Breaking the Sound Barrier

Felix Baumgartner recently broke the world record for the highest skydive at 128,000 feet. The Guardian had an excellent story today about the partnership between Red Bull and Baumgartner. What I love about this idea is breaking the sound barrier... for the brand.

The "sound barrier" I'm talking about is the clutter of noise in today's multi-channel, multi-media environment. I was writing about this problem back in 1994 when I interned at advertising agency Ingalls, Quinn & Johnson in Boston before Facebook was even a twinkle in Zuckerberg's eye (I think he would have been getting his first pimple around that time). Media clutter has gotten so much worse in so many ways since then.

Breaking through the clutter often requires doing something that has never been done before. For Red Bull, it means an outlandish partnership that could have landed the brand in some trouble if Felix Baumgartner had been injured or killed. But for your brand, the partnership doesn't have to be so outlandish. For example, Barack Obama in 2008 created the world's first true nationwide, cloud-based expert system for elections that targeted voters at the individual level with grass-roots (read: millions of volunteers) targeting. This effort was a huge risk although not to the brand itself. Rather, Obama risked misusing millions of campaign dollars that had traditionally been spent on TV.

I have spoken before about one of my favorite marketing books: Mark Stevens' Your Marketing Sucks. Underneath the unpleasant title are many great tales of how to create breakthrough marketing, like Red Bull's stunt, that push the limit of marketing. His premise, with which I heartily agree, is that if you're not making a spectacle of yourself for the sake of the brand, you're probably wasting your money. If nobody sees the marketing and nobody responds, you wasted the money. Period.

Rethink Marketing

Immediately after watching Rebecca Soni's gold medal win on NBC that set the new world record in women's 200M breaststroke at 2:19.56, I saw an AT&T advertisement. A girl with wet hair walks out of her bedroom watching the same gold medal win on her mobile phone. She hears the new world record, pauses for a moment, and then writes on a whiteboard near the front door, "GOAL: 2:19.56."

AT&T's advertising agency must have figured out how to put this ad together between the NBC taping in the afternoon and the final in the evening, but from the viewer's perspective it seemed instantaneous. The tagline, "rethink possible," was a double entendre, talking about rethinking the goal and about rethinking what's possible in instantaneous media.

The genius of the ad was the fact that I am talking about it at all. In fact, I told my wife, my son and several people at work about it. Can you say that about any other advertisement you saw during the Olympics?

The first rule of advertising is to make sure people remember you. Without recall, the ad was a waste of money. Thinking creatively about how to get attention in this media-saturated era will grow in importance over time. Today, at least, AT&T seems to have figured it out.

Startup Marketing

Today, I'm super excited about Opera Theater of Pittsburgh's Summer Fest. We took my kids to The Magic Flute on Sunday afternoon. I wasn't expecting much, as this opera company is the smaller and lesser-known one in Pittsburgh. (Can you believe my awesome adopted city has not one but two opera companies?) I was blown away by the quality of the singing, the excellence of the orchestra, and the overall quality of the production and inventiveness of the staging.

Unfortunately, the house was perhaps one-third empty. This problem got me thinking about startup marketing. How would I have known about the terrific quality of this production except by word of mouth? This is the first summer that Opera Theater of Pittsburgh is performing a summer series, so that might explain the lack of knowledge. Their basic marketing was clearly on target; I found out about the performance by direct mail. I assume the opera company got my information from the Pittsburgh Cultural Trust's shared database. But what about other targets such as people who live in or near Fox Chapel where the performance took place?

These days, a lot of startups wishing to expand quickly are using social crowdsourcing deal sites such as Groupon and Living Social. If you have a business with expiring inventory, such as a theater with a limited number of seats or an event that can't make you money once the date has passed, these services can be an excellent option as long as they don't degrade the experience of higher-paying customers by making the large crowd an unpleasant experience. Startups have to take care that they are able to meet the demand, however. I had an experience with a lawn service recently that had to refund me the money because they could never make it out to mow. That's worse than no marketing at all.

A better potential approach is to rely on your existing best supporters. For Opera Theater of Pittsburgh, what about a campaign to give season ticket holders free tickets if they sign up a certain number of friends? Or for us, a discount on next weekend's performance of Candide if we bring four other friends? Or even just a simple plea to existing supporters to Facebook, blog or tweet about the summer series based on their loyalty to the brand?

Right now, we're trying to leverage these relationships at Vocollect. As the industry leader in voice-directed distribution center work, we have a lot of extremely happy customers who are willing to serve as references and/or refer us to other potential customers. It's a lot easier than finding and convincing companies who have never heard of us, and it tends to lead to more like-minded companies and therefore better sales close rates on new deals. All that's required is some database work, internal coordination and a commitment from the executive team that "share of wallet" matters.

For early-stage companies, that means getting a few great wins and wowing those customers with your service and abilities. It's not an easy task, but some of the fastest-growing companies that have survived for a long time seem to take this coddling of early customers to heart. That's an attitude even seasoned companies can use.

Free Advertising

I clicked on CNN this evening and saw Wolf Blitzer using a Mac and a custom light (to light him up in TV style) with an open back. In the opening, you can make out Energizer batteries. What great exposure for these two brands for free on a site with millions of daily exposures! I wondered casually whether Energizer had a deal with CNN because it looked like that light could use a battery cover.

We have a lot of debate within Vocollect about how prominent our logo should be on Talkman(R) wearable computers and our speech recognition headsets. My view is that the name and logo are free advertising anytime our partners (or even our competitors on occasion) show a mobile worker wearing the Vocollect Voice(R) solution. Why sacrifice this free exposure? Sometimes we even see our logo on customer equipment in their promotional materials or in news articles covering that customer, resulting in some free recognition even among customers who would otherwise decline to provide us a reference.

This thinking came to mind a few weeks ago when I saw that one of our competitors chose a distinctive color for their equipment recently. Now personally I would not have chosen pink for a user community that is at least two-thirds male, but I solute their valiant efforts to get their brand image out there, visible and recognizable. They just need a new brand image consultant. And maybe some improved speech recognition capabilities. And perhaps a product that integrates more easily with WMS software. Then they might have a viable brand on their hands!

De Facto Standard

What do Google, Cisco Systems, Microsoft, Xerox and Vocollect have in common? At some point in their brand history, each of these companies have become the de facto standard in their industry. Achieving this goal requires having a vastly superior product and/or some major network effects.

What can you do with this market position? One excellent strategy (shown at left) is to remind your prospects that you are the industry standard. This strategy works effectively in part because any customer, especially in the B2B setting, wants to mitigate risk. Customers are risk-averse for human reasons, not just business reasons. The average individual wants to be a hero for picking the right solution rather than a goat for picking the solution that doesn't work.

In essence, reminding customers that you are the industry standard is not inwardly-focused marketing (which would be a bad idea). Rather, the idea is to remind prospective buyers that nobody ever got fired for buying Vocollect Voice(R). That's not something our competitors can say, by the way.

Sometimes, the de facto standard occurs because there were not other options to choose, but I have found more often that the de facto standard is, frankly, better.

Beware Vendor Metrics

I was reading about the end of the TV show House earlier today, and I saw this little tidbit in the article:

House‘s current eighth season ratings have remained solid, particularly for a drama airing at 8 p.m. The Monday night show averaged 9.8 million viewers and a 3.9 rating in the adult demo this season through early January when including seven days of DVR playback.

Since when should advertisers consider DVR playback? The DVR portion of the of audience adds only 16% to raw in-time viewing Gross Rating Points (GRP) according to this Nielsen study of DVR usage (as quoted in the New York Times). Let's say for the sake of argument that this particular show, like others, has 40% of the audience using a DVR. If that's the case, the real viewership was:

9.8 million * (1 - 40%) = 5.9 million * (1 + 16%) = 6.8 million

If (as an advertising buyer) you based your effective cost per thousand viewers (CPM) on the 9.8 million, you were over-paying by over 44%.

The misrepresentation probably stems from the network's presentation of their own overblown statistics. I have learned over the years to be highly skeptical of any vendor's own statistics, and in my own work for Vocollect, Inc. I try hard to provide our own customers an independent validation of statistics we quote on our truly superior products. The article mentioned above offers just one more reminder to smart market research analysts and marketing data consumers: examine the sources and rely on your own brain when using external data.

Don't Forget the Benefits

I'm weighing in with my favorite Super Bowl spot. I liked the Cars.com commercial featuring the car buyer with an extra head sprouted out of his back. "Sorry, that's my confidence. It's been coming out a lot lately ever since I compared prices on Cars.com."

There's not a lot of mumbo-jumbo here. Ability to compare cars and prices = greater confidence in the buying decision. The funny and catchy imagery (not to mention the singing head) get our attention, and the setup delivers the product benefit.

I can barely name the benefits in some of the other ads. Dependable Chevy trucks and... now I'm coming up short. It seems that many of the companies forgot either to make the ads memorable or to remind us of the chief product benefit.

I have seen lots of criticism of the Cars.com ad, which leads me to my main point: once you have an ad that delivers some audience attention and the product benefit, you're about halfway done. It may be tempting in the research to eliminate ads that score very high on positives but also very high on negatives, but these polarizing ideas in the market research are often the best in delivering outcomes. A salute to Cars.com for ignoring the potential detractors and delivering a commercial that makes me want to use Cars.com to shop for cars.

A last note: one key measure of an advertisement's success is its repeatability. Judging how much that annoying singing head's music got into my brain, the repeatability measure may be a problem here. I'll tell you in a few weeks whenever I stop hearing , "I wanna buy that car!" over and over in my head.

When Did You Last Click Through To An Internet Ad?

Rule one for advertising: break through the clutter. That applies to B2B companies, too. Their buyers are humans, just like everyday consumers.

Rule two: differentiate from competitors by demonstrating why your solution works better. Yes, this matters for B2B companies as well as B2C brands. Perhaps even more.

That's why this terrific Verizon ad works so well. It might be the only B2B advertisement online that I have clicked on for the past year.

Of Squirrels and Baseball

Two great notes from this week:

1. A good (if "light") analysis posted by Adam Rosenberg in Online Media Daily about Web analytics and Moneyball.  The highlights: A) statistical analysis works well for baseball, a zero sum game, but even better for websites because all players within a market can win with better ROI, retention, relevance, sales, and so forth. B) data complexity increases exponentially and the landscape of the Web itself changes rapidly, causing difficulties in recreating the same analyses over time.

2. We got an ad for "LeafGuard" in the ValPak coupons. It had a picture of a squirrel in the gutter with the caption "My thoughts are in the gutter!" and the fine print, "Nice one, squirrel." We noticed it. The number one metric for whether your advertising is going to move the needle on awareness and purchase intent is whether the ad gets noticed. Differentiation (whether the ad makes you remember why to buy the particular brand) is second. All other considerations pale in comparative importance, so kudos to the LeafGuard people for an excellent execution.

You Know Your Marketing Is Good When...

Yesterday, I was running in the gym at work. I generally hate running indoors. I get bored, and I haven't yet found earphones that stay in while I run while retaining comfort and non-sweatiness. Consequently, I turned on the TV.

We don't have much in the way of daytime TV at work, so Montel was one of my best options. They had a segment about LifeLock, an identity theft prevention company. An ad came on after the segment, not surprisingly for LifeLock. Then another segment about LifeLock, with a different executive from the company. It was only after that segment, when I was beginning to get suspicious, that I realized it was a paid advertorial, AKA infomercial.

In the meantime, I learned a whole bunch about protecting yourself against identity theft, and I began to remember my accountant saying something about getting identity theft protection. Realizing it was an advertisement made me think about advertising's value to the customer.

This value is particular important in business-to-business marketing.  Some of the all-time best B2B advertising I have seen provided excellent insights to which I have returned time and time again, such as the simple but elegant paper from Sawtooth Software on choosing a conjoint methodology. The next time you start to create a whitepaper or seminar series, I say to stick to the LifeLock standard: would someone spend time on this information just for the value you are providing?