A quick reaction to news that relates to your brand can spur exceptional results. After all, your customers are already tuned into the news. All you need to do is weave in a relevant story about your brand. Procter and Gamble, for example, immediately responds to oil spills by donating Dawn dishwashing detergent. The community relations effort drives millions in free publicity while embedding a key brand message about Dawn’s cleaning power.

You don’t need a billion dollar advertising budget to harness the same concept. After Sony announced that it would cease floppy disk production, Ideopia pounced on this news to unseat one of its client’s competitors, whose medical device is dependant on floppies. Yippee!

The Advantage of News Tie-ins

• Built-in and sensitized audience
• Credibility of third party endorsement, e.g. “Silicon Valley News says the floppy is dead.”
• Relevancy. It’s happening now, not six weeks from now when your next ad campaign launches.

Unearth News Tie-ins for Your Brand

• Monitor keywords and trending topics in social media
• Track online publications using Google Alerts
• Keep micro audiences in mind. It may not be news for June and Ward, but it could blow the top off your industry.

Develop a Quick Response Mentality

• Create an infrastructure that can think and act quickly.
• Social Media and Web: 1-2 hours
• Print: 24 hours
• TV and Radio: 12 hours

1. Protect your brand from change like a religious zealot. Your marketing  mojo has worked for 100 years, and by golly it’ll work for another 100. Convince yourself that all good change is evolutionary; that anything progressing faster than a teradactyl is downright dangerous.
2. Democracy rules. Vote on everything, especially creative work. And vote often. Phil in accounting. Lisa in customer service. Your mom. And, of course, legal. Your marketing will be stripped of anything that could possibly make it work, but an ass covered is an ass saved.
3. Believe your sacred brand lives in a vacuum where it is immune to cultural, technological and demographic changes. Like Women’s Suffrage and the internet, they’re all fads anyway.
4. Worry about losing your job. That fear will protect from taking any action that could positively move your business forward, while you may get lucky and ride the flat growth line into retirement.
5. Wear Teflon by Armani. Let the little guys take the fall. Make your subordinates more afraid of losing their job than you are of losing yours. Afterall, it’s your job to cultivate talent internally.
6. Talk a good game. Drop buzzwords. Maybe Tweet once or twice. Reference articles about social media and forward them to higher ups. Everyone will know you’re on top of this new fangled stuff, but don’t do anything about it.
7. Congratulate yourself for being at the top of your industry without wondering if your industry will be there in 5 years.
8. Ignore criticism or even the hint of negative karma. Consumers are idiots or difficult cases. Research lies. And your agency’s job is to suck up and take orders.
9. Never benchmark or evaluate your program against other industries much less competitors. Those guys are clueless and their ideas have no relevance to an aged and revered brand like yours.
10. Consumers are idiots (see No. 8). Listening to what they think or feel about your brand, or how it could better meet their needs is just stupid. What could possibly come from it? New product ideas. More share. Why bother? Your brand had this nailed 100 years ago.

1. Be a follower. It’s great to be number 1, but it might be smarter to watch and learn as competitors expend their resources developing a product and a market, then trump them with a leaner, more targeted product.
2. Make mountains out of molehills. What are the stories behind the little differences in your product or service? Are you fanatics about the smallest part in your product? Do you have a rep that would drive 1,000 miles to meet with a customer in a diner in Minot, North Dakota? The answer could be your next marketing strategy or ad campaign.
3. Benchmark against the best not just your competitors. It’s easy to get lulled into complacency when you consider your marketing programs versus the competition. But what if your company was up against Coke, Nike, Apple, Microsoft, or McDonald’s, how would that change your approach? Could you use the same tactics and strategies?

We’re declaring August National Co-branding month, because we think it’s a great antidote for marketing budgets stretched to the breaking point. Co-branding, which, in English, means getting together with other companies to create awesome promotions you couldn’t pull off individually. By pooling internal marketing resources, visibility on existing advertising, blogs and web sites, you and your co-branding partners can minimize out-of-pocket expenditures. Apply creativity and your partnership could also benefit from free buzz. A few tips:

– Consider organizations with soft assets, e.g. non-profits with large mailing lists.
- Don’t automatically eliminate a competitor. Parts of your business may be ripe for collaboration.
- Think about what will wow your customers.
- Be clear about your objectives: awareness, loyalty, straight-up sales.
- Put it in writing: marketing plans, budgets, ownership agreements, timelines, and take it down to Judge Judy to get it notarized.

Search ads on the web give you a rare opportunity to learn what copy your prospects are responding to in real time. This knowledge is hard won through continual experimentation, trial and error, and occasional thumb sucking. We say share the wealth. For example, we recently learned in our eVitalize web campaign that “Fix up your underperforming web site” beats “Cost effective web marketing strategies” five to one. Understanding how your target perceives your product benefits not only gives you ammo for search, but better ways to communicate through sales and other copy created for the brand. Conversely knowing how an effective salesperson formulates his pitch can inform better keywords and ad copy. The trick is to share and bust through compartmentalized suppliers and internal departments.

You may have noticed that “Consumer: The Next Generation” is much more concerned with the social, philanthropic and environmental values than its predecessors. This explains the rush by some companies to align themselves with non-profit organizations and causes to “get me some of those values.”

Consumers are becoming increasingly cynical about cause related marketing, especially when there’s a disconnect from the cause and the company’s actions. For example, a company that manufactures toys that contain carcinogens supports breast cancer. Level of engagement counts, too. Donating 25 cents of every cereal box sale to the disease du jour is great, But, without educating employees, suppliers, and website visitors, the involvement, consumers may perceive the involvement as being purely utilitarian.

For a different perspective on cause related marketing and how it may actually harm the cause of philanthropy, see Angela Eikenberry’s article, “The Hidden Costs of Cause Related Marketing” in the Stanford Social Institute Review.
http://www.ssireview.org/articles/entry/the_hidden_costs_of_cause_marketing/

Is Your Current Ad Agency a Bit Stale?
40+ Years of experience and fresh ideas to help focus your marketing.
www.some_real_ad_agency.com

I was checking out our search placements yesterday, and I came across this hilarious ad from another agency. The combined years of experience gambit is common with many services companies. It seemed particularly funny here, because it was linked with “freshness.” Besides, we all know companies out there that defy Darwinistic logic to survive even though they totally suck. Also, are we talking one, old dude here, or 40 interns? C’mon guys, it’s the intertube era. What can you do for me now?

Integrating web sites, landing pages and emails into your trade show plans is a very cost-effective way to build excitement, identify hot prospects, and schedule your staff’s time in the booth. A few ideas we’ve used successfully include:

1. Email and web promotions related to a new product that requires redemption at the trade show booth.
2. Scheduling in-person demos online and capturing mobile messaging information to send reminders.
3. Multi-part teaser campaigns – sometimes prohibitively expensive in print – that create buzz for new products.
4. Product specific landing pages that prospects can visit after the show. Downloadable information and video demos keep your brand top of mind, and out of the trash.
5. Rapid and customized email follow-ups to everyone who visits the booth.
6. Search and/or banner advertising scheduled around show assets.

Would you buy a bottle of wine from this hairy humanoid?

I admit it. I am a Neanderthal when it comes to wine. I like my vino cheap, and I make my decisions based on cool graphics and interesting names more than woodsy aftertaste. This is how I came in possession of a 2005 Cabernet Sauvignon ($4.99) from Sasquatch Cellars. Afterall, who better to be an expert vintner than a large, hairy humanoid.

Brand myths, like Sasquatch, can differentiate products in a commodity market. Add a clever back story, which Sasquatch Wine Cellars takes a shot at, can capture a loyal and profitable cult following. Presumably the tin foil hat crowd in Sasquatch’s case. Here’s the upshot: when you uncork your Cabernet for a romantic evening, it cannot smell and taste like benzene. It doesn’t matter how sturdy and robust the marketing is if the product stinks.

Last week, a certain Ideopian had a minor fender bender, which left a golf-ball size crater in her bumper. Three days later, a pile of mail arrives, including 8 letters from personal injury attorneys and 3 chiropractors, all triggered by the filing of a police report. Triggers work because they allow you to present tailored communication at the exact time your prospect wants it. Smart marketers are always looking for them. For example, high pollen counts trigger radio ads for allergy remedies, and weddings trigger campaigns for housewares. Every product or service has a trigger.