Tag: advertising

By Posted on Posted in Activism, Advertising, Branding, Consumer Issues, Copywriting, Demographics/Psychographics, Eco-friendly, Environment, Green Marketing, Innovation, language, Marketing Techniques and Philosophies, Marketing Trends/News, Psychology, Shel's Personal Life, Social and Economic Justice Tagged with , , , , ,

As the primary author of two books in the Guerrilla Marketing series (Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World and Guerrilla Marketing Goes Green) and a speaker at the recent Guerrilla Marketing Summit, I was very interested in how the digital marketing pioneer Hubspot views the whole Guerrilla Marketing concept and brand.

In their seven examples, I was particularly thrilled that they included UNICEF’s super-successful Dirty Water campaign.

Screenshot of a still from the Unicef "Dirty Water" video
Screenshot of a still from the UNICEF “Dirty Water” video

After all, my two Guerrilla books are the ones that extend the Guerrilla Marketing concepts to the worlds of social change of environmentalism. This was a bit of a gamble for UNICEF; there were obviously significant costs in everything from developing the branding to shipping the filthy water. I hope they’re replicating the campaign in other cities, and creating strong follow-up messaging targeted specifically to those touched by this campaign, to keep them donating into the future.

My definition of Guerrilla Marketing is a lot broader than Hubspot’s. To me, Guerrilla Marketing has three main parts:

  1. Being nimble in our thinking and actions, seizing opportunities quickly, including news tie-ins
  2. Going outside and beyond conventional thinking patterns–disrupting the mental flow to get noticed, to move people to action, but in ways that don’t feel obnoxiously intrusive
  3. Focusing not on how great your brand is (the mistake I see so many marketers make. I call it “we, we, we all the way home) but on the results: the benefits, the problems solved, the pain relieved, the wants and needs met or exceeded–whether for the individual customer or for the planet and the species that live on it.

Hubspot’s choice of the Bounty sculpture is a beautiful example.

Ideally, Guerrilla Marketing will be done at little cost, too. But, as the UNICEF and Grammy examples show, there are plenty of Guerrilla Marketing opportunities that aren’t necessarily cheap.

Let’s look at those two more closely, because they offer us very different lessons. It will take you exactly three minutes and 40 seconds to watch the two videos. Go ahead; I’ll wait.

UNICEF

This elaborate campaign involved creating a brand, bottling filthy brown water, and offering it on the streets of New York. The goal: to increase awareness that the clean, drinkable water we take for granted in most of the US (and the developed world generally) is unimaginable luxury for people at the margins in developing countries. Many have to drink filthy, disease-causing water, and many get very sick. The campaign encouraged people to use the money they currently spend on bottled water to provide clean water for those who don’t have it. Each dollar could supply a thirsty child for 40 days. The video documents the whole campaign, in a fast-paced three minutes.

I found this very effective. I love the way they were able to not just raise awareness, but funds. The negative branding is definitely a Guerrilla tactic, and the results are clearly positive. Bravo!

Grammy Ad

This was an expensive missed opportunity. Maybe it’s a generational thing, but this one really didn’t work for me. Great concept, but terrible execution. I want the protagonist be moved and touched by what he’s seeing, but he strolls through the talking posters, blithe and indifferent. He’s not even glancing at the posters! What’s going on in HIS head? We don’t even get a hint. Have  the talking portraits of Harry Potter and the constant animations of things people didn’t animate in the past made a talking poster no-longer-special? And while my wife frequently accuses me of ADD, I found that I hadn’t even processed and recognized one song before it switched after a few seconds to something else. (And OK, I confess, this was not music I’m familiar with anyway). Some of the problem was that the songs all sounded so similar and all seemed to have the exact same beat.

I also think the choice of having multiple copies of each poster was unfortunate. Yes, I recognize that’s a common way to display posters in urban environments. It has NEVER worked for me. I’ve studied some of the advertising masters like David Ogilvy, and they taught me the importance of white space: of having one central object (or person, animal, tree…) able to stand out from what’s around it, because of that empty space around it. If I were buying billboards, instead of, say, 9 medium-sized repeated pictures, I’d use the space for one much larger version of the image. I’d use that white space and not add to the clutter.

Imagine walking down the street and seeing a 20-foot billboard suddenly start to sing with its one and only mouth! Imagine hearing snippets of three or four songs that each have a clear identity, in a true medley, each sung by one giant poster of an artist you recognize instantly. Would you be as blase as the protagonist? I doubt it!

So maybe the commercial would need a full minute instead of 39 seconds. That’s OK. In print copywriting, it’s perfectly OK to take as much time as you need to tell the story; I’ve seen emails with links to 40-page sales letters. Even in broadcast, even though airtime is expensive, we’ve seen many successful commercials that ran an hour (they’re called infomercials and they run on shopping channels). The UNICEF video was three entire minutes and I watched without multitasking, because I was interested both in their message and how they promoted it. If you can’t get it done in less than a minute, either buy more airtime, or script a commercial that CAN get it done in the time you bought.

Facebooktwitterpinterestlinkedinmail

By Posted on Posted in Advertising, Branding, Business Ethics, Corporate Social Responsibility, Demographics/Psychographics, language, Marketing Trends/News, Psychology, Social and Economic Justice Tagged with , , , , , , ,

Being political can be a very good thing for a business—look what it’s done for Ben & Jerry’s. I believe that social/environmental responsibility is what made B&Js a player with 40% or more of the superpremium ice cream market. Without it, it would be just another among the hundreds of minor players with slivers of market share. Many other companies have also benefitted by their strong stands, including Patagonia, The Body Shop, Interface (flooring company), and many others.

But there has to be a good match between audience and messages.

Which is what makes Budweiser’s “Born the Hard Way” Superbowl ad so surprising, almost shocking.

The football-adoring working-class male Bud drinker (a big part of their audience) is one of the demographics most likely to have voted for DT. Many voters in that demographic had enough comfort with the anti-immigrant rhetoric and action that they cast that vote, even if their motivations were on other issues (such as believing that DT would create more jobs). In other words, this ad could anger a large segment of Bud’s core market. Taking that risk is an act of courage.

Budweiser bottle (photo credit Paul Fris)
Budweiser bottle (photo credit Paul Fris)

Those out in the streets for immigrant rights who are not themselves immigrants or the children of immigrants probably skew rather heavily toward craft beer. I don’t think as great a percentage of them will be going for Bud, Coors (BTW, heavily associated in the 1970s with right-wing causes, before it merged with Molson), or any other industrial beer. It’s also worth pointing out that Islam is a no-alcohol religion (though that commandment is not always followed). So Anheuser-Busch is being quite courageous. If right wing elements (or DT himself) call a boycott, it’s going to be hard to get those who support their position to also support their beer.

I speak out of my own tastes here. I am delighted that Bud took this stand. The company says this ad was prepared in October, before the anti-immigrant candidate eked out his Electoral College victory. That may be. But that also left them two months following the election to decide not to run it. Going forward raises my respect for A-B. But until an American Bud tastes as good as the incredible Czech Budwar (originated by the same family), I still won’t want to drink it. I might talk about them in my speeches or even invest in the company, but I’m not likely to be a customer, let alone a brand loyalist.

Wouldn’t you love to be a fly on the wall when A-B discusses this commercial at its next high-level strategic marketing meetings?

If you like to study Superbowl ads, BTW, here’s a reel of someone’s choices for the top 10 of this year. (My comments are underneath the video.)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XF3wOrWBKjc

The “Born the Hard Way” Bud ad didn’t make the cut, though another Bud ad did. I don’t know who curated this, but I don’t share that person’s sensibility. As a group, I found them disjointed, way too violent, and for the most part not focused on selling (other than the McDonald’s “Big Mac for That”). Why does Mercedes spend 3/4 of their ad on a play fight among motorcyclists in a bar? Why was it such a struggle to even make the connection between the Humpty Dumpty ad and the product that less than half an hour after watching, I can’t even remember what the ad was for? Considering how many millions of dollars go into producing and airing each of these ads, it just makes me scratch my head. Is this really a successful marketing strategy?

Facebooktwitterpinterestlinkedinmail

By Posted on Posted in Advertising, language, Marketing Techniques and Philosophies Tagged with , ,

I received this tweet from a stranger today:

@shelhorowitz , please follow me, and check me out. Thank you. [URL]

To which I tweeted back:

Give me a reason

As a marketing consultant and copywriter, that’s one of my mantras. I think “because” is one of the most important words in marketing. I’m always probing the why with my clients, and using that to create compelling marketing strategies and materials.

The days of “oh, look at me, I’m so cool, I have a website” were probably gone by about 1996, if not before.

Your prospects are busy people. They want to know why before they click on your link. They want to know why before they give up even 30 seconds of their time.

Specifically, they want to know the benefit. Will you make them laugh? Give them a tool they need? Solve a problem? Give them celebrity gossip? Help them go green (as I do)? Make a specific offer. They will thank you—and some of them, the right ones, will visit.

This will serve you well in any marketing medium: advertising, freebie information, socialmedia, and lots more, as well as your website.

Facebooktwitterpinterestlinkedinmail

By Posted on Posted in Advertising, Green Marketing, Marketing Techniques and Philosophies Tagged with , , , , , , ,

Just back from a few days in Istanbul, Turkey, where I spoke at a conference and then got to play for a few days.

As with all my trips, I keep my marketing eyes open. Here’s some of what I noticed:

  • Turks are  maniacs for food freshness (and the food is WONDERFUL!) to the point where packing dates as well as expiration dates are common on packages (which I have seen occasionally in the US) and the packing dates are extremely recent (not very common in my own country). I walked into a very small supermarket in kind of a backwater neighborhood on the Asian side and bought a bag of nuts that had been packed just one week earlier. And they tasted amazingly fresh. That tells me that supermarket turnover has to be very fast, and that the customers are looking at those packing dates and rejecting anything too old, if even this small and uncrowded market had food so fresh. If I were marketing any product in Turkey, food or otherwise, I’d think about how to include a freshness campaign.
  • Like many tourist destinations, Istanbul has an army of men (I didn’t see any women doing this) whose job it is to get the tourist into a particular shop (especially carpet shop) or restaurant. In Turkey, they were really personable, and often started by meeting tourists on their way into an attraction, giving some useful pointers, and then saying they’ll meet you at the end and escort you to the shop (and all of them kept those promises). At least the “like” part of the know-like-trust formula is very much a part of doing business. However, most of them lack any discernible USP (Unique Selling Proposition—a reason to do business there rather than with someone else). One that did told us that his partner would give us a discourse on the history of rug-making, which was accurate (I’ll be posting an article soon based on that fascinating conversation).
  • Most of the Turks I saw had dark hair and a medium skin tone, darker than Northern Europeans but lighter than Arabs or Greeks (kind of like my own skin tone, in fact). I did meet several fair-skinned blondes and redheads. Yet if you look at the ads, you’d think half of Turkey is blonde. I could interpret this as blondes having higher status (as they seem to do in the US as well—remember “Is it true Blonde’s have more fun?”), or as rejection of the principle that marketing should use images that resemble your market, or as something else I wasn’t there long enough to understand. Whatever it is, I don’t think it’s coincidence.
  • For green marketers especially: if you want to move society to go green, make the green alternative much more attractive. Public transit in Istanbul is cheap, fast, easy to navigate—and extremely heavily used. Car ownership, by contrast, is expensive and full of hassles from icky traffic to high fuel prices to very limited parking in many areas. The result? Only 1 in 10 Istanbul residents have a car. I’m betting that once the rail connection between the Asia and Europe sides is complete (my understanding is that a tunnel is being constructed), public transit will become even more popular.
Facebooktwitterpinterestlinkedinmail