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.

Beachbody, the creator and distributor of P90X, Turbo Jam and other popular and effective at-home fitness and weight loss programs, has inspired millions of its users across America to maintain leaner and stronger bodies while striving for an optimal lifestyle via exercise and diet. Rather than spending hundreds of dollars on gym memberships and home gym equipment, Beachbody programs are exceptional in that you get a “do-it-yourself” series of world-class, at-home workouts accompanied with a nutritional guide and additional tools to help you track and achieve your fitness goals. Through motivational instructors including Tony Horton and Chalene Johnson as well as the online Beachbody community support groups and fitness coaches, Beachbody is well underway in revolutionizing the health and fitness industry as we speak.

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To start off, I’d first like to refine the reader’s knowledge on what New Media is. Some people consider New Media to be a term referring to what is actually a train of thought, where information is available to anyone with great ease. However, this system of thought dates back to the beginning of the library system. New Media in a more modern sense is simply what the World Wide Web is today. Often when people consider the term they simply label it as “Social Media”, and by this they mean the personal interaction between internet users. The everyday internet surfer considers this communication to be the many websites such as Twitter, YouTube, or Facebook along with many other book shelf websites. These websites are completely free for the user to interact with their friends, and where they can express themselves, for anyone they want to see. So the definition of New Media in a more modern sense could be explained just by social networks.

In 2004 Tim O’Reilly coined the term Web 2.0, and he defined it as a “business revolution in the computer industry”. When someone calls something a new bubble, it doesn’t just mean your everyday small change, but it means something monumental, something that is revolutionary, which is what Tim O’Reilly meant when he coined the term Web 2. And indeed, the new social and network track that the World Wide Web took on is a revolution in itself. But when Tim O’Reilly coined the term and defined it as a business revolution, what did he mean by this? Most obviously is that online-marketers are able to use these websites, to captivate the attention of their users toward promotions. However, is this really a new bubble, or at least is it significant enough to be considered Web 2.0?

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Last week at the National Association of Graduate Admissions Professionals (NAGAP) annual conference in New York City, EMG gave away a pair of tickets to see the highly rated and extremely popular musicals Wicked and West Side Story.  Conference attendees were mailed a mock ticket for each show with a special number on the ticket a few weeks before the conference. By bringing that mock ticket to our booth, attendees were able to check if their number matched the seat number on the real tickets to instantly win the pair. If their number didn’t match, attendees were able to drop their business card for a drawing at the end of the day if the winner had not claimed their tickets. Congratulations to Fareza Khan from St. Thomas University School of Law for winning the pair of Wicked tickets and also to Jennifer Philpot from the University of Louisville for winning the pair of West Side Story Tickets. We hope you enjoyed the show!

As discussed by John Maas in a previous post, Subway has done an amazing job marketing during this time when it seems everyone is trying to find a way to save a few bucks.   Their $5 foot-long campaign (and catchy jingle), along with many of their other marketing tactics, have seemed to really catch on and create new business.

So it’s no surprise that Quiznos would follow suit.

Quiznos is now offering $4 toasty torpedoes to compete with Subway.   If that wasn’t enticing enough, you can go onto their website and get a coupon to get two for the price of one.   Sounds too good to be true, right? It might just be…

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Year after year offices, campuses and households are swept up in March Madness and the Men’s NCAA Basketball Tournament, dreaming of the big upsets, buzzer beaters and of course, bracket poll bragging rights. Over the years however, I’ve been about as likely to watch, or care about, the NCAA Tournament as I am at becoming the next starting power forward for the Lakers. This year has been different though, this year my alma matter and small, little known school just outside Pittsburgh, PA, Robert Morris University appeared in the bracket for the first time since 1992 not only causing me to watch my first full tournament game but also, from doing marketing in for higher education, changed the way I look at the NCAA tournament forever.

Since Robert Morris is little known outside the Pittsburgh area and I now live in southern California, it’s VERY rare that I ever get more than an “oh ok” when I respond to someone asking where I went to college and at times I’ve even found myself replying with “I went to a small school in Pennsylvania, you never heard of it”. Now, with the NCAA Tournament underway and the national recognition that RMU has gotten from it, I found myself transformed into an ambassador for my school with a renewed sense of pride for the place that I got my degree.

Every time RMU was mentioned on TV or when people talked about the tournament, I found myself not only pointing out that I’m an alumni, but answering questions about the school and giving a two minute “sales pitch” on all the great things about it. After digging out my RMU alumni t-shirt and wearing it to the local sports bar to watch the game, I almost felt like a celebrity with the constant flow of people coming up to me and asking me about the school. Throughout the game I was in constantly responding to, and texting friends from college, some of which I hadn’t connected with in a long time, to talk about the game and how exciting it all was.

So now that you see how an NCAA Tournament appearance can affect alumni like me, let’s dig into what effect a Tournament appearance has on the university itself. For starters, as I mentioned previously, the NCAA tournament gives alumni a reason to reconnect with one another, have renewed pride and interest in their school and act as ambassadors which in turn will gives the school a new reason to reach out to those alumni for donations and involvement in events. Secondly, a large majority of high school students want to go to a “name brand” school and the local and national attention that the NCAA tournament provides drastically increases brand recognition and interest from perspective students and inquiries and applications should see a huge spike as a result. Schools like Gonzaga and Duke are prime examples of small schools with a small student population but being nationally known due to having a strong basketball program. Another great example was in 2007 when Appalachian State upset Michigan in a football game to go from complete national obscurity to infamy over night.

This all comes back to the importance of college sports programs and how their success can directly affect the success and growth of a university and can help to attract new students and donors. For small, obscure schools, like Robert Morris, proper use of the money the school will receive from appearing in the tournament along with a great marketing, communications and PR campaign to capture the spike in interested and attention and build off the tournament momentum can lead to positive growth for years to come.