Buick has several pans on the stove to promote vehicles like the new Regal and Lacrosse to culinary aficionados. While the efforts include experiential marketing tours and partnerships with publishers, Buick is also hoping to put mileage on the Lacrosse as sole sponsor of "Project Food Blog," a contest by culinary social-media network Foodbuzz intended to engage food bloggers around the world. The effort is meant to get thousands to compete in a series of writing, cooking and food photography challenges for the chance to win $10,000 and a feature on Foodbuzz.com for one year. Janet Keller, digital-social media manager at Buick and GMC, says the Foodbuzz program highlights Buick's affinity-marketing strategy around culinary, travel, technology and culture. "Foodbuzz is a perfect alignment for us. They are on the forefront of this huge community of people and the concept of [marketing around] blogging is intriguing because it's extremely interactive," she says. Ben Dehan, founder and CEO of San Francisco-based Foodbuzz, says the key to ROI on platforms like his is not click-throughs but value and relevance. He says the company also measures the volume of content carrying Buick's brand identity -- which includes the number of views such content actually gets whether via posts by bloggers, or comments around those posts, and other viral content elaborated from social-media ripostes. "It's not about displays. It's not dictating a message, but creating valuable products and letting the community take control of it," Dehan says. The three-year old company -- which, according to measurement service Quantcast, is the top online food network in terms of traffic with some 13 million unique users per month worldwide -- is also a MediaPost OMMA nominee for online advertising creativity in the sponsorship category. The company is holding a "Blogger Festival" on Nov. 5 in San Francisco with sponsors like Electrolux, Ghirardelli, and Nature's Pride. Buick's Keller argues that partnering with a blogging contest makes more sense than, say, doing a show-and-tell at the Ace Hotel because Buick is more interested in the culinary lifestyle as an expression of discovery than as a privilege of luxury. "Foodbuzz is where bloggers are talking about recipes or ways of presenting food that they have discovered, so it's about unexpected, hidden gems, and that really mirrors our audience. It is premium but also aspirational," she says. Buick also just launched a "Buick Regal Discovery Tour," a Food & Wine and Travel + Leisure-sponsored road show combining ride-and-drives with a culinary tour featuring local talent. Keller says the event, hitting 11 markets, started last weekend in Chicago and garnered between 600 and 800 test drives. Keller says those are big numbers for a tour of this type. "Typically, we have 700 test drives for the entire length of a program like this," she says. The tour, running through December, has five culinary "stations" featuring local chefs preparing dishes, and local artisans and travel consultants. New York is next, then D.C. Buick has also partnered with Bravo's "Top Chef Just Desserts" and The Food Network's "The Next Food Network Star."
Despite lingering concerns about the economy, a new report from American Express Business Insights says luxury sales are up, gaining 9% in the second quarter. While spending in each of the four categories it analyzed increased, furniture and home furnishings showed the biggest improvement -- up 21% -- followed by sales at luxury department stores, which rose 15% in the quarter. (Women powered those department stores sales, making 69% of purchases. And 22% of all charges came from shoppers ages 36 to 45.) While sales also rose in the apparel and accessories (up 9%) and jewelry sectors (up 12%), the report says growth slowed in each of those categories as the quarter progressed, indicating renewed fears about the fledgling recovery. Jewelry sales gained only 3% in June, for example, the smallest increase in the last eight months. A new survey from Unity Marketing, which focuses on affluent consumers, reports that 73% believe the recession is still continuing, no matter what the economists say. Some 21% believe the economy is in recovery. Unity, which conducted the research in July among adults with an average annual income of $307,000, also found that 44% of this group plan to spend less and to save and invest more, in the 12 months ahead. Specifically, they said they were planning to shop less, cut back on dining out, do more comparison shopping, and even clip more coupons. "A recession is not only an economic event," Pam Danziger, president of Unity Marketing and lead researcher, writes in the report, "it is also a cultural one. When affluent consumers believe that a recession is on and might continue for a year or more, they are far more likely to take steps to curtail unnecessary spending." While affluents account for just 20% of U.S. households, they spend more than 40% of the $4 trillion spent at retail every year.
PetSmart is offering one furry customer the chance to appear in a TV spot. Pet parents can enter the "Scare Your Way into a PetSmart Commercial" contest on PetSmart's Facebook Fan Page by uploading photos of their pets decked out in their Halloween best. PetSmart will accept entries through Oct. 27 and 10 finalists will be selected by a combination of public voting and input from a panel of PetSmart experts. The grand prize winner will then be chosen from those 10 finalists by votes Oct. 28-31 on Facebook from fans, pet parents and their friends and relatives. Winners will be announced Nov. 1. The grand prize winner will have their pet cast in a national TV commercial due to air in 2011, win $1,000 cash, and receive free round-trip airfare to the commercial shoot for both the pet, pet parent and a guest. The first runner-up will receive $1,000 cash and the second runner-up will receive $500 cash. Seven runners-up will each receive a $250 PetSmart gift card. Six weekly prizes will be awarded to entrants based solely on public voting. The weekly prize winner will be the entry that receives the most votes during each voting phase. Each weekly prize winner will receive a $500 PetSmart gift card and will also have their pet photo entry featured as PetSmart's Facebook profile photo for one week. Thirty-three weekday random drawing prizes of a $50 gift card will be awarded throughout the submission period. Pets can also strut their stuff in their Halloween fashions at PetSmart's annual Howl-O-Ween Costume Contest and Photo Event, which will be held Oct. 23, from 3 p.m. to 5 p.m. local time in participating PetSmart stores around the nation. Pets can have their photo taken and placed in a commemorative frame, receive a free goodie bag sponsored by Nutro/Greenies (for the first 100 pets) and participate in a pet parade and costume contest. PetSmart is promoting the contest and in-store events on social media, including Twitter and Facebook. More than 13 million families plan to dress up their pets for Halloween this year, according to a 2010 PetSmart survey. PetSmart is catering to those consumers with more pet-related Halloween gear than ever before, including The Martha Stewart Pets collection, sold exclusively at PetSmart, which offers costume designs for pets including a mummy, skeleton, vampire, ghost, spider and devil. New costumes this year include the monster, shark and tiger. Perennial favorites like the bat, bumblebee, cheerleader, cow, football and pumpkin are available, and cats can also sport their own Halloween looks with colorful hats, like the cowboy, princess, and witch hats.
Sara Lee Corp. has joined the Children's Food and Beverage Advertising Initiative (CFBAI), bringing the number of participating companies to 17. The Council of Better Business Bureaus initiative, which had 10 corporate participants at its launch in 2006, seeks to address the problem of childhood obesity by self-regulating advertising to children under 12. Four companies' pledges call for no advertising to children under 12 (Coca-Cola, Hershey, Mars and Cadbury Adams). The other 13 -- now including Sara Lee, as well as Burger King, Campbell Soup, ConAgra, Dannon, General Mills, Kellogg, Kraft, McDonald's, Nestle USA, PepsiCo, Post Foods and Unilever U.S. -- have pledged to advertise only foods/beverages that meet "science-based nutritional standards" reviewed and approved by BBB. Companies advertising to this age group propose the specific nutritional standards to which they pledge to adhere, but all products advertised must meet government standards defining the term "healthy" or American Heart Association HeartCheck standards, according to BBB. Individual participants' standards are posted on BBB's CFBAI site. BBB monitors compliance/progress and issues periodic public reports. The advertising pledges span most traditional and digital media, including company-owned and third-party Web sites, interactive games, mobile media and child-oriented movie DVDs, and also covers word-of-mouth marketing. Product packaging, in-store displays and sponsorships are not included. All participants pledge not to use product placement in child-directed editorial or program content, not to advertise food/beverages in schools spanning pre-kindergarten through sixth grade, and to restrict use of third-party licensed characters in children's advertising to products meeting their own pledged "better for you" product nutrition criteria. Some participants used to apply their pledged standards only when at least half of the targeted audience consisted of children under 12. However, according to BBB, virtually all participants are now applying their standards using an audience threshold of no higher than 35% of children under 12 within the targeted audience. CFBAI also announced that, because most participants now have policies stating that they will not advertise to children under age six, BBB will begin monitoring and reporting on compliance with those policies as of next year. To date, participants have reformulated or created at least 100 products to meet their standards, and at least 30 products that already met nutrition standards were further enhanced, according to BBB. A CFBAI compliance progress report issued in October 2009, covering 2008 advertising, showed 12 of the then-15 participants having implemented their pledges, and "excellent" compliance levels. In November 2009, an analysis conducted by the Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI) confirmed that products being advertised by CFBAI participant companies were meeting their own pledged nutritional standards. However, it emphasized that 59% of the approved products did not meet a set of standards developed by nutrition/health experts, based on the National Alliance for Nutrition and Activity's school wellness model nutrition standards (which reflect Dietary Guidelines for Americans recommendations). CSPI characterized these 59% of products as being "of poor nutritional quality." CSPI recommended that CFBAI guidelines be revised to require that all participating companies comply with a single set of nutritional standards, such as those being developed by the Interagency Working Group on Food Marketed to Children (comprising the FTC, FDA, USDA and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention). That group issued "Tentative Proposed Nutrition Standards" late last year. Early this month, the FTC issued subpoenas to 48 food/beverage companies as part of its research for a follow-up to its 2008 report on food/beverage industry spending, methods and self-regulation in regard to food marketing to children and adolescents. In issuing the subpoenas, the FTC's Division of Advertising Practices/Bureau of Consumer Protection confirmed that it continues to support voluntary industry self-regulation efforts and does not intend to propose federal regulations, but is instead seeking to measure the results of self-regulation and determine if stronger industry efforts are needed. Currently, Congressional action leading to rule-making hearings appears unlikely, according to regulatory watchers. However, issues relating to food/beverage marketing to children continue to draw growing scrutiny as a result of growing public awareness and concern about childhood obesity, in part driven by the presidential Task Force on Childhood Obesity and First Lady Michelle Obama's Let's Move! Campaign. Further, the FTC has become significantly more active in monitoring advertising to children and issuing warning letters to companies making misleading or inadequately supported health-benefits and other product claims. The agency issued such warnings to 11 companies in January, and in June, an official FTC statement confirmed that the agency "will act swiftly to challenge questionable health claims about children's food products." FTC officials have also made public statements criticizing fast-food chains, including Yum Brands, Chuck E. Cheese and IHOP, for failing to participate in CFBAI.
The latest CMO Council study, "Doing Away With Foul Play," on marketers' thoughts on brand-protection and intellectual property risks around sports found that marketers realize they are lagging in the race to stay ahead of counterfeiters, ambushers, and others using digital platforms to steal their brands. The survey, performed with MarkMonitor, a brand protection firm, polled 225 senior sports marketers across a number of industries on how well brands are safeguarding themselves. Also polled were 20 executives from top leagues and corporate sponsors. While 72% said that sports sponsorships are valuable, only 52% are monitoring their brands on digital channels; a quarter said they don't track their brands online. Forty-one percent of respondents listed ambush marketing by competitors as the top concern ahead of counterfeiting and knockoff merchandise. Ambush marketing, where a brand not officially affiliated with an event creates a very public campaign that makes them appear to be, is one such tactic that got several brands more than they paid for at the FIFA World Cup this year. Think of the Bavaria Beer girls, who gave the company free beer ads for the cost of tickets. Forty-one percent of marketers in the survey said ambushing is a top concern in brand protection, putting that issue ahead of counterfeiting, knockoffs, and the improper behavior of top athletes (27% of respondents). "Brands that ambush events are competing with official sponsors for customer attention," says Liz Miller, VP programs and operations for the CMO Council. "If someone does one great stunt that gets someone to try their brand, you have lost that customer. It's not just competition for airtime, it's beyond that." The FIFA games also provided examples of another intellectual property risk -- brand hijacking -- where illegitimate players steal brand logos and event imagery to create faux marketing sites. In the survey, 26% of respondents said brand hijacking was the most important risk, meaning that problem came in fourth place. In the case of the World Cup this year, people ended up buying worthless tickets from a fake Web company that festooned itself with all of the official FIFA partner brands. "Unfortunately, the negative carries over to legitimate brands and properties," says Miller. "The backlash leads back to the sponsoring brands just because their logos happened to be on the site. Ambush marketers and hijackers are latching onto the excitement of global mass events, and that diminishes the value of brands that are official partners and the value of the sports properties themselves," she tells Marketing Daily, explaining that the complexity marketers are facing now with Web 2.0 is that the democratization of the digital space opens doors to fraudulent misappropriation and misuse of brand content. The survey said there was little consensus on what encouraged these problems. Forty-two percent of respondents said lack of enforcement or penalties was the main problem. Second place in marketers' minds was sophistication of perpetrators, and difficulty in the timely detection of threats. "The response strategy must not include just the CIO, CFO and legal departments. There must be a cross-functional, c-suite mandate on protecting customer experience and engagement. Marketers must be part of it," she says, adding that it makes sense to look at sports properties not only as ad platforms but as engagement opportunities. "In this day and age, it's not just how big the signage is, it's 'how do I get that fan base to be loyal to my brand?' It's a vehicle rather than a ... destination."
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In celebration of its 100th anniversary, the Association of National Advertisers has created The Marketers' Constitution. Its goal is twofold: to acknowledge the marketing industry's many contributions to our society, and to help the marketing profession move beyond the inefficiencies, limitations, restrictions and unknowns of the past to a new, effective, transparent, economical and socially responsible model of marketing and media for the future. The Marketers' Constitution sets forth what the ANA believes are ten essential "musts" of marketing for the next 100 years. These will help ensure that the industry thrives and continues to contribute to the growth of the nation's businesses -- as well as to the economic and social wellbeing of our society. Read the entire Marketers' Constitution and show your support for its tenets by digitally signing it. - - -The seventh tenet of the Marketers' Constitution states that marketing professionals must become better, highly skilled, diverse leaders. As an industry, we do not spend enough time, energy and effort fostering the talents, skills and continuous development of marketing professionals. To further our goals of building brands and driving business results, we must attract and nurture people who are completely customer-centric in their orientation, holistic in their view of marketing and media choices, innovative and creative in their thinking, and who are articulate and effective in their personal communications. These people should be results-obsessed team leaders in everything they do. Marketing professionals must be cultivated and encouraged to continue to improve, otherwise, the marketing profession will stagnate and sub-optimize available opportunities. It is important to continuously enhance the skill set of all those who advance the state of marketing, whether it is with marketers, agency executives, or media professionals. The reason why this must become an "obsession" is that most marketing organizations place training and development at the bottom of their priority pile. With organizations downsizing and time management at a premium, many CMOs have deferred "people development" decisions to a later date. This was most apparent in the MME 2010 study by the IAB /4A's/ANA (conducted by Booz & Company), which indicated that only 25% of marketers considered themselves to be "digitally savvy." Although these findings were released two years ago, it is highly unlikely that those data points have turned up too dramatically. In this environment where "everything is digital", it is confounding why those results were so low. However, sound organization management doesn't end with training and development. Successful companies also embrace environments that are "diverse." The marketing industry has suffered a number of bumps and bruises over the years for being relatively poor at attracting minorities to the industry and advancing their careers to senior management positions. Workplace diversity is vitally important to the future success of the marketing industry and its ability to grow businesses. That is why the efforts taking place by the AAF, the 4As and AdColor are so critical. In this increasingly interconnected world, a diverse marketing industry is better able to reach and influence culturally diverse consumers. Diverse backgrounds, perspectives and persuasions contribute to a more inspiring and creative environment -- the kind that stimulates marketing professionals to produce the best work possible. Furthermore, businesses that support inclusion set an example for their employees and positively influence society at large by broadly socializing the inherent value of diversity. With better skills management, training and development, and an increased focus on diversity, the marketing community will consistently produce superior professionals. This will go a long way towards building businesses and brands, helping us all to fulfill the seventh tenet of the Marketers' Constitution.