PJA Blog: The Complex Brand

I was in New York recently listening to some focus groups on enterprise security. The people on the other side of the glass oversaw the safety of tens or hundreds of thousands of employees. They were smart and articulate (and God bless them, they also liked our creative). When we came to the channel survey portion of each group, it was striking how many subjects enthusiastically supported the idea of a one-minute video or even a one-minute podcast as a call to action.

“Sure,” one of the more cranky executives said, “I’d give a minute of my time to hear more.” (more…)

Burt Helm has an interesting piece in the new BusinessWeek about how many advertisers are now offering free services to lure people into looking at, interacting with, or forwarding on their brand information. Anyone who has used Free411 rather than spending $1.50 to get a simple number is a consumer of these new ‘useful’ ads. A few cool examples:

* Being able to text live to a sports event screen, a la wiffiti

* Being able to send ‘goodbye’ photos from behind security to a digital billboard in an airport’s departures area (the idea of distance is demolished a little more every day, it seems)

* Being able to contact an avatar on your mobile device to get you a cab or a designated driver because you’ve had a few too many.

The more you contribute as part of your sign-up, the more information the company takes away. The longer you look at the screen, the longer your brand impression. Etc.

In the BtoB world, we’ve clearly got deep roots in providing valuable content in exchange for a prospect’s attention. In one case, years ago, we convinced HP to postpone another glossy brochure and go with a buyer’s guide for the technology category that was lightly sponsored by the brand. It was more work-intensive to put together an editorial board of doctors and nurses, but the result was so popular it was reprinted twice and placed on a national regulatory recommended reading list for healthcare information systems.

The same rules apply online, of course: give someone content they couldn’t find elsewhere or that makes them more competitive and they will be more loyal to your brand. Amending that list for the Web 2.0 world is in order, too. You can also connect with:

* content that allows people to connect with their peers and exchange that information

* content that allows people to test their skills in real time

* content that allows for co-creation or near real-time collaboration with a brand

The list could probably go on forever. The point we like to make is, don’t just interrupt someone. Inform them. Educate them. Inspire them. That’s got to be a part of the brand territory now.

In recessionary times (see under GE, Earnings Statement, 4.11.08), companies nearly always become more conservative about the value of marketing. That’s no surprise, though I’m still taken aback, working through my third economic downturn in this industry, at how quickly the winds shift. Just yesterday I heard about a client whose $10 million marketing budget had, in the course of five months, been whittled down to just north of $900,000 at the lower edge of the range.

So is marketing an investment or a line item expense, and what business problems can it solve? Local academic marketing programs often ask someone from PJA to come in and present the BtoB perspective on these eternal questions (see under John Wanamaker, advertising budget, which half is wasted), and though these are basic tenets of marketing, it never hurts to be reminded during an economic period when business common sense is often the first thing to suffer.

Here’s the list our head of interactive plans to present at an upcoming marketing class in a lecture hall near you: (more…)

As much as I admire and like a lot of industry analysts we talk to (we’re actually a Gartner customer: makes me feel wistful that some of these people get to think about one industry niche 24 x 7 x 365), there’s always a Cassandra-like note in their reports, not unlike a Tom Peters book. Something along the lines of, “If you don’t undertake these 11 priorities this quarter and reinvent your business process platform by end of year, you’ll be seriously behind your competitors or pushing up the daisies. Et cetera.”

Which would be a serious problem if a lot of companies didn’t have those ‘job’ things to do. One antidote to these pronouncements came recently when I was interviewing a CEO about recent job cuts and whether he was worried about retaining his big stars. His response: “Most of them don’t have the option to go, honestly. And of the few that do, half of those are subject to the same inertia that everybody is subject to, so they’re not going anywhere.”

As you probably know, Forrester now creates a lot of reports for “marketing leadership professionals.” Or as I thought to myself on first seeing one of these documents, “Oh, great. They’re not satisfied making my clients feel guilty about falling behind; now they’re doing the same thing with agencies.”

All this throat-clearing aside, I have read and can recommend a recent report called The Connected Agency by Mary Beth Kemp and Peter Kim that’s getting a lot of buzz (and yes, you can check the records: I did pay my $279 for it). (more…)

My most recent inquiry shows that 30-second spots at the 2008 Super Bowl will run you about $2.7 million, up 4 percent from $2.6 million last year.

Coincidentally, $2.7 million represents the entire marketing budget for some of our B2B clients. Granted, if you don’t sell cars, beer, automobiles, movies, lingerie or mixed nuts, it’s probably not the best place to blow that budget.

Of course, the possibility of doing a Super Bowl ad is invariably tossed around in B2B marketing meetings as the ultimate dream: nearly 100,000,000 sets of eyeballs on your ad, especially if it airs in the first half, and all that follow-on Web activity as people make a mental note to / actually visit your site.

But let’s say that price tag is a bit steep. What can all we non-participants learn from the best features of the best Super Bowl ads, versus blowing off a lot of steam the morning after on which ones were the most effective? Here are a few ideas:

(more…)