momorantings

Did Oreo really win the Superbowl? Did Dulux have a Oreo moment during the Brits last night? Real-time content marketing is all the rage, but let's face some facts. Oreo's Superbowl success waa based on a rightly praised but very traditional existing campaign and, I'd argue, they got lucky with the power blackout. The question that will never be answered is what would have happened if the lights had stayed on? Would the versions thay must have pre-prepared to focus upon preditable outcomes of team victorie, individual performances or the half-time show have had the same impact? This leads us to last night's Dulux tweet. Although smart, my guess is that it wasn't genunely real-time marketing as the statuette design was announced long ago. Nothing wrong with that, but look at the small number of online shares. That's really is mini. It's all very well for the writer to suggest the spread was much wider beause he liked the idea, but that doesn't mean it d...

1) Don't define yourself by your department. 2) Being professional means being objective. 3) People must notice the advertising (words that never appear in the brief). 4) It's all about Bernbach's "Timeless Human Truths". 5) Branding: being unable to repeat the ad without naming the product. 6) You don't need twelve housewives from Slough. 7) Ads don't run on the boardroom table. Photo by Nicole Yershon, shoulder by me.

Probably the most frequent question I am asked is if I believe subscriptions are dying.   And if you would have asked me five years ago, I would have answered in the affirmative. I, like many others, believed the subscription model was outdated--a worn out old chestnut that needed to be replaced. I even had data to prove it. From our peak in 2002 until 2007, Arena Stage had lost 40% of its subscriber base! I was convinced we had held onto a failing business model for far too long, until I started testing alternatives.   In 2008, working with  Shugoll Research , we developed several focus groups with specific target audiences, including current subscribers, lapsed subscribers, multi-show buyers and single ticket buyers. During these focus groups, we presented several alternatives to the traditional subscription, many of which had been recently introduced by other theaters, and to my complete horror, none of them tested anywhere near as well as the t...

Good marketing should share the same mindset as business strategy. Strategy is about identifying and exploiting a sustainable competitive advantage - a fancy way of saying what it is you do better than anyone else and how you intend to maintain that (either by excellence or manoeuvering). Good marketing does the same - it's the distillation of the essence of what it is your company's strategy or entrepreneurial instinct has generated and its aim is to convince customers that your product/service meets their needs better than any other. Now, you wouldn't know about this shared mindset from the bloated mission statements and blandly pompous marketing ideas that are often mistaken for strategy and good marketing. But those tend to be ego-driven rather than customer-driven and overlook the fact that they're about communicating with people. People who make happen the things you want to happen - be they employees who execute the strategy or customers who validate the marketi...

In 2011, the advertisement above was part of a much-lauded and Grand Prix winning campaign The agency declared that The powerful, timely and well-located messaging encouraged 331 FARC guerrillas to demobilise and re-enter society—a 30% uplift on the previous year. In challenging circumstances, strategic planning drew together powerful insights to create a core, successful, thought – taking the spirit of Christmas to guerrilla strongholds. The judges swooned and there were awards all round. Yesterday, the FARC rebels ended their unilaterally-declared 2012 Christmas ceasefire with a series of attacks across Colombia. This marked a significant increase on the 52 that had occurred during the ceasefire.  It would be wrong to wonder how many of the rebels had returned from spending Christmas with their families, but it ccertainly reminds us that "effectiveness" is a very odd concept and that the industry can be a little arrogant. Meanwhile,  people die.

This minor #ikeascenes meme just appeared on my Twitter timeline. I'm guessing it started as the sort of online reportage that used to make Twitter great. But, it also strikes me that it would be a smart way to do initiate some quick and dirty crowd-sourced ethnography. While Google et al have learned to crowd-source translation and other data-gathering via online games and captchas, this ikeascenes meme is appealing to our love of spreading humour. And there's much more truth in humour than you'll find in focus-groups.

Renowned London department store Selfridges is soon to open a Quiet Room featuring a number of special versions of well-known products from which "all brand-noise is removed". Except they seem to have forgotten to remove all but the slightest amount of the "brand noise" from every example I've seen. Which, of course, is the point.