Doritos, Chevrolet, Bud Light and Budweiser have seen the largest boost in buzz/positive consumer perceptions from their Super Bowl ads in the days since the game, reports YouGov’s BrandIndex. As of Feb. 13, Doritos is showing the largest gain: Its Buzz score is up by 11.5 points, to 34.3 (from an average score of 22.8 for the Jan. 1-Jan. 21 baseline period that was used by BrandIndex). Also, Doritos leads in gains among both men and parents, who clearly saw the humor in its “Slingshot Baby” ad. Women as a group have been somewhat less amused: Within this segment, Doritos ranks 7th in Buzz gains. BrandIndex’s Buzz score, measured daily, asks a representative sample of the U.S. population: “If you’ve heard anything about the brand in the last two weeks, through advertising, news or word-of-mouth, was it positive or negative?” Scores range from 100 to -100 and are compiled by subtracting negative feedback from positive. A zero score means equal positive and negative feedback. Close behind Doritos for overall buzz gains as of Feb. 13, at #2, is Chevrolet, with its apocalypse-themed Silverado ad. Chevrolet has gained 9 points over its January baseline score, for a score of 23.5. Buzz for Bud Light and Budweiser has surged over the past week, making them the #3 and #4 buzz gainers. One day after the game, Bud Light was #8, and Budweiser was not among the top 10 gainers. Now, however, both brands are showing 8.5-point gains over their January baseline scores, with Bud Light now showing a Buzz score of 23 and Budweiser a score of 24.1. Hyundai and Pepsi MAX rank #5 and #6, with gains of 6 and 5.9 points since the January baseline period (to scores of 21.7 and 8.0,, respectively). Both increased their scores immediately post-game and continue to score well a week later. Bridgestone, now #7 (up 5.8 points to 15.4), worked its way into the top 10 during the week following the game. Kia and Toyota rank #8 and #9, with a 5.6-point gain for the former (to a score of 15.4) and a 4.9-point gain for the latter (to 23.7) since the January baseline period. E*TRADE, which also made the top 10 gainers list in the week following the game, is now showing a gain of 4.9 points since the baseline period, for a Buzz score of 14.1. Seven of the ads that that were among the top 10 gainers in pre-game days (Jan. 22-Feb. 2) fell off that list in the week following the game. The pre-game leaders, in order, were: Volkswagen, General Motors, Acura, Audi, Doritos, GoDaddy.com, Kia, Hyundai, Lexus and Samsung. YouGov notes, for example, that pre-game #3 gainer Acura, which released its Jerry Seinfield/Jay Leno spot online prior to the game, fell to #26 in the week after the game. Similarly, most of the buzz-gain leaders as of one day after the game (Feb. 7) lost or gained momentum in the week that followed. (For instance, Doritos and Toyota switched places.) The top 10 gainers as of Feb. 7, in order, were: Toyota, Hyundai, M&M’s, Pepsi MAX, Acura, Kia, Volkswagen, Bud Light, Doritos and Honda. Chrysler’s Clint Eastwood “Half-Time in America” ad (which was embraced by Democrats and hated by Republicans, according to MarketWatch), didn’t make any of the top 10 buzz-gainers lists. Looking at Buzz-gain leaders among audience segments as of Feb. 13:
Brands win if they create personalized engagement. During the Super Bowl, people weren't just watching ads, they were creating content. According to Adobe, there were 12,223 tweets every second, per Chris Robinson, senior director of product management and advertising solutions at Adobe. Speaking at the 2012 Association of National Advertisers' TV & Everything Video Forum in New York on Thursday, he pointed out that viewers are becoming participants in programming that is driving overlap in media platforms online and off. But he added that marketers are, by and large, “delivering a disjointed experience to consumers." Samsung's consumer electronics division, for its part, is trying to bridge the gap by going beyond storytelling. Ralph Santana, SVP and CMO of Samsung North America, said social networking must be about story sharing. "Volkswagen set the bar in terms of how big and impactful sharing your story can be. But moving forward, we are moving into collaboratively creating stories with consumers." Santana said the goal is to give people an avenue to be more involved and interactive with brands and to give marketers ways to be more dynamic in terms of how they can tell their brands' stories. He said Samsung’s strategy is to create platforms that allow people to create their own stories, and by sharing, allowing them to also tell the brand story. "This enables consumers to put the brand at the center of their experience that can play out on multiple screens, tap into multiple behaviors and platforms in a way that is collaborative and real-time." Samsung is about to launch such a program around the London Olympics, noted Santana -- who said the brand ultimately wants to be a curator by enabling and eliciting a superior sports experience. That, he said, is the point behind the U.S. Olympic Genome Project, which the company will launch in coming weeks. The initial "How Olympic Are You?" phase encourages people to use Samsung's platform to find athletes with whom they share a degree of separation. "The way it starts is a call to action," he said. The effort uses Facebook to let people create a family tree that shows the Olympic athlete connection. The idea is to curate a community that people can create and share. "Ultimately, it enables you as a consumer to experience us as a brand. It allows us to enable a superior consumer fan-centric experience."
Arby’s Bob Kraut, senior vice president of marketing and advertising, presented a strong case at Thursday’s Ana TV & Everything Video Forum for paying attention to how consumers react to advertising campaigns. Last year, after enduring a slump that was caused by a poor economy and confusing marketing and off-message menu choices, the company launched a new campaign devised by BBDO, proclaiming Arby’s as the “Good Mood Food” fast-food restaurant chain. Kraut described the initial effort as “We are the World meets Glee.” The campaign was designed to let consumers know that it was okay to enjoy the chain’s lineup of good-tasting comfort food because it was also relatively wholesome and fresh. But regardless of the nutritional value, the ads were a viral hit, said Kraut. “We noticed that people started re-mixing ‘Good Food Mood’ spots on YouTube,” said Kraut. “A lot of young people latched onto this,” he said, noting that many of the re-mixes featured kids and families adapting their own humorous lyrics into redone spots. The remixes prompted the company to develop a user-generated “casting call” contest for new 30-second spots. Entrants had to explain why Arby’s food put them in a good mood. The winner would receive a $10,000 prize and the opportunity to appear in a new Arby’s commercial. The promotion for the contest was relatively low-key, said Kraut, and limited to online exposure. But the response was overwhelming -- the company received 1,400 submissions, almost five times as many as the company expected. The submissions were posted on a new Web site and generated 1 million views a month. A new mobile Web site drew 16% of all online views. To draw attention to the effort, the company even filmed a “flash mob” spot in New York’s Times Square. A social media component featured a Facebook “Philly Zone Page” and a “Tweet Aquarium” for consumers to comment on a new fish sandwich. Bottom line: the entire cross-platform effort resulted in the highest sales gain the company had seen in a decade. Facebook fans grew over threefold to nearly 800,000, while Twitter followers climbed to over 30,000. And tagline awareness grew 60% in 10 months. And while 80% of the company’s budget is still reserved for TV Kraut said “we wanted to extend the message,” given the online response. While user-generated content is always a risk, Kraut said the company believed the YouTube re-mixes and the response to the contest revealed an untapped reservoir of consumers “who wanted to connect with us.” During the depths of the recession, said Kraut, the company was hit by a “perfect storm” of bad economy, muddled marketing and confusing shift in menu items that led to a double-digit sales plunge. But with a new integrated marketing campaign that engaged consumers, an improving economy and tweaks to the menu, the company appears to be back on track.
People are using their smartphones to take pictures more and more, but they’re still looking toward single-use devices (such as digital SLRs and point-and-shoot cameras) to get the quality photographs they desire to preserve memories. According to a new study from the Consumer Electronics Association, 55% of consumers still consider a point-and-shoot camera as their primary photography device. However, the number of people who considered a smartphone to be their primary photography device has tripled over the past two years to 18%. Capturing spur-of-the-moment shots was a primary driver for those using their smartphones more. According to the study, the average person takes about 35 photos a month with a smartphone, compared with 32 a month with point-and-shoot cameras. However, the image quality afforded by digital SLRs and point-and-shoot cameras still holds sway over people. According to the survey, 93% of respondents said point-and-shoot cameras had the highest digital image quality. “I see the chance for up-selling digital SLRs as dissatisfaction with point-and-shoot cameras and smartphones continues,” says Charles Colby, president of Rockbridge Associates, which conducted the study with the CEA, in a webcast presenting the results. “I think people are starting to take more photos than ever and they’re starting to think about the quality of those pictures.” With 61% of photos taken as spur-of-the-moment shots, consumers liked the portability of smartphones. The study also found that consumers who used smartphones (and to a lesser extent, tablets) were more likely to use sharing applications, such as sending images via SMS services, email, or posting on social networks. Nearly a quarter of consumers (74%) ranked smartphones highest when it came to ease of sharing. “People are starting to go crazy with sharing and it seems to be generating excitement about photography,” Colby said, although he noted that tablets were not catching on in the same manner as smartphones. “People just aren’t taking as many photos with tablets. I don’t think they’re as easy to use as expected.”
People are no longer just watching television programs. They are talking about them online, often on branded social-media campaigns from program sponsors. Still, defining "social TV" could almost seem a Hobson's choice between a redundancy and an oxymoron. Each one of the three participants in a panel on social TV at the Association of National Advertisers’ (ANA) TV & Everything Video forum in New York gave their two sentences worth. The guy who wrote the book (no pun intended, but "literally," as it turns out) said "social TV" ought to be thought of more as a contraction -- the convergence of social media and TV. And Mike Proulx, SVP, and director of digital strategy at Boston-based Hill Holliday and author of the just-released Social TV, said that's how most people see it, as a broad descriptive of connected devices that link TV to the Internet. Fernando Arriola, VP, media and integration at ConAgra Foods, opined that there's nothing inherently new about social TV, or at least TV as social phenomenon. "It's been around forever. It's any of the ways consumers can share or participate at a deeper level with content." Nadine McHugh, VP, global integrated media communications at Colgate-Palmolive, was even more concise, arguing that social TV is simply TV that people want to talk about and engage with. Certainly, the Super Bowl reflected brand interest in turning TV into a mosaic of simultaneous marketing events on different screens designed to engage consumers with brands and with each other. Coca-Cola's polar bears were in the beverage giant's TV spots, but they were simultaneously online during the game, commenting on the game and, in a meta-commentary, on their own ad. Tom Cunniff, VP and director of interactive communications at Combe Incorporated, asked if such multi-screen programs risk splitting people’s attention across devices. McHugh agreed that the risk exists, but said that, if the central idea is engaging, it only deepens engagement and attention. "We have seen it; consumers are already fragmenting their attention. What social TV does is to bring the experience to life so we can capture consumer attention more." She argued that if the story is good and engaging, it will involve consumers, no matter how many screens are telling it. And Arriola cited data from NBCU that show, in fact, the more that people engage with a brand on multiple devices and levels, the more they engage with TV content. "They are the people who tend to be most loyal to a show, and watch it more." But the key is integration of campaigns well before anyone sits down to pen creative, argued McHugh. She said mapping before creating is where marketers can avoid overspending on strategies to make television a social experience. "And we won’t have a choice because consumers will take the conversation on whether we choose to [consider a social strategy] or not. It would be wise to un-silo and do marketing in an integrated way, and create assets before we create the ad.” But think about how to partner with content providers -- because there are ways to do it for free. Arriola asked, probably rhetorically, if marketers really need to pay for it. "We should think about how can we partner with content providers so we don't incur cost," he said, pointing to free promotional mileage that Web content firm Shazam got from being integral to a Pillsbury augmented reality campaign last year. Summing up, Proulx suggested it is probably best -- in terms of changing strategy and entrenched silo-focused culture at companies and agencies -- to think of TV as new media. "If you believe in that premise, then you need a new planning model for TV. Gone must be the days of TV people and digital people. We have to work together, in unison, at same time, from the get-go."
Because of the national holiday on Feb. 20, Marketing Daily will not be published. Enjoy your time off, and we’ll see you back here on Tuesday. --Nina Lentini, editor
Apple recently unveiled two new products that are available for free to Apple customers: the media-rich interactive iBook Textbook format and the iBooks Authoring Tool for creating interactive iBooks. This new digital publishing innovation -- which has been described as “the next chapter in learning” -- and its authoring tool will be a valuable asset for companies and sales representatives that want to use the iPad to transform their rep-to-customer communications. With Apple’s new interactive iBook format, ebooks look more like their media-rich cousins, the magazines and interactive Web sites. Content authors can create an interactive iBook with a nearly unlimited number of rich media elements, ranging from slide shows to full videos and even quizzes. Any marketer whose audience uses an iPad now has the ability to place content easily into their hands. New Opportunities for Marketers Apple’s latest innovation offers the most immediate benefit to small and mid-tier companies and brands that desire high-quality, rich-media presentations, but are less concerned with activity and usage tracking than larger companies or brands. A well-designed interactive iBook can easily take the place of the PDF or PPT (which can be embedded within an iBook) and provide marketers with a cost-effective, engaging alternative to deploying static content. iBooks offer an interaction with the page that can be used by sales reps to easily navigate the multi-touch interface with a finger swipe or by using the thumbnail navigation at the bottom of both the portrait and landscape layouts. Content is displayed in a number of interactive formats -- including rotatable 3D objects, interactive images, videos, interactive galleries, note-taking for learning, and quizzes and surveys. iBooks offer a unique opportunity for pharmaceutical sales reps, who can now allow physicians to interact with the iBook’s content as it comes alive on the screen in front of them. While the textbook format is an important development for those who deliver education and learning content on the iPad, the more important tool for marketers is the new iBook Authoring app for Mac. This free app provides authoring and publishing support for use in creating and distributing interactive multimedia content to the iPad. Available as a Mac App download, the capabilities of the authoring tool can easily extend beyond textbooks and classroom learning to an in-person iPad sales presentation. This free authoring tool is a WYSIWYG document editor that includes interactive widgets for the creation or embedding of a number of content types including HTML5, Video, Interactive Graphics, and Quizzes. Still, there is no word on the ability to include tracking tags in the page content or the ability of content to directly interact with the Web for reporting or real-time tracking, and engagement is clearly optimized for a landscape layout. Implications for Marketers Stand-alone content is easily deployed via email or Web site download -- but until now, has been limited to the use of static PDF or PPT. In the pharmaceutical world, for example, the rep-to-physician experience often suffers from poor usability, limited in-call navigation, and an inability to provide performance metrics. Now, with the launch of the iBooks Authoring Tool, small- to mid-sized companies and brands can arm their sales teams with high-quality, rich, interactive brand content for a fraction of the time and cost that it has taken in the past. The ability to compete with larger, better-funded brands gives them one more reason to quickly and effectively implement iPad-based sales presentations with rich multimedia content across all of their brands. Smaller companies and brands are not the only ones that will benefit from these new tools. Larger brands and companies that are willing to overlook potential limitations -- like lack of in-piece metrics or call data -- can cost-effectively manage content creation across the enterprise by producing templates and guidance to create rich, interactive content on an approved platform, regardless of who is creating the content. Marketers and sales forces of all sizes should take note: although there are many ways to implement interactive digital content on an iPad for a sales rep to deliver, this new set of easy-to-use (and free) tools may have significant impact beyond the niche brand or category. By putting rich multimedia content within reach of all, Apple may have just helped to level the playing field across all companies and sales forces, regardless of size or budget.