On a dark and ominous night in the bustling and menacing streets of Orange County California, one brave man stands alone. Looking to Chicago. His call of duty igniting a scorching fire in his heart. Armed only with an 8 GB flash drive with a ferociously informative PowerPoint presentation saved on it, he knows what he has to do.

Managing Partner Damien Navarro and his trusty sidekick, Director of Communications and Brand Experience Amanda Vande Brake, are no strangers to the eduWeb Conference as this year’s event will mark EMG’s second appearance. The eduWeb Conference focuses on online marketing strategy and technology in the higher education community. With attendees from various Higher Ed institutions throughout the country, the conference provides a unique look at the frontend (MarCom) and the backend (Technology) bringing these two sides together in one conference, making it the perfect platform for EMG who happens to kick ass and take names in the realm of creating solutions that bridge gaps between marketing and technology. POW!!

EMG will begin its mission in the exhibit hall and, never fear, our dynamic duo is armed with fully loaded case studies to counter any villain challenging recruitment, enrollment and advancement success. WHAMM!! Says Girl Wonder Vande Brake: “We’re really looking forward to engaging with Higher Ed professionals from all types of institutions from all areas of the country. EMG has over 10 years of experience in education creating custom solutions for every kind of brand challenge. We know new challenges are constantly presenting themselves and our experience and success prove that we have the adaptability and capacity to solve them.” ZAP!!

In a characteristically heroic effort, Captain Navarro will be contributing to the conference his expertise in Branded Entertainment. In his presentation titled “Is Your Brand a Celebrity?” Navarro will share how an institution can cut through the clutter to reach a dedicated audience and develop a relationship that will result in increased enrollment and market share. KA-BLAM!! “Branded Entertainment is one of the most effective ways of creating brand awareness and audience engagement. You want to create campaigns that will resonate with your audience on their terms, which is essential for success. I’m hoping that the audience will find the presentation most informative.” Damien jokes, “If I fall short, I think the audience will forgive me once I give away the iPad.” CRASH?!?!

Did you say ‘give away an iPad’?! Yes, boys and girls, to all the good citizens of the world of Higher Ed, Team EMG brings an opportunity to win the latest gadget craze. Visit EMG at booth 4 in the exhibit hall to receive your free swaggerific “I Heart CHI-TOWN” t-shirt. Wear it and be entered to win the iPad. The winner will be announced at Damien’s presentation on Wednesday, July 28 @ 11am. (Sign up for Damien’s follow up webinar, on August 11th, here.)

Looking to optimize the conversion funnel? Need to create a more engaging experience? Desperately seeking better quality applicants? Want to increase advancement? Well, Chicago, Captain Navarro and Team EMG have seen the signal and we never fail to fulfill our duty!!!

Let’s Discuss: The power of combining your brand’s visible assets with promotions to make celebrities out of your audience.

EMG 30-Second Rundown
NASA is currently running an online promotion called “Face in Space” to draw attention and interest to the final two Endeavour shuttle flights, STS-133 and STS-134. The promotion leverages a microsite that allows people to upload a photo of their face to be taken aboard one of the remaining flights and launched into orbit (a nice alternative route into orbit over others that are morbid, costly, or statistically challenging). The campaign has been quite a success so far with over 62,508 total participants from 6 continents (including yours truly representing EMG in space), and a significant amount of global media coverage.

NASA is motivating participation (and driving awareness of its programs in the process) by making available to its audience a chance to be visibly associated with its brand in a significant and meaningful way. Call it “celebrifying” its audience.

Other recent examples of brands employing this tactic:

• To celebrate selling 500,000 Fiat 500 vehicles, Italy’s Fiat Group launched an online promotion that invited the public to submit photos to be incorporated into the paint job of a special edition Fiat 500 showcar (to be known as the Fiat 500 Thousandth). The promotion has received worldwide coverage and all 1,500 spots that were available on the car will be filled.

• In anticipation of the Paranormal Activity DVD release, distributor Paramount invited all the fans that made the movie such a success to submit their name for inclusion in the DVD film credits. Just over 149,000 fans participated, and as of writing this, 823,000 DVDs have been sold.

The EMG Takeaway
There are two dynamics at play here that make this tactic of celebrifying your audience so powerful, Celebrity to the World (incentive) and Celebrity to Us (bonding).

Celebrity to the World is the incentive a brand offers when it creates the opportunity to associate your face or name to the public using a visible brand asset. The prospect of being able to tell my friends my photo is going to be launched into space makes me feel like a celebrity, and motivates me to participate.

Celebrity to Us describes the connection that is formed between a brand and an individual when the brand incorporates them into one of its visible brand assets. Knowing I’ve been included in the launch of a space shuttle makes me feel like a celebrity to NASA, and deepens my bond with the brand.

The real takeaway is that when pairing an incentive to an online promotion, it can be just as effective (if not significantly more so) to appeal to the ego of participants instead of their checkbooks. If NASA created an online essay contest and offered $1,000 to the winner, I’m quite positive they wouldn’t have received the same level of participation or media coverage.

Final Words: When designing a promotion, consider what visible assets your brand can leverage to make celebrities out of your audience to incentivize participation and deepen a connection with your brand.

3 Questions to Continue the Discussion

1. What brands have made you feel like a celebrity?
2. If you’re a brand manager, what visible assets have you used to celebrify your audience?
3. Is your face going to be on board on of the final two Endeavour shuttle flights?

Photo credit: Matthew Simantov / Flickr

Let’s Discuss: An article by Advertising Age, Male Call: Marketers Jump On Men’s Grooming Trend

EMG 30-Second Rundown: The men’s personal-care category is steadily growing (up 1% while the rest of the category is down over 5%) and marketers are taking every opportunity to capture share with one of the biggest array of product launches for men in nearly a decade. Brands which have prevoiusly skewed towards women are even vying for a piece of the pie as seen with Unilever launching its new Dove Men’s + Care line.

Key Quote: Marketing actually has a long history of gender-bending brands that have added, changed or developed gender identities long after they were well-established.

The EMG Takeaway: There are major opportunities for brands to develop products that market to genders in which their brand typically does not appeal.  Personal-care has been a category that has seen more of this than most others over the past decade and now with successes and lessons learned from failures, is poised to jump in with both feet.  With all of the brands now clamoring for attention in the personal-care category with new products and marketing messaging that suggests men need to “smell like a man” and “embrace being a man”, success for these brands could mean big changes for other CPG categories and industries.  With the influx of all this targeted messaging to men around these products working together to create the perception in men that all products they use should be this way and convey this message, its only a matter of time before we start to see laundry detergent, suntan lotion, air fresheners or other products start to have men’s lines.

Final Words: Men like to be reminded that they are men and use products that make them feel more manly, especially when gender lines are blurring more and more each passing year. Marketers and brands have proven to be able to cash in on this time and again when they come

Three Questions from EMG to Continue the Discussion:

1. What brands could benefit the most from launching a male or female line of their products?

2. What is the most effective marketing message the men’s personal-care products are using?

A. Using this product will make women want you (example: Axe Body Spray)

B.  Using this product will make you feel like a man (example: Dove Mens + Care)

C. Your girlfriend wants you to use this product (example: Old Spice Body Wash)

3. Do you think more brands will start marketing to men or will it just be a short fad within only the personal-care line.

Let’s Discuss:

Facebook Fan Pages have evolved to be more than just branded mini-sites filled with engaging apps and a forum for discussion, they are very commonly used for entertainment (as discussed in a previous post on “Other” Facebook fan pages.  But now, skipping the bad and going straight to the evil when the misuse of brand names on fan pages can be considered misleading and spam.

Are Facebook pages used as a marketing tool to “lure” unsuspecting fans into signing up for 3rd party reward offers?

EMG 30-Seconds Rundown:

Facebook pages are meant to be public profiles for businesses and products to drive customer awareness. Brand pages for companies and consumer products, such as Disneyland and Coca-Cola are considered “The Good” type of fan pages.

But there are an increasing number of “Other” Fan Pages for a cause, a movement, or simply just for entertainment.

As Facebook fan pages become more popular, there will be a continual increase in “other” fan pages. Recently, there is a new breed of fan pages on the rise, created by using familiar big brand names, such as Ikea, Walmart, and Best Buy, to convince fans into thinking they can get “gift cards” or “iPads” by becoming a Fan of that recognized brand.

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Let’s Discuss

Entertainment and Marketing. Two separate entities? Not so much. More and more they are one in the same.

EMG 30-Second Rundown

As Chrissy mentions below, the amount of information thrown at us each day is astounding. On most days, I would venture to say that a vast majority of our activities are tied to a brand. Wake up in the morning and get into the shower and realize you are out of your Pantene shampoo. Make a mental note to go to CVS to get more. Look in your closet and decide to wear your favorite t-shirt from American Apparel. Get in your Toyota and drive to work. Along the way note how terrible that new movie, “She’s Out of My League” looks based on the billboard you drive by. Get to your computer and automatically your MSN messenger opens, you check your Gmail, get served ads, watch the OK Go video, sponsored by State Farm. Wait, OK Go and State Farm? What might they have to do with one another? Honestly, nothing, other than opportunity—an opportunity for State Farm to associate itself with really great content. This is where marketing has started to get interesting.

The EMG Takeaway

Marketing has historically been about messaging. Over the years it’s gotten much better at targeting that message, making campaigns more cost effective and ideally more efficient. However, a new crop of marketing is on the rise, and it is more about entertainment than ever before. Ever heard the adage “Content is King”? It’s no lie. As people have become wiser and more impervious to traditional marketing (who has time in their day?), they are, at the same time consuming more and more content (thank you, internet and mobile phones). As brands like State Farm are realizing, aligning themselves with entertaining content that holds consumers attention gives them something that more traditional brands don’t have—a personality. When creating a marketing strategy EMG will always clearly define the target audience in terms of both demographics and psychographics. What “branded content” provides is a vehicle to not just say you understand your audience, but rather to show them that you speak their language and get what they care about. EMG always blends the art of storytelling when positioning a brand and is creating content that doesn’t just inform but entertains as well. More traditional sponsorships were the beginning of this evolution and now we’re in the middle of the true upswing of branded content and branded entertainment (BE has had a few false starts as the next big thing).

Final Words

Reese’s Pieces in E.T. opened the doors and showed what aligning with a great story could do for a brand. Now is the time for brands to step out of the box and create their own content. Check out Sony’s “The Rocket Project”—it’s a story about how the Vaio’s capabilities are great enough to launch a rocket. Informative and entertaining.

Don’t be overwhelmed. “Content” doesn’t have to mean million dollar video project. It can be a small step—contests, user generated videos, sponsorship (never doubt the power of affiliation…just ask Sprite (NBA))—that sets the stage for current and future fans to take notice and pay attention. At the end of the day, before any Call to Action can be completed, you’ve first got to get that consumer to PAY ATTENTION!

3 Questions to Continue the Discussion

1. Have you noticed brands popping up where you wouldn’t have necessarily expect them? For example, at the end of an OK Go video? (FYI, the video is pretty cool….you can find it here)
2. Would you be deterred from watching something if you knew it was blatantly funded by a brand? No offense, but chances are, no. Top Chef wouldn’t be around if it weren’t for GE and the Glad family of products.
3. Got any awesome ideas for a branded entertainment campaign?

Inspired by Mashable’s Onion Ring More Popular Than Justin Bieber in Latest Facebook Meme

Let’s Discuss: Wildly popular “other” Facebook fan pages that are neither Artist, Band, Public Figure, Brand, Product, Organization, or Local Entity (the categories Facebook expects all fan pages to ascribe to), and the motivating forces behind their creation and popularity with those who fan them.

EMG 30-Second Rundown
Some examples of these “other” Facebook fan pages are: Ra Ra Ra Ah Ah Ah, Roma Ro Ma Ma, Gaga Ooh La La (915,233 fans and counting), Snow Cones (528,184 fans and counting), and Can this Onion Ring get more fans than Stephen Harper? (145,166 fans and counting, good thing fried food can’t be elected Canadian Prime Minister).

For context, Honda, which ended its recent Super Bowl commercial with a reference to Facebook.com/Honda, has 299,262 Facebook fans. And in case you’re wondering, “Ra Ra Ra Ah Ah Ah, Roma Ro Ma Ma, Gaga Ooh La La” is a lyric from the Lady Gaga song Bad Romance. That’s correct; a lyric from a Lady Gaga song has more fans on Facebook than the 5th largest manufacturer of cars in the world. I digress.

It’s important to note to that according to Facebook terms of service, “Pages are special profiles that may only be used to promote a business or other commercial, political, or charitable organization or endeavor (including non-profit organizations, political campaigns, bands, and celebrities).” Facebook suggests users who want to create other types of fan pages create a Facebook Group instead, but that hasn’t stopped the flood of these non-conformist Facebook fan pages.

The EMG Takeaway
Why do people create and join these fan pages?

• To display adoration (“I love snow cones, I’ll make a Facebook fan page!”) or perhaps to find others who share a common passion; after all, the best social endeavors facilitate connections of value. On the Snow Cones fan page, the post “Do you have an awesome snow cone story? Let’s hear it!” elicited 691 comments, including my favorite, “While I was pregnant with my first son, I was very sick the entire 9 months. I even lost 40 lbs. because I couldn’t keep food down. The only thing I could eat was Snowcones! Snowcones saved me. My son, now 21, always tells this story to explain why he loves them too.” Unofficial fan pages become micro-niche communities around a common passion.

• To make others laugh, or to be the author of an internet meme. The virality of the internet is greased with humor (ask the founders of Fail Blog, the creators of Rick Rolling, or the 5 million people who go to Break.com every month). According to the original admin of Ra Ra Ra Ah Ah Ah, Roma Ro Ma Ma, Gaga Ooh La La, “I started the page because it was a joke between me and my friends, we didn’t really like the song and thought the lyrics were really random… I didn’t really expect it to get too many fans but then it randomly got big, very fast.” While I personally wouldn’t laugh if I saw a friend become a fan of this particular page, I might if I noticed a friend fan, “Pretending to Text in Awkward Situations,” (3,149,129 fans and counting).

• To make a statement or join a movement. In an environment where fans = popularity, demonstrating that an onion ring can garner more fans than the Prime Minister of Canada is quite a statement. Judging by fan comments on the page “Can this Onion Ring get more fans than Stephen Harper?” (“Onion rings are far more tasty than Conservative policy” and “Even this bad onion ring is better for my health than Stephen Harper”), the statement made by the page creator clearly resonates. In this case fanning a page is almost like slapping a bumper sticker on your car. Also consider that people gravitate towards movements with goals (let’s get more fans than…), and they join these fan pages for the same reason people “followed” Ashton Kutcher on Twitter to help him beat out CNN in a race to one million followers. We want to be a part of something greater than ourselves.

So what can you learn from these “other” fan pages?

As you build your own “official” fan pages, seek out fans that love what you do or the product you provide. When you do engage with your fans, the responses will be that much more passionate, genuine, and valuable to the connections you are creating. Study the most successful of these fan pages as a lesson in what goes viral. “Pretending to Text in Awkward Situations” sounds like an awesome campaign name Boost Mobile. Finally, give your fan base, audience, customers, etc. something to rally around. Yes, contests and sweepstakes are a great motivator, but uniting people in pursuit of a singular and common goal can be very powerful too.

Final Words: Facebook fan pages are great for brands…and a source of niche-communities, viral humor, and Canadian political movements we can all learn from.

3 Questions to Continue the Discussion

1. Have you joined one of these “other” Facebook fan pages? And if so, why?
2. Can you suggest a better categorization for these pages than “other”?
3. Do these pages constitute spam and dilute the value of “official” Facebook fan pages?

Photo credit: Dhack55 / Flickr

Let’s Discuss: An article from the New York Times, The Children of Cyberspace: Old Fogies by Their 20s

EMG 30-Second Rundown: The pace at which technology is accelerating is exaggerating the differences in culture, expectations, and mindsets among different generations of today’s children, teenagers, and young adults. It’s essentially creating mini-generation gaps. Kids only years apart might have vastly different communication preferences, and even mental capabilities such as multi-tasking.

Key Quote: “People two, three or four years apart are having completely different experiences with technology…College students scratch their heads at what their high school siblings are doing, and they scratch their heads at their younger siblings. It has sped up generational differences.”

The EMG Takeaway: Perhaps the notion of the “18-25 year old” marketing segment loses a bit of relevancy as the difference of only a couple years displays itself in exaggerated ways. The article is also resounding endorsement of the discovery process, truly understanding who you are trying to reach, their expectations and needs, and why that knowledge might alter your tactical approach. It’s a phenomenal reminder too for us to step outside of our own expectations for how we want products marketed to us. While one generation might find receiving a text message upon entry to a grocery store utterly intrusive, another generation (or sub-generation) might expect the interaction and find the experience odd or disappointing without it.

Final Words: An article interesting for the insight it provides, and the reminder that it serves.

Three Questions from EMG to Continue the Discussion:

1. How do you stay actively in touch with the expectations of those outside your own generation?

2. Have you observed instances of this mini-generational gap in your own life?

3. Kids have always had the attitude that their parents are hopelessly out of touch; is this any different, or is the contrast of the divide starker than ever?

Photo credit: gnta / Flickr

I think it’s important for us to get a clear understanding of the playing field as it relates to digital marketing today in order to prepare for the challenges we most definitely will face tomorrow. My hope is to provide context for the ideas and direction EMG is heading.

I begin with a few questions that I ask myself every day.

What ideas should we lead with? – The one’s with the best or most compelling creative, relevant strategy, newest technology, most popular or that shows the most promising return on investment? Is it all of the above or something much more complex, integrated and visceral?

How do we measure or benchmark success? Monetize social media? Break through barriers? How do we adapt faster and test quicker? Who are we influenced by? Who do we want to influence?

We now know that digital marketing can at times become the single backbone to success or failure – that it is no longer for simply marketing to youth, Millennials and soccer moms.

We have a continuous flood of information and intelligence resources to help us monitor, uncover and identify common campaign curses, unforeseen pitfalls, potential market penetration opportunities, unique engagement challenges, unconventional strategies and user experience best-practices.

Thought Leaders, must now work together to quickly take advantage of the ever changing digital landscape in order to continue to meet and surpass audience expectations; to not become stale; to determine what to embrace and what to ignore.

Digital marketing has now moved well beyond its infancy of simple electronic press kit sites and landing pages, search marketing, widgets, apps, online promotions and mobile contests, display advertising and even alternate reality games.

Think about the ground-breaking campaigns that are showing success with non-competing partnerships; campaigns that are reaching unbeknownst audiences via aggregated and unique content, popularity rankings, social evangelism and innovative creative; that are creating a personalized story and connection with our audiences outside the boundaries of the previous conventional digital campaign.

How much risk do we take, however?

Regardless of the complexity, all of our goals are singular, simple and historical. Identify the audience, both the core and the fringe, find the best way of delivering our content to them, learn from our success and failures, and risk just enough to stand out and be different.

Left brain verses right, numbers versus pictures. What happens when numerical data exceeds the ability to provide useful information, not because it’s unsolvable, but because the amount of data is expanding so fast that meaning cannot be derived? Sure there is automation to help with the processing, but eventually that data has to be refined to into palatable representations. As marketing becomes more data driven it’s also important to remember it’s marketing’s goal to create emotional reactions.

Think of the Twitter cloud. While an extremely simple example, the Twitter cloud easily displays the biggest topics by increasing the size of the words relative to the number of times a particular word / phrase is mentioned. The data could have easily been presented in numerical results, “245,000 mentions of ice cream,” lifeless. Instead, we “feel” the importance of Ice Cream simply by visualizing its size relative to the other words. We are able to instantly compare the significance of the data based upon feeling, supported by raw numbers. Simple right? What about the fact that data is the fastest growing thing on this planet and its grown rate is actually beginning to exceed the performance abilities of the mediums it’s stored on.

Between the years 2000-2003, two economists at Berkley, Varian and Lyman, estimated that the total production of new information in the year 2000 alone reached 1.5 exabytes. They explain that is about 37,000 times as much information as is in the entire holdings Library of Congress. For one year! Three years later the annual total yielded 3.5 exabytes. That yields a 66% rate of growth in information per year between 2000 and 2003. This is pre-facebook, twitter and MySpace, and look at the amounts of data in those three arenas alone.

Data visualization is crucial to connecting emotional depth with an increased understanding of numbers, especially as we begin to tackle staggering amounts of data. It provides the bridge to communicate the meaning and emotion of the data. It can even bridge the communication gaps that exist between data analysts (left brain) and creative marketing leaders (right brain). The future of marketing relies on both, equally.

Interactive Data Visualization: The following image is a snapshot from Fidg’t, a Java-based desktop application that visualizes a user’s social network using Flickr and LastFM tags. More than just a simple data visualization tool, it allows you to interact with the visual elements and create dynamic relationships from complex data sets and meta-tagging. Simply put, it provides emotional meaning to the data.

Culture is defined as - the art and other manifestations of human intellectual achievement regarded collectively. Technology is changing the recording and dissemination of collective information. There is no better representation of this than the online Enterprise Content Management System. Because of the collaborative nature of these systems it is much easier to update content and keep your message current and valid; but it is also much easier to have conflicting content and incorrect versions of your content.

As a project manager I orchestrate the implementation of Enterprise Content Management Systems for a living. I have managed builds from the ground up and I have managed implementations of third party solutions. Every system out there is unique and each have strengths and weaknesses but there are certain issues that run across all of them. These issues aren’t necessarily flaws in the application but rather, they have to do with the intricacies of deploying information about an organization on a company-wide scale.

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