Although we cover a dozen or so industries from automotive to electronics to retail, when it comes to attracting readers to our stories -- well, we are what we eat, apparently. Six of the Top 10 stories that ran in Marketing Daily in 2010 were about food, beverages and restaurants. Two centered on Gen Y, one was about social media strategies, and the last -- but definitely most read of all the stories we fed you last year -- highlighted Beyonce's role in Vizio's Super Bowl spot. Writer Tanya Irwin, whose beats include pharma, financial services and travel/tourism, has more to say on why she thinks it shut out the rest. Social media dominated the year and many, many of our stories carry a "social media" content tag if not a mention in the headline. Writer Karlene Lukovitz, who covers the food, beverage and restaurant industries, dishes about what made her story so well read. And reporter Karl Greenberg, master of the automotive industry as well as our man on the packaged goods beat, has this to say about his coverage of Coca-Cola's social media capitalization. Writer Sarah Mahoney wears her shoes thin pounding the retail beat and authored two most-read stories, each of which centered on Gen Y. She expounds on her thoughts as to why Millennial coverage captures audience share. While intrepid writer Aaron Baar covers telecom, technology, electronics and entertainment, his contribution to our most-read list was about Pepsi, which tells you much about our readers' intense focus on products we eat and places we eat them in. Which brings us back to Lukovitz, who authored the other three food-related stories. I think if we sneak "social media" and "Gen Y" into the headlines next year, we can boost circulation quite a bit. Then again, maybe we won't have to resort to such nefariousness. Stay tuned!
My most-read story in 2010 was about social media. No! Wait. Really? Social media? No surprise -- social was the "it" platform for marketers in 2010, and pundits have said it will be so this coming year as well, as metrics become more systematized and go deeper than mere hits and leads. My top story, which got would make me a rock star if all of those people had physically shown up at some arena to hear me read the article, maybe with Yoko Kanno on keyboards) was an exegesis of the Coca-Cola's social efforts. Michael Donnelly, Coca-Cola Company's group director of worldwide interactive marketing, talked about the company's social network at last summer's Association of National Advertisers' (ANA) Social Media Conference in New York last summer. Donnelly focused on the company's KO Social Hub, an online forum intended to break down silo walls by letting marketers from different parts of the organization share ideas, regardless of brand, business unit or market. The point, he said, was to reach Coca-Cola's 7 million fans across dozens of social-media sites. He also says that "On Facebook alone, we get 5,000 mentions per day, 99.2% of which is popular." From beverages, my next most-read piece was on pizza. But social, profit-sharing pizza. Last spring, Papa John launched a social-media campaign at its Facebook site, called "Papa's Specialty Pizza Challenge," wherein people were invited to suggest a new pizza. The company offered the winner of the promotion a portion of the profits from sales of the pie, which joined the menu list. The winner also got $1,000 as an incentive to help market the pie. No. 3 was not about beverages or social; it was about beverages and social media. This time, it was about Coca-Cola rival Pepsi's efforts around digital events like BlogHer, Blogworld, SXSW, and Internet Week New York. Bonin Bough, director of digital and social media strategy at PepsiCo, spoke at MediaPost's OMMA Social in June about the company's disparate social tactics, revealing that it has a NASA-like "Mission Control Center" to tie it all together and keep an ear to the ground. "The question is," he said, "how do we create this in terms of real-time insights?" The center has six monitors and five people across different functions. "We are asking how do we create a Petri dish for discovering what new technology will mean to the brand; how do we challenge existing realities?" No. 4 was an item about how marketers actually haven't got a clue about how to push marketing programs through the social media pipes without seeming to push marketing through social media pipes. Geoff Ramsey, co-founder of research firm eMarketer, told the attendees of July's ANA Social Media conference that while Internet marketing spend ($65.2 billion in 2008) will grow dramatically in coming years, many marketers don't know how to include social media in the mix. He illustrated how little prepared marketers are for what's happening in social media by asking for a show of hands among the marketers in the packed auditorium for those who "have a handle on social media." Not one went up. Further down the most-read list was Ford's cause marketing effort with Pandora, which involved artists John Legend and Jewel. The next two most-reads were both about Mercedes-Benz and its Gen Y research based on a competition among business schools like Harvard, New York University, Wharton and Kellogg, in cooperation with NYU, to find out what the generation of consumers likely to consider the Mercedes brand actually thinks of the brand. The eighth-most-popular story with my byline was about the Mercedes Gen-Benz social media program and how it reflects a shift from customer satisfaction to what VP marketing Steve Cannon calls "customer intimacy." "I'm talking about getting that much closer to your customer -- that makes some of our old ways of targeting them look Stone Age," he said. "We have actually taken money away from things like focus groups and the like and moved it to these new programs." Gen-Benz, targeting Gen Y consumers between the ages of 16 and 33, is an online community among so-called "digital natives" who grew up with the Web. The company recruited owners and non-owners alike within that cohort to engage with them in an online community. The last three of my most read stories -- but definitely not least -- were on the programs marketers put together to help Haitians after the earthquake that decimated the island nation in January this year; a piece on five types of cell-phone users; and how Toys R Us promoted "Toy Story 3." On to the new year!
If there's a new technology or media platform that can enable marketing programs, Marketing Daily readers want to know about it, judging from the most-read stories of 2010 covering the consumer electronics and telecommunications industries. Three of the top 10 most-read stories in the space revolved around the ways that companies -- particularly PepsiCo -- were using new technologies to enhance their marketing programs. "Pepsi to Intro Geo-based Loyalty Program was about the company's Foodservice division working with Foursquare on loyalty rewards based on check-ins at local businesses, while the company scored yet again with its PepsiCo10 initiative, which rewarded 10 marketing entrepreneurs who had ideas to use innovative media and technology to market its diverse portfolio of brands. "As it becomes more challenging to engage consumers, and as new [media] platforms emerge, we thought: 'What better way to get in with them and support them?'" Seth Kaufman, PepsiCo's director of media strategy and investment, told Marketing Daily, for the publication of the latter story. "There's lots of emerging technology and emerging platforms. The question is, how can they connect brands with consumers?" Such brand engagement dominated the list. Readers were looking to see which companies were doing a particularly good job connecting with consumers (tech and new-media companies such as Microsoft, Amazon, Yahoo and eBay scored high on the list). Shortly after that story appeared, a marketing executive repeated it back to me, not knowing I had written it as a way to make her point about how brands needed to do a better job understanding what their consumers want, particularly in the realm of search marketing. Reckitt-Benckiser looked to deepen consumer understanding of the company behind brands such as Lysol, Clearasil and Woolite with its own Facebook game, "poweRBrands, designed to mimic the real-life world of an RB marketing executive. Meanwhile, Levi's tried to employ some cross-media magic, using Shazam's song-identifying technology to enhance its already high-profile Super Bowl commercial. Speaking of the Super Bowl, Boost Mobile's debut on the big game garnered enough reads to land on the list, although it's possible most of those people were from Chicago, wanting to see an update of the famed Super Bowl Shuffle. (The spot itself scored a respectable 15th on USA Today's Ad Meter post-game rankings.) Mobile phones and mobile technologies also continued to be hot topics, with readers interested in App downloads and mobile phone usage in the retail space -- both areas which will likely see more development in the coming year. And what would a technology/consumer electronics space be without at least one mention of Apple? Finally, the list rounds itself out with the age-old question, "What do women want? with a new media twist. Turns out it's personalized ads (which is probably what men and kids want, too).
There's no power like star power, as evidenced by the attention Marketing Daily readers paid to a story about superstar Beyoncé Knowles starring in a Super Bowl spot for Vizio. Regardless of whether more Vizio TVs were sold as a result of the TV spot, the songstress could teach other celebrities a thing or two about self-promotion. In June, Forbes placed Knowles at No. 3 on its 2010 Celebrity Power List with $87 million in grosses, thanks to a 93-date world tour, deals with Nintendo and L'Oréal and her House of Deréon fashion line. My regular beats are travel/tourism, pharma, financial services, and pets, but it was the Vizio story that was my most-read in 2010. The most popular Marketing Daily story in the travel category (at #3 of my top 10) focused on Virgin Atlantic improving its Web performance and tracking, a topic that is likely to stay on the lips of marketers in 2011. Marketers across categories learned a valuable lesson in another travel story, where Royal Caribbean defended its decision not to alter its course on a cruise where a port-of-call included Labadee, Haiti (story #8). The cruise ship company was criticized by those who said the decision was insensitive to the turmoil and tragedy caused by the January earthquake. They may not have been travel stories, but the rest of the top 10 stories I covered were all over the map. #2 Eight O'Clock Coffee's N.Y. Promo Celebrates WOM The company gave commuters in New York City a chance to win prizes if they phoned a friend about the brand. The June 28 event offered more than 13,000 cups of the coffee to travelers passing through Grand Central Terminal, and those who phone a friend on the spot and tell them about the coffee's great taste had the opportunity to appear online for the venerable brand. #4 Study: People Willingly Spend More For Green Green consumers (in varying shades) abound on the Internet, said Chuck Moran, chief marketing officer for Burlington, Mass.-based Burst Media, which conducted the study. "Advertisers who are marketing 'green' products online should recognize that the concept of 'green' cannot be communicated to consumers with a single concept, as it means very different things for different people," Moran told Marketing Daily. #5 Weight Watchers Asks Members To 'Lose For Good' Philanthropic efforts continued to attract marketing dollars in 2010. In this initiative, Weight Watchers sought to fight hunger by increasing awareness of the issue and helping provide access to healthy food for those in need. As Weight Watchers members and online subscribers lost weight and participated in other activities, the company donated up to $1 million to two leading hunger-fighting organizations -- Share Our Strength and Action Against Hunger. #6 Among Gen Y Affluents: Chanel, BMW Top BrandsMarketing Daily subscribers love their studies, as evidenced by the popularity of this one, which looked at the top prestige brands among affluent Gen Y consumers. Chanel and BMW were the tops in the first annual L2 Gen Y Prestige Brand Rankings measured the affinity for 105 iconic brands among the next generation of prestige consumers. L2, a think tank for prestige brands, surveyed 450 Gen Y high earners from 45 countries (83% are expected to make more than $100k+/year in the short term) and measured brands in six industry categories. #7 Diesel Launches Social Media Campaign Diesel was one of the first brands to advertise online in the mid-'90s, but had been quiet digitally as of late until this effort in March, which included branded programs with Twitter, FourSquare and Facebook. The effort from the Italian fashion brand was an extension to its national "Be Stupid" campaign. In the campaign, "stupid" actually means "brave" -- lingo that is probably lost on the brand's non-target customers. #9 Lay's Enlists Local Farmers For Mobile Tour The potato chip maker gave a new meaning to knowing where your food comes from when they offered up meet-and-greets with the farmers who grow their potatoes. The nationwide experiential tour from the PepsiCo's Frito-Lay division brand used a mobile greenhouse designed to bring a rural farm experience to city-based consumers. The six-city tour kicked off July 26 in New York City's Times Square and went on to Boston, Detroit, Chicago, Los Angeles and Dallas, attracting thousands of visitors and generating positive buzz for the brand. #10 Study: Facebook Users Show "Herding Instinct" The psychology of marketing came to social media in 2010, where marketers began to stew about how to best reach consumers on Facebook in between their games of "Mafia Wars" and "Farmville." The research, from Oxford University, shows that consumers have a herding instinct to "follow the crowd" once a clear winner is established. However, this instinct appears to switch off almost entirely if the product fails to achieve a certain popularity threshold. The findings have implications for the retail online world. Online book retailer Amazon and the online DVD rental service Netflix already allow their users to rate the products, and as a consequence, influence their future popularity.
Twenty-ten saw food/beverage and restaurant brands pulling out the innovation stops in response to economy-driven "new normal" behaviors -- the former to combat private-label incursion and capitalize on more at-home eating, the latter to woo consumers out of their homes at mealtimes. The common ground: CPGs and foodservice brands alike devised highly creative ways to harness social media. Marketing Daily readers were clearly hungry for inspirational social media marketing examples from food/restaurant marketers ... as well as for broader social and integrated media insights provided by some intriguing research over the past year, as shown by the top 10 best-read stories by yours truly: 1. Top Execs Dish About Social Media Hey ... everyone wants to know what the folks in the executive suite are thinking. And when senior executives at major companies (PepsiCo, Hershey and McDonald's, to name a few) reveal their views on social media -- channels that are simultaneously a boon and a constant challenge for marketers -- you've got a winning combination of two hot topics. Most important, these executives offered specific, thoughtful, on-spot insights on best practices for leveraging these emerging media. 2. Chipotle Mexican Grill Wants Your Spam This QSR came up with a clever idea: A "No Junk" cause-related campaign that both enhanced existing customer relationships and built awareness among potential converts to its "fast-food-with-integrity" brand promise. Each time a consumer forwarded a piece of junk mail to Chipotle, the chain made a donation to The Lunch Box, an organization dedicated to helping schools serve healthy meals. The campaign's premise -- and Chipotle's effective use of social and online media to get the message out -- grabbed the attention of our readers, as well as the chain's target consumers. 3. Coke Scores With First Viral Video Granted, any Coca-Cola marketing effort is bound to be of interest to other marketing pros ... but this one was particularly intriguing. To support its "Open Happiness" global marketing campaign, Coke created a "Happiness Machine" -- a vending machine installed on a college campus that dispensed free Coke, whole pizzas and balloon animals, among other goodies -- and filmed students' delighted responses, using the footage as the brand's first-ever viral-only (no TV ad usage) video. Viral is right: Within a week of posting the video on YouTube, sending a single global tweet and posting some mentions on Coke's Facebook page, Coke enjoyed 645,000 views of its video. 4. Tweeters Star In Wheat Thins TV Ads This Kraft Foods/Nabisco brand leveraged Twitter with panache. Wheat Thins identified random tweeters about its crackers (eschewing a predictable focus on the brand's actual Twitter followers), and filmed their reactions as Wheat Thins reps surprised them on their home turf with branded gifts ... like an entire pallet of free boxes of the crackers. The videos were then used for TV ads and social/online media efforts that both entertained and effectively conveyed the brand's "Crunch is Calling" message. 5. Emergen-C Uses Social Media for (Real) Sampling This marketer of fizzy vitamin drink mixes intrigued marketing colleagues by moving the power of digital engagement into the real world. The idea: Enabling social media fans to get or gift friends with free, mail-delivered sample packets (as well as the virtual type). 6. Hispanic Study Reveals Marketing-Critical Complexities The hot button here was all marketers' need to understand the nuances of communicating effectively with the crucial, rapidly growing U.S. Hispanic population. Marketing Daily readers clearly gleaned some insights from highlights of a year-long, in-depth study by Starcom MediaVest and NBC Universal's Telemundo, which shed light on the true diversity of Hispanics and offered specific guidance for marketing appropriately and effectively to specific Hispanic audience segments. 7. Kraft Mac & Cheese Gets New, Unified LookMarketing Daily broke the story of Kraft's iconic Macaroni & Cheese brand rolling out a new logo featuring a "noodle smile" and contemporary package design across its product line. The initiatives, backed by a 360-degree campaign (noodle-smile billboards and public-place sculptures, as well as digital and more standard traditional media) are capitalizing on the brand's enhanced, economy-driven momentum. Tongue-in-cheek messaging with both humorous and sentimental appeal assures value-driven parents that they, along with their families, should enjoy the original meal-in-a-box they loved as kids -- as well as the brand's new, more sophisticated family offerings. 8. Reports: New Insights On Social Media's Impact More social media insights ... this time in a restaurant industry context. Highlights from a major social media study conducted by food service consultancy Technomic showed these media having limited impact on QSR restaurants' overall potential customer universe, but a major influence within specific, younger dining-out segments. Restaurant (and other) marketers took notice. 9. Oscar Mayer Auctions Wienermobile Adventure A contest concept that made the most of both a fun/whimsical element and cause-related marketing. Oscar Mayer built on older consumers' fond, well-embedded image of the brand -- yet also appealed to new generations with no memory of the iconic "I Wish I Were An Oscar Meyer Weiner" commercials /campaign. The contest offered parents and kids a chance to ride around on a "Weinermobile" and share the fun with their neighbors, while also contributing to a worthy cause: Contest entries triggered Oscar Mayer donations to Feeding America. 10. Facebook: How Formats, Timing Affect Response Facebook being the primary social medium for many brands, marketers clearly "liked" absorbing insights from a Vitrue study that revealed which consumer segments are most receptive to which types of Facebook and other social media content (video, text, etc.)
When it comes to what consumers do when they go shopping, Marketing Daily readers want to know two things: Who's spending (especially if it's Gen Y), and how much are they spending? Here are the top 10 retail/consumer behavior stories of the year: 1. Fickle Gen Y Trusts Channels, Not Brands" A question-and-answer session with Paul Parkin, founding partner of SALT Branding in San Francisco, generated more reads than any other story in the retail sector this year, probably because he articulated exactly why this generation drives marketers nuts: They've got no loyalty. "I have no doubt that when the new Facebook -- whatever that turns out to be -- comes along, Millennials will flock to it," he told us. 2. Report: Gen Y Will Spend Us Into Recovery In a similar vein, a report from PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP and Retail Forward grabbed readers' attention by quantifying just how important those free-spending Millennials are to a brand's success. In fact, only 25% of the Gen Y shoppers included in the research say the economy changed their spending habits, compared to 36% of Gen Xers, and 37% of Boomers. 3. Shopper Marketing Grows Faster Than Digital, Social For all the buzz created by social media and m-commerce, this Booz & Co. report found that humble shopper marketing -- yep, boring old end-caps and shelf signage -- is emerging as one of the most effective tools in a marketer's arsenal, with 83% of food, beverage and consumer products planning to crank up their spending on it. 4. Facebook, Victoria's Secret Big With Online Shoppers Of course, it's always possible that a Victoria's Secret story vaults into the top 10 just because of the models. (But if that's the case, we wonder why our story on Victoria's Secret's $2 million bra -- which even had a photo of the lovely Adriana Lima modeling the topaz-encrusted creation -- didn't make our list?) It's more likely that readers want to hear about companies using Facebook to actually win sales, and how VS uses its fan base to launch new products and special promotions. 5. New Rules Of Mama Marketing: Older, Greener Once again, demographics are the driver, and Gen Y isn't always the crowd that tickles your fancy: In this case, it was Experian research illuminating just how old the typical mom has gotten: The universe of moms of children 18 and under who are 35 plus has grown from 40.9 million to 44.9 million in just four years. 6. Deloitte Study: Consumers Love Spending Less We suspect readers liked this story so much because even though it told them news they didn't want to hear -- and that fun-to-be-frugal gestalt has been especially painful in the luxury sector -- it was a truth many of us felt right to our very bones. In fact, 81% of consumers say they enjoy spending less. To borrow a line from a favorite Sprint commercial, we like sticking it to the man, even if we are the man. 7. Saints Shine, Snickers Scores And Bud Disappoints It could be that readers clicked on this story so often because watching oldster actors Betty White and Abe Vigoda get tackled in the dirt is good clean fun, or that Super Sunday created a vast collective longing for the Clydesdale moment that never came. But we suspect it's that America got swept away by one of the most spectacular story lines to ever come out of the NFL. Sure, the ads were good. But "Who dat?" fever was better. 8. After Toning Tushes, Reebok Tackles Thighs Okay, this one doesn't fit either our demographic or spending theme, and we can't even claim it's got that New Orleans juju. We're thinking that a) "tush" is just a really cute word, and b) there's a level of intrigue that anyone is silly to think "toning gear" actually works. Like Snuggies and Chia Pets, marketers wonder, "Who's buying this crap? And how can I get them to buy my crap?" 9. Gens X/Y, Rich Households Hike Private-Label Sales Like No. 6, readers went for this Nielsen data on private-label sales because -- even if you are in the business of branding -- it's hard not to applaud as sensible a consumer uprising as the success of private labels. With more retail chains creating multiple tiers of high-quality private-label products, it's nice to see that the principal rules of marketing still apply: Offer consumers quality products at a better price, and they'll take it -- no matter how good the national brand's ad campaign is. 10. Coupon Use Grows For The First Time In 17 Years And finally, our 10th-ranked story is yet another vindication of the clever consumer, beating back branding efforts at every turn. The recession turned coupon-clipping into a national sport, with Inmar reporting a 27% jump in coupon use in 2009. Brand equity, be hanged, the people say: Give me a dollar-off coupon and I'm anybody's baby.
Happy New Year to all our readers. We will be celebrating the dawn of 2011 tonight and we'll be right back here on Monday, ready to traverse the road ahead -- with you. Be safe, be happy! --Nina Lentini
Most of the top 50 leading brands, which in total boast 70 million Facebook "fans," have so far failed to capitalize on the brand-building opportunities presented by social media, according to a study by AT Kearney. In fact, most use their Facebook profiles to continue to "showcase traditional, time-honored and digitally irrelevant one-way communications." Let's review the state of so-called corporate social media engagement as reported: More than half of the top 50 brands began by presenting their corporate story: GE, Nintendo and Heinz, among them. Five of the top 50 brands (Interbrand) had no Facebook page. Meanwhile, otherwise ubiquitous brands, including: McDonald's, American Express, Sony, Disney, Gucci and Louis Vuitton, made only "official" wall postings and did not allow "fans" to initiate conversations. The Kearney analysts were even more alarmed to find that only one of the Interbrand Top 50 brands routed fans to an unfiltered Facebook wall; the other 44 initially choose to show consumers a filtered selection of company posts. No One's Answering Even more distressing, 89% of consumer replies on company Facebook pages went unanswered. Gucci was the laggard, without a single reply over the past three months, while Philips was the leader with nine responses. Only 11 companies had replied to more than one consumer. The researchers found it hard to comprehend a rationale behind these results. Do marketers not take Facebook seriously, even with half a billion users? Are they frightened to cede uncensored control to their customers? Do they lack the resources, internally or via their agencies (especially public relations) to deal with the volume of communication that an effective Facebook site can generate? Or, perhaps large corporations simply have no soul and can't dance to the cultural beat? Getting Your Attention Social engagement is definitely about two-way conversations and making brands more "friendly and personable" -- but brands must give consumers some reward in exchange for the attention. And brands are doing just that. The Kearney study showed that while only 5% of company-to-consumer posts engaged consumers in discussions; 71% were promotional -- discount offers, prizes, etc. And, the promotional posts were the most-liked while informative postings were the least effective and drew the fewest comments. So perhaps marketers should follow the examples of brands like Gap's use of Facebook Deals and Dell's use of Twitter to deliver discount codes. Still, inactivity, unresponsiveness and a lack of engagement are the most common characteristics shared by corporate social media pages. Such "anti-social networking," where the corporation creates its fan page and filters all activity, cannot win people's interest and loyalty. As always it comes down to the issue of command and control. Most corporations still have no clue, nor does it appear much desire to experiment and learn, when it comes to opening a productive conversation that will engage their customers. Nor does it appear that public relations agencies are making much headway in the drive toward corporate (client) transparency. Until corporations are willing to align their legal definition as "individuals" with their long-term corporate interests, one should not expect much more of the social brand experience.