Michael Vick's Apology, Crisis PR and the Analysts

Michael Vick apologized today for his role in the dogfighting scandal. In a press conference, he stood up, without notes, and accepted responsibility. Does it make it right? Of course not. But it's been a while since we've heard a complete apology from a public figure who has been busted. Take a look:



PR experts were saying he's toast (and maybe he is), but going up there, without notes and just talking for a few minutes was the best possible thing he could do.

Lots of people think crisis PR people can get you out of a jam. They can't get you out of this. When you've done wrong, and as wrong as he has, this was the best possible thing he could've done in the hopes of salvaging his career in a year or so.

My two cents. What are yours?

Hilton's "Be Hospitable" Campaign Tied to Paris' Bad Reputation?

Paris Hilton told Larry King tonight that she spent time in jail reading the Bible, although she couldn't cite her favorite verse. Yeah... I'm thinking she made that one up.

But my sister pointed out something interesting. The Hilton family of hotels launched their feel good "Be Hospitable" campaign around the same time that Paris' frivolity was starting to catch up with her. Could it be that Paris' is having such a negative impact on the brand image of Hilton Hotels that the firm felt compelled to reply?

After all, they'd run another campaign about getting from Point A to Point B before they started this.

Here's a version of their ad campaign. Check it out.



Feel better about "Hilton" than you did watching Larry King tonight? What do you think? Coincidence, or fixing some brand damage?

Most Hated Internet Words Have an Impact on Marketing

Apparently every time you say "blog," you're driving some people nuts. And if you say something like "be sure to use your netiquette when you're on my wiki," that's a recipe for disaster.

A new poll released the most irritating words that came from the Internet. The top five must hated web words are:

1. folksonomy (web classification system using tags)
   
2. Blogosphere (the universe of blogs)
   
3. blog (uh, what you're reading)
   
4. netiquette (rules of behavior on the web)
   
5. blook (a book that came from a blog)

This clearly has marketing ramifications. Some people would love to have an online community where they could quickly post content and read what people thought about it. But those same people don't want a blog. People may want to know what all the blogs are saying about them, but they feel like a dork saying blogosphere.

Words matter. If you don't know that and appreciate that, then marketing is probably not a good career choice. And while some people no doubt admire your mad web 2.0 skills, Obi Wan, another percentage think you're being a dork.

It's easy to think everyone is talking about blogs. And they are. Just some people are making fun of it...

Did Snap, Crackle and Pop Surrender to the Fat Police?

Kellogg's is making big changes in how they market breakfast cereal to kids. They're also making big changes to certain breakfast cereals formulas to ensure they meet some new health guidelines. (Kellogg's created the guidelines themselves.)

Apparently, Tony the Tiger is ok... (Well, actually, he's great, but you know what I mean.) But Toucan Sam and Snap, Crackle and Pop may be on the unemployment line if Kellogg's can't find a new recipe for them by 2008.

While nutritionists can debate the merits of their "complete breakfast", the question for marketers is did Kellogg's capitulate to pressures too soon, too late or just in time? Animated cereal characters have been on TV for a generation, so are they really the cause of obesity?

As a marketer, can you reinvent an iconic brand relatively quickly? Does Froot Loops even exist without Toucan Sam?

My thoughts:

• It was time to change the formulas. They are one small part of the obesity epidemic, but they can help a bit. They would have been punished in sales if they'd resisted too long;
• If they can get Froot Loops to taste close to the way they taste, stick with Toucan Sam. If it's a dramatically different flavor, then invent a new brand and a new way to market it. Let Toucan Sam live and die with his product.

Those are my two cents... Yours??

8 Ways to Pick the Right Agency

In the last post, I outlined Ten Tips to Being a Good Client. Tip #1 was pick the right agency, which is important enough, and complex enough, to warrant its own discussion. So, here it is, 8 ways to figure out if you're picking the right agency. I've written this mostly toward picking an ad agency, but similar principles apply for picking a PR firm.

1. Pick by size. Often the size of your account may align with the size of the agency you end up with. Or you may prefer a "nimble boutique" or a "name brand shop." Bigger is NOT necessarily better. You want right for you. While the industry may have formal categories for these things, in my experience shops fall into these categories:
• 1-10 people: just starting or small.
• 11-40 people: over the start-up hump, some critical mass
• 41-75 people: crossing 40 seems to be a milestone that takes people to a different place
• 75-300 people: these are getting to be some serious shops, likely with a few national brand name type clients
• 300+ people: these are likely owned by one of about 3 giant holding companies that own everybody. If you don't know who they are, you can't afford them.
2. Pick by your budget. Most firms that have been around a while have minimum project or monthly fees. We won't take companies without a certain budget, not because we're mean or greedy, but because we're set up to help in a certain way. We can't provide that help in a meaningful way for $5,000. Are you likely to spend $25,000 in fees, or $250,000 in fees or $2.5m in fees? The answer to that question takes you to different types of firms.
3. Pick by your specific needs. Are you trying to get some collateral designed, or are you trying to run a small campaign, or are you trying to run a large campaign? If you need collateral, find a design shop. If you're investing hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars on an ad campaign, don't use a design shop. Find a strategic marketing partner. (Heck, call me... ;-)
4. Pick by experience. Find a firm that's done it before. Either in your category (i.e., retail, healthcare, b2b, etc.), or with a lot of creative experience in the media you want to use, or by skill set. It's amazing to me the number of clients who can't tell the difference between a PR firm, an advertising agency and a marcom firm. And every agency with more than 1 person claims to be "full service." Dig deeper.
5. Pick your team. If you've used steps 1-4 to narrow it down well, then a lot comes down to the skills of your team and the chemistry you have with them. Don't be wowed by the pitch team. Know your team. Talk to them. Do you trust them with your money and the growth of your business? This is a great filter after you've narrowed down the list.
6. Be reasonable during proposals. Remember that work starts when you start paying for it. If you've got a big budget, if you're the biggest juiciest account in the market, you can play puppetmaster and ask for spec creative, spec media plans, etc. Otherwise, remember that the work starts when you start paying for it. If you've got a small budget (like under a million for an ad campaign), judge creative skills based on track record. The spec creative isn't going to be right anyway, because the firms don't know you well enough yet. Don't waste your time and theirs.
7. Don't hide your budget. This is a classic one. People who won't say (or don't even know) their budget. And don't say "Tell me what it should be," because the answer is "More than you have..." You can always do more marketing and we'll think of stuff that you can do faster than you'll find money to pay for it. Some think if they share their budgets it will cost them more. Not true. It will tell bidders if they're in the right place, it will get you talent that might otherwise walk away figuring you have no money. There's a difference between agency fees/prices and budget, but hiding your budget doesn't help anyone. (Make 'em sign an NDA if you're worried about your competitors, or give a range.)
8. Be as specific as you can. During this two-way wooing stage, say what you know. Say what you don't yet know. If you don't really know how the campaign is going to shape up, don't ask "how much will you charge for this?" That's like asking how much a painter would charge to paint a house without telling him how big the house it. In my experience, price is usually not the biggest factor (if you've done some filtering up front), but you can ask for hourly rates of key positions if you want to compare.

Hopefully these tips get you closer to finding the right kind of agency for you. Because almost nobody is teaching marketing directors how to do these things... I remember being sort of clueless the first time my boss told me to find an agency... Maybe better selection processes would lead to longer relationships--and that benefits everyone.

~Jim Tobin
http://www.lifeismarketing.com

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

10 Reasons PR Relationships Don't Work

Guy Kawasaki has a great post on his blog called The Top Ten Reasons Why PR Doesn't Work. Here are the top ten, but read the post to really understand them...

1. The client doesn’t understand the publicity process.

2. The scope of work is not detailed and agreed upon by both parties.
   

3. The client has not been properly trained on how to communicate with the media.
   

4. The client and the PR person or firm are not a good match.
   

5. The client has not gotten results quickly enough and ends the relationship too soon.
   

6. PR people don’t explain the kind of publicity placements a client will most likely receive.
   

7. Clients don’t realize that what happens after you get the publicity coverage is sometimes more important than the actual placement.
   

8. Clients refuse to be flexible on their story angles.
   

9. Clients get upset when the media coverage is not 100% accurate or not the kind of coverage that they wanted.
   

10. Clients won’t change their schedules for the media.

This particular list was put together by an agency person, so it's a bit biased as to who is to blame on things... Having said that, there may be items missing on the agency side of the blame score sheet, but there's a lot of truth in what's in here, too...

Again, read the whole post here. It's very worth it...

Agencies or Clients: Who is Worse?

The cover story of Marketing News is called "Proving Ground: Greater need for ROI calls agencies' role into question."

Fascinating statistic in it:

• A recent study by the CMO Council showed that half of public relations and advertising firms' clients likely would switch agencies this year;
• 54% of 350 marketers surveyed plan to drop one of their agencies this year.
  
• Meanwhile, PR firms experienced the largest turnover among all types of marketing agencies in 2006, with more than 35% of marketers replacing their PR agencies last year.

The study cited "poor performance, lack of strategy and creative firepower and insufficient outcomes" as the things that made clients irate.

So whose fault is it?

• Are agencies only interested in creating funny nonsense, so they've lost focus on the bottom line?
• Or have clients started to treat their agencies like hourly vendors, and then wondered why they're not as connected as they were when they were treated (and paid) like partners?
• Are agencies focused on their own bottom line more than their clients' bottom line?
• Or do clients fail to disclose, stick to (or even have) a clear strategy and measurement plan, leaving them to judge executions based on personal preference

I've been a client for years and now I'm on the agency side, so I've seen some of both... Over the next couple days I'm going to focus separately on what makes a good client and what makes a good agency... Maybe we'll find a happy middle ground somewhere.

UPDATE: First article is up: "What Makes a Good Advertising Client."

As always, I welcome your comments.

Romancing the Audience

What marketing best practices can we learn from a first-time author? Turns out that my sister-in-law, Michelle Willingham Leonard, is a natural at this stuff.

When Michelle signed a three-book deal with Harlequin, she knew she'd sell a bunch of copies just on Harlequin's marketing muscle. But she also knew that to move herself up over other authors, she should sell some books, too. What things is she doing that we should all remember?

1. Make a Connection: Her first book signing ever was along with world famous author Nora Roberts. Michelle knew people were there to see Nora, but they had to stand by her table when they were in line. She told each one that she was a first-time author who was so excited to have a book in print. Suddenly the person in the line was part of her story, and they helped complete it. She sold every book.
2. Talk, and Listen: Michelle's had a blog for some time now. She shares her successes, her personal and business stories. She invites comments, and gets a lot of them. So much of marketing is one-way, you get a lot back from listening, too.
3. Break Down Your Audience: Michelle could have said, "Any romance novel reader in the world is my target, so I need a campaign to reach them." But she was much more realistic, sending books and simple press releases to local papers and magazines, playing up the "Local Teacher Makes Good" angle. She sent similar stuff to her alma mater, her hometown paper and other places, with "Hometown Girls Makes Good" type angles. As a result, she got feature stories in area papers. That's got to sell some books, right?
4. Look for Unique Opportunities: When Michelle saw two copies of her book on the shelf at her local store, she asked the manager if she could sign them both and put "Autographed Copy" stickers on them. He said ok. Both books sold quickly. (And I bet the manager ordered a few more copies once he knew she was local...)
   

I love some of the fun, big budget ideas that the pros come up with. But marketing is so basic, right? Who cares? Why should they care? Where are they? How can I reach them? etc. etc. Kudos to Michelle for getting it.

Friday Cartoon Fun

Enjoy this all-too-true cartoon and have a great Memorial Day weekend!

Credit to Tom Fishburne at Sky Deck Cartoons.

Ignoring Strategy 2.0

Just read a good post over on a blog called OkDork. The post was called Top 5 Stupid Trends of Marketing 2.0, and Noah Kagen, the writer, made several good points. Ok, actually he makes one really good point and 4 sort of fun ones...

The one really important point is that Web 2.0, if you 're applying it to marketing, is just a tool. And like all good marketing tools it can be applied intelligently or it can be swung around like a monkey with a hammer.

He asks good questions like, "Do you need a blog." Everyone wants to rush to answer yes, and many more should have them than do, but everyone? Seriously?

Learn about tools, to be sure, but think about strategy first!

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...

All sorts of "positioning" jokes

You know I love my Nintendo Wii. I admire how fun it is to play, but I also admire the business sense of the Nintendo folks who reinvented gaming while the Xbox and Playstation crowd were just switching it to Hi-Def (and charging $599 a pop). And I admire their positioning of it and how they marketed, as you saw in my earlier post, How We Marketed the Wii.

Now Wired magazine shows how the Wii can be positioned as a valid workout. Check out this chart:

• Instead of 30 minutes of aerobics (242 calories), play 30 minutes of Wii Boxing (250 calories).
• Instead of 15 minutes of sex (33 calories), play 7 minutes of Wii Tennis (46 calories).

Now, the first one seems to me to be a better idea than the second one, but this is a great positioning opportunity! (Pun sort of intended...) Videogames used to be the cause of obesity and now it can be part of the solution?!? Golden...

Have you tried the Wii? I'm telling you, you start sweating when you use it... I was sore for two days after my first try...

Creativity on Any Budget

The company I work for has been in business for 22+ years, yet we've never found a client with enough money to do what they want to do. Advertising is expensive. If they've got $200,000, they need $1 million. If they've got $1 million, they've got $5 million worth of needs, and so on. But these pictures here show that creativity is not a budget thing--it's a thinking thing.

Here are very creative outdoor executions on a tiny budget, a medium budget and a decent budget. The theme across all three is someone who saw things in a fresh way.

Tiny Budget: Brilliant Outdoor Medium Budget: Brilliant Outdoor
Decent Budget: Brilliant Outdoor

How "We" Marketed the "Wii"

The Nintendo Wii is an amazing new gaming system--and a blockbuster product. Try to find it in any store and it will be sold out (I FINALLY got one, tonight, after looking casually since Christmas...And just for the record, it's great...). But what's really cool is how they marketed it. Some key things:

• They used advertising to go after older, non-traditional gaming markets, including seniors.
• The didn't advertise at all to "gamers". To reach them, they gave systems to key bloggers and let them write about them. They set up Wii MySpace and YouTube sites and they did heavy public relations.

This is marketing in a Web 2.0 world. In essence, "we" all marketed the Wii. It's also "convergence marketing". Part of that is giving up control of your message (who knew what the bloggers were going to actually say???). But the return in 3rd party credibility and buzz is amazing.

Their YouTube video, shown below, as of right now has been watched 1,295,711 times! And the media budget for that extensive media buy? Nothing of course.



This is great, holistic, converged marketing. And great outside the box thinking. Business 2.0 has a fascinating piece on how the product came to life. Read it here.

Advertising on Second Life

"They paved paradise...and put up a parking lot."

There have been lots of articles written about Second Life. If you're into these kind of marketing, gaming, technology trends, you no doubt know about it. And, you may know that marketers like Virgin are already discovering it, opening stores in this virtual world, selling downloads, and making real money. (152 individual users made more than $5,000 in real money by doing business in Second Life in the month of March alone!)

The future of that world is crystal clear.

• Early adopters come in and create an economy;
• Some clever marketers see an opportunity to extend their brand into this world, many think it's funny, clever, good thinking;
• Less clever marketers start to come in. The humor of it all goes away;
• Every two-bit marketer finds a way to extend into Second Life, the users go away;
• The buzz fades, the "citizenry" shrinks but doesn't disappear. Marketers go away (mostly) and Second Life continues smaller, less hyped.

It seems a little sad to me on the one hand. On the other, it seems like the natural order of things. We find a new place and we all rush there, transforming it. Just a cautionary tale for those who would make millions in their alternative universe.

Making Money On Tragedy

There's been more than enough debate about whether NBC News should've aired the "manifesto" of the gunman. It's clear to me that they should not have done so. I have no connection to the school and I'm angry that I have to see that twisted loser's face on TV, on my newspaper, on my homepage...

It was clearly about $$. No doubt. Want further proof that the media is cashing in on a hot news cycle. The AP reported that respected outlets like the New York Times and CNN are buying Google Ad Words for phrases like "Virginia Tech Shooting." Clearly, that tragedy is a marketing opportunity for them--a chance to extend their brand positioning.

I'm all for creative, outside the box thinking about marketing tactics. I'm all for looking at current events to see how your product aligns with those, can capitalize on those. But at some point, did nobody in those marketing departments stop for a minute and say, "Hey, maybe this is not the moment we capitalize on a brand opportunity. Maybe we just let this one pass. We're still the dang NY Times, it's not like people will forget us if we don't have our AdWords up this week.

Ridiculous. Have we lost our compass by that much? I've included no links to those pubs, as they don't deserve the reward.

And now, a gunman at NASA killed a hostage and himself. Does NBC share the blame in some small way? Will CNN buy AdWords?

The most logical piece I've seen on all this is from Peggy Noonan. You can read it here.

Back to more traditional posts tomorrow.

Powerful Social Marketing Message

The company I work for does a lot of social marketing, and I think we're pretty good at it. Done properly, social marketing uses the best practices of marketing to issues. In many cases, however, you can go well beyond traditional marketing, because building the "brand" isn't as important in most cases as raising awareness of the issue.

Here's a great campaign for the Traffic Police in Mumbai, India that uses a special invisible red ink that is only activated when it gets wet. Wow.

Found at Houtlust

Absolutely Brilliant Outdoor

The key to good creative is narrowing your message down to one simple thing. If you can do that, and you have a good team, you'll get good creative. (Those are, by the way, pretty big "ifs".)

Here's an example of a campaign where they got it right: done for the Red Cross and running in San Francisco:

It doesn't have to say much of anything. A really powerful reminder of why you give to the Red Cross. It just takes something most people don't have: a narrow focus and a willingness to get outside and think...

Props again to Coolhunter for finding this.

Keep Spinning Until The Idea Comes

What a fabulous idea for casino marketing. For a casino that is located (I believe) in Europe, came this great piece of out-of-home advertising:

What I really like about this is that the agency didn't just think of the standard tactics and choose among them. They invented a whole new tactic. I can imagine the fun of picking a number (or red/black, or even/odd) to guess for your luggage.

Great idea. Courtesy of disruption, which is written in some foreign tongue...