Good students know research matters. And for its new youth-skewing line of soups, "Campbell's Go," the company has done its research, about 18 months’ worth (enough time for a course-loader to earn a Masters) to get insights around what 20- and 30-somethings want in life and food. And it's not a can of chicken Manhandler. It's flavor mashups like Creamy Red Pepper With Smoked Gouda, and Chicken Quinoa with Poblano Chilies -- two of the six soups under the new "Go" umbrella designed to appeal to peripatetic, multicultural young adults who grew up eating diverse cuisine. The company is hitting target markets to tout the pouch-based soups with "communal table" tasting events (think Pain Quotidien) with influencers and press. At one such program in New York’s Soho on Tuesday, Darren Serrao, general manager of innovation and new business development for the company, explained that the new line of soups also reflects a major shift since Denise Morrison became CEO a year and a half ago. "From that point, we started to do things differently than most CPG companies. We created breakthrough teams comprising smaller, dedicated work groups -- each one autonomous, self-directed and cross-functional," he said. Each comprises a marketer, researcher, R&D person, a chef and a packaging engineer. "While most companies start with ideation around a product, we set out to solve problems, spending lots of time with consumers in the process." Thus, he said, the company didn't set out to make new soups, but to address the fact that younger consumers love convenient meal options, but not so much purchasing it in grocery stores. Campbell's tested some 50 different flavor profiles, and did ethnographic research in "hipster market hubs" -- Austin, Texas, Portland, Ore., London and Washington, D.C., then middle-America cities like San Antonio, Des Moines, Iowa, Springfield, Ill. and Little Rock, Ark., per Charles Vila, VP, customer and consumer insights. "These are restless spirits with adventurous tastes," he said. "They grew up on sushi -- Mexican food, for example. It's not 'ethnic cuisine' to them." The company is promoting the new sku entirely online, per Nelson Warley, senior brand manager. "This is a highly social audience," he said, explaining that the company partnered with music, humor sites, and gaming platforms. Campbell tapped BuzzFeed to develop custom Campbell's Go posts; with Funny or Die, including around Don Cheadle's "Captain Planet" series; and Spotify, where consumers can create custom playlists built off the persona of the soups (the other four soups are Coconut Curry with Chicken and Shiitake Mushrooms, Spicy Chorizo and Pulled Chicken with Black Beans, Golden Lentil with Madras Curry, Moroccan Style Chicken with Chickpeas); and with "Angry Birds: Star Wars." All programs involve a coupon offer to drive consumers to Campbell Go's Facebook and Tumblr pages. Retailers are doing sampling programs at night, peak Millennial shopping hours. Serrao said the company communicates to consumers on social media directly through the personality archetypes for each soup, which are featured on the soup pouches, and appear in humorous videos.
The "results may vary" disclaimer applies when it comes to mobile strategies for auto shoppers. A new study by mobile-local ad network xAd and call measurement company Telmetrics, based on Nielsen data, shows a lot of variation in how shoppers use mobile devices. But the study makes a few generalizations: 68% of auto shoppers using mobile devices to shop are Caucasian; 64% are male; and 35% have a household income from $50,000 to $100,000. And there are sub-categories: the slightly higher-income cohort that does its searching around general auto information and manufacturer sites; non-Caucasian deal hunters with average incomes of $35,000 to $50,000, who spend the majority of time at general auto information sites and manufacturer sites; circumstantial and emergency users, typically Caucasian females who depend on quick access to Auto info via search and familiar brand properties; and gear heads who are typically African American males, ages 25-54 with an annual income of $100,000 to $150,000. But there are big variations in how consumers use mobile in their hunt for wheels. The study says about half of all mobile auto searchers make a purchase and slightly fewer want to do the buy that day. The study says proximity, right fit and price are the most important factors. And while smartphone users tend to want to buy a vehicle within the hour, tablet searchers are less impulsive. The firms says that of the 15% of mobile consumers conducting mobile Auto searches, fewer than one percent are using apps. Rather, mobile versions of research sites like KBB.com, AutoTrader.com and edmunds.com are the most popular. The takeaway: don't make apps for bottom-funnel consumers. “Automotive mobile marketers should recognize auto searchers’ preference for mobile websites over apps,” said Bill Dinan, president of Telmetrics. “Also, understanding the role of location – specifically the importance of local driving distance – is essential to harnessing the 65% undecided mobile Auto audience and their purchasing power.” Forty-four percent of auto searchers looked up a business location or directions, and 43% looked up pricing info or compared prices; 36% looked for a business phone number and/or called the business. Thirty-five percent of mobile auto searches involved people who know exactly what car they want. Tablet users are much more familiar with the brand they want before conducting a search.
Ahead of its annual year-end “Brand of the Year” list -- the brands in 15 categories that pulled the highest average TV ad scores for the year -- Ace Metrix has this year released a “watch list” of the five brands with the highest scores year-to-date as of Nov. 1. To qualify for contention, a brand has to have aired at least five TV ads within the year. Some notable trends among the front-runners: *Restaurants are leading the pack. All five of the top restaurant/QSR category brands year-to-date (YTD) -- Applebee’s, Baskin-Robbins, Longhorn Steakhouse, Olive Garden and Outback – have average Ace scores in the 600’s (specific scores won’t be released until year-end). That’s impressive even by the standards of this category, which has a high average score (571, YTD 2012) compared to many other categories. Casual-dining restaurant brand ads have performed particularly well this year, thanks to consumers perceiving these venues as a small, affordable luxury as economic recovery continues (many of these ads stress value, along with taste/quality, as a key or primary selling point), notes Ace Metrix CEO Peter Daboll. *Some of the biggest beer and soft drink brands are absent. Three of the alcoholic beverage front-runners are beer brands, but brands like Budweiser, Miller and Coors are not among them. Instead, the front-runners are Blue Moon, Heineken and Samuel Adams – along with spirits brands Jack Daniel’s and Maker’s Mark. (Last year’s most effective ads in this category included Budweiser, Bud Light, Miller Lite and Coors Light.) The average YTD 2012 Ace score for alcoholic beverages is 481. In the non-alcoholic beverages category (average YTD Ace score: 547), the front-runners include Coca-Cola and Mountain Dew, but not other big soft drink brands like Pepsi and Dr Pepper. Instead, three of the top five are non-soft drinks: Ocean Spray, Tropicana and Gatorade. *Tech brand influence is shifting toward mobile/tablets. Last year, technology category Ace-score advertising leaders included Apple hardware and Microsoft hardware/software, reflecting the Mac-versus-PC battle. This year, those products aren’t among the YTD front runners. Instead, the five tech-ad leaders are Apple’s iPhone (despite Samsung having run three times as many ads for it mobile phones in 2012); Samsung’s hardware (its Galaxy Note tablets have so far trumped the iPad on Ace scores); Samsung’s television brands; Google (for its Nexus 7 tablet); and PlayStation. Front-runners on the “watch list” in other categories YTD include: *Candies and snacks: Hershey’s, M&M’s, Orville Redenbacher’s, Pepperidge Farm and Reese’s. (Average YTD category Ace score: 558.) *Financial: CapitalOne, Citibank, E*Trade, Ameritrade and Visa. (Average YTD category Ace score: 483.) *General business: Ad Council, AT&T, GE, Panasonic and Procter & Gamble/P&G. (Average YTD category Ace score: 566.) *Household: Bounty, Downy, Febreze, Scrubbing Bubbles and Swiffer. (Average YTD category Ace score: 560.) *Insurance: Allstate, Farmers, Liberty Mutual, Nationwide and State Farm. (Average YTD category Ace score: 509.) *Luxury auto: Acura, BMW, Buick, Cadillac and Infinity. (Average YTD category Ace score: 552.) *Non-luxury auto: Chevrolet, Chrysler, Ford, Subaru and Volkswagen. (Average YTD category Ace score: 529.) *Packaged foods: Campbell’s, Oscar Mayer, Pillsbury, Progresso and Special K. (Average YTD category Ace score: 553.) *Personal care: Crest, Dove, Dr. Scholl’s, Listerine and Old Spice. (Average YTD category Ace score: 501.) *Retail: Best Buy, The Home Depot, Lowe’s, Victoria’s Secret and Walgreens. (Average YTD category Ace score: 514.) *Telecommunications: AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile, Verizon and XFinity. (Average YTD category Ace score: 524.)
BMO Harris Bank is launching a campaign that aims to communicate that the bank offers customers practical answers to life's financial questions. "Our customers want the right guidance at the right moment in their lives,” said Mark Furlong, president and CEO, Chicago-based BMO Harris Bank, in a release. Developed in partnership with Y&R Midwest, the effort includes four 30-second television spots, print, digital, in-branch and outdoor advertising. The campaign focuses on the bank’s goal of being a partner that delivers great customer service, said Justine Fedak, senior vice president, brand, advertising, and sponsorships for BMO Harris Bank. "While we have continued to grow as an organization, our commitment to customers has never been stronger and our approach to advertising reflects the connections with customers we make every single day,” Fedak says. In one spot, called “Paycheck,” a young executive gets his first paycheck, which his older co-worker ruefully tells him “it’s your first of many.” He daydreams big about all he can do with his newfound cash, such as buying a big-screen TV, custom suits and fancy meals. Then a paper airplane hits him in the head and he is jolted back to reality. He unfolds the paper, which says: “Whoa, one thing at a time.” He nods his head in agreement as the voiceover concludes: “Every check account should come with a little guidance. BMO Harris Bank.” BMO Harris is different than most bank brands in that its customers have an emotional connection -- not only with their banker, but with the bank, says Kary McIlwain, president of Y&R Midwest. “And that connection comes from being a bank that offers its customers guidance beyond just products,” McIlwain says. “These spots reflect the straightforward personality of the BMO Harris brand, yet show how the bank surprises and delights customers.” BMO Harris Bank N.A. has over 600 branches and approximately 1,300 ATMs in Illinois, Wisconsin, Indiana, Kansas, Missouri, Minnesota, Nevada, Arizona and Florida.
Not content with letting Bullseye the Dog tower over a village of tiny people, Godzilla style, Target is rolling out its second holiday campaign: An invisible singing duo who steer shoppers to the biggest bargains. The additional seasonal campaign features a “superpumped” Target Deals Duet, and in its holiday blog, refers to them as “livelier Jiminy Crickets -- a shopping conscience steering you in the right direction.” While the actors in the spots can’t see them, “the quirky singing-and-saving duo shines a light on savings and appears at moments when guests are making their most important gift-giving decisions,” a Target spokesperson tells Marketing Daily, via email. There’s even a spot dedicated to the industry’s buzzword of the season: “Self-gifting.” (Instead of fa-la-la-la, they sing, “Buy one for me, and one for you-you-you.”) The spokesperson says the two efforts, both created by 72andSunny, combine to form “a comprehensive holiday marketing campaign that captures imagination and truly delivers the emotion -- the joy -- that will get guests excited.” He adds that the chain has officially retired the Christmas Champ campaign, a series of long-running spots featuring a maniacal blonde in a red sweatsuit, training for her shopping marathon. It looks like Target’s timing is spot-on. A new survey from the National Retail Federation finds that Americans are indeed more enthusiastic about shopping this year, with 52.8% already out there buying, compared with 51.4% at this time last year. And there are signs that shoppers intend to splurge more; some 23% plan to buy someone jewelry, for example, the highest since 2007. Last month, the NRF reported that it expects 60% of Americans to buy themselves a present this season -- the highest self-gifting has ever scored in its 10-year survey. On average, the survey, conducted for the NRF by BIGInsight, reports that self-gifters will spend an average of $140 on their own presents.
I wasn’t expecting to wake up on the morning after Election Day feeling refreshed and ready to face the day. Like many nail-biting Americans, I too had consumed “pundit porridge” and was fully prepared, stiff drink in hand, set for a long night of dimpled chads, hanging chads, pregnant chads, stuck levers, recounts, court battles, and computer voting systems that did not compute. Does anyone remember The Simpsons spoof when Homer tried to vote in 2008, or his latest battle with the booth? Yet none of that came to pass and surprisingly, a valuable PR lesson emerged. On Election Eve, Wolf Blitzer of CNN delivered another “major projection” -- that President Obama would win re-election as battleground Ohio went from yellow (unknown data) to Democratic blue on the large touchscreen Electoral College map. In the end, after being behind or tied (depending on which poll you read) with Governor Romney in all eight of the toss-up states, Colorado, Florida, Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada, Ohio, Virginia and Wisconsin, Obama swept the board. CNN called Obama’s election at almost the same time in 2008. But it wasn’t exactly déjà vu. As many political observers noted -- albeit with greater fanfare after the fact -- President Obama’s 2012 re-election efforts bore little resemblance to his 2008 campaign. It was an entirely different game plan. Gone was much of the soaring rhetoric -- the emotional appeal to “Change we can believe in.” Many felt the campaign was missing something. As in the first presidential debate in October (which I had plenty to say about in an earlier article) had Obama shown up for work? The answer, we now know, is a resounding yes. In the days since President Obama’s victory speech, David Axelrod, a senior advisor to the president’s re-election campaign, has emerged almost hero-like, the engineer of his boss’s return to the Oval Office. Axelrod, along with the President’s Chicago campaign staff, basically rewrote their 2008 election rule book and went for an entirely different approach, painting Romney as an out-of-touch business elite, while quietly and effectively working “on the ground” to drum up base support and drive home the get out the vote message. The famed Ronald Reagan-asked political question “Are you better off than you were four years ago?” quickly became the political statement “Think how much better off you will be with Obama at the helm four years from now.” Implicit in the craftily reworked question: think how far we’ve already come, and are you ready to turn the clock back now? Whether you’re the future president of the United States, an executive in a communications company, or a client seeking public relations counsel, candidate Obama’s 180-degree turnaround tactics serve as a vital PR lesson for us all. Just because a particular strategy or communications channel is working at one point in time doesn’t mean it will work for the same client going forward -- or even other clients in related industries. Each client campaign, like a presidential campaign, is radically different from the next. Technology changes (remember, we don’t call out Obama’s BlackBerry anymore) and data, stats -- and yes, colorful infographics too -- update almost as fast as people tweet. Often I fear that companies fail to appreciate this simple lesson. Like a presidential cabinet filled with “yes men” and “yes women,” they have grown isolated in their own insular and endlessly praising micro universe. If left unchecked, they begin speaking their own jargon-laden language, touting internal developments that wouldn’t fill up a press release and certainly wouldn’t inspire a journalist to open the email pitch. This may not be the most profound conclusion. But when a profound person like President Obama demonstrates the flexibility and honesty to radically alter his approach, recognizing the shortcomings of the old, that too is a sign of leadership in and of itself. And perhaps it’s the first indication that Americans of both Red and Blue leanings will see a different kind of leader emerge from the White House in this second act. If presidents can change, so too can PR firms and the companies they serve. And that’s not a CNN “major projection.” It’s a prediction that I fully vote for and endorse. Anyone care to join me?
Long the afterthought of the digital marketing tool kit, “search” is emerging as a nexus between consumer behavior and real-time data. In fact, I would argue that as more social platforms emerge and devices continue to become the lifeblood of interpersonal communication, search must be viewed as a strategic imperative in today’s convergent marketplace. But why, at a time when the digital landscape is evolving faster than the blink of an eye, has search stagnated? While the rest of the industry was rapidly evolving, most digital professionals were having a hard time keeping pace, with little time to look at the bigger picture and how search could be optimized. It’s time for a paradigm shift in the way that we as marketers approach search. Web 2.0 is long gone, and we’re in a new era of digital evolution -- a time of extreme entrepreneurialism with social platforms driving much of the industry. The more platforms and devices that are added to the landscape, the more digitally social and complex the world becomes. All of this boils down to more consumer information. Harnessing this frenzy will provide a window into consumer behavior, allowing us to compare real versus reported insights, and ultimately help to improve business. As traditional marketers become more comfortable with the digital landscape and social platforms as marketing tools, they are beginning to see the power of search. In fact, search continues to grow double digits year-over-year, as it increasingly gets woven into consumer connection points. But in order for search to be truly effective, the way we approach it must evolve. I have identified three main areas that must be addressed in order to maximize the potential of the search category: Strategy, Technology and Talent (ST2).