Lay’s Potato Chips is teaming up with actress Eva Longoria and Iron Chef Michael Symon to invite consumers to create the next great potato chip flavor. The contest invites fans to submit their potato chip flavor ideas for the chance to win $1 million in grand prize money or one percent of their flavor's 2013 net sales (whichever is higher). From now until Oct. 6, consumers can share their flavor inspirations on the Lay's Facebook page, with the winning flavor being revealed in 2013, the year Lay's celebrates its 75-year anniversary. Consumers can also enter the contest via cell phone by texting FLAVOR to CHIPS (24477). To submit a suggestion, fans will be asked to provide their name, flavor name, up to three possible ingredients and a 140-character description or inspiration for their flavor. The "Do Us A Flavor" contest launched July 20 in Times Square at the first-ever Lay's brand flavor store. Visitors can sample up to 20 existing Lay's flavors. Actress and restaurateur Eva Longoria, and celebrity chef and restaurateur Michael Symon were on hand for the launch. Longoria and Symon will be part of a judging panel made up of chefs, foodies and flavor experts who will narrow down the contest submissions to three finalist flavors. In addition, the two will appear in national television and online advertising, as well as a retail marketing campaign to support the contest. Longoria is a cookbook author, philanthropist and the owner of Beso eateries in Los Angeles and Las Vegas known for their eclectic menu of colorful and tasty dishes from around the world. Originally from Cleveland, Symon is the current co-host of the ABC daytime talk show "The Chew" and appears on the Food Network's "Iron Chef America" and Cooking Channel's "Symon's Suppers." He is also the owner of four award-winning restaurants: Lola, Lolita, Roast and B Spot, as well as the recently opened Bar Symon inside Pittsburgh International Airport. Lay’s is promoting the contest on Facebook, where consumers can select their favorite flavors by clicking an "I'd Eat That" button (rather than the Facebook Like button). They can then share their voting activity back to the Facebook community. Consumers in need of additional inspiration can use Chef Michael Symon's "Flavorizer" app, which scans the individual's Facebook timeline to recommend ingredients that are most unique to him or her. Three finalist flavors will be fully developed by Frito-Lay's culinary experts and unveiled in early 2013. Then, it will be up to fans to vote for the finalist flavor they love most with the winning flavor being revealed in May 2013. The two runner-up finalists will each win $50,000 in prize money, with the grand prize winner taking home $1 million or one percent of the 2013 net sales of the winning flavor (whichever is higher).
Any parent who owns a tablet knows how much kids love them. But many of those parents also know that turning over a high-end electronic device to a toddler is almost inviting trouble. Enter Nabi, an Android-powered tablet created especially for kids, with a special soft case designed to survive small drops and pre-loaded with apps specifically designed for kids and safe Web-browsing features. The device, which was introduced last year, is launching its first advertising campaign via mOcean this week. “There are a lot of tablets on the market, but there aren’t many that are made for kids that are adult grade tablets,” Mike Braue, director of client services, consumer brands at mOcean, tells Marketing Daily. “This is for kids who want what their parents have in terms of an Apple-type experience.” A television commercial in the campaign depicts the wonder and potential a tablet can open up for children. A boy walks down a country path holding the hand of an astronaut in a space suit, another faces off against a Shaolin warrior, and a girl assists in a surgical operation with a stuffed bunny. “To you, it’s a tablet,” says a woman’s voiceover. “To them, it’s the world.” “We wanted to open a dialogue with moms to let her know this is a tool that can help her enrich her kids’ lives,” Braue says. “This is an experience that you can share with your kids and better monitor what they’re doing.” To create the spot, Braue and mOcean drew upon the agency’s history of creating movie trailers for Disney and other studios to craft a story that appeals to both kids and parents alike, he says. “The idea is that this is something that is an entertaining experience. It wasn’t like telling the story with a bunch of screen grabs. It was more about the world you’re transported to, and we understand how to tell a story that is non-traditional and allows you to escape.” Though the spot targets moms, it will be running on kid-oriented cable networks such as Nickelodeon, Sprout and Disney XD during the day (as well as some more mom-specific programming in the evenings). “We’re running on kids media because it’s an efficient way to reach moms,” Braue says. Braue notes that the Nabi is a full-fledged, Android-powered tablet akin to a Kindle Fire and not a “kidified” product. In the product’s first year last year, it sold out during the holiday season, he says. But rather than wait for the holiday advertising to begin this year, the brand opted to launch an advertising campaign this summer to take advantage of the brand’s first-mover status in the category. “There’s a lot of competition from the big tablet makers that’s right around the corner,” Braue says. “We have word of some of that competition that’s coming and we want to make sure that we’re first to market with a tablet of this caliber.”
Groupon- and LivingSocial-type, just-in-time daily deal sites are growing like blue plate specials, but, until now, there has been no such Web-shopping service devoted to the most Web-savvy, most affluent, well-travelled and impulse-buying consumers: gay men. A new site, DirectMale.com, hopes to get first-mover advantage. The Washington, D.C.-based online voucher company, which launched just under a month ago, is selling upscale goods and services featuring local and national offers from bars, clubs, restaurants, spas, salons, travel, hotels, cruises and much more. While the Direct Male site is new, the service isn't. The 20-year-old company actually started as a direct-mail business with a 100,000-person opt-in database, where participating households got "card decks" in their mailboxes, with offers from the likes of Jim Beam Brands, the National Gay and Lesbian Travel Association, British Airways and GlaxoSmithKline. "We are the first national player in this space," says founder and CEO Andrew Isen. "Last summer, when we began to put everything together, we thought we would do it local but the gay male market is so strong that we opted to go nationally out of the bag." He says the niche market, because of the liquidity of its population and its willingness to part with cash for the right products, has become a much-coveted segment in the last two decades. "And because gay men are brand loyal, [marketers] know the value of targeting this segment." Isen says that rather than focus on deals-of-the-day the site will have a regular rotation of timed offers. Isen says they are much more affluent than the general market, with the gay male consumer earning nearly double the average household income with 70% more disposable income. The company says that in the U.S. there are about 12.3 million gay men over the age of 18, and 93% of them are active online consumers. He says among products and services that are popular with gay men -- bespoke clothing that would otherwise be hard to find, skin care, and personalized household products and apparel, for example -- travel is one of the biggest. "We are offering, for example, a trip to a gay-friendly resort in Nicaragua. Travel is one of the biggest items and categories in the gay segment. And it always has been." He points out that roughly 80% of gay men have passports, which is double national average. They travel substantially more than any other niche; the International Gay and Lesbian Travel Association has 3,000 members. "Today, every airline and hotel chain has gay-specific services. Winn Las Vegas, for example, has a concierge dedicated to gay clientele." Per Isen, gay men are, per capita, on the Internet more than any other niche segment. Direct Male is mobile optimized. "The newest studies show that gay male consumers -- over 40% -- will only use mobile smart devices to make web purchases. They will only use smartphones or tablets."
The next generation takes the idea of digital nativism a step further. A lot of preschoolers today can do the multi-screen thing by the time they're three. Will marketers be ready for them when they hit school age, and will they be ready for school and the things that come with it, like books? A new study from Ipsos MediaCT, “LMX Family,” conducted among 2,700 U.S. families -- 700 with preschoolers and the rest with kids 6-12 years old -- shows that parents are bringing digital devices to kids at younger ages, and that kids at young ages are savvy about smartphones, tablets, laptops and games, and prefer them over traditional media and modes of playing and connecting. Sixty-nine percent of LMX Family respondents said they have an Internet-capable cell phone; a third have tablets, which is up from 10% last year. A quarter have eReaders, up from 17% last year. None last year had an Internet-enabled appliance. This year, 8% of respondents do. At an event on the findings, Donna Sabino, who leads the Kids & Family Center of Excellence at Ipsos MediaCT, said the very presence of kids gives parents the push to make tech purchases, as many see it as an educational investment. The study, for example, found that 18% of families with kids between 6 and 12 plan on buying an iPad 3 in the next year. By contrast, only 7% of child-free people plan to do so. LMX Family data show that in preschoolers’ homes there are more laptops, consoles, gaming devices, and smartphones than in homes where kids are six and older. The study found, for example, that among preschoolers' households, 83% reported having laptops; 37% hand-held gaming devices; 76% consoles; and 73% Internet-enabled mobile devices. In households where kids are between 6 and 12 years of age, those numbers are 79%, 22%, 60% and 67%, respectively. "Gen Y parents are bringing the devices into the house and introducing the youngest kids to them," said Sabino. She added that half of preschoolers' parents let them use their tablets. "We are seeing a change in behavior as a result of this. We see growth in VOD, games, and videos on phones and tablets concurrent with declines in outdoor playing and playing with traditional toys. And traditional activities associated with childhood are becoming digitally supported." Indeed, the study found that fewer kids than in 2011 are playing with toys, playing outside, watching DVD's, watching live TV and reading a book or magazine. The study also finds that social media is also a hockey-stick graph as kids get older: while 16% of 6- to 8-year-olds have a profile page on a social network, per the study, over half of 11-year-olds have one, and 94% of all kids with profile pages have one on Facebook. Eighty-three percent of parents monitor their children's privacy settings on their networks, and 78% are their kids' friends on the kids' social network, per Sabino, who said the favorite digital activities for kids are playing games (28%), socializing (24%), watching their favorite TV show (19%); and going to a favorite web site (9%), but that the high ranking for gaming is driven by boys. "Girls are socially oriented, so the top online activity for girls is connecting with people," she said. Sabino asked presentation attendees what they would imagine kids would want to have with them on a (digitally connected) desert island. The top vote was a mobile phone. But the choice among the biggest group of kids was a laptop. And number two was TV, followed by gaming console (boys again) and last was a smartphone, with only 11% of kids choosing that. Cara Berman, SVP of Mediavest USA, said that the company is trying to create experiences that connect with kids in the digital environments in which they play. "Whether it's gaming platforms with media partner or experiences." An example of physical/digital integration is "NBA Baller Beats", billed as the first full-body motion-based NBA video game with a real (Spalding) basketball. The game, which debuted at the Electronic Entertainment Expo in Los Angeles last month and goes on sale this fall, sets real-ball-handling skills like dribbling, fakes crossovers, and around-the-world to licensed tracks from different genres. "It shows that any product can become tech savvy," said Larissa Faw, a Forbes writer. But she also said these kinds of hybrid efforts can fail, as with Hasbro's Twister dance with Britney spears, where the Twister game is packaged with a speaker device pre-loaded with Spears' songs and a disco ball with lights. "It would have been cool in the Nineties but there are so many ways to use newer technology to make Twister cool." Berman said advertising is difficult when kids are in the audience because they know early on when a commercial comes on. "You have to provide value and not just to a child but to parents, too, whether it's educational or teaching a new skill." She said the other challenge is measurement. "Overall, we are putting out lots of content and trying to measure on the back end on brand awareness, sales and brand health."
Sales of prepared foods and ready-to-eat foods at retail will reach $32.45 billion in 2012, up 7.5% from 2011, according to Packaged Facts. The prepared foods retail net extends across a wide number of retail formats, but supermarkets command majority share. Supermarkets garner 60% of prepared foods purchase visits, trailed by Walmart (15%) and convenience stores (12%), according to “Prepared Foods and Ready-to-Eat Foods at Retail,” a just-released report from Rockville, Md.-based Packaged Facts. The market for store-made meals and prepared foods -- which include rotisserie or fried chicken, hot pizza, hot food bars with Asian-style entrees, sushi bars, deli sandwiches, and soup and salad bars -- is doing well in this period of economic doldrums. That’s partly because the cost of meals are not on par with fast food and family restaurant options -- they beat them, making them accessible to a wide range of household incomes. Strong, high-quality store-brand portfolios are a significant advantage for prepared foods retailers in keeping the price points of prepared foods down, and part of the winning formula. Retailers such as Costco, Kroger, Safeway and SUPERVALU continue to grow and leverage their private-label products in conjunction with developing their foodservice programs, according to the report. Whole Foods has particularly been a trendsetter in educating customers on health, food and diet. Its Health Starts Here program, Wellness Clubs and Whole Kids Foundation not only serve to educate Whole Foods customers, they also build customer relationships and goodwill, according to the report. Most convenience store foodservice platforms, on the other hand, still operate under the assumption that the people buying them do not want to put health concerns first. According to Packaged Facts, this ignores the fact that millions of consumers do want to eat healthier fare, and many might appreciate a tasty but healthy option just at the point when impulse and efficiency directs them to a convenience store. And serving consumers is not just about providing quality, cost-effective, convenient, and healthful foods, according to David Sprinkle, publisher of Packaged Facts. It’s also about providing an atmosphere that draws people in. This is why more and more supermarket operators are integrating “neighborhood” messaging into their strategies, and a reason that big-box players such as Walmart are experimenting with smaller-box formats, he says.
My new word is zettabyte, which the Jedi knights at mashable.com define as the equivalent of all the data created and stored online from the year dot through 2010. The people who think of visual metaphors say we can think of one zettabyte as the Great Wall Of China. Now think of this: that wall of data doubled in 2011. And word is that it will grow by a factor of 30 by 2015. The sheer volume of data underscores a truth that we're all wrestling with: our behaviors have simply changed. We create -- and depend on-- data in ways that defy all previous human experience. It's one thing to say I no longer listen to the radio to find out the weather... What's weird is that I no longer even look out the window. I can find temperature, humidity, and thunderstorm predictions more quickly, easily and accurately on my iPad. We have retrained our frontal cortex (and various other mental lobes) to book our vacations, shop for shoes and manage our money. We're acting on our digital dreams. And by the way, my dreams are not the same as yours (with the possible exception of the seaside villa in the Cinque Terre). How do I know? Because my iPad, and my iPhone, are populated with a unique set of bookmarks, apps and cookies. They have become the portal through which I interact with the world, just as yours have for you. Our choice of digital tools and devices governs our interactions with the world. So how to get someone to spare a thought for us marketers? It's about changing behaviors. For years, marketers have focused on changing emotions in order to change behaviors (if this hamburger makes you hungry, maybe you’ll buy it!). In fact, most of us are still working with the emotionally driven AIDA model (awareness-interest-desire-action), invented at the dawn of modern advertising in 1898 by early ad-man E. St. Elmo Lewis, the first president of the ad industry's oldest trade association, the ANA. (Total aside: the opera "Aida," by Giuseppe Verdi, premiered in Cairo a generation earlier, in 1871.) But maybe something has changed in the intervening 100+ years. In a recent column, Jane Brody quotes Suzanne C. Segerstrom, a professor of psychology at the University of Kentucky, who says behavior is actually easier to change than emotions. More evidence of this comes from studies of health behaviors that show that we’re capable of adopting new habits long before we feel the satisfaction of doing something new. So which behaviors can we leverage for smarter, more strategic marketing? We’ve come up with four for the digital era:
A driver with an automatic transmission has made her choice. What goes on under the hood — not the person behind the wheel — is going to decide how the car will move forward. That’s the way it is for digital marketers and ad agencies, with the whole business built around all systems firing at once, with millions of advertising decisions and transactions that are made almost instantaneously. Every day, for example, Redwood City, Calif.-based Turn, the demand-side platform (DSP) provider, makes “over 30 billion advertising decisions, analyzes over 1.5 trillion customer attributes and provides instant access to billions of digital advertising impressions.” So in that ultra-streamlined advertising vehicle, is there room for custom-buying?Yes, says Joanna O’Connell, senior analyst for interactive media at Forrester Research. But in “The Future of Digital Media Buying,” a recent analysis, she first takes us on one last trip down Memory Lane while at the same time constructing figurative Road Closed barriers to make sure nobody goes back there. The old-style traditional media planning process, she says, depends on things like securing the lowest cpms and relying on old-style relationships between planners and buyers. “Unfortunately,” she notes, “the tent poles of the traditional media-planning process — which serve models like tv-buying just fine — don’t translate effectively in the digital environment, but it’s widespread nonetheless.”Digital is faster and nimbler and far more complex, and ever morphing into the next thing, where even two years is an eternity. That makes it seem almost impossible for a marketer or advertiser to customize their approach.“The most obvious answer is that you make sure both hands are talking to each other,” on the creative side and the programmatic side, O’Connell says. “For example, say you’re going to run a big, splashy unit on a very high reach or important media property. Well, you’d want programmatic people to know that’s happening, including the search folks, so that they can do whatever they think is appropriate. “I had a travel marketer give me an example: She was saying I want my dsp to be looped into the fact that I’m going to run a home-page placement on Yahoo because that will influence what they do from a bidding standpoint. That’s bringing some really smart and holistic thinking to how you make brand experience — or bespoke stuff — and programmatic work together.”Meshing the need for dsp with the need for customization is part of what went into MediaMath’s acquisition of Adroit in 2010. MediaMath provides advertisers with that broad coverage of the digital terrain; Adroit provides the crucial customizations in various markets. The business of customizing digital buys is only going to get bigger. Turn, for one, is selling its expertise at parsing online audiences and taking its message out, probably more broadly than its own data would suggest is necessary. It bought its first tv commercial advertising on the season finale of Mad Men, enacting a Madison Avenue-ish scene in which a hot ’60s couple locks in an amorous embrace behind an office door. Suddenly the door swings open to reveal the jilted wife, who pulls a pistol and takes aim. “In 10 milliseconds, Turn delivers your ad to all the right online audiences with deadly accuracy,” the voiceover intones, as the bullet spins toward its target in slo-mo. “Never second-guess a decision — at least not a business one.” Similar to Turn, one of the real leaders in customizing is Adnetik’s aim (Audience Investment Management), which creates custom audience-targeting solutions. aim can analyze the quality of a Web site based on at least 35 different attributes ranging from the quality of its content to its visual integrity — attractive Web sites retain visitors. From that data analysis, aim can help customize where a client’s ads should go, and even where on a Web page it should be placed within the Web site. The company’s technology can place a numerical value that can sort through 6,500 attributes, grading them best to worst, based on the advertiser’s needs. That can tell individual advertisers where they want to be. “Better yet,” says Ken Berquist, Adnetik senior vice president for business development, “it can tell them where they don’t want to be.” Avoiding wasted ad spends probably ranks as high as finding the right places — and prevents an advertiser from ultimate disappointment. Berquist says dsps augmented by aim-like data cut to the chase, and he thinks larger companies are beginning to realize that programmatic buying with customization overlays allows them to dramatically pinpoint their messages. “Advertising agencies don’t provide that added value,” he says. Giant companies often have internal criteria for targeting advertising that they may not want anyone — including ad agencies — to discover.Brian Werner, associate media director for Razorfish’s health division, says dsps can only take an ad buyer so far, like making sure people in the right demographic — generally 35 and over — can see a message. But which message? Razorfish clients try to attract consumers with one set of messages, and doctors, nurses and other caregivers with totally different messages. It’s there that Razorfish uses customization tools that dsps and trading desks can’t always provide.“We think about customization to reach the right target in very specific ways,” Werner explains. “For example, we know that if somebody’s been to our site, we shouldn’t show them an ad directing them to our site the next time we see them. We don’t want to say, ‘Hey, go to our site,’ because we know they’ve already been there. So the next ad should be more appropriate to them, based on our knowledge. And because of digital we can do all of that. We can layer on additional information we know about them. We’ve been able to do this for a while. For a long time now we’ve been pushing our clients to fully embrace that capability.”Customization also lets clients play closer to the vest. It seems to keep ad-buy decisions grounded in fact, not based on external factors or sentimentality. O’Connell points out that “traditional” display-media planning relied on buying clout and lowest-price negotiations, and “the depth of the relationship between planners and salespeople.” Then, she says, “people drove the display-buying machine, from negotiation, to management of insertion orders, to optimization, to reporting.” But that’s impossible in any successful online digital marketing operation. “It’s super messy right now, and marketers are being inundated by vendors,” O’Connell says. “But honestly, that’s nothing new in digital media. Certainly in the 10 years or so that I’ve worked as a planner and buyer at an agency, I went from having five ad networks call on me to having 150 ad networks calling on me. And they all looked the same. It’s a very fragmented ecosystem. But there are also some pretty deep changes going on and that’s tough. It’s complicated.” How complicated? So much so that the Forrester report contains this sweet but unsettling subhead to one section: “Understanding the Acronyms Is the First Step to Recognizing the Opportunity.” The page that follows contains an extraordinary graphic created for the investment bank Luma Partners, which is a crazy-quilt pastiche of logos from dozens of digital firms all involved in helping move the advertiser to the audience, and the very specific types of products they sell. All of that speaks to a digital ad model that is awash not just with players, but with new ways of playing. Ben Kneen, who is director of ad solutions for webmd.com and operates a Web site, adopsinsider.com, which gives news and advice about the burgeoning digital ad world, agrees that the traditional ad-buying atmosphere has changed, and, he says, hallelujah for that. “You want to work with people you like, and it’s still very much a relationship-driven business,” he says. “But there’s a lot more substance behind it and you’ve got to deliver. I don’t think business is getting done because people are buying each other expensive lunches at the Four Seasons. People don’t have time to take these long lunches and go to spas.” While that you-take-me-golfing-if-I-buy-through-your-company mentality has evaporated, the personal touch still exists in an industry run on ad networks, exchanges and dsps, even if it’s measured in billions of impressions calculated in split seconds. It’s found in the cadre of professionals who know the product they’re selling online and know the customers they’re looking for, he says. That seems to be the point O’Connell makes in her report — and that dsps and other sophisticated programmatic providers make to clients. “There is a lot of room for operational efficiencies and a lot of opportunity to use things like algorithms to make real-time decisions,” she says. “Honestly, what I think that does is create more room in the human brain to be strategic. You can spend that extra hour you freed up meeting with the creative team brainstorming on the most interesting, innovative idea you both can think of and how you can apply it in a digital media environment. Not everybody has time for that right now.” In the end, maybe customization is baked into effective digital advertising; it just takes the right people to do it right. “From an ROI perspective, there is so much more value in hiring people who know what they are doing in this space than being on the fastest, best technology platform,” Kneen says. “Just because the technology is more complex doesn’t mean there’s a lot of payoff, in terms of additional value to the marketer. Just because the technology can slice and dice people in new ways doesn’t mean that all of a sudden you’re convincing 50 percent more people to buy something. The talent is really what is in short supply. That’s what’s more difficult to get a handle on — finding the right people who know how to use thesevtools