Trying to stand out either by embracing digital or going old-school

Johnny Rose is right, and that's a major problem for marketers.EVERYONE has an online presence, and EVERYONE is using digital ads, emails, and even texts to try to stay top-of-mind for their target customers. 

We're all inundated by ads any time we go online. For brands looking to get attention, what's the best way? Should the up the ante on digital with splashy CGI effects to achieve viral status? Or should they take the opposite track and return to paper images for billboards and catalogs to connect more intimately and concretely with their customers? 

Both approaches are currently in use, and the splashy ones are definitely getting more coverage.

Upping the ante for digital

You must have seen the gargantuan Maybelline mascara wands appearing to brush giant lashes no buses and Tube trains:

A similar tactic was used to show a skyscraper-high Barbie stepping out of her box in Dubai. 

Both the makeup and Barbie movie promo grabbed a lot of attention because they looked like real custom installations on location. Many people first thought that there really were giant lashes attached to a bus or train. In fact, though, these outsized promos only existed in the digital realm. You could only see the CGI-generated mascara, lashes, and towering doll on a video that blended them with a real background. effects with the real world. 

The amount of  buzz generated by  indicating that digital out-of home (DOOH) AKA faux OOH advertising may be the one to opt for to get the most publicity bang for your advertising bucks. While no one has shared exactly what these headline-grabbing stunts cost, it seems that they may be more economical  than traditional OOH advertising setups.

Retreating from digital 

Perhaps when the everyone else is zigging toward digital, the way to zag is to go in the opposite direction. That's seems to be the thinking of some brands that are conspicuously embracing good, old-fashioned paper to connect with customers.

It may not be altogether surprising that a bricks-mortar icon would return to its roots of publishing a paper catalog for its anniversary sale, a practice that it had abandoned only four years ago in the case of Nordstrom reintroducing the paper catalogs that it had abandoned in 2019. 

But even a brand born in the digital age is turning to paper. Zappos put its 2023 back-to-school catalog in paper format to be mailed out, Digiday reports, Perhaps the Amazon-owned shoe retailer is taking a cue from the ultimate online seller, which has mailed out holiday season toy catalogs since 2018. 

Amazon also has found it effective to use mail out paper letters, as I described in Amazon Uses Snail Mail. Amazon invests in the extra cost of printing and postage because when our digital inboxes hold thousands of unread messages, we still tend to open the envelopes that come in the mail. 

Reviving traditional OOH 

Instead of trying to compete with Maybelline to achieve virality from a faux OOH marketing setup, cosmetic brand Murad is investing in traditional billboards in New York and Los Angeles  to promote its products and store.

"The social space has become so competitive, it’s [become more] interesting for us to think about how to advertise differently,” Paul Schiraldi, CEO of Murad told Glossy .“It’s the old-school reach and frequency media advertising strategy, but it works.”


While traditional may resonate more with the viewers who see the actual billboards in strategic locations, including  Times Square, instead of having to view the effect on a screen, it certainly doesn't raise the same level of buzz as the CGI-enabled promotions.

But, at the end of the day, the goal is not just to have people talk about your promotions but to incentivize them to actually buy your products. So this may play out well for the company's revenue goals if it brings in their target market around that location. 

There's good data to back that assumption: The Out of Home Advertising Association of America (OAAA) recently reported that its popular has been increasing and accounted for $1.82 billion in spending in just the first quarter of 2023.  Businesses don't usually spend that kind of money unless they expect to achieve substantial ROI.

If you were faced with the choice of investing in paper or digital promotions, which would you choose? 

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Ryan George shows best and worst marketing practices

 If you If you are not familiar with Ryan George, then check out his YouTube Channels. Screen Rants, which offers commentary on films in the guise of pitch meetings in which spoilers abound, has nearly 8.5 million subscribers (and millions of views on his take on Spider-Man: No Way Home in which he reveals, among other things, how long it takes to watch five movies to get all the connections in this one).

The  Ryan George channel has 1.38 million subscribers. One of the recent videos on that channel contains fundamental points about the customer's experience. In What Shoppiong on Amazon Feels Like, he nails both best practices and worst practices for effective marketing. 

Best practice: conveying the sponsor message 

The brand paying George for the video is mentioned at the beginning but only very briefly. That means that even if you don't want to sit through an  extended description of the features and benefits SayMine.com boasts of, you will at least have heard of it. 

That's a win-win solution. By placing the more extended description at the end, he's removing the irritation people have from being forced to watch an ad before they get what they want, something that is not likely to make people develop more positive feelings for the brand. 

I touch on the downside of withholding content from your audience in Make your content as accessible as possible.

The brand still gets its spotlight with a brief mention in the beginning and in Ryan George's description of the video. Plus when he delivers the spiel about it, he does so in a kind of tongue-in-cheek manner consistent with the Ryan George brand. He delivers it in the guise of the "adstronaut."

Worst practices: irrelevance, keyword-stuffing descriptions, and information overload

Within the video, the role of Amazon shows an obliviousness to what the shopper wants and needs that highlight the worst practices of pushing products and services on the shopper that are irrelevant to his current needs. He's shopping for a chair and is not interested in video recommendations.

When he finally does get to see chairs, all of them are identical despite showing different brand names with variations on descriptions. Those of us who have shopped on Amazon know this is accurate but just to prove it, I'll put a screenshot from Amazon below:

Compare that with one of the ones in the video:

Content writers, take note! These product descriptions exemplify an SEO strategy that forgets about how the text sounds to  the human reader .

While all that may not overwhelm the shopper, attempting to make sense of the thousands of reviews may do so. That is also not an exaggeration. One of the chairs I checked on the site had over 23.5K ratings. 

Talk about information overload! A few hundred would be more credible and manageable than the huge number of reviews that certain products show on eCommerce sites.

Audiences loved this video because they could so relate as customers. Marketers and online sellers should pay attention because the humor here works because it is true. Turning off shoppers and losing potential customers due to bad practices is no laughing matter. 

Related:

Amazon uses snail mail for direct mail and Seeing stars

Most memorable brand slogans

What do brands aspire to when they set out to create a slogan? They want to be remembered. I was inspired to make my own list of memorable slogans to identify my own favorites get the dates down for each. The baker's dozen below are selected to represent some ranges. I don't mean to endorse any of the products or stores listed only to applaud excellent copy.

1. Apple – “Think Different” The slogan was introduced in 1997, way before most of the world adopted the ubiquitous smartphone. It was born as a decided twist on  IBM's "Think",  the brand identity established in 1915 when Thomas J Watson expressed his frustration at the lack of thought:

“The trouble with every one of us is that we don’t think enough. We don’t get paid for working with our feet — we get paid for working with our heads,” he intoned in a noteless lecture that continued for several minutes. “Knowledge is the result of thought, and thought is the keynote of success in this business or any business.”

Watson then wrote the command "Think" on a blackboard. The rest is history, literally IBM history that was the backdrop for Steve Jobs' differentiation of his computer brand.

2. The California Milk Processor Board — “Got Milk?” Goodby Silverstein & Partners originally came up with that slogan in 1993, and it was such a hit that it was licensed for use by milk processors and dairy farmers.



 

3. De Beers — “A Diamond Is Forever” A woman named (Mary) France Gerety came up with that
slogan back in 1947, and it has been used ever after and been further immortalized in a James Bond novel and film.  It was named ‘The Slogan of the Century’ by Advertising Age in 1999.

4. FTD — "Say it with flowers" This one dates all the way back to 1917 when people were generally familiar with the connotations of different blooms. See The Language of Flowers.


5. Greyhound — "Go Greyhound and Leave the Driving to Us" dates back to 1956



6. M&M's  — “Melts in Your Mouth, Not in Your Hands.” The slogan was trademarked in 1954, though that was the goal of developing this form of candy in the 1940s. The unlikely source for this information is the explanation of a work of art on the MoMA site.

7. Maxwell House — “Good to the Last Drop” slogan dates back to the 1920s. The company played up the attribution to one of the most memorable presidents,  Theodore Roosevelt.

8. Kellogg’s Rice Krispies — The words "Snap! Crackle! Pop!®" first appeared in a print ad in 1929. Four years later, the artist Vernon Grant created the whimsical elves named for those sounds associated with the cereal. They then began appearing on ads, posters, and, of course, cereal boxes.

9. L'Oreal — “Because I’m Worth It" dates back to 1971 to position the brand as a  premium one because it cost more than its main competition Clairol.

10. MasterCard — "There are some things money can't buy. For everything else, there's MasterCard" 1997 was the year that the credit card first branded itself as "priceless" by capturing the thrill of experiences one can enjoy, thanks to the card. It was a brilliant play on the truism that money can't buy happiness. The elephant example is of the heart-warming variety, though many take a sassier approach.

11. New York State — "I Love NY" " was created by graphic artist Milton Glaser  to boost tourism to New York State (not just NYC) in 1977. But it only became the the official state slogan in 2009, the year that the "I Love New York" song by Steve Karmen was also adopted as the official state song. In the age of emojis, we're used to symbols standing in for words, particularly the heart for love, but likely we owe that to Glaser's vision.

12. State Farm — “Like a Good Neighbor, State Farm Is There.” Barry Manilow composed this memorable jingle for the insurance company in 1971.

13.Virginia Slims —" You’ve Come A Long Way, Baby" The cigarette brand launched this campaign in 1968 and kept it up for decades (of equating feminism with the freedom to smoke a cigarette made specifically for women and gain equal opportunity for lung cancer). New iterations came out to match changing fashions and to reflect on "bad old days" for women. 


If you're interested in what makes people like and/or remember a slogan, see A study of the antecedents of slogan liking. According to its abstract, "the liking for a slogan may be unrelated to media expenditure, and driven largely by the clarity of the message, the exposition of the benefits, rhymes, and creativity."

Do you think this level of content is beyond your budget? Think again. Poor quality content not only fails to deliver the ROI you get from high quality content; it can actually harm your brand by demoting the the site ranking you've invested so much in building up.

What you really can't afford is poor quality content. Hire a seasoned pro to craft the right message for your organization and your demographics. Learn more here and book a free consultation call.

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The Ad that Delivers What Women Want

 "What does woman want?" That question  perplexed that father of modern psychology, Sigmund Freud. It continues to puzzle marketers today, as we saw in What Women Want to See in Ads.

 The truth is that the answer was set out well over 500 years ago in one of the legendary knight stories, The Wedding of Sir Gawain and Dame Ragnell: Spoiler alert: when the knight was given the choice of having his otherwise hideous-looking wife beautiful at night or during the day, he lets her make that decision and  was rewarded with beauty 24/7. 

But that insight of 1450 has been lost over the generations as marketers seek to push on women what they want instead of empowering them to make the decision for themselves. But one swimsuit company got smart about it and so has seen a very positive response to its ad on Facebook:

We proudly want to introduce ModLi.

A different kind of swimwear.

Sometimes - the usual bikini/one-piece is just perfect. Whether you are sun bathing, in a hot-tub with friends, going to the beach with your partner, etc...

And for "other" situations in life, ModLi is perfect.  Playing with your kids on the beach, going to the pool with family, swimming, water sports, or just walking on the coastline.

Benefits:

- Sun Protection (UPF +50 Reducing harmful rays by 98%)

- No wardrobe "Malfunctions"

- Comfortable "It's like the difference between wearing work clothes and sweatpants"

- Lab Tested Fabrics

- Designed by professional designers with customer requests in mind

The ad served on Facebook garnered 6.7K reactions, 683 shares, and 1.2K comments, a sample of which you can see below:

The large number of likes on many of these comments indicate that they do accurately reflect the feelings of many women. They like having  the option to choose if they wish to cover up or not without being judged for those choices. 

Read more in  The Answer to What Women Want in a Swimsuit Ad

You've come a long way, baby, but you haven't yet arrived

The current state of marketing to women has a vibe that harkens back to the print ads for Virginia Slims cigarettes that ran through the 1970s and 80s with the tagline, “You’ve come a long way, baby.” The backgrounds were a representation of the bad old days of restrictions on women that contrasted with the confidently posed model holding her slim cigarette.

The bad old days for marketing featured blatantly sexist ads in which women aspired to nothing more than pleasing their husbands or on catching a husband by being pretty and ladylike. We have moved on, but not altogether.

Marketers have become aware of the need to move with the time and have adapted ad images accordingly. The way women are represented in ads is no longer limited to airbrushed models who exhibit the “right” figure, skin tone, hair, and age.

While ad imagery has come a long way, surveys of women indicate that marketing still has a long way to go.


Only 29% of American women believe advertising portrays them accurately is the title of Callie Schweitzer’s LinkedIn article posted on March 9, 2021. The statistic comes from Morning Consult. Even men weren’t fully convinced, as less than half (44%) said they considered women’s representation accurate.

That's not exactly passing marks.

A flame-broiled fiasco on International Women’s Day 2021

You don’t have to look hard for the brand that seriously misread the room in issuing a Tweet in honor of International Women’s Day, and the Internet made sure you knew about it even after the Tweet was deleted.



The extremely provocative-sounding declaration was meant to reference support for women who become professional chefs and its project called HER (helping equalize restaurants). But without that immediate context provided only within the print ad that you can see below, there was the apparently sexist declaration alone, and that boomeranged against the brand.



The backlash was so strong, that the account had to offer the combination of an apology and reason for deleting the tweet.



Burger King fell right into that marketing hole that Schweitzer complained about with an assertion that “perpetuates centuries-old cultural stereotypes of what society ‘expects’ women to be.” It should be obvious that marketers should steer clear of marketing to women in such forms. But it is still trickier for them to identify what women do want to see and hear in marketing.

Read more in What Women Want to See in Ads

Biggest Cyber Monday Ever

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This year’s Cyber Monday was the biggest ever. Impressive as they are, the numbers for sales only tell one part of the story. The other is which brands invested in ads in kicking off the holiday shopping season and how customers responded and reached out to them.

Crunching through the numbers, Adobe Analytics reported that this year’s Cyber Monday Sales broke US sales records, thitting  $7.9  billion, an amount that represent 19.3 percent YOY growth and which exceeded the predicted spend of  $7.79 billionthat would have translated into 17.6 percent YOY growth  for the day.

Those represent just online sales, but some of the same people also spent money in stores over the Thanksgiving weekend. According to the National Retail Foundation(NRF)  over 89 million gave business to both online and physical retail outlets, which represents an increase of close to 40 percent over last year.

Investing in the technology that enables multichannel shopping had a real payoff, according to the NRF. “The multichannel shopper outspent the single-channel shopper by up to $93 on average.”

So what role did marketing play in the billions of dollars of spending? Working with DialogTech, 4C Insights put out a report that presented the data on ads, social lift, and phone calls. What they found was that the top 10 advertisers were made up not just of retailers but also financial services, automotive and other industries. The impact of their TV ads appears in the increase in social media engagement that immediately followed their ads...

Read more in 

Why Cyber Monday 2018 Was Biggest Ever

Related posts: http://writewaypro.blogspot.com/2018/11/time-to-say-tis-season.html

http://writewaypro.blogspot.com/2018/08/capitalizing-on-holiday-marketing.html

Time's Up for Mad Men

“Mad Men” portrayed the male-dominated world of advertising in the 1960s.  Although we're nearly twenty years into the next century now, some of the industry's sexist norms persist. It's time to do something about it.  

In the wake of the #MeToo Movement's call to give voice to the victims of sexual harassment, industries have been forced to face up the problem and work on solutions. Among the organizations devoted to progress in this area is TIME'S UP,™ which was formed by women in the entertainment industry this past January. In March, the organization partnered with women in the advertising industry to launch the industry-specific TIME'S UP™/ADVERTISING.

Read more in An Attitude Adjustment for Advertising