your ad. In an urban environment, skateboarders are looking for some place to ride and rails they can grind on.

This next example is for an undetermined brand, but it's funny and gets people to spend time with the ad. And it made me laugh, so it's in the post. Enjoy...Credit to Boredstop for the finds.

~Jim Tobin
Life Is Marketing

More Great Guerilla Advertising from Mini

A few weeks ago, I wrote a post about a great outdoor ad from the folks at Mini involving a subway stop. That one was about the car's surprising interior room.

Today a colleague sent me this bathroom advertising campaign for the Mini. This one focuses on the exceptional handling of the Mini around curves. I'm not sure what kind of person came up with this campaign, but they are both twisted and brilliant.The agency I work for invented urinal mat advertising in the 1980s, for an anti-AIDS campaign. That involved printing a clever message ("Use a Condom: Your Life is In Your Hands") directly after on a urinal mat. But this takes it to a brilliant new level.

And while we're on the subject, here's another fun bit of urinal mat advertising, this one for ESPN Brazil.
One of the guys in my office was jealous of this last one. He indicated he'd drink a lot more water if we had it here. I don't think I'll be putting that on my to-do list, although I appreciate how clever these ads are. More importantly, I think the target audiences in both cases will appreciate them.

~Jim Tobin
Life is Marketing

Simpsons Movie Uses Surprisingly Few Tie-Ins for Marketing

The Simpsons Movie is getting a lot of buzz already, and with a huge promotion budget they could've chosen lots of partners for tie-ins--partners that would've spent millions more promoting the movie.

But they did not. They chose only 4:

• Burger King
• Jet Blue
• 7-Eleven; and
  
• Vans (shoes)

Even more interesting, according to Hollywood Reporter, is that only one of them has a big advertising budget. Instead, they will use non-traditional marketing to reach the target audience.

Some believe this was to further the Simpsons irreverent personality. Others believe that the power of non-traditional marketing is growing enough that the Simpsons folks felt they could score with it. I tend to think it's a little of both.

(As for me, I'm on vacation the rest of this week, so no more posts for me! See you next week. I'll try to lure some guest commentary later this week...)



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Wii: Today's Hot Game Console Pays Homage to Old School Game Favorites

I continue to love playing the Wii. We're starting to amass a number of games, which makes it more fun, of course. And I've been a fan of their mix of traditional and social media marketing for a while.

Now, the Coolhunter points us to an ad in Italy for the Wii that pays homage to the old games, like Donkey Kong and Mario Bros. This ad is made of Post-It notes, which create a great visual for those old pixelated characters.And if you make an ad out of Post-It notes, people are going to take notes off of it over time, effectively destroying the ad (or spreading the word, depending on your perspective).

These notes talk about the classic video games and how fun they are to play new versions on the Wii. The headline: "Wii'll not forget."

Good stuff.

Jim Tobin
Life is Marketing



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Honda Minisodes Clever, Subtle, On Brand

One of the tenets of new marketing--meaning marketing in an era of Web 2.0--is that sales efforts should be more subtle. Treat people as if they are intelligent and they'll respond to your product if it meets their needs and interests.

MySpace Minisodes, which are sponsored by the Honda Fit, are a edited versions of old, once popular sitcoms. The 30 minute shows have been stripped of commercials and extraneous detail to tell the story in 4-5 minutes. They'll go live on MySpace this week.

• Clever, because they're fun to watch.
• On brand, because the Honda Fit is a small car from a reputable company.
• Subtle, because the commercial message is only 8 seconds long, which is tolerable in a web environment.

Nice work all around...

New Tool is Old School

So, you want to use that DVR to fast forward past the commercials, eh? How high tech of you, Mr. Tivo.

Proving that what's old is new again, advertisers are weaving their products more tightly into the show's plot. Clunky product placement, like when Jeff shills for the latest Ford F-150 he's giving away on Survivor, may evolve into more seamless integration.

A new series called Mad Men will appear on AMC this year. It's about Madison Avenue in the 1960s glory days. Those were the days when products were blatantly part of the show. Anyone remember when Fred and Barney were sponsored by Winston, and actually took a break on the show to enjoy a smoke? True.

Mad Men will be sponsored in part by Jack Daniels, with integration on and off the show. Here's the funny part. The Brand Director at Jack Daniels is taking credit for finding "the next new thing." Uh, yeah, not so new champ...

What Makes a Good Advertising Client

In an earlier post, I talked about the huge numbers of CMOs firing their agencies and wondered aloud if it were really the agencies to blame or the clients in many of those cases. Over the last couple of years, I've been invited to guest lecture at UNC-Chapel Hill in Bob Lauterborn's advanced advertising class. He's doing an amazing thing in that class: He's teaching students how to be good clients because, as he points out, nobody else is.

Since I've been on the client side and the agency side, each for several years, I shared with the class this Top 10 ways to be a good client.

1. Choose the right agency for you in the first place. There's so much to say about that alone, I'm going to do a later post on that. Look for the link HERE when it's done, but it's so important to get the right fit in the first place.
2. Understand how agencies work. It's our job as account people to act like we have no other clients, but we do. And what we sell is our time and the fact that at least some of us really know how to do our jobs. If you trust that, and utilize that, it can pay huge dividends.
3. Agree on what you're trying to accomplish. Sound simple, but you need to have clear goals. You should share your overall business plan, not just the marketing tactics you want the agency to do today. You should set a strategy as a team for achieving your marketing objectives and finally, you need to agree how you’re going to measure it. Then measure it that way. Curiously, few companies do all these things.
4. Trust each other. Share your budget completely. Let the agency help you prioritize; otherwise how can they say you should do A before B because A will make you more money? I did this with my agency, and it worked well. Bring me any idea you want, just tell me which item(s) it replaces and why. Similarly, trust your creative team, or get a new one. If you were that talented in design or copywriting, you'd have a different job. I think it may have been David Ogilvy who said, and I loosely paraphrase: "Once you buy a dog, stop barking."
5. Know your limitations. You should know your product best (see rule #7), and that’s the problem. You're no longer normal and you can't look at the product like a "normal" person does. Agencies are translators--that’s what the good ones do, they translate what you want to say into what the prospect wants to hear. Your changes and input should be based on reflecting strategy and getting the facts right.
6. Understand advertising. Don’t feature puke. You can't write a user's manual in an ad. You need to have reasonable expectations for what “ads” can do for you and you need to understand how much you can communicate well in an ad. If you don't, that's ok. That shows me you understand rule #5. Simply refer back to rule #4 for the way out of it.
7. Understand your product. This is your key job in the relationship. Know who you are, who you’re not, and how you compare to your competitors. Know what your prospects care about. This is really hard. It's a full time job if you're doing it right.
8. Respect time. The deadlines we're working off of are to help you meet your goals. Respond quickly. Make all your changes at once if you possible can...you're the one paying for the time, remember. And if it’s not worth your time to read our contact reports, why are you paying us to do the work?
9. Understand the money. First of all, pay your bills. Most agencies are small businesses and not the place to stretch your cash flow. You also need to understand what costs what (A $400 photo is cheap; A proof will cost $750 or so; The average TV spot in the U.S. costs over $340,000. Expect yours to cost between $50,000 and $250,000 if you have enough budget to be on TV.) Don’t try to do what you can’t afford to do.
10. If you treat your agency like clerks, you'll get the shelves restocked--and not much else. The big trend is beating down agency fees. Is it a coincidence that CMOs are now complaining that they don't get big ideas? My agency years ago was hired by Kmart to do a consulting project. We suggested they hire a relative unknown named Martha Stewart. How much was that idea worth? You can't measure it in hourly rates. Find a compensation structure that's reasonable on both ends and maybe "lack of strategy" complaints will go away.
    

I know this sounds like I'm an apologist for the "do no wrong" agencies. Not at all. When I was on the client side I saw the smarmy account guy, the disappear for two weeks account service and more. That's the subject of a future post...

What do you think?

~Jim Tobin
www.lifeismarketing.com

So what IS YouTube anyway?

YouTube continues to creak under its own weight. The Los Angeles Times has a story where people are complaining that YouTube is losing it's "real" feeling because so many videos being placed there are corporate or commercial.

"Part of the allure of YouTube is the realness of it," one person whined in the article. "[The YouTube community] is nervous that if people are being paid to do their videos, it's not real anymore."

Is YouTube a place to surf around and look for fun videos? Or is YouTube a place to host and promote money-making content... That mix is shifting...

Here's the deal folks. YouTube has a huge viewer base. YouTube offers free posting, hosting and streaming of video content. Like many things, this will start out as something individuals use, it will grow to critical mass, and corporations will begin to use it to make money. It's the natural order of things.

Does nobody else remember the early 90s when people were afraid the web was going to go corporate? It certainly did, in a big way. And many of the web's coolest things are corporate provided. (Yes, many of the web's worst things are corporate provided, too, and many, many great things come from individuals.)

YouTube is going to continue to provide a valuablel service, and continue to creak...

Buying Buzz

Well, well, well... Advertising Age is reporting new data from the folks at Nielsen. They took data from two sources and found that the greatest chance of having buzz around a new product was to have advertising support of it. Yes, advertising support.

There's a lot to be said for blogs, Facebook, Second Life and all the other forms of social media out there today. And lots of the biggest advocates are getting a lot of ink in the ether saying that advertising is either dead or irrelevant. That's a great headline, to be sure. And there are issues with advertising, no doubt... But it's still a pretty powerful tool in the toolbox when used in the right way, at the right time...

Having said that, there are countless examples of using advertising badly...

The new tools in the toolbox are very exciting. But just like I was very happy to get my fancy new RotoZip a couple years back (until I lost the darn thing... I think my mover stole it), that doesn't mean the hammer isn't still pretty effective...

Friday Fun

This would be even funnier if it weren't so true... Have a great weekend.

In an earlier post, I talked about how people come to me frequently with their product ready. Sometimes even with their strategy "ready." But too often they haven't done the hard work of perfecting (or at least nearly perfecting) their product before they worry about marketing... If they did that, it would be amazing how much more effective their product would be.

Cartoon credit to Tom Fishburne and his fun website.

What Does Separate Equal?

The trend for years in big budget marketing is to have separate agencies for creative and media buying. As budgets have grown into the tens of millions, hundreds of millions and more, I guess that came out of (perhaps long overdue) respect for the media process.

But it never made sense to me. Media buying, done right, is creative. And good creative is thinking about delivery options. Separating them can work, sure, but how many good ideas do you miss when you do that? You won't know.

The tide may be shifting, as companies like the Johnson & Johnson and Proctor & Gamble are saying in the Wall Street Journal that it's a bad idea. And when those types of mega advertisers speak, trends follow. Watch for more accounts to roll back up into one agency.

That's what I think anyway. What do you think should or will happen?

The Internet's Being Joost

Over the years, you've had to learn new Internet service company names, including Firefox, Skype, ICQ (which essentially became AOL Instant Messenger). Add to that list another name: Joost.

Joost is a new service that allows you to watch TV shows over the Internet with full clarity. They've got credible deals with folks like Warner Bros. for content.

But what's interesting about all these companies (except WB of course) is that they are using the same tools to grow big. Like the Nintendo Wii posting I made earlier, they are letting customers do the work for them. (Not a surprise, as one of the founders of Joost founded Skype, too...)

And, taking a page from ICQ, they are creating fake shortages to build excitement. You can't get Joost by going to the website. You have to be invited. They make you work a bit, and create a perception of being an insider. It worked great for ICQ. I think it will work well for Joost. Expect to hear more about them in the coming months...

To learn more about Joost, watch this 3-minute CBS News clip on it: