Major Marketing Missteps from Adidas, M&M's and Coke

No more boots for Ms. Green and other changes for M&M's candies

A major component of marketing is tapping into trends and  making an impression. When it works, these brand messages captures attention and show their relevance to customer concerns to increase feelings of loyalty. 

 But when the brand missteps, it embarrasses itself and risk alienating the very people it intended to court. Here are three recent examples from major brands that certainly had the budge to do adequate research before launching such campaigns.

Adidas' topless pics: branding boon or bust? 

On February 9, 2022, Adidas pinned a tweet with the hashtag #SupportEverything that included 25 pictures of women's breasts to demonstrates the range of sizes, shapes, and colors (though skin tones have no bearing whatsoever on the fit and support of a bra). Here's the tweet without the photos:

The brand posted the same photo to its Instagram, though there the breasts have a bit of airbrushing to achieve the digital equivalent of pasties. The overall reaction  on the Meta-owned platform was more positive than it was on Twitter, judging from the sentiments expressed in the nearly 3k quote tweets.

It's true that some considered the move liberating. For example, Jezebel applauded the tweet in Adidas Frees the Nipple. 

The Barstoolsports blog response corroborates what I thought was the real game here: baring what is usually covered still gets a certain amount of shock value, and that is what the brand is exploiting in presenting the 25 pictures.  While the post celebrated achieving marketing goals, the comments in response were not at all the positive if you're after celebrating diversity in women's bodies. It is the inevitability of such reactions that makes some people feel this is not a positive step for women

On its own site, Adidas doesn't show any topless women. In fact, the embedded video (also on YouTube) that explains the problem women have in finding the right fit only shows braless women from the back, where the marks left from bras attest to poor fit.  

The braless pictures, on the other hand, are meant to make the very reasonable notion of making sports bras do more than serve as short tank tops into something almost transgressive. It's really not, and Adidas is certainly not the first brand to offer more bra fit choices than the standard 32A to 40D range of sizes.

My guess is the social media manager was told, "Do something to get people's attention," and the person decided this was pushing the envelope. For the "no such thing as bad publicity" school of thought, it's a success. But I believe that the brand did alienate some potential customers here, making it into a branding bust (pun intended) for a consumer brand with a very wide market base.

M&M's misses the mark when aiming for inclusivity

M&M's candies got a makeover in the name of inclusivity. But the public is not impressed. M&M’s announcement about the changes included this video:

The comments are probably not quite what they were expecting, or they would have disabled them to begin with, as I wrote here. 

 

Mars says it’s not just about candy but a larger commitment “to create a world where society is inclusive.”  The emphasis on women’s representation is what trickles down to showing the candies that have female identities wearing more sensible shows now than they have in the past.  

For example, Ms. Brown’s high heels have been replaced by sensible pumps. Ms. Green’s heeled boots are replaced by comfortable sneakers.

I’m all for comfortable footwear myself and gave up on high heels long ago, though I have to say, I don’t really believe that cartoon renderings designed to sell candies will have a direct impact on female choices. The representations of different types of people could add to the fun consuming candies but they really don’t direct people’s life decisions. 

Indeed, that kind of critique was raised even by those who are very much in favor of changing thing. The fact remains that fictionalized progress is no substitute for real progress. Then there's the other camp that is tired of brands' claims they’re saving the world through their products and marketing. 

Despite marketers insisting that people want to see their values reflected in brand messaging, claiming too much for a brand makeover can backfire. It’s clear that audiences are not nearly as impressed with the brand message as the brand is with itself, and that’s now a win.  

Coke missteps when hopping on the gaming bandwagon

Massively multiplayer online (MMO) are designed to be extremely engaging with life-like characters and details to make up an immersive environment. As I wrote here, they often center around epic battles between species that may be using highly advanced or medieval style weapons.

Coca-Cola brand decided to hope on this hot trend, using an MMO as the backdrop for the commercial it released on September 30, 2021:

Spoiler alert: drinking Coke doesn’t just revive the player; it gives the ross between an Orc and the Hulk character in the game enlightenment. He literally throws down his weapon and grasps the hand of his enemy is a show of solidarity that brings the whole world to the verge of shocked recognition. 

Everyone embraces peace and love to fit wit the tagline of “We are one Coke Away from each other.”

Coke

One of the comments on the video is from Kevin Sugrue who explains what the brand gets wrong::

“Lacks insight and understanding of esport gamers. This tries to approriate [sic!] the gaming trend in Coke's pursuit of regaining relevance among a younger audience. You compete in MMO games to help your team triumph over the competition; not to unite the entire world.”

Here Coke tried to plaster its “I’d like to buy the world a Coke and teach it harmony” jingle on a specific form of gamification culture that may just resent the intrusion. Those who are deeply involved in that culture consider it an epic fail for the brand.

On the flip side, we have examples of brands that seized opportunities to endear themselves to the public, as in the case of Audi's response to a loss on Wheel of Fortune.

Related: Mary Poppins' Guide to Gamified Marketing

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When two screens are better than one

In the last century, people who would plan what to watch on TV would turn to printed guides. Thanks to the proliferation of channels and the rise of streaming services, they have a lot more options to choose from. But this brave new world also opens up new ways for marketers to reach the audiences that will lift viewership. 

A  leader in global TV analytics, Samba TV, connects data on viewership with cross-screen ad exposure to helps programmers measure and optimize tune-in campaign performance. Toward that end it draws on partnerships for insight into what viewers are tuning into on their second screen. 

TV and digital are better together, says cross-screen analytics leader Samba TV.

Read more in 

Second Screen Synergy for TV Marketing

Social and shopping: there is a generation gap

pic https://c1.staticflickr.com/5/4318/35933760125_ecef823c7f_b.jpg

Fashion choices are very much influenced by what shoppers see online. One way brands can grab audience attention is through social media.  

GlobalData surveyed 5,000 U.K. shoppers and found 30.4 percent of U.K clothing shoppers are using social media to inspire their clothing choices. The survey revealed that even though Facebook still dominated shopper attention overall, it was not as popular among younger generations. This year’s Piper Jaffray Taking Stock With Teens® survey took note of the preferences of 6,000 teens in the U.S. Only eight percent of teens admit to using Facebook, making it the second least favorite social media platform, ahead of Pinterest.

However, Facebook-owned Instagram has seen so much retail success that it just added that shopping capability to Instagram Stories. The company’s June 12 announcement referred to the 300 million who check Instagram Stories daily.

Read more in 

Instagram Stories: Shopping For Gen Z

Mood Marketing Drives Toyota's Latest Campaign

The calendar still says 2017, but for car brands, it's already 2018. To market  this year's Camry, Toyota is veering away from making its car look like the sensible, though boring choice. Its “Sensations” campaign is meant to tap into what its audience is feeling.

Among the commercials designed for the campaign are some that explicitly encourage making the purchase of the care for “the wrong reasons.”  Those present the Camry as an attractive choice that makes driving a sensuous experience – as if the car were a sexy sports car.

As you can see from the video above, “Striking” presents a young woman in the role of the Bond girl, who zooms by in a car that flutters her hair as if she were in a convertible with the top down. It meant to be exciting, and once y're excited you can find a corresponding video identified by emoji.

Read more in Toyota Turns to Twitter for Mood Marketing

When you're happy, you do show it

 Targeted marketing works when it is done in the right place and at the right time. Getting the place right is increasingly feasible with today's location-aware technology. But getting the time right depends on knowing when a person is in the mood to receive the message.

That's the goal behind the Centiment, a machine learning startup that applies AI to analyzing the expression of emotion “to make advertising more ethical and efficient for everyone.” It does that by creating what it calls “thought-driven AI and Google for feelings.”

In a phone interview, Micah Brown, the company's CEO and founder, explained how this approach is a game-changer that makes ads more effective by taking cues from “moods rather than price and brand.” The ads are designed to fit with how the individuals in the target market “are feeling at the current time rather than what you think is best from them.” 

The mood assessment offers two strategic advantages for marketers. One is that it allows them to deliver ads to people while they are in that receptive mood. The other is that they can see the feelings particular ads generate in their target market.

 Here's a video of Centiment in Action:

Read more in In the Mood for Marketing

Twitter tools, now with more buttons!

Marketers have recognized the great potential for spreading their messages through shared content on social media. Now Twitter is bringing out new tools for tapping into that potential alongside the new chatbots designed to increase user engagement.

On May 23, Twitter announced that “a new, customizable Direct Message Card” was available to “in limited beta to Twitter advertisers.”  Combining eye-catching pictures or videos with :fully customizable call-to-action buttons,” the card gives marketers a way to reach new customers and further engage existing ones, as well as foster shares of branded interactive experiences, particularly for brands that use chatbots.

On June 13, Twitter further expanded the options for businesses to connect with customers through Direct Messaging with new buttons. As the Twitter blog put it, “ Now, businesses can attach buttons to messages to make it easy for people to take actions outside of the Direct Message conversation – like composing a Tweet, following an account, or opening a website within the Twitter app.”

Read more in 

Cards, Buttons, and Bots (Tweet, Tweet!)

Twitter analytics

Twitter just offered me an analysis of my followers. I've checked out a number of data visualization apps for Twitter in the past, and those took much longer to process the data. As this is form Twitter, it already has the data and gave very fast results. I found it interesting that the majority of my followers are male, 69% in fact. I'm not certain if that's a reflection of general gender representation on Twitter or of the fields of interests connected to my account.

I got this :

38% Marketing

38% Entrepreneurship

30% Leadership

30% Startups

18% SEO


Top interests?


47% Tech news

47% Technology

47% Politics and current events

41% Business and news

41%Business news and general info

38% Marketing

38% Entrepreneurship

32%Business and finance

30% Leadership

30% Startups


I'm not surprised as my top city is NY at 12%.


Of course, Twitter is offering this as a way to interest me in Twitter ads, but there are no strings attached in checking out the stats. Another service you can use for Twitter information Quillconnect.narrativescience. Its particular spin on data reporting is storifying your account and letting you know how your posts compare with those of your connections on average. It also offers some advice to gain engagement, though I chose to ignroe it, as I am not going to go out of my way to tweet about television. I think it actually mistakes the tweets about biased media reports to be tweets about television, as I don't really discuss programming otherwise.
Related posts: http://writewaypro.blogspot.com/2015/02/ignore-this-piece-of-advice.html

Twitter Analytics Puts Cards on the Table

How am I tweeting?

NewTwitterAnalytics  offers answers. Almost every business has a Twitter account, but many fail to take full advantage of Twitter's many add-on tools. What's holding them back?
Perhaps it's just a matter of not knowing how to measure their impact and figure out how the tools contribute to their goals. Twitter solves that problem with its new Analytics for Twitter Cards service.  Read more in

Twitter Analytics Puts Cards on the Table

Humans, big data, and cheesecake

"For all their brilliance, computers can be thick as a brick," observed Tom M. Mitchell, a computer scientist. Read more about this in There’s Still Room for Humans

Another post on big data looks at how a restaurant chain uses the technology in

The Cheesecake Factory's Big Data Entrée

That's big data entertainment!

In the past, the device held by someone watching television was usually a remote control. In the future, it is just as likely to be a mobile device. Starting next fall, television ratings will be measured in tweets as well as Nielsen numbers as social conversations are analyzed to calculate the reach of a program. Nielsen and Twitter announced the new form rating last month, but their partnership has been in the works for over a year. 

Snoopy was prophetic. 3-D movies have made a comeback. Consequently, movies today pack a lot more data per frame. But big data is also involved in the trend toward data streaming that is displacing discs and in the data on what people want to watch. 

Big data drives today’s movie industry, both in terms of the amount of data packed into each frame you see at theaters and in terms of video streaming online.  It’s what delivers 3-D effects in the theater and personalized recommendations to Netflix viewers.  And very big numbers ride on both.

In the past few years, 3-D movies have staged a comeback on a scale much greater than their  brief heyday in the 1950s. Adding in the 3-D effect adds "anywhere from 100% to 200% more data per frame," according to Jeff Denworth, vice president of marketing for DataDirect Networks (DDN). Denworth attributes the proliferation of present-day 3-D films to the huge success James Cameron had with the 3-D film "Avatar" in 2009, which packed a petabyte of data. 

"Avatar" cost about $237 million to produce, but it brought in more than ten times that amount. It earned the distinction of   IMDB identifies it as "the highest-grossing film of all time."  By the beginning of 2010, it had taken in $2,779,404,183.  A rash of 3-D films followed this success, and many did very well. According to iSuppli Market Intelligence (owned by IHS)  in 2011 3-D films brought in $7 billion at the box-office, 16 percent more than the previous year.

 The full figures for 2012 are not yet in, though they will likely be higher as the number of 3-D screens have gone up from about 9,000 in "2009 to 43,000 in by the third quarter" of 2012. One of the biggest draws of the year, Marvel’s 3D superhero flick, "The Avengers," grossed  $1,511,757,910 in 2012.  As 3-D has grown so common at the theater, movie-makers have to point to something else to distinguish their offering.

 "The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey" had to do 3-D one better with its "brand new format High Frame Rate 3D (HFR 3D)." Instead of the 24 frames per second, which is the movie standard, it packs in 48. The advantage to the viewer, it claims, is that the greater number offers an experience "closer to what the human eye actually sees." Perhaps so, but quite a number of viewers were less than thrilled by the effect. Nevertheless, by December 29, 2012, "The Hobbit" had already taken in $600,508,000, according to IMDB figures.  

Big data is also the key to watching movies on the small screen. Instead of picking up a disc when they buy or rent a movie, people now can just have it come right to them. As Dan Cryan, senior principal analyst at HIS  observed, in 2012 Americans made  "a historic switch to Internet-based consumption, setting the stage for a worldwide migration from physical to online." 

 Estimates of  online movie payments for the US in 2012 are “3.4 billion views or transactions, up from 1.4 billion in 2011.  This form of video streaming is dominated by Netflix in the US, where it makes up "33% of peak period downstream traffic"  Amazon, Hulu, and HBO Go follow far behind at 1.8%, 1.5%, and .5% respectively.  It intends to keep its lead with the help of big data.

Netflix was the subject of a WSJ blog on using big data to improve streaming video.  Though Netflix still offers to mail out the DVDs people select for rental, more customers now opt for streaming.  In the interest of improving efficiency on that end, Netflix transferred its holdings to Amazon’s cloud. It also started using Hadoop, which enables it "to run massive data analyses, such as graphing traffic patterns for every type of device across multiple markets." That helps plan for improved data transmission and better understanding of the customer.

In addition to using big data solutions for delivery of content, Netflix applies algorithms to predict what their customers would likely want to watch next.  This type of data mining technology makes Netflix confident that it can handle hosting original content. In fact, it bet more than  $100 million on it; that’s the reported sum paid for the rights to two seasons of House of Cards, one of several original content series it plans on streaming. 

 As Netflix’s Chief Communications Officer, Jonathan Friedland, says, "We know what people watch on Netflix and we’re able with a high degree of confidence to understand how big a likely audience is for a given show based on people’s viewing habits." 

So what do you think? Is it possible to guarantee a hit with big data?

Is your face your calling card?

Many books include pictures of the author on the back cover or inside the jacket. That is one thing I never bother to check when considering whether or not I want to read a book.  I  still don't really think about the author's appearance as I read. And I don't really think about my own as I write. 

I use a quill for my signature picture here, as well as on my other blogs. It also serves as  my profile photo  on Facebook, Google+ and Twitter. I feel it conveys what I am about more accurately -- in terms of my role as writer - than my photo would. Or maybe I'm just camera-shy.

On  the other hand, my actual photo does serve as my profile picture for the UBM boards on which I write. The policy there, as it is for many newspapers, is to require a photo for the writers. Those who comment only and don't blog can get away with using any picture they like for their profile photo or just use the default picture if they don't bother to upload one of their own. 

Once I had my picture posted in that way, I put it in for my LinkedIn profile, as well. It seemed more consistent to have the same picture represent me there. Also the more standard practice on LI is to use an actual photo than a representational picture.  I still can't see attaching a photo to a resume, though anyone who wishes to find my photo simply has to do an online search to find one in a fraction of a second.

While the net dooes tend to attach author faces to content,  I don't believe I am more drawn to articles that feature faces.I must be  in the minority, though, because I'm certain that those who demand faces find that they are effective at drawing more audience interest. 

. What do you think about  the face as calling card?

Thoughts on the Human Face of Big Data

See my blog post on the brand new board, Big Data Republic, Predicting People's Participation in a Big-Data Project